1751, and arriving February 1, 1752.  Even from his much-mutilated journal, we can see that he travelled with his eyes open, and that his interests were many.  As he mentioned in his journal thirty persons with whom he became acquainted at the Barbados, we infer that in spite of bashfulness he was an easy mixer.  This short journey to the Barbados marks the only occasion on which George Washington went outside of the borders of the American Colonies, which became later, chiefly through his genius, the United States.[1]

[Footnote 1:  J.M.  Toner:  The Daily Journal of Major George Washington in 1751-2 (Albany, N.Y., 1892).]

In July, 1752, Lawrence Washington died of the disease which he had long struggled against.  He left his fortune and his property, including Mount Vernon, to his daughter, Sarah, and he appointed his brother, George, her guardian.  She was a sweet-natured girl, but very frail, who died before long, probably of the same disease which had carried her father off, and, until its infectious nature was understood, used to decimate families from generation to generation.

To have thrust upon him, at the age of twenty, the management of a large estate might seem a heavy burden for any young man; but George Washington was equal to the task, and it seems as if much of his career up to that time was a direct preparation for it.  He knew every foot of its fields and meadows, of its woodlands and streams; he knew where each crop grew, and its rotation; he had taken great interest in horses and cattle, and in the methods for maintaining and improving their breed; and now, of course being master, his power of choosing good men to do the work was put to the test.  But he had not been long at these new occupations before public duties drew him away from them.

Though they knew it not, the European settlers in North America were approaching a life-and-death catastrophe.  From the days when the English and the French first settled on the continent, Fate ordained for them an irrepressible conflict.  Should France prevail?  Should England prevail?  With the growth of their colonies, both the English and the French felt their rivalry sharpened.  Although distances often very broad kept them apart in space, yet both nations were ready to prove the terrible truth that when two men, or two tribes, wish to fight each other, they will find out a way.  The French, at New Orleans, might be far away from the English at Boston; and the English, in New York, or in Philadelphia, might be removed from the French in Quebec; but in their hatreds they were near neighbors.  The French pushed westward along the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, and from Lake Erie, they pushed southward, across the rich plains of Ohio, to the Ohio River.  Their trails spread still farther into the Western wilderness.  They set up trading-posts in the very region which the English settlers expected to occupy in the due process of their advance.  At the junction of the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers, they planted Fort Duquesne, which not only commanded the approach to the territory through which the Ohio flowed westward, but served notice on the English that the French regarded themselves as the rightful claimants of that territory.