His Excellency: George Washington (11 page)

A LAST RESORT

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were searching for early glimmerings of a broader belief in American independence, Washington’s remarks about the Stamp Act—a clear and unequivocal denial of Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies without their consent—might be offered up as evidence of his prescient premonitions as early as 1765. Such selective readings distort the larger pattern, however, which suggests that neither Washington nor any other colonist was thinking seriously about seceding from the British Empire at this early stage. Washington expressed his relief that the British government had come to its senses, in part because of pressure from merchants like Robert Cary, and repealed the Stamp Act in 1766. He seemed unconcerned about the lingering constitutional question of Parliament’s authority, presumably believing that as long as it remained theoretical it could and would be completely ignored. “All therefore who were instrumental in procuring the repeal,” he wrote Cary, “are entitled to the Thanks of every British Subject.” He still considered himself such a creature. The wave, it seemed, had passed safely under the ship.
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For the next three years, from 1766 to 1769, Washington’s mind remained focused on more proximate and pressing problems: cultivating his new wheat crop; worrying about Patsy’s health; lobbying in Williamsburg for the “bounty lands” in the Ohio Country. He was not even present at the session of the House of Burgesses in April 1768 when the delegates protested the Townshend Act, a clever (ultimately too clever) measure imposing new duties on colonial imports which the British ministry claimed were not, strictly speaking, taxes. Over the next year, he did not participate in the public debate that raged in Virginia and that produced non-importation schemes in Massachusetts and New York.
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Then, in April 1769, he entered the debate in a major and quite distinctive way. In a letter to George Mason, his neighbor down the road at Gunston Hall, Washington began to use the language of a prospective revolutionary: “At a time when our Lordly Masters in Great Britain will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprevation of American freedom,” he wrote, “it seems highly necessary that something shou’d be done to avert the stroke and maintain the liberty which we have derived from our Ancestors.” Petitions and remonstrances to the king or Parliament, he believed, were ineffectual. They had been tried before without success. And their plaintive character irritated Washington, because it seemed to reinforce the sense of subordination and subservience the colonists were protesting against and that he found so personally offensive. The only sensible course, he argued, was a comprehensive program of non-importation that, “by starving their Trade & manufacturers,” would exert pressure on the British government to alter its course, as it had done after the Stamp Act. But if the “Lordly masters in Great Britain” persisted in their imperious policies—and here, for the first time, Washington did glimpse the future—then the two sides were on a collision course that could only end in war, which he called “a dernier resort.”

Then he added a revealing corollary, very much rooted in his own experience with Cary & Company:

That many families are reduced almost, if not quite, to penury & want, from the low ebb of their fortunes, and Estates selling for the discharge of Debts, the public papers furnish but too many melancholy proofs of. And that a scheme of this sort [i.e., non-importation] will contribute more effectually than any other I can devise to immerge [remove?] the Country from the distress it at present labours under, I do most firmly believe, it can be generally adopted.

In other words, a collective decision to stop purchasing British commodities would enforce a level of discipline and austerity on the Virginia planter elite that most of its members—and, truth be known, he himself—had shown themselves unable to enforce voluntarily. While such a scheme risked a collision course with the British Empire, it reduced the risk that so many Virginia planters were running of remaining on a collision course with bankruptcy. Washington was not just drawing on his own deep contempt toward English presumptions of superiority; he was also urging Virginians to embrace the same economic self-sufficiency he had decided to implement at Mount Vernon. This was the moment when Washington first began to link the hard-earned lessons that shaped his own personality to the larger cause of American independence.
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It was also the occasion when Washington first played a leadership role in the House of Burgesses on an issue that transcended local election disputes or veterans’ claims. On May 18, 1769, he presented the proposal calling for a colony-wide boycott of enumerated English manufactured goods, to include a cessation of the slave trade. George Mason had actually drafted the proposal, but he could not present it himself because his long-standing reluctance to leave the secure confines of Gunston Hall meant that he refused to stand for election to the House of Burgesses. This was an important moment in Washington’s public career, for he now became an acknowledged leader in the resistance movement within Virginia’s planter class. Back at Mount Vernon in July he wrote to Cary, ordering only a few new items, saying that he intended to observe the terms of the boycott “religiously,” but giving Cary final approval, oddly enough, of what to include or exclude.
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There was then, in the strange way that history happens, a five-year hiatus. Though Washington himself observed the terms of the boycott “religiously,” as he put it again to Cary, the Virginia Association proved as difficult to enforce as Great Britain had found the mercantile empire to regulate. Most importantly, Parliament had repeated its backpedaling pattern after the Stamp Act, this time disavowing all the Townshend duties except the one on tea, it being intended to remain as the principled symbol of British authority. Most observers, Washington included, believed that the wave had once again passed under the ship.

The next surge began in the summer of 1774, in response to parliamentary legislation the colonists called the Intolerable Acts, which closed Boston’s port and imposed martial law on Massachusetts as punishment for the orchestrated riot that came to be called the Boston Tea Party. Writing to George William Fairfax, who had moved back to England with Sally the previous year, Washington vowed that “the cause of Boston . . . ever will be considered as the cause of America (not that we approve their conduct in destroying the Tea.)” The escalation of British repression produced an equally dramatic escalation in Washington’s thinking, or at least in the language he used to characterize British policy. In addition to his familiar themes—petitions were worse than worthless, abstract arguments must be accompanied by economic pressures—now he detected a full-blooded conspiracy against American liberty. “Does it not appear,” he asked rhetorically, “as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness, that there is a regular, systematic plan formed to fix the right and practice of taxation upon us?” In a long letter to Bryan Fairfax, George William’s half brother, he repeated the conspiracy charge, then added the provocative argument that, unless the colonies stood together against this challenge, Great Britain would “make us as tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we rule over with such arbitrary Sway.”
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The slavery analogy is startling, both because of its stark depiction of the power emanating from London, and because its potency and credibility grew directly out of Washington’s personal familiarity with the exercise of just such power over his own slaves. During the American Revolution several English commentators called attention to the hypocrisy of slave owners wrapping their cause in the rhetoric of liberty. In Washington’s case, the rhetoric was heartfelt precisely because he understood firsthand the limitless opportunity for abuse once control was vested in another. He did not see himself as a hypocrite so much as a man determined to prevent the cruel ways of history from happening to him.

His belief that a British conspiracy was afoot serves as an almost textbook example of the radical Whig ideology that historians have made the central feature of scholarship on the American Revolution for the past forty years. These historians have discovered a cluster of ideas about the irreconcilable tension between liberty and power that English dissenters, called “the Country Party,” hurled at the Hanoverian court and the inordinately long-standing ministry of Robert Walpole in the middle third of the eighteenth century. There is now a well-established consensus that many prominent American revolutionary thinkers, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and George Mason, were familiar with the writings of such English Whigs as John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Viscount Bolingbroke, and that their response to Parliament’s legislative initiative in the 1760s was at least partially shaped by what they read about the inherently corrupt and conniving character of British government as depicted by the Country Party.
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There is some reason to believe that Washington’s political vocabulary grew in this more radical direction because of increased interaction with Mason in the summer of 1774. Mason was generally regarded as Virginia’s most learned student of political theory, well versed in all the Whig writers. He and Washington conferred several times in July as Mason was drafting the Fairfax Resolves, which also warned of a concerted British plan to make all colonists into slaves and imposed the dramatic dichotomy of English corruption and American virtue over all its recommendations. Washington actually chaired the meeting in Alexandria where the Fairfax Resolves were adopted. (The most important recommendation was for convening a Continental Congress to approve a comprehensive boycott of British imports.) Washington’s escalating rhetoric, in short, probably reflected the intensive collaboration with Mason, who provided him with instruction on the language of radical Whig ideology.
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Interestingly, Washington himself acknowledged that he was an unsophisticated student of history and English politics, and that “much abler heads than my own, hath fully convinced me that it [current British policy] is not only repugnant to natural right, but Subversive of the Laws & Constitution of Great Britain itself.” But he placed the emphasis for his radical evolution elsewhere, indeed inside himself: “an Innate Spirit of freedom first told me,” he explained, “that the Measures which [the] Administration hath for sometime been, and now are, most violently pursuing, are repugnant to every principle of natural justice.”
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While we cannot know, at least in the fullest and deepest sense, where that voice inside himself originated, it does seem to echo the resentful voice of the young colonel in the Virginia Regiment, bristling at the condescending ignorance of Lord Loudoun and the casual rejection of his request for a regular commission in the British army. It harks back to the voice of the master of Mount Vernon, lured by Cary & Company (and, truth be told, his own urge to replicate the lifestyle of an English country gentleman) into a mercantile system apparently designed to entrap him in a spiraling network of debt. (Indeed, less than a year earlier, in November 1773, when he had instructed Cary to pay off the remainder of his debt with funds from Patsy’s inheritance, Cary had refused, correctly claiming that the two accounts were not transferable.) The voice also resonates with the same outraged frustration he felt whenever some distant and faceless British official, the most recent version of the vile breed being Earl Hillsborough, blocked his claim for western lands, allegedly to protect Indian rights but more probably, he believed, to reserve the land for London cronies.

All of which is to suggest that Washington did not need to read books by radical Whig writers or receive an education in political theory from George Mason in order to regard the British military occupation of Massachusetts in 1774 as the latest installment in a long-standing pattern. His own ideological origins did not derive primarily from books but from his own experience with what he had come to regard as the imperiousness of the British Empire. Mason probably helped him to develop a more expansive vocabulary to express his thoughts and feelings, but the thoughts, and even more so the feelings, had been brewing inside him for more than twenty years. At the psychological nub of it all lay an utter loathing for any form of dependency, a sense of his own significance, and a deep distrust of any authority beyond his direct control.

He spent the first week of August in Williamsburg at the Virginia Convention, called to select seven delegates to the Continental Congress. When all the votes were counted, he came in third, just behind Richard Henry Lee and comfortably ahead of Patrick Henry. The vote was a measure of his growing stature as a stalwart, cool-headed leader of the protest movement in Virginia. (As one of his ablest biographers put it, his fellow burgesses knew that Henry could be counted on to say the magnificent thing, whereas Washington could be counted on to say little, but do the right thing.) Off he then went to Philadelphia, where he performed according to form: silent during the debates but thoroughly dedicated to opposing the Intolerable Acts and supporting a rigorous Continental Association against British imports.
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While in Philadelphia he received a letter from Robert McKenzie, a veteran of the Virginia Regiment who had subsequently obtained a commission in the British army, warning him that the colonial cause was hopeless, that “all the best characters” were on the other side. Since Washington regarded himself as a charter member of that exclusive club, he diplomatically questioned McKenzie’s assessment, then offered his own best guess at where history was headed: “more blood will be spilt on this occasion (if the Ministry are determined to push matters to an extremity) than history has ever yet furnished instances of in the annals of North America.” Before he left town he purchased a new sash and epaulets for his military uniform, inquired about the price of muskets, and ordered a book by Thomas Webb entitled
A Military Treatise on the Appointments of the Army.
Though he still hoped it could be avoided, he was preparing for the last resort.
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