II.

Early Life

George Washington was born on his father’s estate in Westmoreland County, Virginia, on February 22, 1732. He was the eldest son of a well-to-do Virginia farmer, Augustine Washington, by his second wife, Mary Ball. The Washington family was descended from two brothers, John and Lawrence Washington, who emigrated from England to Virginia in 1657. The family’s rise to modest wealth in three generations was the result of steady application to farming, land buying, and development of local industries.

Young George seems to have received most of his schooling from his father and, after the father’s death in 1743, from his elder half-brother Lawrence. The boy had a liking for mathematics, and he applied it to acquiring a knowledge of surveying, which was a skill greatly in demand in a country where people were seeking new lands in the West. For the Virginians of that time the West meant chiefly the upper Ohio River valley. Throughout his life, George Washington maintained a keen interest in the development of these western lands, and from time to time he acquired properties there.

George grew up a tall, strong young man, who excelled in outdoor pursuits, liked music and theatrical performances, and was a trifle awkward with girls but fond of dancing. His driving force was the ambition to gain wealth and eminence and to do well whatever he set his hand to.

His first real adventure as a boy was accompanying a surveying party to the Shenandoah Valley of northern Virginia and descending the Shenandoah River by canoe. An earlier suggestion that he should be sent to sea seems to have been discouraged by his uncle Joseph Ball, who described the prospects of an unknown colonial youth in the British Navy of that day as such that “he had better be put apprentice to a tinker.”When he was 17 he was appointed surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia, the first public office he held.

In 1751 George had his first and only experience of foreign lands when he accompanied his half-brother Lawrence to the island of Barbados in the West Indies. Lawrence was desperately ill with tuberculosis and thought the climate might help, but the trip did him little good. Moreover, George was stricken with smallpox. He bore the scars from the disease for the rest of his life. Fortunately this experience gave him immunity to the disease, which was later to decimate colonial troops during the American Revolution.