This contains spoilers for the movie “Young Washington.”
It’s not every day that a movie gets made about a Virginian, but now Hollywood has made one, so let’s take a look at “Young Washington,” which premiered over the weekend.
As the name suggests, the movie is about the young George Washington, specifically focusing on his formative experiences in the early days of the French and Indian War.
That’s a period that often gets short shrift in our telling of history in Virginia, in favor of an emphasis on Virginia’s role in the American Revolution — even though the seeds of that revolution were planted in the war that preceded it.
As Americans, we are most familiar with an older George Washington — the image of the white-haired man on our dollar bills and quarters. In his youth, though, Washington was very much an action figure, known for his physical prowess (even if he didn’t really throw a silver dollar across the Potomac). It was those qualities that helped put Washington into the center of action during the French and Indian War, and those exploits that later vaulted him to the leadership of the Continental Army in 1775.
The movie brings star power: Kelsey Grammer as Lord Fairfax, Ben Kingsley as Gov. Robert Dinwiddie, Mary Louise Parker as Mary Washington and Andy Serkis (who was “Gollum” in “The Lord of the Rings”) as Gen. Edward Braddock.
How accurate is this movie’s portrayal of Washington? Broadly speaking, “Young Washington” is true to the big facts but, like many biopics, sometimes rearranges pesky details to fit the cinematic storytelling. We get a sense of that early on in the film when there’s a scene that we’re told takes place in King George County — except the landscape is shown as mountainous. As Virginians know, there are no mountains in King George County. This is Hollywood at work, or, more accurately, Hollywood on location: This may be a film about America’s central icon, but it was mostly made outside the United States. Most of the movie was shot in Ireland, with post-production work in Canada.
For those who care about the details: The movie has Washington’s older half-brother, Lawrence Washington, die sooner than he really did. It has Washington resign his commission for different reasons than in real life. It shows Washington being smitten with Sally Cary. In fact, she was married at age 13, and their flirtatious relationship took place after she became Sally Fairfax. “Flirtatious,” by the way, is the word the Library of Congress itself uses to describe the letters that young George Washington wrote to a married woman. The timing of their eyebrow-raising correspondence might be a little inconvenient for some hagiographic storytelling.
There have certainly been worse offenses when it comes to Hollywood telling stories about historical figures.
The main themes of the movie are quite true.
Washington had a tenuous place in Virginia society. Had his father, Augustine “Gus” Washington, lived, George might have been sent off to school in England the way Gus Washington’s other sons had been. Members of the Virginia gentry then aspired to be proper Englishmen. Gus Washington’s death at age 49 changed George’s career trajectory. His older half-brother, Lawrence, inherited most of the property. As the son of Gus Washington’s second wife, 11-year-old George was left with relatively little. “It was more than many Virginians owned, but placed him at the low end of the gentry,” writes historian David Stewart in his biography of Washington. “The family’s horizons shrank. No more Washingtons attended school in England.” Washington would not become wealthy until adulthood, when he married the wealthiest widow in Virginia. Even then, he was always conscious that his wealth came from his wife and that Mount Vernon came to him only because his half-brother’s widow had remarried and moved elsewhere. At first, he was simply there as a tenant on a lease.
The movie does a good job of showing young Washington shuffling about at the edge of Virginia’s high society, trying to find a place for himself. Washington very much wanted to be a British military officer and was always denied that opportunity. The British never thought much of American colonials, a mindset that the French and Indian War did not change and which later led the British to disaster during the American Revolution. That dismissive viewpoint stymied Washington’s great ambition early on, although it also opened the way for his ascension later.
The movie also does a good job depicting the geopolitics of North America in the 1750s: Three different powers wanted to possess the vast lands west of the Alleghanies known as the Ohio territory: the British pushing west from the seaboard, the French pushing south from modern-day Canada and the indigenous tribes who already lived there. To its credit, the movie shows the natives as a politically astute people trying to maneuver as best they could between what they regarded as two rival invaders. This reflects one of the themes in “Forced Founders,” a book by the prize-winning Revolutionary War historian Woody Holton (and son of the former Virginia Gov. Linwood Holton). What the movie doesn’t do — and maybe can’t do within the constraints of time — is explain just why many native tribes eventually aligned themselves with the French rather than the British. That’s because the French generally treated the native tribes better, and often intermarried, while the British response (and later the American response) was more inclined toward extermination or eviction.
What’s beyond the scope of this movie (but might still be of interest to Virginia viewers) is how Virginians of the 1700s regarded the Ohio territory as Virginia territory. In time, the leading members of Virginia society — which by then included Washington — came to own land in the Ohio country. They wanted to sell it as real estate speculators; those lower on the social scale often wanted to buy that land. This was something that united two disparate economic classes in Virginia and turned them so aggressively against British rule: After the French and Indian War, the British wanted to hold down military costs and issued the Proclamation of 1763 that forbade settlement beyond a certain point. Then in 1774, the British transferred the administration of the Ohio country to French-speaking Quebec. For Virginians who had fought in the French and Indian War, and felt they were entitled to some of those western lands, these two actions went well beyond the philosophy of “no taxation without representation”; they seemed personal. This was London denying the Virginians what they felt was their rightful opportunity. That was almost the same to them as if the French had won the French and Indian War. The Virginian Richard Henry Lee, who introduced the resolution that led to independence, considered the Quebec Act “the worst grievance” of many against the British. We’re getting ahead of the story, though. (If you want more on some of those stories, see our Cardinal 250 project that is telling the story of Virginia’s role in independence. We have stories on the Proclamation of 1763, the Quebec Act and many others.)
This movie is not all hero worship. On the contrary, it shows Washington’s greatest blunders. He led the Virginia militia to a defeat, and surrender, in what is now western Pennsylvania. Perhaps if his father hadn’t died, he’d have been sent off to be schooled in England and learned French — in which case he’d have understood that the paper he was signing admitted blame in the killing of a French officer. Of course, if his father hadn’t died, and Washington had gotten a formal English schooling, maybe he wouldn’t have sought advancement through the military.
One lesson from Washington’s life is that he learned from his mistakes and never made the same one twice. The movie glosses over some of the nuance: It shows Washington on better terms with the natives than he was. Tanaghrisson — the “Half-King” — complained that Washington tried to command the natives “as his slaves” and that’s why they abandoned him. Slavery is a topic that the movie touches on, but oh so very lightly.
The movie correctly shows Gov. Robert Dinwiddie being unhappy with Washington for the debacle at Fort Necessity but doesn’t show that Dinwiddie was both worried about some of that blame falling on him — he had “sent [Washington] off with not enough men or support, hoping to stitch together a victory from stray units cobbled together at the last moment,” the historian Stewart writes. Nor does it show that Dinwiddie was secretly thrilled by the military clash, no matter which way it went. “He had wanted a war over the Ohio valley,” Stewart writes. “After Fort Necessity, he had one.”
The movie, though, does show one key point: “Half-starved, largely stranded in difficult country, and surrounded by enemies, the officers and men had followed Washington,” Stewart writes. “He had the precognitive gift of command, a gift rooted in the way he walked and held himself, his gestures, how he spoke and connected with people.”
The British responded to the defeat at Fort Necessity by sending in the regulars, under Gen. Edward Braddock. Washington wrangled a position as an aide based on the argument that he knew the territory. Braddock ignored Washington’s warnings about how difficult the terrain would be and was ambushed on his way to modern-day Pittsburgh one July day in 1755. The movie’s most preposterous scenes — Washington’s exploits during that battle — are mostly true. The movie does kill off Braddock more quickly than the French did, and incorrectly says he didn’t order a retreat. He did. The movie shows a dying Braddock giving his ceremonial sash to Washington; that happened, but not until after the battle, not as a way to let soldiers know that Washington now spoke for him.
In his biography of Washington (“George Washington: The Political Rise of America’s Founding Father”), Stewart writes that “one myth died on July 9, 1755, and another was born.” The myth that died was the superiority of the British military, especially when led by professionals from European battlefields and not colonial rustics. Braddock was the epitome of a British professional officer, yet he led his men into a slaughter while the colonial Washington helped lead them out. “The myth that stirred to life,” Stewart writes, “was of the hero Washington, a stranger to fear, blessed by the gods. He had dashed from Braddock’s side and back, delivering orders through hours of blistering gunfire, his life in danger every moment. He was the tallest man on the field, on horseback, unmistakable to friend and foe. A horse was killed beneath him and another wounded. Each time he recounted. A bullet pierced his hat. Others went through his clothes. Not one touched his flesh. As each aide to Braddock fell, Washington kept on.”
There may really have been a native leader at the battle who watched Washington in awe and spoke of him being protected by divine intervention, although it may not have been the words cited in the movie or as told years later by one of the battle’s survivors: “The Great Spirit protects that man and guides his destinies — he will become the chief of nations and a people yet unborn will hail him as the founder of a mighty empire.”
We have a long history of embellishing good stories, and there’s definitely some embellishment around Washington, but the essence of “Young Washington” is true, and that’s more than we get a lot of times these days.
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