Washington [41]
George Washington clearly had a much more active inner life than his reserved exterior might have suggested. In late May he confided to Jack his interest in obtaining a seat in the House of Burgesses. He said that he probably couldn’t run in his home district because George William Fairfax might stand as a candidate, so he banked his hopes instead on Frederick County. His letter to Jack lays out in remarkable detail his canny political style, which served him well for the rest of his life. He instructed his brother to canvass the opinions of prominent men in the county “with[ou]t disclosing much of mine; as I know your own good sense can furnish you with means enough without letting it proceed immediately from me.” If gentlemen seemed inclined to support him, “you then may declare my intentions and beg their assistance. If, on the contrary, you find them more inclined to favour some other, I w[oul]d have the affair entirely subside.”19 It is a highly revealing letter. Washington believed that ambitious men should hide their true selves, retreat into silence, and not tip people off to their ambition. To sound out people, you had to feign indifference and proceed only when convinced that they were sympathetic and like-minded. The objective was to learn the maximum about other people’s thoughts while revealing the minimum about your own. Always fearful of failure, Washington wanted to push ahead only if he was armed with detailed knowledge and enjoyed a high likelihood of success. This cautious, disciplined political style would persist long after the original insecurity that had prompted it had disappeared.
AS BRADDOCK AND HIS nearly three thousand men straggled toward Fort Cumberland (the former trading post at Wills Creek on the Potomac) in early June, the bullheaded general began to fathom the wisdom of Washington’s advice to travel lightly across the mountainous territory. The pace of forward motion was so glacial, just two miles daily, that it seemed they would never penetrate to the Forks of the Ohio. Braddock had insisted upon bringing along his complete artillery train and thousands of bushels of grain. Men and horses dropped dead from exertion as they crossed steep hills, and the frustrated Braddock, moody at the best of times, became increasingly testy. In this situation, he heeded Washington’s advice and culled a division of eight hundred men to march ahead. With the French hourly strengthening their defenses at Fort Duquesne, time was now working against the British.
As it turned out, Washington could not pause to savor his influence, for he was “seized with violent fevers and pains in my head” in mid-June .20 He proved the latest victim of an epidemic exacting a frightful toll on Braddock’s forces: dysentery. This infection of the digestive system produces violent diarrhea, and Washington suffered cruelly from hemorrhoids. At first the stoic young aide tried to conceal the malady, but he soon found it so debilitating that he had to travel lying down in a covered wagon. On June 23 Braddock ordered him to accompany the slower-moving forces in the rear and gave him a patent medicine, Dr. James’s Powder, which Washington pronounced “the most excellent medicine in the world.”21 (It consisted of phosphate of lime and oxide of antimony.) The young aide was so distraught at being left behind