You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

by Alexis Coe

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.

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 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.”

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.

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.

Everyone knows that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, a woman is probably a shrew. And shrews, of course, need taming.

That narrative was well received, too; America loves a self-made man, particularly one who overcomes the manipulations of a petty woman to seize his great destiny.

Until the very end, Washington worries about respect and reputation. He needn’t have; the nation hasn’t always remembered him clearly, but we’ve never forgotten our first.

2 When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usualy Discovered.

By age seventeen, he was the surveyor of Culpeper County, the youngest ever hired, and by eighteen he had purchased thousands of acres of land in the Shenandoah Valley. Thanks to him, there was finally steady money coming in at Ferry Farm.

Tanacharison, the Seneca chief, knew just what to call the twenty-one-year-old upstart who summoned him in 1753. His Christian name might have been George Washington, but Tanacharison, known to Europeans as the “Half-King,” would call him “Conotocarious.” In English, it translated to Town Taker, or Devourer of Villages.

Washington didn’t trust the Half-King or his other chiefs. “The Indians are mercenary,” he later wrote. “[E]very service of theirs must be purchased; and they are easily offended, being thoroughly sensible of their own importance.”

The French, however, laid the blame squarely at Washington’s feet. De Jumonville would become a martyr—and a persuasive tool for rallying the public against the British. “The Misfortune is, that our People were surprized,” they wrote in an official report.

“The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire,” British writer Horace Walpole commented at the time. At the age of twenty-two, Washington had committed a political misstep of global consequence. The British and the French were now formally engaged in a battle (known as the French and Indian War) for American land, forcing their allies in Austria, Germany, Prussia, Russia, Spain, and Sweden to take sides. The theater of war quickly spread into far-flung colonial holdings in the Americas, Africa, India, and even the Philippines. If the American Revolution had not taken place, Washington would probably be remembered today as the instigator of humanity’s first world war, one that lasted seven years.

Under the British imperial system, even the most enterprising colonist would remain second class. An Englishman who held a lower rank could order him around, and worse, that Englishman made more money than he did. Everyone knew it, too, which outraged Washington and made recruiting colonists for the British cause a constant challenge. At one point, an official suggested that he supplement his ranks with men from the county jail. Washington privately complained that he’d have better luck trying “to raize the Dead to Life again.” In a letter to Dinwiddie, he equated the undervalued work of colonial officers with those held in bondage: “to be slaving dangerously for the shadow of pay, through the woods, rocks, mountains,—I would rather prefer the great toil of a daily laborer, and dig for a maintenance . . . than serve upon such ignoble terms.”

To accept inferior compensation was to admit that he was inferior to the Dinwiddies and Fairfaxes of the world, an idea he couldn’t abide. So he offered to serve the crown on a volunteer basis, without pay, hoping it would send the message that he was their equal. Washington had yet to grasp that any value they saw in merit and loyalty paled beside the importance of birthright.

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.

Another letter, from officer William La Péronie, provides some evidence that Washington did have premarital sex. Four years before he and Martha wed, La Péronie imagined him “plung’d in the midst of dellight heaven can aford & enchanted By Charms even stranger to the Ciprian Dame (+ M’s Nel).”3 “Ciprian Dame” was eighteenth-century-speak for a sex worker, but she may have been a barmaid or a mistress or a slave. It is therefore possible that Washington had a sexual relationship with a woman other than Martha, and that possibility includes nonconsensual sex with an enslaved woman.

It’s easier to love a rich man than a poor man “Is his fortune sufficient to maintain me in the manner I have been accustomed to live?”

Sally would not be as fortunate. After the Revolution, the Fairfaxes moved to London, where her husband’s noble relatives snubbed her; the state claimed their property back home as a penalty for remaining loyal to the crown, and her brother lost the family fortune. She later wrote to her sister-in-law, “I now know that the worthy man is to be preferred to the high-born.”

“My inclinations are strongly bent to arms,” Washington had written in 1754, when he was twenty-two, but he just couldn’t satisfy that desire in His Majesty’s forces. The next time he would join them on the battlefield, it would be to destroy them.

Washington also blamed Cary & Co. for endangering his livelihood. The law required that colonists sell any tobacco they grew through England, but his crops fetched prices far lower than he deemed fair—not that Mount Vernon’s soil, regularly tested by drought and heavy rain, grew especially good tobacco. Like many land-rich, cash-poor Virginia planters, including Thomas Jefferson, Washington got behind on his payments to London purveyors, and was soon in debt. He spent the 1760s and early 1770s attempting to break the cycle, which was only possible because his marriage to Martha had brought with it hundreds of enslaved people. Washington purchased additional slaves and indentured servants, and leased others from nearby plantations. While they worked, the man they called “Master” holed up in the mansion house, inhaling books and pamphlets on agriculture and manufacturing. He hoped to diversify his crops and maybe produce some artisanal goods.

Mount Vernon’s large enslaved community, of whom more than half originally belonged to the Custis estate, labored from sunup to sundown, six days a week, under the careful watch of overseers. Although estates like Mount Vernon are called “plantations,” it’s a word inflected with genteel romanticism. If we look at what actually occurred there, we see them for what they were: forced-labor camps.

SLAVE QUARTERS By Washington’s death in 1799, there were 317 slaves and about 25 hired or indentured white servants living at Mount Vernon. They were housed in “small villages,” as his presidential home calls them today, across Washington’s five farms. In 1797, a visitor “entered one of the huts of the Blacks” and described what he saw: “the husband and wife sleep on a mean pallet, the children on the ground; a very bad fireplace, some utensils for cooking, but in the middle of this poverty some cups and a teapot.”

“I think the Parliament of Great Britain hath no more Right to put their hands into my Pocket, without my consent, than I have to put my hands into your’s, for money,” he lectured a friend. “And this being already urged to them in a firm, but decent manner by all the Colonies, what reason is there to expect any thing from their justice?”

Parliament was using “despotism to fix the Shackles of Slavery upon us,” Washington said. It was the American colonists’ duty to resist such oppression on behalf of “mankind”—a category he understood to exclude mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters, along with millions of slaves.3 It was an ironic choice of words considering Somerset v Stewart, a 1772 decision from the Court of the King’s Bench in London, which held that chattel slavery was neither supported in common law nor authorized by statute in England and Wales—a clear victory for abolitionists, which terrified Southern colonists. If slavery was outlawed in America, their profits would plummet, as would the power they derived from bondage—including the luxury of rebellion. In London, writer Samuel Johnson railed against the hypocrisy of “these demigods of independence” in a forty-page pamphlet asking, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

And rich. Washington was rich enough to pay his own way, and perhaps support others, too, but devoted enough to the cause to risk it all. That was the kind of man that colonists, no matter where they were from, wanted to lead them into a seemingly unwinnable war.

In the aftermath of the battles at Lexington and Concord the previous spring—during which Massachusetts militias had defeated the British—there was an urgent need to move quickly. “[T]he once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with Blood, or Inhabited by Slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous Man hesitate in his choice?” Washington had written from Mount Vernon, and in London, the British were asking the same thing.8 Votes were taken. In Philadelphia, miraculously, the delegates reached a unanimous decision on June 15, 1775: They would raise an army, and George Washington would lead it.

For all Washington’s talk of the “American Union and Patriotism,” his arsenal of personal grievances cannot be underestimated. He had grown and changed over the previous sixteen years, but at his core, he was still a man eager to be recognized. As commander in chief of the Continental Army, he would be at the center of his country’s story. It was the ultimate way to right past wrongs, to distinguish himself not by where he came from or whom he married but by what he had achieved. And there could not be a more auspicious start than a unanimous election. Only Washington could deny himself the opportunity to drive the British out. Only the British could deny him victory. These were the odds he had always wanted, and he wasn’t about to sit this one out.

The British didn’t see themselves as invaders in 1776, but they showed up, just the same, with the largest invasion force they had ever mustered—400 ships carrying 32,000 troops, enough to block off America’s key waterways and starve it of military supplies. The flotilla was led by Admiral Richard Howe, who’d earned the nickname “Black Dick” because he was said to smile only when a lot of people were about to die. With help from Loyalists on the ground, Black Dick would teach a violent lesson to the “rascally banditti” and “firebrands of sedition” who had taken up arms against the sovereign.1 He announced his arrival on the Hudson with a two-hour cannonade.

If America was not a sovereign nation, its soldiers were “rebels,” which meant the British didn’t have to follow established rules on the treatment of prisoners. They’d answer to no one but themselves.

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. A weapon he needed to ward off criticism arrived just in time, in 1776, right after he had been appointed commander in chief. That was when Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved poet who’d been named after the boat that brought her from West Africa to Boston, wrote an affecting ode in praise of the Revolution. The final stanza was dedicated “To His Excellency George Washington.” Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side, Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide. A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine, With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! Be thine.

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 May 31, 1779, he allocated a third of his army to General John Sullivan, writing: The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.

And so was the image of that Christmas night, recorded seventy-five years later in Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. The painting’s inaccuracies abound—the flag Monroe carries has yet to be introduced, the ice is much too thick—but it hardly matters.9 Leutze managed to capture a certain against-all-odds spirit, which seemed to persuade the world that America was born righteous, so Washington along with it.

Good spies are hard to come by. The job attracts risk-takers, fabulists, escapists, idealists, adventurers, and worse. Early American history is littered with the names of men who swiftly learned they lacked the instinct or constitution for espionage. Perhaps the best known is Nathan Hale, who ventured into British-occupied Long Island in September 1776 with no training, no handler, no safe house, and no extraction plan. He was promptly caught.

The Culper ring had a far-flung member they called “Samuel Culper, Jr.” who lived even deeper undercover in British-occupied New York. The operative, Robert Townsend, was a practicing Quaker who wrote passionate essays in the New York Royal Gazette, a Tory newspaper, and operated a coffee shop favored by British soldiers.12 It was the perfect cover, allowing Townsend to eavesdrop on customers, who often discussed military business. A courier shuttled intelligence sixty miles east to Setauket, where it made its way to Tallmadge and, not infrequently, to the commander in chief.

Billy Lee is often noted and praised by contemporaries and historians for his constant presence during the war, without any reflection on or seeming awareness of the irony: Lee had no choice in the matter. The figurehead of American liberty was never far from a representation of its (and his own) deep-seated hypocrisy. And of course there wasn’t any question of Lee enjoying the same battlefield perks as his master. He received only one update about his family during the war: “If it will give Will any pleasure he may be told his wife and child are both well,” Lund wrote to Washington in late 1775.16 After that, there are no more references to Lee’s family.

“Gentleman, you must pardon me,” he said, putting on his new spectacles. “I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.”3 Softened by his sincerity, the soldiers accepted their fate. Some would wait for years after the war to be paid, but others would sign away their future earnings to parasitic lenders, settling wherever they could. The British were resigned to a similar fate. As the redcoats departed the colonies for London and European theaters of war, they staged fire sales, some of which the Washingtons partook in, picking up French wine, beer, olives, nuts, water glasses, and china as they moved between Philadelphia, New York City, and West Point. They would save them for, at long last, private life—which they planned on starting as soon as the treaties were ratified. It was the only thing standing between Washington and the permanent retirement he craved, “from whence no Traveller returns.”4

Following the stage directions, Washington rose to deliver his speech. His voice was surprisingly ragged and his hands were shaking, but the words he spoke were consistent with everything he’d said before: He was unworthy of the role of general, but aspired to the cause, and succeeded because of Divine Providence and the men who served under him. “I consider it an indispensable duty to close this last solemn act of my Official life, by commending the Interests of our dearest Country to the protection of Almighty God, and those who have the superintendence of them, to his holy keeping,” he said. “Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of Action.” He concluded, “[A]nd bidding an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.”9

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.

“We are either a United people, or we are not,” Washington had written James Madison in November 1785.13 America had always intended to succeed without a king, a dominant church, or a military leader, let alone an arthritic retiree with blurry vision, fogged hearing, a couple of teeth, and limited cash flow. Washington was no longer an ambitious youth with something to prove but a fifty-four-year-old man with everything to lose.

Martha, however, wouldn’t even entertain the idea of attending. “Mrs. Washington is become too Domestick, and too attentive to two little Grand Children to leave home,” he had written earlier in early May 1787.15 She was also comforting Fanny, who had buried her first child only two weeks after his birth. Experience had taught her this: Family was fleeting, and when Washington went to big meetings in Philadelphia, whatever tranquility they had come to know was about to be completely disrupted.

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.

As one of his favorite writers, Joseph Addison, wrote in a play called Cato, “Thy life is not thy own, when Rome demands it.”

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.) The Virginian and the New Englander made for an odd couple. Washington was tall and athletic, whereas the much shorter Adams had already earned the nickname “His Rotundity.” People either loved or grudgingly respected Washington, whereas Adams was a more divisive figure.

Adams argued that Washington be called “His Highness, the President of the United States of America, and Protector of the Rights of the Same.” When Jefferson got word in Paris, where he was serving as U.S. minister to France, of the spectacle, he wrote in code that it was “the most superlatively ridiculous thing I ever heard of.” Ben Franklin had described Adams, Jefferson added, as “Always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes absolutely mad.”1 And Jefferson was a friend of Adams.

“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.”

Billy Lee, the slave who was Washington’s manservant for the entirety of the war, was left behind when he could no longer keep up. After he was crippled due to injuries sustained in service to Washington, Lee was demoted to shoemaker. The year before his first accident, he’d convinced Washington to bring Margaret “Peggy” Lee to Mount Vernon. They had met during the war, and while Washington clearly didn’t care for her, he nonetheless wrote to Clement Biddle in an attempt to bring her to Virginia.

For whatever reason, Peggy never arrived. It seems that Lee never did remarry.