Washington was in Williamsburg when the thunderclap of the Boston Port Bill burst over the colony. He also learned that three thousand redcoats had landed in Boston, fortifying Gage’s position. During the French and Indian War, Gage had written warmly to Washington, “It gave me great pleasure to hear from a person of whom the world has justly so good an opinion and for whom I have so great an esteem.”⁴ Such fraternal sentiments between imperial warriors now belonged to a vanished world. Washington blasted military rule in Boston as “unexampled testimony of the most despotic system of tyranny that ever was practiced in a free gov[ernmen]t.”⁵ He and his fellow burgesses enlisted the Lord on their side, declaring that June 1, the day of the port’s closure, should be observed “as a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer.”⁶ In what was fast becoming a ritual, Dunmore dissolved the House of Burgesses. That very morning Washington had breakfasted with the governor at his farm outside Williamsburg. It was now plain that the rights of the burgesses dangled by a slender thread that could be severed at will by the golden shears wielded by the all-powerful royal governor.

The next day Washington and other militant burgesses moved to their familiar resort, the Raleigh Tavern, where they poured forth scorn for the Boston Port Bill, ratified a boycott of tea, and endorsed an annual congress with other colonies to protect their collective rights. They reached the critical conclusion that an assault on one colony was an assault on all. In this crazily illogical world, Washington and other burgesses threw a ball that evening to welcome the governor’s wife. Quite obviously this was no typical revolt of the poor or dispossessed, but a fissure at the pinnacle of the social structure, involving men long accustomed to rule. Washington was one of twenty-five burgesses still lingering in Williamsburg in late May when a letter arrived from Samuel Adams, beseeching the Virginians to discontinue trade with England. The legislators decided to cease all imports and reconvene on August 1.

Land was never far from George Washington’s thoughts, and he smarted at new British policies that curtailed speculative activities. The Quebec Act transferred the Great Lakes and territory north of the Ohio River to Catholic Quebec, restricting the acreage available to Virginians. Still more jarring was a ruling from London that land grants to French and Indian War veterans under the 1763 proclamation would be limited to British regulars, discriminating against colonial officers and reopening an ancient wound for Washington. “I conceive the services of a provincial officer as worthy of reward as a regular one and [it] can only be withheld from him with injustice,” he observed with contempt.⁷ As we have seen, the ambitious Washington took these slights personally, and they now tipped him over the edge into open revolt.

To gauge opinion before the August meeting of the burgesses, Washington chaired a gathering of his Alexandria constituents on July 5. Their response to the Boston turmoil was both swift and decisive: they agreed to send 273 pounds sterling, 38 barrels of flour, and 150 bushels of wheat to “the industrious poor of the town of Boston . . . who by a late cruel act of Parliament are deprived of their daily labor and bread.”⁸ Having dissolved the burgesses, Governor Dunmore ordered new elections, and Washington engaged in the bread and circuses of a fresh campaign on July 17, a gaudy spectacle at odds with the high-minded rhetoric in the air. One observer related how Washington and his ally, Major Charles Broadwater, gave Alexandria voters “a hogshead of toddy,” or punch, followed by a ball that evening that was punctilious in its choice of beverages: “Coffee and chocolate, but no tea. This herb is in disgrace amongst them at present.”⁹ Washington and Broadwater were swept into office.

On Sunday, July 17, Colonel George Mason arrived at Mount Vernon for an overnight stay, and he and Washington refined a list of twenty-four resolutions that he had brought. The next day the resolutions were presented to their Fairfax County committee and, with Washington in the chair, adopted with minor changes. These Fairfax Resolves, as they became known, reflected the views of the “Country Party” of landed British gentry, who had protested what they saw as the corruption of Britain’s constitution by venal politicians during Robert Walpole’s ministry earlier in the century. The resolves argued that people should obey only laws enacted by their chosen representatives or else “the government must degenerate either into an absolute and despotic monarchy or a tyrannical aristocracy.” Another resolution stated that “taxation and representation are in their nature inseparable.” Still another called for an intercolonial congress to guarantee a common defense. Perhaps the most surprising resolution passed under Washington’s watchful eye was a plea to suspend the importation of slaves into Virginia, along with a fervent wish “to see an entire stop forever put to such a wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade.”¹⁰ It was the first time Washington had publicly registered his disgust with the system that formed the basis of his fortune. Because of surplus slaves in Virginia, the resolution wasn’t quite as courageous as it appeared and caused no immediate change in behavior at Mount Vernon. When the Fairfax County citizenry met at the Alexandria Court House on July 18, in what Washington described as a mood of “hurry and bustle,” they adopted the Fairfax Resolves and named Washington head of a twenty-five-member committee to chart future policy responses.¹¹

With the Fairfax Resolves, Washington emerged as a significant political leader a full year before being named to head the Continental Army. No fence-sitter, this conservative planter was a true militant. When the Boston Gazette printed the Fairfax Resolves, Washington’s renown reverberated through the colonies for the first time since the French and Indian War. During this period he allowed his heated opinions to bubble up and boil over as his pronouncements grew more vehement. Later on he had to muzzle his public views for the sake of continental harmony, but during the summer of 1774 he had no qualms about expressing open militance. He scoffed at the notion that the forthcoming congress should submit more petitions to the king when so many had failed: “Shall we, after this, whine and cry for relief?” ¹² His slumbering conscience was now fully awakened. All the petty indignities that he had endured at British hands exploded in revolutionary rage as his personal pique was sublimated into something much grander. As the historian Joseph Ellis notes, George Mason probably helped Washington “to develop a more expansive vocabulary to express his thoughts and feelings, but the thoughts, and even more so the feelings, had been brewing inside him for more than twenty years.”¹³

NOT SURPRISINGLY the acrimonious quarrel with the Crown strained Washington’s relations with the family that had long embodied for him the British Empire, the Fairfaxes. In August 1773, shortly after Patsy’s death, George William and Sally Fairfax had sailed to England to pursue a complex inheritance suit in chancery in London. George and Martha Washington were the last people to see them off, waving farewell at the dock. By this point Sally Fairfax had entered into a period of chronic health problems, including a brush with smallpox. As it turned out, she and her husband never returned to Virginia or set eyes on the Washingtons again. Despite the manifold demands on his time, Washington agreed to oversee the Fairfax affairs in Virginia and got a power of attorney to do so—an act of friendship that lasted until he took command of the Continental Army. The Fairfaxes must have known that their farewell might be irrevocable because they gave Washington the authority to auction off Belvoir’s furniture. It is hard to imagine that the commotion shaking the colonies played no part in their decision to decamp to England, but George William claimed to be an ardent friend of the patriotic cause and denied any political motivation behind their trip.