George Washington: The Political Rise of America's Founding Father - Hardcover

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David O. Stewart turned to writing after a career practicing law in Washington, DC, defending accused criminals and challenging government actions as unconstitutional. He is a national bestselling and award-winning author of four previous books on American history. He is formerly the president of the Washington Independent Review of Books.

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Chapter 1

Time for a New Plan

In late 1757, a man on horseback rode toward a large house that overlooked the Potomac River, several miles south of Alexandria, Virginia. Draped with a soldier's cloak, the man's figure was martial, tall, and lean. His russet hair was tied at the nape of the neck. His face reflected weeks of grinding illness. His fair complexion, usually ruddy from wind and sun, had paled. Though he was particular about the fit of his garments, now they sagged from his long frame.

Colonel George Washington, the twenty-five-year-old master of Mount Vernon, was home from war on Virginia's western frontier. Though he was taller and stronger than most men, four years in the wilderness had sapped his health. Some days before, he had left his command of the Virginia Regiment in the Shenandoah valley. Charged with stopping bloody Indian raids with a thousand-man regiment, but often having fewer than half that number, Washington had met with little success. Sick and dispirited, he left for home without permission from his British commander or from the colony's royal governor.

Washington's affliction had lingered for nearly three months, then worsened. A frontier doctor had bled him, but it did not help. When the doctor said that Washington might die unless he had an immediate rest, the young officer left for Mount Vernon, assuming that the Indian attacks would subside in the cold months, when even tough Shawnee warriors stayed near their home fires.

Washington had the "bloody flux," a vivid term for dysentery, which haunted military camps. Often fatal, the bloody flux was a grim ordeal under the best of conditions: cramps, diarrhea, intermittent chills and fever, dehydration, and debilitating fatigue. Its eighteenth-century name reflects the stage when the sufferer expels blood. Through the frosty autumn, commanding too few troops against a skilled enemy, Washington might have felt the disease was part of a curse against him.

For four years, Washington had ridden thousands of miles through Virginia and Pennsylvania, back to eastern Virginia, and as far as Boston, but few of those journeys could have been as difficult as his ride home to Mount Vernon that November. The bloody flux compelled frequent stops for undignified squats. Remounting the horse would be another trial.

Washington stopped in Alexandria, not far from Mount Vernon, to see the Reverend Charles Green. Like many pastors, Green ministered to bodies as well as souls. He directed the young commander to eat only jellies and the like, avoiding meat. Green also prescribed gum Arabic (gum from African acacia trees) and sweet wine from the Canary Islands.

No friend or family member greeted Washington at Mount Vernon, though the estate was far from empty. More than a dozen Black slaves, along with white servants and overseers, cared for the house and worked the fields. Jonathan Alton, servant to Washington earlier in the war, likely settled the ailing squire in a warm room.

Finding the cupboards bare of the items prescribed by Reverend Green, Washington sent to Belvoir, the nearby estate of the aristocratic Fairfaxes. His friend George William Fairfax was away in England, so Washington asked Mrs. Fairfax to lend him Canary wine, green tea from China, and a pound of hartshorn shavings to make jellies. "I am quite out," he confessed, "and cannot get a supply anywhere in these parts." He added a bachelor's plea for "such materials to make jellies as you think I may not just at this time have."

For the next six weeks, no correspondence survives from Washington's pen. No evidence shows visitors coming to Mount Vernon-not his mother or sister from Fredericksburg, nor any of his four surviving brothers. Through the shortening days, Washington's disease maintained its grip in a house heated by wood fires. Cramping and sweating and shivering, Washington ate jellies while sipping tea and sweet wine. He had time-nothing but time-to reflect on where he stood in life and what might lie ahead.

The truth, one that likely gnawed at him, was harsh. After a brilliant beginning, he had stumbled from setback to disappointment.

At twenty-two, he was acclaimed a hero, his exploits recounted throughout British North America and in England. As commander of the Virginia Regiment, he gave orders to men decades older. Blessed with athletic ability, stern self-discipline, and polished manners, Washington was good at most things he tried. He expected success.

But his war had taken an ill turn. Washington led his men to an indefensible position and endured a grisly defeat by the French and their Indian allies. His surrender saved lives, but the truce terms proved controversial. Then a British army, with Washington as aide to the commander, marched into the wilderness and was slaughtered, suffering unprecedented casualties. Washington's reputation survived because he had not been in command and showed signal courage, but the episode was an epic failure.

Since that disaster, Washington's Virginia Regiment had flailed ineffectively against raids by France's Indian allies. The raiders killed or kidnapped nearly at will, looting settlements while easily evading Washington's men. Settlers fled east, as did Virginia soldiers who deserted in record numbers. Washington's current situation-eighty miles from his overmatched force, staring into a fire, his world defined by chills and fever and the chamber pot-was far from the soaring trajectory he had imagined for himself.

From his earliest days, Washington hungered for distinction, for high reputation that would validate his worth. He never minced words about it: His goal was renown. Two years before, he wrote that "the chief part of my happiness" was "the esteem and notice the country has been pleased to honor me with." Serving as an unpaid volunteer for part of his military service, he said he wanted only the "regard and esteem" of Virginians. Years later, he wrote that his "only ambition is to do my duty in this world as well as I am capable of performing it and to merit the good opinion of all good men." Yet in late 1757, his military career seemed to promise only failure. For a man who ached for recognition, that prospect would be a horror.

His personal life offered little solace. He had courted women, once proposing marriage before entering military service. That woman's father rejected him, skeptical that George Washington would be an advantageous match. Service on Virginia's frontier had offered few opportunities for finding a life partner of the type Washington needed, one with social standing and financial assets.

Washington's challenge was to remount the ladder of his high aspirations. The challenge was greater because he could no longer turn to the men who had propelled his early ascent. His father, Augustine (called Gus), died when George was eleven. He left George, his third son, a good name and enough slaves and land to stand above the middling classes, but nowhere near enough to enter Virginia's elite.

Two other men played paternal roles for George. Half-brother Lawrence, fourteen years older, hauled his brother up in the world alongside him. And Lawrence presented George to Colonel William Fairfax, who had managed his family's huge lands from the Belvoir mansion where the colonel's son George William now lived. A power in the colony's government, Colonel Fairfax boosted Washington into high military office while dispensing sound advice. But Lawrence had died some years before, Colonel Fairfax only a few months back.

A fourth sponsor was alive, but no longer a friend. Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie...