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Lawrence Washington, George’s great-great-grandfather and an Anglican minister,
Lawrence Washington,
became paternal grandfather of the first president.
Augustine—the future father of George Washington—was
From spotty early records, Augustine emerges as a remorseless, hard-driving businessman.
Augustine married Mary Johnson Ball,
Mary Ball was born in 1708
George Washington was born around ten A.M. on February 11, 1732,
when the new Gregorian calendar deferred it by eleven days to February 22.
In 1736 Augustine Washington sailed to England and negotiated a one-twelfth ownership share of the Principio Company.
Augustine’s early death robbed George of the classical education bestowed on his older brothers, leaving him with an enduring sense of stunted, incomplete schooling.
There would always be a cool, quiet antagonism between Washington and his mother. The hypercritical mother produced a son who was overly sensitive to criticism and suffered from a lifelong need for approval.
Throughout his life, he exhibited a faultless precision in dress, regarding a person’s apparel as the outward sign of inner order.
What Washington didn’t recall was that the British regulars under Mackay had stood steadfast under French fire, while the ranks of his own Virginia Regiment had broken and dived for cover.
at least two-thirds, he thought, had been victims of friendly fire.
His frontier experience only darkened his view of human nature, and he saw people as motivated more by force than by kindness. “Lenity, so far from producing its desired effects, rather emboldens them in these villainous undertakings,” he told Dinwiddie.
Washington remained a stickler for discipline, which he identified as “the soul of an army,” and he encouraged military discipline even in private matters.
When a portion of the Augusta County militia was summoned to duty that October, fewer than a tenth even bothered to show up. From these early experiences, Washington came to believe devoutly in the need for rigorously trained, professional armies rather than hastily summoned, short-term militia.
The experience gave Washington new insight into the problem of being ruled by people overseas who were ignorant of local conditions.
Washington’s storied self-control was not something inherited but achieved by dint of hard work, making it all the more formidable an accomplishment. In later years Washington liked to philosophize about love and marriage and became a veritable Polonius with young relatives as he peppered them with sage advice. In 1795 he received a letter from his adopted granddaughter, Eleanor Parke Custis, who had attended a Georgetown ball and boasted of her indifference to the advances of young men there. Washington warned her bluntly of the often-unstoppable force of passion. “Do not therefore boast too
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self control
Perhaps most important, his experience in the French and Indian War made him a believer in a strong central government and a vigorous executive. Forced to deal with destructive competition among the colonies, dilatory legislative committees, and squabbling, shortsighted politicians, he had passed through an excellent dress rehearsal for the prolonged ordeal of the American Revolution.
Historians have often pondered the paradox of why rich Virginia planters later formed a hotbed of revolutionary ferment, and the explanation partly lies in their long, sullen dependence upon London factors. Of four million pounds borrowed by colonists by the outset of the American Revolution, half was owed by the prodigal farmers of Tidewater Virginia.44 As they gorged on credit, their luxurious lives rested on a precarious foundation of debt. Virginia borrowers regularly blamed their London factors for this indebtedness rather than examining their own extravagant consumption. In piling up
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when money can be had in this way, repayment is seldom thought of in time
Had he not started with tobacco, he might never have become so enmeshed with a reprehensible system that he learned to loathe.
During the first year of his marriage, he acquired 13 slaves, then another 42 between 1761 and 1773. Since he paid taxes on slaves older than twelve years of age, we know that he personally owned 56 slaves of working age in 1761, 62 in 1762, 78 in 1765, and 87 in 1770.
A master of the profitable use of time, Washington listed his monthly doings in his diary under the rubric “Where and how my time is spent.” Whether for business or social occasions, his punctuality was legendary, and he expected everyone to be on time. In his business dealings, he boasted that “no man discharges the demand of wages or fulfills agreements with more punctuality than I do.”49 Preoccupied with timepieces throughout his life, Washington aspired to stand at the center of an orderly, clockwork universe. He accorded the sundial a central spot on his mansion lawn, as if to suggest
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George and Martha Washington never turned away beggars at their doorstep.
Townshend Acts, which placed duties on paint, glass, paper, and tea and buttressed the power of royal officials by freeing them from reliance on colonial assemblies for money. Hardening its stance toward the restive colonists, the Crown dispatched the HMS Romney to Boston, where radicals had a chance in May 1768 to ponder the political message carried by its fifty guns.
One can argue plausibly that the events of the winter of 1768-69 converted George Washington from a rich, disaffected planter into a rabid militant against British policies.
That winter changed everything, and he began to evolve into the George Washington known to history.
Washington provided here a key insight into the psychology of debt: fear that any attempt at a more frugal existence would disclose the truth about a person’s actual wealth.
Unlike the French Revolution, the American Revolution started with a series of measured protests by men schooled in self-government, a long, exhaustive search for a diplomatic solution, before moving toward open rebellion.
There matters stood on December 16, 1773, when a patriotic band, masquerading as Mohawk Indians, heaved 342 chests of tea into Massachusetts Bay.
They reached the critical conclusion that an assault on one colony was an assault on all.
Washington was one of twenty-five burgesses still lingering in Williamsburg in late May when a letter arrived from Samuel Adams, beseeching the Virginians to discontinue trade with England. The legislators decided to cease all imports and reconvene on August
Land was never far from George Washington’s thoughts, and he smarted at new British policies that curtailed speculative activities.
The Quebec Act transferred the Great Lakes and territory north of the Ohio River to Catholic Quebec, restricting the acreage available to Virginians. Still more jarring was a ruling from London that land grants to French and Indian War veterans under the 1763 proclamation would be limited to British regulars, discriminating against colonial officers and reopening an ancient wound for Washington. “I conceive the services of a provincial officer as worthy of reward as a regular one and [it] can only be withheld from him with injustice,” he observed w...
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Another resolution stated that “taxation and representation are in their nature inseparable.”
Still another called for an intercolonial congress to guarantee a common defense.
It shows the schizophrenic nature of Washington’s world that he was auctioning off slaves in the immediate aftermath of the First Continental Congress, which had endorsed an end to importing slaves. Ditto for Washington’s action in February 1775, when he paid fifty-two pounds “for value of a Negro boy Tom,” whom he sent off to his western
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”49
liberty or death
There was no talk as yet of a commander in chief, for the simple reason that the Congress still regarded itself as representing a collection of colonies, not a sovereign nation.
Washington had the inestimable advantage of fully looking the part of a military leader.
Clearly, for these rank amateurs in warfare, Washington’s military résumé was neither sketchy nor irrelevant—and he was suddenly deemed the fountainhead of wisdom.
Since Virginia was the most populous colony, it seemed logical that the perfect commander would hail from that
Both John and Samuel Adams regarded Washington’s appointment as the political linchpin needed to bind the colonies together.
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.
Things seldom happened accidentally to George Washington, but he managed them with such consummate skill that they often seemed to happen accidentally. By 1775 he had a fine sense of power—how to gain it, how to keep it, how to wield it.
