Washington [114]
During their first year of marriage, Jacky and Nelly divided their time between Mount Airy and Mount Vernon, despite the lonely Martha’s wish that they move permanently to Mount Vernon. That May, George and Martha took them to an unusual boat race on the Rappahannock River. As the family unfolded twenty blankets and a picnic barbecue on the riverbank—Washington brought forty-eight bottles of claret to spread good cheer—they watched a macabre sporting event. Two boats, each manned by five or six muscular slaves, raced out to an anchored boat and back, while spectators cheered and placed bets onshore. It was an exceedingly strange vignette: the man who would be fighting for American liberty exactly one year later was being entertained by teams of strong, athletic slaves.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A Shock of Electricity
AFTER THE REVOCATION of all the Townshend duties, except the one on tea, the political world of Williamsburg had reverted temporarily to some semblance of normality. In October 1771 Washington was reelected as a Fairfax County burgess. To safeguard his seat, he paid four pounds to tavern keeper John Lomax to feed a hearty supper to voters; twelve shillings to a Harry Piper, so that his slave Charles could fiddle up a storm for them; and another pound for good measure to a Mr. Young, who sated the hungry electorate with free cakes.
In early 1773 Washington still operated in a world of flagrant contradictions. He stanchly backed measures criticizing Parliament and the North ministry, while also socializing with the royal governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, a redheaded Scot with a large nose and fiery gaze who took office in 1771 with no inkling of just how stormy his tenure would be. In March 1773 Washington supported the burgesses’ decision to form a Committee of Correspondence to harmonize defensive measures with other colonies and to “propose a meeting of deputies from every colony at some central place,” as Jefferson was to recall.1 Still slightly detached from the fray, Washington didn’t serve on the committee and continued to straddle two worlds. Dining with Lord Dunmore and still ravenous for land, Washington badgered him for another five thousand acres in the Ohio Country under the royal proclamation of 1763, the one designed to reward French and Indian War veterans.
There matters stood on December 16, 1773, when a patriotic band, masquerading as Mohawk Indians, heaved 342 chests of tea into Massachusetts Bay. Such was the instinctive respect for private property in the colonies that even Boston firebrand Samuel Adams boasted that the tea party had occurred “without the least injury to the vessels or any other property.”2 The tea tax wasn’t as punitive as is commonly supposed—the cost of tea to the colonists actually declined—but it threatened local merchants by eliminating smugglers and colonial middlemen, entrenching the East India Company’s monopoly. It also perpetuated the hated practice of taxation without representation.
When the news from Boston reached Mount Vernon around New Year’s Day, Washington deplored the methods of the tea party, even if he loathed the tax on tea. It was the next step in a fast-unfolding drama that would fully radicalize him. The administration of the bluff, portly Lord North had decided that Boston should pay for the destroyed tea and that Parliament should assert its supremacy, cracking down on harebrained schemes of independence now beginning to ferment in the colonies. In March Parliament passed the Boston Port Bill, shutting down the port of Boston until the townspeople reimbursed the East India Company for its lost tea. Along with other draconian measures that subverted the Massachusetts charter and clamped military rule on Boston, the harsh new laws were known as the Coercive Acts or “Intolerable Acts.” Such ham-handed reprisals forged new unity among the colonists. Similarly, the tea party convinced many British sympathizers that colonial protesters had become a violent rabble who had