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."