George Washington: First in War, First in Peace (American Heroes) - Softcover

James A. Crutchfield of Franklin, Tennessee, is author of many books on American history, including The Way West and The Santa Fe Trail.

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"I Can Read Three or Four Pages Sometimes Without Missing a Word"

The large mantel clock in the dining room at Mount Vernon had just chimed eleven times when the three physicians once again entered George Washington's bedroom and looked despairingly upon his limp body. The doctors had been by the former president's side practically all day long, hoping against all odds that the sixty-seven-year-old warrior would show some signs of improvement. Now, as midnight rapidly approached, they glanced sadly at each other. There was no hope in their faces.

Martha Washington sat nearby, attended by a few house servants and her husband's private secretary, Tobias Lear. The room was cold. A mid-December snowstorm had swept down the Potomac River two days earlier and sent temperatures plummeting. Rushing about to keep the cavernous Mount Vernon as warm as possible, the servants heaped several additional blankets uponWashington's listless body, leaving nothing exposed but his porcelainlike face.

Two of the physicians finally excused themselves and walked downstairs to await the inevitable. Dr. James Craik, a close associate whose friendship dated back to French and Indian War days, continued his vigil as Washington weakened. Shortly before midnight, he called Dr. Craik to his side and murmured, "My breath cannot last long." Sadly, Craik motioned to Martha that the end was near.

Within minutes Washington was dead, most likely from acute epiglottitis caused from a virulent bacterial infection. In his nearly seven decades on earth, he had, as military commander, led his new country to independence from Great Britain; later, as the first president, he orchestrated its great leap forward into the brotherhood of nations. He was indeed as his friend Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee declared a few days later in a resolution before Congress, "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."

 

 

 

The Washington dynasty in America began with the arrival from England of John Washington, George's great-grandfather, around 1656. A successful tobacco farmer and public servant, he had, by the time of his death in 1677 at age forty-five, acquired a number of plantations and several thousand acres of Virginia land, including the site of Mount Vernon.

John Washington's son Lawrence was born in 1659 and, at age eighteen, following his father's death, inherited most of the estate. He pursued the life of a planter, served as sheriff ofWestmoreland County, and was elected to four terms in the House of Burgesses. He died in 1698 at age thirty-nine.

In 1694 Lawrence's second son, Augustine, was born on his grandfather's farm. Orphaned at the age of four, the boy was raised by his stepfather. In 1715 he married Jane Butler, by whom he eventually sired four children. Following in the footsteps of his grandfather and father, Augustine became prominent in the community. He served as a justice and as the sheriff of Westmoreland County, was commissioned a captain in the local militia, and owned forty-nine slaves, two iron furnaces, and property in three Virginia counties.

Jane Butler Washington died in 1729, leaving Augustine to care for two sons and a daughter (another child had died in infancy). Sixteen months later, he married Mary Ball from nearby Lancaster County. The couple's first child, George, arrived at ten o'clock on the morning of February 22, 1732 (or, according to the old-style calendar, February 11) at the family plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia.

 

 

 

When George was three years old, his family relocated to Hunting Creek, the future Mount Vernon, another plantation owned by his father and located forty miles up the Potomac River from his birthplace. Three years later, the Washingtons moved again, this time to Ferry Farm, situated on the Rappahannock River near Fredericksburg. In addition to a modest six-room house and a paltry collection of household furnishings, George's father owned twenty slaves. It can be assumed that young Washington led a normal farm boy's life at Ferry Farm, running and rompingin the woods, fishing, hunting, tormenting frogs and turtles in the nearby creek, playing soldier, and reading.

His hopes of attending school in England died with his father in 1743. His education at Ferry Farm was informal--and negligible--especially compared with the college degrees acquired by his future friends and associates (John Adams, Harvard; Thomas Jefferson, College of William and Mary; James Madison, Princeton). He learned quickly, however, and by age nine was bragging to his boyhood friend Richard Henry Lee, "I can read three or four pages sometimes without missing a word." During his quest for an education, the youngster also learned important maxims that would guide him for the rest of his life. Among his earliest known writings is a list of "The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation," which he reproduced from an old text into his own copybook. Consisting of 110 proverbs, the list included such thoughts as "Keep your nails clean and short, also your hands and teeth clean, yet without showing any great concern for them," and "Use no reproachful language against any one; neither curse nor revile."

Over the next few years, George alternated between his mother's home at Ferry Farm, half brother Lawrence's Mount Vernon plantation, and half brother Augustine's farm, also on the Potomac. His favorite place was Mount Vernon, and in the absence of his father, he grew to rely heavily on the counsel and companionship of Lawrence, fourteen years older and an officer in the British army. His days at Mount Vernon were happy ones, and he rejoiced at hearing the stories of Lawrence's military exploits. On one occasion, he was even privileged to accompanyLawrence to Barbados in search of a cure for the deadly tuberculosis that infected the elder Washington's lungs. The trip did nothing to help Lawrence, but during the journey George contracted a mild case of smallpox that provided him with lifetime immunity to the disease. Years later, during the awful winters of the Revolution, when large numbers of his soldiers died of the malady, he was spared.

 

 

 

Lawrence Washington's father-in-law and close neighbor at Mount Vernon was William Fairfax, the American agent for his cousin, Lord Thomas Fairfax of England. Lord Fairfax had been granted an enormous tract of land--at one time approaching five million acres--in the Shenandoah Valley and in the Northern Neck, the peninsula formed by the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers and Chesapeake Bay. William Fairfax, the property's overseer, lived at Belvoir, a mansion that deeply impressed young Washington, who visited there often and became accustomed to--and appreciative of--the style of living of Virginia's wealthy class. He even visited with his lordship when the Englishman toured America.

Lord Fairfax took a liking to the youth and used his substantial influence to obtain a Royal Navy commission for him, but the boy's mother adamantly refused to allow him to leave home, especially after her brother opined that it was "better to put [George] apprentice to a Tinker." Still trying to help the lad, now age sixteen, his lordship gave him a job surveying his properties that lay beyond the distant Allegheny Mountains. Washington had always done well in mathematics and easily caught on tothe surveyor's craft. As well as developing his drafting skills, he became an expert horseman and woodsman and learned the mysterious secrets of the trackless forest around him.

While George was apprenticing as a surveyor, several influential...