On a May day in 1758, as he spurred upon the way to Williamsburg, under
orders from the frontier, Washington rode straight upon an adventure he
had not looked for. He was within a few hours’ ride of the little
capital; old plantations lay close upon the way; neighborly homes began
to multiply; and so striking a horseman, riding uniformed and attended,
could not thereabouts go far unrecognized. He was waylaid and haled to
dinner, despite excuses and protests of public business calling for
despatch. There was a charming woman to be seen at the house, his friend
told him, if a good dinner was not argument enough--and his business
could not spoil for an hour’s stay in agreeable company. And so, of a
sudden, under constraint of Virginian hospitality, he was hurried into
the presence of the gracious young matron who was at once, and as if of
right, to make his heart safe against further quest or adventure. Martha
Custis was but six-and-twenty. To the charm of youth and beauty were
added that touch of quiet sweetness and that winning grace of
self-possession which come to a woman wived in her girlhood, and widowed
before age or care has checked the first full tide of life. At seventeen
she had married Daniel Parke Custis, a man more than twenty years her
senior; but eight years of quiet love and duty as wife and mother had
only made her youth the more gracious in that rural land of leisure and
good neighborhood; and a year’s widowhood had been but a suitable
preparation for perceiving the charm of this stately young soldier who
now came riding her way upon the public business. His age was her own;
all the land knew him and loved him for gallantry and brave capacity; he
carried himself like a prince--and he forgot his errand to linger in her
company. Dinner was soon over, and his horses at the door; there was the
drilled and dutiful Bishop, trained servant that he was, leading his
restless and impatient charge back and forth within sight of the windows
and of the terrace where his young Colonel tarried, absorbed and
forgetful; man and beast alike had been in the service of the unhappy
Braddock, and might seem to walk there lively memorials of duty done and
undertaken. But dusk came; the horses were put up; and the next morning
was well advanced before the abstracted young officer got at last to his
saddle, and spurred on belated to Williamsburg. His business concerned
the preparations then afoot for General Forbes’s advance upon Duquesne.
“I came here at this critical juncture,” said Washington to the
President of the Council, “by the express order of Sir John St. Clair,
to represent in the fullest manner the posture of our affairs at
Winchester”--lack of clothes, arms, and equipage, lack of money, lack of
wise regulations touching rank and discipline. General Forbes had been
in Philadelphia a month already, awaiting the formation of his army in
Virginia; Sir John St. Clair, his quartermaster-general, had come into
the province to see that proper plans were made and executed; it was
necessary that matters should be pressed forward very diligently and at
once; and Washington,
[Illustration:
Patrick Henry Washington Pendleton
LEAVING MOUNT VERNON FOR THE CONGRESS OF THE COLONIES]
when once at the seat of government, was not slack to urge and
superintend official action. But, the troublesome business once in
proper course, he turned back to seek Mrs. Custis again, this time at
her own home, ere he went the long distance of the frontier. The onset
was made with a soldier’s promptness and audacity. He returned to his
post, after a delay too slight to deserve any reasonable man’s remark,
and yet with a pledge given and taken which made him look forward to the
end of the campaign with a new longing as to the winning of a real home
and an unwonted happiness.
This was not his first adventure in love, but it was his last, and gave
him a quiet joy which stood him in stead a whole lifetime. No young
Virginian could live twenty-six years amidst fair women in that hale and
sociable colony without being touched again and again by the quick
passion; and this man had the blood of a lover beyond his fellows.
Despite the shyness of a raw lad who lived much in the open, he had
relished the company of lively women from the first, meeting their gay
sallies sometimes with a look from his frank blue eyes that revealed
more than he knew. Love had first found him out in earnest six years
ago, when he was but just turned of twenty; and it had taken all the
long while since to forget his repulse at the hands of a fair young
beauty in that day of passion. Mary Phillipse had but taken his fancy
for a moment, because he could not pass such a woman by and deem himself
still a true Virginian. It was more serious that he had been much in the
company, these last years, of a fair neighbor of the vivacious house of
Cary, whose wit and beauty had haunted him in the very thick of
campaigns upon the frontier, and who still mastered his heart now and
again, with a sort of imperious charm, in the midst of this very happy
season when he knew Martha Custis his veritable heart’s mistress for the
future. It may well have made him glad of misadventures in the past to
know his heart safe now.
The campaign dragged painfully, far into the drear autumn. December had
come before the captured post on the Ohio could be left to the keeping
of Colonel Mercer and a little garrison of provincials. But when at last
he was free again there was no reason why Washington should wait longer
to be happy, and he was married to Martha Custis on the 6th of January,
1759. The sun shone very bright that day, and there was the fine glitter
of gold, the brave show of resplendent uniforms, in the little church
where the marriage was solemnized. Officers of his Majesty’s service
crowded there, in their gold lace and scarlet coats, to see their
comrade wedded; the new Governor, Francis Fauquier, himself came, clad
as befitted his rank; and the bridegroom took the sun not less gallantly
than the rest, as he rode, in blue and silver and scarlet, beside the
coach and six that bore his bride homeward amidst the thronging friends
of the country-side. The young soldier’s love of a gallant array and a
becoming ceremony was satisfied to the full, and he must have rejoiced
to be so brave a horseman on such a day. For three months of deep
content he lived with his bride at her own residence, the White House,
by York River side, where their troth had been plighted, forgetting the
fatigues of the frontier, and learning gratefully the new life of quiet
love and homely duty.
These peaceful, healing months gone by, he turned once more to public
business. Six months before his marriage he had been chosen a member of
the House of Burgesses for Frederick County--the county which had been
his scene of adventure in the old days of surveying in the wilderness,
and in which ever since Braddock’s fatal rout he had maintained his
headquarters striving to keep the border against the savages. Small
wonder that he led the poll taken there in Winchester, where through so
many seasons men had seen him bear himself like a capable man and a
gallant, indomitable soldier. ’Twas no unwelcome duty, either, to take
his young wife to Williamsburg in “the season,” when all Virginia was in
town in the persons of the Burgesses and the country gentry come to
enjoy the festivities and join in the business then sure to be afoot.
The young soldier was unused to assemblies, however, and suffered a keen
embarrassment to find himself for a space too conspicuous amidst the
novel parliamentary scene. He had hardly taken his seat when the
gracious and stately Robinson, Speaker of the House and Treasurer of the
colony these twenty years, rose, at the bidding of the Burgesses, to
thank him for the services of which all were speaking. This sudden
praise, spoken with generous warmth there in a public place, was more
than Washington knew how to meet. He got to his feet when Mr. Speaker
was done, but he could not utter a syllable. He stood there, instead,
hot with blushes, stammering, all a-tremble from head to foot. “Sit
down, Mr. Washington,” cried the Speaker; “your modesty is equal to your
valor, and that surpasses the power of any language that I possess.”
Again and again, as the years passed, Washington returned at each
session to Williamsburg to take his place in the Assembly; and with
custom came familiarity and the ease and firmness he at first had lacked
upon the floor. His life broadened about him; all the uses of peace
contributed to give him facility and knowledge and a wide comradeship in
affairs. Along with quiet days as a citizen, a neighbor, and a country
gentleman, came maturity and the wise lessons of a various experience.
No man in Virginia lived more or with a greater zest henceforth than
Colonel Washington. His marriage brought him great increase of wealth,
as well as increase of responsibility. Mr. Custis had left many thousand
acres of land, and forty-five thousand pounds sterling in money, a
substantial fortune to the young wife and the two little children who
survived him; and Washington had become, by special decree of the
Governor and Council in General Court, trustee and manager of the whole.
It needed capacity and knowledge and patience of no mean order to get
good farming out of slaves, and profitable prices out of London
merchants; to find prompt and trustworthy ship-masters by whom to send
out cargoes, and induce correspondents over sea to ship the perishable
goods sent in return by the right vessels, bound to the nearest river;
and the bigger your estate the more difficult its proper conduct and
economy, the more disastrous in scale the effects of mismanagement. No
doubt the addition of Mrs. Custis’s handsome property to his own broad
and fertile acres at Mount Vernon made Colonel Washington one of the
wealthiest men in Virginia. But Virginian wealth was not to be counted
till crops were harvested and got to market. The current price of
tobacco might leave you with or without a balance to your credit in
London, your only clearing-house, as it chanced. Your principal
purchases, too,
[Illustration: “THE WHITE HOUSE,” ON THE PAMUNKEY]
must be made over sea and through factors. Both what you sold and what
you bought must take the hazards of the sea voyage, the whims of sea
captains, the chances of a foreign market. To be farmer and merchant at
once, manage your own negroes and your own overseers, and conduct an
international correspondence; to keep the run of prices current, duties,
port dues, and commissions, and know the fluctuating rates of exchange;
to understand and meet all changes, whether in merchants or in markets,
three thousand miles away, required an amount of information, an
alertness, a steady attention to detail, a sagacity in farming and a
shrewdness in trade, such as made a great property a burden to idle or
inefficient men. But Washington took pains to succeed. He had a great
zest for business. The practical genius which had shone in him almost
prematurely as a boy now grew heartily in him as a man of fortune.
Messrs. Robert Cary & Company, his factors in London, must soon have
learned to recognize his letters, in the mere handling, by their bulk.
No detail escaped him when once he had gotten into the swing of the
work. They must be as punctilious as he was, they found, in seeing to
every part of the trade and accounting with which he intrusted them, or
else look to lose his lucrative patronage. He was not many years in
learning how to make the best tobacco in Virginia, and to get it
recognized as such in England. Barrels of flour marked “George
Washington, Mount Vernon,” were ere long suffered to pass the inspectors
at the ports of the British West Indies without scrutiny. It was worth
while to serve so efficient a man to his satisfaction; worth while or
not, he would not be served otherwise.
He had emerged, as it were, after a tense and troubled youth, upon a
peaceful tract of time, where his powers could stretch and form
themselves without strain or hurry. He had robust health, to which he
gave leave in unstinted work, athletic strength, and an insatiable
relish for being much afoot and in the open, which he satisfied with
early rounds of superintendence in the fields where the men were at
their task’s, with many a tireless ride after the hounds, or steadfast
wait at the haunts of the deer; a planning will that craved some
practical achievement every day, which he indulged by finding tasks of
betterment about the estate and keeping his men at them with unflagging
discipline; a huge capacity for being useful and for understanding how
to be so, which he suffered his neighbors, his parish, his county, the
colony itself, to employ when there was need. To a young man, bred these
ten years in the forests and in the struggle of warfare upon a far
frontier, it had been intolerable to live tamely, without executive
tasks big and various enough to keep his energy from rust. The clerical
side of business he had learned very thoroughly in camp, as well as the
exceeding stir and strain of individual effort--the incessant letter
writing necessary to keep promised performance afoot, the reckoning of
men and of stores, the nice calculations of time and ways and means; the
scrutiny of individual men, too, which is so critical a part of
management, and the slow organization of effort: he had been in a fine
school for these things all his youth, and would have thought shame to
himself not to have learned temperance, sagacity, thrift, and patience
wherewith to use his energy. His happy marriage did him the service to
keep him from restlessness. His love took his allegiance, and held him
to his home as to a post of honor and reward. He had never before had
leave to be tender with children, or show with what a devotion he could
preside over a household all his own. His home got strong hold upon him.
His estates gave him scope of command and a life of action. ’Twas no
wonder he kept his factors busy, and shipped goods authenticated by the
brand.
The soldierly young planter gave those who knew him best, as well as
those who met him but to pass, the impression of a singular restraint
and self-command, which lent a peculiar dignity and charm to his speech
and carriage. They deemed him deeply passionate, and yet could never
remember to have seen him in a passion. The impression was often a
wholesome check upon strangers, and even upon friends and neighbors, who
would have sought to impose upon him. No doubt he had given way to
bursts of passion often enough in camp and upon the march, when
inefficiency, disobedience, or cowardice angered him hotly and of a
sudden. There were stories to be heard of men who had reason to remember
how terrible he could be in his wrath. But he had learned, in the very
heat and discipline of such scenes, how he must curb and guard himself
against surprise, and it was no doubt trials of command made in his
youth that had given him the fine self-poise men noted in him now. He
had been bred in a strict school of manners at Belvoir and Greenway
Court, and here at his own Mount Vernon in the old days, and the place
must have seemed to him full of the traditions of whatsoever was just
and honest and lovely and of good report as he looked back to the time
of his gentle brother. It was still dangerous to cross or thwart him,
indeed. Poachers might look to be caught and soundly thrashed by the
master himself if he chanced their way. Negligent overseers might expect
sharp penalties, and unfaithful contractors a strict accounting, if
necessary work went wrong by their fault. He was exacting almost to the
point of harshness in every matter of just right or authority. But he
was open and wholesome as the day, and reasonable to the point of pity
in every affair of humanity, through it all. Now it was “my rascally
overseer, Hardwick,” in his diary, when certain mares were sent home
“scarce able to highlone, much less to assist in the business of the
plantations”; but not a month later it was “my worthy overseer,
Hardwick, lying in Winchester of a broken leg.” It was not in his way to
add anything to the penalties of nature.
A quiet simplicity of life and a genuine love of real sport rid him of
morbid humors. All up and down the English world, while the eighteenth
century lasted, gentlemen were commonly to be found drunk after
dinner--outside New England, where the efficient Puritan Church had
fastened so singular a discipline in manners upon a whole society--and
Virginian gentlemen had a reputation for deep drinking which they had
been at some pains to deserve. A rural society craves excitement, and
can get it very simply by such practices. There is always leisure to
sleep afterwards, even though your dinner come in the middle of the day;
and there is good reason you should be thirsty if you have been since
daybreak in the saddle. To ride hard and to drink hard seemed to go
together in Virginia as inevitably as the rhymes in a song; and ’twas
famous hard riding after the fox over the rough fields and through the
dense thickets. If Washington drank only small beer or cider and a
couple of glasses of Madeira at dinner, it was no doubt because he had
found his quick blood tonic enough, and had set himself a hard regimen
as a soldier. He did not scruple to supply drink enough for the
thirstiest gathering when he presented himself to the voters of the
country-side as a candidate for the House of Burgesses. “A hogshead and
a barrel of punch, thirty-five gallons of wine, forty-three gallons of
strong cider, and dinner for his friends,” was what he cheerfully paid
for at his first election, and the poll footed but a few hundred votes
all told. Mount Vernon saw as much company and as constant merriment and
good cheer as any house in Virginia; and the master was no martinet to
his guests, even though they came upon professional errands. “Doctor
Laurie came here, I may add drunk,” says his quiet diary, without
comment, though the doctor had come upon summons to attend Mrs.
Washington, and was next morning suffered to use his lancet for her
relief. No doubt a good fellow when sober, and not to be lightly chidden
when drunk, like many a gallant horseman and gentleman who joined the
meet of the country-side at the hospitable place to follow the hounds
when the hunting was good. There was fox-hunting winter and summer, in
season and out, but the sport was best in the frosty days of January and
February, when the year was young and the gentlemen of the country round
gathered at Belvoir or Gunston Hall or Mount Vernon two or three times a
week to warm their blood in the hale sport, and dine together
afterwards--a cordial company of neighbors, with as many topics of good
talk as foxes to run to cover. The hunt went fastest and most
incessantly when Lord Fairfax came down from his lodge in the Valley
and joined them for days together in the field and at the table.
Washington loved horses and dogs with the heartiest sportsman of them
all. He had a great gusto for stalking deer with George Mason on the
broad forested tracts round Gunston Hall, and liked often to take gun or
rod after lesser game when the days fell dull; but best of all he loved
a horse’s back, and the hard ride for hours together after the dogs and
a crafty quarry--a horse it put a man to his points to ride, a country
where the running was only for those who dared. His own mounts could
nowhere be bettered in Virginia. There was full blood of Araby in his
noble Magnolia, and as good hunting blood as was to be found in the
colony in his Blueskin and Ajax, Valiant and Chinkling. His hounds he
bred “so flew’d, so sanded,” so matched in speed and habit, that they
kept always tune and pace together in the field. “A cry more tuneable
was never holla’d to, nor cheered with horn,” than theirs when they were
let “spend their mouths” till echo replied “as if another chase were in
the skies.” ’Twas first to the stables for him always in the morning,
and then to the kennels.
It had been hard and anxious work to get his affairs into prosperous
shape again when the war was over, and those long, hopeless summers on
the stricken frontier. Stock, buildings, fences--everything had to be
renewed, refitted, repaired. For the first two or three years there were
even provisions to buy, so slow was the place to support itself once
more. Not only all his own ready money, but all he got by his marriage
too, and more besides, was swallowed up, and he found himself in debt
before matters were finally set to rights and profitable crops made and
marketed. But, the thing once done, affairs cleared and became easy as
if of their own accord in the business of the estate. The men he had to
deal with presently knew their master: the young planter had matured his
plans and his discipline. Henceforth his affairs were well in hand, and
he could take his wholesome pleasures both handsomely and with a free
heart. There was little that was debonair about the disciplined and
masterful young soldier. He had taken Pallas’s gift: “Self-reverence,
self-knowledge, self-control, these three alone lead life to sovereign
power. And because right is right, to follow right were wisdom in the
scorn of consequence.” But he took heed of his life very genially, and
was matured by pleasure no less than by duty done. He loved a game of
cards in almost any company, and paid his stakes upon the rubber like
every other well-conducted man of his century. He did not find
Annapolis, or even Philadelphia, too far away to be visited for the
pleasure of seeing a good horse-race or enjoying a round of balls and
evenings at the theatre, to shake the rustic dulness off of a too
constant stay at home. Mrs. Washington enjoyed such outings, such little
flings into the simple world of provincial fashion, as much as he did;
and they could not sit waiting all the year for the short season at
Williamsburg.
A young man at once so handsome, so famous, and so punctilious in point
of dress as Colonel Washington could not but make a notable figure in
any society. “I want neither lace nor embroidery,” was the order he sent
to London. “Plain clothes, with a gold or silver button (if worn in
genteel dress), are all I desire. My stature is six feet; otherwise
rather slender than corpulent.” But he was careful the material, the
color, and the fit should be of the best and most tasteful, and that
very elegant stuffs should be provided from over sea for Mrs. Washington
and her children, and very substantial for the servants who were to be
in attendance upon the household--a livery of white and scarlet. ’Twas a
point of pride with Virginians to know how to dress, both well and in
the fashion; and the master of Mount Vernon would have deemed it an
impropriety to be less careful than his neighbors, less well dressed
than his station and fortune warranted. He watched the tradesmen
sharply. “’Tis a custom, I have some reason to believe, with many
shopkeepers and tradesmen in London,” he wrote bluntly to the Messrs.
Cary, “when they know goods are bespoken for exportation, to palm
sometimes old, and sometimes very slight and indifferent, goods upon us,
taking care at the same time to advance the price,” and he wished them
informed that their distant customers would not be so duped.
He longed once and again to be quit of the narrow life of the colony,
and stretch himself for a little upon the broader English stage at home.
“But I am tied by the leg,” he told his friends there, “and must set
inclination aside. My indulging myself in a trip to England depends upon
so many contingencies, which, in all probability, may never occur, that
I dare not even think of such a gratification.” But the disappointment
bred no real discontent. There could be no better air or company to come
to maturity in than were to be had there in Virginia, if a young man
were poised and master of himself. “We have few things here striking to
European travellers (except our abundant woods),” he professed, when he
wrote to his kinsman Richard Washington in England; “but little variety,
a welcome reception among a few friends, and the open and prevalent
hospitality of the country”; but it was a land that bred men, and men of
affairs, in no common fashion.
Especially now, after the quickening of pulses that had come with the
French war, and its sweep of continental, even of international, forces
across the colonial stage, hitherto set only for petty and sectional
affairs. The colonies had grown self-conscious and restless as the plot
thickened and thrust them forward to a rôle of consequence in the empire
such as they had never thought to play, and the events which succeeded
hurried them to a quick maturity. It was a season a young man was sure
to ripen in, and there was good company. The House of Burgesses was very
quiet the year Washington first took his place in it and stood abashed
to hear himself praised; but before Mr. Robinson, its already veteran
Speaker, was dead, a notable change had set in. Within five years,
before the country on the St. Lawrence and the lakes was well out of the
hands of the French, the Parliament in England had entered upon measures
of government which seemed meant of deliberate purpose to set the
colonies agog, and every body of counsellors in America stood between
anger and amazement to see their people in danger to be so put upon.
The threat and pressure of the French power upon the frontiers had made
the colonies thoughtful always, so long as it lasted, of their
dependence upon England for succor and defence should there come a time
of need. Once and again--often enough to keep them sensible how they
must stand or fall, succeed or fail, with the power at home--their own
raw levies had taken part with the King’s troops out of England in some
clumsy stroke or other against a French stronghold in the North or a
Spanish fortress in the South; and now at last they had gone with
English troops into the field in a national cause. Provincials and
redcoats had joined for a final grapple with the French, to settle once
and for all who should be owners and masters on the coveted continent.
The issue had been decisive. By the summer of 1760 Washington could
write his kinsman in England that the French were so thoroughly drubbed
and humbled that there remained little to do to reduce Canada from end
to end to the British power. But the very thoroughness of the success
wrought a revolution in the relations of the colonies to the
mother-country. It rid them of their sense of dependence. English
regiments had mustered their thousands, no doubt, upon the battle-fields
of the war in order that the colonies might be free to possess the
continent, and it was hard to see how the thing could have been
accomplished without them. But it had been accomplished, and would not
need to be done again. Moreover, it had shown the colonial militia how
strong they were even in the presence of regulars. They had almost
everywhere borne an equal part in the fighting, and, rank and file, they
had felt with a keen resentment the open contempt for their rude
equipment and rustic discipline which too many arrogant officers and
insolent men among the regulars had shown. They knew that they had
proved themselves the equals of any man in the King’s pay in the
fighting, and they had come out of the hot business confident that
henceforth, at any rate, they could dispense with English troops and
take care of themselves. They had lost both their fear of the French and
their awe of the English.
THE HEAT OF POLITICS