Washington [17]
On April 13, 1748, toughened by a month of adventures, Washington finished his surveying trip. He had shown sporadic traces of an aesthetic sense, rhapsodizing about the “beautiful groves of sugar trees” and the “richness of the land,” but the trip had mainly alerted him to the extraordinary business opportunities that abounded in these virgin lands, commencing a lifelong fascination with westward expansion.22 With extensive knowledge of these frontier outposts, Washington would emerge as the founder best able to visualize the ample contours of the American future, making the notion of a continental empire more than a mere abstraction.
Lawrence Washington helped to spark George’s interest in distant settlements, having joined with Thomas and William Fairfax in a land venture called the Ohio Company that ultimately gained the right to half a million acres of frontier land. The locus of settlement would be the so-called Ohio Country, west of the Allegheny Mountains, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers flowed together to form the headwaters of the Ohio River; the place was widely known as the Forks of the Ohio. It would be the competing claims of England and France to this bountiful territory that would shortly thrust George Washington into his first military confrontations and chart a direction for his future life.
BY THE LATE 1740S George Washington had his feet solidly planted in two worlds: while burnishing his social skills for polite Virginia society, he also readied himself for wilderness service. Now that he had found a professional footing, he needed to dress the part. He had already acquired a respectable wardrobe, taking along on one trip nine shirts, six linen waistcoats, four neckcloths, and seven caps.23 Sometime in 1749-50 he jotted down, with impressive exactitude, a 152-word description of a frock coat he wanted made, which was to have “a lapel breast, the lapel to contain on each side six button holes and to be about 5 or 6 inches wide, all the way equal, and to turn as the breast on the coat does; to have it made very long-waisted and in length to come down to or below the bent of the knee, the waist from the armpit to the fold to be exactly as long or longer than from thence to the bottom, not to have more than one fold in the skirt etc. etc.”24 No tailor could have requested more specific instructions: Washington was designing his coat down to the smallest detail. Throughout his life, he exhibited a faultless precision in dress, regarding a person’s apparel as the outward sign of inner order.
Still rather awkward in society—“He was a very bashful young man,” one matron later recalled. “I used often to wish that he would talk more”—Washington was trying to acquire other social habits of the Virginia gentry.25 He learned to dance, an activity in which he sparkled, and gambled at whist and loo, card games then voguish among the British aristocracy. But he remained trapped in an adolescent dependence on his mother, which cramped his social style, and he suffered from the spartan life at Ferry Farm. In one letter to Lawrence, he regretted that he could not join him on a trip to the colonial capital at Williamsburg: “My horse is in very poor order to undertake such a journey and is in no likelihood of mending for want of corn sufficient to support him.”26
The young man was highly responsive to female charms. In December 1748 his friend George William Fairfax, twenty-four, had married eighteen-year-old Sarah Cary, who was to be immortalized under her married name of Sally Fairfax. The alluring daughter of Wilson Cary, an eminence in the House of Burgesses, Sally had grown up in a mansion on the James River near Hampton Roads. Her family was rich and cultured, boasting a well-stocked library, and Sally was fluent in French. A photograph of a lost portrait shows a comely young woman with smooth, creamy shoulders and a long neck, wearing a simple but glamorous décolleté dress that discloses an ample expanse