George Washington's Early Years
The Tender Years of the Man on the Dollar Bill
Washington was born into a fairly prosperous Virginian family, and with diligence and luck succeeded in becoming a surveyor at age 16 before inheriting Mount Vernon
Our Father Who Art from Virginia
Unless she was a psychic endowed with preternatural powers that allowed her to see into the future, Mary Ball Washington could not have known that the son she gave birth to would one day become a father of a country--let alone of a country that was not yet a country but just an obscure far-flung corner piece of that seemingly endless, seemingly all-encompassing empire directed by the decadent, powdered periwigs of the day from the relatively small island nation of Britain. This was the same Britain that was itself a part of the Roman Empire just a few hundred years earlier.
An examination into the early life of George Washington might provide some insight into his later exploits.
Born, as mentioned, to Mary Washington and to Augustine Washington, as not previously mentioned, in the year 1732 in the British colony of Virginia, George Washington entered the world in a state of what might be termed privileged innocence.
These were quaint, old-fashioned times. So quaint and old-fashioned that Washington was born according to the old Julian calendar in the year 1731. It was only later, when Washington's tea-loving colonial masters decided to adopt the new-and-improved, with-it Gregorian calendar in 1752, that Washington's new birth year was changed to 1732.
Outdated calendars and quaintness aside, George Washington was the oldest child of five children, with mother Mary being her husband's second wife. Four of the children were boys and one was a girl.
When a Story About Honesty Is Really a Lie
Anton Chekhov's play The Cherry Tree is similar to the Washington story about his having cut down a cherry tree, in that both are products of sentimentality.
Washington was generously helped -- propelled even -- into legend and the good graces of his countrymen by a parson named Mason Locke Weems who made up the cherry-tree story. In his sugar-coated, aggrandising book A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington, Weems paints a near saintly picture of Washington that is full of wholesome goodness and religious piety-- ironic, since Washington was never known to be particularly religious, and in fact asked for no prayers to be said or minister to be by his bedside while he was dying.
The mischievous yet quickly repentant Washington was said to be aged 6 when he chopped down his father's cherry tree. In any event, Washington reputation as an upstanding role model was established and has endured to this day.
A Good Grounding in Presidential Basics
Unlike his two half-brothers by his father's previous marriage, Washington was not sent off to England to study. He was instead educated at home. His early education included the study of the classics, geography, astronomy, arithmetic, "rules of civility" and surveying.
After the death of his father in 1743 Washington was taken in by his half-brother Lawrence, who lived in a small house with a farm along the Potomac. Lawrence had named the house and farm Mount Vernon after Admiral Edward Vernon. Vernon had been Lawrence's commanding officer with the British navy.
A-Surveying We Will Go
It was through this same half-brother that Washington came into contact with George William Fairfax, who gave Washington his first job at age 16 doing surveying work. Washington's initial inclination, however, had been to go to sea, but this idea had been quickly poo-pooed by Washington's mother.
In the year 1751 Lawrence became ill with tuberculosis, and in an attempt to restore him to good health, Washington accompanied his half-brother to Barbados. Lawrence succumbed to the dread disease anyway the following year soon after returning home.
Out of this death came Washington's inheritance of Mount Vernon. With youthful vigour and an estate in hand, Washington was now ready to embark on a military career and go out into the world.
To be continued in a later article.
