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Washington
The Indispensable Man
James Thomas Flexner
A moment at Mount Vernon, drawn on the spot during July, 1796. Washington scans through a telescope his view of the Potomac while Martha bends over the tea table. The young lady in the Grecian pose is Nelly Custis. The other figures are assumed to be Washington’s secretary, Tobias Lear, and Lear’s son. The dog is unidentified. By Benjamin Henry Latrobe (Photograph courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union)
Life mask of Washington by Jean Antoine Houdon (Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library)
To Beatrice, my wife
Contents
Preface
Illustrations
Introduction
1. A Powerful Apprenticeship (1732–1753)
2. A Clumsy Entrance on the World Stage (1753–1754)
3. Love and Massacre (1754–1755)
4. Desperation and Disillusionment (1755–1759)
5. George Washington’s First War (1753–1759)
6. A Virginia Businessman (1759–1775)
7. Washington in His Landscapes (1759–1775)
8. A New Call to Arms (1765–1775)
9. A Virginian in Yankee-Land (1775)
10. An Early Triumph (1775–1776)
11. The Continental Army on Trial (1776)
12. Depths (1776–1777)
13. Heights (1777)
14. The Loss of Philadelphia (1777)
15. The Conway Cabal (1777–1778)
16. The Road Turns Upward (1778)
17. Hope Abroad and Bankruptcy at Home (1778–1779)
18. Enter a French Army (1779–1780)
19. Treason (1775–1780)
20. Virginia Endangered (1780–1781)
21. Yorktown (1781)
22. A Gulf of Civil Horror (1781–1783)
23. Goodbye to War (1775–1783)
24. Pleasures at Home (1783–1787)
25. Canals and Conventions (1783–1787)
26. The Constitution of the United States (1787–1788)
27. Hysteria and Responsibility (1788)
28. A Second Constitutional Convention (1789)
29. The Social Man (1789)
30. Infighting Foreshadowed (1790)
31. The Great Schism Opens (1790–1792)
32. Europeans and Indians (1783–1791)
33. Desire to Escape (1791–1792)
34. No Exit (1790–1793)
35. Bad Omens (1792–1793)
36. Earthquake Faults (1793 and thereafter)
37. A French Bombshell (1793)
38. Trouble All Around (1793)
39. A Tragic Departure (1793)
40. Opposite Hands Across the Ocean (1794)
41. The Whiskey Rebellion (1790–1794)
42. The Democratic Societies (1794)
43. A Disastrous Document (1795)
44. Tragedy with a Friend (1795)
45. Downhill (1795–1796)
46. Washington’s Farewell Address (1796)
47. The End of the Presidency (1796–1797)
48. Home Again (1797–1799)
49. Mental Confusion (1797–1798)
50. Politics at Sunset (1798–1799)
51. Washington and Slavery (1732–1799)
52. Death of a Hero (1799)
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Preface
When more than a dozen years ago I began my biographical study of George Washington, I intended to encompass his life in a single volume such as this one. But I then concluded that so short a work could not be written without being superficial or incomplete.
Compare, for instance, the magnitude of the tasks faced by biographers of Washington and Lincoln. Washington lived eleven years longer than Lincoln. While Lincoln was a major national figure for only some seven years (from the Douglas debates to his assassination), Washington was for twenty-four years (from his election as commander in chief to his death) the most conspicuous and influential man in the United States. For seventeen of those years, comprising the war, the Constitutional Convention, and the Presidency, he was from day to day actively engaged in great events. Before all that, his role in the French and Indian War made him internationally known when he was hardly twenty, an age at which Lincoln was still an obscure frontiersman.
The scope of my studies was almost doubled by a determination to describe Washington’s indispensable role in the creation of the United States and yet not lose the man in the leader. Events indicative of character were as important to my work as world-shaking decisions. I thus found myself writing a four-volume biography of Washington, published between 1965 and 1972.
After these books had been happily received, pressure on me was renewed to prepare a biography of Washington that would be available to a broader public than any four-volume life could be. And to my surprise, I concluded that all the previous effort had made it possible for me to distill, at long last, what I had discovered into a single volume, one that would, without entirely omitting anything of importance, present in essence Washington’s character and career.
The fact that the longer work stands on many shelves has contributed to the possibility of achieving the shorter. Knowing that further facts, more personal details, deeper analyses, and also justifications for my conclusions can be found in the apposite original volumes, I have felt enabled to move rapidly from one high point to another. The bibliographies and source references, which in the original work totalled 112 pages, make it unnecessary to append here more than a brief essay and list.
Despite its relation to the longer biography, this one-volume life is by no means a series of patched-together extracts. The extreme reduction of scale—to about one fifth—dictated that, if the shorter work were to have its own integrity and literary effect, the material would have to be revisualized and rewritten. Except for the account of Washington’s death, the text is almost altogether new.
J.T.F.
Illustrations
Life mask of Washington, by Jean Antoine Houdon
Sally Fairfax, by an unknown artist
Letter from Washington to Sally Fairfax
Title page and frontispiece of The Bull Finch
How Mount Vernon Grew—three stages:
The house Washington lived in as a boy
After the 1759 enlargement
The completed mansion
Washington, by Charles Willson Peale
Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, by Charles Willson Peale
General Charles Lee, after a drawing by B. Rushbrooke
General Horatio Gates, by Gilbert Stuart
Banner of Washington’s Life Guard
Recruiting poster
Washington’s camp cot and pack bag
General Thomas Conway, an engraving
The Marquis de Lafayette, by Francesco-Giuseppe Casanova
The Count de Rochambeau, by Charles Willson Peale
Peggy Shippen, by John André
General Benedict Arnold, after a drawing by Pierre Eugène du Simitière
Major John André, by an unknown artist
Portrait of Washington, after a drawing by Pierre Eugène du Simitière
The Dove of Peace weathervane
Mount Vernon about 1792: east and west fronts
Plan of Mount Vernon, 1785
Gambling table used at
Mount Vernon
Washington at the time of the Constitutional Convention, by Charles Willson Peale
Washington taking the oath of office as President, an engraving by Amos Doolittle
Presidential table decorations and wine cooler
Alexander Hamilton, by John Trumbull
Thomas Jefferson, by Jean Antoine Houdon
Mrs. Samuel (Eliza) Powel, by Matthew Pratt
James Monroe, by Gilbert Stuart
Edmond Charles Genêt, by Ezra Ames
Edmund Randolph, by an unknown artist
John Jay, by Joseph Wright
Washington reviewing the whiskey army, by Frederick Kemmelmeyer
The Washington Family, by Edward Savage
Washington’s survey of the Mount Vernon plantation
Interior view of Mount Vernon
The last portrait of Washington, by Charles B. J. F. de Saint-Mémin
Mount Vernon in winter
Introduction
During my years of work on a biography of Washington, I have made various unexpected discoveries. Surely the most surprising was that George Washington is alive. Or, to put it more accurately, millions of George Washingtons are alive. Washingtons have been born and have died for some two centuries.
Almost every historical figure is regarded as a dead exemplar of a vanished epoch. But Washington exists within the minds of most Americans as an active force. He is a multitude of living ghosts, each shaped less by eighteenth-century reality than by the structure of the individual brain in which he dwells. An inhabitant of intimate spaces, Washington is for private reasons sought out or avoided, loved or admired, hated or despised. I have come across almost no Americans who prove, when the subject is really broached, emotionally indifferent to George Washington.
The roles played by the mythological George Washingtons fall into two major categories: one Freudian, the other a procession of mirrors reflecting people’s attitudes toward the situation of the United States at their time.
In an essay that had no specific reference to Washington, Freud described how “infantile fantasies” concerning people’s own fathers can shape their conceptions of historical figures. “They obliterate,” Freud wrote, “the individual features of their subject’s physiognomy, they smooth over the traces of his life’s struggles with internal and external resistances, and they tolerate in him no vestiges of human weakness or imperfection. Thus, they present us with what is in fact a cold, strange, ideal figure instead of a human being to whom we might feel ourselves distantly related.”
This is an exact description of the marble image of Washington which so many Americans harbor—and dislike. I have been amazed by the infantile glee with which people I have met made fun of my writing a biography of Washington. Was I recording the clacking of wooden false teeth? Had I ever tried to envision how Washington would have looked in long winter underwear? These mockers often dance up and down with self-satisfaction, like a small child who has dared express an impious thought about his father.
Down the years, Washington’s second mythological role has been as a national symbol, an alternate to the American flag. In periods when Americans were happy with their society, they have thought of Washington with adulation. At times of resentment and self-distrust, the mythological Washingtons have been resented and distrusted. I have discovered, sometimes to my considerable embarrassment, that the current attitude toward Washington—and toward me as his biographer—is often hostile.
My continuing effort has been to disentangle the Washington who actually lived from all the symbolic Washingtons, to rescue the man and his deeds from the layers and layers of obscuring legend that have accreted around his memory during some two hundred years. This involved, in the first place, an act of will. I tried to forget everything I had ever heard about George Washington. Rather than endeavor to emend old images, I determined to start with a blank canvas.
Beginning thus, as it were anew, I found a fallible human being made of flesh and blood and spirit—not a statue of marble and wood. And inevitably—for that was the fact—I found a great and good man. In all history few men who possessed unassailable power have used that power so gently and self-effacingly for what their best instincts told them was the welfare of their neighbors and all mankind.
Most of the brickbats now being thrown at Washington are figments of the modern imagination. In being ourselves untrue to the highest teaching of the American tradition, we of this generation have tended to denigrate that tradition, to seek out all that was unworthy, to emphasize whatever justifies national distrust. In so doing, we have discarded an invaluable heritage. We are blinding our eyes to stars that lead to the very ideals many of us most admire: the sanctity of the individual, the equality of all men before the law, government responsive to the people, freedom for all means of communication, avoidance of what Washington denounced as international “ambition,” the self-determination of people everywhere.
To find again the American ideals we have lost, we may not return to our national beginnings with the blinded eyes of idolatry or chauvinism. Let us examine deeply every flaw, every area, where George Washington and his fellow founding fathers were untrue to what they professed. Let us examine Washington not as the spotless figure delineated by infantile fantasies or by self-seeking wavers of the flag. Let us determine without prejudice exactly what happened, exactly how men behaved. If we do this, we shall, so I am profoundly convinced, find, in the dark valley where we often stand, inspiration.
ONE
A Powerful Apprenticeship
(1732–1753)
No American is more completely misunderstood than George Washington. He is generally believed to have been, by birth and training, a rich, conservative, British-oriented Virginia aristocrat. As a matter of fact, he was, for the environment in which he moved, poor during his young manhood. He never set foot in England or, indeed, any part of Europe. When at seventeen he began making his own living, it was as a surveyor, defining tracts of forest on the fringes of settlement. Soon the wilderness claimed him, first as an envoy seeking out the French in frozen primeval woods and then, for almost five years, as an Indian fighter.
No other President of the United States before Andrew Jackson was as much shaped by the wilderness as Washington, and he had less formal education than did Jackson, than Lincoln even. Both Jackson and Lincoln studied law, while Washington’s total schooling hardly went beyond what we should consider the elementary grades.
In all his long life, Washington never heard of Sulgrave Manor, the ancient British house far back in his lineage, which has been reverently restored as a relic of his transatlantic ancestry. By the time he was born, the family had lost all memory of their British origin. The first settler, John Washington, was an impoverished adventurer who reached Virginia in 1675. The “Wild West” was then on the Atlantic seacoast, and John might have been a character—not the hero—in a modern Western. He was implicated in the murder of five Indian ambassadors; he was a most unscrupulous businessman; and after the wife who was George’s ancestress died, he married in succession two sisters who had been accused before him, when he had sat as justice of the peace, one with keeping a bawdy-house and the other with being the governor’s whore.
As Virginia grew, the Washington family prospered modestly. No member ever reached the social and political pinnacle of serving on the King’s Council, but they associated with members and sometimes even married their daughters. Had George’s childhood proceeded smoothly, he would have been raised in the conventional manner of the minor Virginia gentry. But his childhood did not proceed smoothly.
Legend has clustered around George’s father, Augustine Washington, but we know for sure little about him beyond what is revealed in business records. These show him to have been restless, apprehensive, unsure, making deals which he subsequently denied making. He was often in the law courts. He married twice. Two sons survived from his first marriage, and from his second, five children of whom George was
the oldest.
The future hero saw the light on February 11, 1732,* in a cheaply built house, now long vanished, near where Pope’s Creek empties into the Potomac. As an infant, he was carried some forty miles upriver to a story-and-a-half farmhouse on a bluff (eventually to be known as Mount Vernon). When the boy was six, the family moved again, this time to the farm across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg that was to be George’s childhood home. An inventory made when he was eleven reveals modest comfort. The house had six rooms, four below and two above, into which were crowded thirteen beds and one couch. To service these, the Washingtons owned six good pairs of sheets, ten inferior pairs, and seventeen pillow cases. Their proudest possessions were described as “plate”: one soup spoon, eighteen small spoons, seven teaspoons, a watch, and a sword for a total value of £25 10s. Although they owned two china tea sets, they had only eleven china plates: most of the Washingtons’ utensils were whittled from wood. However, Augustine owned twenty slaves: seven able-bodied, eight of moderate value, and five not capable of work.
Washington spent his childhood in what was for rural Virginia a lively place. Transatlantic vessels beat up the Rappahannock outside his windows to Fredericksburg, and a ferry plied across to the town from the Washington property. There was a perpetual trickle of travelers, some of whom found a temporary haven in the Washingtons’ many beds.
The intention was that George would, like his father and two older half brothers, go to school in England. He was later to disapprove of foreign schooling as weakening the passion of Americans for freedom. In his case, the test was not made. When he was eleven, his father died, carrying away with him any hope of George’s receiving education abroad. The disappointment haunted George for years.
Augustine Washington left the major parts of his modest property to his two older sons, George’s half brothers. The house in which the family lived, Ferry Farm, was eventually to come to George, but his mother was in control, and throughout a long life she refused to relinquish the property.
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