CHAPTER 1

Barbados

Was strongly attacked with the small Pox.

It was by a hair's breadth that George Washingtonwas ever born. Augustine Washington's secondwife, Mary Ball, was pregnant with her first childwhen at a dinner party at the Washington farmhouse oneSunday afternoon after church, an incredible, very tragicincident occurred. Thunder rolled and lightning zig-zagged theskies as one of the familiar summer storms arrived over thefarm at Pope's Creek. Biographer Willard Randall hasdescribed how a bolt "struck the house and traveled down thechimney and hit a young girl who was visiting theWashingtons for Sunday dinner." The poor girl "diedinstantly." According to Randall, the electric current was "sostrong it fused the knife and fork she was using to cut hermeat." As Washington's mother-to-be was "sitting only a fewfeet away," she naturally felt the shock and was "severelyjolted." It was a close call for the as yet unborn GeorgeWashington. It has to be counted as the first of many.

Although the family was not in fear for their lives, theFerry Farm was largely destroyed by fire on Christmas Eve,when little George was not yet eight years old. It was at aboutthis time that George's younger sister Mildred died in infancy,just short of her first birthday. And it was not three years laterthat his father died. The farm was left to George.

But all in all, it can be said that George Washington inhis early childhood experienced a fairly quiet, safe life in hisnative Virginia. His was a wealthy, sophisticated plantationfamily. He experienced, so far as is known, no terribly closeencounters with the Grim Reaper during his early years. Hemay have suffered a brief bout with diptheria, and he mayhave even been afflicted by the childhood measles, as he laterhad chances to contract that disease and did not. He may havehad the mumps. At age sixteen, while on the surveyingmission for Lord Fairfax, there was the "Ague and Feaver"(malaria), which, as he remembered, "I had to an extremity."Malaria of course had to be taken seriously. Indeed (as notedabove), when Washington was but a toddler, his half-sisterJane (who was ten, orperhaps twelve, years old)had been lost to a "fevercontracted in theTidewater swamps,"surely malaria. And as ifa malaria mosquito is notenough for the sixteen-year-oldWashington,toward the end of thatearly surveyingexpedition, the pallet ofstraw upon which the ladwas sleeping somehowbecame ignited. Happily,a fellow surveyor awokein time to extinguish theflames. So there were troubles enough, but GeorgeWashington was in fact nineteen years old before his life wasseriously imperiled.

Washington departed from the region that is now theUnited States only once in his sixty-seven years. This was in1751, when he was nineteen years old, when with his half-brotherLawrence he sailed to Barbados. George was veryfond of the much older Lawrence, and the two had grownquite close, very much enjoying their riding together over thebeautiful Virginia countryside.

Lawrence was actually fourteen years older thanGeorge. He was the son of Augustine Washington by his firstwife, Jane Butler. When he was only eleven years old,Lawrence (and later his brother Augustine, Jr.) was deliveredby his father to the Appleby Grammar School, CountyWestmoreland in Old England. When the lad returned toVirginia some eight years later, at age twenty, his education"complete," it was to find he had a six-year-old half-brothernamed George, his father having remarried after the death ofLawrence's mother.

On July 10, 1740, Lawrence, now twenty-two yearsold, was by the Governor of Virginia, William Gooch, giventhe senior commission as Captain of one of Virginia's fourcompanies of soldiers. For the next two years he was quiteactive in the English military expeditions against the seaportof Castagna, New Granada (now Columbia), and against bothCuba and Panama. In his last battle he participated in theBritish landing at Guatanamo. Miraculously, especially as thetroops were devastated by yellow fever, he survived all ofthese experiences.

In 1742, having returned to Virginia, Lawrence wasplaced in charge of his father's 2000-acre plantation along thePotomac River, and five years later was married to the eldestdaughter of the prominent landowner Colonel WilliamFairfax. Anne Fairfax was fifteen years old; Lawrence wastwenty-five, a very common disparity in those years.

The year after his marriage Lawrence was elected toVirginia's House of Burgesses and became a member of theambitious Ohio Company of Virginia. He was the primemover in the founding of a wholly new town on the Potomac,which was named Alexandria. But his health by this time hadturned "bad," and he hurried off to London to consultphysicians. From time to time (as in the winter of 1750) youngGeorge had accompanied Lawrence, of whom he was mostfond, to the resort of warm baths in the region now known asBerkeley Springs, West Virginia. But because his health wasnot improving, Lawrence elected to journey to Barbados,which island (in spite of the fact that both tuberculosis andsmallpox were rampant there) had somehow acquired areputation for a health-improving climate. The island wasconsidered a "cure for the vapours."

Barbados had been under Portuguese rule and thenSpanish, but the English had taken over the island and hadoccupied it since 1625. Lawrence had learned a little of thehistory of the island, and he certainly had heard enough fromthe Fairfax family to know that it was a gorgeous spot. Ofcourse the island had been a slave society through both theSpanish and the Portuguese rule. Through all of this time theslaves worked the sprawling plantations, which producedtobacco and cotton, and later on sugar. The Barbados wasthen, and it...