The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers Read Online Free Page B

the old gentleman.” To some extent these obligations extended to George William Fairfax. He had befriended George, the teenage country bumpkin, as Lawrence’s brother, and their relationship had remained close for the previous decade. There is not a hint in any of Washington’s letters of a change in opinion or attitude, even when he emerged as Virginia’s most notable military leader.
    In fact, it can be argued with some force that this role of military hero only made the possibility of George realizing his desire for Sally Cary Fairfax more remote. In a sense George had become the man Lawrence might have been—and that only intensified his sense of obligation to the Fairfaxes. Honor was the brightest word in Lawrence Washington’s vocabulary—a beacon that both guarded and guided his conduct. The thought of doing something that Lawrence would have judged grossly dishonorable was a more than believable reason why George chained his desire deepwithin himself. It was another lesson in the harsh school of self-control in which destiny seemed to be matriculating him.
    This does not mean that George Washington was inhibited by puritanical views of sexual conduct. Puritanism was almost as foreign to eighteenth-century Virginia as Mohammedanism. Life on the frontier was by no means devoid of women. Every eighteenth-century army had “camp women” who were married or pretended to be married to soldiers and followed them into the war zone. One of his officers wrote to Washington while he was home on leave, wondering if he was “plunged in delight…& enchanted by charms even stranger to the Ciprian Dame.” A Ciprian Dame was an available woman, sometimes a prostitute. Another officer wrote him from South Carolina, telling him that the local women lacked “the enticing heaving throbbing alluring…plump breasts common with our northern belles.” Such letters have enabled some writers to imagine a blazing covert affair between Sally and George that lasted months or even years. 21
    Far stronger is evidence that suggests Washington struggled to put Sally out of his mind and future. George pursued several other women, notably strong-willed Mary Philipse, heiress to a swath of the Hudson River Valley. But his efforts were halfhearted—proof, it might seem, either of his longing for Sally or of Mary’s temperamental resemblance to Mary Ball Washington. This was the situation in March 1758 when the ailing bachelor, still convinced that he was in his final days, mounted his horse and rode slowly to Williamsburg to see Dr. John Anson, the best physician in Virginia, hoping against hope that this medico might have a cure but fearing that he would deliver a death sentence. Before he departed, George told his British superior on the frontier, Colonel John Stanwix, that he had “ruined [my] constitution” and was thinking of “quitting my command.” He was convinced that he had tuberculosis and foresaw little but “approaching decay.” 22
    To Washington’s amazement and delight, Dr. Anson assured him that he was recovering nicely and had prospects of living to a vigorous old age. The reincarnated patient strode into Williamsburg’s spring sunshine and began thinking about what to do with the rest of his life. One of his first thoughts was marriage. The sequence inclines this writer to wonder if during the long winter of his illness, he and Sally had not told each other—or at least hinted—that they realized their love had no future.Another scenario, perhaps more likely, has Washington reaching this glum but unavoidable conclusion during the long, lonely night hours in his sickbed.
    Realistically, in 1758 Virginia, there was no way that Colonel George Washington could marry Sally Cary Fairfax. It would have triggered an immense scandal that would have made them both social outcasts. A clandestine affair could easily have led to the same result. Either way, Washington would have exposed himself to a ruinous lawsuit from her