Washington [99]
WHEN WASHINGTON ATTENDED the House of Burgesses in the spring of 1767, the furor over the Stamp Act had temporarily subsided. During this sleepy, uneventful session, Washington received one of the two surviving letters written to him by Martha. It shows her as a warm and affectionate if uneducated wife. The note reads in its entirety: “My Dearest: It was with very great pleasure I see in your letter th[at] you got safely down we are all very well at this time but it still [is] rainney and wett I am sorry you will not be at home soon as I expe[ct]ed you I had reather my sister would not come up so soon, as May wou[ld] be [a] much plasenter time than April we wrote to you las[t] post as I have nothing new to tell you I must conclude my self your most Affcetionate Martha Washington.”26
Having failed to learn its lesson with the Stamp Act, Great Britain again provoked colonial discontent in 1767 with the Townshend Acts, which placed duties on paint, glass, paper, and tea and buttressed the power of royal officials by freeing them from reliance on colonial assemblies for money. Hardening its stance toward the restive colonists, the Crown dispatched the HMS Romney to Boston, where radicals had a chance in May 1768 to ponder the political message carried by its fifty guns. In September British warships disgorged two regiments of redcoats, who marched through town to the beat of fife and drums and then pitched tents on the Common in a show of strength designed to intimidate local protesters.
Of late Washington’s attendance in Williamsburg had been haphazard, and he missed the debate in the burgesses that included vehement denunciations of the Townshend duties. The legislators cloaked their plea to the king in obsequious language, appealing to his “fatherly goodness and protection,” but the royal heart remained unmoved.27 Reflecting their tough position, officials in London sent to Virginia a new governor, Lord Botetourt, a peer of the realm with secret instructions to dissolve the Virginia assembly if it persisted in willful opposition to imperial wisdom. For all their ire over the Townshend duties, the burgesses still couldn’t resist the allure of an honest-to-goodness British aristocrat, and on November 2, 1768, Washington and fellow burgesses flocked to a festive welcoming dinner for the royal governor.
One can argue plausibly that the events of the winter of 1768-69 converted George Washington from a rich, disaffected planter into a rabid militant against British policies. Had he died before that winter, he would have left no real record of distinction, aside from youthful bravery in the French and Indian War. That winter changed everything, and he began to evolve into the George Washington known to history. Moving beyond the disputes over self-advancement that had preoccupied his younger, insecure self, he suddenly seemed a larger figure in the nascent struggle against British injustice. All his seething frustration in seeking a royal commission during the war; all his vocal disaffection with Robert Cary and Company; all his dismay over British policies that handicapped him as a planter and real estate speculator—these enduring complaints now crystallized into splendid wrath against the Crown.
That winter Parliament grew so disgruntled over colonial protests against its tax policy that it was proposed (though never executed) that the ringleaders be shipped to England and tried for treason under an old statute dating from Henry VIII’s reign. As word of this proposal spread, so did protest against the mother country. In early April Washington received a packet from Dr. David Ross of Bladensburg, Maryland, containing news of associations being set up in Philadelphia and Annapolis to boycott nonessential British imports as long as Parliament persisted in foisting unfair taxes on the colonies. The packet included plans for a comparable Virginia association, drawn up by a nameless writer. Washington sent it to his friend and