Washington [88]
Four days later Washington learned of an unexpected challenge to his seat. Lieutenant Colonel Adam Stephen had fought with Washington at Fort Necessity and in the ill-fated Braddock expedition and wound up as second in command in the Virginia Regiment. More recently Washington and Stephen had sparred during an intense scramble for western lands. In 1754, to spur lagging recruitment, Governor Dinwiddie had promised bounty lands in the Ohio Country to war veterans, and Washington had formed a partnership with three veterans—Robert Stewart, George Mercer, and Nathaniel Gist—to accumulate such land. They competed with a rival partnership led by Adam Stephen, who in later years, in a conversation with Dr. Benjamin Rush, vilified Washington as a “weak man.”5 Washington, for his part, castigated his quondam friend Stephen as “designing” and unprincipled.6
On February 15, 1761, Captain Stewart relayed word to Washington from Winchester that Stephen was “incessantly employed” in campaigning for one of the two seats from Frederick County. For two years Washington and Thomas Bryan Martin had held those seats, but Martin had now decided to retire, prompting Washington’s former aide and new partner, George Mercer, to run in his stead. Adam Stephen evidently denigrated Washington as the handpicked candidate of the wealthy landowners, for Stewart told Washington that “the leaders of all the patrician families remain firm in their resolution of continuing for you,” while Stephen issued demagogic appeals for “the attention of the plebeians, whose unstable minds are agitated by every breath of novelty, whims, and nonsense.”7
Washington was sufficiently alarmed by Stephen’s election bid that, uncharacteristically, he stooped to an unscrupulous stratagem to win. The episode shows that at twenty-nine he still hadn’t learned to curb his more assertive impulses. He urged the sheriff who oversaw the election, Captain Van Swearingen, to favor his candidacy with a blatantly unfair tactic. Because there was no secret ballot and people openly voiced their votes, it was hugely advantageous for candidates if the first voters favored them, stimulating a bandwagon effect. While disclaiming that he was doing this, Washington planted the idea in the sheriff ’s mind: “I hope and indeed make no doubt that you will contribute your aid towards shutting [Stephen] out of the public trust he is seeking.” Then Washington suggested that if pro- Washington and Mercer voters were “hurried in at the first of the poll, it might be an advantage. But as sheriff, I know you cannot appear in this, nor would I by any mean[s] have you do anything that can give so designing a man as Colo. Stevens the least trouble.”8 If Washington took an ethical shortcut here, he wanted to keep up appearances and pretend that he wasn’t.
Washington’s trick seemed to work like a charm: of the first fifteen people to announce their vote, fourteen were Washington partisans and twelve also voted for George Mercer. The favoritism was so palpable that Washington’s brothers Jack and Samuel were the first two people to vote, while his brother-in-law, Fielding Lewis, his friend Dr. Craik, and his brother Charles lagged not far behind. When the final count was tallied, Washington had 505 votes, Mercer 400, and Stephen 294. Washington, feigning aristocratic indifference