"There is not a king in Europe but would look like a valet de chambre by his side." New England having seen him was henceforth wholly on his side.His traditions were not those of the Puritans, of the Ephraims and the Abijahs of the volunteer army, men whose Old Testament names tell something of the rigor of the Puritan view of life.Washington, a sharer in the free and often careless hospitality of his native Virginia, had a different outlook.In his personal discipline, however, he was not less Puritan than the strictest of New Englanders.The coming years were to show that a great leader had taken his fitting place.
Washington, born in 1732, had been trained in self-reliance, for he had been fatherless from childhood.At the age of sixteen he was working at the profession, largely self-taught, of a surveyor of land.At the age of twenty-seven he married Martha Custis, a rich widow with children, though her marriage with Washington was childless.His estate on the Potomac River, three hundred miles from the open sea, recently named Mount Vernon, had been in the family for nearly a hundred years.There were twenty-five hundred acres at Mount Vernon with ten miles of frontage on the tidal river.The Virginia planters were a landowning gentry; when Washington died he had more than sixty thousand acres.The growing of tobacco, the one vital industry of the Virginia of the time, with its half million people, was connected with the ownership of land.On their great estates the planters lived remote, with a mail perhaps every fortnight.There were no large towns, no great factories.Nearly half of the population consisted of negro slaves.It is one of the ironies of history that the chief leader in a war marked by a passion for liberty was a member of a society in which, as another of its members, Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, said, there was on the one hand the most insulting despotism and on the other the most degrading submission.The Virginian landowners were more absolute masters than the proudest lords of medieval England.These feudal lords had serfs on their land.The serfs were attached to the soil and were sold to a new master with the soil.They were not, however, property, without human rights.On the other hand, the slaves of the Virginian master were property like his horses.They could not even call wife and children their own, for these might be sold at will.It arouses a strange emotion now when we find Washington offering to exchange a negro for hogsheads of molasses and rum and writing that the man would bring a good price, "if kept clean and trim'd up a little when offered for sale."In early life Washington had had very little of formal education.
He knew no language but English.When he became world famous and his friend La Fayette urged him to visit France he refused because he would seem uncouth if unable to speak the French tongue.Like another great soldier, the Duke of Wellington, he was always careful about his dress.There was in him a silent pride which would brook nothing derogatory to his dignity.No one could be more methodical.He kept his accounts rigorously, entering even the cost of repairing a hairpin for a ward.He was a keen farmer, and it is amusing to find him recording in his careful journal that there are 844,800 seeds of "New River Grass"to the pound Troy and so determining how many should be sown to the acre.Not many youths would write out as did Washington, apparently from French sources, and read and reread elaborate "Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation." In the fashion of the age of Chesterfield they portray the perfect gentleman.He is always to remember the presence of others and not to move, read, or speak without considering what may be due to them.In the true spirit of the time he is to learn to defer to persons of superior quality.
Tactless laughter at his own wit, jests that have a sting of idle gossip, are to be avoided.Reproof is to be given not in anger but in a sweet and mild temper.The rules descend even to manners at table and are a revelation of care in self-discipline.We might imagine Oliver Cromwell drawing up such rules, but not Napoleon or Wellington.
The class to which Washington belonged prided itself on good birth and good breeding.We picture him as austere, but, like Oliver Cromwell, whom in some respects he resembles, he was very human in his personal relations.He liked a glass of wine.He was fond of dancing and he went to the theater, even on Sunday.He was, too, something of a lady's man; "He can be downright impudent sometimes," wrote a Southern lady, "such impudence, Fanny, as you and I like." In old age he loved to have the young and gay about him.He could break into furious oaths and no one was a better master of what we may call honorable guile in dealing with wily savages, in circulating falsehoods that would deceive the enemy in time of war, or in pursuing a business advantage.He played cards for money and carefully entered loss and gain in his accounts.He loved horseracing and horses, and nothing pleased him more than to talk of that noble animal.He kept hounds and until his burden of cares became too great was an eager devotee of hunting.His shooting was of a type more heroic than that of an English squire spending a day on a moor with guests and gamekeepers and returning to comfort in the evening.
Washington went off on expeditions into the forest lasting many days and shared the life in the woods of rough men, sleeping often in the open air."Happy," he wrote, "is he who gets the berth nearest the fire." He could spend a happy day in admiring the trees and the richness of the land on a neighbor's estate.
