Washington [115]
Washington was in Williamsburg when the thunderclap of the Boston Port Bill burst over the colony. He also learned that three thousand redcoats had landed in Boston, fortifying Gage’s position. During the French and Indian War, Gage had written warmly to Washington, “It gave me great pleasure to hear from a person of whom the world has justly so good an opinion and for whom I have so great an esteem.”4 Such fraternal sentiments between imperial warriors now belonged to a vanished world. Washington blasted military rule in Boston as “unexampled testimony of the most despotic system of tyranny that ever was practiced in a free gov[ernmen]t.”5 He and his fellow burgesses enlisted the Lord on their side, declaring that June 1, the day of the port’s closure, should be observed “as a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer.”6 In what was fast becoming a ritual, Dunmore dissolved the House of Burgesses. That very morning Washington had breakfasted with the governor at his farm outside Williamsburg. It was now plain that the rights of the burgesses dangled by a slender thread that could be severed at will by the golden shears wielded by the all-powerful royal governor.
The next day Washington and other militant burgesses moved to their familiar resort, the Raleigh Tavern, where they poured forth scorn for the Boston Port Bill, ratified a boycott of tea, and endorsed an annual congress with other colonies to protect their collective rights. They reached the critical conclusion that an assault on one colony was an assault on all. In this crazily illogical world, Washington and other burgesses threw a ball that evening to welcome the governor’s wife. Quite obviously this was no typical revolt of the poor or dispossessed, but a fissure at the pinnacle of the social structure, involving men long accustomed to rule. Washington was one of twenty-five burgesses still lingering in Williamsburg in late May when a letter arrived from Samuel Adams, beseeching the Virginians to discontinue trade with England. The legislators decided to cease all imports and reconvene on August 1.
Land was never far from George Washington’s thoughts, and he smarted at new British policies that curtailed speculative activities. The Quebec Act transferred the Great Lakes and territory north of the Ohio River to Catholic Quebec, restricting the acreage available to Virginians. Still more jarring was a ruling from London that land grants to French and Indian War veterans under the 1763 proclamation would be limited to British regulars, discriminating against colonial officers and reopening an ancient wound for Washington. “I conceive the services of a provincial officer as worthy of reward as a regular one and [it] can only be withheld from him with injustice,” he observed with contempt.7 As we have seen, the ambitious Washington took these slights personally, and they now tipped him over the edge into open revolt.
To gauge opinion before the August meeting of the burgesses, Washington chaired a gathering of his Alexandria constituents on July 5. Their response to the Boston turmoil was both swift and decisive: they agreed to send 273 pounds sterling, 38 barrels of flour, and 150 bushels of wheat to “the industrious poor of the town of Boston . . . who by a late cruel act of Parliament are deprived of their daily labor and bread.”8 Having dissolved the burgesses, Governor Dunmore ordered new elections, and Washington engaged in the bread and circuses of a fresh campaign on July 17, a gaudy spectacle at odds with the high-minded rhetoric in the air. One observer related how Washington and his ally, Major Charles Broadwater, gave Alexandria voters “a hogshead of toddy,” or punch, followed by a ball that evening that was punctilious in its choice of beverages: “Coffee and chocolate, but no tea. This herb is in disgrace amongst them at present.”9