You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

by Alexis Coe

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

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

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.

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.

Martha was in a unique position for a young woman in the New World. At twenty-seven, the five-foot-tall widow was attractive in appearance, disposition, status, and family. She was petite, buxom, and had already given birth to two children—Jack, age four, and Patsy, age two—which signaled she was capable of bearing more for her future husband. Her father-in-law, half-brother-in-law, and late husband had died, the last without a will, leaving her one of the wealthiest women in Virginia—and free of meddling trustees. Martha was recognized as a so-called feme sole under English common law and had the right to legally conduct business as any man would. There were plenty of suitors milling about, eager to control her estate, which included around 290 enslaved people and almost eighteen thousand acres of land.

Acknowledging Washington’s rank would mean recognizing America as a sovereign nation, and that was a nonstarter. The Howe brothers, for all their guns and ships, and ships with guns, didn’t have much bargaining power. The Royal Army was open to reconciliation or battle, and nothing else. They could offer Washington pardon, but only in exchange for a total and complete “dissolution of all rebel political and military bodies, surrender of all the forts and posts, and restoration of the King’s officials.”6 It was a bad offer for Washington as an individual and for America as a country. He refused.

Washington put Caleb Gibbs, of the 14th Massachusetts Continental Regiment, in charge of the new unit, which he called “My Guards.” Soldiers called them “His Excellency’s Guard” and “Washington’s Body Guard,” but most of his men called them “the Life Guards.” They dressed in blue and buff uniforms with leather helmets bearing a white plume. Gibbs had the buttons on his uniform engraved with “USA”—the first known record of the abbreviation.

Washington’s insistence on being addressed by his title reminds us that he could be a brilliant tactician, but his strategic and intellectual victories off the battlefield have been totally overshadowed by his military triumphs during the Revolution. He won the war, but he didn’t do it with sheer force alone.16 He couldn’t have. If Washington had tried to match the Howe brothers in experience or armed forces, the war would not have been the second longest in American history.17 There likely wouldn’t be an American history. To pigeonhole him as a military leader is to underestimate how much the fledgling government needed Washington as a diplomat and political strategist. His ability to manage large-scale combat while also running spy rings and shadow and propaganda campaigns in enemy-occupied areas is a significant—and often overlooked—part of the Revolutionary War.

White Americans’ enthusiasm for liberty and “humanity and tenderness” was mostly reserved for people who shared their skin color. They had no plans to abolish slavery. That left them vulnerable to the British, who’d promised freedom for slaves who fought for the crown. Washington, who owned several hundred people himself, recognized the power of the pledge—not only in the reality it promised but also in what it signified to the rest of the world.

Just as Wheatley’s support reassured colonists, news of Indian oppression was essential to Washington’s hearts-and-minds campaign throughout the colonies. At times, the crown had made peace treaties with the Indians that curtailed westward expansion, and the colonists saw themselves as the victims. In an attempt to reassure them, and with the full support of Congress, Washington undertook a campaign of genocide against the Six Nations, the northeast Iroquois confederacy. On

Sir James Jay, a physician in New York, had developed a “sympathetic stain” for secret correspondence.

When it came to spying, the Americans lagged too far behind their enemy. The crown had centuries of experience in espionage, as it did in warfare, but Washington had the means to play catch-up in only one realm.

The British and the Hessians brought smallpox with them when they arrived to quell the Revolution, and though Washington had been immune since contracting the disease in Barbados in 1751, he quickly learned that almost everyone around him was vulnerable. “I am very much afraid that all the Troops on their march from the Southward will be infected with the small pox, and that instead of having an Army here, we shall have an Hospital,” he wrote to General Horatio Gates in early 1777.11 The Virginia legislature, worried that inoculation would spread rather than contain the disease, made inoculation illegal. But the epidemic, which Washington called “this most dangerous enemy,” threatened to defeat the patriots; by 1776, 20 percent of his army had suffered or died from smallpox.12 Variolation, a new technique, was risky; at best, it put soldiers out of commission for weeks at a time. Still, Washington decided to move ahead with compulsory mass inoculations. Smallpox-related fatalities of soldiers and recruits dropped by 17 percent as soon as inoculation was introduced; by the end of the war, it had reached 1 percent.

The heartbreak didn’t end after Yorktown. Washington had grown fond of the men who served under him, and he spent the next year saying goodbye, in one way or another, to many of them. “I often asked myself, as our Carriages distended, whether that was the last sight, I ever should have of you? And tho’ I wished to say no—my fears answered yes,” he wrote to Lafayette, who, having secured independence and nationhood for the United States, returned to his native France, eyes firmly fixed on the monarchy. Alexander Hamilton went to Congress in New York. Others died in the waning skirmishes of the war. “Poor Laurens is no more,” Washington wrote to Lafayette in 1782, upon learning John Laurens, who had served as his aide-de-camp, was killed by redcoats while foraging (or plundering, as the British argued in their defense) in South Carolina.31

The country celebrated his voluntary resignation, and in London, subjects of the British crown marveled over “a Conduct so novel, so inconceivable to People, who, far from giving up powers they possess, are willing to convulse to the Empire to acquire more.” King George himself allegedly said, upon hearing of the plan, “If [Washington] does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” America would spark an age of revolutions. When France experienced its own, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, he did not step down from power, but rather declared himself emperor. Years later, he would say, “They wanted me to be another Washington.”13 But he couldn’t be. No one could.

When Washington assumed the presidency, his reputation was beyond reproach. Everywhere he went, the public celebrated him, and everyone he met respected him, wanted to be his friend, and seemed eager to serve him in any capacity. But by the end of two terms in office, Washington was estranged from three of his four original cabinet members, as well as three out of four future presidents. Half the country considered itself politically opposed to him.

BEFORE WASHINGTON BECAME PRESIDENT AFTER WASHINGTON BECAME PRESIDENT FINAL RELATIONSHIP STATUS John Adams “I glory in the character of Washington because I know him to be an exemplification of the American character.”1 “Too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station and reputation.”2 Friends Thomas Jefferson “In War we have produced a Washington, whose memory will be adored while liberty shall have votaries, whose name will triumph over time, and will in future ages assume its station among the most celebrated worthies of the world.”3 “His colloquial talents were not above mediocrity, possessing neither copiousness of ideas, nor fluency of words. in public when called on for a sudden opinion, he was unready, short, and embarrassed.”4 Estranged Thomas Paine “I shall never suffer a hint of dishonor or even a deficiency of respect to you to pass unnoticed.”5 “And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.”6 Estranged James Madison “The conduct of Washington does equal honor to his prudence and to his virtue.”7 “[Washington’s conduct is] improper & indelicate.”8 Estranged James Monroe “I have a boundless confidence in him, nor have I any reason to believe he will ever furnish occasion for withdrawing it.”9 “[T]he labours of y[...

All in all, it was a pleasant trip that concluded with consensus around the Constitution of the United States, with a preamble written by Morris.17 When the time came to sign it, Washington was the first; he was likely the first to depart Philadelphia, too. He did so satisfied that, with minimal interference, and at the expense of just a few weeks of neglecting private affairs, the country had been set on the right path. Now he could return to Mount Vernon for good. Unfortunately for Washington, he was the only one left with that impression. Alexander Hamilton, who had served as his aide-de-camp until 1781, argued that, by attending, Washington had “pledged to take a part in the execution of the government.” 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. “It cannot be considered as a compliment to say that on your acceptance of the office of President the success of the new government in its commencement may materially depend,” Hamilton wrote, keeping the pressure on.18 “You must be the President,” echoed Morris.19

The first presidential election in the United States was its least dramatic. There were no debates and no campaigns; when the Senate and the House of Representatives met for the first time on April 6, 1789, in New York to tally the votes, there were no surprises. George Washington appeared on every ballot and received sixty-nine electoral votes to secure the presidency. He easily beat John Adams, who garnered thirty-four votes, the top total among ten other also-rans. Second place gave the vice presidency to Adams. (By 1804, the Twelfth Amendment required that electors name both a president and a vice president on their ballots.)

People either loved or grudgingly respected Washington, whereas Adams was a more divisive figure. One had mastered the art of self-control, offering his opinions only when he judged it wise, whereas the other could not restrain himself. And when it came to the daunting roles they were about to assume, Washington was focused on big issues, like establishing enduring norms for his office and addressing foreign debt, whereas Adams was obsessed with essentially meaningless formalities, like the president’s title.

Adams, and practically every vice president who followed, suffered the consequences of his faux pas. Washington did not easily trust or forgive, and this inauspicious beginning ensured Adams wouldn’t become a confidant. “My Country has in its Wisdom contrived for me, the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived,” Adams later wrote to his wife, Abigail. “I can do neither good nor Evil, I must be born away by Others and meet the common Fate.”2

The best thing about the house was that Congress paid the yearly rent of $845. Washington argued, as he had during the war, that he should cover his own living expenses, which was great for optics but terrible for his pocketbook. Fortunately for him, the Constitution required compensation and Congress allotted him a twenty-five-thousand-dollar annual salary plus the cost of living. But the new government didn’t pay in advance, and like most Virginians, Washington was land rich and cash poor.

Washington was pragmatic through it all; he had already outlived most of the men in his family, and he’d lived some of those years hard, which apparently showed. “Time has made havoc upon his face,” observed Fisher Ames, a congressman from Massachusetts, during the inauguration.

Article II of the Constitution said that the president should make treaties “with the advice and consent of the Senate,” and that’s exactly what he was trying to do—consult with them ahead of upcoming negotiations with the Creeks, the Cherokees, and the Carolinas about ongoing violence between tribes and white settlers. The Continental Congress was wholly responsible for the conflict; it had effectively stolen large swaths of indigenous land, claiming that the Indians had forfeited their right to it by supporting the British during the Revolution. (In reality, only a handful of tribes had actually done so.)

Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the treasury, was in charge of solving the debt problem. Emulating the British system, he proposed setting up a central bank. It would issue currency, oversee the national banking system, and assume the interest payments on states’ debts—but the principal loan would never be paid back. And while the federal government would run the Bank of the United States, it wouldn’t own it. A small group of investors would, making relief of the national debt integral to their own prosperity. The plan inflamed regional tensions. Southerners had paid off nearly all their wartime debts already, thanks in large part to slave labor. They disliked ceding a measure of their financial autonomy to the federal government, and they were smarting about the debate over a permanent location for the capital; the majority of the sixteen proposed sites were in the north. Southerners were looking at a situation in which they’d be saddled with others’ debts (thanks to Hamilton, a New Yorker) and stripped of political influence (because of the likely northern capital location).

Washington would hold eight more meetings of the cabinet—a term coined by Madison—in 1791.19 “[I]n these discussions, Hamilton & myself were daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks,” Jefferson later wrote.20 His description turns meetings into a blood sport, with Washington as the referee and Jefferson and Hamilton the razor-beaked competitors.

By 1792, their fights spilled out of the cockpit. Jefferson and Madison, who were ideological allies, quietly funded Philip Freneau’s National Gazette, which criticized all of Washington’s policies and attacked Federalist supporters; he was, at least in the first term, far too popular with the people to assault directly. Just as they had blamed Parliament for misleading the king, they now blamed Washington’s seemingly favorite adviser, Hamilton, for misleading the president. Hamilton was already promoting—and perhaps backing—John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States, a pro-administration paper; he sometimes wrote for it under the name “An American.”21

Jefferson did emerge with one diplomatic win: Washington agreed to receive Edmond-Charles Genêt, the first ambassador from the French Republic. But when Genêt arrived in the spring of 1793, he didn’t go straight to Philadelphia, as he should have, to pay his respects to the president. Instead, the young redheaded ambassador began a monthlong anti-neutrality tour from Charleston, South Carolina, to New York. He urged Americans to openly defy Washington—whom he described as “a man very different from the character emblazoned in history”—by pressuring Congress to declare support for France, sending privateers to seize British merchant ships, and wresting control of Florida and Louisiana from the Spanish, who were now also at war with France.6

John Adams recalled in a letter to Jefferson in 1813, “when ten thousand People in the Streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his House, and effect a Revolution in the Government, or compell it to declare War in favour of the French Revolution, and against England.”8

Washington seems to have taken this personally. He was no king; he had not handed down the tax to fund his jewel habit or build a seventh castle. Rather, democratically elected officials had voted it into law. He saw these local attacks as a direct challenge to legitimate federal authority and was determined to quash the protest and have its participants tried for treason. But according to the Constitution, the commander in chief could send in troops only at the request of state officials, and Pennsylvania governor Thomas Mifflin wasn’t ready to take that step. Washington saw a rebellion, but Mifflin saw isolated (and largely whiskey-fueled) acts of desperation from a community that felt unheard. Only land-owning white men could vote, and land ownership in western Pennsylvania had fallen dramatically since the earliest period of white settlement. In some townships, none of the locals owned any land at all; their landlords—the ones who were allowed to vote—lived in the big cities. Much of the population covered rent and other necessities by bartering crops or whiskey. They rarely paid in cash, which was scarce in the region. For the majority of the population, then, even a low yearly tax would leave them with nothing.

He became the first and only president to take up arms against his own citizens, and to come along for the ride—though he did so mostly from a carriage, dismounting only when it was time to review the troops.

The press was stunned by Washington’s imprudence: The man famous for his self-control and judiciousness had neglected to consider whether military action was warranted. Couldn’t he have simply threatened the poor civilians into submission—or, better yet, actually talked to them? With some effort, the troops arrested one hundred and fifty whiskey rebels. But without much evidence, and with few people willing to testify, only two men, John Mitchell and Philip Wiegel, were found guilty of treason. Although Washington bragged about the peaceful resolution, he must have felt embarrassed about the situation, or at least the reception his overreaction had received; he used a presidential pardon for the first time in history, and let the men go.

To Washington, though, the damage was already done. At sixty-four, he wanted to retire, and this time, no one talked him out of it. The Constitution prescribed term limits of four years, but it did not restrict how many terms could be served; in choosing to stop at two, Washington set a precedent that would endure into the twentieth century, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt went for a third. Once again, he would shock the world by giving up power, overseeing a peaceful transfer from one systematically elected official to another.

Judge actually agreed, but not without terms: She would remain with the Washingtons until they died; the end of their life would signal an end to her bondage. And she would not be gifted or sold to anyone. When Whipple wrote as much, Washington went apoplectic.

In lieu of coercion from the federal and state governments, Washington could have freed his slaves as an individual, but always found a reason or excuse not to. The main issue was always money. According to a Virginia law passed in 1782, he could set any number of enslaved men, women, and children above forty-five years or under twenty-one (for men) and eighteen (for women) free if they could be “supported and maintained by the person so liberating them.” If he failed to do so, the court would “sell so much of the person’s estate as shall be sufficient for that purpose.”19 Washington didn’t have the cash. “My estate for the last 11 years have not been able to make both ends meet,” he had written to Lund Washington in 1787, and little had changed since.20

It’s hard to know how serious he had been over the years about liberating his slaves; when the topic came up in letters, he often said he would prefer to discuss it in person. Whether those discussions happened and how they went, we’ll never know. What’s clear is that, however Washington felt about owning human beings, he wasn’t willing to part with everything he had to free them.

Adams, the first (and only) president who openly identified with the Federalists, wanted to muster an army in case hostilities broke out, and turned to sixty-six-year-old Washington, who had left the Continental Army fifteen years earlier, to lead it.14 “We must have your Name, if you, in any case will permit Us to Use it,” Adams pleaded in June

The document, which includes a painstaking inventory of his worldly possessions, reveals him to be one of the richest men in America. He wasn’t lying when he had claimed to be cash poor—though there always seemed to be money for finery, or to hire slave hunters to catch Hercules and Ona Judge—but he wasn’t exactly telling the truth, either. Washington was land rich, incredibly so, far past his own plantation. Washington owned 51,000 acres of land, mostly in what was then Virginia, but also Maryland, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and what became Ohio, along with small tracts in various cities; that included properties in the City of Washington (now Washington, D.C., which is currently, for context, a total of 43,740 acres). Over the years, Washington had tried to sell some of it off, but he rarely succeeded; either there were no takers, or there were, but they didn’t meet his criteria. Had he accepted the offers he received, he might have had enough money to do what he’d been talking about for two decades: emancipate the people he’d enslaved.

Instead, Washington failed to free a single slave during his lifetime. He was always waiting for something—a land deal, a law to compel him—but in the end, he always came back to the same problem: The fate of his slaves’ families. Many of the people Washington enslaved had married the Custis slaves, who belonged to Martha’s heirs, and it seems her family had no intention of freeing them. But Washington wouldn’t have to deal with any of those complications after he died. In his will he stipulated that his hundred and twenty-three slaves should be freed—after Martha had her use of them, and the income they would generate.

Most modern accounts of Washington’s will are fairly forgiving, even sometimes congratulatory. Mount Vernon, now a museum and presidential library, summarizes it thus: “At the end of his life Washington made the bold step to free all his slaves in his 1799 will—the only slave-holding Founding Father to do so.”8 The often repeated statement lacks crucial details and context: the slaves’ manumission was not immediate and other slave-owning founders, including Benjamin Franklin, didn’t emancipate their slaves in their wills because they had already done so while they were alive. After Franklin returned from France in 1785, he freed his slaves. In 1790, he petitioned Congress to abolish slavery—while Washington was president, three years before he signed the Fugitive Slave Law. “If his countrymen in Washington’s state of Virginia had followed his example in freeing their slaves as quickly as practicable,” writes Ashley Bateman, a teacher, “who knows the impact it could have had on the South.”9 Bateman ignores that Virginians already had in-state models to follow. Prominent Virginian Robert Carter III (whom Washington may have known through his eldest half brother Lawrence) manumitted over four hundred and fifty slaves in his lifetime. Like Washington, Carter had hoped gradual emancipation would pass the Virginia legislature in his lifetime, but unlike Washington, when it seemed clear it would not, he began to do so himself in 1791.