Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/414

Rh 388 WASHINGTON [PRESIDENT. little reading made up its substance. His education was but elementary and very defective, except in mathematics, in which he was largely self-taught. Sparks has &quot; edited &quot; the spelling, grammar, and rhetoric of Washington s Writings to such an extent as to destroy their value as evidence. About 1748 we begin to know something of Washington s life. He was then at Mount Vernon with his half-brother Lawrence, who was his guardian. Law rence was the son-in-law of his neighbour Lord Fairfax, with whom he had served at Carthagena, and had made the acquaintance of Admiral Vernon, from whom Mount Vernon was named. A commission as midshipman was obtained for George through the admiral, but the opposi tion of the boy s mother put an end to the scheme. As a substitute, the appointment as surveyor of the enormous Fairfax property was given to Washington at the age of sixteen ; and the next three years of his life were spent in this service. He always retained a disposition to speculate in Western lands ; many of his later investments were of this kind, and they are treated in Butterfield s Washing ton-Crawford Letters. He seems already to have impressed others with a belief in his force of mind and character, for at the age of nineteen, when the first indications of the &quot;French and Indian war&quot; appeared, he was appointed adjutant of the Virginia troops, with the rank of major ; on the death of his half-brother Lawrence in the following year he was executor under the will, and residuary heir of Mount Vernon; and in 1753, when he had barely attained his majority, the young man was made commander of the northern military district of Virginia by the new lieutenant-governor, Dinwiddie. It is at this point in his career that Washington appears in Thackeray s Virginians, but the portrait there drawn of a &quot; shrewd young man &quot; on the lookout for a rich wife is not accepted as life-like by Americans. At the outbreak of the French and Indian war in 1753-54 Washington was the agent sent by Governor Dinwiddie to warn the French away from their new forts in western Pennsylvania ; the command of the Virginia troops who began hostilities fell to him, and his vigorous defence of Fort Necessity (see UNITED STATES, vol. xxiii. pp. 734-35) made him so prominent a figure that in 1755, at the age of twenty-three, he was commissioned commander-in-chief of all the Virginia forces. He served in Braddock s campaign, and in the final defeat showed for the first time that fiery energy which always lay hidden beneath his calm and unruffled exterior. He ranged the whole field on horseback, making himself the most conspicuous mark for Indian bullets, and, in spite of what he called the &quot; dastardly behaviour &quot; of the regular troops, brought the little remnant of his Virginians out of action in fair order. In spite of this reckless exposure he was one of the few unwounded officers. For a year or two his task was that of &quot;defending a frontier of more than 350 miles with 700 men ;&quot; but in 1758 he had the pleasure of commanding the advance guard of the expedition which captured Fort Du Quesne and renamed it Fort Pitt. The war in Virginia being then at an end, he resigned his post, married Mrs Custis, a widow, and settled at Mount Vernon. Washington s life for the next twenty years was merely that of a typical Virginia planter, a consistent member of the Established (Episcopal) Church, a large slaveholder, a strict but considerate master, and a widely trusted man of affairs. His extraordinary escape in Braddock s defeat had led a colonial minister to declare in a sermon his be lief that the young man had been preserved to be &quot; the saviour of his country.&quot; If there was any such impression it soon died away, and Washington gave none of his associates reason to consider him an uncommonly endowed man. His marriage had brought him an increase of about $100,000 in his estate ; and his diaries show comparatively little reading, a minutely methodical conduct of business, a wide acquaintance with the leading men of the country, but no strong indications of what is usually considered to be &quot; greatness.&quot; As in the case of Lincoln, he was educated into greatness by the increasing weight of his responsibilities and the manner in which helmet them. Like others of the dominant caste in Virginia, he was repeatedly elected to the legislature, but he is not known to have made any set speeches in that body, or to have said anything beyond a statement of his opinion and the reasons for it. That he thought a great deal, and took full advantage of his legislative experiences as a political education, is shown by his letter of April 5, 1769, to his neighbour George Mason, communicating the Philadelphia non-importation resolu tions, which had just reached him. He considers briefly the best peaceable means of resistance to the policy of the ministry, but even at that early date faces frankly and fully the probable final necessity of resisting by force, and endorses it. Without speech-making, he took a promi nent part in struggles of his legislature against Governor Dunmore, and his position was always a radical one. He even opposed petitions to the king and parliament, on the ground that the question had been put by the ministry on the basis of right, not of expediency, that the ministry could not abandon the right and the colonists could not admit it, and that petitions must be, as they had been, rejected. &quot;Shall we,&quot; says he in a letter, &quot;after this whine and cry for relief?&quot; In 1774 the Virginia Conven tion, appointing seven of its members as delegates to the Continental Congress, named Washington as one of them ; and with this appointment his national career begins. Washington s letters during his service in Congress show that he was under no delusions as to the outcome of the taxation struggle, and that he expected war. In one letter he says that if the ministerial policy is persisted in &quot; more blood will be shed than history has ever yet furnished instances of in the annals of North America.&quot; His associates in Congress recognized his military ability at once, and most of the details of work looking towards pre parations for armed resistance were by common consent left to him. Even in the intervals of his Congressional service he was occupied in urging on the formation, equipment, and training of Virginia troops, and it was generally understood that, in case of war, Virginia would expect him to act as her commander-in-chief. History was not to be cheated in that fashion. The two most powerful colonies were Virginia and Massachusetts. War began in Massachusetts ; New England troops poured in almost spontaneously ; it was necessary to ensure the support of the colonies to the southward ; and the Virginia colonel who was at the head of all the military committees was just the man whom the New England delegates desired. When Congress, after the fights at Lexington and Concord, resolved to put the colonies into a state of defence, the first practical step was the unanimous selection, on motion of John Adams of Massachusetts, of Washington as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United Colonies. Befusing any salary, he accepted the position, asking &quot; every gentleman in the room,&quot; however, to remember his declaration that he did not believe himself to be equal to the command, and that he accepted it only as a duty made imperative by the unanimity of the call. He reiterated this belief in private letters even to his wife ; and there seems to be no doubt that, to the day of his death, he was the most determined sceptic as to his fitness for the positions to which he was called in succession. He was commissioned June 19, 1775, and reached Cambridge, Mass., July 2, taking command of the levies there assembled for action against the British