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GEORGE WASHINGTON As Washington College commemorates the bicentennial anniversary of its founding patron's death, Professor Robert Fallaw examines the formative and retirement years of an American icon. |
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| On the way to his 1789 inauguration as the nation’s first President, 58-year-old George Washington was feted in Philadelphia as the “first citizen of the age” and “the greatest man in the world.” This is the Washington at the height of his contemporary fame and the man of history known to most Americans. Both the young Washington and the old Washington are absent in our minds. The young man is hardly known. We seem to think of Washington as springing from his mother’s womb already mature, stiff, and dignified. The old Washington is recalled only as a crumbling figure tortured by painful dentures. Yet for a fuller understanding of the man, we should look at both the youthful Washington and the old Washington. First going back to the early years: the young Washington was the product of an unsettled, almost frontier life, not of placid Tidewater Virginia. The family, in contrast to general impression, was not particularly wealthy. Washington’s father, Augustine, was a restless sort and acquired only a modest amount of property. Furthermore, he left most of it to George’s two older half-brothers. George, the oldest of five |
children from Augustine’s second marriage, wound up with very little. Even a part of that was administered by his mother, Mary Ball Washington, whose relations with George were, despite more myth-making, very touchy. At the age of 17, Washington was essentially on his own. He made his way with surveyor’s rod and considerable independent courage into a western Virginia frontier that hardly knew the impact of civilization. Lord Thomas Fairfax, the largest landholder in Virginia, employed the young Virginian as a surveyor for his many western land claims. Washington’s experience in the western forests came to the attention of Virginia’s royal governor, Robert Dinwiddie, a strong advocate of westward expansion and the view that French occupation of what is now western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley was intolerable. In 1753 Dinwiddie chose Washington, the experienced denizen of the western woods, to thread his way through the virgin forests to warn the French that Virginia was now claiming this land. The French were not impressed and told Washington to go back where he |
came from. The 21-year-old envoy almost didn’t make it. With a lone companion, Christopher Gist, Washington survived a missed point-blank shot fired by an Indian guide who turned on the two men before he was subdued. Frozen nights in icebound forests and icy river crossings also tested his mettle. Washington’s survival proved his hardiness and fired his self-confidence. A second foray into the west, in 1754, was even more humiliating. The French forced the young militia commander, directing a raw band of recruits back from the Ohio country, into a hastily built fortification, “Fort Necessity,” in what is now southwestern Pennsylvania. The fort could not survive the French assaults and Washington was captured. He was most fortunate to be sent back to Virginia with only a warning, for the commander of the French force was the brother of a French diplomat whom Washington’s band had killed. Washington’s next activity on the western frontier again came very close to ending his life. This time, also in 1754, large-scale hostilities broke out in the Ohio Valley between the French and the British. It was the beginning of (CONTINUED ON p. 21) |
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| Washington College Magazine - Spring 99 | 20 | |||||||||||||||
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