Washington: A Life (15 page)

In New York, Washington socialized with his friend Beverley Robinson, son of the powerful speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and he may have entered into a romantic dalliance with Robinson’s sister-in-law, Mary “Polly” Philipse. The twenty-six-year-old Polly would have been a prime catch for an upwardly mobile young man: she was slim, dark-haired, beautiful, and heiress to a colossal fortune. Unsubstantiated legend claims that Washington proposed marriage; if so, he lost out to Major Roger Morris, son of an English architect, who had fought with Washington at Braddock’s defeat.

By the time he moved on to Boston, Washington’s triumphal journey attracted considerable interest. When he arrived, the
Boston Gazette
saluted him as “the Hon. Colonel Washington, a gentleman who has deservedly a high reputation of military skill, integrity, and valor, though success has not always attended his undertakings.”
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Aside from Washington’s military renown, Governor Shirley may have had sentimental reasons for seeing him: his son had also acted as an aide to Braddock and was killed during the campaign. In presenting his grievances to the governor on March 5, 1756, Washington met with only mixed success. Although Shirley confirmed that he possessed superior rank to Dagworthy, he wouldn’t budge on other matters and rebuffed a petition signed by Washington’s officers for inclusion in the royal establishment. He also disappointed his young visitor by appointing Governor Sharpe of Maryland to lead the next campaign against Fort Duquesne—a military honor about which young George Washington already harbored a rich fund of fantasies. On his way home, the disappointed colonel stopped to confer with Sharpe, an interview that left him so dispirited that he “fully resolved to resign my commission.”
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Upon arriving in Williamsburg, he was somewhat assuaged by news that the assembly had decided to expand Virginia’s forces to fifteen hundred men.

In these dealings with powerful older men, Washington hadn’t yet developed the tact that would distinguish him in later life, and given his age, he seemed to bristle unduly at being assigned a subordinate position. His emotions were still raw, and he exhibited a naked, sometimes clumsy ambition that he later learned to cloak or conquer. This young careerist brooded interminably over the discrimination leveled against colonial officers and betrayed a heightened sense of personal injustice—feelings that would assume a more impressive and impersonal ideological form during the American Revolution. Nevertheless there was a gravitas about the young Washington, a seriousness of purpose and a fierce determination to succeed, that made him stand out in any crowd.

 

 

AS SOON AS WASHINGTON returned to Winchester in early April, he confronted a fresh crisis. Indians had sacked so many settlements and slain so many inhabitants that the dazed surviving families looked to Washington as their savior. At first he could barely scrape up a few dozen men to mount a spirited defense and despaired of waging an equal battle with the Indians, telling Governor Dinwiddie that “the cunning and craft” of the Indians “are not to be equalled … They prowl about like wolves and, like them, do their mischief by stealth.” He despaired of fighting them upon equal terms.
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Feeling embattled, Washington issued a plea for intercolonial union that foreshadowed his later stress on national unity. “Nothing I more sincerely wish than a union to the colonies in this time of eminent danger,” he told Pennsylvania governor Robert Hunter Morris.
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Even as a young man, the complex Washington seldom had a single reason for his actions. His pursuit of self-interest and selfless dedication to public service were often intermingled, sometimes making it hard to disentangle his true motives. Perhaps for this reason, he could always discern both the base and the noble sides of human nature. For Washington, the French and Indian War presented few elevating ideas beyond the moral superiority of the British side. Nevertheless, his indignation about the savagery he purported to see practiced by his French and Indian foes seems heartfelt. He began to view himself as the self-styled champion of the backwoods people and was moved by their piteous plight. In a remarkable letter to Robert Dinwiddie on April 22, 1756, he made an impassioned statement about the murder of frontier families and his desire to alleviate their suffering.

Here one can sense a flood of deep feeling welling up beneath the surface of Washington’s tightly buttoned personality. A spark of idealism began to flicker intermittently through his sulking about his personal status—a spark that would someday flare into a bright flame.

Faced with Indian raids that depopulated whole settlements, Dinwiddie issued orders calling up the militia in western counties, and Washington suddenly found himself at the head of a thousand temporary recruits who bridled at their treatment by highborn officers. Reflecting this resentment, the
Virginia Gazette
blasted Washington’s officers as “rank novices, rakes, spendthrifts, and bankrupts” who “browbeat and discouraged” the militia and gave them “an example of all manner of debauchery, vice, and idleness.”
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Livid over this bad publicity, Washington informed Dinwiddie of numerous warnings he had issued about these vices and promised to “act with a little more rigor than has hitherto been practiced, since I find it so absolutely necessary.”
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Washington presented the strange spectacle of a young man chastising dissolute behavior, and Dinwiddie stood solidly behind him. “He is a person much beloved here and has gone through many hardships in the service and I really think he has great merit.”
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Throughout the spring, Washington squawked about the fickle militia, who disappeared whenever an Indian threat materialized. Apparently concerned by the moods of his temperamental protégé, Colonel William Fairfax preached a stoic calm in the face of adversity and wrote two letters invoking the military heroes of antiquity. “Your good health and fortune is the toast of every table,” he reassured Washington. “Among the Romans such a general acclamation and public regard shown to any of their chieftains was always esteemed a high honor and gratefully accepted.” Holding up Caesar and Alexander the Great as models to emulate, Fairfax said that Washington shouldn’t be disturbed by unreliable militia but should bear such hardships “with equal magnanimity [as] those heroes remarkably did.”
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IN MID - AUGUST, Colonel Washington staged a small pageant in Winchester to mark the official start of the French and Indian War, announced in London three months earlier. Escorted by town worthies, he marched three companies to the parade ground and read aloud the declaration of war, urging his men to show “willing obedience to the best of kings and by a strict attachment to his royal commands [to] demonstrate the love and loyalty we bear to his sacred person.”
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With that, numerous toasts were drunk and muskets boomed. Nevertheless the absolute power of distant bureaucrats in London preyed on Washington’s mind. Three weeks earlier he had conveyed greetings to John Campbell, Earl of Loudoun, the new commander of His Majesty’s forces in North America. No longer a military novice, Washington touted himself as a war veteran and seasoned his welcome with self-promotion: “We humbly represent to your Lordship that we were the first troops in action on the continent on [the] occasion of the present broils and that by several engagements and continual skirmishes with the enemy, we have to our cost acquired a knowledge of them and of their crafty and cruel practices.”
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Eager to please his new commander, Washington struggled to make his new recruits presentable. He had long been troubled by an inability to clothe them, but in March he procured for each man “a suit of thin sleazy cloth without lining” and some waistcoats of “sorry flannel.”
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No sooner had he accomplished this than he found men selling the miserable clothing he had obtained. Indignant, he threatened them with five hundred lashes. Where his men had once deserted two or three at a time, sixteen absconded into the woods in August, and the shortage of men grew more perilous. When a portion of the Augusta County militia was summoned to duty that October, fewer than a tenth even bothered to show up. From these early experiences, Washington came to believe devoutly in the need for rigorously trained, professional armies rather than hastily summoned, short-term militia.

All summer and fall Washington was exasperated by military arrangements on the western frontier. He objected in strenuous terms to Lord Loudoun’s decision in early December to station Virginia troops at Fort Cumberland in Maryland, when it made more sense to keep them at Winchester, Virginia. Washington’s tenacity on this issue led to a clash with Dinwiddie, who sided with Loudoun. Until this point Washington had prudently tended his relationship with the royal governor and was exemplary in bowing to civilian control. Now, in a terribly impolitic move, he bypassed Dinwiddie to lobby House of Burgesses speaker John Robinson, violating a cardinal rule of Virginia politics that the governor had final authority in such matters. The decision also smacked of disloyalty to someone who had consistently boosted Washington’s career. The young man poured out his frustrations to Robinson, saying his advice to Dinwiddie had been “disregarded as idle and frivolous … My orders [from Dinwiddie] are dark, doubtful and uncertain:
today approved, tomorrow condemned
.”
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The same day Washington aggravated matters by telling Dinwiddie that Loudoun had “imbibed prejudices so unfavourable to my character” because he had not been “thoroughly informed.”
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Since Dinwiddie had been Loudoun’s primary source of information, he would have interpreted this as a direct attack on his own conduct.

On January 10, 1757, throwing caution to the wind, Washington sent Lord Loudoun a letter so lengthy that it runs to a dozen printed pages in his collected papers. It provides a graphic picture of the twenty-four-year-old Washington’s ambivalence about the British class system. On the one hand, he flattered Loudoun unctuously even as he denied doing so. “Although I have not the honour to be known to Your Lordship, yet Your Lordship’s name was familiar to my ear on account of the important services performed to His Majesty in other parts of the world. Don’t think My Lord I am going to flatter. I have exalted sentiments of Your Lordship’s character and revere your rank … my nature is honest and free from guile.”
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Washington then brashly declared his impatience with “chimney corner politicians” in Williamsburg and cited his failure to win a well-merited promotion in the British Army.
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“In regard to myself, I must beg leave to say [that,] had His Excellency General Braddock survived his unfortunate defeat, I should have met with preferment equal to my wishes. I had his promise to that purpose.”
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Washington also mentioned that, after their brave stand at Fort Necessity, his men had expected inclusion in the regular British Army. In sending this letter, Washington knew that he had overstepped political boundaries and confessed in closing, “When I look over the preceding pages and find how far I have exceeded my first intention, I blush with shame to think of my freedom.”
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Driven by thwarted ambition, the still-gauche Washington resolved to advise Loudoun in person and prevailed upon Dinwiddie to allow him to go to Philadelphia to consult with him. The governors of five colonies flocked there to see him too, but Lord Loudoun, a haughty Scot with a reputation as a martinet, was in no special hurry to see anyone, forcing Washington to cool his heels for six weeks. From an aide to Loudoun, Washington learned that the general had admired his long letter, but when he met with him, the commander seemed deaf to his opinions. It was clear that Virginia had been assigned a secondary importance in imperial war strategy and that any assault on Fort Duquesne had been postponed. The only victory that Washington could claim was Loudoun’s decision that Maryland would take responsibility for Fort Cumberland, freeing the Virginia Regiment to man Virginia forts.

Before leaving Philadelphia, Washington wrote to Dinwiddie and vented his bitter outrage at the inferior status foisted upon the Virginia Regiment: “We can’t conceive that being Americans should deprive us of the benefits of British subjects, nor lessen our claim to preferment. And we are very certain that no body of regular troops ever before served 3 bloody campaigns without attracting royal notice. As to those idle arguments which are often times used—namely, ‘You are defending your own properties’—I look upon [them] to be whimsical and absurd. We are defending the King’s Dominions.”
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This statement represented a huge intellectual leap: Washington was suddenly asserting that the imperial system existed to serve the king, not his overseas subjects. The equality of an Englishman in London and one in Williamsburg was purely illusory. In time, the Crown would pay dearly for Washington’s disenchantment with the fairness of the British military.