CHAPTER ONE

George Washington

A Life



By WILLARD STERNE RANDALL



Henry Holt and Company

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"A PROMPT AND LITERAL OBEDIENCE"

In the normal course of events, George Washington would have become an Oxford don and followed the profession of his English father. As it turned out, he never went to college. He received the least formal schooling of any of the Founding Fathers and remained self-conscious about this lack all his life. What robbed Washington of a university education but spared him the impecunious existence of an Oxford don was a revolution in England in the mid-seventeenth century. Had not the English civil wars of the 1640s intervened, the Washingtons probably would never have left England. George Washington probably would have studied and taught at Oxford until, as a middle-aged bachelor, he gave up the austere existence of the scholar to become an obscure country parson, sitting below the salt at the table of the local lord of the manor.

George Washington was the first of his old English family to oppose a king. All of his English and American ancestors including his mother were staunch royalists. Several Washingtons were courtiers knighted by James I. William Washington married Anne Villiers, half-sister of the first Duke of Buckingham, the corrupt court favorite of King James. His younger brother, Thomas, was a page to Prince Charles I. Henry Washington was a celebrated colonel in Charles I's royalist army. Henry's sister married royalist Colonel William Legge. Their son was created the first Earl of Dartmouth; the second earl was British secretary of state at the outbreak of the American Revolution. Indeed, the first Washington to settle in America had to leave England because his family would not rebel against their king.

There is an enduring myth that Washington's family "was gentle but undistinguished," that "usually the Washingtons married their social betters," that George Washington "did not know his forebears and cared less," but recent research shows that Washington himself contributed to his own log-cabin image. As president, Washington responded to a request for information on his family origins from Sir Isaac Heard, Garter King of Arms in London, averring that he had "no document" to shed light on his English origins. All he would admit was that two brothers, John and Lawrence Washington, had "emigrated from the north of England" but "from whom they descended" he had no written record. But why would he feel the need to produce written records for the royal genealogists at Windsor Castle? He rejected a peerage during the Revolution and a monarch's crown during the constitutional crisis of 1787-1789. To the English, who must have known of his roots and certainly should have known better after a bitter civil war than to ask about them, he gave a short, cold answer. They were "of no moment," he said.

He provided more details in written memoranda to Colonel David Humphreys, his plump, supercilious former aide who started to write Washington's first biography. He required Humphreys to show him a draft of the biography and then "consign them [the original notes] to the flames." He corrected Humphreys on important particulars, but only those he considered noteworthy. Humphreys wrote that Washington came from an "opulent" family in England and that "his ancestors, who transferred a considerable inheritance from their native to their adoptive country, had been in the New World from the year 1657" when two brothers "came to America over the Atlantic from Cumberland in England." If Washington knew more, he refused to cooperate.

Just as he showed his detestation for the trappings of English nobility by refusing to wear a wig during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Washington opposed the acceptance of any title or honors from any foreign government. His objection became part of the Constitution. But he was also a master diplomat. Many American revolutionaries traced their descent from English Puritans, the persecutors of his family. By the time of his presidency Washington could afford to downplay the importance of his ancestry, but as a young orphan in the deferential status-conscious royalist society of Virginia his ease of access to colonial drawing rooms and his ability to win rapid advancement in the military and in government, coupled with his success at courting a wealthy and socially prominent woman, all depended at least in part on the fact that both sides of his family came from impeccable English stock who were already part of the Virginia ruling class. Several had served in Virginia's House of Burgesses. Many were militia officers. Almost all held rank and status in the country gentry as county court justices and Church of England vestrymen.

The Washingtons today would be called a "county family" in England. Through his paternal grandmother, George Washington was descended from King Edward III and was related to the Churchills. Washington's paternal ancestors came from Sulgrave Manor, a Northamptonshire estate about seventy-five miles northwest of London. The size of the Washington family was its curse. Too often the land was divided and its money parceled out among heirs. George Washington's last English forebear, Lawrence, was fifteen when Sulgrave Manor was sold off in 1616. He had to leave the land and find some other respectable livelihood--the clergy or the military--or, all else failing, become a lawyer or merchant. But most of these required a university education. His great-uncle and uncle had gone to Oxford, where, at seventeen, Lawrence enrolled in Brasenose College.

He arrived at Oxford's high-water mark of enrollment. An unprecedented proportion of young Englishmen, many with little or no money, were matriculating during Oxford's brief democratization. In a boom unsurpassed until the nineteenth century, more Oxonians graduated to Parliament between 1620 and 1660 than at any time before the mid-twentieth century. Lawrence Washington proceeded to the bachelor of arts degree and was elected a Fellow on condition that he could not have an income of more than a few pounds sterling a year. Wealth was considered grounds for disqualification. If he married, he would have to leave. For six years, Washington shared bachelor digs at Brasenose. He bought out the furnishings of his predecessor, and added, for his own sleeping room, a four-poster bed and a large number of leather-bound books. In the basement, he kept hogsheads of beer; in the yard heifers, cows, and a hog for bacon. Students assembling in his chambers around a large table sat on leather chairs or cushions while Washington read and lectured on philosophy and interrogated them.

Lawrence Washington turned out to be a fine young bureaucrat before there was the word for one who climbs relentlessly up through an organization. At twenty-four he was appointed Lector of Brasenose, at twenty-nine the college's disciplinarian, one of two university proctors. He held sway over everyone in town and in gowns in Oxford. He patrolled the streets at night to enforce the curfews, pursuing malefactors into their houses and hauling back young lords from brothels and taverns. He ordered women found in college rooms to be flogged. From his rare perch of clerical and civil power, Washington fell into an intense internal struggle that destroyed him.

The English revolution, so much the precursor of the American Revolution, began in the English universities. Eager college students lined up to read from Bibles chained to churches so they wouldn't be stolen. The universities were thronged with poor students whose scant 10 [pounds sterling] tuition was paid by merchants who were secret Puritans. Lawrence Washington was appointed university proctor by Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, the king's point man for the suppression of Puritanism, who was also chancellor of Oxford. On August 22, 1631, with King Charles I personally presiding, Laud denounced the principal officers of Oxford as heretics. Lawrence Washington's roommate and closest friend was fired. Four days later, Reverend Lawrence Washington, who was more acceptable to Laud, was appointed to replace his roommate. As Laud's willing agent on the Brasenose faculty, Reverend Washington carried out a thorough purge of Oxford's Puritan clergy.

Father Washington also caught the eye of a wealthy and unusually literate young widow, Amphilis Twigden of Great Tring Manor in Hertfordshire. When nine out of ten women in East Anglia couldn't sign their names, Amphilis wrote long, charming letters. Reverend Washington soon decided that Amphilis was better and more profitable company than Laud's plotting clerics. He risked his position by courting her. In search of a higher-salaried job, he outfitted himself expensively, strapped on a dress sword, and went off to London. He drew on connections at Charles I's court to collect his political debt. Archbishop Laud appointed him rector of the rich parish of Purleigh in Essex. He married Amphilis, and in 1633 she gave birth to their first son, John, the great-grandfather of George Washington and the first American Washington.

John Washington was expected to emulate his father and become an Oxford don. According to custom, Reverend Washington secured the king's recommendation for a "schollers' place" [sic] for eight-year-old John at Charterhouse School in London where he was to prepare for Oxford. But the Puritan backlash during the English civil wars brought a sudden end to Reverend Washington's cozy existence and dashed his son's academic prospects. The Puritans took a dim view of the jovial, amiable cleric who liked to have a pot of ale at one of Purleigh's pubs. The Puritans stripped some 2,800 Church of England curates of their benefices. Lawrence Washington was Puritan Enemy Number Nine on the list of "scandalous, malignant priests." Parliamentary inquisitors in Essex described him as "a common frequenter of ale-houses, not only himself sitting daily tippling there but also encouraging others in that beastly vice. [He] hath often been drunk."

Out of work with six children, the Washingtons were spared from starvation only by their royalist relatives. Lawrence's aunt Margaret was married to Sir Edwin Sandys (connecting the Washingtons with the Churchills). Sandys was treasurer of the Virginia Company and an early investor in the transatlantic tobacco trade. He sheltered Washington's wife and children. Reverend Washington went off alone to Little Brasted in Essex, "a poor and miserable [parish] whose pulpit was only filled with difficulty," and lived in poverty and increasing tipsiness.

Any chance Reverend Washington's sons had for a university education had been dashed. If his father had not been purged John probably would have gone to Oxford where, each year, an increasing proportion of freshmen had been following their fathers into the church. The year John was to matriculate, all known royalists were expelled. Instead, John Washington used his Sandys connections and a small inheritance to become the first Washington to go to sea and seek his fortune as a merchant adventurer. As the Puritan Commonwealth continued to make life precarious for young royalists, John Washington sailed to America, where the colony of Virginia had declared itself a royalist sanctuary.

The father's catastrophe proved good fortune for the son. John Washington became apprenticed to a merchant. He learned to keep accounts in a counting house along the London waterfront where cargoes came from all over England's booming maritime empire. There were wonderful opportunities to make money as the English competed for trade routes with the Dutch, French, and Spanish. John Washington decided to get into the tobacco re-export business: more than 40 percent of all tobacco imported from the English colonies Virginia and Maryland was reshipped to European markets. By 1656, twenty-four-year-old John Washington knew the tobacco trade and navigation well enough to invest his inheritance in the cargo of the Sea Horse, a merchant ketch whose owner signed him on as first mate and junior partner. Young Washington could expect a handsome profit. At each port, he went ashore to trade tobacco. In Denmark, the Sea Horse docked at Copenhagen and Washington traveled alone to the royal city of Elsinore.

As part of his contract, young Washington agreed to cross the Atlantic Ocean to procure a new cargo of tobacco in Virginia. The ship anchored in the Potomac River in February 1657. While John was ashore, the Sea Horse blew aground during a storm and began to sink. Washington managed to repair and refloat the ship, but most of the tobacco was water-logged and had to be jettisoned. His inheritance lost, John Washington decided then and there not to return to England. While ashore, he had met an elderly planter-exporter named Nathaniel Pope who latched on to the young Englishman as just the right bridegroom for his daughter. Here was the son of an Oxford don who knew the European tobacco markets! For father and prospective son-in-law, it was love at first sight. Pope, a rich tobacco planter and member of the Maryland Assembly with extensive landholdings, was the ideal model for a young merchant mariner on the make.

It is hard to tell whether Washington fell in love with Anne Pope or his prospects as heir-apparent, but he suddenly broke his contract with Captain Prescott, who refused to pay him and sailed away. Pope advanced Washington a hefty 80 [pounds sterling] in gold and dangled the bequest of 700 acres of riverfront land. Shortly afterward, John married Anne. Nathaniel Pope appointed Washington to administer his family's lands. In only a few years, John Washington assumed the same second-tier social status in Virginia that his family had long enjoyed in England, even if to settle in Virginia in the 1650s was like deciding today to emigrate to the Brazilian rain forest. After the manor houses of England, the Virginia Tidewater plantation houses were rude shacks in a wilderness.

John Washington's migration added two new elements to the Washington family character. From that time on, they relentlessly pursued money and land. By the age of thirty, John Washington succeeded as a merchant-planter. At a time when frontier land was still cheap and tobacco fetched a high price in England, George Washington's great-grandfather accumulated five thousand acres in ten years. He also received paid emoluments from the royal governor as county coroner, trustee of estates, guardian of children, justice of the county court, and most notably, lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia, initiating another Washington family tradition.

In September 1659, John and Anne Washington's first son was born at about the same time he began to import indentured servants from England. He received "head rights" of fifty acres for each servant. He put the servants to work for five to seven years clearing, cultivating, and defending his land. In all, he "brought over" sixty-three white servants. His neighbors elected him to the Virginia House of Burgesses for the Northern Neck.

As his wealth increased, so did his family. Anne Pope Washington gave birth to five children in nine years and died. Washington remarried quickly, choosing Anne Gerrard, a woman already twice widowed. The second Mrs. Washington was a shrewd businesswoman who imported servants, something few women did. His second marriage brought Washington a mill and a tavern plus a courthouse and a jail, which he leased to the colonial government. He combined a sharp eye for real estate and a knack for inside trading. When speculators along the Potomac failed to perfect their titles to grants of royal lands by settling them fast enough, the lands reverted to the colony's government. Colonel Washington made a secret pact with the secretary of the colony. They had the land surveyed just before its original grant expired and then quickly patented it for themselves. By this inside trading, the tract where Little Hunting Creek emptied into the Potomac became the future site of Mount Vernon. Colonel Washington's half-share of this 5,000-acre boondoggle placed him squarely among the leading families of the Potomac region.

The first Colonel Washington's militia appointment helped touch off Bacon's Rebellion in September 1675, and cast a shadow over the Washington family name. When Indians raided Virginia from Maryland, Virginia's royal governor, William Berkeley, ordered Washington to call out the militia. The governor of Maryland gave Virginia permission to pursue the natives. Washington crossed the Potomac and learned that Indians had taken refuge in a makeshift fort.

Whether the Indians came out to parley or, seeing that the fort was about to fall, came out to surrender is unclear. According to testimony before an investigating committee of the Virginia House of Burgesses, Washington suggested marching the prisoners to the farm where the fighting had taken place to compare the markings of the Indians killed there with his live prisoners. The Marylanders later contended that Washington grew impatient with Indian denials and ordered his men to club the Indians to death. The surviving Indians gave him the nickname Burner of Towns. The name became hereditary and was later applied to George Washington. Governor Berkeley gave John Washington only a stern reprimand. Undeterred, Washington continued to support the royalists during Bacon's Rebellion and made money by smuggling supplies to the Maryland shore even after Bacon's rebels seized his farms. Once again a Washington had upheld the king's side in an armed rebellion.

Colonel Washington died at forty-four. His estate was divided equally among his wife and three children, two sons and a daughter. The Washingtons traditionally took a dim view of the standard practice of primogeniture. His oldest son, Lawrence, George Washington's grandfather, received most of the land and a share in Washington's mill. Living the life of a young country gentleman, Lawrence made enough money from a string of public offices to support himself. He was elected a member of the House of Burgesses and sheriff of Westmoreland County. He was an aberration among Washingtons; he cared little for land speculation. Social status meant more to him. He married Mildred Warner, daughter of the late Speaker of the House of Burgesses and a member of the governor's council. George Washington's grandparents led a life of ease. They made a long wedding trip to England and had three children. Like his father, Lawrence died young. He was thirty-seven.

Their second son, Augustine, was only three when his father died. Gus, as everyone called him, grew into an amiable blond giant. He very nearly spent his life in England, where his mother and her new husband took him. When Mildred died, her husband plunked Gus into Appleby School in Westmoreland, England. The boy spent nearly four happy years in the English boarding school while his Virginia relatives went to court to break Mildred's will. They succeeded. Brought back to Virginia, Gus was raised by an uncle, John Washington, the sheriff of Stafford County. George Washington's father grew to over six feet tall and became known for his great strength and kindness. Not long after Gus's twenty-first birthday, he married Jane Butler, daughter of a lawyer and planter. Their marriage united 1,740 prime acres, a powerful attraction to Gus, who inherited the Washington acquisitiveness for land. A year after their marriage the young couple bought a fine piece of ground on a neck of land on the south bank of the Potomac. They built a modest one-and-a-half-story house named Wakefield. In this frontier farmhouse, George Washington was born.

Exactly where George Washington was born was for a long time a subject of intense scholarly controversy. Washington's well-meaning adopted grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, evidently erred when he marked the spot in 1815 with a small monument. The federal government bought twenty-one acres around the site in 1882 and erected a 51-foot shaft of granite near where the house had stood before it was destroyed by fire. As the bicentennial of Washington's birth approached, the Wakefield National Memorial Association erected a supposed replica of the house. Memorial House, built on the foundations of a 38- by 14-foot eighteenth-century-style building, became a national park. But further research revealed a much larger U-shaped foundation almost sixty feet long, centrally located on the plantation. For years, the civic group that had built the replica in the wrong place resisted the findings of archaeologists, refusing to tear down the reproduction and build a more authentic structure. Instead, they devoted their efforts to filling the ersatz house with period furniture. Only one small tilt-top table could be obtained that, according to tradition, came from the original house.

What may be an exact replica of Washington's birthplace was built in 1825 several hundred miles to the south in Florence, Alabama, while Washington's heirs still inhabited Mount Vernon. It is a handsomely trimmed, one-and-a-half-story, three-bedroom brick house. Its most striking features are crow-step gables rising on both sides and two full Doric columns and two half-columns in front, making a relatively small house appear gracious and inviting. Like many houses of the era, it has a center hall flanked by living room and dining room. The high-ceilinged master bedroom is off the dining room. Upstairs, there are two more bedrooms under the eaves, separated by a sitting room. The largest room in the house is the kitchen, which is connected to the dining room by a generous pantry.

The original Wakefield was modest by Virginia Tidewater standards because Gus Washington used his money wisely to develop iron-ore mining and build furnaces on his lands. When England went to war with Sweden, English iron imports disappeared. An iron rush ensued in Virginia, and Gus Washington was the first out of the gate. In 1724, Washington discovered rich iron ore deposits about eight miles northeast of Fredericksburg. For half a dozen years, small amounts of iron ore had been mined in the Northern Neck and shipped to England. Through a Virginia partner, London investors offered Gus Washington a one-sixth interest in a new iron-mining and manufacturing works, the Principio Company, in exchange for the rights to his iron ore deposits. Washington went to London to negotiate for himself. He took along his two sons, Lawrence and Augustine, Jr., and enrolled them in his alma mater, Appleby. He returned to Virginia with a generous contract only to discover when he arrived home that his wife, who had stayed behind with their four-year-old daughter, was dead.

Few mothers of American presidents have been praised or vilified more than Mary Ball Washington, the first president's tall, athletic, jut-jawed mother. In the early nineteenth century, early Washington biographer and Methodist clergyman Mason Weems invented the story that young Washington could not tell a lie after he cut down a cherry tree. The Reverend Jared Sparks, president of Harvard College and biographer of the Founding Fathers, sanitized Washington by bowdlerizing his letters (those that he didn't give away to autograph collectors). Both men busily grafted and pruned facts to form a Washington myth. Parson Weems and Jared Sparks deified Mary Ball Washington, or at least made her the mother of a god. As with so much else, the historians of the twentieth century have been busy not only chopping down George Washington but knocking his mother off her pedestal. On the occasion of Washington's bicentennial in 1932 one proclaimed that Mary Ball was "grasping, querulous and vulgar":

She was a selfish and exacting mother whom most of her children avoided as soon and as early as they could, to whom they did their duty but rendered little love. It was this sainted mother of Washington who opposed almost everything that he did for the public good, who wished his sense of duty to end with his duty to her.

Nineteenth-century mythmakers put Washington's mother in the log cabin with her godlike son. Twentieth-century chroniclers diminish her as a crude frontier type. But Washington's legend has become so powerful that another president, Harry S. Truman, wrote glowingly of George Washington as one of his favorite chief executives but put his mother down as "a strange woman" and a "miser" who "although she was really quite rich complained all her life that she was destitute."

According to family records exhumed by Mary Ball Washington's brother, Joseph, Jr., a London barrister of Lincoln's Inn and a court official who left Virginia to live and practice law in England, the first Ball family came to America in 1657, the same year John Washington emigrated. The Balls, also royalists, sailed into exile with their entire household, family and servants. Settling in Lancaster County, William Ball established himself as a major planter and trader. After only two years in the colony he became a justice of the county court. He helped Governor Berkeley put down Bacon's Rebellion. He was rewarded by promotion to lieutenant colonel of county militia and served as a fellow officer of Lieutenant Colonel John Washington. When Colonel Ball died in 1680, he left his wife, Hannah, nine slaves as part of a sizable estate. His son, William II, George Washington's maternal grandfather, assumed his mantle in county politics and served in the House of Burgesses. He had six children. Widowed at fifty-eight, he married again, to a woman who could not write, a condition not uncommon among Virginia frontier women.

The first of William and Mary Ball's children was George Washington's mother, Mary Ball. During his sojourn in England, Gus Washington met Mary Ball, who was visiting relatives in London. At twenty-two she was already considered virtually a spinster--girls in Virginia usually married by eighteen. Mary Ball had gone to London to be introduced into English society. On her illiterate mother's side she was a Montague, a member of a famous landed family. George Washington's mother, Mary Ball, was only three years old when her father died. She was taken to her stepfather's farm at Yeocomico, Virginia. Her mother married again, a fourth time; she died at thirty-five. Her chief gifts to her daughter were a devout Anglicanism and a love of horses.

Each time a parent or stepparent died, Mary Ball received a legacy in land, livestock, furniture, slaves, cash, and, usually, a good horse. When her mother died, she was sent to live with a half-sister. She learned what was expected of a Virginia gentlewoman: sewing, dancing, embroidery, the Anglican catechism (she had already learned to read and write), painting, horseback riding, how to treat her slaves. She also became acquisitive and attached to all her possessions, especially her horses. By the time Mary was eighteen she had enough land and personal property to have been pursued by the usual coterie of Tidewater swains. But if she was, she may not have found anyone she would accept. Could it have been that there was something so strong and independent about her that every suitor seemed to back away?

For one thing, Mary Ball had developed a lifelong disregard for the opinions of others, especially about fashion. She far preferred the company of horses to that of other people. She seemed to be happiest when she was eighteen and a brother-in-law bequeathed her a young dappled gray horse. Throwing a silk plush saddle over its back, she charged over fields and fences and through woods. She remained unconcerned that she was considered "a young woman of a mind that never was orderly." She had thick dark eyebrows, a strong-set jaw, and a high, intelligent-looking forehead. She remained single until Gus Washington's bereavement. The fact that the tall, gray-eyed, fair-haired widower Washington already had three children did not deter Mary Ball. They married in the spring of 1731. Eleven months later, on February 11, 1732, under the existing English calendar (eleven days were later added to catch up with the rest of the world), their first son, George, was born. Into Wakefield, the Washington's modest brick house on Pope's Creek, Mary crowded all the furniture she had inherited, jammed alongside the Washington family's accumulation. When she was pregnant with George Washington, she experienced a shock that may have shaped her relationship with the large child taking shape in her womb. One summer Sunday afternoon, while the family was having dinner with guests from church, a thunderstorm rolled in. A bolt of lightning struck the house and traveled down the chimney and hit a young girl who was visiting the Washingtons for Sunday dinner. The electric current was so strong it fused the knife and fork she was using to cut her meat. She died instantly. The lightning hit with such force that it severely jolted the pregnant Mary Washington, who was sitting only a few feet away. From that time on, Mary Ball Washington cringed and tried to hide whenever lightning passed overhead, burying her face in her hands. For the moment, she recovered, but she became increasingly fearful over the years. She was so happy a few months later when a strong, sound baby was born that she traveled around the Tidewater showing off George Washington to all his cousins for an entire month, before she even had him baptized.

Mary Ball Washington never recovered fully from the shock she had seen and felt. She rarely traveled any farther than church on Sunday and her timorousness touched off a number of clashes with her family, especially her sons, whom she discouraged from taking any risks. In his choice of a military career, George Washington faced a long struggle against a mother who kept him from going to sea as a boy and embarrassed him in front of senior British officers when he was a young aide-de-camp. Even when he became a hero in the American Revolution, she could not understand; in fact she resented his desire to stray from her side and leave the safety of the farm to go off to war. She never understood her own role in shaping his need to act with courage in a very public way. Her step-granddaughter (the wife of Robert E. Lee) passed down the family tradition that Mary Ball Washington "required from those about her a prompt and literal obedience somewhat resembling that demanded by proper military subordination." She had no doubt of her own "mental power that enabled her rightly to judge and wisely to direct." From his boyhood, George Washington knew what an order sounded like--and the pain of disobeying one.

George Washington did not sit down and write of his childhood, as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin did. Nor, as Jefferson did, did he ever reminisce in old age for his granddaughter, leaving charming anecdotes to act as homilies for his grandchildren. He seems to have been ashamed of his impoverished childhood and his poor education and his fear of his mother. As soon as he could, he ran away from his boyhood world and fled into the woods, where he remade himself into a brave and tight-lipped young warrior. What little can be deduced about his childhood has to be gleaned from scant evidence. George Washington made himself as elusive as the white-tailed deer that abounded in the forests that he came to love, and he left few footprints in his writings.

What is indisputable is that George Washington grew up on a farm. His childhood world was filled with children, chickens, dogs, pigs, calves, horses, and as many as fifty slaves. From ten thousand woodland acres, most of it uncleared, his father, tall, affable, sandy-haired Gus Washington, harvested a modest living. He reinvested much of the produce of his and his slaves' labor in better land for his tobacco crops and iron-mining venture. By the time little George turned three and could walk unsupervised around the place, the U-shaped brick house on a knoll near present-day Oak Grove in Westmoreland County was becoming seriously overcrowded. The house was fairly spacious for the region, but as more children came and Gus's business and politics brought more guests and Mary crowded in more furniture, it was obvious that the house was inadequate.

To move to a better piece of land closer to his business interests, Gus Washington decided they should rent out the Pope's Creek farm and move forty miles upriver to a 2,500-acre farm he had assembled where Little Hunting Creek emptied into the Potomac. It was called Epsewasson; it would be years before anyone called it Mount Vernon. There were still no roads wider than a horse. For weeks, Gus Washington directed the slaves as they built large rafts, and he told them what furniture and farm implements went into which barrels for the long voyage upriver. On the appointed day, little George watched as the entire farm livestock and barrels went aboard the rafts. The slaves followed Gus's lead as they pushed with long poles out into the river, careful to stay in the shallows as close to the riverbank as they could and still avoid fallen trees.

George was used to playing with children from neighboring farms. At Epsewasson, more isolated than Wakefield, there were no neighborhood boys to play with. His companions were slave children. Most of the excitement at first swirled around the construction of a new house on the high bluff overlooking the Potomac. Gus Washington had designed a large, steeply sloped roof for the one-and-a-half-story brick farmhouse and a wide front porch and center hall to funnel breezes wafting up from the Potomac. Solid and unpretentious like the Washingtons, the house sat screened from the river by tall trees. At the water's edge Gus built a dock where his slaves rolled the thousand-pound hogsheads of tobacco to merchant ships that sailed downriver into the Chesapeake and on into the Atlantic toward London. Here a boy watched all the waterfront activity, daydreamed of ships, and learned to dangle a fishing line. In the distance, through his father's telescope, he could plainly make out an Indian village a mile across the river on the Maryland shore.

At Epsewasson he also began to learn about life and death. When he was scarcely three, his ten-year-old half-sister, Jane, so close to him for his first conscious years, died of one of the fevers that plagued the steaming, mosquito-infested Tidewater in summer. George began to equate the hot season with death and frequent funerals. Soon there was another baby in the house. By the time George was six, along came Betty and Samuel. George's mother always seemed to be bulging with pregnancy or holding a baby at her breast.

When George was five, he met his half-brothers Lawrence and Austin for the first time. Since their mother had died, they had lived in England. At Appleby School they had learned the classics. George was especially fond of Lawrence, who was sensitive, intelligent, and had elegant manners and speech littered with literary allusions. Lawrence had decided it was time to come home to Virginia. A new war for empire, this one called King George's War, loomed between England and France and their allies. Gus Washington turned over to Lawrence the house and farm at Epsewasson. As the firstborn son it would be his one day, anyway.

The boy George was busy learning how to help his mother and how to sit on a horse. At first, his father held him up in front and steadied him with a brawny arm when he needed it. George started out a lifetime on horseback clinging to fistsful of the animal's mane. Soon he could take the reins himself, timorously at first, and ride a horse taller than he was. Even when his father was away he practiced, under the expert eye of his mother. From his father and his brother he learned how to fish and hunt, skills absolutely indispensable to life on the frontier. There was plenty to learn on the new farm, and at day's end when the blistering sun subsided, he could make magic visits down to the river. He imbibed the leisurely excitement of fishing patiently and quietly in the hot sun, learning a lifelong hobby. At night, when the tide came in and there were crabs in the river, he watched how the grown-ups used lanterns to lure the shiny blue crustaceans to the surface and snare them with their nets.

When George was seven years old, the Virginia Gazette for January 11, 1740, carried a story that Admiral Edward Vernon was leading a British fleet to attack Cartagena, a heavily fortified Spanish fortress on the Darien Peninsula seacoast of Colombia. England was determined to break Spanish domination of the Caribbean. A war fever raged. Three weeks later the Gazette reported that Admiral Vernon was sailing with seven men-of-war to attack the Spanish fleet at Porto Bello. Actually the battle had already taken place--Vernon had captured the Spanish port in a bold surprise attack. He would have been content to seize the base at Porto Bello and from there control the Caribbean sea lanes, enjoying the proceeds of the phenomenal loot and prize money paid at auction for ships he had captured, but the British ministry in London wanted to oust the Spanish from Cartagena. It had been captured and ransomed in every British war with Spain since Sir Francis Drake had first sacked it in the 1580s, and after each war the Spanish had strengthened their fortifications until Cartagena became the strongest citadel in New Spain. The British government ordered Admiral Vernon to follow up his easy victory at Porto Bello with a land-and-sea attack on the Spanish settlements in Colombia.

For the first time English settlers in America were ordered to raise troops to serve in a British overseas expedition. Red-coated recruiting officers with drummers and flags marched from town to town. The martial stirrings quickly reached the Washington household. Between them, Virginia and Maryland were to raise a battalion of troops, one-fourth of the 3,000-man American regiment. Lawrence Washington immediately applied for a captaincy. As a third-generation Virginian with two high-ranking militia officers in his family and strong recommendations from members of the royal governor's executive council, Lawrence won the coveted commission. In a matter of weeks, Captain Washington raised his own company of one hundred green-uniformed Virginia troops. Lawrence was resplendent in his new scarlet breeches and navy blue jacket and gold-laced hat. A shiny brass officer's gorget hung from his neck; a crimson sash draped across his shoulder held his silver short-sword. Captain Washington soon led his contingent aboard a British troop transport and sailed south into what one British military historian has called "a howling fiasco" that "accomplished nothing but the strewing of the Spanish Main with English corpses."

The expedition dragged on into the yellow fever season. Most of the Americans who did not die in the assault succumbed to the fetid troop ships. The Americans, blamed by the British for the expedition's failure, were assigned the deadly task of carrying the scaling ladders for the more experienced British storming parties. Captain Washington's company took part in silencing a battery at Cartagena. The bombastic Admiral Vernon praised him in his official report for his bravery, but a place at the officers' mess table aboard his flagship did little to compensate for 90 percent American casualties. These were mostly caused by an array of diseases--scurvy, dysentery, yellow fever, malaria--and beatings and starvation at the hands of British officers, who then pressed-ganged any Americans who had survived the land assault into service on Royal Navy ships to replace dead English sailors. By late October 1742, after an absence of two terrible tense years of waiting, Lawrence Washington returned to Virginia, but he never fully recovered his health.

George Washington clung to scant memories of his father. Gus Washington's days at home at Ferry Farm became rarer as George's boyhood raced on. Far more frequently, George spent his days with his mother. Life in the Washington household revolved around the crowded kitchen and dining room, where an amazing array of meats were served after being roasted in the large fireplace. During Washington's boyhood, the nearby forests were still full of game. In 1739, when George was seven, a botanist visiting the Virginia frontier reported to a friend in England of finding

deer in great plenty, bears, buffaloes, wolves, foxes, panthers, wild cats, elks, hares, squirrels (three or four sorts), raccoons, opossums, beavers, otters, muskrats, polecats, minks ... porcupines, but they are very scarce.... Then, for fowls, wild turkeys very numerous, partridges, wild geese, swans, brants, cormorants, teal duck and mallard, black ducks and another sort we call summer ducks, plover two or three sorts, soris (a delicious eating bird in shape and [in] way of living like your water rails), heath fowls (called here improperly pheasants), wild pigeons in prodigious great flocks, fieldhares, woodcocks, snipes, herons, bitterns, eagles, larks as big as quails.

This abundance not only encouraged George to eat but to learn to hunt--his father taught him to covet the white-tailed deer. As a young boy he practiced the arts of stealth and surprise in the woods and the quick accurate marksmanship that brought back game for the family even if it led to the overeating of meat. Few Virginians ate enough fruits and vegetables. It was game and corn, cornbread and game. Many Virginians ate meat as often as five times a day.

At home, where George's mother spent virtually all her time, the Washingtons enjoyed exceptional comforts for the time and place, especially considering that they lived a day's ride from the edge of the white man's civilization. There were probably framed English prints on the walls. Neighbors had displays of Roman ruins in gilded frames and Hogarth's rollicking prints and flowers. Mary's brother was a connoisseur of fine prints and delighted in sending from London the latest prints from the shops on the Strand. It is inconceivable, given his closeness with his sister, that he left her drawing room and dining room walls barer than those of her socially competitive neighbors.

Yet Gus and Mary Washington were not extravagant. They did not fall into the trap that left so many Virginians in permanent debt to their English factors. There was silver on the table, but it was mostly spoons. When Lawrence came home from England, he brought George's younger sister Betty a gift from Uncle Joseph. This high-water mark of luxury in the household was long remembered: six silver spoons, a chest of tea, a silver strainer and tongs, and a box full of sugar cubes "ready broke." Now the Washingtons could serve tea in the latest English fashion. An inventory of King George County taken in the early 1740s shows how typical the Washington household was among the second rank of Virginia plantations. The walls were painted and a mirror hung in the entry hallway. There were two tables for meals and eleven leather-bottomed chairs arranged around them. There was plenty of china on the tables, but it was not fine. Few glasses had survived Atlantic crossings. Sometimes there was linen on the table, but it was coarse.

What visitors from England noticed more was the sheer quantity of food, all of it homegrown or hunted nearby. Bread and meat were abundant, their consumption ample. An average family and its servants consumed fifty pounds of flour a day as they eagerly cut down forests to make way for wheat fields. The Washingtons had their own mill. They charged one-twelfth of the grain they ground for their hungry neighbors. The slaves were fed cornmeal and pork, receiving fixed rations each year at hog-killing time. In addition to pork, hominy grits, and cornbread, the master's family ate large quantities of game and beef, which cost a penny a pound in 1740. After a prayer of thanks to God, young George could launch into white or corn bread and either hot or (if there were no green vegetables to boil) cold meat, chicken, fish, and oysters. For Sunday dinner, served at noon and often shared with guests invited after the morning Anglican service, there could be greens, fish, roast pig, cheese, puddings--with plenty of liquor (preferably rum or brandy) for the parents. No wonder George grew so tall.

George's father was often away on his restless quest for more land and more ore, and when he was home he pursued more income from his lengthening string of county and colony offices. With the new town of Fredericksburg burgeoning just across the narrow Rappahannock, however, other people were now demanding his son's attention. Seven was the traditional age for a boy in Virginia to begin schooling. There are no records, but he apparently began to learn to read, write, and keep sums from a tutor, a convict indentured servant Gus bought to teach his children. George began to copy out lessons in a beautiful round scroll. By the time his brother Lawrence returned in his red-and-blue uniform, George was already crossing the river each morning to the log schoolhouse in Fredericksburg. There he was preparing for the day when, like his father and stepbrothers, he would cross the Atlantic to Appleby School, to be educated formally as an English gentleman. In all, George Washington received between seven and eight years of schooling. For nearly four years, he took the ferry each morning to Fredericksburg.

When he was not bending over his quill pen and inkstand, George Washington was practicing to become a superb rider and wrestler. He was generally healthy, although the unbalanced diet of the Tidewater, combined with his mother's slavish adherence to the application of herbs, may have given George a case of rickets, a disease associated with malnutrition, which left him with a thin, caved-in chest. His mother became increasingly parsimonious over the years, and even if there were a good doctor around she did not like to pay one. He later resented and rejected his mother's stinginess, and as an adult would rely heavily on doctors while rejecting herbal nostrums.

Whenever his father was home between trips to England and to the western Virginia frontier, George followed him around in the way young boys do. Boys were considered the charges of their fathers and girls were trained by their mothers. He accompanied his father on daily rounds of inspecting the slaves at their labors. He learned the techniques of giving orders and of gaining obedience from men. Little black boys he had once played with now had to carry out his every wish. On special occasions he rode with his father over to the iron furnace to watch the blast. What a thrill for a young boy! Or he would go along to watch the slaves work his father's new grist mill on Does Creek. He learned that free white men as well as slaves and bondservants had to work hard and get dirty if they wanted to prosper. He watched his father load the wagons at the furnace, hauling twice as much as any man who worked for him. He also watched when his father came home after a trip to the west, unstrapped his surveying tools, and locked them safely in a shed. These, his father told him, were the keys George would need to claim the lands to the west that everyone, including his father and all his friends, seemed always to be talking about.

George had just turned eleven on Easter in 1743 and was visiting his Washington cousins at Chotank when a message arrived from his mother to hurry home. His father had been away for months on one of his periodic voyages to England and had returned home seriously ill. Whatever communicable disease had stricken him, the local verdict was "gout of the stomach." Modern medical experts deny there is any such disease, but whatever it was killed Gus Washington. His father's death before the age of fifty and his grandfather's at thirty-seven gave Washington the lasting impression that the Washingtons were not long-lived. Partly because of unhealthy conditions in the Tidewater, where undrained swamps produced malaria and where medicine was exceedingly primitive, few people reached old age. Roughly half the immigrants from England died within the first five years. His grandfather's death at thirty-seven was about average. But his obsession with the ages of dead antecedents gave George a gloomy, diffident manner. Of his eight siblings, two died in infancy and six between the ages of thirteen and sixty-four. George outlasted them all, not succumbing until he hastened his own death at sixty-seven. A robust constitution, inherited as much from his mother as his father, may account for the fact that George Washington outlived all of his male line, but his overriding impression was that he could not expect many years.

Yet Washington's intimations of his own mortality were certainly not a sign of hypochondria. He had the strength to survive, in addition to mumps, a severe case of smallpox, four encounters with malaria, which afflicted him from age sixteen to his dying day, as well as serious and protracted bouts of dysentery. He endured smallpox and malaria simultaneously. He had a brush with tuberculosis, suffered from typhoid fever, twice suffered near-fatal bouts of influenza, and, as president, was crippled for months by a staphylococcus infection of the hip and a serious attack of pneumonia. He was dosed with quinine so much for recurring malaria that he suffered marked hearing loss and was nearly deaf by the time he left the presidency. Only his mother lived to an age today considered old. Unimpressed that her son was by that time the first president of the United States, she died at eighty-two. But all the illness, death, and dying seemed to have some good side effects on Washington. From his boyhood he grew in patience, self-control, courage, and determination. War seemed to come as a relief for him. His adrenaline pumping, he was never healthier than when under the crushing responsibilities of command during the Revolutionary War. Here, at least, he could see his enemies.

(C) 1997 Willard Sterne Randall All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-8050-2779-3