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In September 1746 Lawrence Washington and Colonel Fairfax concocted a plan to spring fourteen-year-old George from his mother’s domination and launch him on a promising career in the Royal Navy. At a confidential meeting in Fredericksburg, designed to keep Mary Washington securely in the dark, Fairfax transmitted to George a letter from Lawrence telling of an open position for a midshipman aboard a royal frigate then anchored in Virginia.
Fucking hell. That's not manipulative at all
Sometime in 1749-50 he jotted down, with impressive exactitude, a 152-word description of a frock coat he wanted made, which was to have “a lapel breast, the lapel to contain on each side six button holes and to be about 5 or 6 inches wide, all the way equal, and to turn as the breast on the coat does; to have it made very long-waisted and in length to come down to or below the bent of the knee, the waist from the armpit to the fold to be exactly as long or longer than from thence to the bottom, not to have more than one fold in the skirt etc. etc.”
What in the fuck, man
Two days after his appointment, George performed an obligatory survey of four hundred acres in eastern Culpeper County and proudly affixed his signature to the document with his new title. Apparently, this was the only survey George ever performed in the county for which he was the nominal surveyor.
What was that you were saying about 'reliable'
He couldn’t offer comfort in person at Mount Vernon because he himself had contracted a new ailment: malaria.
Why don't people get malaria in the south anymore? Not like there's a lack of mosquitoes
Update: There was an eradication effort in the 40s and 50s that led to the founding of the CDC--which is only based out of Atlanta because that was the epicentre of malaria infections at the time
According to the Half King’s mocking account, Washington thought the French soldiers would pop up conveniently in the open field and allow themselves to get shot.
In fairness, that pretty well does describe 1700s European battle strategy
He had already sketched out uniforms for his officers, telling them in vivid terms what they should don: blue coats with scarlet cuffs and facings, scarlet waistcoats trimmed with silver lace, and “every one to provide himself with a silver-laced hat of a fashionable size.”
We realy don't talk enough about how many of the famous presidents were massive dandies
the Washington crest—a griffin poised above a crown, set above an ornamental shield with three stars, the whole emblazoned with the Latin motto Exitus Acta Probat (“The outcome justifies the deed”).
Not exactly the motto expected of a man generally portrayed as fair and reasonable
he employed a method known as rusticated boards that created the illusion of a stone exterior. First plain pine boards were cut and beveled in a way that mimicked stone blocks. Then white sand from the Chesapeake Bay was mingled with white paint, which lent the painted wood the rough, granular surface of stone. In many respects, Mount Vernon is a masterpiece of trompe l’oeil. Washington used another sleight of hand on his study walls, a technique called “graining” that transformed cheap, locally available woods, such as southern yellow pine or tulip poplar, into something resembling expensive
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Lmao seriously we need to talk more about these upstart future presidents and their ways of looking richer than they were
six pairs of tony shoes and gloves.
The fuck are tony shoes
Daniel’s father, Colonel John Custis IV, was a rich, tyrannical man who had made life sheer misery for his equally difficult wife, Fidelia, née Frances Parke. Their marital spats were the stuff of legend on the eastern shore of Virginia. When the couple rode by the shore one day, John became so enraged at Fidelia that he drove their carriage straight into Chesapeake Bay. When Fidelia asked where he was going, John replied with a sneer, “To hell, Madam.” To which she retorted boldly, “Drive on, sir.”
Lmao
Adding to this combustible mix was a mulatto son named Jack that John Custis had fathered with a slave called Alice. Once before John had threatened to disown Daniel and leave all his money to “Black Jack.” This seemed a distinct possibility if Daniel didn’t shelve his plans to marry Martha Dandridge. Far from hiding Black Jack, the irascible John Custis doted on him, and when the little boy was five, he submitted a petition to the governor to free the boy “christened John but commonly called Jack, born of the body of his Negro wench young Alice.”19 To celebrate his emancipation, the boy was
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Ok I need an entire biography of asshole Custis
It seems likely that when her husband, George William, was detained in Great Britain on legal matters that winter, Sally frequented Mount Vernon and nursed George through his illness. We will never know whether their affair was consummated.
The man was shitting himself on the regular. I think we can safely assume he wasn't banging anyone, married or otherwise
That Sally refused to credit his love or openly reciprocate it suggests that she was an artful woman who had enjoyed having her vanity stroked by a handsome younger man.
See, and from my reading it sounds like she was trying to walk a fine line between not upsetting a man important to the family she married in to and not encouraging the flirtation he persisted in even after being told to stop multiple times
Colonel James Wood,
There seem to be a lot of Colonel James Woods in history
On election day, July 24, 1758, the absentee candidate engaged in the popular, if technically illegal, custom of intoxicating local voters. His campaign forwarded him an expense account for thirty-four gallons of wine, three pints of brandy, thirteen gallons of beer, eight quarts of cider, and forty gallons of rum punch, costing the candidate a sizable thirty-nine pounds in Virginia currency. Accepting this expense, Washington hoped that his backers had plied all voters impartially with strong beverages: “My only fear is that you spent with too sparing a hand.”
I'm understanding better why we don't have a direct democracy (aside from general logistics)
The couple possessed a copy of Conjugal lewdness: or matrimonial whoredom by Daniel Defoe and The lover’s watch: or the art of making love by Aphra Behn.
Y'know, they don't tell you in history class that Washington owned the period equivalents of the Kama Sutra and The Joys of Sex
Perhaps the earthiest comment Washington ever made about sex occurred when he learned of the marriage of forty-seven-year-old Colonel Joseph Ward. He seemed to find forty-seven a comically advanced age for matrimony. “I am glad to hear that my old acquaintance Colo. Ward is yet under the influence of vigorous passions,” he told a correspondent. He supposed that Ward, “like a prudent general,” had “reviewed his strength, his arms, and ammunition before he got involved in an action. But if these have been neglected . . . let me advise him to make the first onset upon his fair del Tobosa
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Oh my
slave masters in the eighteenth century seldom rationalized or romanticized slavery as a divinely sanctioned system, as happened before the Civil War. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other Virginia planters acknowledged the immorality of slavery, while confessing perplexity as to how to abolish it without producing mayhem and financial ruin.
Worth noting that the modern construction of race was being created at this time, to the point that you can see its evolution in Jefferson's personal writings
Washington exemplified the self-invented American, forever struggling to better himself and rise above his origins.
One thing that hasn’t aroused dispute is the exemplary nature of Washington’s religious tolerance. He shuddered at the notion of exploiting religion for partisan purposes or showing favoritism for certain denominations. As president, when writing to Jewish, Baptist, Presbyterian, and other congregations—he officially saluted twenty-two major religious groups—he issued eloquent statements on religious tolerance. He was so devoid of spiritual bias that his tolerance even embraced atheism. When he needed to hire a carpenter and a bricklayer at Mount Vernon, he stated that “if they are good
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A convinced supporter of the separation of church and state, Washington declared that “no man’s sentiments are more opposed to any kind of restraint upon religious principles than mine are.”
Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son
Wait, Ben Franklin had an illegitimate son?
the cost of tea to the colonists actually declined—but
Was the tea shit though? I'd absolutely riot over inferior tea
The resolves argued that people should obey only laws enacted by their chosen representatives or else “the government must degenerate either into an absolute and despotic monarchy or a tyrannical aristocracy.” Another resolution stated that “taxation and representation are in their nature inseparable.”
Many southerners feared that the New Englanders were a rash, obstinate people, prone to extremism, and worried that an army led by a New England general might someday turn despotic and conquer the South.
I mean...
The Vassalls had owned a slave family that remained in the house, and when Washington toured his new headquarters, he found a slave boy, Darby Vassall, swinging on the front gate. In a friendly manner, Washington expressed interest in taking him into his service, but Darby, imbued with the spirit of liberty, asked what his pay would be. At that interjection, Washington evidently lost interest. “General Washington was no gentleman,” Darby later said, “to expect a boy to work without wages.”
I mean. Kid's not wrong
Captain Daniel Morgan,
Another man best known from alcohol
By January 1777 he ordered Dr. William Shippen to inoculate every soldier who had never had the disease. “Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure,” he wrote, “for should the disorder infect the army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence, we should have more to dread from it than the sword of the enemy.”
Washington was often likened to the Roman general Fabius, who held Hannibal at bay through a prudent strategy of dodging encounters that played to the enemy’s strength. Nevertheless this commonly cited analogy can easily be overstated, for Washington nursed fantasies throughout the war about fighting a grand climactic battle that would end the conflict with a single stroke.
Do we have evidence that Fabius didn't?
Arnold’s bravery, meanwhile, fostered an image, later hard to eradicate, of an officer who was dedicated root and branch to the cause and who acted courageously on his own initiative.
Not that hard. Literally the only thing I know about Benedict Arnold is that he was apparently a traitor
On November 7 Lord Dunmore announced that slaves or indentured servants who had fled from their rebel masters could join his Royal Ethiopian Regiment and win their freedom.
I mean. I might take that chance
Whatever his motivations, it was a water-shed moment in American history, opening the way for approximately five thousand blacks to serve in the Continental Army, making it the most integrated American fighting force before the Vietnam War.
Inasmuch as Martha was fond of the younger woman, Caty could hardly have enjoyed an illicit romance with the general.
Its so cute that you assume a wife's friendship with another woman must mean that woman isn't banging the husband
Only recently a British judge had handed down this grisly sentence to Irish revolutionaries: “You are to be drawn on hurdles to the place of execution, where you are to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead, for while you are still living your bodies are to be taken down, your bowels torn out and burned before your faces, your heads then cut off, and your bodies divided each into four quarters.”
Ffs a bit overkill there
He contrived a plan to flee, if necessary, to lands he owned in the Ohio Country,
There's an interesting alternate history: Washington being absorbed into a native colony
News of the Declaration elicited snide rebukes from the British side, one officer saying that it served to highlight “the villainy and the madness of these deluded people.”
I mean. In fairness. If Texas decided to declare independence tomorrow I'd (a) cheer but also (b) not really take it seriously if for some reason the US as a whole decided they were still part of the country.
