Washington [95]
The response was immediate and full-throated in its militance. In the House of Burgesses, a young rabble-rouser, Patrick Henry, rose amid the dark wooden benches and brandished fiery resolutions. “Resolved,” he announced, “that the taxation of the people by themselves or by persons chosen by themselves to represent them . . . is the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom.”4 For a young law student standing in the rear of the hushed chamber, these words sounded with a thrilling resonance. “He appeared to me to speak as Homer wrote,” Thomas Jefferson remembered.5 For some staid burgesses, Henry’s remarks seemed excessively inflammatory. “Tarquin and Caesar each had his Brutus,” Henry roared in response to them, “Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third—” He was interrupted by cries of “treason” from Washington’s longtime patron, Speaker Robinson, who was enthroned in his lofty chair. Legend asserts, although many scholars now dispute, that Henry retorted, “If this be treason, make the most of it.”6
In all likelihood, Washington had returned to Mount Vernon by the time these electrifying words shook the chamber. He was about to set out for Williamsburg in late July 1765 when he learned that Governor Fauquier, alarmed that Massachusetts legislators had invited the burgesses to send a delegation to New York to protest the Stamp Act, had summarily terminated the session. Of this decision, Washington surmised, “I am convinced . . . that the Governor had no inclination to meet an Assembly at this juncture.”7 For Fauquier, this Stamp Act Congress represented a blatant act of sedition, and he had no intention of allowing burgesses to participate. After he dissolved the assembly and held new elections, Washington used the opportunity to switch his seat from Frederick County to Fairfax County, closer to home. Until this point, Washington had mostly striven to please his royal masters in London, and he still had little patience with radicals who wanted to seize and incinerate the stamps, especially when a Williamsburg mob set upon his colleague George Mercer and burned him in effigy after he returned from England holding the despised post of stamp collector for the colony.
Nevertheless, angry feelings festered inside George Washington, and they erupted that September in a caustic letter to Robert Cary that showed how long-standing personal grievances were being transmuted into burning political causes. For the first eight paragraphs, Washington roundly chastised his London factors for the inferior prices his tobacco fetched and the shoddy, overpriced goods he had to swallow in return. When he turned to the Stamp Act, he wrote with almost gleeful vengeance. Distancing himself from “the speculative part of the colonists,” who regarded “this unconstitutional method of taxation as a direful attack upon their liberties,” he made it plain that he disagreed with their methods, not their opinions.8 In threatening terms, he said the eyes of the colonists were beginning to open as they realized they could boycott British luxury goods by devising domestic substitutes, and he forecast that courts would be shut down, since England had starved the colonists of currency with which to pay the stamp tax. With courts closed, he hardly needed to add, British creditors would be unable to collect from their American debtors.
The young man who had worked so hard to ingratiate himself with his superiors in the British Army was suddenly breathing fire. Washington was always reluctant to sign on to any cause, because when he did so, his commitment was total. Just as he predicted, some colonial courts were shut down by the Stamp Act, leaving British creditors enraged. Washington wasn’t the only one who found the Stamp Act a piece of self-destructive folly. In the House of Commons, Benjamin Franklin was asked how British soldiers sent to