Washington [118]
By this point George Washington knew that a clash with the mother country was almost inevitable. For that reason, the auction of Belvoir’s effects in August and December must have carried heavy symbolic overtones for him. For reasons of pride, status, and undoubtedly nostalgia, George Washington bought more than half of the Fairfax furniture, everything from window curtains to candlesticks to a bust of Shakespeare. He indulged his old penchant for mahogany, the expensive wood that signified wealth in the colonies. It must have been a melancholy task for Washington to see Belvoir’s furnishings dismantled, ending the aristocratic world that had shaped his early dreams.
As the old world emptied out, a new one was being born that August in Williamsburg, where the rebel burgesses, trained in self-government, reconstituted themselves as the Virginia Convention. “We never before had so full a meeting . . . as on the present occasion,” Washington exulted, as more than one hundred delegates attended.23 Within a week, the delegates had thrashed out a plan aligned with the Fairfax Resolves, thrusting Washington into the forefront of the action. They agreed to set up an association that would ban imports beginning in November and, if Great Britain still refused to redress their grievances, tobacco exports after August 1775. They also issued a stinging indictment of the arbitrary behavior in Boston of Washington’s old colleague General Gage.
On Friday, August 5, 1774, George Washington’s life changed forever when he was elected one of seven Virginia delegates to the general congress that would meet in Philadelphia, to be known as the First Continental Congress. When these statesmen were selected, Jefferson said, a “shock of electricity” flew through the air.24 The vote underscored the dramatic elevation of Washington’s standing: he trailed Speaker Peyton Randolph by only a few votes and received nine votes more than the superlative orator Patrick Henry. Before leaving Williamsburg, Washington obtained a copy of Jefferson’s pamphlet A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which took dead aim at the notion that the colonies existed to benefit the mother country. Jefferson ended with a dire warning for George III: “Kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people. Open your breast, Sire, to liberal and expanded thought. Let not the name of George the Third be a blot in the page of history.”25
ON AUGUST 30, 1774, two influential burgesses, Patrick Henry and Edmund Pendleton, spent the night at Mount Vernon before departing with Washington and his manservant, Billy Lee, for the First Continental Congress. They left on a sultry, windless morning, and Martha Washington, infused with martial spirit, saw them off like a good, self-sacrificing matron from antiquity. Edmund Pendleton left an indelible portrait of Martha’s unwavering commitment: “She seemed ready to make any sacrifice and was cheerful, though I know she felt anxious. She talked like a Spartan mother to her son on going to battle. ‘I hope you will stand firm—I know George will,’ she said. The dear little woman was busy from morning until night with domestic duties, but she gave us much time in conversation and affording us entertainment. When we set off in the morning, she stood in the door and cheered us with the good words, ‘God be with you gentlemen.’”26 It was a courageous show on the part of a woman who had already buried a husband and three children, the last of whom had