George Washington

CHAPTER I. Origins and Youth

ORIGINS AND YOUTH

Zealous biographers of George Washington have traced for him a most respectable, not to say distinguished, ancestry. They go back to the time of Queen Elizabeth, and find Washingtons then who were "gentlemen." A family of the name existed in Northumberland and Durham, but modern investigation points to Sulgrave, in Northamptonshire, as the English home of his stock. Here was born, probably during the reign of Charles I, his great-grandfather, John Washington, who was a sea-going man, and settled in Virginia in 1657. His eldest son, Lawrence, had three children--John, Augustine, and Mildred. Of these, Augustine married twice, and by his second wife, Mary Ball, whom he married on March 17, 1730, there were six children--George, Betty, Samuel, John Augustine, Charles, and Mildred. The family home at Bridges Creek, near the Potomac, in Westmoreland County, was Washington's birthplace, and (February 11, Old Style) February 22, New Style, 1732, was the date. We hear little about his childhood, he being a wholesomely unprecocious boy. Rumors have it that George was coddled and even spoiled by his mother. He had very little formal education, mathematics being the only subject in which he excelled, and that he learned chiefly by himself. But he lived abundantly an out-of-door life, hunting and fishing much, and playing on the plantation. His family, although not rich, lived in easy fashion, and ranked among the gentry.

No Life of George Washington should fail to warn the reader at the start that the biographer labors under the disadvantage of having to counteract the errors and absurdities which the Reverend Mason L. Weems made current in the Life he published the year after Washington died. No one, not even Washington himself, could live down the reputation of a goody-goody prig with which the officious Scotch divine smothered him. The cherry-tree story has had few rivals in publicity and has probably done more than anything else to implant an instinctive contempt of its hero in the hearts of four generations of readers. "Why couldn't George Washington lie?" was the comment of a little boy I knew, "Couldn't he talk?"

Weems pretended to an intimacy at Mount Vernon which it appears he never had. In "Blackwood's Magazine" John Neal said of the book, "Not one word of which we believe. It is full of ridiculous exaggerations." And yet neither this criticism nor any other stemmed the outpouring of editions of it which must now number more than seventy. Weems doubtless thought that he was helping God and doing good to Washington by his offensive and effusive support of rudimentary morals.

Weems had been dead a dozen years when another enemy sprang up. This was the worthy Jared Sparks, an historian, a professor of history, who collected with much care the correspondence of George Washington and edited it in a monumental work. Sparks, however, suffered under the delusion that something other than fact can be the best substance of history. According to his tastes, many of Washington's letters were not sufficiently dignified; they were too colloquial, they even let slip expressions which no man conscious that he was the model of propriety, the embodiment of the dignity of history, could have used. So Mr. Sparks without blushing went through Washington's letters and substituted for the originals words which he decided were more seemly. Again the public came to know George Washington, not by his own words, but by those attributed to him by an overzealous stylist-pedant. Well might the Father of his Country pray to be delivered from the parsons.

One of the earliest records of Washington's youth is the copy, written in his beautiful, almost copper-plate hand, of "Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior, In Company and Conversation." These maxims were taken from an English book called "The Young Man's Companion," by W. Mather. It had passed through thirteen editions and contained information upon many matters besides conduct Perhaps Washington copied the maxims as a school exercise; perhaps he learned them by heart.

They are for the most part the didactic aphorisms which greatly pleased our worthy ancestors during the middle of the eighteenth century and later. Some of the entries referred to simple matters of deportment: you must not turn your back on persons to whom you talk. Others touch morals rather than manners. One imagines that the parson or elderly uncles allowed themselves to bestow this indisputably correct advice upon the youths whom they were interested in. A boy brought up rigidly on these doctrines could hardly fail to become a prig unless he succeeded in following the last injunction of all: "Labor to keep alive in your heart, that little spark of celestial fire called conscience."

When he was eleven years old, Washington's father died, and his older half-brother, Lawrence, who inherited the estate now known as Mount Vernon, became his guardian. Lawrence had married the daughter of a neighbor, William Fairfax, agent for the large Fairfax estate. Fairfax and he had served with the Colonial forces at Cartagena under Admiral Vernon, from whom the Washington manor took its name. Lord Fairfax, William's cousin and head of the family, offered George work on the survey of his domain. George, then a sturdy lad of sixteen, accepted gladly, and for more than two years he carried it on. The Fairfax estate extended far into the west, beyond the immediate tidewater district, beyond the fringe of sparsely settled clearings, into the wilderness itself. The effect of his experience as surveyor lasted throughout George Washington's life. His self-reliance and his courage never flagged. Sometimes he went alone and passed weeks among the solitudes; sometimes he had a companion whom he had to care for as well as for himself. But besides the toughening of his character which this pioneer life assured him, he got much information, which greatly influenced, years later, his views on the development, not only of Virginia, but of the Northwest. Perhaps from this time there entered into his heart the conviction that the strongest bond of union must sometime bind together the various colonies, so different in resources and in interests, including his native commonwealth.

From journals kept during some of his expeditions we see that he was a clear observer and an accurate reporter; far from bookish, but a careful penman, and conscious of the obligation laid upon him to acquire at least the minimum of polite knowledge which was expected of a country gentleman such as he aspired to be.

Here is an extract in which he describes the squalid conditions under which he passed some of his life as a woodsman and surveyor.

We got our suppers and was lighted into a Room and I not being so good a woodsman as ye rest of my company, striped myself very orderly and went into ye Bed, as they calld it, when to my surprize, I found it to be nothing but a little straw matted together without sheets or any thing else, but only one thread bare blanket with double its weight of vermin, such as Lice, Fleas, etc. I was glad to get up (as soon as ye light was carried from us). I put on my cloths and lay as my companions. Had we not been very tired, I am sure we should not have slep'd much that night. I made a Promise not to sleep so from that time forward, chusing rather to sleep in ye open air before a fire, as will appear hereafter.

Wednesday 16th. We set out early and finish'd about one o'clock and then Travelled up to Frederick Town, where our Baggage came to us. We cleaned ourselves (to get rid of ye game we had catched ye night before), I took a Review of ye Town and then return'd to our Lodgings where we had a good Dinner prepared for us. Wine and Rum Punch in plenty, and a good Feather Bed with clean sheets, which was a very agreeable regale.

The longest of Washington's early expeditions was the "Journey over the Mountains, began Fryday the 11th of March 1747/8." The mountains were the Alleghanies, and the trip gave him a closer acquaintance than he had had with Indians in the wilds. On his return, he stayed with his half-brother, Lawrence, at Mount Vernon, or with Lord Fairfax, and enjoyed the country life common to the richer Virginians of the time. Towns which could provide an inn being few and far between, travellers sought hospitality in the homes of the well-to-do residents, and every one was in a way a neighbor of the other dwellers in his county. So both at Belvoir and at Mount Vernon, guests were frequent and broke the monotony and loneliness of their inmates. I think the reputation of gravity, which was fixed upon Washington in his mature years, has been projected back over his youth. The actual records are lacking, but such hints and surmises as we have do not warrant our thinking of him as a self-centred, unsociable youth. On the contrary, he was rather, what would be called now, a sport, ready for hunting or riding, of splendid physical build, agile and strong. He liked dancing, and was not too shy to enjoy the society of young women; indeed, he wrote poems to some of them, and seems to have been popular with them. And still, the legend remains that he was bashful.

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