Washington [50]
AS SOON AS WASHINGTON returned to Winchester in early April, he confronted a fresh crisis. Indians had sacked so many settlements and slain so many inhabitants that the dazed surviving families looked to Washington as their savior. At first he could barely scrape up a few dozen men to mount a spirited defense and despaired of waging an equal battle with the Indians, telling Governor Dinwiddie that “the cunning and craft” of the Indians “are not to be equalled . . . They prowl about like wolves and, like them, do their mischief by stealth.” He despaired of fighting them upon equal terms.24 Feeling embattled, Washington issued a plea for intercolonial union that foreshadowed his later stress on national unity. “Nothing I more sincerely wish than a union to the colonies in this time of eminent danger,” he told Pennsylvania governor Robert Hunter Morris.25
Even as a young man, the complex Washington seldom had a single reason for his actions. His pursuit of self-interest and selfless dedication to public service were often intermingled, sometimes making it hard to disentangle his true motives. Perhaps for this reason, he could always discern both the base and the noble sides of human nature. For Washington, the French and Indian War presented few elevating ideas beyond the moral superiority of the British side. Nevertheless, his indignation about the savagery he purported to see practiced by his French and Indian foes seems heartfelt. He began to view himself as the self-styled champion of the backwoods people and was moved by their piteous plight. In a remarkable letter to Robert Dinwiddie on April 22, 1756, he made an impassioned statement about the murder of frontier families and his desire to alleviate their suffering.
I am too little acquainted, sir, with pathetic language to attempt a description of the people’s distresses, though I have a generous soul, sensible of wrongs and swelling for redress. But what can I do? If bleeding, dying! would glut their insatiate revenge, I would be a willing offering to savage fury and die by inches to save a people! I see their situation, know their danger, and participate [in] their sufferings without having it in my power to give them further relief than uncertain promises . . . The supplicating tears of the women and moving petitions from the men melt me into such deadly sorrow that I solemnly declare . . . I could offer myself a willing sacrifice to the butchering enemy, provided that would contribute to the people’s ease.26
Here one can sense a flood of deep feeling welling up beneath the surface of Washington’s tightly buttoned personality. A spark of idealism began to flicker intermittently through his sulking about his personal status—a spark that would someday flare into a bright flame.
Faced with Indian raids that depopulated whole settlements, Dinwiddie issued orders calling up the militia in western counties, and Washington suddenly found himself at the head of a thousand temporary recruits who bridled at their treatment by highborn officers. Reflecting this resentment, the Virginia Gazette blasted Washington’s officers as “rank novices, rakes, spendthrifts, and bankrupts” who “browbeat and discouraged” the militia and gave them “an example of all manner of debauchery, vice, and idleness.”27 Livid over this bad publicity, Washington informed Dinwiddie of numerous warnings he had issued about these vices and promised to “act with a little more rigor than has hitherto been practiced, since I find it so absolutely necessary.”28 Washington presented the strange spectacle of a young man chastising dissolute behavior, and Dinwiddie stood solidly behind him. “He is a person much beloved here