A Year With George Washington
January 28th,1752 – 19-year-old George Washington meets with Lt. Governor Robert Dinwiddie for the first time in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Newly recovered from his bout with smallpox and home from a trip to Barbados with his older half-brother Lawrence, nineteen-year-old George Washington was tasked with delivering reports of their Caribbean excursion to Lt. Governor Robert Dinwiddie. Neither of them knew it at the time, but the tandem would soon set the world ablaze, igniting a war that would span the globe.
Though technically inferior in rank to the duly appointed governor, Dinwiddie exercised full authority over the colony in the governor’s perpetual absence. He only served as the de facto governor for seven years, 1751 to 1758, all of which coincided with Washington’s early and formative adulthood.
Born in 1692, Dinwiddie was approaching sixty at their first meeting. His portrait, by an unknown artist, shows a serious man, tight-lipped and with close-set eyes. His wig is perfectly quaffed. His simple yet rich clothing is tight-fitting around a rounded torso, in keeping with the well-proportioned life of an aristocrat. He looks like a man accustomed to getting what he wants and one who would brook no argument.
After matriculating from the University of Glasgow in 1707, Dinwiddie joined the British Colonial Service in 1727 and became the customs collector of Bermuda. Before being appointed Lt. Governor of Virginia, he served as Surveyor General of Customs for Southern American ports.
Dinwiddie became a sort of mentor to young Washington, especially after Lawrence, who was Washington’s elder by fourteen years, fell ill with Tuberculosis and died not long after his and Washington’s return from Barbados.
A stockholder in the Ohio Company, along with Lawrence and another of Washington’s brothers, Dinwiddie, used his authority as governor to protect his and the others’ investment. The Ohio Company was a land speculation entity organized to provide settlement opportunities for Virginians and block French expansion into the Ohio Valley. The French had recently begun building forts in the Ohio Valley, a direct threat to the Ohio Company’s charter.
Following Lawrence’s death in July of 1752, George, just twenty years old, assumed Lawrence’s title of Adjutant General of James River County, Virginia, Northern Neck. This appointment bound Washington’s fortunes with those of Governor Dinwiddie. It was not long before the governor called on Washington in his new capacity to deliver a letter to the French demanding that they vacate the Ohio Valley.
A year and a half later, in December 1753, at the direction of Governor Robert Dinwiddie, Twenty-one-year old Major George Washington would begin his military career and set the stage for the conflict that would eventually lead to the American War of Independence.
