You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

by Alexis Coe

Under the British imperial system, even the most enterprising colonist would remain second class.

Great love stories don’t often begin with dysentery. But had George Washington not contracted the disease during his final year of British military service, he would never have met Martha Dandridge Custis.

Good spies are hard to come by. The job attracts risk-takers, fabulists, escapists, idealists, adventurers, and worse.

“Washington did not really outfight the British,” the British spymaster Major George Beckwith said. “He simply outspied us.”23

He best deserves the Name of Father who acts the Part of one.

The world had only known kings, despots, and dictators, and Washington held unprecedented authority in a new republic.

It was the first time in Western history that a general would be addressing his civilian superiors as he left military service.

The majority of delegates voted for a single executive, versus three, based on the assumption that Washington was going to be the first president. They figured that he’d define the role through precedents. They could see no other way of establishing the office. If he refused, there was no backup choice.

America was born with enough wartime debt to crush it to death. The government owed forty million dollars to its own citizens, who had loaned it money, and twenty-five million to individuals around the world.

The Washingtons went to the theater on occasion, and attended Trinity Church on Broadway, but when they did, Martha felt as closely watched as the person delivering the sermon. “I think I am more like a state prisoner than anything else, there is certain bounds set for me which I must not depart from—and as I can not doe as I like I am obstinate and stay at home a great deal.”8

Political partisanship, Washington predicted, would reduce the government to a crowd of bickering representatives who were very good at thwarting each other but got very little accomplished for their constituents.