His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis Page B

be witheld from him with injustice.” And since Hillsborough’s decision was, as he put it, “founded equally in Malice, absurdity, & error,” Washington felt no obligation to obey it. As far as the American West was concerned, he was already declaring his independence. 33
    A LAST RESORT
    I F ONE were searching for early glimmerings of a broader belief in American independence, Washington’s remarks about the Stamp Act—a clear and unequivocal denial of Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies without their consent—might be offered up as evidence of his prescient premonitions as early as 1765. Such selective readings distort the larger pattern, however, which suggests that neither Washington nor any other colonist was thinking seriously about seceding from the British Empire at this early stage. Washington expressed his relief that the British government had come to its senses, in part because of pressure from merchants like Robert Cary, and repealed the Stamp Act in 1766. He seemed unconcerned about the lingering constitutional question of Parliament’s authority, presumably believing that as long as it remained theoretical it could and would be completely ignored. “All therefore who were instrumental in procuring the repeal,” he wrote Cary, “are entitled to the Thanks of every British Subject.” He still considered himself such a creature. The wave, it seemed, had passed safely under the ship. 34
    For the next three years, from 1766 to 1769, Washington’s mind remained focused on more proximate and pressing problems: cultivating his new wheat crop; worrying about Patsy’s health; lobbying in Williamsburg for the “bounty lands” in the Ohio Country. He was not even present at the session of the House of Burgesses in April 1768 when the delegates protested the Townshend Act, a clever (ultimately too clever) measure imposing new duties on colonial imports which the British ministry claimed were not, strictly speaking, taxes. Over the next year, he did not participate in the public debate that raged in Virginia and that produced non-importation schemes in Massachusetts and New York. 35
    Then, in April 1769, he entered the debate in a major and quite distinctive way. In a letter to George Mason, his neighbor down the road at Gunston Hall, Washington began to use the language of a prospective revolutionary: “At a time when our Lordly Masters in Great Britain will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprevation of American freedom,” he wrote, “it seems highly necessary that something shou’d be done to avert the stroke and maintain the liberty which we have derived from our Ancestors.” Petitions and remonstrances to the king or Parliament, he believed, were ineffectual. They had been tried before without success. And their plaintive character irritated Washington, because it seemed to reinforce the sense of subordination and subservience the colonists were protesting against and that he found so personally offensive. The only sensible course, he argued, was a comprehensive program of non-importation that, “by starving their Trade & manufacturers,” would exert pressure on the British government to alter its course, as it had done after the Stamp Act. But if the “Lordly masters in Great Britain” persisted in their imperious policies—and here, for the first time, Washington did glimpse the future—then the two sides were on a collision course that could only end in war, which he called “a dernier resort.”
    Then he added a revealing corollary, very much rooted in his own experience with Cary & Company:
That many families are reduced almost, if not quite, to penury & want, from the low ebb of their fortunes, and Estates selling for the discharge of Debts, the public papers furnish but too many melancholy proofs of. And that a scheme of this sort [i.e., non-importation] will contribute more effectually than any other I can devise to immerge [remove?] the Country from the distress it at