And asking
my readers to travel over one of those well-worn trails again, I can offer
no better reason than that I may on the way call attention to objects and
outlooks that should be of special interest to the eyes of a company of
men and women whose geographical or racial ancestors gave us him in giving
us the west.
Washington was born a British colonist. His great-grandfather settled in
Virginia at about the time that La Salle was making his way up the St.
Lawrence to the seigniory of St. Sulpice above the Lachine Rapids. His
father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were frontiersmen, farmers, or
planters. He had himself the discipline of the plantation, but he learned
surveying and had also the sterner experiences of its frontier practice.
Then came his appointment at nineteen as an adjutant-general of colonial
militia in Virginia and with that office the still sterner disciplines
beyond the frontier, where France was tutor, without which tuition he
would doubtless have become and remained a successful colonial Virginia
planter and general of militia.
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