Still rather awkward in society—“He was a very bashful young man,” one matron later recalled. “I used often to wish that he would talk more”—Washington was trying to acquire other social habits of the Virginia gentry.²⁵ He learned to dance, an activity in which he sparkled, and gambled at whist and loo, card games then voguish among the British aristocracy. But he remained trapped in an adolescent dependence on his mother, which cramped his social style, and he suffered from the spartan life at Ferry Farm. In one letter to Lawrence, he regretted that he could not join him on a trip to the colonial capital at Williamsburg: “My horse is in very poor order to undertake such a journey and is in no likelihood of mending for want of corn sufficient to support him.”²⁶

The young man was highly responsive to female charms. In December 1748 his friend George William Fairfax, twenty-four, had married eighteen-year-old Sarah Cary, who was to be immortalized under her married name of Sally Fairfax. The alluring daughter of Wilson Cary, an eminence in the House of Burgesses, Sally had grown up in a mansion on the James River near Hampton Roads. Her family was rich and cultured, boasting a well-stocked library, and Sally was fluent in French. A photograph of a lost portrait shows a comely young woman with smooth, creamy shoulders and a long neck, wearing a simple but glamorous décolleté dress that discloses an ample expanse of bosom. A woman of obvious beauty and sensuality, she has bright, sprightly eyes and an alluring personality. For an inexperienced youth like George, Sally, two years his senior, must have exuded a bewitching air of mystery. If his attraction to her blossomed into a full-blown infatuation, it probably started innocently enough.

Sometime around 1749-50 George became smitten with a young woman he coyly referred to as the “Low Land Beauty” and dallied with another he referred to as “very agreeable,” who was likely Mary Cary, Sally’s younger sister.²⁷ George found solace by copying out two banal poems about a man spurned by his lady love. In one poem, the poet is tortured by secret love: “Ah! woe’s me, that I should Love and conceal, / Long have I wish’d, but never dare reveal.”²⁸ In the second poem, the poet stands helpless beford his ardor. “Oh Ye Gods why should my Poor Resistless Heart / Stand to oppose thy might and Power / At Last surrender to cupids feather’d Dart / and now lays Bleeding every Hour / For her that’s Pityless of my grief and Woes / And will not on me Pity take.”²⁹ But Washington was not born to pine away as an idle, lovesick youth.

In the spring of 1749 he again profited from his connection with brother Lawrence when he helped to survey the new Potomac port of Alexandria, north of Mount Vernon; Lawrence served as a trustee of the town. A more momentous change occurred in July 1749, when George was appointed surveyor of Culpeper County. Even though the College of William and Mary, under a 1693 charter, retained the power to name the county surveyor, it proved susceptible to the blandishments of influential men. When seventeen-year-old George Washington captured this lucrative sinecure, becoming the youngest official surveyor in Virginia history, it reflected his privileged friendship with the omnipotent Lord Fairfax. Instead of starting out as a lowly, obscure apprentice, the young man was enabled by patronage to skip the preliminary steps. As Marcus Cunliffe has noted, the young Washington “was not an intellectual genius or the heir to a great fortune,” but “he was evidently energetic, reliable, and canny.”³⁰

Two days after his appointment, George performed an obligatory survey of four hundred acres in eastern Culpeper County and proudly affixed his signature to the document with his new title. Apparently, this was the only survey George ever performed in the county for which he was the nominal surveyor. He then gladly turned his attention to more profitable opportunities awaiting him in the hinterlands beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains, where rich soil tempted hordes of settlers. As fortune’s favorite, George received a steady stream of assignments that issued from the splendid portals of Belvoir as Lord Fairfax cashed in on the booming settlements in his domain. These surveys were often plum assignments, for they covered small, easily measured parcels that could be surveyed in a single day. Choosing to work in crisp spring or autumn weather, George avoided the summertime, when thick foliage impeded the sight lines of surveyors. Lord Fairfax pocketed one shilling per annum for every fifty acres of settled land and piled up a substantial fortune from the labors of George and his fellow surveyors. Within a year the busy young man shed his duties as surveyor of Culpeper County, most likely because he no longer needed the extra work.

In the spring of 1750 George Washington again mounted his horse, loaded up his surveying tools, and cantered off to the Shenandoah Valley. He laid out forty-seven tracts on that one trip alone, jotting notes for each survey in a tiny notebook he tucked into his pocket. He grew increasingly accustomed to the wilderness and was no longer too particular about changing his clothes. As he notified a friend, “The coldness of the weather will not allow my making a long stay, as the lodging is rather too cold for the time of year. I have never had my clothes off, but lay and sleep in them like a Negro.”³¹ An instant professional success, George toiled just a few months yearly and made his first significant land investment in October 1750, buying nearly fifteen hundred acres in the Shenandoah Valley. Thus began his continuing fixation on land speculation. As Dorothy Twohig, an editor of Washington’s papers, notes, “No theme appears more frequently in the writings of Washington than his love for the land—more precisely, his own land.”³² Only eighteen, Washington already had his first plantation, on which tenants or hired help grew corn, wheat, and tobacco. He never stopped accumulating acreage and by age twenty had assembled 2,315 acres in the Shenandoah Valley. For a young man who could not afford corn for his horse a year earlier, it was a startling and nearly dreamlike elevation in status.

George’s soaring success coincided with an alarming turn in Lawrence’s health. In May 1749 the latter had to relinquish his seat in the House of Burgesses due to a hacking cough—a telltale symptom of tuberculosis. That winter at Mount Vernon, George had intermittently helped to care for his brother. On one occasion, he wrote tenderly to Lawrence, “Dear Brother, I hope your cough is much mended since I saw you last; if so, [I] likewise hope you have given over the thoughts of leaving Virginia.”³³ Instead, the cough only worsened, and Lawrence sailed to England to consult doctors there. In his absence, George commiserated by mail with his sister-in-law Ann and did his best to cheer her up. He couldn’t offer comfort in person at Mount Vernon because he himself had contracted a new ailment: malaria. “I am deprived of the pleasure of waiting on you (as I expected) by ague and fever which I have had to extremity,” he informed her.³⁴

While George recuperated, Lawrence returned from England still in the terrible throes of tuberculosis. In desperation, accompanied by his younger brother, Lawrence decided to test the medicinal powers of warm springs in western Virginia (later the town of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia). Infirm people had begun making pilgrimages to this natural spa to soak in the waters or drink them to regain their health. Later it was a fashionable place, but George found the warm springs dark, gloomy, and secluded and scarcely conducive to improved health. He grumbled that they “are situated very badly on the east side of a steep mountain and enclosed by hills on all sides, so that the afternoon’s sun is hid by four o’clock and the fogs hang over us till nine or ten.”³⁵ While Lawrence sampled the waters, George distracted himself with surveying trips in the surrounding countryside.