Adopted Son Page 5

  He was more objective when he wrote about these matters earlier, in 1779. “At the same time the destinies of France and her rival were both to be decided,” he said. England was in danger of losing much of her commerce, a quarter of her subjects, and half the British territory. On the other hand, if she reunited with the thirteen colonies, “[t]hat would have been the end of our Antilles and our possessions in Africa and Asia, of our maritime commerce, and…ultimately of our political existence.”47

  Lafayette and his friends talked up the American cause, and the logic of French participation in it, when they returned to the capital in the fall of 1775. They joined sociétés de pensée (thinking groups, direct ancestors of the political clubs that would appear during the French Revolution), which were multiplying in Paris. Those were forums for vigorous debate on political questions, not viewed tolerantly by the government. They paralleled the Masons and often had identical memberships with the lodges, but they were not outgrowths of Masonry. The latter, however, had proven itself congenial to young officers with unconventional views, and it offered a tradition of secrecy—nothing said in a lodge meeting was to be repeated outside the room. The day after Lafayette’s daughter Henriette was born on December 15, he, Noailles, and Ségur joined the Masonic Lodge Saint-Jean de la Candeur, in Paris.48

  There they fell under the spell of a defrocked Jesuit priest, the Abbé Guillaume Raynal, who spouted tedious harangues against kings, priests, and slave owners. Nobody paid much attention to him until the government banned his tirades, making him popular in Masonic lodges, where the king’s agents could not hear him. In those chambers he ranted against a multitude of evils incarnate, including royalty, nobility, and the church, and extolled the “rights of man.” Young Lafayette was greatly impressed, and late in life he called the Jesuit windbag the greatest writer of the eighteenth century.49

  Lafayette thereby began an association with a loose network of organizations, the Freemasons, that would continue on and off for the rest of his life. He was never a prominent or especially active member, but time and again he found it useful to take advantage of connections that Freemasonry offered. For an ambitious teenager, the very notion of belonging to an exclusive group, with rituals and signs known only to the select, was its own attraction. That behind it lay a socially tolerant philosophy of “liberty, equality, fraternity” was added cachet. Besides, there were all those American revolutionaries who were said to be Masons. Even before Lafayette met Washington, what was good enough for the older man was good enough for him.50

  The young French captain wanted to enlist in the American cause, even if his understanding of what that cause was all about was vague. He wanted to go to l’Amérique. But he was a French soldier and bound to his duty in France, so unless his country joined with the Americans against the British, the chances of his fighting in America appeared slim.

  Nevertheless, somehow or other he would find a way to escape from the house of Noailles and his domineering father-in-law. He would serve under General Washington.

  TWO

  So Young and Inexperienced a Person

  (FEBRUARY 1732–JUNE 1775)

  What creature goes about on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs at the end of the day?

  —THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX

  Tidewater Virginia was worn-out farmland in 1732. Indians had farmed the area for millennia, keeping it fertile by mixing their crops. English settlers had worked the land for only a century, but they had mined the soil, wearing it out by farming the same crops year after year. For the soil, the most debilitating crop was tobacco. For the farmers, the most rewarding crop was also tobacco. It required so much labor that small farmers could raise no more than an acre of the stuff, devoting the rest of their land to wheat, corn, flax, and other consumables. Large planters had another solution to tobacco’s demands for labor—slaves. The crop was living gold, giving the poor farmer the only cash he ever saw, making the rich farmer even richer.

  Tobacco had created a class society in the Tidewater. An emerging aristocracy controlled the greater share of land, wealth, and political power. Below it stood two underclasses: free farmers struggling for survival and at the bottom slaves and indentured workers, who had little control over their own condition.

  Ships sailed up the rivers, unloading cargoes at plantation or county wharves, taking on tobacco. Most goods came from England, along with books and schoolmasters, although the wealthier Virginians often sent their sons over the sea for their education. Virginia was a land of opportunity for the hungry, the greedy, the ambitious. They need only look west.

  Or they could look next door. In Virginia’s Northern Neck, near the fall line where the Tidewater gave way to the Piedmont, two plantations overlooked the Potomac River. One was Epsewasson, part of the Washington family’s extension of its ambitions to the frontier. Its main building was a common timber farmhouse, a place to sleep between days of hard work carving a farm from the wilderness, built by its occupants and their slaves. The other was Belvoir, headquarters of an immense royal grant of land to Lord Fairfax, a grand mansion imported from England, filled with luxurious furnishings, a place to entertain and to impress, paid for by income from His Lordship’s estates back home. Together they represented a divide in Virginia’s future.

  KEEP TO THE FASHION OF YOUR EQUALS

  George Washington was born into this English-Virginian world on February 22, 1732, at Popes Creek Plantation, a snow-covered tobacco farm overlooking a wide, sparkling tributary of the lower Potomac. He was part of the fourth generation of Washingtons in Virginia, a succession of orphans who married well, expanded their landholdings through skill and hard work, and died young to leave something for their own orphans.

  John Washington, homeless at age eleven, arrived in 1657 at age twenty-five, amassed over 10,000 acres, and died when his son, Lawrence, was a teenager. Lawrence left a tidy sum behind for his son, Augustine, then four years old, when he died in 1698. “Gus” grew up to buy Popes Creek Plantation, Epsewasson upriver, and Ferry Farm across the Rappahannock from an iron mine he had bought near Fredericksburg. He married in 1715 and produced three sons (one of whom died an infant) and a daughter before his wife died in 1729. He married again in 1731, to Mary Ball, who gave him four sons and a daughter who survived. The first child was George. He in turn lost his father, Augustine, when he was eleven years old, after the family had moved to Ferry Farm.1

  Gus left an estate that included over 10,000 acres of land in seven tracts, forty-nine slaves, and the iron mine. George’s eldest half brother, Lawrence, got the lion’s share, including the mine and Epsewasson. George’s inheritance included Ferry Farm, half interest in a useless tract of 4,360 acres, ten slaves, three small lots in Fredericksburg, and part of the residuary estate.2

  It was not much, and it fell under the control of George’s mother, Mary, until he reached legal age. She was not the type to let go of anything once she had her hands on it; George battled her for thirty years before he gained title to his own inheritance. Mary was a selfish, tyrannical woman and a terror to the neighborhood. The boy’s home life was miserable.3

  The situation also made the young Washington independent and self-reliant. Whenever he could, he stayed with his half brothers, and he went farther afield to visit distant relatives. His chief refuge was Lawrence, a tall, charming, scholarly man, who took on the role of protector and adoptive father to George. He had been educated in England, then returned to Virginia, only to leave again to serve as an infantry captain in an expedition against the Spanish in the Caribbean. The fleet was ably commanded by Admiral Edward “Old Grog” Vernon. Incompetent generalship in the land force, however, brought the campaign to grief. Lawrence returned disgusted by British generals and their contempt for Americans, although he had great admiration for the admiral, in whose honor he renamed his estate Mount Vernon.4

  George spent much of his youth at Mount Vernon, where his elder brother looked for ways to rescue
him from Mary. They included enlistment as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, a scheme Mary loudly scotched. More important was Lawrence’s encouragement of George’s self-instruction, and his introduction to a wider world. The two of them formed a tight bond, and George looked to Lawrence for the guidance their father’s death had deprived him of. They were together much of the time, and George drank in his brother’s stories of his military adventures and his views of the British government and its empire. Lawrence’s dignity and sheer decency were powerful examples for the younger brother to follow.

  The boy’s education was indifferent, involving a tutor and a country school, and it was over by the time he was fifteen. Its most positive result was a broad foundation in mathematics. Otherwise, he read whatever came to hand. Lawrence gave him some guidance in the classics and encouraged what became a lifelong interest in self-education by reading. He also received pointers in behavior. His most famous work in his childish hand was copying out 110 maxims called “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.” These lacked the piety that laced most advice to the young in those days—religion would not be among Washington’s major concerns until late in his life.

  Beginning with the first rule (“Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those that are present”), George learned to treat people considerately. He was taught to show courtesy toward inferiors, equals, or superiors, kindness to the first, and deference to the last. As for the middle, “[k]eep to the fashion of your equals.” The maxims drummed into Washington the importance of maintaining personal dignity and honor, qualities that so distinguished Lawrence.5

  George’s brother gave him free run of Mount Vernon’s stables, and he became a superb horseman—more than one admirer during the Revolution described him as the best they had ever seen. When Lawrence’s in-laws, the Fairfaxes, imported a pack of foxhounds, Washington developed a passion for fox hunting. He harbored a passion of another kind—a volcanic temper, which more than anything else he feared losing control of. He cultivated an outward reserve, even iciness, and trained himself (with only partial success) not to take offense at what others said or did. Equally, he acquired a hunger for approval from others. He wanted to be admired, respected, but not necessarily liked. He was socially awkward, owing to his rural upbringing, and he had few friends. Standing a rawboned six feet three inches tall, however, he was easy to notice.

  Washington’s main stab at a social life came in November 1752, when he was initiated into the Masonic Lodge at Fredericksburg, although he was below the required age of twenty-one. He attended twice more, until he reached the Sublime Degree of Master Mason (“Third Degree”) in August 1753, then only twice again, that year and in 1755. Freemasonry—which in America was more social than political—became important to him late in life, but he never was diligent about going to meetings.6

  The young man was more interested in improving himself, socially and economically. He had inherited the land hunger of his family and his class and began a lifelong quest to own more. His chief distinction from other Virginia planters in this was a parallel interest in learning how to farm without wearing the soil out. The Washingtons had, over four generations, acquired thousands of acres, but they never counted among the grandees of Virginia. All their houses were small, rustic, crowded, and fitted out with necessities, not luxuries. That was true of Mount Vernon when Lawrence owned it. Its house was not the large mansion George would turn it into, but a cramped timber farmhouse.

  Things were different next door, at Belvoir, the manor house of the 5 million Virginia acres owned by England’s Lord Fairfax and managed by his nephew William, a model gentleman who introduced George to the history of Republican Rome and taught him that the highest achievement was to earn the applause of his countrymen through honest deeds.

  Belvoir was splendid. The parlor at Ferry Farm served as an extra bedroom, but in the Fairfax mansion that room was filled with mahogany furniture and dominated by an enormous—and enormously expensive—mirror above the mantel. Majestically overlooking the Potomac, the house was like nothing else Washington had ever seen. Unlike the timber houses of his own family, he said, Belvoir was “of brick, two stories high, with four convenient rooms and a large passage on the lower floor; five rooms and a large passage on the second; servant’s hall and cellar below.” Other buildings around the house included offices, stables, and a coach house, surrounded by a large garden yielding “a great variety of fruits all in good order.”7

  Washington wanted to live like that. He also wanted to go through life dressed as well as the Fairfaxes, and he became meticulous about his clothing. Proper dress and grooming contributed to the commanding presence and air of dignity, even nobility, that everyone who saw him during the Revolution would notice.

  In 1748, when Washington was sixteen, William Fairfax hired a surveyor to subdivide some of his lands in the Shenandoah Valley. Washington and Fairfax’s son George went along. It was a rough trip into the wilderness, and he reveled in every minute of it, even his first night’s lodging in a squatter’s shack. “I, not being as good a woodsman as the rest of my company,” he wrote in his journal, “stripped myself very orderly and went in to the bed, as they called it, when to my surprise, I found it to be nothing but a little straw matted together, without sheets or anything else, but only one threadbare blanket, with double its weight of vermin, such as lice, fleas, etc…. I put on my clothes, and lay as my companions [on the floor].” The next night was better, he recalled: “We had a good dinner prepared for us, wine and rum punch in plenty, and a good feather bed with clean sheets, which was a very agreeable regale.”8

  During more than a month in cold, early spring weather, Washington discovered that he loved being beyond the frontier. He bore hardships well and learned how to survey. When he returned, he became the Fairfaxes’ surveyor and soon earned his license as a public surveyor. He had discovered something else during his first trip: surveyors were ahead of the market when it came to finding valuable lands. Over the next three years, Washington made repeated trips west, claiming land for others and himself. He became an agent of the Ohio Company, a scheme put together by a syndicate of English and Virginian aristocrats to wheedle the king into giving them large grants of land beyond the Appalachians.

  While George explored the frontier, his brother Lawrence came down with tuberculosis. He decided to go to Barbados to recuperate, taking George with him. Lawrence’s improvement was only temporary, however, and while there George contracted smallpox, scarring his face but giving him immunity to this plague. After they returned to Mount Vernon, Lawrence died of his disease. He had appointed George executor of his estate and residuary heir to his property, including Mount Vernon, which George received title to in 1761.

  Washington was orphaned again, deprived of the guidance and sterling example Lawrence had given him. But whatever inward doubts he harbored, outwardly he was ready to challenge the world. In 1753, the world challenged him.

  A YOUTH OF GREAT SOBRIETY, DILIGENCE, AND FIDELITY

  England and France had been at war with each other for centuries, and their colonists in America sometimes were drawn into the conflict. They provided troops and supplies, invaded enemy territory, and incited Indians to do their butchery for them. The Indians—arrayed in groups varying from isolated bands to multitribal confederations—played the two white tribes off against each other, promising allegiance to whichever offered the best tribute. As a general rule, the Indians favored the French, because their population was smaller and they paid the best bribes. By the 1750s the English were clearly a greater threat to native well-being. Their growing population displaced eastern tribes westward, where they collided with other tribes. In response, they attacked frontier settlements and farms. The French in Canada encouraged them with firearms, ammunition, and plenty of liquor.

  In 1752 and 1753, French authorities in Canada sent expeditions to the Ohio River Valley to post markers of their king’s sover
eignty. In the spring of 1753 they extended a line of military posts from the eastern end of Lake Erie toward the Forks of the Ohio, where Pittsburgh now stands. That not only challenged British claims to the country but threatened the future profits of the Ohio Company. Its investors had plans of their own to build a post at the Forks, trade with the Indians, and claim the lands beyond.

  Robert Dinwiddie, lieutenant governor of Virginia, was a Scottish tycoon and, along with the Fairfaxes, a heavy investor in the Ohio Company. News of three new French posts in what is now western Pennsylvania, forming a line aimed at the Forks, alarmed him. He complained to his government in London about this invasion, and suggestively asked for instructions. In October 1753, King George II’s orders arrived. Virginia should build forts on the Ohio and send an emissary to confirm whether the French had invaded English soil. If that was the case, the officer should “require of them peaceably to depart.” If they refused, “[w]e,” said the king, “do strictly command and charge you to drive them out by force of arms.”9

  King George did not understand that this order committed his government and its British and American taxpayers to doing the Ohio Company’s work for it. Since Virginia’s Assembly (House of Burgesses) would have to pay the major part of the bills, the conniving Dinwiddie kept it in the dark. He summoned the King’s Council (the appointed upper house) and urged it to authorize an expedition to drive the French out, and build a post at the Forks. He had just the candidate to lead the enterprise—the twenty-one-year-old George Washington.

  Washington confessed, “It was deemed by some an extraordinary circumstance that so young and inexperienced a person should have been employed on a negotiation with which subjects of the greatest importance were involved.” But he was “used to the woods,” said one of Dinwiddie’s business partners, and “a youth of great sobriety, diligence, and fidelity.” Besides, he could be trusted not to feather his own nest while serving the interests of the Crown, so thoroughly mixed up with those of the Ohio Company.10