In 1751, when he was nineteen, Washington bettered his lot by becoming adjutant of one of the four military districts of Virginia, with a salary of one hundred pounds and a far less toilsome occupation.  This in turn led up to his military appointment in 1754, which he held almost continuously till 1759, when he resigned from the service.

Next to a position on the Virginia council, a seat in the House of Burgesses, or lower branch of the Legislature, was most sought, and this position had been held by Washington’s great-grandfather, father, and elder brother.  It was only natural, therefore, that in becoming the head of the family George should desire the position.  As early as 1755, while on the frontier, he wrote to his brother in charge of Mount Vernon inquiring about the election to be held in the county, and asking him to “come at Colo Fairfax’s intentions, and let me know whether he purposes to offer himself as a candidate.”  “If he does not, I should be glad to take a poll, if I thought my chance tolerably good.”  His friend Carlyle, Washington wrote, had “mentioned it to me in Williamsburg in a bantering way,” and he begged his brother to “discover Major Carlyle’s real sentiments on this head,” as also those of the other prominent men of the county, and especially of the clergymen. “Sound their pulse,” he wrote, “with an air of indifference and unconcern ... without disclosing much of mine.”  “If they seem inclinable to promote my interest, and things should be drawing to a crisis, you may declare my intention and beg their assistance.  If on the contrary you find them more inclined to favor some other, I would have the affair entirely dropped.”  Apparently the county magnates disapproved, for Washington did not stand for the county.

In 1757 an election for burgesses was held in Frederick County, in which Washington then was (with his soldiers), and for which he offered himself as a candidate.  The act was hardly a wise one, for, though he had saved Winchester and the surrounding country from being overrun by the Indians, he was not popular.  Not merely was he held responsible for the massacres of outlying inhabitants, whom it was impossible to protect, but in this very defence he had given cause for ill-feeling.  He himself confessed that he had several times “strained the law,”—­he had been forced to impress the horses and wagons of the district, and had in other ways so angered some of the people that they had threatened “to blow out my brains.”  But he had been guilty of a far worse crime still in a political sense.  Virginia elections were based on liquor, and Washington had written to the governor, representing “the great nuisance the number of tippling houses in Winchester are to the soldiers, who by this means, in spite of the utmost care and vigilance, are, so long as their pay holds, incessantly drunk and unfit for service,” and he wished that “the new commission for this county may have the intended effect,”