Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy

by Nathaniel Philbrick

By the end of my American Revolution trilogy, I had come to realize that Washington did not win the war so much as endure an eight-year ordeal that would have destroyed just about anyone else.

He’d entered the conflict an unrepentant Virginia slaveholder. By the end of the war, he’d learned that his African American soldiers were as competent and brave as anyone else in his army. He’d also befriended the idealistic French nobleman Lafayette, who later claimed, “I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery.”

President Washington was, I began to realize, exactly the kind of tortured soul to whom I’m drawn—a leader whose troubled relationship with slavery embodied the contradictions and denials of our own conflicted relationship with the country’s past.

Partisanship had been born, and by the end of his second term Washington was deeply embittered by the political divisions that threatened to destroy the country. And yet, because of what he’d accomplished during the first years of his presidency—both in the executive mansion and on the road—he’d established a government that was built to last.

Yes, Washington was the father of his country, but he was also the father of the American mule—the creatures that pulled thousands upon thousands of pioneer wagons across the plains and served the U.S. military as late as the war in Afghanistan in the twenty-first century—and it all began here, at Mount Vernon.

Nelly recounted how when Martha, who was more than a foot shorter than her husband, wanted to “command his attention,” she would “seize him by the button . . . [and] he would look down upon her with a most benignant smile, and become at once attentive to her and her wishes, which were never slighted.”

“Men’s minds are as variant as their faces,” he wrote. “Liberality and charity . . . ought to govern in all disputes about matters of importance.” On the other hand, “clamor and misrepresentation . . . only serve to foment the passions, without enlightening the understanding.”

Since 1776, the state’s constitution had given voting rights to any adult—male, female, white, or African American—who had lived in New Jersey for a year and was worth at least fifty pounds. (This would remain the case until 1807, when the Anti-Federalist state legislature restricted the right to vote to white males in an effort to prevent women, who tended to vote Federalist, from participating in the 1808 presidential election, ultimately won by the Anti-Federalist Thomas Jefferson’s heir apparent, James Madison.)

In a few years, Washington’s worst fears would be realized when his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, secretly enlisted Freneau, on Madison’s recommendation, to begin attacking the Washington administration in the press.

What he couldn’t have anticipated, and refused to believe until well after the initial damage had been done, was that someone from his own administration would take the lead in attempting to undermine his best efforts to create an enduring union.

As Abigail Adams observed about Washington, “If he was really not one of the best-intentioned men in the world, he might be a very dangerous one.”

Despite all her misgivings and regrets, she was “determined to be cheerful and to be happy in whatever situation I may be, for I have . . . learnt from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances; we carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us, in our minds, wherever we go.”

That left stealing the technology. On November 11, 1789, only a few weeks after Washington visited the Hartford Woolen Manufactory, a packet from England arrived in New York with a twenty-one-year-old passenger from Britain named Samuel Slater. Slater had just completed his apprenticeship at a textile mill in Belper, Derbyshire. Ambitious and intelligent, Slater had come to realize that the chances of his ever acquiring a mill of his own in England were highly remote. Such was not the case on the other side of the Atlantic, assuming, of course, he could reproduce British technology in America. Slater had carefully studied all aspects of textile mill design and painstakingly committed each detail to memory. In a little over a year, with the financial backing of the Quaker Moses Brown, he opened America’s first cotton-spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

(The sheer number of these “only a man” traditions, no matter how dubious, makes you think that Washington really was telling anybody who would listen that despite all the adulation he was by no means perfect. That did not prevent him, however, from making sure anyone with political power knew he was the boss.)

It’s been estimated that 60 percent of the slave-trading voyages launched from North America originated in Rhode Island; in some years it was as high as 90 percent.

Yes, there were slave traders in Newport, Bristol, and Providence, but most of the state’s slavery connections were more indirect. Rhode Island’s farmers and merchants provided plantation owners in the Caribbean and the southern states with beef, butter, hay, horses, candles, salt cod, barrel hoops and staves, timber, and shoes. Other Rhode Islanders were in the rum distillery business, purchasing slave-produced sugar and molasses from the Caribbean and distilling it into the rum that was then used to trade for slaves in Africa. More than any other northern state, Rhode Island served as, in the words of the Slavery and Justice report, “the commissary of the Atlantic plantation complex.”

many Rhode Island textile manufacturers decided to specialize in the cheapest cloth possible: the coarse, cotton-wool blend used by southern planters to clothe their enslaved workers. Known as Negro cloth, this quickly became a Rhode Island specialty, as did the cloth used to make slave blankets and the sacks used for collecting cotton, known as bagging.

history isn’t being lost when a statue is toppled to the ground; history is being made.

After spending the last year and a half following Washington’s tour across the country, both Melissa and I had come to realize how wrong it was to reduce Washington’s travels to a historical joke. Every tavern and house in which he’d slept—both as a general and as a president—represented another day (and night) devoted to a nation that didn’t even exist when he set out for the first meeting of the Continental Congress in 1774.

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.