Washington [116]
On Sunday, July 17, Colonel George Mason arrived at Mount Vernon for an overnight stay, and he and Washington refined a list of twenty-four resolutions that he had brought. The next day the resolutions were presented to their Fairfax County committee and, with Washington in the chair, adopted with minor changes. These Fairfax Resolves, as they became known, reflected the views of the “Country Party” of landed British gentry, who had protested what they saw as the corruption of Britain’s constitution by venal politicians during Robert Walpole’s ministry earlier in the century. The resolves argued that people should obey only laws enacted by their chosen representatives or else “the government must degenerate either into an absolute and despotic monarchy or a tyrannical aristocracy.” Another resolution stated that “taxation and representation are in their nature inseparable.” Still another called for an intercolonial congress to guarantee a common defense. Perhaps the most surprising resolution passed under Washington’s watchful eye was a plea to suspend the importation of slaves into Virginia, along with a fervent wish “to see an entire stop forever put to such a wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade.”10 It was the first time Washington had publicly registered his disgust with the system that formed the basis of his fortune. Because of surplus slaves in Virginia, the resolution wasn’t quite as courageous as it appeared and caused no immediate change in behavior at Mount Vernon. When the Fairfax County citizenry met at the Alexandria Court House on July 18, in what Washington described as a mood of “hurry and bustle,” they adopted the Fairfax Resolves and named Washington head of a twenty-five-member committee to chart future policy responses.11
With the Fairfax Resolves, Washington emerged as a significant political leader a full year before being named to head the Continental Army. No fence-sitter, this conservative planter was a true militant. When the Boston Gazette printed the Fairfax Resolves, Washington’s renown reverberated through the colonies for the first time since the French and Indian War. During this period he allowed his heated opinions to bubble up and boil over as his pronouncements grew more vehement. Later on he had to muzzle his public views for the sake of continental harmony, but during the summer of 1774 he had no qualms about expressing open militance. He scoffed at the notion that the forthcoming congress should submit more petitions to the king when so many had failed: “Shall we, after this, whine and cry for relief?” 12 His slumbering conscience was now fully awakened. All the petty indignities that he had endured at British hands exploded in revolutionary rage as his personal pique was sublimated into something much grander. As the historian Joseph Ellis notes, George Mason probably helped Washington “to develop a more expansive vocabulary to express his thoughts and feelings, but the thoughts, and even more so the feelings, had been brewing inside him for more than twenty years.”13
NOT SURPRISINGLY the acrimonious quarrel with the Crown strained Washington’s relations with the family that had long embodied for him the British Empire, the Fairfaxes. In August 1773, shortly after Patsy’s death, George William and Sally Fairfax had sailed to England to pursue a complex inheritance suit in chancery in London. George and Martha Washington were the last people to see them off, waving farewell at the dock. By this point Sally Fairfax had entered into a period of chronic health problems, including a brush with smallpox. As it turned out, she and her husband never returned to Virginia or set eyes on the Washingtons again. Despite the manifold demands on his time, Washington agreed to oversee the Fairfax affairs in Virginia and got a power of attorney to do so—an act of friendship that lasted until he took command of the Continental Army. The Fairfaxes must have known that their farewell might be irrevocable because they gave Washington the authority