You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

by Alexis Coe

(As Abigail Adams, born a generation after Mary, once wrote, “I will not say that all my Geese are swans”

Washington supplemented his fieldwork by studying Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation, a sixteenth-century book on etiquette.

Strive not with your Superiors in argument, but always Submit your Judgement to others with Modesty”),

“A SENSIBLE WOMAN CAN NEVER BE HAPPY WITH A FOOL”

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

theory rarely survives experience unscathed,