George 2: Befriending Aristocrats

When the youthful George Washington visited his half-brother Lawrence at Mount Vernon he was only a few miles from Belvoir, the estate of Lord Fairfax. Of all the members of the British Peerage Lord Fairfax was the only one who visited the colonies and decided to make his permanent residence there. Maybe he was influenced by the fact that he owned more than 5 MILLION acres in the Potomac and Shenandoah Valleys.

Since Lawrence had married into the Fairfax family George had many opportunities to visit the old aristocrat who was about 40 years his senior. As a young boy George had written out 110 maxims of good behavior from a book of etiquette so he would know how to behave in polite society and this probably helped him make a good impression in the noble household.

Lord Fairfax's true passion, though, was not etiquette but fox hunting – and what really won him over to friendship with his teenaged neighbor was the discovery that George was a great horseman who could ride to the hounds just as hard and fearlessly as he could himself. Fairfax grew to respect his young neighbor so much that he hired him to survey his vast lands when George was only 16 years old.

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George had very little formal education as a child. He probably had some lessons at home to supplement his meager classroom experience. Part of his self-education was copying all sorts of legal documents such as deeds into his notebooks. This was the kind of useful information that would be helpful to a great landowner someday.

He learned reading and writing and arithmetic from the parish sexton in a little school house. Later he did some more advanced studies under a Mr. Williams. Here he learned some higher mathematics and maybe some English Literature and the beginnings of surveying.

George became especially interested in surveying and practiced around Mount Vernon. He kept a field notebook where he recorded his measurements, diagrams, and calculations. Surveying was an especially useful skill in a land where millions of acres would soon be divided up and sold. When Lord Fairfax asked George to survey his lands the young man was ready for the job, and ready for his first expedition into the wilderness.

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Note:
My biographical study of George Washington was intended for my own education but I thought I would also like to share what I have learned here on my blog. The main sources of information I used were:

First, "George Washington: A Biography" by Washington Irving. I like this one because it was written by one of our early American literary masters and because it was written so long ago that Irving often mentions talking with people who had actually seen George.

Second, "Washington: An abridgement in one volume By Richard Harwell of the seven-volume George Washington" By Douglas Southall Freeman. I wanted the complete seven volume set but that is not yet available on Kindle. Too bad. Still, this abridgement is a great work, packed with information.

Third, "Washington: A Life" By Ron Chernow. This is an excellent modern biography that came out in 2010, helping me to get some of the more recent research missing from the older biographies.

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Copyright © 2018 by Joseph Wayne Gadway