Washington, George (1732—99)

Early Life and Career

Born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, in 1732, Washington was the son of Mary Ball and Augustine Washington, an ambitious tobacco planter. When his father died in 1743, George Washington went to live with his older half brother, Lawrence, who in 1751 took him to Barbados. There he contracted smallpox, developing an immunity to the disease that would later claim the lives of thousands of soldiers in the Continental Army. A year later, when Lawrence Washington died of tuberculosis, his 2,500-acre Mount Vernon plantation became part of Washington's inheritance.

Already Washington had begun work as a surveyor employed by Virginia's influential Fairfax family, into which Lawrence had married. He charted the Fairfaxes' land holdings in the Shenandoah Valley, where he gained a familiarity with the trans-Appalachian West that was further strengthened in 1754 when, as a young officer in the Virginia militia, he journeyed into the Ohio Country to secure his colony's land claims against those of the French. There he surrendered in a battle that helped to ignite in North America the Seven Years' War. Soon afterwards he accepted an appointment as commander of Virginia's frontier militia, a position he held until 1758.

Upon his return to Mount Vernon, Washington solidified his status as a member of the gentry. In 1759 he married Martha Dandridge Custis, a widow whose estate of 18,000 acres, when combined with the lands that he had inherited or purchased, made him one of Virginia's richest men. He [Page 923]enlarged and renovated his house, secured seats as a vestryman and justice of the peace, and won election as a member of the House of Burgesses. He earned a reputation as an able legislator and ardent critic of British imperial policies. In 1774 he collaborated with fellow planter and statesman George Mason on the Fairfax Resolves, which recommended a unified colonial boycott of British imports. With these credentials Washington traveled to Philadelphia as one of Virginia's delegates to the Continental Congress.

Revolutionary General

There, dressed in the uniform of the Virginia militia, Washington attracted the notice of many peers. Like them, he shared the civilian legislators' disdain for British encroachments on colonists' rights, including Parliament's apparent attempt to intimidate Americans by stationing on their shores an army whose protection their popular assemblies had never requested. Like them, he seemed willing to take great risks to resist British policies. Unlike them, however, he had war-fighting experience and a carefully nurtured public reputation as a military man. These facts, combined with the realization that military engagements against the British at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts probably secured northern support for the resistance movement, made Washington—a delegate from the most populous colony in the South—an easy choice to unite the colonies as commander of the Continental Army in June 1775. Entrusted with building an army powerful enough to secure victory, he could also be trusted to restrain that army from threatening republicanism.

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