by Alexis Coe
PTJ: Julian P. Boyd, et al., eds. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. 39 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950–.
WGW: John Clement Fitzpatrick et al., eds. The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745–1799. 39 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1931–1944.
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S ANIMALS
1. “To George Washington from Frederick Kitt, 15 January 1798,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-02-02-0026.
2. “From George Washington to John Sinclair, 20 July 1794,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-16-02-0311.
PREFACE
1. I have plenty of books by women historians on Washington’s wife, his marriage, his role as a slave owner, his title, or other focused approaches. In addition to Erica Dunbar’s Never Caught, please see Patricia Brady’s Martha Washington, Flora Fraser’s The Washingtons, and Mary V. Thompson’s “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret.”
2. Women, such as Jeanne Heidler, coauthored books with their husbands, although in Heidler’s case it is an excellent book on Washington’s circle during his presidency, not a biography. Women have most often written about Washington’s wife and marriage.
3. Annette Gordon-Reed’s first book on Jefferson was published in 1997, but Pearl Graham began challenging Jefferson scholarship as early as the 1940s; significant scholarly contributions were also made by Fawn Brodie, Jan Lewis, Lucia Cinder Stanton, and Virginia Scharff.
4. I am referring to the journalist Noemie Emery, author of Washington: A Biography, and the travel writer Blair Niles, author of Martha’s Husband: An Informal Portrait of George Washington. When I say “women historians,” I think of women who identify as historians as well as women who are credentialed. There, the numbers get far worse. It may well be that we haven’t seen one in a hundred years.
5. The George Washington Financial Papers Project, “Ledger B, 1772–1793,” May 8, 1784, 179, http://financial.gwpapers.org/?q=content/ledger-b-1772-1793-pg179.
6. I spoke about Weems as an itinerant minister on an Audible podcast I cohosted called “Presidents Are People Too!”
INTRODUCTION: THE THIGH MEN OF DAD HISTORY
1. Unger insists that Washington was also “human to the core: laughing, loving, and living life to the fullest.” (Did he also dance like no one was watching?) Harlow G. Unger, The Unexpected George Washington: His Private Life (New York: Wiley, 2006), 1.
2. Of course, that very character trait is what stopped him from being as reckless as Hamilton or as power-hungry as Napoleon.
3. Richard Brookhiser, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 4. Politicians have tried, too. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, and President Woodrow Wilson all produced heavy books about America’s first.
4. Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), xiv.
5. John Ferling, who has authored several books on Washington, writes that he had “the striking look of what we would expect today in a gifted athlete.” John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2010), 14.
6. Presidents’ Day used to belong to Washington alone, but now, like much about his legacy, the particulars have been absorbed into a greater unifying symbol of national strength and heroism.
7. Alexis Coe, “What the Least Fun Founding Father Can Teach Us Now,” The New Yorker, November 22, 2017, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-the-least-fun-founding-father-can-teach-us-now.
8. John K. Amory, “George Washington’s Infertility: Why Was the Father of Our Country Never a Father?” Fertility and Sterility 81, no. 3 (March 2004): 495–99.
9. Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin Random House, 2010), 102.
10. Chernow, 80.
11. Chernow, 825.
12. “From George Washington to Robert Orme, 2 April 1755,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed November 9, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0122.
13. Chernow, Washington, 53.
14. Chernow’s exaggerations have gone unnoticed or unremarked upon. Gordon Wood, the well-known and respected historian of early American history, wrote that Chernow’s “understanding of human nature is extraordinary and that is what makes his biography so powerful,” and his book was “the best, most comprehensive, and most balanced single-volume biography of Washington ever written.”
15. Chernow, Washington, 5, 6, 10, 11, 18, 54, 97, 98, 157, 432, 524, 525.
16. Paul Leicester Ford, The True George Washington (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1896), 17. Some of these historians have also made much of a lack of gravestone upon the spot where Mary is buried, which seems silly. She was buried at home, not in a cemetery, and by the time Washington returned from Philadelphia, his sister had sold the land. The family no longer controlled the property. He may have intended to move it to the family vault during his retirement, but he died within a couple of years.
17. Carl Bode, “The First First Mother,” The Washington Post, May 7, 1982, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1982/05/07/the-first-first-mother/2aceb419-92ac-4df2-8cac-46d8bc3c3270/?utm_term=.864168281093.
18. James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1974).
19. Chernow, Washington, 11.
20. A. L. Bassett, “Reminiscences of Washington,” Scribner’s Monthly 14, no. 1 (May 1877): 78.
21. “Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, May 27, 1794,” Massachusetts Historical Society, accessed October 14, 2017, www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17940527aa.
22. Laura J. Galke, “The Mother of the Father of Our Country: Mary Ball Washington’s Genteel Domestic Habits,” Northeast Historical Archaeology: 38, no. 2 (2009).
23. “In her dealings with servants, she was strict,” writes Douglas Southall Freeman. “They must follow definite round of work.” Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington, A Biography, Vol. 5: Victory with the Help of France (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), 193.
24. “Court Case, 3 December 1751,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed February 2, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0019.
25. “From George Washington to Betty Washington Lewis, 13 September 1789,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 2, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-04-02-0017.
CHAPTER 1: HIS MOTHER’S SON
1. The exact number is unknown to scholars.
2. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 11–22.
3. Archeologists have yet to excavate the slave quarters at Ferry Farm.
4. Charles Moore, ed., George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926), xi–xv.
5. “From George Washington to Lawrence Washington, 5 May 1749,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 9, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0003.
6. As Chernow describes it, Lawrence and Colonel Fairfax came up with a plan to “spring fourteen-year-old George from his mother’s domination.” Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin Random House, 2011), 17.
7. Roland Pietsch, “Ships’ Boys and Youth Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Northern Mariner 14, no. 4 (October 2004): 11–24.
8. Edward G. Lengel, General George Washington: A Military Life (New York: Random House, 2005), 12.
9. Joseph Ball to Mary Washington, May 19, 1747, quoted in Marion Harland,
The Story of Mary Washington (New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co, 1893), 79–81.
10. David Humphreys, Life of General Washington (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 8. Mary and her son understood opportunity cost. The most obvious way to acquire wealth and prestige in early America wasn’t through the Navy, nor was it, as Ball had suggested, to become an apprentice to a tinker, a vendor of household utensils. It was through land. And yet, Chernow spins this story as damning of Mary: “One can say with certainty,” he writes, “that it was the first of many times she seemed to measure her son’s worth not by what he might accomplish elsewhere but by what he could do for her, even if it meant thwarting his career.” Chernow, Washington, 18.
11. “From George Washington to James Craik, 4 August 1788,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed May 30, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-06-02-0386.
12. Paula S. Felder, Fielding Lewis and the Washington Family: A Chronicle of 18th Century Fredericksburg (Fredericksburg, VA: The American History Company, 1998). Also see King George County Order Book, Book 2 (1735–1751). And proximity meant she would remain close to Mary, who would be present at the births of her grandchildren.
CHAPTER 2: “PLEASES MY TASTE”
1. Alicia K. Anderson and Lynn A. Price, eds., George Washington’s Barbados Diary, 1751–52 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 46.
2. Anderson and Price, 49.
3. Anderson and Price, 67.
4. George Washington to W. M. Fauntleroy, Sr., May 20, 1752, in PGW, CS, 1: 49–50.
5. “From George Washington to Robin, 1749–1750,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed January 17, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0007.
CHAPTER 3: “THE WORLD ON FIRE”
1. The editors of Washington’s papers at the University of Virginia discovered that, decades later, “he carefully scraped the original ink off the paper with a knife and then wrote his changes” to letter books from this time; overstrikes and insertions indicated conscious alterations. See “The Letter Book for the Braddock Campaign,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed May 2, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0119.
2. “Instructions from Robert Dinwiddie, 30 October 1753,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 2, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0029.
3. “From George Washington to John Stanwix, 10 April 1758,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 9, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-05-02-0087.
4. “Expedition to the Ohio, 1754: Narrative,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed June 2, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/01-01-02-0004-0002.
5. “From George Washington to Robert Dinwiddie, 29 May 1754,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed June 4, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0054.
6. “From George Washington to John Augustine Washington, 31 May 1754,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed January 20, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0058. [Original source: PGW, CS, 1: 118–119.] Upon hearing this, King George reportedly said, “He would not say so, if he had been used to hear many.” For more on that, see Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second, vol. 1 (London: H. Colburn, 1847), 400.
7. “From George Washington to Robert Dinwiddie, 29 May 1754,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed March 1, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0054. [Original source: PGW, CS, 1: 107–115.] For John Shaw’s account, see William L. McDowell, Jr., ed., Documents Relating to Indian Affairs, 2 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1958–1970).
8. “From George Washington to Robert Dinwiddie, 29 May 1754,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 9, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0054.
9. George Washington to Augustine Washington, August 2, 1755, in WGW, 1: 156.
10. “From George Washington to Richard Corbin, February–March 1754,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0034.
11. “From George Washington to Horatio Sharpe, 24 April 1754,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed August 7, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0044.
12. “From George Washington to Robert Dinwiddie, 18 May 1754,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed February 11, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0050.
CHAPTER 4: “BLOW OUT MY BRAINS”
1. PGW, CS, 1: 254–257.
2. Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin Random House, 2010), 55.
3. “From George Washington to Mary Ball Washington, 18 July 1755,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed November 15, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0167.
4. On December 6, 1755, George Washington invoiced for “1 piece of Suitable Cambrick for Ruffles” and “2 pairs Men’s Silk Stockings” among other goods. “Invoice of Sundry Goods to be Ship’d for the Use of Geo. Washington at Mount Vernon, Potomac River Virginia,” WGW, 1: 254.
5. “From George Washington to Robert Dinwiddie, 11–14 October 1755,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed December 4, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-02-02-0099.
CHAPTER 5: THE WIDOW CUSTIS
1. “From George Washington to George Augustine Washington, 25 October 1786,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-04-02-0279. [Original source: PGW, Confederation, 4: 307–310.]
2. “To George Washington from George Mercer, 17 August 1757,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-04-02-0242. [Original source: PGW, CS, 4: 370–375.]
3. “To George Washington from William La Péronie, 5 September 1754,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0099. [Original source: PGW, CS, 1: 203–205.]
4. As Mary V. Thompson has often pointed out, any character-based arguments that can be made against this claim will inevitably sound an awful lot like the ones Thomas Jefferson’s biographers made for decades before Fawn Brodie and Annette Gordon-Reed corrected them.
5. “From George Washington to Armand, 10 August 1786,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed December 12, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-04-02-0190.
6. George Washington to Eleanor Parke Custis, January 16, 1795, in WGW, 13: 27.
7. Washington to Custis, 28.
8. Washington to Custis, 27–28.
9. Washington to Custis, 28.
10. Washington to Custis, 28
11. The George Washington Financial Papers Project, “Ledger A, 1750–1772,” May 4, 1758, 39, http://financial.gwpapers.org/?q=content/ledger-1750-1772-pg39.
12. Martha Custis to Robert Cary & Company, 1758, in Joseph E. Fields, ed., “Worthy Partner”: The Papers of Martha Washington (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 25–26.
CHAPTER 6: “I CANNOT SPEAK PLAINER”
1. “From George Washington to Francis Halkett, 2 August 1758,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed May 5, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-05-02-0284.
2. “From George Washington to Sarah Cary Fairfax, 12 September 1758,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed September 21, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-06-02-0013.
3. “From George Washington to Sarah Cary Fairfax, 25 September 1758,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed September 25, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washing
ton/02-06-02-0033.
4. “Sally Fairfax to a Sister-in-Law in Virginia, 1788,” quoted in Wilson Miles Cary, Sally Cary: A Long Hidden Romance of Washington’s Life (New York: The De Vinne Press, 1916), 45.
5. “From George Washington to William Fitzhugh, 15 November 1754,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed November 6, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0114.
CHAPTER 7: “WHAT MANNER OF MAN I AM”
1. “From George Washington to Jonathan Boucher, 21 May 1772,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed November 12, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-09-02-0036, and “From George Washington to William Fitzhugh, 15 November 1754,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed November 6, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-01-02-0114.
2. “[Diary entry: 31 July 1770],” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed May 7, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/01-02-02-0005-0018-0031.
3. “From George Washington to Burwell Bassett, 20 June 1773,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed December 6, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-09-02-0185. [Original source: PGW, CS, 9: 243–244.] Washington, worried that his wife, with Jack away at college in New York, would be too lonely, asks Bassett to see if he can compel Martha’s mother to come and live with them: “. . . and that I was Master of Arguments powerful enough to prevail upon Mrs Dandridge to make this place entire, & absolute home. I should think, as she lives a lonesome life (Betcy being Married) it might suit her well, & be agreeable, both to herself & my wife, to me most assuredly it would.”
4. George Washington to Reverend Jonathan Boucher, December 16, 1770, in WGW, 3: 35.
5. “To George Washington from Jonathan Boucher, 18 December 1770,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed October 26, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-08-02-0282.
6. “From George Washington to Robert Cary & Company, 28 September 1760,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed October 6, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-06-02-0266-0001.
