After his father’s death, George found asylum from his difficult mother in periodic trips to stay with Lawrence at Mount Vernon, which would always beckon invitingly on the far horizon of his life. From time to time he also escaped to his brother Austin’s place at Pope’s Creek, though he was never as close to him. In a surviving portrait of Lawrence Washington by an unknown artist, he is clad in the uniform of a British Army officer but seems made of gentler stuff than George. He has boldly marked eyebrows, full lips, a cleft chin, and receding brown hair. The dark eyes are large and sensitive, evoking a poet or a scholar more than a bluff soldier. Indeed, the cultivated Lawrence presented an appealing model of urbanity for his younger brother. “For the enlargement of George’s mind and the polishing of his manners, Lawrence was almost an ideal elder brother,” writes Douglas Southall Freeman. ²

After returning from the military debacle at Cartagena, Lawrence Washington appeared headed for a life of easy riches. Though a lackluster businessman, he was fortunate to marry Ann Fairfax in July 1743, three months after his father’s death, a fateful match that catapulted him to the apex of Virginia society, a status certified by Lawrence’s election to the House of Burgesses.

The bride was the daughter of the august Colonel William Fairfax, who wielded breathtaking power in Tidewater Virginia as land agent for the Northern Neck Proprietary, the long strip of fertile farmland between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. Through this land grant, dating back to the reign of King Charles II, the Fairfax family controlled a veritable duchy of five million acres that extended all the way west to the Shenandoah Valley. William represented his cousin, Thomas Fairfax, the sixth Baron Fairfax, in administering this princely domain. Through a maze of business dealings and social and marital ties, Fairfax power ramified into every corner of Virginia society.

Ann Fairfax grew up on the family estate, Belvoir, which shimmered like a radiant mirage on the Potomac River, four miles downstream from Mount Vernon. This luxurious realm encapsulated the youthful fantasies of George Washington, who later described it thus: “Within full view of Mount Vernon, separated therefrom by water only, [it] is one of the most beautiful seats on the river . . . there are near 2,000 acres of land belonging to the tract, surrounded in a manner by water.” Of the two-story Georgian brick mansion that stood as its stately centerpiece, Washington recalled that it “stood on high and commanding ground.” ³ The house was approached by a circular drive and a huge courtyard, with formal grounds, stables, a coach house, and lavish gardens laid out with the full grandeur of an opulent British country house.

By marrying Ann Fairfax, Lawrence Washington crossed a social chasm that segregated the merely comfortable from the fabulously rich, making George a welcome visitor at Belvoir at the impressionable age of eleven. When Lawrence and Ann lost four children in infancy, it only fortified their bond with George. Ushered into the rarefied milieu of Belvoir, George befriended the colonel’s son, George William Fairfax, who was eight years his senior and rather snobbish; the latter faintly praised Belvoir as a “tolerable cottage” in a “wooded world.” ⁴ A portrait of the fastidiously dressed George William shows a man with a long, narrow face and an alert, slightly suspicious glance. The Fairfax connection opened up a world of extraordinary magnificence for young Washington, who must have felt a rough country bumpkin in comparison. His amazing career would never have unfolded had his fortunes not meshed so neatly with the interests of this ruling clan.

George won more than grudging entree to the Fairfax estate, for Colonel Fairfax spied unusual potential in this capable youth, invited him on foxhunts, and took an active interest in furthering his career. The colonial world revolved around such pivotal connections. To secure a powerful patron was an indispensable prerequisite to advancement for a boy born outside the upper gentry. In the mid-1750s, while coaching his younger brother Jack, George exhorted him to spend more time at Belvoir: “I should be glad to hear that you live in perfect harmony and good fellowship with the family at Belvoir, as it is in their power to be serviceable upon many occasions to us as young beginners . . . to that family I am under many obligations, particularly to the old gentleman.” ⁵ That old gentleman, Colonel Fairfax, seemed to dote on Washington and signed his letters to him “your assured and loving friend.” ⁶ The Fairfax sponsorship lifted George above the mass of Virginia commoners and made the world of the highborn seem tantalizingly within reach. Perhaps he relived his own youth when he later instructed a young relative, “It is therefore absolutely necessary, if you mean to make any figure upon the stage, that you should take the first steps right.” ⁷ From their letters, we can also tell that George and Colonel Fairfax shared copies of Caesar’s Commentaries and a life of Alexander the Great and frequently swapped views on military heroes from antiquity. Since the colonel once boasted that he had trained himself to make no “outward show” of emotion, he may also have provided a model of restrained behavior for George as well. ⁸ Colonel Fairfax knew George thoroughly enough that, in writing to Mary Washington, he pinpointed her son’s outstanding flaw, which he must correct: “I wish I could say that he governs his temper.” ⁹ It should be said that the authenticity of this letter has been questioned.

In September 1746 Lawrence Washington and Colonel Fairfax concocted a plan to spring fourteen-year-old George from his mother’s domination and launch him on a promising career in the Royal Navy. At a confidential meeting in Fredericksburg, designed to keep Mary Washington securely in the dark, Fairfax transmitted to George a letter from Lawrence telling of an open position for a midshipman aboard a royal frigate then anchored in Virginia. When George acquiesced in the idea, Fairfax reported back to Lawrence that his brother vowed to “be steady and thankfully follow your advice as his best friend.” ¹⁰ As George later acknowledged, it was “the wish of my eldest brother . . . that this should take place.” ¹¹ From Lawrence, George received a letter endorsing the plan, which he was then to deliver to his mother, whose approval was hardly taken for granted.

At first, Mary Washington gave qualified approval to the move. Perhaps eager to flee from Ferry Farm, George indicated that he had his “baggage prepared for embarkation.” ¹² Then Mary consulted a family friend, Robert Jackson, who supported the plan, but she seized on passing statements that he made to confirm her growing reservations. As Jackson informed Lawrence, “She offers several trifling objections such as fond and unthinking mothers naturally suggest and I find that one word against his going has more weight than ten for it.” ¹³ Mary also consulted her rich half brother in England, Joseph Ball, who sent back a canny analysis about naval discrimination against colonials. Advising that George be apprenticed instead to a tinker (a vendor of household utensils), Joseph noted that “a common sailor before the mast has by no means the common liberty of the subject; for they will press him from a ship where he has 50 shillings a month . . . and use him like a Negro, or rather, like a dog.” ¹⁴ That his uncle wanted George to train as a tinker bespeaks low family expectations that would have struck terror into this upwardly bound young man. Mary finally vetoed the idea of George joining the navy and thereby performed a major service in American history, saving her son for a future army career.

Whether Mary was persuaded by reasonable arguments, or simply didn’t wish to part with her robust eldest son around the farm, is impossible to know. One can say with certainty that it was the first of many times she seemed to measure her son’s worth not by what he might accomplish elsewhere but by what he could do for her, even if it meant thwarting his career. She would always be strangely indifferent toward his ambitions, making decisions about him from a purely self-interested standpoint. On the other hand, she was a single mother, clearly valued George’s abilities as the eldest son, and deemed him a necessary substitute for the missing father.

The following year, when George was fifteen, his family underwent a period of extreme financial stringency that ended his education. During a severe cash crunch in later life, he wrote that “with much truth I can say, I never felt the want of money so sensibly since I was a boy of 15 years old.” ¹⁵ With his mother having ruled out a seaman’s life, George opted to become a surveyor. Throughout his career, he would cherish real estate as an almost foolproof investment that always appreciated in value. Indeed, he could already see that most, if not all, of the major Virginia fortunes had arisen from rampant land speculation. Surveying was a well-trodden path for rising young men, and not only because surveyors could book rich fees as settlers sprawled into the western wilderness. While acting as agents for others, young surveyors with an eye on the main chance could scout choice properties for themselves. Such work could eventually elevate young men hampered by meager capital into the elite club of well-off planters.

Surveying suited Washington’s talents perfectly. He was proficient in math, exacting in approaching problems, and fond of the outdoors. His father had left behind a complete set of surveying instruments, and George ran his first lines at Ferry Farm. By October 1747 he had netted three pounds and two shillings by apprenticing himself to a local surveyor, and he initiated the habit of recording his expenses and revenues with scrupulous care. George Washington was always a man who monitored his every move. He regarded his knowledge of math and surveying as preliminary steps toward becoming a top-notch planter, observing that nothing was more “necessary to any person possessed of a large landed estate, the bounds or some part or other of which are always in controversy.” ¹⁶ For the rest of his life, Washington was stamped by his practical experience as a surveyor. At Mount Vernon, he had an irresistible penchant for carrying a compass and performing his own measurements. Even when he toured the thirteen states as first president, he methodically recorded the topographical features of places, as if he remained a working surveyor. Whether as planter or president, his study was liberally supplied with maps and charts.

Young Washington’s emergence as a surveyor had a fortuitous start. In 1746 Baron Fairfax, the absentee proprietor of the Northern Neck, visited Virginia to canvass his vast domain and stayed at Belvoir. Portraits show a shrewd, worldly man with a jowly face and intelligent eyes. He had the ultimate power to sell and lease all lands in the Northern Neck. Apparently pleased by what he saw, this veteran foxhunter decided to erect a hunting lodge for himself, known as Greenway Court, in the Shenandoah Valley. This quickened the development of his western lands, producing a windfall for the surveyors he employed. George Washington was splendidly poised to benefit from this development. His stalwart patron, Colonel Fairfax—now head of the King’s Council, the upper house of the Virginia legislature—hired the surveyors, and his son, George William, was assigned to sell the leaseholds.

Thus in March 1748 sixteen-year-old George Washington saddled his horse and joined his friend George William Fairfax on a surveying expedition across the Blue Ridge Mountains, plunging into the wilds of the Shenandoah Valley. Their mission was to carve up Lord Fairfax’s acreage into salable leaseholds. To mark this rite of passage, George Washington set quill to paper and began a travel diary entitled “A Journal of My Journey over the Mountains.” It represents his earliest piece of writing of any length. Here, beyond the pale of Virginia society, he told of pounding rains that swelled rivers and mountain winds that played havoc with his belongings. Overflowing waterways had to be forded, primitive roads traversed. Washington navigated canoes down whitewater streams in driving rain, shot wild turkey, and slept on bearskins under the stars or in smoky tents. This was a raw, violent world such as Washington had never experienced before, but he adapted to it with remarkable speed and aplomb and quickly grew inured to hardship.

This fastidious young man learned to deal with the many earthy surprises presented by frontier life. Early in the trip, when the group stayed with a Captain Isaac Pennington, George made the mistake of expecting clean, comfortable quarters. After he stripped off his clothes and climbed into the rustic bed, he found it to be “nothing but a little straw, matted together without sheets or anything else, but only one threadbare blanket with double its weight of vermin, such as lice, fleas, etc.” He promptly got up and put back on his clothes. Worn out from a day of riding, he managed to fall asleep, but resolved henceforth “to sleep in the open air before a fire.” ¹⁷ The next night at Fredericktown, he got a feather bed with fresh sheets and fumigated the lice he had picked up the previous night.

On March 23 Washington registered his first encounter with Native Americans, depicting his party as “agreeably surprised” by meeting thirty Indians fresh from battle who were dismayed to be bearing only a single scalp. Washington and his group plied the Indians with liquor, which prompted them to form a circle and leap about in a war dance, accompanied by a deerskin drum and the dry rattle of a gourd. George described how the “best dancer jumps up as one awaked out of a sleep and runs and jumps about the ring in a most comical manner.” ¹⁸ Despite the martial nature of the dance, the gory detail of the scalp, and the fact that they had goaded the Indians into getting drunk, the young surveyor only saw something picturesque and outlandish in the spectacle. Still insular in his reactions, he chided one group of Dutch settlers as “ignorant” because they “would never speak English, but when spoken to, they speak all Dutch.” ¹⁹ A patronizing streak in George later emerged when he derided some settlers as “a parcel of barbarians and an uncouth set of people.” ²⁰ Whatever his inner reservations about the frontier folk, George succeeded in handling them with uncommon finesse.

That George, tutored by Lawrence and the Fairfax family, was already a well-bred young man is reflected in his disdain for the crude existence he confronted. Yet a rugged side of his nature gloried in this unruly world. Possessed of unusual equanimity, he showed that he could shuttle gracefully between worlds of extreme gentility and roughness. He became accustomed to roasting food on sharpened sticks over open fires and dining on wooden chips instead of plates. Nothing appeared to faze him. One windy night in early April, George awoke to discover that the straw mat he was sleeping on had caught fire; luckily, one of the men woke up and stamped it out. The next night was even more blustery. “We had our tent carried quite off with the wind and was obliged to lie the latter part of the night without covering.” ²¹ All this he took in stride.

On April 13, 1748, toughened by a month of adventures, Washington finished his surveying trip. He had shown sporadic traces of an aesthetic sense, rhapsodizing about the “beautiful groves of sugar trees” and the “richness of the land,” but the trip had mainly alerted him to the extraordinary business opportunities that abounded in these virgin lands, commencing a lifelong fascination with westward expansion. ²² With extensive knowledge of these frontier outposts, Washington would emerge as the founder best able to visualize the ample contours of the American future, making the notion of a continental empire more than a mere abstraction.

Lawrence Washington helped to spark George’s interest in distant settlements, having joined with Thomas and William Fairfax in a land venture called the Ohio Company that ultimately gained the right to half a million acres of frontier land. The locus of settlement would be the so-called Ohio Country, west of the Allegheny Mountains, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers flowed together to form the headwaters of the Ohio River; the place was widely known as the Forks of the Ohio. It would be the competing claims of England and France to this bountiful territory that would shortly thrust George Washington into his first military confrontations and chart a direction for his future life.

Still rather awkward in society—“He was a very bashful young man,” one matron later recalled. “I used often to wish that he would talk more”—Washington was trying to acquire other social habits of the Virginia gentry. ²⁵ He learned to dance, an activity in which he sparkled, and gambled at whist and loo, card games then voguish among the British aristocracy. But he remained trapped in an adolescent dependence on his mother, which cramped his social style, and he suffered from the spartan life at Ferry Farm. In one letter to Lawrence, he regretted that he could not join him on a trip to the colonial capital at Williamsburg: “My horse is in very poor order to undertake such a journey and is in no likelihood of mending for want of corn sufficient to support him.” ²⁶

The young man was highly responsive to female charms. In December 1748 his friend George William Fairfax, twenty-four, had married eighteen-year-old Sarah Cary, who was to be immortalized under her married name of Sally Fairfax. The alluring daughter of Wilson Cary, an eminence in the House of Burgesses, Sally had grown up in a mansion on the James River near Hampton Roads. Her family was rich and cultured, boasting a well-stocked library, and Sally was fluent in French. A photograph of a lost portrait shows a comely young woman with smooth, creamy shoulders and a long neck, wearing a simple but glamorous décolleté dress that discloses an ample expanse of bosom. A woman of obvious beauty and sensuality, she has bright, sprightly eyes and an alluring personality. For an inexperienced youth like George, Sally, two years his senior, must have exuded a bewitching air of mystery. If his attraction to her blossomed into a full-blown infatuation, it probably started innocently enough.

Sometime around 1749-50 George became smitten with a young woman he coyly referred to as the “Low Land Beauty” and dallied with another he referred to as “very agreeable,” who was likely Mary Cary, Sally’s younger sister. ²⁷ George found solace by copying out two banal poems about a man spurned by his lady love. In one poem, the poet is tortured by secret love: “Ah! woe’s me, that I should Love and conceal, / Long have I wish’d, but never dare reveal.” ²⁸ In the second poem, the poet stands helpless before his ardor. “Oh Ye Gods why should my Poor Resistless Heart / Stand to oppose thy might and Power / At Last surrender to cupids feather’d Dart / and now lays Bleeding every Hour / For her that’s Pityless of my grief and Woes / And will not on me Pity take.” ²⁹ But Washington was not born to pine away as an idle, lovesick youth.

In the spring of 1749 he again profited from his connection with brother Lawrence when he helped to survey the new Potomac port of Alexandria, north of Mount Vernon; Lawrence served as a trustee of the town. A more momentous change occurred in July 1749, when George was appointed surveyor of Culpeper County. Even though the College of William and Mary, under a 1693 charter, retained the power to name the county surveyor, it proved susceptible to the blandishments of influential men. When seventeen-year-old George Washington captured this lucrative sinecure, becoming the youngest official surveyor in Virginia history, it reflected his privileged friendship with the omnipotent Lord Fairfax. Instead of starting out as a lowly, obscure apprentice, the young man was enabled by patronage to skip the preliminary steps. As Marcus Cunliffe has noted, the young Washington “was not an intellectual genius or the heir to a great fortune,” but “he was evidently energetic, reliable, and canny.” ³⁰

Two days after his appointment, George performed an obligatory survey of four hundred acres in eastern Culpeper County and proudly affixed his signature to the document with his new title. Apparently, this was the only survey George ever performed in the county for which he was the nominal surveyor. He then gladly turned his attention to more profitable opportunities awaiting him in the hinterlands beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains, where rich soil tempted hordes of settlers. As fortune’s favorite, George received a steady stream of assignments that issued from the splendid portals of Belvoir as Lord Fairfax cashed in on the booming settlements in his domain. These surveys were often plum assignments, for they covered small, easily measured parcels that could be surveyed in a single day. Choosing to work in crisp spring or autumn weather, George avoided the summertime, when thick foliage impeded the sight lines of surveyors. Lord Fairfax pocketed one shilling per annum for every fifty acres of settled land and piled up a substantial fortune from the labors of George and his fellow surveyors. Within a year the busy young man shed his duties as surveyor of Culpeper County, most likely because he no longer needed the extra work.

In the spring of 1750 George Washington again mounted his horse, loaded up his surveying tools, and cantered off to the Shenandoah Valley. He laid out forty-seven tracts on that one trip alone, jotting notes for each survey in a tiny notebook he tucked into his pocket. He grew increasingly accustomed to the wilderness and was no longer too particular about changing his clothes. As he notified a friend, “The coldness of the weather will not allow my making a long stay, as the lodging is rather too cold for the time of year. I have never had my clothes off, but lay and sleep in them like a Negro.” ³¹ An instant professional success, George toiled just a few months yearly and made his first significant land investment in October 1750, buying nearly fifteen hundred acres in the Shenandoah Valley. Thus began his continuing fixation on land speculation. As Dorothy Twohig, an editor of Washington’s papers, notes, “No theme appears more frequently in the writings of Washington than his love for the land—more precisely, his own land.” ³² Only eighteen, Washington already had his first plantation, on which tenants or hired help grew corn, wheat, and tobacco. He never stopped accumulating acreage and by age twenty had assembled 2,315 acres in the Shenandoah Valley. For a young man who could not afford corn for his horse a year earlier, it was a startling and nearly dreamlike elevation in status.

George’s soaring success coincided with an alarming turn in Lawrence’s health. In May 1749 the latter had to relinquish his seat in the House of Burgesses due to a hacking cough—a telltale symptom of tuberculosis. That winter at Mount Vernon, George had intermittently helped to care for his brother. On one occasion, he wrote tenderly to Lawrence, “Dear Brother, I hope your cough is much mended since I saw you last; if so, [I] likewise hope you have given over the thoughts of leaving Virginia.” ³³ Instead, the cough only worsened, and Lawrence sailed to England to consult doctors there. In his absence, George commiserated by mail with his sister-in-law Ann and did his best to cheer her up. He couldn’t offer comfort in person at Mount Vernon because he himself had contracted a new ailment: malaria. “I am deprived of the pleasure of waiting on you (as I expected) by ague and fever which I have had to extremity,” he informed her. ³⁴

While George recuperated, Lawrence returned from England still in the terrible throes of tuberculosis. In desperation, accompanied by his younger brother, Lawrence decided to test the medicinal powers of warm springs in western Virginia (later the town of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia). Infirm people had begun making pilgrimages to this natural spa to soak in the waters or drink them to regain their health. Later it was a fashionable place, but George found the warm springs dark, gloomy, and secluded and scarcely conducive to improved health. He grumbled that they “are situated very badly on the east side of a steep mountain and enclosed by hills on all sides, so that the afternoon’s sun is hid by four o’clock and the fogs hang over us till nine or ten.” ³⁵ While Lawrence sampled the waters, George distracted himself with surveying trips in the surrounding countryside.

As Lawrence’s condition deteriorated, he decided to gamble on a trip to Barbados, hoping the tropical warmth would revive him; at the time, people with consumption flocked to Barbados as an open-air sanatorium. Because Lawrence’s wife had just given birth to a daughter, it again fell upon George, nineteen, to accompany his thirty-three-year-old brother, acting as both nursemaid and companion. So grave was Lawrence’s prognosis that the brothers braved a season of severe hurricanes in the West Indies. On the boat to Barbados, George kept a ship’s log, in which he documented heaving seas and blustery weather. After an exceptionally rough thirty-seven-day passage, the ship docked at Barbados on November 3, 1751. In short order, Lawrence was examined by a Dr. William Hillary, who delivered the hopeful opinion that Lawrence could be saved.

This reprieve provided a fleeting opportunity for George to relish his only trip outside of North America. As the two brothers rode outside of town in “the cool of the evening” to seek their new lodgings, George seemed enraptured by the profuse tropical flowers and foliage and extolled the “beautiful prospects which on every side presented to our view the fields of cane, corn, fruit trees etc. in a delightful green.” ³⁶ His senses came alive to the island’s sights and sounds. He savored avocado and pineapple for the first time and marveled at the most gargantuan collection of fruits he had ever seen heaped on a dinner table. When he attended a melodrama by George Lillo entitled The London Merchant, it was probably his first taste of a professional stage production, marking the start of a lasting fondness for theater.

The two brothers rented rooms outside Bridgetown from a Captain Croftan, the commander of Fort James, who introduced them to island society. Aside from early morning rides with George, Lawrence was too debilitated to engage in much activity. In his despondent letters home, he bewailed their situation—“We soon tire of the same prospect. We have no bodily diversions but dancing”—even as George was enchanted by the social whirl. ³⁷ From his window, the young man surveyed ships gliding by in Carlisle Bay and watched soldiers execute drills. He also appraised the island’s fort with the critical eye of a future general. “It’s pretty strongly fortified,” he wrote in his diary, “and mounts about 36 guns within the fortifications.” ³⁸

Even amid the trip’s escapist pleasures, George had a conspicuous habit of improving himself, turning everything into an educational opportunity. He took copious notes on a multitude of topics. Curiously, the sole reference to slavery concerned the sensational trial of a slave owner, Colonel Benjamin Charnock, who was acquitted of raping his maid. George bore little sympathy for Charnock, as revealed by his reference to him as a man of “opulent fortune and infamous character.” ³⁹ The most intriguing diary entry contains shrewd observations on the leadership style of the Barbados governor, with George noting that “as he avoids the errors of his predecessor, he give[s] no handle for complaint. But, at the same time, by declining much familiarity, [he] is not overzealously beloved.” ⁴⁰ The proper degree of familiarity between governors and the governed would be an absorbing preoccupation throughout his career. George Washington, too, would decline familiarity and sometimes inspire more respect than outright love.

Just two weeks after arriving on Barbados, George started running a high fever and contracted a savage headache, evidence that he had been “strongly attacked with the smallpox,” as he noted in his diary. ⁴¹ Within a few days ghastly red pustules erupted across his forehead and scalp. For three weeks the feverish young man, confined to bed, was nursed back to health by the “very constant” presence of Dr. John Lanahan. ⁴² Before long, the pustules turned to scabs, then dropped off altogether, leaving a smattering of reddish-brown spots. For the rest of his life, George’s nose was lightly pitted with pockmarks, a defect discreetly edited from many sanitized portraits. The smallpox siege ended with his complete recovery on December 12, 1751. In retrospect, George’s brush with a mild case of smallpox was a fantastic stroke of luck, furnishing him with immunity to the most virulent scourge of eighteenth-century armies.

Exactly one week after his recovery, George returned home to Virginia aboard a ship, the Industry, and endured yet another wrenching, storm-tossed journey. To compound his woes, as he succumbed to seasickness, a seaman filched his money while he lay dozing. By the time his ship made landfall in Yorktown in late January, George must have had an aversion to sea voyages, for he never essayed one again. He stopped off in Williamsburg, armed with letters of reference to Robert Dinwiddie, the new lieutenant governor, who invited him to dine and was to emerge as a prominent new mentor. George then hurried off to Mount Vernon to relay to Ann the dreadful news that Lawrence still languished in Barbados with no relief from his illness. Lawrence clung to one last wispy hope: that a stay in Bermuda would work the magic that had failed to materialize in Barbados, and he compared himself grimly to “a criminal condemned, though not without hopes of reprieve.” ⁴³

With his brother marooned in Bermuda, George returned to surveying near his Bullskin Plantation in northern Frederick County and further supplemented his holdings there. Perhaps because his immune system was compromised after his bout of smallpox, George suffered yet another frightening illness, a “violent pleurisy” that must have petrified him with the prospect that he, too, had developed tuberculosis. ⁴⁴ Though an exceptionally muscular and vigorous young man, he was susceptible to the many illnesses that ran freely in eighteenth-century Virginia.

In a bizarre piece of timing, George attempted a bit of courtship from his sick-bed. He sought to win the hand of sixteen-year-old Elizabeth “Betsy” Fauntleroy, whose father was a luminary in Richmond County. The adolescent George seemed to daydream about one rich, unattainable girl after another. Having now recovered from the charms of the “Low Land Beauty,” he was stalking bigger game. From a letter that he wrote to William Fauntleroy, Betsy’s father, we can see that the girl had already rejected his advances. As George apprised the father, he intended “as soon as I recover my strength to wait on Miss Betsy in hopes of a revocation of the former, cruel sentence and see if I can meet with any alteration in my favor.” ⁴⁵ Unfortunately we do not have the father’s response to this letter, leaving us to wonder whether Fauntleroy scoffed at George as a bumptious parvenu who aspired above his social rank.

Fate was about to hand George some advantages that would bring such a lofty marriage within his grasp. Lawrence’s hope that Bermuda would rejuvenate him turned out to be his last illusion: returning to Virginia, he died at Mount Vernon on July 26, 1752. For George, his brother’s death at age thirty-four was emotionally equivalent to the death of a second father and possibly more devastating. He had identified with Lawrence, shared in his professional life, and participated intimately in his terminal illness. Lawrence left his affairs in such a disorderly state that George, as an executor, bewailed their being in “the utmost confusion.” ⁴⁶ Luckily, the debts proved manageable, and Lawrence’s death provided another bonanza for George, on whom windfalls showered at the most implausible moments. In his will, Lawrence bequeathed to him three parcels of land in Fredericksburg. Far more consequential was a clause stipulating that, if Ann and their infant daughter died without an heir, George would inherit the 2,500 acres of Mount Vernon and adjoining properties “in consideration of the natural love and affection” which Lawrence had borne “unto his loving brother George Washington.” ⁴⁷ At the time of Lawrence’s death, this eventuality seemed a distant prospect, many decades away, if ever.

George had long hoped to emulate his admired brother, but now he would almost graft his life onto Lawrence’s, as if George would extend his brother’s short life and fulfill its golden promise. The older brother became a revered figure in George’s memory, “a young man of the most promising talents.” ⁴⁸ Though George was poorly equipped for such a post, lacking military experience, he vigorously pursued the position of adjutant general left vacant by his brother’s death. Inspired by Lawrence’s example, he decided to swap a surveyor’s life for that of a soldier. The colony had now been divided into four districts, with an adjutant responsible for each. Naturally, George wanted to serve as adjutant in the district covering the Northern Neck. When he was awarded the Southern District instead, he seemed not thrilled by his assignment to an important post but dismayed by the low-prestige district.

At twenty, George already had enough powerful patrons in Williamsburg to jockey to alter the decision. When William Fitzhugh, who was named to the Northern Neck adjutancy, moved to Maryland, Washington saw an opening to lobby to replace him. “I am sensible my best endeavors will not be wanting and doubt not but by a constant application to fit myself for the office,” he wrote to Dinwiddie. “Could I presume your Honour had not in view a more deserving person, I flatter myself I should meet with the approbation of the Gentlemen of the council.” ⁴⁹ The young Washington could be alternately fawning and assertive, appealingly modest and distressingly pushy. While he knew the social forms, he could never quite restrain, much less conceal, the unstoppable force of his ambition. In the end, Fitzhugh resigned his post and yielded the Northern Neck adjutancy to young Washington. In early February 1753, just before his twenty-first birthday, George Washington took the oath of office and became district adjutant, which paid one hundred pounds annually and crowned him with the title of Major Washington.

In his seemingly inexorable rise in the world, Washington proved no less resourceful in the social sphere. In September 1752 a new Masonic lodge was convened in Fredericksburg, and two months later Washington was inducted as one of its first apprentices. Within a year he progressed swiftly through the ranks to become a Master Mason. We don’t know how Washington reacted to the fraternal group’s arcane rituals and occult signs. Still a relatively young movement, Freemasonry had been founded in London in 1717, drawing its symbols from the squares and compasses of masons’ guilds. While American Masons preached the Enlightenment ideals of universal brotherhood and equality, they discarded the anticlerical bent of their European brethren. Washington believed devoutly in the group’s high-minded values. He attended lodge meetings sporadically, came to own two Masonic aprons, walked in Masonic processions, and was even painted in full Masonic regalia during his second term as president. Repeatedly throughout his career, he paid tribute to the movement. “So far as I am acquainted with the principles and doctrines of Free Masonry,” he said toward the end of his life, “I conceive it to be founded in benevolence and to be exercised only for the good of Mankind.” ⁵⁰ On another occasion, he stated that the purpose of Freemasonry was to “enlarge the sphere of social happiness” and “to promote the happiness of the human race.” ⁵¹ Whatever credence he gave to Masonic ideals, the young George Washington, a born joiner, was likely drawn to the group as a convivial place to hobnob and expand his social contacts.

What strikes one most about the twenty-year-old George Washington was that his sudden remarkable standing in the world was the result not so much of a slow, agonizing progress as of a series of rapid, abrupt leaps that thrust him into the topmost echelons of Virginia society. The deaths of those he loved most dearly had, ironically, brightened his prospects the most. Quite contrary to his own wishes, the untimely deaths of his father and his half brother had endowed him with extraordinary advantages in the form of land, slaves, and social status. Every misfortune only pushed him further along his desired path. Most providential of all for him was that Lawrence Washington had expired on the eve of the French and Indian War, a conflict in which George’s newfound status as district adjutant would place him squarely at the forefront of a thunderous global confrontation.