The Dangerous Book of Heroes Read Free Page A

combined effort to prevent the loss of any more of their land. From this conflict comes the story that General Amherst gave blankets used by smallpox patients as gifts to Native Americans, in a deliberate attempt to infect them. However, smallpox was then endemic in North America, as it was in Europe and Britain, and the cause and transmission of the disease was not known.
    In a response to Pontiac’s rebellion and the southern negotiations, the Royal Proclamation of October 1763 banned further British settlement or purchase of Native American territory, effectively the land west of the Appalachian Mountains. Many colonialists were unhappy with these terms.
    George Washington, meanwhile, lived the life of an English gentleman farmer, which was exactly what he was. He rode to hounds, watched cockfights, bred horses and livestock, took snuff, smoked a pipe, drank punch and Madeira wine, played billiards, and gambledat cards. He patronized the theater, concerts, and balls when in town, ordered his clothes from London, and hosted house parties, picnics, and barbecues at an extended Mount Vernon. In turn, he and Martha were invited to visit other influential Virginian plantations. He bought more and yet more land and employed thirteen house servants to look after his mansion.
    To pay for it all, he exported tobacco to the free-market London tobacco exchange. His leaf, though, was still only mediocre. Like many others living an expansive lifestyle, he found himself accruing debt as tobacco prices fell in the postwar economic depression. Thomas Jefferson was another of the plantation owners who indebted themselves, from the falling value of their crop and by living beyond their means. Washington decided to diversify.
    He replaced much of his tobacco with wheat and, by using and letting his own mill, smithy, kilns, and cider presses, tried to make the combined estates self-sufficient. His overseers were instructed to “buy nothing you can make yourselves.” He even expanded into coastal fishing, salting the catch for sale and for food for his slaves. Despite all this, it was only the inheritance from his stepdaughter’s death in 1773 that allowed him to clear his debts.
    By 1775 he had doubled the size of Mount Vernon to sixty-five hundred acres and had more than a hundred slaves. Yet Washington still coveted the Native American territories west of the Appalachians, the lands he had visited and admired as a surveyor and soldier. Like many colonials he resented the 1763 proclamation, despite the 1768 and 1771 modifications in which Native American chiefs conceded settlement along the Ohio Valley from Fort Pitt to the Kentucky River.
    Washington confided to a business associate: “I can never look upon that Proclamation in any other light (but I say this between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians.” He was a member of both the Ohio and the Mississippi Companies investing in this territory. More land meant more wealth through crops, speculation, mortgages, and credit.
    As a result of the Seven Years’ War the British government had the largest national debt in its history, £146 million. It had secured North America and the Caribbean from French control, as well as a lasting peace with Native Americans. That three-year conflict had been fought from Niagara to Virginia solely by the British army, with only four of the thirteen colonies assisting in a minor way. Parliament thought that the colonies should pay a share of the cost of these wars, which, after all, had been started by the massacre at Jumonville’s Glen. At the time, those in Britain liable to taxation were levied an average of eighteen pounds a year, those in the colonies, eighteen shillings a year.
    Acts authorizing taxes such as the stamp tax, the quartering tax, and tea tax were introduced. Some were repealed after protest, but all led to discontent. “No taxation without representation” was