You Never Forget Your First

by Alexis Coe

  MULES

  The so-called Father of the American Mule began breeding mules—the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse—after he received a stud from the King of Spain in 1785. Within fifteen years, he had a herd of nearly sixty. They plowed fields and pulled wagons.

  SHEEP

  In the summer of 1794, Washington wrote to a friend in England: “After the Peace of Paris in 1783, and my return to the occupations of a farmer, I paid particular attention to my breed of Sheep (of which I usually kept about seven or eight hundred).”2 American wool, he declared, was equal to anything found abroad. He bred his sheep in October, welcomed lambs in March, and sheared in May. It isn’t clear which breed he raised at Mount Vernon, but he used them for more than wool; his archives tell us they provided manure for his five farms, lanolin for ointment, and meat for dinner.

  Timeline

  1732

  On February 22, George Washington is born in Westmoreland County, Colony of Virginia, British America.

  1739

  Likely starts school, around the age of seven.

  1743

  Father dies. Washington, age eleven, inherits ten enslaved people.

  1749

  Appointed to his first public office as surveyor of Culpeper County at age seventeen.

  1751–1752

  Travels to Barbados, his only trip abroad, with half brother Lawrence.

  1752

  Lawrence dies, and his widow leases Mount Vernon to Washington.

  1752–1758

  Fights on behalf of the British in the French and Indian War, which he had unwittingly started.

  1759

  Retires from the military and becomes a gentleman farmer. On January 6, marries Martha Custis, widow of Daniel Parke Custis, and becomes stepfather to Jacky, age four, and Patsy, age two.

  1761

  Inherits Mount Vernon after Lawrence’s widow dies.

  1761–1776

  Is a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses.

  1773

  Patsy, age seventeen, dies in Washington’s arms.

  1774–1775

  Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress.

  1775

  Appointed commander in chief of the Continental Army in the American Revolution.

  1783

  Formally gives up military commission, much to the surprise of the world.

  1787

  Heads the Constitutional Convention.

  1789

  Unanimously elected the first U.S. president. Mary, his mother, dies.

  1793

  Unanimously reelected to second term as president.

  1797

  Refuses a third term, setting a two-term precedent. Retires to Mount Vernon.

  1799

  Dies on December 14 at Mount Vernon at the age of sixty-seven.

  Preface

  You Never Forget Your First—But You Do Misremember Him

  Years into writing this book, I moved my desk and rearranged my George Washington books by category, which is when I noticed something curious about my collection of popular biographies: All of them were authored by men.1

  In the course of my research, I got used to a certain male skew (a lot more on that in the Introduction), but I hadn’t realized quite how persistent it was. I thought that perhaps my small library—which did not include the out-of-print books or budget breakers I borrowed from the library—simply didn’t represent an accurate sample. When digital sleuthing seemed to confirm the disparity, I dismissed that sample, too, this time for being too large. I wrote to a researcher at Mount Vernon, Washington’s historic home, and asked her to confirm my findings, only to send her down the same path. She, in turn, consulted with an editor at the University of Virginia’s George Washington papers, and on and on it went, all leading to the same conclusion: No woman has written an adult biography of George Washington in more than forty years, and no woman historian has written one in far longer. (His most recent female biographers, a journalist and a travel writer, contributed two books out of hundreds.2)

  For nearly two and a half centuries, most of the stories Americans have told themselves about their country’s past have been about men, by men, for men. Women, like people of color, have typically been relegated to supporting roles. And so when women biographers and historians get a chance to correct the record, they tend to shift the focus away from the leading man, lingering instead on the forgotten people and understudied issues around him—which are actually integral to the understanding of him, too.

  In 1997, for instance, Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of law and history at Harvard, published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, a groundbreaking investigation that includes a brilliant review of the people who denied that Jefferson fathered children with Hemings, whom he enslaved.3 By highlighting their prejudices and inaccuracies, Gordon-Reed forever changed the way we talk about Jefferson. In 2017, Erica Dunbar, a professor of history at Rutgers, made a significant contribution to Washington studies with Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. Dunbar brings Judge’s courageous story to the forefront and forces us to reconsider Washington’s much-lauded reputation as the only Founding Father to emancipate his slaves in his will. These kinds of books somehow manage to cover much of what can be found in the 900-page brick of a presidential biography on your dad’s nightstand, only with far more nuance—and in far fewer pages.

  In fact, women historians have often reminded us that we don’t always know what we think we know. There’s a lot more work to be done, and it’s not limited to “women’s history.” We need to question and review everything—including presidential biographies—but there’s an expectation that women will write books about women; people of color will write about people of color. I was constantly reminded of this when I was asked what I was working on.4 The conversation often went like this:

  “What’s your book about?”

  “George Washington.”

  “His marriage?”

  “No.”

  “His wife?”

  “No.”

  “His . . . social life?”

  “No. It’s a biography. Like a man would write.”

  The typical Washington biographer grew up on the East Coast, most often in Virginia. He began visiting Mount Vernon and Revolutionary War battlefields as a boy, and now, as a man, he does his research there, among others who look like him. I, on the other hand, grew up in California, which became a state fifty-one years after Washington died and almost eighty years after the American Revolution began. This means that I faintly recall learning about Washington in my textbooks, but was surrounded by the physical relics of another history—Spanish missions, the ghosts of the Gold Rush. I didn’t even visit Mount Vernon until I was in graduate school, and I certainly didn’t leave thinking, “One day, I’ll write a book about George Washington!”

  My preoccupation with Washington began years later, with an attempt to read between the lines of his major biographies—particularly Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life. At first, I found the male historians’ fixation on his manliness entertaining, b
ut the sheer repetition of their narratives needled me. They always presented Washington’s half brother as his god, for example, and his mother as his scourge. I began to dig into the primary sources they cited and was, almost immediately, vexed by some of their interpretations and the opportunities they missed. They seemed bound to follow rote protocols, distancing us from a man we really ought to know better. And then we, in turn, end up inadvertently perpetuating so many stereotypes and exaggerations.

  Consider, for instance, the old story about Washington’s wooden teeth. If you actually think about it, it doesn’t really make sense. Wood would be a terrible material for dentures. Moisture makes it swell and soften and split. Whatever bits of denture Washington didn’t accidentally swallow would fall out of his mouth while he was, say, leading the Continental Army or quelling conflict between Alexander Hamilton and, well, nearly anyone. His breath, moreover, would have been legendarily bad—embarrassing fodder for the gossipy Founding Fathers.

  So perhaps it’s not surprising that there is not a single letter or diary entry substantiating the wooden teeth. Nor are there instructional materials on wooden-tooth making in early American medical literature, or anything to suggest that Washington was a dental innovator. The wooden teeth are a myth, plain and simple. Some of us accept it, perhaps instinctually, because we haven’t been taught to think critically about Washington, our mysterious national father figure. Then again, maybe we’d simply prefer not to know the appalling truth.

  There’s no doubt that Washington had terrible teeth. He began pouring money into dentists, toothbrushes, medications, and cleaning solutions by the age of twenty-four, when he paid a “Doctr Watson” five shillings to pull a tooth. By the age of fifty-seven, the unanimously elected first president of the United States had but one tooth of his own left and had long been investing in dentures. If you examine the paintings Washington sat for, it’s easy to see that each set had a different effect on his bite. (His changing jawline looks particularly awkward on the dollar bill, painted by Gilbert Stuart.) But the dentures’ poor aesthetics paled in comparison to the physical discomfort they caused, “forc[ing] the lip out just under the nose.” Washington complained throughout his letters and diaries, in which he frequently writes of aching teeth and inflamed gums.

  Washington kept some of his dead teeth at Mount Vernon, in hopes they might be reused in dentures. “I am positive I left them there, or in the secret drawer in the locker of the same desk,” he wrote to Lund Washington, the distant cousin whom he’d hired to plantation-sit during the Revolutionary War. But those teeth didn’t get a second chance, for the same reason they didn’t survive in his mouth the first time around. John Greenwood, a dentist he hired to fix his dentures, admonished Washington in one letter, writing that the teeth he had sent were “very black, occasioned either by your soaking them in port wine, or by your drinking it.” (If he’d been better acquainted with Washington, he would have known that his patient’s drink was Madeira, a fortified wine.) Greenwood would have to rely on other materials, none of which were wood.

  At best, we can say that Washington had a poacher’s smile. His dentists took chunks of ivory from hippopotamuses, walruses, and elephants, sculpted them down, and affixed them to dentures using brass screws. They filled in any gaps with teeth from less exotic animals, such as cows and horses, or—when the Madeira stains weren’t too bad—from Washington himself. But he didn’t always have to look quite so far afield. At the age of eleven, he inherited ten slaves from his father, and over the next fifty-six years, he would sometimes rely on them to supply replacement teeth. He paid his slaves for their teeth, but not at fair market value. From his ledger, recorded in his own hand, we see that he offered six pounds and two shillings for at least nine teeth—two-thirds less than Greenwood offered in newspaper advertisements.5

  So how did we get from a mix of teeth from slaves and animals to wooden teeth? No one is quite sure, which has led me to wonder whether this myth is connected to another even more pervasive one. When Washington was young, the story goes, he got a little too excited about a new hatchet and hacked away at his father’s beloved cherry tree. Upon being caught, he supposedly confessed on the spot, proclaiming, “I cannot tell a lie.”

  Washington’s act of arborcide is another fabrication, but this time we know who is responsible for it: Mason L. Weems, a broke itinerant parson bookseller with impeccable timing.6 Weems decided to write a biography a year before Washington died and promised Philadelphia printer Matthew Carey that The Life of George Washington, crammed with the apocryphal stories that we still tell today, would “sell like flax seed.”

  And Weems was right. Readers got the exclusive stories they hungered for, and they embellished them and passed them on. Slowly, Washington ceased to be a man and became the embodiment of the nation at its best, most noble and public-spirited. The outright fabrications may have stopped, but the mythmaking persists.

  Introduction

  The Thigh Men of Dad History

  All of the Founding Fathers have problems. Thomas Jefferson strikes modern audiences as beyond hypocritical, John Adams as tiresome, and James Madison as downright boring. But according to Washington’s own biographers, he’s in real trouble.

  Joseph Ellis calls him “the original marble man.” Ron Chernow says he is “composed of too much marble to be quite human.” Harlow Giles Unger says he’s “as stonelike as the Mount Rushmore sculpture.”1 What is to blame for Washington’s inhuman stature? Well, for starters, his renowned self-control.2 “My countenance never yet betrayed my feelings,” Washington once said. That was an exaggeration, but he was discreet enough to land himself, as Richard Brookhiser has lamented, in “our wallets, but not our hearts.” Every biographer humbly endeavors to break Washington out of his sepulchre—by proceeding in almost the exact same way as the one who came before him.3

  First, his biographers stick a portrait of the man Ellis calls America’s “foundingest father” on the cover.4 Many favor Washington’s most iconic image, his rigid and gloomy face on the one-dollar bill, but most prefer a painting that shows his whole body, because his thighs drive them wild. Brookhiser, examining a portrait from 1792, can’t help but notice how “well-developed” they are. Ellis admires how they “allowed him to grip a horse’s flanks tightly and hold his seat in the saddle with uncommon ease.” For Chernow, Washington’s “muscular thighs” were just the beginning. He was a “superb physical specimen, with a magnificent physique . . . powerfully rough-hewn and endowed with matchless strength. When he clenched his jaw, his cheek and jaw muscles seemed to ripple right through his skin.”5

  They pair that visual coffin of a cover with a verbal coffin of a title, often adhering to the same stale format. George Washington: A Biography. George Washington: A Life. George Washington: A President. The more adventurous among them might throw in a hyperbolic word or two (Destiny! Power! Genius!) or a phrase borrowed from Washington’s time, immediately lost on potential new readers (“His Excellency” or “For Fear of an Elected King”). With titles this stodgy, presidential biographies will always appear as if they are for men of a certain age, intended to be purchased on Presidents’ or Father’s Day.6

  The Thigh Men, as I came to think of these kinds of biographers over the years, are a decidedly “size matters” crowd.7 Chernow’s book on Washington, which won the Pulitzer Prize, clocks in at almost a thousand pages, a record among single-volume editions on our first president—in no small part because it takes every opportunity to remind readers that the great general was very, very manly. This seems obvious from a basic review of the facts: Washington survived every disease he contracted (apart from the last one, of course) without much more than a few pockmarks to show for it. He walked away basically unscathed from every battle and skirmish, though some of the horses he rode in on were less fortunate. After a while, it begins to feel as though there’s something hinky behind these biographers’ repetitive insistence on Washingt
on’s conspicuous masculinity—because there is.

  A Childless Father

  The father of this country was no father. At least, not biologically. When Washington married the widow Martha Custis, he became the guardian to her two children—a son named Jacky, age four, and a daughter named Patsy, age two—whom he appears to have loved and treated as if they were his own. Washington was devastated when Patsy, who had epilepsy, passed away. He was endlessly effortful with Jacky, who often shirked responsibility and made rash decisions. And the older Washington got, the more wards he seemed to inherit. He considered Marquis de Lafayette, for instance, a surrogate son. (The affection was mutual: Lafayette named his own son George Washington and his daughter Virginia.)

  In a young, monarchy-weary America, Washington’s lack of heirs gave him a distinct political advantage; it comforted people to know that he had no bloodline to preserve, no power-hungry scion to worry about. He didn’t avoid the subject of childlessness or wax regretful over it, which suggests it wasn’t a source of great tragedy in his life. Yet the Thigh Men are obsessed with it. They spend dozens of pages discussing how it happened and why it doesn’t detract from his innate virility—as if that’s a preoccupation everyone shares.