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 and has gone through many hardships in the service and I really think he has great merit.”²⁹

Throughout the spring, Washington squawked about the fickle militia, who disappeared whenever an Indian threat materialized. Apparently concerned by the moods of his temperamental protégé, Colonel William Fairfax preached a stoic calm in the face of adversity and wrote two letters invoking the military heroes of antiquity. “Your good health and fortune is the toast of every table,” he reassured Washington. “Among the Romans such a general acclamation and public regard shown to any of their chieftains was always esteemed a high honor and gratefully accepted.” Holding up Caesar and Alexander the Great as models to emulate, Fairfax said that Washington shouldn’t be disturbed by unreliable militia but should bear such hardships “with equal magnanimity [as] those heroes remarkably did.”³⁰

IN MID - AUGUST, Colonel Washington staged a small pageant in Winchester to mark the official start of the French and Indian War, announced in London three months earlier. Escorted by town worthies, he marched three companies to the parade ground and read aloud the declaration of war, urging his men to show “willing obedience to the best of kings and by a strict attachment to his royal commands [to] demonstrate the love and loyalty we bear to his sacred person.”³¹ With that, numerous toasts were drunk and muskets boomed. Nevertheless the absolute power of distant bureaucrats in London preyed on Washington’s mind. Three weeks earlier he had conveyed greetings to John Campbell, Earl of Loudoun, the new commander of His Majesty’s forces in North America. No longer a military novice, Washington touted himself as a war veteran and seasoned his welcome with self-promotion: “We humbly represent to your Lordship that we were the first troops in action on the continent on [the] occasion of the present broils and that by several engagements and continual skirmishes with the enemy, we have to our cost acquired a knowledge of them and of their crafty and cruel practices.”³²

Eager to please his new commander, Washington struggled to make his new recruits presentable. He had long been troubled by an inability to clothe them, but in March he procured for each man “a suit of thin sleazy cloth without lining” and some waistcoats of “sorry flannel.”³³ No sooner had he accomplished this than he found men selling the miserable clothing he had obtained. Indignant, he threatened them with five hundred lashes. Where his men had once deserted two or three at a time, sixteen absconded into the woods in August, and the shortage of men grew more perilous. When a portion of the Augusta County militia was summoned to duty that October, fewer than a tenth even bothered to show up. From these early experiences, Washington came to believe devoutly in the need for rigorously trained, professional armies rather than hastily summoned, short-term militia.

All summer and fall Washington was exasperated by military arrangements on the western frontier. He objected in strenuous terms to Lord Loudoun’s decision in early December to station Virginia troops at Fort Cumberland in Maryland, when it made more sense to keep them at Winchester, Virginia. Washington’s tenacity on this issue led to a clash with Dinwiddie, who sided with Loudoun. Until this point Washington had prudently tended his relationship with the royal governor and was exemplary in bowing to civilian control. Now, in a terribly impolitic move, he bypassed Dinwiddie to lobby House of Burgesses speaker John Robinson, violating a cardinal rule of Virginia politics that the governor had final authority in such matters. The decision also smacked of disloyalty to someone who had consistently boosted Washington’s career. The young man poured out his frustrations to Robinson, saying his advice to Dinwiddie had been “disregarded as idle and frivolous . . . My orders [from Dinwiddie] are dark, doubtful and uncertain: today approved, tomorrow condemned.” ³⁴ The same day Washington aggravated matters by telling Dinwiddie that Loudoun had “imbibed prejudices so unfavourable to my character” because he had not been “thoroughly informed.”³⁵ Since Dinwiddie had been Loudoun’s primary source of information, he would have interpreted this as a direct attack on his own conduct.

On January 10, 1757, throwing caution to the wind, Washington sent Lord Loudoun a letter so lengthy that it runs to a dozen printed pages in his collected papers. It provides a graphic picture of the twenty-four-year-old Washington’s ambivalence about the British class system. On the one hand, he flattered Loudoun unctuously even as he denied doing so. “Although I have not the honour to be known to Your Lordship, yet Your Lordship’s name was familiar to my ear on account of the important services performed to His Majesty in other parts of the world. Don’t think My Lord I am going to flatter. I have exalted sentiments of Your Lordship’s character and revere your rank . . . my nature is honest and free from guile.”³⁶