Bunker Hill

have impressed his fellow delegates at the Continental Congress as “sober, steady, and calm,” but as the painter Gilbert Stuart came to recognize, lurking beneath Washington’s deceptively placid exterior were “the strongest and most ungovernable passions.” “Had he been born in the forest,” the painter claimed, “he would have been the fiercest man among the savage tribes.”
    Washington, forty-three, with reddish hair and fair skin that burned in the sun, had assumed his duties as commander in chief with reluctance. Within weeks of his arrival in Boston, however, he had decided that he must end the siege with one dramatic stroke. Unaware of the enemy’s decision to evacuate, he was determined to destroy the British army before it had another opportunity to venture out of Boston. Washington was perfectly aware of the consequences of such a decision. By attacking the city itself, he would, in all likelihood, consign Boston to the flames.
    Against all odds, Boston had so far endured. What remained to be seen was whether she would survive George Washington.
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    Even though they were an old and prominent family, the Washingtons were not rich enough to be considered genuine Virginia aristocracy. Washington’s father had died when he was eleven. The teenager’s best hope for achieving the social standing he craved was in the military, and in 1754, at the age of twenty-two, he was sent into the wilderness of modern western Pennsylvania to retake the fort at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers that the French had seized from the British and renamed Fort Duquesne. With the help of a group of Iroquois warriors led by Tanacharison, also known as the Half-King, Washington’s band of approximately forty soldiers attacked a smaller detachment of French. What happened next will never be completely known, in large part because Washington did his best to downplay the brutal horror of the encounter. It seems likely that despite their best efforts to surrender, the French, who claimed to be on a diplomatic mission, were slaughtered by Washington’s combined Indian and English force. According to one account, Washington was attempting to communicate with the enemy’s wounded leader Jumonville when Tanacharison clove the Frenchman’s skull in two with a tomahawk and proceeded to wash his hands in Jumonville’s mangled brains.
    Washington later tried to depict the encounter as a kind of backwoods brawl. In truth, he had lost control of a situation that ultimately sparked the beginning of the French and Indian War. Several weeks later, by which time Washington’s native allies had abandoned him, the roles were reversed when the Virginians, now holed up at the Great Meadows, several miles from the skirmish scene in what Washington called Fort Necessity, were attacked by a large French force led by Jumonville’s brother. By nightfall, close to a third of Washington’s men were killed or wounded. Convinced that they were about to be massacred, the remnants of Washington’s force broke open the rum supply and proceeded to drink themselves into oblivion. Luckily, the French leader allowed the English to surrender the next morning on the condition that they not return to the region for a year. Somehow Washington survived this catastrophe with his reputation intact (a talent he would display throughout his life), and the following year he found himself in the midst of yet another slaughter when he and a young British officer named Thomas Gage were part of General Braddock’s disastrous attempt to take Fort Duquesne in 1755.
    What remained of the first phase of Washington’s military career was devoted to righting the wrongs committed during this bloody baptism in the wilds of western Pennsylvania. Disgusted with the inadequacies of the undisciplined colonial militia, he wanted, more than anything else, an officer’s commission in the British army. The British army, however, did not want him, and in the years after the failed Braddock Expedition, he did his best to create his own provincial version of the regular army.
    In 1755, Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie named Washington colonel of the Virginia Regiment. It was an unparalleled opportunity for an aspiring twenty-three-year-old American officer—a chance to organize a group of a thousand full-time soldiers, their salaries paid by the colony. Washington proved to be a tough disciplinarian, whipping malcontents and hanging deserters at a rate