Washington”s experience had peculiarly fitted him to catch this
vision
Washington”s experience had peculiarly fitted him to catch this
vision. Fortune had turned him westward as he left his mother”s
knee. First as a surveyor for Lord Fairfax in the Shenandoah
Valley and later, under Braddock and Forbes, in the armies
fighting for the Ohio against the French he had come to know the
interior as it was known by no other man of his standing. His own
landed property lay largely along the upper Potomac and in and
beyond the Alleghanies. Washington”s interest in this property
was very real. Those who attempt to explain his early concern
with the West as purely altruistic must misread his numerous
letters and diaries. Nothing in his unofficial character shows
more plainly than his business enterprise and acumen. On one
occasion he wrote to his agent, Crawford, concerning a proposed
land speculation: ‘I recommend that you keep this whole matter a
secret or trust it only to those in whom you can confide. If the
scheme I am now proposing to you were known, it might give alarm
to others, and by putting them on a plan of the same nature,
before we could lay a proper foundation for success ourselves,
set the different interests clashing and in the end overturn the
whole.’ Nor can it be denied that Washington”s attitude to the
commercial development of the West was characterized in his early
days by a narrow colonial partisanship. He was a stout Virginian;
and all stout Virginians of that day refused to admit the
pretensions of other colonies to the land beyond the mountains.
But from no man could the shackles of self-interest and
provincial rivalry drop more quickly than they dropped from
Washington when he found his country free after the close of the
Revolutionary War. He then began to consider how that country
might grow and prosper. And he began to preach the new doctrine
of expansion and unity. This new doctrine first appears in a
letter which he wrote to the Marquis de Chastellux in 1783, after
a tour from his camp at Newburg into central New York, where he
had explored the headwaters of the Mohawk and the Susquehanna: ‘I
could not help taking a more extensive view of the vast inland
navigation of these United States [the letter runs] and could not
but be struck by the immense extent and importance of it, and of
the goodness of that Providence which has dealt its favors to us
with so profuse a hand. Would to God we may have wisdom enough to
improve them. I shall not rest contented till I have explored the
Western country, and traversed those lines, or great part of
them, which have given bounds to a new empire.’
