Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (14 page)

He lived in a patriarchal society, as one of the patriarchs. Such societies and men change the ideas that guide them slowly, and, when they do, only reluctantly. Washington did not want to believe ill of the king and the king’s government. Before the crises of the 1760s and 1770s, he had never given royal government much thought. His world was made up of men uninterested in change that bent the proprieties, but they were sensitive to challenges to their rights and to their liberty.

In the early 1770s the rhythm of planters’ lives followed the cycle of crops. The slowness—by modern standards—of transportation everywhere, but especially across the Atlantic, reinforced this measured pace. On the most basic level, these circumstances enforced a kind of stability.

In referring to the defense of American liberty in these years of the Townshend crisis as “the cause,” Washington meant the defense of the right of Americans to govern and tax themselves. He thought of the right as a central part of the British constitution, and he came to
believe that governing authorities in Britain had abandoned that constitution, while in America he and others like him insisted that they could not under its terms be taxed by any body in which they were not represented.

The three years following the repeal of the Townshend duties saw no fresh outrage, no act of terrible oppression against the constitution he prized, but he did not believe that the cause was now out of danger. The British government had ceased oppressive action, at least for the moment, but it had not given up its claim to do whatever it chose to do. So matters rested, or drifted.

In this lull until 1774, Washington wrote little about Virginia’s rights, though he did not suspend thought about them. He gave his time, however, to his planting life. That life sometimes led him to extraordinary ventures; one, in 1772, embodied his long-standing hope of opening up the upper Potomac River to navigation “from Fort Cumberland to tide water.” Land in the Ohio Country remained in the front of his mind, especially the grant Governor Dinwiddie had authorized in 1754 for Washington and the veterans of the disastrous campaign that ended at Fort Necessity. He reported to his old officers and soldiers on the division then under way of those lands, said goodbye to George William Fairfax, who was moving to England, and agreed to take on Fairfax’s power of attorney in America. Since Belvoir was not going to be sold, this responsibility included supervising the overseer of the plantation and looking after the house. Washington’s own work in business demanded more than ordinary energies, as he sought better services for his increased stake in the market and bought additional slaves for his new mill. He also built a ship to carry his flour to Barbados, a venture that led to protracted trouble with the ship’s master, who proved unreliable.
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In June 1773, while Washington juggled the responsibilities of farm, field, and sea, plus service to widows who had had difficult husbands, he faced even greater responsibilities in his family. He had traveled with Jack to the city, got him settled in lodgings and studies, and returned to Mount Vernon. He had not been home long when Patsy Custis died in epileptic seizure. She had endured such episodes for several years, events that aroused the sympathy of her stepfather and mother, as well as their dread that one might kill her. When that occurred, her mother, filled with grief, needed desperately the love of
her husband. Washington gave it unstintingly and, for several months, devoted much of his time to her care. Martha Washington rallied a few months later, but for as long as her suffering demanded his attention, Washington withdrew from all but necessary business. A very different sort of family concern had nagged at him throughout 1773: Jack had told his family in April that he was engaged to be married. The news had surprised everyone, including his teacher Jonathan Boucher. Jack had quietly courted Eleanor (Nelly) Calvert, who proved early on to be much more interesting to him than his studies with Boucher and the faculty of King’s College.
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The rhythms of ordinary life changed radically in 1774, when Parliament acted in response to the Boston Tea Party. When Washington first heard of the destruction of the tea, he felt both disapproval and dismay. These feelings soon gave way to stronger feelings of anger at Parliament, which had responded with the Intolerable Acts, closing up the port of Boston and transforming the government of Massachusetts into one with no place for liberty or the British constitution. In May, summoned to Williamsburg, he voted with most of the burgesses in favor of resolutions calling for a day of fasting and prayer in protest against British actions.
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The pace of opposition to British measures now picked up. At first the Boston Port Act had seemed to Virginians to be the most shocking aspect of what Parliament had done. Washington expressed his dismay on learning of the act, but he soon realized that Parliament had broader measures under way that threatened “American liberty.” This term appeared in his writings and that of others early in the spring. It was American liberty and American rights that were at risk, not simply Boston’s or Massachusetts’s; and the oppression prospectively included all of America. There were hints in Washington’s letters even before this crisis that a plot had been started in Britain to reduce the liberties of Americans. Now, with the assault on Boston, it was out in the open. His part in organizing Virginians and Americans throughout the colonies rested on this premise that a plot existed, designed to end long-standing freedom in America.
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As a member of the House of Burgesses, he took part in generating support of the first Virginia statement calling for a repudiation of the British action. Though the Burgesses set the tone, most of the action in Virginia early in 1774 took place on the county and provincial levels.
After the House of Burgesses met as an informal body in the Raleigh Tavern—a site selected after Governor Dunmore dissolved the body—official fetters could be thrown off. Lord Dunmore thought he had sent the House packing on May 26, but the next day it designated itself the “Association,” composed of members who would manage the opposition to official action for the next two years. On May 30, the Association called on its members to meet on August 1, when an agreement to ban trade with Britain would be made. The Association reported in a broadside that prevailing opinion was that nonimportation would be the first step, followed by nonexportation if the first failed to persuade Parliament to withdraw its Boston policies.
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The organizations that swung into action after the dissolution of the House of Burgesses served Virginia well into 1775. Washington chaired one in July, “a general Meeting of the Freeholders and Inhabitants of the County of Fairfax.” He was of course a member of the House representing the county and widely known throughout the colony. The meeting in July resembled similar meetings all over Virginia and eventually produced a set of resolves that recounted the history of the controversy with Parliament and proposed a detailed course of action in response to the Intolerable Acts. Its strictures and prescriptions were to find their way into the decisions of both Continental Congresses. These were the Fairfax Resolves.
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George Mason wrote the Fairfax Resolves, not his neighbor George Washington. Mason, who lived about twenty miles away in Gunston Hall, was a good friend of Washington. The two men wrote each other and spent time together working their way through the problems common to all the colonies. Mason visited Washington the day before the July meeting for Fairfax County, and his influence on Washington remained strong throughout the year.

The first ten of the Fairfax Resolves laid out in some detail the basis of colonial grievances, insisting that “the most important and valuable Part of the British Constitution, upon which it’s very Existence depends, is the fundamental Principle of the People’s being governed by no Laws, to which they have not given their Consent, by Representatives freely chosen by themselves.” It was Mason’s sentence, but Washington might have written it. In all of the protests emanating from the Fairfax meeting and all the Virginia Conventions that followed, preceding the First and Second Continental Congresses, the fundamental
issue in Washington’s thought was the right of the colonies to govern themselves. He did not advocate independence in 1774; the right to consent—or not to consent—to measures bearing on colonial liberties was an example of the freedom he had in mind. He, along with virtually all colonial leaders, denied that they were looking for independence; they believed—some, like Washington with many doubts—that freedom to govern themselves was possible within the British Empire. This belief and a sense of honor led them to offer to pay for the tea destroyed in the Boston Tea Party. Mason, with Washington’s support, argued in the Fairfax Resolves that the British Parliament’s claim to “the Power of regulating our Trade and Commerce” was necessary for “the general Good of that great Body-politic of which we are a Part.” Mason added that this claim and its exercise in the past were, however, in some “Degree repugnant to the Principles of the Constitution.” He was willing, temporarily it seemed, to compromise liberty for the general good of the empire—a willingness that, being repugnant, soon disappeared.

The Fairfax Resolves and the discussion and revision in the months that followed all contributed to Washington’s political thought before independence. He took part in the discussions in this extended period, and as far as anyone in Virginia could tell he agreed with their development in the Continental Congresses, a development that gradually claimed more power for the colonies as it rejected that of Parliament. For a time the rejection of Parliament’s claims, while maintaining the fiction that the colonies were loyal constituents of the empire, depended on a distinction between king and Parliament. It was the king’s ministers and Parliament that threatened colonial liberties—not the king. Eventually this idea of separation crumbled as the king showed himself as an enemy of America.
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Throughout the process of rejecting every part of the British policies, Washington held firm. There was in almost all his statements, especially in letters to friends and family members, harshness, even bitterness, in his judgments of Crown and Parliament. His friend Bryan Fairfax, who had worked closely with him on other matters, disagreed with the measures of resistance adopted by the Burgesses that followed its dissolution in May. In the exchange of letters between the two friends, Fairfax said that “the Majority of the english Parliament, or a great part, [acted] from honest tho’ erroneous principles.”
But Washington saw corruption in the policies, and described British actions as “a regular Plan at the Expence of Law & Justice, to overthrow our Constitutional Rights & liberties.” A month later, after the meeting on the Fairfax Resolves, he insisted in an argument with Bryan Fairfax that if the colonies submitted “to every Imposition that can be heap’d upon us,” such submission “will make us tame, & object Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.”
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The meetings of the First Continental Congress, in September 1774, followed by the Second Congress, in May 1775, brought the process of alienation on the part of the American colonies to a head. Washington served in both meetings, though he left the Second long before it declared independence to assume command of the army.

In September, Washington had arrived in Philadelphia with a reputation as a man of great wealth and a military leader. The wealth was real, but a story that was told concerning an offer he supposedly made to finance an army to fight the British was not. His military background had brought him a reputation that had generated such fantasies. He seems always to have impressed others with his bearing; he stood out among the delegates and elicited comment. Silas Deane, of Connecticut, described his countenance as “hard,” but added that he had “a very young Look, & an easy Soldierlik Air.” Deane knew something of Washington’s history in the previous war, noting that Washington “was the means of saving the remains” of Braddock’s army. Deane also praised Washington’s speech in public: “he speaks Modestly, & in cool but determined Stile & Accent.” There were other comments about his style and bearing, all favorable to him.
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Washington played a limited role in the First Congress, but in the Second he found himself the delegates’ choice to lead the Continental Army. He had arrived at its meeting in May dressed in civilian garb. Within a few days, as talk of war increased among the delegates, he began appearing in the meetings wearing a military uniform, probably that of a special volunteer company formed in Virginia just before he left for Philadelphia. The uniform reminded delegates of fame earned in the war against the French. It’s likely no reminder was needed, given his soldierlike bearing and his record.

Washington himself had misgivings about his ability to command successfully a large army. He wrote Martha of his desire to avoid accepting the command “from consciousness of its being a trust too
great for my Capacity.” But he also felt that he must accept it, “as it has been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this Service, I shall hope that my undertaking of it, is designed to answer some good purpose.” There was another dimension to his feelings about the command—turning it down, he felt, “would have reflected dishonour upon myself, and given pain to my friends.” His reflections reveal the complications for him of the call to duty, and it is not too much to say that he both wanted and did not want to command the army. Whatever satisfaction this new responsibility—this calling—gave him owed much to his glimpse of destiny and his sense of honor. His musings did not reach brooding about it. He escaped that state of mind by recognizing that he was in the hands of Providence, as he said. That belief was enough—he would be George Washington, American commander in chief, guided by Providence.
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