It is fairly safe to say that he was born in Westmoreland County on a plantation bordered by Pope's Creek on one side and Bridges' Creek on the other. Many years after his father moved away, the plantation was given the name of Wakefield. Consequently, during his lifetime Washington was said to have been born at Pope's Creek or at Bridges' Creek; while later works say that he was born at Wakefield. They were all the same place.

The plantation of Washington's nativity was a mile wide, comprising a thousand acres of fine wood and bottom land; the house faced the Potomac, the lawn sloping to the bank. The river loafed along three or four hundred yards from the porch, and doubtless kept the mother and the baby's black mammy fluttering like hens to prevent their duckling from entering the water before he could swim.

The house burned down in 1779,3 and no picture of it was ever made. A monument stands there now, an obelisk like a miniature of the great shaft in Washington City. Owing to a blunder, the monument was set over what was probably an outhouse.

In order to get everything wrong, we celebrate Washington's birthday on the twenty-second of February, instead of the eleventh. Wise men had long known the inaccuracy of the popular opinion that a year is always 365 days long, and, as far back as 1582, Pope Gregory had lent his authority to a revision of the old calendar. But antiCatholic England did not accept the Gregorian correction until 1752, by which time it was necessary to add eleven days to all Old Style dates to bring them up to the sun. New Year's day was simultaneously changed from the 25th of March (the Day of the Annunciation) to the first of January. Hence we find the date of Washington's birth put with an ambiguous double numeral, as February 11, 1731/2. During the Revolutionary War, the French allies cele

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brated his birthday on the eleventh of February. President Ezra Stiles of Yale speaks of it as February 11th, in 1779. And to his dying day he thought of himself as born on February eleventh. In the last two Februaries of his life he wrote in his Diary under February 11th, that he went up to Alexandria to attend "an elegant Ball and Supper at Night," "in commemmoration" of his birthday.

He doubtless caused his little mother a heavy travail, for he was probably a big and lusty child, since he was so big and lusty a man.

But he probably did not cry much, since his voice was never strong, and he was subject to colds. He must have been a blue-eyed babe, for his eyes were almost white in later years.

Unlike Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday is a day later, February twelfth, Washington was no scion of poverty. He came of high aristocratic lineage and was christened in a baptismal robe of silk, a little mantle that was shown in 1850, and may still be cherished in some collection.®

The church where he was baptized is unknown and the record perished, though it may have been at Pope's Creek Church, which has also perished. But even without the Bible entry, it would have been certain that he was baptized, as his parents were pious and, had they not been, they would hardly have dared to brave the law, for it was a crime in Virginia then to omit the rite of baptism, and the child could be taken away from its evil parents. Almost worse yet, the law of 1662 imposed a fine of 2000 pounds of tobacco for failure to have a child baptized.'

It was a crime also for man or woman to stay away from the various church services. Virginia passed in 1610 the earliest Sunday law in America; the penalties being, for staying away the first time, a fine; for the second, a whip

ping, "and for the third to suffer death." In 1623 the penalty was reduced to one pound of tobacco for one absence, or 50 pounds a month.

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The people were taxed to support the clergy. By the law of 1696, "all and every minister and ministers shall have and receive, for his or their maintenance, the sum of sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco, besides their lawful perquisites." "

The clergy of the time were so unreliable that laws had to be passed to force them to attend to their duties, but they would brook no delinquency in the payment of the taxes levied on believers and unbelievers, dissenters and all alike for the support of the Anglican establishment-whose disestablishment and ruination for half a century would one day be largely due to the very George Washington whose infant bulk weighed down the arms of his father's sister, Widow Gregory, at the christening.

Perhaps, indeed, the baby George, who became so fervid a lover of the dance, was baptized to dance-music! Many other children were. We cannot be sure that the minister who christened him was sober.

"Nothing was more common, even with the better portion of them," says Bishop Meade 10 of the Virginia clergy, "than to celebrate the holy ordinance of Baptism, not amidst the prayers of the congregation, but the festivities of the feast and the dance, the minister sometimes taking a full share in all that was going on."

So much emphasis has been so often laid on the intensely religious atmosphere in which George Washington was reared that it is important to realize just what that atmosphere was. The picture of the times has been painted in infinite detail by one whose information and religious fervor are beyond cavil, by no less an authority than Bishop

Meade of Virginia, whose father was Colonel Richard Meade, the "friend Dick" and military aide of Washington.

His conscience forced him to describe with fidelity "the unworthy and hireling clergy of the Colony. . There was at this time not only defective preaching but most evil living among the clergy many of them had been addicted to the race-field, the card-table, the ball-room, the theatre-nay, more, to the drunken revel. One of them had been for years the president of a jockey-club.

"Another preached against the four sins of atheism, gambling, horse-racing, and swearing, while he practiced all of the vices himself. When he died, in the midst of his ravings he was heard hallooing the hounds to the chase

"There was no such thing as family prayers at that day.

Infidelity became rife in Virginia, perhaps beyond any other portion of the land. The clergy, for the most part, were a laughing-stock or objects of disgust . . . .. almost all men thought and spoke ill of our clergy and communicants. . . . I have from time to time become acquainted with the state of things at Ripon Lodge and Mount Vernon as to the clergy . . . at Dumfries and Pohick . . . in order to conceal the shame of the clergy from the younger ones and to prevent their loss of attachment to religion and the Church, the elder ones sometimes had to hurry them away to bed or take them away from the presence of these ministers when indulging too freely in the intoxicating cup."

There arose so much dispute as to the point at which a clergyman's "excitement from intoxicating liquors has reached that point which must be regarded as the sin of drunkenness" that a report was made to the Bishop of London a few years before Washington's birth, in which the tests of clerical intoxication in Virginia were given, including these: "Striking, challenging, or threatening to fight,

staggering, reeling, vomiting; incoherent, impertinent, obscene, or rude talking." "

When George Washington was three years old his father moved away from Bridges' Creek and settled in Prince William County, where he became a vestryman in Truro parish in 1735. He also represented the county in the House of Burgesses.12

Captain Washington was a man of increasing consequence. He had sent his eldest son, Lawrence, to England for his education. In 1737 the Captain went over again himself and brought back a shipload of convicts. In the batch he probably included a teacher for his five-year-old boy. For, according to the Reverend Jonathan Boucher,13 an English clergyman who was later a tutor to Jacky Custis:

"George, like most people thereabouts at that time, had no other education than reading, writing and accounts, which he was taught by a convict servant whom his father bought for a schoolmaster."

The convicts of those wild and cruel times, when little children were hanged for stealing a shillingsworth, must have been of a better class than now, or an indulgent father would never have entrusted his son to one. The sexton of Truro parish was a convict, William Grove, and many of the transported exiles were well-educated gentlemen whose disgrace was their glory."

There were two other teachers, Mr. Williams and Rev. James Marye, of Fredericksburg, to whose environs Captain. Washington had moved when George was seven. Fredericksburg, founded in 1727, was only five years older than the boy and was hardly so much as a hamlet, for Colonel Byrd 15 described it as it was in 1732:

"Besides Colo. Willis, who is top man of the place, there are only one Merchant, a Taylor, a Smith and an Ordinary keeper; though I must not forget Mrs. Levinstone, who