At twenty-one, as a man of “discretion, accustomed to travel, and familiar with the manners of the Indians,” he was sent by Governor Dinwiddie on a delicate mission which involved encroachments by the French on property claimed by the English. During all these years he came at close intervals to visit his mother, now living in her own house in Fredericksburg, which was still his home.
After his distinguished campaign against the French army under M. De Jumonville in the region of Ohio, where he exposed himself with the most reckless bravery, he came to Mt. Vernon which he inherited from his brother, Augustus, married Martha Custis, a young widow with two children and large landed estates, and became a member of the House of Burgesses, punctually attending all the sessions.
Indeed, one finds oneself eagerly looking for an occasional lapse in this epic of punctuality. It would humanize him. Anyway, one is glad to see that he was a patron of the arts and the theatre, and his industry in keeping day-books, letter-books, contracts and deeds is somewhat offset by the fact that he played the flute.
He seldom spoke in the House of Burgesses, but his opinion was eagerly sought and followed. We will pass over the time when Dunmore prorogued the “House,” and of the events which ended in Washington’s being made Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army.
We are, perhaps, more interested in another visit to Fredericksburg to see his mother, after he had resigned his commission. From town and country, his friends gathered to give him welcome and do him honor. The military turned out, civic societies paraded, and cannon boomed.
When “George” got Arrested
In between his career as statesmen and as soldier, we strain our eyes for a thread of color, and we discover that he was once brought before a justice of the peace and fined for trading horses on Sunday. And again, that he was summoned before the grand jury and “George William Fairfax, George Washington, George Mason,” and half dozen others were indicted for “not reporting their wheeled vehicles, according to law.”
It is worth noting, too, that while her son, George, was leading the American army, Mary, his mother, was a partisan of the King; a tory most openly. “I am sure I shall hear some day,” She told some one, calmly, in her garden, “that they have hung George.”
Nevertheless, his first two messages, after he crossed the Delaware and won signal victories, were to Congress and his mother. And after the hard-riding courier had handed her the note, and the gathering people had waited until she laid down her trowel, and wiped the garden earth from her hands, she turned to them and said: “Well, George has crossed the Delaware and defeated the King’s troops at Trenton.”
Washington Advises Lovers