George Washington was cast for his career by a very scant and homely
training. Augustine Washington, his father, lacked neither the will nor
the means to set him handsomely afoot, with as good a schooling, both in
books and in affairs, as was to be had; he would have done all that a
liberal and provident man should do to advance his boy in the world, had
he lived to go with him through his youth. He owned land in four
counties, more than five thousand acres all told, and lying upon both
the rivers that refresh the fruitful Northern Neck; besides several
plots of ground in the promising village of Fredericksburg, which lay
opposite his lands upon the Rappahannock; and one-twelfth part of the
stock of the Principio Iron Company, whose mines and furnaces in
Maryland and Virginia yielded a better profit than any others in the two
colonies. He had commanded a ship in his time, as so many of his
neighbors had in that maritime province, carrying iron from the mines to
England, and no doubt bringing convict laborers back upon his voyage
home again. He himself raised the ore from the mines that lay upon his
own land, close to the Potomac, and had it carried the easy six miles to
the river. Matters were very well managed there, Colonel Byrd said, and
no pains were spared to make the business profitable. Captain Washington
had represented his home parish of Truro, too, in the House of
Burgesses, where his athletic figure, his ruddy skin, and frank gray
eyes must have made him as conspicuous as his constituents could have
wished. He was a man of the world, every inch, generous, hardy,
independent. He lived long enough, too, to see how stalwart and capable
and of how noble a spirit his young son was to be, with how manly a
bearing he was to carry himself in the world; and had loved him and made
him his companion accordingly. But the end came for him before he could
see the lad out of boyhood. He died April 12, 1743, when he was but
forty-nine years of age, and before George was twelve; and in his will
there was, of course, for George only a younger son’s portion. The
active gentleman had been twice married, and there were seven children
to be provided for. Two sons of the first marriage survived. The bulk of
the estate went, as Virginian custom dictated, to Lawrence, the eldest
son. To Augustine, the second son, fell most of the rich lands in
Westmoreland. George, the eldest born of the second marriage, left to
the guardianship of his young mother, shared with the four younger
children the residue of the estate. He was to inherit his father’s farm
upon the Rappahannock, to possess, and to cultivate if he would, when he
should come of age; but for the rest his fortunes were to make. He must
get such serviceable training as he could for a life of independent
endeavor. The two older brothers had been sent to England to get their
schooling and preparation for life, as their father before them had been
to get his--Lawrence to make ready to take his father’s place when the
time should come; Augustine, it was at first planned, to fit himself for
the law. George could now look for nothing of the kind. He must
continue, as he had begun, to get such elementary and practical
instruction as was to be had of schoolmasters in Virginia, and the young
mother’s care must stand him in the stead of a father’s pilotage and
oversight.
Fortunately Mary Washington was a wise and provident mother, a woman of
too firm a character and too steadfast a courage to be dismayed by
responsibility. She had seemed only a fair and beautiful girl when
Augustine Washington married her, and there was a romantic story told of
how that gallant Virginian sailor and gentleman had literally been
thrown at her feet out of a carriage in the London streets by way of
introduction--where she, too, was a visiting stranger out of Virginia.
But she had shown a singular capacity for business when the romantic
days of courtship were over. Lawrence Washington, too, though but
five-and-twenty when his father died and left him head of the family,
proved himself such an elder brother as it could but better and elevate
a boy to have. For all he was so young, he had seen something of the
world, and had already made notable friends. He had not returned home
out of England until he was turned of twenty-one, and he had been back
scarcely a twelvemonth before he was off again, to seek service in the
war against Spain. The colonies had responded with an unwonted
willingness and spirit in 1740 to the home government’s call for troops
to go against the Spaniard in the West Indies; and Lawrence Washington
had sought and obtained a commission as captain in the Virginian
regiment which had volunteered for the duty. He had seen those terrible
days at Cartagena, with Vernon’s fleet and Wentworth’s army, when the
deadly heat and blighting damps of the tropics wrought a work of death
which drove the English forth as no fire from the Spanish cannon could.
He had been one of that devoted force which threw itself twelve hundred
strong upon Fort San Lazaro, and came away beaten with six hundred only.
He had seen the raw provincials out of the colonies carry themselves as
gallantly as any veterans through all the fiery trial; had seen the
storm and the valor, the vacillation and the blundering, and the shame
of all the rash affair; and had come away the friend and admirer of the
gallant Vernon, despite his headstrong folly and sad miscarriage. He had
reached home again, late in the year 1742, only to see his father
presently snatched away by a sudden illness, and to find himself become
head of the family in his stead. All thought of further service away
from home was dismissed. He accepted a commission as major in the
colonial militia, and an appointment as adjutant-general of the military
district in which his lands lay; but he meant that for the future his
duties should be civil rather than military in the life he set himself
to live, and turned very quietly to the business and the social duty of
a proprietor among his neighbors in Fairfax County, upon the broad
estates to which he gave the name Mount Vernon, in compliment to the
brave sailor whose friend he had become in the far, unhappy South.
Marriage was, of course, his first step towards domestication, and the
woman he chose brought him into new connections which suited both his
tastes and his training. Three months after his father’s death he
married Anne Fairfax, daughter to William Fairfax, his neighbor. ’Twas
William Fairfax’s granduncle Thomas, third Lord Fairfax, who had in that
revolutionary year
[Illustration: THOMAS, SIXTH LORD FAIRFAX]
1646 summoned Colonel Henry Washington to give into his hands the city
of Worcester, and who had got so sharp an answer from the King’s stout
soldier. But the Fairfaxes had soon enough turned royalists again when
they saw whither the Parliament men would carry them. A hundred healing
years had gone by since those unhappy days when the nation was arrayed
against the King. Anne Fairfax brought no alien tradition to the
household of her young husband. Her father had served the King, as her
lover had--with more hardship than reward, as behooved a soldier--in
Spain and in the Bahamas; and was now, when turned of fifty, agent here
in Virginia to his cousin Thomas, sixth Baron Fairfax, in the management
of his great estates, lying upon the Northern Neck and in the fruitful
valleys beyond. William Fairfax had been but nine years in the colony,
but he was already a Virginian like his neighbors, and, as collector of
his Majesty’s customs for the South Potomac and President of the King’s
Council, no small figure in their affairs--a man who had seen the world
and knew how to bear himself in this part of it.
In 1746 Thomas, Lord Fairfax, himself came to Virginia--a man strayed
out of the world of fashion at fifty-five into the forests of a wild
frontier. The better part of his ancestral estates in Yorkshire had been
sold to satisfy the creditors of his spendthrift father. These untilled
stretches of land in the Old Dominion were now become the chief part of
his patrimony. ’Twas said, too, that he had suffered a cruel
misadventure in love at the hands of a fair jilt in London, and so had
become the austere, eccentric bachelor he showed himself to be in the
free and quiet colony. A man of taste and culture, he had written with
Addison and Steele for the _Spectator_; a man of the world, he had
acquired, for all his reserve, that easy touch and intimate mastery in
dealing with men which come with the long practice of such men of
fashion as are also men of sense. He brought with him to Virginia,
though past fifty, the fresh vigor of a young man eager for the free
pioneer life of such a province. He tarried but two years with his
cousin, where the colony had settled to an ordered way of living. Then
he built himself a roomy lodge, shadowed by spreading piazzas, and
fitted with such simple appointments as sufficed for comfort at the
depths of the forest, close upon seventy miles away, within the valley
of the Shenandoah, where a hardy frontier people had but begun to
gather. The great manor-house he had meant to build was never begun. The
plain comforts of “Green way Court” satisfied him more and more easily
as the years passed, and the habits of a simple life grew increasingly
pleasant and familiar, till thirty years and more had slipped away and
he was dead, at ninety-one--broken-hearted, men said, because the King’s
government had fallen upon final defeat and was done with in America.
It was in the company of these men, and of those who naturally gathered
about them in that hospitable country, that George Washington was bred.
“A stranger had no more to do,” says Beverley, “but to inquire upon the
road where any gentleman or good housekeeper lived, and there he might
depend upon being received with hospitality”; and ’twas certain many
besides strangers would seek out the young major at Mount Vernon whom
his neighbors had hastened to make their representative in the House of
Burgesses, and the old soldier of the soldierly house of Fairfax who
was President of the King’s Council, and so next to the Governor
himself. A boy who was much at Mount Vernon and at Mr. Fairfax’s seat,
Belvoir, might expect to see not a little that was worth seeing of the
life of the colony. George was kept at school until he was close upon
sixteen; but there was ample vacation-time for visiting. Mrs. Washington
did not keep him at her apron-strings. He even lived, when it was
necessary, with his brother Augustine, at the old home on Bridges’
Creek, in order to be near the best school that was accessible, while
the mother was far away on the farm that lay upon the Rappahannock. Mrs.
Washington saw to it, nevertheless, that she should not lose sight of
him altogether. When he was fourteen it was proposed that he should be
sent to sea, as so many lads were, no doubt, from that maritime
province; but the prudent mother preferred he should not leave Virginia,
and the schooling went on as before--the schooling of books and manly
sports. Every lad learned to ride--to ride colt or horse, regardless of
training, gait, or temper--in that country, where no one went afoot
except to catch his mount in the pasture. Every lad, black or white,
bond or free, knew where to find and how to take the roving game in the
forests. And young Washington, robust boy that he was, not to be daunted
while that strong spirit sat in him which he got from his father and
mother alike, took his apprenticeship on horseback and in the tangled
woods with characteristic zest and ardor.
He was, above all things else, a capable, executive boy. He loved
mastery, and he relished acquiring the most effective means of mastery
in all practical affairs. His very exercise-books used at school gave
proof of it. They were filled, not only with the rules, formulæ,
diagrams, and exercises of surveying, which he was taking special pains
to learn, at the advice of his friends, but also with careful copies of
legal and mercantile papers, bills of exchange, bills of sale, bonds,
indentures, land warrants, leases, deeds, and wills, as if he meant to
be a lawyer’s or a merchant’s clerk. It would seem that, passionate and
full of warm blood as he was, he conned these things as he studied the
use and structure of his fowling-piece, the bridle he used for his
colts, his saddlegirth, and the best ways of mounting. He copied these
forms of business as he might have copied Beverley’s account of the way
fox or ’possum or beaver was to be taken or the wild turkey trapped. The
men he most admired--his elder brothers, Mr. Fairfax, and the gentlemen
planters who were so much at their houses--were most of them sound men
of business, who valued good surveying as much as they admired good
horsemanship and skill in sport. They were their own merchants, and
looked upon forms of business paper as quite as useful as ploughs and
hogsheads. Careful exercise in such matters might well enough accompany
practice in the equally formal minuet in Virginia. And so this boy
learned to show in almost everything he did the careful precision of the
perfect marksman.
In the autumn of 1747, when he was not yet quite sixteen, George quit
his formal schooling, and presently joined his brother Lawrence at Mount
Vernon, to seek counsel and companionship. Lawrence had conceived a
strong affection for his manly younger brother. Himself a man of spirit
and honor, he had a high-hearted man’s liking for all that he saw that
was indomitable and well-purposed in the lad, a generous man’s
tenderness
[Illustration: MOUNT VERNON AT THE PRESENT DAY]
in looking to the development of this thoroughbred boy; and he took him
into his confidence as if he had been his own son. Not only upon his
vacations now, but almost when he would, and as if he were already
himself a man with the rest, he could live in the comradeship that
obtained at Belvoir and Mount Vernon. Men of all sorts, it seemed, took
pleasure in his company. Lads could be the companions of men in
Virginia. Her outdoor life of journeyings, sport, adventure, put them,
as it were, upon equal terms with their elders, where spirit, audacity,
invention, prudence, manliness, resource, told for success and
comradeship. Young men and old can be companions in arms, in sport, in
woodcraft, and on the trail of the fox. ’Twas not an indoor life of
conference, but an outdoor life of affairs in this rural colony. One
man, indeed, gave at least a touch of another quality to the life
Washington saw. This was Lord Fairfax, who had been almost two years in
Virginia when the boy quit school, and who was now determined, as soon
as might be, to take up his residence at his forest lodge within the
Blue Ridge. George greatly struck his lordship’s fancy, as he did that
of all capable men, as a daring lad in the hunt and a sober lad in
counsel; and, drawn into such companionship, he learned a great deal
that no one else in Virginia could have taught him so well--the
scrupulous deportment of a high-bred and honorable man of the world; the
use of books by those who preferred affairs; the way in which strength
may be rendered gracious, and independence made generous. A touch of Old
World address was to be learned at Belvoir.
His association with Lord Fairfax, moreover, put him in the way of
making his first earnings as a surveyor. Fairfax had not come to
America merely to get away from the world of fashion in London and bury
himself in the wilderness. His chief motive was one which did him much
more credit, and bespoke him a man and a true colonist. It was his
purpose, he declared, to open up, settle, and cultivate the vast tracts
of beautiful and fertile land he had inherited in Virginia, and he
proved his sincerity by immediately setting about the business. It was
necessary as a first step that he should have surveys made, in order
that he might know how his lands lay, how bounded and disposed through
the glades and upon the streams of the untrodden forests; and in young
Washington he had a surveyor ready to his hand. The lad was but sixteen,
indeed; was largely self-taught in surveying; and had had no business
yet that made test of his quality. But surveyors were scarce, and boys
were not tender at sixteen in that robust, out-of-door colony. Fairfax
had an eye for capacity. He knew the athletic boy to be a fearless
woodsman, with that odd, calm judgment looking forth at his steady gray
eyes; perceived how seriously he took himself in all that he did, and
how thorough he was at succeeding; and had no doubt he could run his
lines through the thicketed forests as well as any man. At any rate, he
commissioned him to undertake the task, and was not disappointed in the
way he performed it. Within a very few weeks Washington conclusively
showed his capacity. In March, 1748, with George Fairfax, William
Fairfax’s son, for company, he rode forth with his little band of
assistants through the mountains to the wild country where his work lay,
and within the month almost he was back again, with maps and figures
which showed his lordship very clearly what lands he had upon the
sparkling Shenandoah and the swollen upper waters of the Potomac. ’Twas
all he wanted before making his home where his estate lay in the
wilderness. Before the year was out he had established himself at
Greenway Court; huntsmen and tenants and guests had found their way
thither, and life was fairly begun upon the rough rural barony.
It had been wild and even perilous work for the young surveyor, but just
out of school, to go in the wet springtime into that wilderness, when
the rivers were swollen and ugly with the rains and melting snows from
off the mountains, where there was scarcely a lodging to be had except
in the stray, comfortless cabins of the scattered settlers, or on the
ground about a fire in the open woods, and where a woodman’s wits were
needed to come even tolerably off. But there was a strong relish in such
an experience for Washington, which did not wear off with the novelty of
it. There is an unmistakable note of boyish satisfaction in the tone in
which he speaks of it. “Since you received my letter in October last,”
he writes to a young comrade, “I have not sleep’d above three nights or
four in a bed, but, after walking a good deal all the day, I lay down
before the fire upon a little hay, straw, fodder, or bear-skin,
whichever is to be had, with man, wife, and children, like a parcel of
dogs and cats; and happy is he who gets the berth nearest the fire.... I
have never had my clothes off, but lay and sleep in them, except the few
nights I have lay’n in Frederick Town.” For three years he kept steadily
at the trying business, without loss either of health or courage, now
deep in the forests laboriously laying off the rich bottom lands and
swelling hill-sides of that wild but goodly country between the
mountains, now at Greenway Court with his lordship, intent upon the
busy life there,--following the hounds, consorting with huntsmen and
Indians and traders, waiting upon the ladies who now and again visited
the lodge; when other occupations failed, reading up and down in his
lordship’s copy of the _Spectator_, or in the historians who told the
great English story. His first success in surveying brought him frequent
employment in the valley. Settlers were steadily making their way
thither, who must needs have their holdings clearly bounded and defined.
Upon his lordship’s recommendation and his own showing of what he knew
and could do, he obtained appointment at the hands of the President and
Master of William and Mary, the colony’s careful agent in the matter, as
official surveyor for Culpeper County, “took the usual oaths to his
Majesty’s person and government,” and so got for his work the privilege
of authoritative public record.
Competent surveyors were much in demand, and, when once he had been
officially accredited in his profession, Washington had as much to do
both upon new lands and old as even a young man’s energy and liking for
an independent income could reasonably demand. His home he made with his
brother at Mount Vernon, where he was always so welcome; and he was as
often as possible with his mother at her place upon the Rappahannock, to
lend the efficient lady such assistance as she needed in the business of
the estate she held for herself and her children. At odd intervals he
studied tactics, practised the manual of arms, or took a turn at the
broadsword with the old soldiers who so easily found excuses for
visiting Major Washington at Mount Vernon. But, except when winter
weather forbade him the fields, he was abroad, far and near, busy with
his surveying, and incidentally making trial of his neighbors up and
down all the country-side round about, as his errands threw their open
doors in his way. His pleasant bearing and his quiet satisfaction at
being busy, his manly, efficient ways, his evident self-respect, and his
frank enjoyment of life, the engaging mixture in him of man and boy,
must have become familiar to everybody worth knowing throughout all the
Northern Neck.
But three years put a term to his surveying. In 1751 he was called
imperatively off, and had the whole course of his life changed, by the
illness of his brother. Lawrence Washington had never been robust; those
long months spent at the heart of the fiery South with Vernon’s
fever-stricken fleet had touched his sensitive constitution to the
quick, and at last a fatal consumption fastened upon him. Neither a trip
to England nor the waters of the warm springs at home brought him
recuperation, and in the autumn of 1751 his physician ordered him to the
Bahamas for the winter. George, whom he so loved and trusted, went with
him, to nurse and cheer him. But even the gentle sea-air of the islands
wrought no cure of the stubborn malady. The sterling, gifted, lovable
gentleman, who had made his quiet seat at Mount Vernon the home of so
much that was honorable and of good report, came back the next summer to
die in his prime, at thirty-four. George found himself named executor in
his brother’s will, and looked to of a sudden to guard all the interests
of the young widow and her little daughter in the management of a large
estate. That trip to the Bahamas had been his last outing as a boy. He
had enjoyed the novel journey with a very keen and natural relish while
it promised his brother health. The radiant air of those summer isles
had touched him with a new pleasure, and the cordial hospitality of the
homesick colonists had added the satisfaction of a good welcome. He had
braved the small-pox in one household with true Virginian punctilio
rather than refuse an invitation to dinner, had taken the infection, and
had come home at last bearing some permanent marks of a three weeks’
sharp illness upon him. But he had had entertainment enough to strike
the balance handsomely against such inconveniences, had borne whatever
came in his way very cheerily, with that wholesome strength of mind
which made older men like him, and would have come off remembering
nothing but the pleasure of the trip had his noble brother only found
his health again. As it was, Lawrence’s death put a final term to his
youth. Five other executors were named in the will; but George, as it
turned out, was to be looked to to carry the burden of administration,
and gave full proof of the qualities that had made his brother trust him
with so generous a confidence.
His brother’s death, in truth, changed everything for him. He seemed of
a sudden to stand as Lawrence’s representative. Before they set out for
the Bahamas Lawrence had transferred to him his place in the militia,
obtaining for him, though he was but nineteen, a commission as major and
district adjutant in his stead; and after his return, in 1752,
Lieutenant-Governor Dinwiddie, the crown’s new representative in
Virginia, added still further to his responsibilities as a soldier by
reducing the military districts of the colony to four, and assigning to
him one of the four, under a renewed commission as major and
adjutant-general. His brother’s will not only named him an executor, but
also made him residuary legatee of the estate of Mount Vernon in
[Illustration: LAWRENCE WASHINGTON
(From a portrait, by an unknown artist, in the possession of Lawrence
Washington, Alexandria, Virginia)]
case his child should die. He had to look to the discipline and
accoutrement of the militia of eleven counties, aid his mother in her
business, administer his brother’s estate, and assume on all hands the
duties and responsibilities of a man of affairs when he was but just
turned of twenty.
The action of the colonial government in compacting the organization and
discipline of the militia by reducing the number of military districts
was significant of a sinister change in the posture of affairs beyond
the borders. The movements of the French in the West had of late become
more ominous than ever; ’twas possible the Virginian militia might any
day see an end of that “everlasting peace” which good Mr. Beverley had
smiled to see them complacently enjoy, and that the young major, who was
now Adjutant-General of the Northern Division, might find duties abroad
even more serious and responsible than his duties at home. Whoever
should be commissioned to meet and deal with the French upon the western
rivers would have to handle truly critical affairs, decisive of the fate
of the continent, and it looked as if Virginia must undertake the
fateful business. The northern borders, indeed, were sadly harried by
the savage allies of the French; the brunt of the fighting hitherto had
fallen upon the hardy militiamen of Massachusetts and Connecticut in the
slow contest for English mastery upon the continent. But there was
really nothing to be decided in that quarter. The French were not likely
to attempt the mad task of driving out the thickly set English
population, already established, hundreds of thousands strong, upon the
eastern coasts. Their true lines of conquest ran within. Their strength
lay in their command of the great watercourses which flanked the
English colonies both north and west. ’Twas a long frontier to hold,
that mazy line of lake and river that ran all the way from the Gulf of
St. Lawrence to the wide mouths of the sluggish Mississippi. Throughout
all the posts and settlements that lay upon it from end to end there
were scarcely eighty thousand Frenchmen, while the English teemed upon
the coasts more than a million strong. But the forces of New France
could be handled like an army, while the English swarmed slowly
westward, without discipline or direction, the headstrong subjects of a
distant government they would not obey, the wayward constituents of a
score of petty and jealous assemblies tardy at planning, clumsy at
executing plans. They were still far away, too, from the mid-waters of
the lakes and from the royal stream of the Mississippi itself, where
lonely boats floated slowly down, with their cargoes of grain, meat,
tallow, tobacco, oil, hides, and lead, out of the country of the
Illinois, past the long, thin line of tiny isolated posts, to the
growing village at New Orleans and the southern Gulf. But they were to
be feared, none the less. If their tide once flowed in, the French well
knew it could not be turned back again. It was not far away from the
Ohio now; and if once settlers out of Pennsylvania and Virginia gained a
foothold in any numbers on that river, they would control one of the
great highways that led to the main basins of the continent. It was
imperative they should be effectually forestalled, and that at once.
The Marquis Duquesne, with his quick soldier blood, at last took the
decisive step for France. He had hardly come to his colony, to serve his
royal master as Governor upon the St. Lawrence, when he determined to
[Illustration:
FRENCH AND ENGLISH
IN
NORTH AMERICA
1755
]
occupy the upper waters of the Ohio, and block the western passes
against the English with a line of military posts. The matter did not
seem urgent to the doubting ministers at Versailles. “Be on your guard
against new undertakings,” said official letters out of France; “private
interests are generally at the bottom of them.” But Duquesne knew that
it was no mere private interest of fur trader or speculator that was at
stake now. The rivalry between the two nations had gone too far to make
it possible to draw back. Military posts had already been established by
the bold energy of the French at Niagara, the key to the western lakes,
and at Crown Point upon Champlain, where lake and river struck straight
towards the heart of the English trading settlements upon the Hudson.
The English, accepting the challenge, had planted themselves at Oswego,
upon the very lake route itself, and had made a port there to take the
furs that came out of the West, and, though very sluggish in the
business, showed purpose of aggressive movement everywhere that
advantage offered. English settlers by the hundred were pressing towards
the western mountains in Pennsylvania, and down into that “Virginian
Arcady,” the sweet valley of the Shenandoah: thrifty Germans, a few;
hardy Scots-Irish, a great many--the blood most to be feared and
checked. It was said that quite three hundred English traders passed the
mountains every year into the region of the Ohio. Enterprising gentlemen
in Virginia--Lawrence and Augustine Washington among the rest--had
joined influential partners in London in the formation of an Ohio
Company for the settlement of the western country and the absorption of
the western trade; had sent out men who knew the region to make interest
with the Indians and fix upon points of vantage for trading-posts and
settlements; had already set out upon the business by erecting
storehouses at Will’s Creek, in the heart of the Alleghanies, and,
farther westward still, upon Redstone Creek, a branch of the Monongahela
itself.
It was high time to act; and Duquesne, having no colonial assembly to
hamper him, acted very promptly. When spring came, 1753, he sent fifteen
hundred men into Lake Erie, to Presque Isle, where a fort of squared
logs was built, and a road cut through the forests to a little river
whose waters, when at the flood, would carry boats direct to the
Alleghany and the great waterway of the Ohio itself. An English
lieutenant at Oswego had descried the multitudinous fleet of canoes upon
Ontario carrying this levy to its place of landing in the lake beyond,
and a vagrant Frenchman had told him plainly what it was. It was an army
of six thousand men, he boasted, going to the Ohio, “to cause all the
English to quit those parts.” It was plain to every English Governor in
the colonies who had his eyes open that the French would not stop with
planting a fort upon an obscure branch of the Alleghany, but that they
would indeed press forward to take possession of the Ohio, drive every
English trader forth, draw all the native tribes to their interest by
force or favor, and close alike the western lands and the western trade
in very earnest against all the King’s subjects.
Governor Dinwiddie was among the first to see the danger and the need
for action, as, in truth, was very natural. In office and out, his study
had been the colonial trade, and he had been merchant and official now a
long time. He was one of the twenty stockholders of the Ohio Company,
and had come to his governorship in Virginia with his eye upon the
western country. He had but to look about him to perceive that Virginia
would very likely be obliged to meet the crisis unaided, if, indeed, he
could induce even her to meet it. Governor Hamilton, of Pennsylvania,
also saw how critically affairs stood, it is true, and what ought to be
done. His agents had met and acted with the agents of the Ohio Company
already in seeking Indian alliances and fixing upon points of vantage
beyond the Alleghanies. But the Pennsylvania Assembly could by no
argument or device be induced to vote money or measures in the business.
The placid Quaker traders were as stubborn as the stolid German farmers.
They opposed warlike action on principle. The Germans opposed it because
they could not for the life of them see the necessity of parting with
their money to send troops upon so remote an errand. Dinwiddie did not
wait or parley. He acted first, and consulted his legislature
afterwards. It was in his Scots blood to take the business very
strenuously, and in his traders blood to take it very anxiously. He had
kept himself advised from the first of the movements of the French.
Their vanguard had scarcely reached Presque Isle ere he despatched
letters to England apprising the government of the danger. Answer had
come very promptly, too, authorizing him to build forts upon the Ohio,
if he could get the money from the Burgesses; and meantime, should the
French trespass further, “to require of them peaceably to depart.” If
they would not desist for a warning, said his Majesty, “we do hereby
strictly charge and command you to drive them off by force of arms.”
Even to send a warning to the French was no easy matter when the King’s
letter came and the chill autumn rains were at hand. The mountain
streams, already swollen, presently to be full of ice, would be very
dangerous for men and horses, and the forests were likely enough to teem
with hostile savages, now the French were there. A proper messenger was
found and despatched, nevertheless--young Major George Washington, of
the Northern District. The errand lay in his quarter; his three years of
surveying at the heart of the wilderness had made him an experienced
woodsman and hardy traveller, had tested his pluck and made proof of his
character; he was well known upon the frontier, and his friends were
very influential, and very cordial in recommending him for this or any
other manly service that called for steadiness, hardihood, and resource.
Dinwiddie had been a correspondent of Lawrence Washington’s ever since
the presidency of the Ohio Company had fallen to the young Virginian
upon the death of his neighbor Thomas Lee, writing to him upon terms of
intimacy. He knew the stock of which George, the younger brother, came,
and the interests in which he might be expected to embark with ardor; he
could feel that he took small risk in selecting such an agent. Knowing
him, too, thus through his family and like a friend, he did not hesitate
in writing to Governor Hamilton, of Pennsylvania, to speak of this youth
of twenty-one as “a person of distinction.”
Washington performed his errand as Dinwiddie must have expected he
would. He received his commission and the Governor’s letter to the
French commandant on the last day of October, and set out the same day
for the mountains. Jacob Vanbraam, the Dutch soldier of fortune who had
been his fencing-master at Mount Vernon, accompanied him as interpreter,
and Christopher Gist, the hardy, self-reliant frontier trader, whom the
Ohio Company had employed to make interest for them among the Indians of
the far region upon the western rivers which he knew so well, was
engaged to act as his guide and counsellor; and with a few servants and
packhorses he struck straight into the forests in the middle of bleak
November. It was the 11th of December before the jaded party rode, in
the cold dusk, into the drenched and miry clearing where the dreary
little fort stood that held the French commander. Through two hundred
and fifty miles and more of forest they had dragged themselves over
swollen rivers, amidst an almost ceaseless fall of rain or snow, with
not always an Indian trail, even, or the beaten track of the bison, to
open the forest growth for their flagging horses, and on the watch
always against savage treachery. It had become plain enough before they
reached their destination what answer they should get from the French.
Sixty miles nearer home than these lonely headquarters of the French
commander at Fort Le Bœuf they had come upon an outpost where the French
colors were to be seen flying from a house from which an English trader
had been driven out, and the French officers there had uttered brutally
frank avowal of their purpose in that wilderness as they sat at wine
with the alert and temperate young Virginian. “It was their absolute
design,” they said, “to take possession of the Ohio, and, by G--, they
would do it.... They were sensible the English could raise two men for
their one, yet they knew their motions were too slow and dilatory to
prevent any undertaking of theirs.” The commandant at Fort Le Bœuf
received the wayworn ambassador very courteously, and even graciously--a
thoughtful elderly man, Washington noted him, “with much the air of a
soldier”--but would make no profession even that he would consider the
English summons to withdraw; and the little party of Englishmen
presently turned back amidst the winter’s storms to carry through the
frozen wilderness a letter which boasted the French lawful masters of
all the continent beyond the Alleghanies. When Washington reached
Williamsburg, in the middle of January, 1754, untouched by even the
fearful fatigues and anxieties of that daring journey, he had
accomplished nothing but the establishment of his own character in the
eyes of the men who were to meet the crisis now at hand. He had been at
infinite pains, at every stage of the dreary adventure, to win and hold
the confidence of the Indians who were accounted friends of the English,
and had displayed an older man’s patience, address, and fortitude in
meeting all their subtle shifts; and he had borne hardships that tried
even the doughty Gist. When the horses gave out, he had left them to
come by easier stages, while he made his way afoot, with only a single
companion, across the weary leagues that lay upon his homeward way.
Gist, his comrade in the hazard, had been solicitously “unwilling he
should undertake such a travel, who had never been used to walking
before this time,” but the imperative young commander would not be
stayed, and the journey was made, spite of sore feet and frosts and
exhausting weariness. He at least knew what the French were about, with
what strongholds and forces, and could afford to await orders what to do
next.
COLONEL WASHINGTON