The Life of George Washington. Woodrow Wilson

      Chapter II

      A Virginian Breeding

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      George Washington was cast for his career by a very scant and homely training. Augustine Washington, his father, lacked neither the will nor the means to set him handsomely afoot, with as good a schooling, both in books and in affairs, as was to be had; he would have done all that a liberal and provident man should do to advance his boy in the world, had he lived to go with him through his youth. He owned land in four counties, more than five thousand acres all told, and lying upon both the rivers that refresh the fruitful Northern Neck; besides several plots of ground in the promising village of Fredericksburg, which lay opposite his lands upon the Rappahannock; and one-twelfth part of the stock of the Principio Iron Company, whose mines and furnaces in Maryland and Virginia yielded a better profit than any others in the two colonies. He had commanded a ship in his time, as so many of his neighbors had in that maritime province, carrying iron from the mines to England, and no doubt bringing convict laborers back upon his voyage home again. He himself raised the ore from the mines that lay upon his own land, close to the Potomac, and had it carried the easy six miles to the river. Matters were very well managed there. Colonel Byrd said, and no pains were spared to make the business profitable. Captain Washington had represented his home parish of Truro, too, in the House of Burgesses, where his athletic figure, his ruddy skin, and frank gray eyes must have made him as conspicuous as his constituents could have wished. He was a man of the world, every inch, generous, hardy, independent. He lived long enough, too, to see how stalwart and capable and of how noble a spirit his young son was to be, with how manly a bearing he was to carry himself in the world; and had loved him and made him his companion accordingly. But the end came for him before be could see the lad out of boyhood. He died April 12, 1743, when he was but forty-nine years of age, and before George was twelve; and in his will there was, of course, for George only a younger son's portion. The active gentleman had been twice married, and there were seven children to be provided for. Two sons of the first marriage survived. The bulk of the estate went, as Virginian custom dictated, to Lawrence, the eldest son. To Augustine, the second son, fell most of the rich lands in Westmoreland. George, the eldest born of the second marriage, left to the guardianship of his young mother, shared with the four younger children the residue of the estate. He was to inherit his father's farm upon the Rappahannock, to possess, and to cultivate if he would, when he should come of age; but for the rest his fortunes were to make. He must get such serviceable training as he could for a life of independent endeavor. The two older brothers had been sent to England to get their schooling and preparation for life, as their father before them had been to get his—Lawrence to make ready to take his father's place when the time should come; Augustine, it was at first planned, to fit himself for the law. George could now look for nothing of the kind. He must continue, as he had begun, to get such elementary and practical Instruction as was to be had of schoolmasters in Virginia, and the young mother's care must stand him in the stead of a father's pilotage and oversight.

      Fortunately Mary Washington was a wise and provident mother, a woman of too firm a character and too steadfast a courage to be dismayed by responsibility. She had seemed only a fair and beautiful girl when Augustine Washington married her, and there was a romantic story told of how that gallant Virginian sailor and gentleman had literally been thrown at her feet out of a carriage in the London streets by way of introduction - where she, too, was a visiting stranger out of Virginia. But she had shown a singular capacity for business when the romantic days of courtship were over. Lawrence Washington, too, though but five-and-twenty when his father died and left him head of the family, proved himself such an elder brother as it could but better and elevate a boy to have. For all he was so young, he had seen something of the world, and had already made notable friends. He had not returned home out of England until he was turned of twenty-one, and he had been back scarcely a twelvemonth before he was off again, to seek service in the war against Spain. The colonies had responded with an unwonted willingness and spirit in 1740 to the home government's call for troops to go against the Spaniard in the West Indies; and Lawrence Washington had sought and obtained a commission as captain in the Virginian regiment which had Volunteered for the duty. He had seen those terrible days at Cartagena, with Vernon's fleet and Went worth's army, when the deadly heat and blighting damps of the tropics wrought a work of death which drove the English forth as no fire from the Spanish cannon could. He had been one of that devoted force which threw itself twelve hundred strong upon Fort San Lazaro, and came away beaten with six hundred only. He had seen the raw provincials out of the colonies carry themselves as gallantly as any veterans through all the fiery trial; had seen the storm and the valor, the vacillation and the blundering, and the shame of all the rash affair; and had come away the friend and admirer of the gallant Vernon, despite his headstrong folly and sad miscarriage. He had reached home again, late in the year 1742, only to see his father presently snatched away by a sudden illness, and to find himself become head of the family in his stead. All thought of further service away from home was dismissed. He accepted a commission as major in the colonial militia, and an appointment as adjutant-general of the military district in which his lands lay; but he meant that for the future his duties should be civil rather than military in the life he set himself to live, and turned very quietly to the business and the social duty of a proprietor among his neighbors in Fairfax County, upon the broad estates to which he gave the name Mount Vernon, in compliment to the brave sailor whose friend he had become in the far, unhappy South.

      Marriage was, of course, his first step towards domestication, and the woman he chose brought him into new connections which suited both his tastes and his training. Three months after his father's death he married Anne Fairfax, daughter to William Fairfax, his neighbor. 'Twas William Fairfax's granduncle Thomas, third Lord Fairfax, who had in that revolutionary year 1646 summoned Colonel Henry Washington to give into his hands the city of Worcester, and who had got so sharp an answer from the King's stout soldier. But the Fairfaxes had soon enough turned royalists again when they saw whither the Parliament men would carry them. A hundred healing years had gone by since those unhappy days when the nation was arrayed against the King. Anne Fairfax brought no alien tradition to the household of her young husband. Her father had served the King, as her lover had—with more hardship than reward, as behooved a soldier—in Spain and in the Bahamas; and was now, when turned of fifty, agent here in Virginia to his cousin Thomas, sixth Baron Fairfax, in the management of his great estates, lying upon the Northern Neck and in the fruitful valleys beyond. William Fairfax had been but nine years in the colony, but he was already a Virginian like his neighbors, and, as collector of his Majesty's customs for the South Potomac and President of the King's Council, no small figure in their affairs—a man who had seen the world and knew how to bear himself in this part of it.

      In 1746 Thomas, Lord Fairfax, himself came to Virginia—a man strayed out of the world of fashion at fifty-five into the forests of a wild frontier. The better part of his ancestral estates in Yorkshire