The Americanisation of George Washington

THE AMERICANISATION

OF GEORGE WASHINGTON

Pwrcr~ L.

WHITE*

My analysis of the Americanisation of George Washington will suggest three general points. First, nationalism is more fundamentally a sociopsycbological phenomenon than the intellectual conception which it is widely believed to be, Second, the American Revolution owed more to so~iopsycho~o~~l factors than to the EnIightenment ideas so much stressed by ~evoIutionary historians of the last generation. Third, anticolonial movements in general owe much more to such factors than to the ideas of intellectuals. Among legions of sociopsychological findings potentially reIevant to my subject I have chosen to focus on three. The first is William Graham Sumner’s observation about the relationship between in-groups and out-groups. A recent reaffirmation of Sumner’s point asserts that when in-group members see themselves as highly similar and out-group members as highly dissimilar, ‘heightened.. . bias is the result’.’ The relevance to the Americanisation of George Washington is that when he started the Seven Years War it brought some 30,000 British army personnel to the American colonies, a vastly greater number than had ever been present before, Their presence increased exponentially the opportunities for the colonial people and the British to discover how they differed and for the in-group~out-group phenomenon to manifest itself. The second finding is called the labelling phenomenon. It asserts that peopIe tend to take on identities attributed to them.* The relevance to the Americanisation of George Washington is that neither he nor any significant number of colonial residents felt an American identity before the arrival of large numbers of British army personnel3 It was these British visitors who attributed American identity to the colonial people and brought the labelling phenomenon into operation. The third finding, one which lacks a name, asserts that people become afienated from groups which frustrate them in their pursuit ofpersonal goals, but give strong loyalty to those groups which help them to achieve their goals4 George Washington’s paramount goal was public esteem. The relevance of the finding tying group loyalty to fulfillment ofpersonal goals lies in the fact that the colonial people lavished appreciation upon Washington, while the British pointedly and repeatedly denied him the recognition which he craved. Why Washington had such a consuming passion for public esteem is not at all clear. He may have been influenced by a prevailing intellectual climate which stressed civic duty.5 He may also have been influenced by the circumstances of his youth, particularly the querulous, carping character of his widowed mother, the only parent he had after age eleven. ln any case, and for whatever reason, his own repeated affirmation make clear that public esteem was the preeminent concern of his life. *Department of History, University of

Texas

at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, U.S.A.

419

These propositions seem to me to be useful when applied to the facts relating to the A~lericanisation of George Washington which we must now examine. Historians have recognised from Wasb~~gton’s time to our own that Washington was the earliest and most important symbol of the emerging American identity, As Gary Wills put it: ‘Washington already stood for an entire people before some observers even suspected there was a people. Before there was a natian, before there was any symbol of that nation (a flag, a constitution,. . .) there was Washington’.6 The question left unaddressed is how did he become American? Washin~t~n’s family background was not only English, but Anglican as opposed to Puritan7 His immigrant ancestor, the son of an Anglican clergyman, left Cromwell3 Puritan Commonwealth to settle in Anglican Virginia. In Virginia the very English Washin~ons were moderateIy successful, but they were not among the provincial eiite. George’s father was a businessman, educated at Appleby school in England, and sufficiently prosperous to send his first two sons to his alma mater. George, the third son, first-born to his father’s second wife, would also have gone to Appleby if his father had not died when Gearge was only eleven. As it was, George’s formal education was brief and rudimentary. He was in fact among the least educated of all American presidents. The early influences on George’s life are difficult ta assess. What influence may have come from his father remains obscured by the ‘tantaiising absence of any reference to him in his son’s surviving correspondence. His mother was a selfcenrred nag who wrote him chiefly to ask for favors or to complain‘ Two much more positive influences were his half-brother Lawrence and Lawrence’s neighbor and father-in-law, Colonel William Fairfax. Each deserves more extended comment. Lawrence Washi~~on returned from school in England in 1738 when George was six. Two years later he won a commission as Captain in the ‘American Regiment’ recruited in the colonies to assist in the British attack upon the Spanish colonial port of Cartagena. The attack was a disastrous failure but important for our purposes because it engendered ar perhaps only deepened an in-group/out-group animosity between the British and the Americans. The American participants, stigmatised as ‘incomparably worse than the worst ofthe English’, were for the most part either impressed into the navy or used as laborers8 Less than ten percent ever returned home, Lawrence learned later that the Virginians had been accused of cowardice in reports to EngIand,g In the ten years which remained of his brief life after returning from Cartagena, Lawrence became the idol and the career-model for his younger ~alf~brother~ George, who in fact lived with him much of the time after their father’s death. Lawrence married the daughter of Colonel William Fairfax, a neighbor who was land agent for his cousin Lord Thomas Fairfax, owner of much of northern Virginia. The Colonel was also a member of the Council, an elite group which shared executive authority with the governor. With the Colonel’s assistance Lawrence became adjutant-general of the colony mihtia, president of an important venture in land speculation, the Ohio Company, and a member of the legislature, When Lawrence became seriously ill with tuberculosis, George accompanied him on a voyage to Barbados which failed, however, to restore Lawrence’s health, He died in 17X$ when George was just twenty, Colonel Fairfax and his family were also major influences in Was~i~gton~s

The Americanisation of George Washington

421

early life. The Colonel’s English-educated son, George William Fairfax, developed a friendship with George despite being seven years his senior. George became infatuated with George William’s wife Sally, who was two years older than he. Sally is in fact the only person for whom Washington ever expressed deep affection in his surviving correspondence. Colonel Fairfax appears to have become almost a foster father to George, as well as his patron. He helped George to get established as a surveyor and to acquire large land holdings at a very early age. He was behind George’s appointment at age twenty as adjutant-general for one of the four districts of the Virginia militia with the rank of major. Most important of all, it was he who informed George that the Government had received instruction to warn the French to get out of the Ohio valley. This information enabled Washington to volunteer for that mission before others knew of the opportunity. During George’s subsequent military career, the Colonel wrote him frequently with useful information and gentle guidance. When George’s heroism was the toast of the provincial elite, the Colonial mentioned to him how highly Roman leaders had valued such tributes.‘O Washington’s first military career, lasting only from 1753 to 1758 (ages 21 to 26), made his name known on both sides of the Atlantic and provided the background for his Americanisation. It began with his heroic journey to warn the French to leave the Ohio valley. Washington had to travel virtually alone in winter deep into the wilderness inhabited, if at all, by unfriendly Indians. He narrowly escaped an assassination effort and nearly drowned while trying to cross a river on a crude raft in frigid weather. His published account of these adventures was widely read for its diplomatic significance, but it served as heady personal publicity as well.” Then, commanding a small force sent to seize the site of modern Pittsburgh, Washington attacked a still smaller French force, killing ten and capturing twenty-one. This was the first bloodshed of the Seven Years War. The French would later claim that Washington had knowingly assassinated a French diplomat bent on negotiation. Washington’s account provides strong evidence, however, that the French mission was military, not diplomatic. For our purposes the significance is that Washington again received widespread publicity in circumstances tending to make the colonial populace view him as their hero unjustly accused.i2 Two less heroic developments followed Washington’s initial military triumph. First he was forced to surrender his Fort Necessity to a superior French force. Then the governor of Virginia, faced with a difficult conflict over command between Washington and British officers, chose to dissolve Virginia’s regiment into independent companies. With no troops to command, Lieutenant Colonel Washington resigned. Soon, however, Washington accepted the offer of a staff position with General Braddock whom the British had sent over with a small army to finish what Washington had started. Disdainful of Indians, both those who wanted to help him as well as those who opposed him, Braddock overconfidently blundered into an encounter in which his force of 1500 was badly mauled and he himself killed by a force of only 300 French and 600 Indians. Washington had four bullets through his clothing and had two horses shot from under him. Public opinion, both in England and in the colonies, castigated the Regulars for arrogance as well as

cowardice, while exalting the Americans for their practical way of fighting and for heroism, especially the Virginians. ” The prestige he gained in his encounter enabled ~~ashington to write his own terms for accepting command as full Colonel of a new Virginia regiment to defend the colony’s now vulnerable frontier. He was twenty-three. For the next three years he would strive mightily to protect frontier settlers from French and Indian raids until finally at the end of 1758 the British General John Forbes recaptured the site of what then became Pittsburgh. With peace restored to the frontier, Washington resigned again, but with at least the beginning of an American identity of which he had been largely unaware when he began his military career five years before. How had Washington’s incipient Americanisation come about? In my judgment each of the three sociopsychological endings referred to at the outset probably contributed to it. Let us look at some facts which appear to support that view. Even before his first clash with the French, Washington expressed outrage that his officers received less pay than did British officers of the same rank. It would, he wrote, ‘grate some Officers of this Regiment beyond ail measure to serve upon such different terms when their Lives, their Fortunes, and their Characters’ (i.e. reputations) were as much at risk as were those of men ‘happy enough to have King’s Commissions’.i4 Unequal rank grated even more harshly. British army regulations then provided that any British Captain outranked alf colonial officers of field grade. Washington~s most persistent annoyance on this score came from a farmer British captain who with a company of some thirty Maryland provincials successfully presumed to command Colonel Washington’s regiment of several hundred Virginians when they were in Maryland and to commandeer their supplies as well. fs ~~ash~ngton’s greatest frustration, however, arose from the British army’s refusal to grant commissions above company grade (i.e. captain) to American officers. A full colonel at twenty-three, Washington sought assiduously to win a field grade British commission or to have his regiment taken into the British army under his command. Despite endorsements from Virginia’s governor, the legislature, and other prominent provincials, the British refused. The matter climaxed in 1757 when, with much encouragement from men of high status, Washington took his request in person to the British commander, Lord Loudoun. Loudoun’s response was to send a third of Washington’s Virginia regiment to South Carolina and split up the rest among several frontier forts, while enhancing the role of the former British captain who had so h~miiiated the young coionel.f6 These are examples of discrimination in an official context which appear to have made the colonial people an out-group in the British perspective, but the phenomenon appeared in other contexts as well. None of the British officers with whom Washington associated was as blunt as General Wolfe, the captor of Quebec, who wrote that the Americans were ‘the dirtiest, most contemptible, cowardly dogs’.” Braddock, however, had approached that by insisting in warm disputes with Wash~n~on that the country, meaning the colonies in general, were ‘void of Honour and Honesty’.r8 Braddock’s defeat, as noted eariier, brought an outburst of writing on both sides of the Atlantic contrasting the British and

The Americanisation of George Washington

423

American approaches to fighting Indians, as well as the cowardice ofthe regulars and the bravery of the Americans. Thus Washington could hardly have been unaware of the tendency for the British and the Americans to emphasise how they differed from each other and to show ‘heightened bias’ as a result. The labelling phenomenon was slow to appear. The British were prone to use terms such as ‘provincials’ to refer to the people of the colonies, but the British army fostered use of the word ‘American’, most notably in creating the ‘Royal American Regiment’ and recruiting for it very widely in the colonies. While the Regiment’s enlisted men were expected to be almost entirely from the colonies, a vain expectation in the end, its officers were almost entirely European professionals. I9 Thus the army’s use of the term ‘American’, conferred not only a label but inferior status as well, a not infrequent concommitant of the labelling phenomenon. British frustration of Washington’s craving for recognition and esteem should be evident from these examples, but the American gratification of his ambition After the Braddock fiasco a friend wrote perhaps requires amplification. Washington from Philadelphia that his name was more talked of there than that of any other military man and suggested that he might do very well recruiting for was deathly ill in 1757 several his regiment in that city. 2o When Washington prominent people wrote him insisting that the interest of ‘the Country’ required him to recover.2L When he resigned after Forbes’ success, the Virginia legislature, of which he was then a member, passed a resolution of thanks to him personally, without reference to his regiment, for his services. Legend holds that he was so moved that he was unable to respond.22 But had he become American? Two steps were really required for Washington to become American. First he had to cast off British identity and loyalty. Washington never specifically repudiated British identity in this period, but it is striking that in contrast to the conventional affirmations by British officers of zeal to serve the king, Washington wrote on leaving to join Braddock that his ‘sole motive’ was to merit the ‘approbation and esteem’ of his country.23 Although he used ‘country’ vaguely, he never used it to mean Britain. Usually it meant his area of Virginia, Virginia itself, or Virginia and its neighboring provinces. On numerous other occasions he wrote that the purpose of his military service was to merit the esteem of his friends. There is a marked paucity of references to the king in his writings and the perfunctory nature of such references as he does make to his obligation to the monarch are strongly suggestive of alienation. The second step required to effect Americanisation was the subordination of provincial to American identity. Although Washington clearly retained strong identification with the province whose military forces he headed, it is most striking that in drafting a memorial to the governor on behalf of his officers he wrote: ‘We cannot conceive that being Americans shoud (sic) deprive us of the benefits of British Subjects; nor lessen our claim to preferment.. . .‘24 Thus in 1757 did George Washington profess American identity in a context which was seemingly entirely provincial. Still Washington’s American identity in 1757 was incipient, probably even tentative, not at all the full-blown expression we associate with nationalism and

424

Philip i.. White

nationalists, but it would grow to provide motivation for the most important American revolutionary leader of them all. My contention is that Washington’s Americanisation owed nothing to European ideas of nationalism which were still to be formed, that it owed little to ideas of the European Enlightenment of which he showed almost no awareness, that it bore little relationship to major theories of anti-colonial movements. I contend instead that the Americanisation of George Washington arose chiefly from sociopsychological factors such as the in-group/out-group distinction, the labelling phenomenon, and the tendency of people to become alienated from groups which frustrate their ambitions and give loyalty to groups which help them to achieve their personal goals. Philip

L. White

University of Texas at Austin

NOTES 1. Warren G. Stephen, ‘Intergroup Relations’ in Gardner Lindzey and E. Aronson (eds), Handbook of SocialPsychology, 3rd ed., Vol. II (New York, 1985), p. 614. This work will be cited hereafter as Handbook. 2. Dane Archer, ‘Social Deviance’ in Handbook II, pp. 743-804. See also Stephen, op. cit., pp. 599-658. 3. Richard L. Merritt, Symbols ofAmerican Community, 173%f775(New Haven, 1966) is the basic work on use of the term American, but I disagree with his statement (p. 156) that the ‘colonial wars postponed the emergence of national separateness in America.’ See also Fred Anderson, A People’s Army (New York, 1984) on how the Seven Years War influenced Massachusetts’ soldiers and Douglas E. Leach, Roots of Conjlict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans (Chappel Hill, 1986) who documents differences between British and American military personnel and concludes: ‘it is not difficult to discover in such firmly shaped impressions living seeds of revolution and separation’ (p. 166). 4. Kay Deaux and L.S. Wrightman, Social Psychofogy in the 80’s (4th ed., Monterey, 1984), p. 378. See also R.L. Moreland and J.M. Levine, ‘Socialization in small groups: Temporal changes in individual-group relations’ in L. Berkowitz (ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 1.5 (New York, 1982). 5. Gary Wills, C~ncinnatas: George Washington and the En~~g~tenme~t (New York, (1984), p. xxiv, suggests that Washington was influenced by ‘the Enlightenment conception of political heroism’. 6. Ibid., p. xxi. 7. Biographical facts which I have used come chiefly from D.S. Freeman, George Washington: Young Washington (2 vols., New York, 1948) James T. Flexner, George Washington: The Forge of Experience (Boston, 1965) and John E. Ferling, TheFirst of Men: A Lzfe of George Washington (Knoxville, 1988). 8. J.W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, II (London, 1910), p. 78. 9. J. Alfred Jones, ‘The American Regiment in the Carthagena Expedition’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, XXX (1922) pp. l-20. 10. W.W. Abbot ted.), ThePapers of George Washington, Coioniaf Series, III(Charlottesville, 1984), p. 56. This work will be cited hereafter as Abbot. Cf. Wills, note 5. 11. Donald Jackson (ed.), Diaries of George Washingtorz, I, 1748-1765, (Charlottesville, 1976) p. 149.

The Americanisation

of George

Washington

425

12. Flexner, pp. 173-174; Abbot I, pp. 110-111. 13. Paul E. Kopperman, Bruddock at the Monongahela (Pittsburgh, 1977) is the best account of this event. See also Abbot, I, pp. 331-333, 336-337. 14. Abbot, I, p. 130. See also p. 99. 15. Abbot, II, p. 294, passim. 16. Abbot, IV, p. 128. See also Washington’s memorial to Loudoun, pp. 120-121. 17. Beckler Willson (ed.), The Life and Letters of James Wove (London, 1909), p. 392. 18. Abbot, I, p. 299. 19. Stanley M. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (New Haven, 1933), pp. 27-34, 61-68, 86-87, 307-308 provides the basic facts on the complicated history of the Royal American Regiment and the role of anti-American prejudice among the high British officials who created it. See also Abbot, II, p. 292; III, p, 319; IV, p. 54. 20. Abbot, II, p, 115. 21. Abbot, V, pp. 64, 77 (George Mason), p. 81 (Stanwix). 22. The resolution is in Abbot, VI, p. 192. The legend appears in John C. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Writings of George Wa~h~~gt~n, II, 175’7-1769 (Washington, DC.. 1931), p. 318n. 23. Abbot, I, p. 253. 24. Abbot, IV, p. 113.