Washington [49]
FROM HIS LOFTY PERCH atop the Virginia Regiment, Washington kept bucking for a royal commission. His frustration crested in late 1755, when he clashed with a man named John Dagworthy at Fort Cumberland on the Maryland frontier. As a colonial captain from Maryland, Dagworthy held a rank that seemed inferior to Washington’s, but he claimed superior authority based on an old royal commission. Writing to Dinwiddie, Washington threatened to resign if he had to truckle to the hated Dagworthy. Dinwiddie appealed to Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts, a barrister who had succeeded Braddock as supreme commander of British forces in North America. Aiming at deeper institutional change, Washington also wanted Shirley to absorb his regiment into the regular British Army, removing the two-tiered system that had bedeviled him. Governor Dinwiddie granted him permission to travel to Boston so that he could confront Shirley in person. When he set off for Boston in February 1756, Washington was accompanied by two aides and two slaves who sported the fine livery custom-made in London. In Philadelphia the young colonel, very dashing in his blue regimentals, enjoyed his first taste of a northern city and embarked on a shopping spree for clothing, hats, jewelry, and saddles. He was pleased by the clean, well-ordered town, which a friend was to tout to him as the peaceful home “of many nations and religions,” while expressing admiration for “that great man Mr. Penn.”20 Christopher Gist had already notified him that his fame had spread to the city. “Your name is more talked of in Philadelphia than that of any other person in the army,” he had written the previous fall .21
In New York, Washington socialized with his friend Beverley Robinson, son of the powerful speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and he may have entered into a romantic dalliance with Robinson’s sister-in-law, Mary “Polly” Philipse. The twenty-six-year-old Polly would have been a prime catch for an upwardly mobile young man: she was slim, dark-haired, beautiful, and heiress to a colossal fortune. Unsubstantiated legend claims that Washington proposed marriage; if so, he lost out to Major Roger Morris, son of an English architect, who had fought with Washington at Braddock’s defeat.
By the time he moved on to Boston, Washington’s triumphal journey attracted considerable interest. When he arrived, the Boston Gazette saluted him as “the Hon. Colonel Washington, a gentleman who has deservedly a high reputation of military skill, integrity, and valor, though success has not always attended his undertakings.” 22 Aside from Washington’s military renown, Governor Shirley may have had sentimental reasons for seeing him: his son had also acted as an aide to Braddock and was killed during the campaign. In presenting his grievances to the governor on March 5, 1756, Washington met with only mixed success. Although Shirley confirmed that he possessed superior rank to Dagworthy, he wouldn’t budge on other matters and rebuffed a petition signed by Washington’s officers for inclusion in the royal establishment. He also disappointed his young visitor by appointing Governor Sharpe of Maryland to lead the next campaign against Fort Duquesne—a military honor about which young George Washington already harbored a rich fund of fantasies. On his way home, the disappointed colonel stopped to confer with Sharpe, an interview that left him so dispirited that he “fully resolved to resign my commission.”23 Upon arriving in Williamsburg, he was somewhat assuaged by news that the assembly had decided to expand Virginia’s forces to fifteen hundred men.
In these dealings with powerful older men, Washington hadn’t yet developed the tact that would distinguish him in later life, and given his age, he seemed to bristle unduly at being assigned a subordinate position. His emotions were still raw, and he exhibited a naked, sometimes clumsy ambition that he later learned to cloak or conquer. This young careerist brooded interminably