Page images
PDF
EPUB

the sixth of January, 1759, George Washington and Martha Custis were married at her home in the good old Virginia way, in the midst of a joyous assemblage of mutual friends, to them the happiest result of the campaign against the French fort at the fork of the Ohio.

MOUNT VERNON.

For three months after their marriage the young people lived at the White House, her home. While there he took his seat in the house of burgesses at Williamsburg. By a vote of the house previous to his coming it was agreed to give him a signal welcome through an address by the speaker. The speech was hearty and eulogistic, and recounted his distinguished services to his country. Washington attempted to reply, but only blushed, trembled and stammered. "Sit down, Mr. Washington," said the speaker; "your modesty equals your valor, and that surpasses any language I possess."

Mount Vernon, his estate, was on the Potomac river, beautifully situated on a bluff of land which gave a wide view of the river and surrounding country. He described it in a letter to a friend thus: "No estate in United America is more pleasantly situated. In a high and healthy country; in a latitude between the extremes of heat and cold; on one of the finest rivers in the world, a river well stocked with various kinds of fish at all seasons of the year, and in the spring with shad, herring, bass, carp and sturgeon in great abundance. The borders of the estate are washed by more than ten miles of tide-water; several valuable fisheries appertain to it; the whole shore, in fact, is one entire fishery." Here on this rich estate George and Martha Washington lived in old Virginia style, with many colored domestics, in a large house for those times, with many outbuildings, in the midst of care, plenty, hospitality, carrying on a great business, and having the oversight and conduct of so great an agricultural establishment. Among his slaves were. men of nearly all trades then in use. Almost everything needed was produced on the estate, and the owner had need to be versed in the business of every department. It was Washington's ideal

of a true manly life. He loved the country, the soil, agricultural pursuits; he loved the independence, isolation, dignity, plenty of the planter style of life. After he had taken his wife to his home, he wrote to a friend: "I am now, I believe, fixed in this seat, with an agreeable partner for life, and I hope to find more happiness in retirement than I ever experienced in the wide and bustling world." His wife brought him over a hundred thousand dollars in money and property, and her two children—a boy six and a girl four years of age-double that amount to care for; so that his retirement to a private and domestic life meant business, care and responsibility on a large scale. The last year of his military service had quite impaired his usually robust health, which now rapidly improved.

Washington was an Englishman, at this time, of the truest type, loyal to the king and constitution, customs, laws and church of England. There was no country like England; no people like Englishmen; no other government so genuine, strong and noble. He had much intercourse with England; had his agents there to whom he consigned the products of his estate and through whom he made purchases. Ships plied directly between England and the Potomac river. There was considerable travel between Virginia and the home country. Many young men were sent to England to be educated, and they kept up a fresh importation of English customs, tastes and style of life.

Virginia was the most English at this time of any of the colonies, and prided herself on this distinction. She made the least departure from the opinions and life of aristocratic England. Such homes as Washington's were conducted, as much as they could be, as were the wealthier homes of the mother country. And the expectation, no doubt, was that more and more American society would take the form of English society. The war that had been just fought with the French and Indians was in part to get more room for the English government to spread out its people, laws and power.

But how often are human calculations thwarted. Washington, now called to serve in the legislature of his State, in the

civil service of his country, began to feel the greed, and injustice and tyranny of the English government. Her laws for the colonies were restrictive; often entrenched upon their rights; shut up their trade to her ships and ports; her governors in the colonies often vetoed the most wholesome laws, and, like Braddock with his regulars, seemed to forget the new circumstances of a new people. As he learned of Braddock that the English army, conducted on the home system, was an unwieldy, slow and expensive thing in an American border warfare; so he learned in the civil service that King George and his parliament, and the governors and judges they sent over, were as incompetent to conduct the civil service of America. Little by little he was learning England's faults; learning that one people cannot legislate for and rule wisely another people far away and living under essentially different circumstances.

Washington was a devoted English churchman, was a vestryman in the church at Alexandria, and also at Pohick, and always attended church with his family when the weather favored, and, Mr. Irving says, was a communicant. This consecrated his devotion to England and its government and order of life. He was in the House of Burgesses when questions of difference came up with the governor and home government; understood, both as a legislator and a business man; how the restrictive navigation and trade and anti-manufacturing laws hindered the business of the colonies; heard the arguments pro and con; heard the vehement and powerful eloquence of Patrick Henry, as he set forth the natural rights of men and the injury to those rights in the colonies, by the unnatural and oppressive measures of the mother country. Notwithstanding his great love of England, he could not be blind to her faults. He loved the colonies and saw the great prospects before them. His quickest, deepest sympathies were for humanity.

In Washington's quiet and careful life at Mount Vernon, he studied, as they came up one after another, the great questions at issue between the colonies and the king and parliament, and his clear judgment favored the colonies all the time. As a private citizen he studied the great questions of statecraft; of

natural and colonial rights; of the English constitution and law; of navigation and commerce; of taxation and representation; of the rights of the people; as they were discussed by the great minds of the colonies and England as they never had been before. It was the maturing period of his thoughts and principles, which was preparing him for public action on that grand scale and in those stirring scenes which made him "The father of his country" and one of the world's most illustrious of men.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS.

It is pleasant to think of great men as natural men; and such was Washington. He was intensely interested in human things; in human ambitions and pleasures; in human loves and affairs. He was careful in his dress; circumspect, polite and deferential in his manners; prudent in his speech; usually self-governed, yet of strong passions; was a good hunter; enjoyed duck-shooting; entered heartily into social intercourse; was a good horseman, and took pride in his horses; relished jokes; with all his dignity and aristocratic associations, was democratic in his sympathies. He loved women and children; was a thoroughly domestic man; he loved the stir and show and power of military combination and movement; loved the drill, promptness and obedience of a good soldier. He was an exact and methodical business man; kept his accounts with punctilious accuracy; wrote in a clear, round hand; kept his clothes, books, tools, affairs in complete order; was a good correspondent, warm in his friendships, severe in his censures of wrongdoing; courageous, yet prudent; kept a diary and preserved much of his personal history; was bashful and modest; not given to public speech, yet never fell into the mistake that he was not of much account; was a reader of good books; an accurate observer of men and things; was very practical, and of wide and varied wisdom; was large-hearted and public-spirited.

In his full manhood he stood six feet high; was broadshouldered and full-chested; was erect, stately; moved with grace and dignity. He was of robust constitution, invigorated

by outdoor occupation, rigid temperance and orderly habits. Few men equaled him in strength and endurance. His hair was brown, eyes blue, complexion florid, head round, face full, expression calm and serious.

COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF.

While Washington was quietly attending to the affairs at Mount Vernon and occupying his seat in the house of burgesses at its sessions, the disturbed affairs of the colonies moved. rapidly on from bad to worse to an open rupture with the mother country, as related in the first chapter of this book. At the suggestion of John Adams, in the general Congress, seconded by Samuel Adams, he was nominated and unanimously elected commander-in-chief of the army of the united colonies. It was an office unsought and undesired. He accepted it to serve the distracted colonies and the suffering people, and with the con. viction, as he said to Patrick Henry on the day of his election, that "This day will be the commencement of the decline of my reputation." He refused all pay, asking only that his expenses be provided for. No man in America was more honest and earnest in the position the colonies had taken, and he cast all he had and was into the cause, believing it would be of little worth if the cause was not sustained.

Mr. Bancroft, in his history of the United States, says: "Never in the tide of time has any man lived who had in so great a degree the almost divine faculty to command the confidence of his fellow men and rule the willing. Wherever he became known, in his family, his neighborhood, his county, his native state, the continent, the camp, civil life, the United States, among the common people, in foreign courts, throughout the civilized world of the human race, and even among the savages, he, beyond all other men, had the confidence of his kind."

Washington was elected commander-in-chief on the fifteenth of June, 1775. He accepted the office with great diffidence, believing himself not equal to its great duties. He started as soon as he could set his affairs in order; not stopping to visit his family

« PreviousContinue »