had been trained in self-reliance, for he had
been fatherless from childhood. At the age of sixteen he was working at
the profession, largely self-taught, of a surveyor of land. At the age
of twenty-seven he married Martha Custis, a rich widow with children,
though her marriage with Washington was childless. His estate on the
Potomac River, three hundred miles from the open sea, recently named
Mount Vernon, had been in the family for nearly a hundred years.
There were twenty-five hundred acres at Mount Vernon with ten miles of
frontage on the tidal river. The Virginia planters were a landowning
gentry; when Washington died he had more than sixty thousand acres. The
growing of tobacco, the one vital industry of the Virginia of the time,
with its half million people, was connected with the ownership of land.
On their great estates the planters lived remote, with a mail perhaps
every fortnight. There were no large towns, no great factories. Nearly
half of the population consisted of negro slaves. It is one of the
ironies of history that the chief leader in a war marked by a passion
for liberty was a member of a society in which, as another of its
members, Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, said,
there was on the one hand the most insulting despotism and on the
other the most degrading submission. The Virginian landowners were more
absolute masters than the proudest lords of medieval England. These
feudal lords had serfs on their land. The serfs were attached to
the soil and were sold to a new master with the soil. They were not,
however, property, without human rights. On the other hand, the slaves
of the Virginian master were property like his horses. They could not
even call wife and children their own, for these might be sold at will.
It arouses a strange emotion now when we find Washington offering to
exchange a negro for hogsheads of molasses and rum and writing that the
man would bring a good price, "if kept clean and trim'd up a little when
offered for sale."

In early life Washington had had very little of formal education. He
knew no language but English. When he became world famous and his friend
La Fayette urged him to visit France he refused because he would
seem uncouth if unable to speak the French tongue. Like another great
soldier, the Duke of Wellington, he was always careful about his dress.
There was in him a silent pride which would brook nothing derogatory
to his dignity. No one