George Washington

George Washington

George Washington was born 1732 and he died in 1799. He seems today a figure larger than life itself… almost as he was when he was a familiar person in the halls, homes, shops, and bars of 18th-century city Williamsburg.

Thomas Jefferson who served with Washington in the House of Burgesses, wrote: 'On the whole, his character was, in its mass, perfect, in nothing bad, in a few points indifferent; and it may truly be said, that never did nature and fortune combine more perfectly to make a man great, and to place him in the same constellation with whatever worthies have merited from man an everlasting remembrance.

Lawrence, suffering from a lung complaint took a Barbados voyage in search of health in a warmer climate....and George accompanied him. The younger brother contracted smallpox and returned to Virginia alone, but with a immunity to a disease that destroyed colonial-era armies. Lawrence died in 1752, and the Mount Vernon estate passed by stages into George's hands until he inherited it in 1761.

Washington also succeeded to Lawrence's militia office. Governor Robert Dinwiddie first appointed him assistant for the southern district of the colony's militia, but soon conferred on him Lawrence's assistantcy for the Northern Neck and Eastern Shore. So it happened that in 1753 the governor sent 21-year-old Washington to warn French troops at Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio (that's modern Pittsburgh) that they were encroaching in territory claimed by Virginia.

The French ignored the warning and the mission failed, but when Washington returned Dinwiddie had Williamsburg printer William Hunter publish his official report as The Journal of Major George Washington. It made the young officer well-known at home and away.

Returning to the Ohio in April with 150 men to remove the intruders, Washington got his first taste of war in a fight with a French scouting party. He wrote to his brother Jack, 'I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.' [1]

A second fight quickly followed and Washington, retreating to Fort Necessity, was beaten by an even more numerous French force. He surrendered and, in his ignorance of French, signed an embarrassing surrender agreement. But he had opportunities to get revenge for his defeat. The whistling bullets heralded the start of the Seven Years' War, as it was called in Europe. In America it was called the French and Indian War or, sometimes, Virginia's War. Horace Walpole wrote, 'The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.'

Washington returned to the field as an friend to General Braddock in 1755 and performed with distinction, despite sickness, in the disastrous campaign against Fort Duquesne. Later that year Dinwiddie gave him command of all Virginia forces and promoted him to colonel.

In these years Washington had two arguments with English officers who viewed their regular-army commissions as superior compared to of the Virginia militia commander. These disputes may mark the beginning of Washington's anger of British attitudes toward the ...