Washington [120]
Washington worked the First Continental Congress like a mature candidate. He turned ecumenical in his churchgoing habits, attending services at Presbyterian, Quaker, Roman Catholic, and a pair of Anglican churches. With the weather consistently fine and clear, he socialized assiduously in the evenings, dining out in thirty-one private homes in two months and scarcely ever sticking to his lodgings. He became a habitué of something called the Governor’s Club, summarized by one visitor as “a select number of gentlemen that meet every night at a certain tavern, where they pass away a few hours in the pleasures of conversation and a cheerful glass.”36 With his compulsion to record his everyday life, Washington asked Lund Washington to send on his diary, disguised for safekeeping as a letter. “It will be found, I presume, on my writing table,” he wrote. “Put it under a good strong paper cover, sealed up as a letter.”37
Washington showed a knack for expanding his network of acquaintances, meeting with “Farmer” John Dickinson and befriending two young Philadelphians—merchant Thomas Mifflin and lawyer Joseph Reed—who later served as his aides. Along with John Adams, Washington received a memorable guided tour of the Pennsylvania Hospital from Dr. William Shippen, Jr. The finest hospital in the colonies, it still had a vaguely medieval air, as Adams noted: “We saw in the lower rooms underground the cells of the lunatics . . . some furious, some merry, some melancholy.”38 An inveterate shopper, Washington also took time to buy a cloak for his mother and a pocketbook for his wife. This conservative revolutionary decided that Billy Lee should dress a little more fashionably for the historic occasion and plunked down fifteen shillings for new shoes for his slave.
The First Continental Congress balked at the still-radical idea of independence, and George Washington expressed the predominant mood when he declared flatly, “I am well satisfied, as I can be of my existence, that no such thing is desired by any thinking man in all North America; on the contrary, that it is the ardent wish of the warmest advocates for liberty that peace and tranquillity, upon constitutional grounds, may be restored and the horrors of civil discord prevented.”39 The delegates clung to the pleasing fiction that a benevolent George III was being undermined by treacherous ministers, and they implored the king as their “loving father” to rouse himself and rescue his colonial subjects. Going beyond mere words, they set up a Continental Association (hence the name Continental Congress) that would block imports sooner, and exports later, from and to Great Britain. To police this agreement, delegates called for creation of local enforcement committees, which could spawn militias if necessary. They also vowed to “wholly discontinue the slave trade” and “discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing, and all kinds of gaming, cock-fightings, exhibitions of shows, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.”40 This emphasis on moral reformation could only have assisted the likelihood that the clean-living Washington would become commander in chief. An exceptionally conscientious delegate, he was one of only two Virginia delegates still in Philadelphia when the First Continental Congress adjourned on October 26, 1774.
On October 30 George Washington was back at Mount Vernon, where the most urgent matter claiming his attention was the sale of property owned by his business partner George Mercer, then in woeful financial straits. Several weeks later Washington conducted a sale of property, including ninety slaves, from Mercer’s plantation at Bull Run Mountains. “The Negroes, horses, and stock have all sold exceeding high,” Washington reported after the auction .41 It shows the schizophrenic