At eleven years old left an orphan to the care of an excellent but unlettered mother, he grew up without learning.  Of arithmetic and geometry he acquired just knowledge enough to be able to practice measuring land; but all his instruction at school taught him not so much as the orthography or rules of grammar of his own tongue.  His culture was altogether his own work, and he was in the strictest sense a self-made man; yet from his early life he never seemed uneducated.  At sixteen, he went into the wilderness as a surveyor, and for three years continued the pursuit, where the forests trained him, in meditative solitude, to freedom and largeness of mind; and nature revealed to him her obedience to serene and silent laws.  In his intervals from toil, he seemed always to be attracted to the best men, and to be cherished by them.  Fairfax, his employer, an Oxford scholar, already aged, became his fast friend.  He read little, but with close attention.  Whatever he took in hand he applied himself to with care; and his papers, which have been preserved, show how he almost imperceptibly gained the power of writing correctly; always expressing himself with clearness and directness, often with felicity of language and grace.

When the frontiers on the west became disturbed, he at nineteen was commissioned an adjutant-general with the rank of major.  At twenty-one, he went as the envoy of Virginia to the council of Indian chiefs on the Ohio, and to the French officers near Lake Erie.  Fame waited upon him from his youth; and no one of his colony was so much spoken of.  He conducted the first military expedition from Virginia that crossed the Alleghanies.  Braddock selected him as an aid, and he was the only man who came out of the disastrous defeat near the Monongahela, with increased reputation, which extended to England.  The next year, when he was but four-and-twenty, “the great esteem” in which he was held in Virginia, and his “real merit,” led the lieutenant-governor of Maryland to request that he might be “commissioned and appointed second in command” of the army designed to march to the Ohio; and Shirley, the commander-in-chief, heard the proposal “with great satisfaction and pleasure,” for “he knew no provincial officer upon the continent to whom he would so readily give that rank as to Washington.”  In 1758 he acted under Forbes as a brigadier, and but for him that general would never have crossed the mountains.

Courage was so natural to him that it was hardly spoken of to his praise; no one ever at any moment of his life discovered in him the least shrinking in danger; and he had a hardihood of daring which escaped notice, because it was so enveloped by superior calmness and wisdom.

His address was most easy and agreeable; his step firm and graceful; his air neither grave nor familiar.  He was as cheerful as he was spirited, frank and communicative in the society of friends, fond of the fox-chase and the dance, often sportive in his letters, and liked a hearty laugh.  “His smile,” writes Chastellux, “was always the smile of benevolence.”  This joyousness of disposition remained to the last, though the vastness of his responsibilities was soon to take from him the right of displaying the impulsive qualities of his nature, and the weight which he was to bear up was to overlay and repress his gayety and openness.