Empire: World History - 151. The Founding Fathers: George Washington (Ep 1)

Episode Date: May 22, 2024

Everybody knows Washington as the strapping, powerful general and then president who helped to overthrow the British and forge America, but how did he get there? He was born into a respectable Virginian planter family, had an ordinary education and, with the exception of his tortured relationship with his mother, had a childhood of no note. However, as a young man he sought out the world and learnt all he could from it. He fought as a soldier alongside the British where he displayed his capacity for immense bravery and his ability to motivate men, setting him on his path to his great achievement. But he was not a saint, his great passion was farming and to work his farm he had vast numbers of slaves. He consistently sought to expand his land too, normally at the expense of the Native Americans. Join William and Anita as they discuss the complexity of George Washington and his life before the American Revolution. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durunpool. We are here to discuss a really interesting character in the history of America. In fact, you might say the big dad. of American history, George Washington.

And you know, we like an origin story on this here podcast. So this is going to be the making of George Washington. His life, his childhood, his adolescence, all the things that go into making the man before the American Revolution, George Washington, that you're probably more familiar with. And most of you will have heard and seen a number of times pastitious about this scene,

supposedly from Washington's childhood. Kermit the Frog did it, by the way, on the Muppet's show. So you have a young boy with a little axe in his hand at a fallen tree. You all know what I'm talking about. And this is the moment supposedly where George Washington shows in childhood that he is made of true stuff. Because he goes to his father who is incensed by the loss of this tree and says, Pa, I cannot tell a lie. It was I who chopped down your cherry tree with my little hatchet.

You all know that story? You heard that story? It's bullshit. It did not happen. Completely bullshit. Made up by his biographer, right? Well, made up by a really opportunistic man going by the wonderful name of Mason Lock Weems, who made a pitch to his Philadelphia publisher. And it's quoted, I've been just reveling in so many brilliant George Washington books at the moment. This is a revelation in the book by Ron Cherno, who also very famously did the biography of Hamilton, which Lin-Manuel Brander based his musical.

But he's got a quote from this. I've got something to whisper in your lug, Weems wrote in January 1800. Washington, you know, is gone. So this is the end of the story where we are after Washington's death. Millions are gaping, says Weems, to read something about it. My plan, exclamation mark. I give his history sufficiently minute and go on to show that his unparalleled rise and elevation were due to his with capital letters, great virtues.

Now, it was Weems who made up this story out of absolute nothing, and he didn't do it until the fifth edition of the book. So it only occurred to him to boost the figures by sort of throwing in a few more made-up anecdotes, five print runs later. So that story is Boulderdash. In general, I think he is somebody who has, you know, had the thing that happens in any country in the late 19th or early 20th century. the nationalists get a hold of a life story and turn someone from a human being into a sort of saintly paradigm. And Washington has feet of clay as much as any other man, including, of course, being first and foremost a slave-owning plantation man. That's his main source of income and his job.

Sure. So let me start up by another story of sort of a bullshit artist who wants to make his name off Washington's back. And this is when Washington is still alive. It's a rather wonderful man called Gilbert Stewart, who is a painter who is in England and is in the marshalcy because he's run up such enormous debts. Which is the debtors prison for those who don't know. Debtors prison. Which all these Dickensian characters end up in. Yeah. So what he does is he hatches this plan that he's going to be saved from all his debts and pay off all his creditors and then he'll be able to come back to England and everything will be fine. If only he can make it to America.

So as he writes, when I can net a sum sufficient to take me to America, I shall be off. my native soil. There I expect to make a fortune by Washington alone. And so he sort of wheedles his way when he gets to the United States through a man called John Jay, who's Chief Justice Jay, and he does a portrait for him, which is very, very good and sort of lionises the man and John Jay loves it. And all he wants is an introduction to Washington. So he does make the introduction. Now this man, who has all the charm of, you know, sort of that Celtic blood that runs in your veins as well, he decided he's going to charm Washington. as he's charmed every one of his sitters.

But he doesn't realize that Washington is this really taciturn man who does not like chatters. He doesn't chat very much either. So he sits on whatever, ever, ever Gilbert Stewart does. He doesn't respond. So he says to Washington, look, you are a great man, but I want to see the real man underneath. And I want you to think of me not as your painter, but as the real man that I have. And Washington just fixes him.

It's pretty much the only thing he says in these hours of sitting with me. he says Washington, it's always been a maxim rather to let my designs appear from my works, not my expressions. And so poor old Gilbert Stewart, who's hoping to become busy mates with Washington, sits and does this portrait, which is really very difficult and describes a man who is fierce and savage just under the skin, you know, that he hides it all with this cool exterior, but there's boiling underneath this savage of a man. And it becomes the picture that is on every bill in America. That is the portrait that is done

by this mind. Isn't that lovely? Yeah. So anyway, we should talk about him. There's a lovely description of him by a congressman at this period, which I love. He said, he's no harems, scerum, ranting, swearing fellow, but sober, steady and calm. Yes, I know. I've seen that as well.

But then there are so many other accounts of him actually having a volcanic temper. I mean, others of the founding father said, you know, when he lost his rag, he lost it, mechanically. And so it was actually, you know, a day-to-day minute-to-minute struggle to keep it all locked in. And when we get into his childhood, you'll see why all this turmoil was locked away. We can be amateur, psychologists together. We would never do that. You know how we are. You know what we're like. So look, George Washington born on the 22nd of February 1732. And by all accounts, he was an enormous baby. Whereabouts in Virginia? Yeah, in Virginia. Westmoreland County. Westmoreland County, exactly right. Not far from. the Potomac River. And it was a very difficult, difficult delivery because he had a massive head,

apparently, according to historians. And so his mother, Mary, suffered quite a lot from that child birth experience. Mary Ball, Washington. She's a one, I'll tell you. So that's suffering that, you know, poor old George causes her by accident by, you know, just appearing in the world. She revisits on him a hundredfold. So even though, you know, these light, you know, these light were saying, these lionised sort of hagiographies of people afterwards that say, oh, he loved his mother and he described his mother as the most beautiful woman who ever lived. There is plenty, if you dig down into his letters, that describes a very dysfunctional relationship with a woman who never really showed great warmth, never showed great kindness. And indeed,

you will find out, tries to sabotage this man's career a number of times along the way. Very unmotherly activity. William, just say what Joseph John Ellis said about George Washington's family in their standing. He calls him respectable, if not quite prominent, members of Virginia society. And there's this picture he paints of the father, Augustine Washington, as a kind of reasonably wealthy planter in Virginia. But in the mid-18th century, at this sort of period, his land is only 10,000 acres, which is considered not much. That will not be much. It is not much. Well, it sounds like quite a lot. So that veneer, but it doesn't actually compare to what a lot of landowners, because as you quite rightly said, Virginia is all about swallowing up land at this time.

If you want to think of it, it's kind of like, I don't know, Jeremy Bowen gave me this phrase. I was chatting to him about it, named drop clunk, but it's a horizontal empire, you know, where you just expand, expand, expand, expand, expand, expand, expand, expand, this way, that way, just amass as much as you can within within your own boundaries. And 49 slaves, but what are they growing? What's the, is it cotton already? Tobacco. Tobacco. Tobacco is already tobacco. And of course, it's our friend John Rolf, as we said on our Pocahontas episode last week, who brings tobacco to Virginia and turns it into this crucial plantation crop. Well, tobacco is the thing that is the cash crop and is the big export crop.

So look, that gives you an idea of a middle class family, but this is not a family that has its roots in comfort. Because George Washington's great, great-grandfather, was hounded out of England by none other than your friend, Oliver Cromwell. Is he my friend? And, well, you like talking about him, don't you? I mean, you like, you like telling stories. No, but you love, you know, talking about man.

But Washington's great-great-grandfather was an Anglican minister, and he was described as a scandalous, malignant priest, and therefore sort of harried and harrowed. I mean, this was, you know, what they called a lot of priests that they didn't like. And so this is sort of the start of the English Civil War, basically, chasing him out. Where are they in England? What part of... They are in Oxford. That's where they are. Anbury, Salgrave Manor was the family residence. And, you know, they're doing okay, but then, you know, all of their world sort of the bottom falls out.

And he tells his son, you're not going to have a future here. You need to go to America because, you know, we're doomed under Cromwell. There's no hope. So John, who is the most socially mobile, goes to America with nothing, you know, sort of two tuppence in his pocket kind of thing. And he's recruited to fight Indians in Maryland. That's what happens to him. And he becomes a social climate. And you get ranks for just turning up at this point because people are so grateful that you're fighting. And when you say fighting Indians, what does that mean? Joining a militia?

Joining a militia, exactly that. And he gets rewarded with the colonel's rank in one of the first. of the militias. And he actually is quite a one himself, John Washington, because he marries, he has sort of like a respectable marriage festival. His wife dies. A lot of families. In fact, the Washington family in particular, Washington describes himself as a short-lived family, because all of their lives are pretty short. Apart from him, you know, he's the only one who sort of bucks the trend of dying very young. But John Washington, his wife dies. And he marries in quick succession. It says here a pair of lusty sisters who have been accused.

respectively of running a brothel and engaging in adulterous relations with the governor. So, you know, this is a colourful family. Not that you'll get that in any of the high geographies. Well, I mean, it's interesting that, you know, these things are difficult. But his father, Augustine, Washington, is, you know, he's a strapping man, we're told, sort of six foot tall, you know, a very fair complexion. He could raise up and place in a wagon a mass of iron that two ordinary men could barely raise from the ground, it says about Augustine, his father. But his father's not in his life for very long,

because by the age of 11, he's died. Just his terrifying mother. Just as terrifying mother who, you know, is bringing up half-brothers and the half-brothers of Augustine. So Augustine's married before. His wife dies and then he marries Mary, who is George's mother. And then he has other siblings, younger siblings. George is the oldest child of Augustine and Mary. But the marriage before produces two sons. His brothers, in his half-brothers, the older ones, Lawrence, who's going to be very, very important in George Washington's life, are sent to Appleby Grammar School to be educated, in the English way, in civility, in Latin and in Greek. And George, who looks up to these half-brothers, and who's left with sort of the slightly dragonish Mary, his mother. And is relied upon this little boy, you know, to look after his younger siblings, because she's a single mum.

At the end of there, she's a single mom, and she's struggling, and she's got sort of this land that everybody wants. a piece of to try and manage and this very, very young family, he doesn't get the same education. And for his whole life, William, and this reminds me so much the Victoria story, you know, resents the fact that he was not given a proper education, that he is not a man of letters. And all of his letters, so they often sort of, well, not all, but most, will have this sort of apologetic air that I'm sorry I don't have prettier phrases for you. It's funny how people do feel that. My father actually had that.

My father went to the army in wartime and never went to university. And all through his life felt that as something lacking in himself. And I think that's a very common thing. And also, you know, if you've traded that in instead for being a nursemaid, you know, when you're only, you're barely in double digits, you know, as an age. It's 11 years old. He has to look after or help Mary, at least, Mary Washington, take care of Betty, Samuel, John, Augustine, Charles and Mildred.

All of these kids is gaggle are very, very younger than him, children, who he adores, by the way. He doesn't resent them, but he does resent his mother and the fact that he has to sort of shoulder this incredibly adult burden, even though he is just a child. And tell me about his brother Lawrence, because he seems to turn up a lot in the biographies. Yeah, Lawrence is really important. What's the story of his relationship with him? So Lawrence is handsome. I mean, he's the heir to, you know, the fortune. They're all big chaps, aren't they?

I mean, Washington himself is tall, and one of the things that all people always remark on is he's tall commanding and strolling and stroke. Yeah, well, there's also there's controversy over that. So, you know, a lot of the history books put him at six foot two or six foot three. And yet, one, again, this Chernobyl brilliant biography, which I can honestly, if you feel like getting through a doorstep, this is a glorious one to get through. It's so brilliant. What's the title?

It's called Washington, a life. But what he does is he goes through letters that Washington wrote his tailor. Because Washington actually, when he grows older and we're jumping ahead a little bit, is quite the dandy. Like he wants to be very, very well dressed. And he designs his outfits. Brilliant. And he gets the actual height from the tailor.

He gets the height measurements, right? So he gets the, because they are really tailored to trousers. So it turns out he's six foot, not six foot two. But the reason why they're six foot two, six foot three thing is doing the rounds is because they measured his death. with his toes pointed out. You know, when you were lying on a bed and your toes are pointing out

a little bit like a ballet dancer, and that's why he gets the extra two, three inches. I have said, I'm impressed by Rod Cherdo's... That's a brilliant way of getting the actual height of your... Go to the Taylor's Records, of course. He's absolutely fabulous. And through the Taylor's letters to his tailors, it also turns out this man has monstrously large hands.

It's all, like, really unusual hands. So it has to pay extra to get these, enormous gloves to fit his sort of like great hams of hands. Anyway, so he grows up in fairy farm. He doesn't grow up on the land that Lawrence owns, his brother you're asking about, you know, the older brother. And the brother becomes the sort of father figure to him after the father dies? He comes back and he takes over his father's lands. Whereas, you know, Mary and the little children are growing up nearby in another place, another sort of cabin, six-foot farmhouse, really, not cabin, but, you know, much more roughly human called Ferry Farm.

But Lawrence realizes that George needs to get out of there, you know, because she's just a bit of a pill. And he wants him to join the Navy. He has great ambitions for his brother. And he's had experience of fighting for the British as well. So he fights, his first experience, Lawrence, who writes home, and, you know, these would be George Washington's first skirmishes with battle and what it is to be in a war. You know, for a boy's own imagination, this is quite something. But Lawrence is fighting, you know, in 1739, Great Britain clashed with space. in the Caribbean, the War of Jenkins' ears.

I mean, maybe you can tell us more about the War of Jenkins' ear because it was one of those things that, I think, a long time ago, kids at school in Britain had to learn, didn't it? I remember studying it. Yeah, exactly. It's one of those weird titles of chapters in your school textbook, which is apparently a coinage of Thomas Carlyle, who we've had before friend of the show.

He coins this to talk about this skirmish in the Caribbean during the war of the Austrian succession and those skirmishes between the French and the English on the borders of Canada. And this is 1739 to 48. This is the same sort of time as the Second Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland, Spain, Britain and France are all busy competing for colonies and for power in the continent and in the colonies. And this, This is focused on the Caribbean and the fighting takes place in the Caribbean and on New Granada. Yeah, and it's, I mean, it's called the Battle of Jenkins' ear because this Admiral Jenkins, who is supposedly Robert Jenkins, his ear is hacked off. He's mutilated.

And that's why, you know, this is a cause of spell eye that, you know, you do not treat our people like this. So Britain mobilises, you know, an amphibious reply to this and enlists a lot of colonial subjects to fight, you know, the geography of it, if it's the Caribbean. make sense to get people who are a bit near. So there's an American foot regiment that is mobilised, and Lawrence is part of that. And he's sort of on the northern coast of South America, it's a absolute disaster at sea. You know, the British being completely hammered. Lawrence and his men never can actually get off their ship because it's got yellow fever and all of the men are sick. And he's writing these letters back to his brother about just what this is like. But also it's, he writes to his family. Complete nightmare being on a ship

full of men with fever. Puking and, you know, all the other stuff. But what he also does communicate to his family is that the British treat these colonial soldiers like serfs. So even if they have rank. Is that the first time we get that in the Washington family? It's the first time you get that because, you know, he's got a proper job fighting for the British. And Washington will get to know this firsthand. But that's his big brother, his hero is right? He's right. back, you know, he's sick, he's fighting in a ridiculous war where they're just being completely blasted out of the water. And they're treating him like crap, frankly. What's interesting, I think, about this is that it shows how very much the, what's now the United States, was connected

to the Caribbean economy at this point. In fact, later on, Lawrence takes George to Barbados when he's trying to cure his TB. And that's where Washington contracts smallpox. But what we've got to put together in our heads is the idea that the Caribbean slave plantations or the Virginia slave plantations are very much part of the same economic world. And that the same slave ships which are taking these unfortunate enslaved Africans from the west coast of Africa are also pulling in at the ports along the American coast. and the 49 slaves that we know that were on Washington's plantation during his childhood would have come via the Caribbean. Well, and also, I mean, you ought to know that at 11 years old when his father dies, part of the bequest to him, which is a parcel of land.

It's not the big bit of land which goes to Lawrence, but a parcel of land, and he gets to be the owner of 10 human beings. They are his property, age 11, he owns 10 human lives. It's interesting because in our series we did last year on enslavement and the slave economy, that whole thing. We didn't focus so much on the plantations in the United States, but they were just simply an extension of the Caribbean. And one of the things we've always got to remember is that the richest part of the Western British Empire at this point is not the United States. It's Jamaica. That is where all the money is being made.

And this is like a provincial outpost of that. We have to reorder the hierarchy in our mind. Yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. I mean, you sort of mentioned that Lawrence contracts TB and George goes with him. George goes with him, again, as sort of the family nursemaid to make sure that he, you know, survives the trip and is okay. And again, is sort of shocked and struck by what life is like over there. And we'll see all the plantations of Barbados.

That won't be something unusual to him. That will be just what the world is like. but he sees the decline in a very big, strong man, and he can't understand why he sort of survives it, you know. And this then becomes a thing about him in later life, that he is greater than a normal man, you know, to fight off smallpox and come back from that. It's part of the mythology that this is a man who death will spare because he's destined for greater and greater things. Tell me if I'm wrong, but Lawrence's land is Mount Vernon, now one of the great sort of... It will become Mount Vernon. That's right. exactly right. And this becomes one of the great sort of iconic landmarks of the states. It's where

Washington is put to rest. And does George inherit it on Lawrence's death, or how does it come to him? So in the father's will, it says that if Lawrence dies and Lawrence will die of TB, he will not make it out of the tuberculosis. It will take his life. He'll die. But it will go to Lawrence's wife and his daughter. And if they pre-decease George, then it goes to George. So that's what ultimately does. does happen. And it's not like sort of George Washington wants his brother to die because he loves his brother. His brother is basically one of the only things keeping him sane. And he's all the time, you know, that all of this is going on in his childhood. He's juggling all these things. He is ruining the fact that he's not allowed to advance. He's not allowed to learn anything. He's not

allowed to sort of be properly educated. Later in life, he'll say, every hour misspent is lost forever. Future years cannot compensate for the lost days at this. And he means, you know, the childhood period of your life. So it is just a constant right to the end, nagging regret of his. He sort of tries to educate himself. There's a book that Mary has in the house. It's called The Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation. Brilliant title for a book.

I know. Isn't it brilliant? We can all do with a copy of that. Yeah, I know. And it's got things like, you know, do not hum to yourself because that's common. You know, the kind of thing, don't put your elbows on the table. You know, just basically do up your flies, you know, that kind of thing. I love to see it.

You, but he sort of. of, you know, cleanse not your teeth with a tablecloth, napkin, fork or knife, but if others do it, let it be done with a picktooth. And he copies this out. So all this stuff is now at Mount Vernon, you know, in his museum. Have you been there? No, I've got, I really want to go. I've read so much about it, but I haven't actually been. And their neighbours, they've got this sort of English Toff family. Yes, why don't you tell us a little bit about the Fairfaxes, because they are so important. So the Fairfaxes were the leading parliamentary family in Yorkshire. It's the Thomas Fairfax, who is the commander-in-chief of O'Don-Cromwell's army in the north, and he is the general who fights

the Battle of Nesby, which is a crucial turning point in the Civil War. And I think also it's a Thomas Fairfax who saves the medieval glass in Yorkminster. And when the parliamentary troops have captured York, they are all set. They start smashing up the Yorkminster. And Thomas Fairfax turns his muskets on his own troops and saves, which is why today a York Minster still got all its medieval fittings, including all its wonderful glass, and we have the Fairfaxes to thank for that. And what's their relationship with the Washington's? Oh, God, so they have a warm relationship with Lawrence, because I think Lawrence, one point, is courting one of the Fairfax girls. And through them, they get to know George,

because Lawrence is always trying to spring him from his miserable house, you know, the fairy farm. And so he gets to know the Fairfaxes, in particular. He gets to know. to know the patriarch of the Fairfax family, who really takes a liking to him, Colonel Fairfax. You know, you can tell that he likes this boy and sees some stuff in him because he signs all his letters to George, you're assured and loving friend, which is, you know, just not a thing in those days unless you feel great affection for somebody. And in fact, it's the Fairfaxes who concoct this plan with Lawrence before Lawrence dies when George Washington's only 14 years of age, that we can get him out of his mum's shadow if we can just get him into the Royal

Navy and Fairfax through his connections manages to get him a position as a midshipman. And do you think that Mary is happy for this opportunity? She doesn't want him in the Navy. Is she not? She makes kicks up an enormous fuss and writes to the Navy saying you're not taking him. No, he's not going to be joining, whatever they say. And she basically torpedoes, forgive the pun, but torpedoes the chance. But the uncle weighs in too, doesn't he? And he's use his language, which I think is very interesting in that it gives us the tone of the Washington family at this point. The uncle says he shouldn't join the Navy. This is Mary's brother,

because it would, and this is a quote, would cut him and staple him and use him like a negro or rather like a dog. Isn't that a shocking? So that's how this family are talking. Well, that's how everybody talks, and it's awful, it's inexcusable. In the plantation society, well, not everyone, the slave owners. Good to remind people that other human beings, The slave owners did not regard black people as often being people at all. You know, it's sort of like sort of equating them with animals on the farm. You know, the uncle that you spoke about, you know, who uttered that horrific now to REO's horrible, horrible, horrible phrase, has also got a plan B for George, his nephew.

He says he should become a tinker and he should actually concentrate himself on selling utensils for the household because that's where he can make a good, honest living. And it just shows, you know, and this poor guy who is growing up, with, you know, expectations and desire and ambition to further himself and support his family and all of those things and get out from under his mum's thumb, wants to be so much more than that. So, you know, it's sort of inner fury. And it's at that point that he stars. And this is only, I'm just the age of these people when they decide to take their life into their own hands in the stories that we cover on Empire. It's always shocking to me. He's one year older than my son. I love my son

very much, but it is often an enormous success to get out of bed on time. But George Washington, age 15, decides that he is going to take on his own education and he's going to learn to be a surveyor. So, you know, he writes about this period when he's between, with truth, I can say, I never felt the want of money so sensibly since I was a boy of 15 years old, because the seaman's life, that's gone, thanks to Mary and his uncle. So he then decides, because he's quite good at maths, he's taught himself how to do maths, that he is going to be a surveyor because there are people buying up thousands of acres of Virginian land and they need people to survey it. They need people to go out into the places where, you know, the Native American tribes are living and survey

those with the intention that we might take those one day. And George is the man to do this. And this is a very important part of the story too, and we absolutely mustn't gloss over it, that the Washington's are not just thinking of at all of staying on their own acres. They are expanding into territory which is not only occupied and lived in by Native American tribes, but which has been reserved for them in various treaties that the colonial government assign. So these guys are pushing with absolute intent to take over this land and to expel the Indians westwards. They are absolutely on the move ready to expropriate and seize this territory. But this idea of him going out and surveying for other rich people,

and it's mainly the Fairfaxes at first, you know, age 15, age 16, he goes out. And this is where he learns to be the tough wild man of the woods, because it's basically him on a horse going out into the wild with nothing other than pen and paper drawing maps and surveying the land to bring back to Fairfax, his friend and benefactor. But all the while he's doing that, And this is, I think, really interesting. He is also scouting out land that he himself can save up and buy

because he is also somebody who wants to buy land for himself. Because land, through land comes power. Through power comes status. Through status, you can get yourself a good wife and then be truly free of that childhood control of your mother and everything else. So join us after the break when we'll come back and see how that goes. So welcome back. So now we have the teenage.

George Washington, showing a bit of interest for the first time in the local ladies. And I'm very keen on this character, Betsy Fontelroy, as in Little Lord Fondelroy. Do you say Fontleroy? All this time I've been saying Fontleroy. Well, you might be right. Is it? Fonthleroy. Fonter roy.

I thought it was a French name. Well, I'm just common. Maybe that's a weak commonest little Lord Fonelroy. Anyway, whatever her pronunciation, he puts into. to his diary that his poor resistless heart was pierced by Cupid's feathers dart. And what that means is he's got a crush on Betsy. But she rejects him because at this point, tall, handsome George Washington is also awkward, clumsy and very shy. And there's a few other women you said that you have heard about at this point in and out of his life. Yeah, no, he's sort

of, you know, of course, if you're spending this much time with, you know, the Fairfaxes, George William Fairfax has married this 18-year-old girl called Sarah Carey, who is beautiful and lovely and the most beautiful woman in Virginia, blah, blah, blah. But she has a younger sister, who is also very, very beautiful and lovely called Mary. And George is completely smitten by her. I think he refers to her as his lowland beauty when he writes about her in his diaries and his letters, you know, my lowland beauty. And he tries and he tries to, you know, sort of say, marry me. because he sees that that's how the Fairfaxes do it. This is, you know, what a gentleman does.

You know, and he's written out all of these rules of civility. This is what you do next, right? And so the Washingtoners are very much looking over their shoulders at the Fairfaxes, seeing how they dress, how their manners are, reading these little manuals on how to be a gentleman, this sort of thing. But the thing is Mary's not going to marry him because he's still not, you know, rich enough. There are bigger families. So Mary's hand is given to another, and poor 17-year-old,

Washington, heart slightly broken. But he does get, you know, some kind of respite because he's named chief surveyor of Culpeper County, you know, because he's doing so well as a surveyor and everybody wants him to do it for them because he's the one who rides out. And is that land which is already settled or is this Washington going out into the wilds and sort of driving the Native American tribes? It's going into Indian land, you know, and saying, okay, well, this, and regarding it as being empty.

Because they're hunting grounds. You know, the fact that the British have promised it to people, all of that doesn't matter because this is Virginian soil as far as he's concerned. He's a very, very proud Virginian. And is that how he would have identified himself? What would he have called himself? A Virginian. He's a Virginian. His brother was a proud Virginian. His father was a Virginian. This mattered a lot to people in Virginia. It was a real identity, a strong identity. Just like in Boston, people who, you know, came from New England and came from Boston had a really proud. identification with the place of the land. The land is everything. The land is everything. So we've talked a little bit about the Native Americans and they're on the edge of our picture. We're seeing their lands being seized, being surveyed, being gradually settled by the Virginians. But they are also, as we saw in our last episode, this is the moment when what the Americans call,

the French and the Indian Wars begin to break out. Tell us about those. I mean, those are are really important and really, and George Washington will be front and center in those. This is an important moment for him. And this is the same conflict, which is known to British historians, as the Seven Years War. And we've come across it before many times in this podcast, not least in our first episodes, because it is the outbreak of the Seven Years' War that propels Robert Clive to India, that leads him to attack the French at Chundernaga, and is the background to the Battle of Plassy. But it begins not in India, not in the Caribbean, not in the continent, all places where it will rage, and it will become a world war. But it begins, of all places, on the 21st of June,

1752, when a party of French Indians, led by the French adventurer, Charles Laglad, who has a Huron wife and is also influential among many Native American tribes, the Seneca, the Iroquois, and the Mick Mack. And he leads a war party of 240 warriors across Lake Huron, over Lake Erie, into the newly settled farmlands of British Ohio. So this is very much the world of Last the Mexicans, all that Daniel Day-Lewis stuff. And so you could imagine those war canoes with French in their uniforms, accompanied by all the Native American Mick Mack and the Iroquois. And Tomahawks at the ready, they fall on the British settlement of Picklewileney, achieving complete surprise.

There are only 20 British settlers who managed to muster at the stockade, rather like Deerfield in our last episode. And of those, one is later sculpted and another ceremonially born. boiled and the most delicious parts of his body eaten, all of which, of course, creates tremors of fear and these stories are exaggerated and come back. And the violent raid spreads this sense of instability and even terror among British traders and settlers as far as New York and Virginia, where George Washington is settling out on his surveying trips. And within months, regular French troops supported by indigenous guides,

auxiliaries and large numbers of Indian warres were rumoured to be moving to the headwaters of the Ohio Valley. Yeah, not just heading too, but building forts. I mean, that's what they're really, really scared or is that the French are going to start erecting. And as a surveyor, George Washington goes out and sees these things and reports back, actually they're building. They're building, you've got to take this seriously because they're not going to, you know, these aren't incursions.

This is land grab. And so on the first of November, it's the governor of Virginia who sends this. 21-year-old militia volunteer north to investigate. And this is George Washington's first appearance in actual sort of history books. This is when he actually enters the fray. And this is the beginning of this war, which will rage around the world for seven years. And it's a total war, to be properly global, it's fought on multiple continents. And it's the, it's part of this long, 100-year struggle between Britain and France, which I'm sure we're going to be coming to many times in this podcast. And it's going to carry European arms and warfare from Ohio to the Philippines,

from Cuba to the coast of Nigeria, the heights of Abraham, all that stuff with Wolf on the heights above Quebec, and into the marshy flatlands and mango groves of Plathie. And to be honest, you know, having, you know, the British hire these colonial soldiers to do their work. And at this time, I think he's a lieutenant colonel or lieutenant colonel will be his rank in his fighting force. And he's given this sort of rag-tag bunch of men who are all just, you know, they're basically farmers who have been taken off their land who aren't trained and he has to sort of drill them and train them. But it's a measure, I think, of the society at that time that these men you describe just as farmers are also all armed. They've all got weapons. And they're

used to fighting the Native American tribes with whom they're coming into regular contact, often in a very aggressive way. Yeah. I mean, sort of his interactions with Native Americans are interesting. He looks down on them and I can't find the phrase, but I'd underlined a few things that I'd read in various places where he speaks about them being treacherous only after their own, you know, sort of interest because the French are doing deals with the, you know, the Indian population. And Washington is trying to as well. So he, you know, enlists the help of a man colourfully known as the half king to help him scout out these French fortifications that are going up and try and, you know, report back to the British of what is going on.

There is a horrible, horrible moment where they come across a French party. And this is a really controversial moment because... What date is this? 1754. And they come across this party of French who are half asleep and they've crept up on them. And Washington can't allow because he's got these Indians with him in his party. But there is a massacre. There is a massacre of hideous proportions where they are slain and scalped.

and one of them, the half king supposedly, cracks open the skull of one of these French, and pulls out his brain. And it's all very bloody and is bloodily reported. You know, the story sends reverberations. And this is what really launches him, actually. He has to come back, ride back fast, because now he's got all of this picture of what the French are planning. And actually, the way he does that is very Daniel DeLuos. You know, he has to get back. I can hear that stirring music from the movie. He dresses, he dresses as a Native American Indian together. back and rides hard to get back with this sort of missive, almost collapses when he gets back

to the Fairfaxes in Belvoir, which is where they live. And he writes these thousands and thousands of words. And he's told by his commanding officer, a man called Dinwiddie, who's quite an unsympathetic character, that, look, you've basically got a day to summarise this so we can send this to England, because they need to know. And what he writes about all of the scalping, the murderings and the, you know, the fighting and how dangerous and precarious the situation is, gets into the British newspapers. So he becomes this legend. Colonel, you know, Colonel Washington becomes this sort of superhero who did all this to get back this information that will prove pivotal to the British fight back. But he then is involved in a catastrophic failure, isn't he, the following year in

March 1755. That is a failure with Edward Braddock, who seems like an idiot. Yeah, the British General. Tell us about Braddock. Edward Braddock is indeed an idiot. And I think this is one of the moments when Washington comes to the conclusion that the colonial British armies are not all that cracked out to me and that he thinks that his own settler Virginians are far better fighters and far better at this sort of warfare than the guys fresh off the boat from Britain. So in March 1755, British General Edward Braddock leads an expedition to try and force the French out of Ohio County, which they've just moved in. into and to take back at these forks in the Ohio River. And Washington, who's now

beginning to be known in the newspapers in Britain, volunteers in order to try and gain some military experience, because he's done a few bit of surveying, he's done a little bit of militia work, but he hasn't joined a proper 18th century army. And at this point, he's very deferential to these British troops and presumes they know how to manage it. Kind of, to a point, But what he says, and this is before he goes to fight for Braddock in this disastrous campaign, he says the Virginians behave like men, they die like soldiers. And he says, the British, in contrast, the dastardly behaviour of English soldiers, exposed all those who were inclined to do their duty to almost certain death.

He describes how, you know, they just run away at the mere sound of whooping, which is that sound, you know, the war cry of the Indians, that they just don't have the guts for it. And it's the Virginians who stand their ground. are those wonderful scenes in The Last of the Mexicans when you can hear those war cries coming out of the forest. And remember, they're walking through... I haven't seen it.

Oh, you've got such a treat. It's one of the great movies. Really? I didn't want to see it because I don't like that sort of... Will I like it? Will I like it? You will like it, and you'll particularly like, if I know you, Anita, you'll particularly like Daniel Day, too, it's in a loincloth.

Okay, all right. For history purposes, only. And it's got this wonderful Scots music. The two guddles in the story are the Monroe. and someone had the brilliant idea of using a Monroe reel as the basis for the soundtrack. Oh, okay. So you get these spectacular landscapes and mountains and sort of unbroken fur. Is that the similar time?

It's this moment. It's this very moment. Very good. Okay. So tell us about Braddock, the man that neither of us like very much, Edward Braddock. So Braddock is just a conventional British soldier who's used to fighting. Stuck's shirt. You know, set-piece battles on the continent in flatland.

And instead, he's in kind of unbroken forest and with mighty rivers and great lakes. And the kind of conventional continental form of warfare with set-piece battles and squares. He sends 3,000 men. Yep. And completely ill-equipped in these ridiculous sort of squares that you're talking about to March. And, of course, they're ambush and it goes down, the whole thing goes down very badly. and Washington sees how ill-equipped British tactics are to deal with this sort of irregular warfare. And in the process of observing all this, allegedly, so the history book say, two horses are shot under Washington, four bullet holes through his coat, but he survives without a scratch.

I don't know whether we should be reading that with a pinch of salt or not, but he's clearly in the action. Yeah, and there are other accounts of him, you know, sort of even in his early surveying trips, where, you know, there is a rushing river and his companions say, well, we're not crossing that, George, you must be menthol. And he sort of gets on his horse. He always rides a very sort of hefty stallion because of his height, six foot,

not six foot three. But he sort of wades across rivers that nobody else will dare. There is no doubt that this is a very brave man. But you know, during this Braddock expedition, where basically Braddock has sent his men into a mincer because they don't know how to fight and they're panicking and they're running around and they're getting killed in huge numbers.

where George Washington is standing his ground and he's fighting. And I don't know how to put this more delicately, really, but he's taken over by a terrible dysentery and fever and develops enormous piles. Washington. And he has a real, Washington does. So he is fighting this entire time, completely dehydrated, depleted, and he's riding around, you know, this moment where he gets sort of shot at

and holes in his coat and sort of comes out of it without a scratch. He's riding around on a cushion because he's in such pain. That's the only way he can fight. But it's a catastrophe. We haven't given the figures. Out of the 1,300 troops that Braddock is leaving, 900 are killed. And in comparison, they kill apparently only 23 of the French or Native American forces on the other side. So they're completely outclass.

It's interesting that say exactly the same time and exactly the same moment in India, you have a very similar thing where you have regular British Army troops who are fighting much less effectively. and you'll find this again with the wars against Tipu a little bit later, then the East India Company forces, which are full of sepoys, who know the territory and have adapted to Indian warfare. And over and over again in 18th century India, you'll have these British troops coming out, all being paid double what the local troops are being paid

with all their heirs and graces and not able to fight this kind of warfare properly. No, exactly that. And also, you know, the fact that he comes back, bloodied but alive and so many haven't come back. This mythology of Colonel Washington grows and grows and grows. There's a Presbyterian minister called Samuel Davis who says this heroic youth Colonel Washington, because he's been shot out and not killed, is being groomed by God for higher things. And Davis says, I cannot but hope that Providence has hitherto preserved him in so single a manner for some important service to this country. So there are all these things, these portents.

And this sounds like a completely made up quote. This is actually true, is it? It is actually true as far as I mean, who knows? I wasn't there. They call him the hero of monogallahela, which is the name of the bathroom. Yeah, so I mean, you can see, and this is contemporaneous newspaper reports. So no, I think it's absolutely right that they suddenly think this man is touched by God. But also, very importantly, reading about all of this far, far away is a man called Benjamin Franklin,

who sees that, you know, for the first time, the British are not superior. because all of those sort of colonial Americans who are there are always brought up with a chip on their shoulder that, you know, they look down on, they're paid less, even if they fight in the army. They're paid a completely different pace guy, and this happens, as we say, in India, and this puts everyone's backs up.

Exactly that. But what Franklin says is, he says this whole transaction, this Braddock debacle, he said the whole transaction gave us the first suspicion that our exalted ideas of the prowess of British regular troops had not been well-founded. So you get this tiny seed, You know what? They're not as tough as you think they are. Anyway, so look, we'll sort of gallop through, because of his daring do, he gets command of a Virginian regiment. You know, he's rising through the ranks. I think a very important thing to put in here is that at the end of the seven-year war, or the French and Indian War, if you want to give it its American name, various treaties are signed, which assign the borders not only with what will become the French and Canada,

Canada, but which are defining which is the British area and which is the Native American area. And this also becomes a major issue for Washington and many of the other founding fathers, because these men who portray themselves in the Declaration of Independence as the men of Liberty, founding their empire of liberty, are also the men who are busy expropriating land from the Native Americans. And what they dislike is that the British have given to the Native Americans and signed a treaty and are enforcing a treaty, which stops them encroaching on more and more of their land. That hems their encroachment, stops them encroaching, exactly that. So they're saying all the antipathies, they don't think they're hard enough anymore. They're stopping them from growing 100,000 acres into 200,000 to 3,000, you know, into an entire statewide ownership.

But he's become George Washington at this point really disillusioned because he has really hated the way the British prosecuted their wars. He doesn't like being bossed around by people who are idiots and who don't know the land as well as he doesn't. They're not brave like he is. And who have won this war, but in his view, boxed in the Virginia settlers. So as far as Washington is concerned, and indeed his whole class of these Virginia planters,

the British have won this. World War. They are the victors at the end of the seven-year war and across the board. And yet they have made a series of treaties which is stopping him from speculating, settling and annexing great chunks of land. And this is something which many of the founding fathers are furious about. They are all wanting to expand the land under their control. And this is true of Franklin. This is true of people like Patrick Henry and the Lee family, and it's true of George Washington. And in September 1763, in the aftermath of this war, Washington and nine other speculators launched the Mississippi Land Company. Yet again, we have these colonial companies, which are commercial organizations,

which are being used to throw back the frontiers and claim land for the British Empire. And they want to claim 2.5 million acres of the Ohio Valley where all that fighting was taking place in what today is Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee. And as far as they're concerned, the British government have basically blocked them off. And they've now got treaty obligations to Native Americans, which cut into the trading and unsettling interests of this class. You know, if you are going to take that much land, you also need to take slaves to work that land. So that's why, you know, sort of the prodigious slaveholdings of some of these founding fathers is enormous.

We're talking hundreds and hundreds of people. I think Washington is very cynical about this. And when he's confronted by the colonial authorities saying that there are treaties with the Native American tribes, they can't just go and settle it and build plantations there, Washington's response is very telling. He says, I can never look upon that proclamation in any. the other light than a temporary expedience to quiet the minds of the Indians. He is very clear that his future lies in displacing tribes of Native Americans, moving westwards with waves of settlers

and plantations. And his beef with the British is that they are sticking to their treaty. That was the end of the Seven Years' War, but Washington didn't actually fight to the end, because a few years before the end of the Seven Years' War, in fact, in 1758, he had had enough of these British, and he resigned his commission. And a year later, almost exactly a year later, in fact, he gets married to a woman called Martha Dandridge Curtis. Now, Martha, Martin,

who is now sort of lionised also as this great woman. She's a tiny woman. So, you know, like Washington is six foot something, or six foot. She's only five foot. is a teeny woman with teeny hands, teeny gloves. But she's also a great landowner as well. So you get this unification of two huge landowning families. Does he effectively marry an heiress? He marries an he, he sort of writes this letter to his first love, sort of saying, you know, that it was sad. I wasn't, you know, I wasn't good enough for you then, but we all marry and we

marry up, meaning, you know, he marries up for Martha. I think, you know, there are some love letters. I won't trouble you with them now that he still writes to her sort of, In that sort of tone of civility, not actually saying, I've always loved you and you missed your chance, but talking about sort of duty and understanding of what it is to be married. He's a man on the rise. He's a man on the rise. And they become the golden couple, Martha and George. You know, basically he says, you know, sort of rather disingenuously, I am just a farmer. I'm a farmer, a humble farmer now.

He's a humble farmer who has married a woman who has 18,000 acres and 30,000 pounds to her name. he has now got thousands and thousands of acres and many, many slaves. He's a member of the House of Burgesses, too. He's becoming a politician, yeah. But he's also a Freemason. He loves the Freemasons. He becomes a Freemason, an ardent Freemason at that. Which is why you've got all those weird pyramids and eyes on the dollar bills.

So, you know, a lot has been said about you can't judge people in the day by our standards now. And, you know, how much should they really know about how slaves were treated? You know, there was sort of slight lofty above it, you know, while Martha is furnishing the house and Mount Vernon and making everything beautiful and everything is now, you know, he gets his own coat of arms, by the way, which I, you know, I can't remember what it says something like, you know, deeds matter more than words, something like that. But in the meantime, there is a letter that says he absolutely does know, you know, that they're not treated very well. So one of his overseers, you know, the mansion's being renovated at Mount Vernon. He goes, now he is the sole owner of Mount Vernon. It takes a lot. 16,000 bricks needed to be forged just for two new chimneys that are going to be in Mount Vernon. And he's got this sort of slave carpenter team that's working. An overseer called Humphrey Knight, there's a letter to Washington says that, you know, he didn't hesitate to apply the lash if necessary.

As to the carpenters, I have minded them all I possibly could and has whip him when I could see fault. So it is like one absolute direct line, you know, you know how they're being treated. So what's important here again, and I think it's a very important answer to those who say, you know, you've got to forgive this and ignore it because it's this what happened at the time. What is significant is that when Washington takes on the British in years to come and we'll be dealing with that, his slaves run off and join the British from Mount Vernon. And there's a huge exodus of George Washington slaves going to fight against Washington for the British, which I think is a very, very telling moment. Until the next time we meet is goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Duremberg.