Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy

by Nathaniel Philbrick

You may not believe it, but George Washington is bigger than Elvis—at least he was in 2014. In that year, Graceland attracted a whopping 600,000 visitors, while a million people visited Mount Vernon. And that’s not counting the dogs, because, I’m happy to report, the grounds of Mount Vernon are dog friendly.

In 1784, the king of Spain, hoping to win favor with the newly independent United States, agreed to send George Washington some male and female donkeys, known as jacks and jennies. These were followed by a shipment of Maltese donkeys from Lafayette in France. A cross between the Spanish and the Maltese breeds, named Compound, would become the Adam of American donkeys—the animal from which this country’s donkeys (and their mule progeny) are descended. 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. —

Because the springs exerted considerable pressure, closing his mouth required Washington to forcibly grit his teeth, contributing to the grim, determined look captured in so many portraits.

Call me crazy, but I think Washington’s dentures, which could very well include the teeth of some of his enslaved workers, are not a bad metaphor for this country: all our anxiety, despair, embarrassment, rage, racism, fear, laughter, horror, and hope ingeniously cobbled together into a contraption once clamped between the jaws of our first president.

Her name was Annie, and she, too, owned a dog. She said that Alexandria was “the most dog-friendly city in America.” There were so many dog day-care centers in town that people asked each other, “So where does your dog go to school?” Melissa laughed and said that our dog was homeschooled.

Washington, the man who never told a lie, lied. He told his hosts he planned to leave the next morning at ten. When the company of light horse arrived to escort his carriage out of the city, they were shocked to discover that Washington had long since departed. It was a subterfuge he would employ more than a few times in his travels ahead.

He and Harrison had come to disagree about the Constitution, but Washington wasn’t about to let that difference of opinion destroy their friendship. “Men’s minds are as variant as their faces,” he wrote. “Liberality and charity . . . ought to govern in all disputes about matters of importance.”

Now, eight months later, as I stood on the deck of our bobbing tour boat in New York Harbor, I realized that the Statue of Liberty—a green colossus inspired by the abolition of slavery—was the ultimate Civil War monument.

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.”

Other than his spy chief, Benjamin Tallmadge, Washington was probably the only person in the United States who knew the identities of everyone involved in the Culper Spy Ring. In the spring of 1790, these unheralded saviors of the Republic continued to live in obscurity in this remote portion of Long Island; not even their own families knew about their activities during the war.

Hamilton had assumed that one of his collaborators on The Federalist Papers, James Madison, would support him on these controversial proposals. During the Constitutional Convention three years earlier, the two had even discussed the necessity of assumption. But now, as a congressman from Virginia, Madison decided to side with his state’s interests rather than the economic needs of the federal government, and he denounced the plan. It was the beginning of the political divide that would soon consume the country as rancor and partisanship quickly rose to the fore in the House and the Senate.

Once again Washington decided that to tackle slavery at this early stage in the Republic’s development would foment the crisis that might break the Union apart. He might have been right in his assessment, but by ducking the Quaker call for abolition, Washington had made it easier for future generations of Americans—both in the North and in the South—to turn a blind eye to the evils of slavery.

Washington noted that the farmers fertilized their crops with horse manure collected from the streets of New York City and that post-and-rail fences divided up the fields.

Unlike the South, where the enslaved represented the majority of the population, slavery was largely invisible in Newport, although an estimated 30 percent of the city’s population in the mid-eighteenth century was made up of free and enslaved African Americans. In many respects, Rhode Island, more than any other state in the Union, embodied the contradictions and subterfuges of the nation it had only reluctantly decided to join.

Thomas Jefferson, he wrote like an angel. Listen to Washington’s reply to Moses Seixas: All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

“It is hard to imagine any eighteenth-century Rhode Islander whose livelihood was not entangled, directly or indirectly, with slavery.” And it wasn’t just Rhode Island. As the Brown report also makes clear, slavery was a nationwide sin. Whether it was cotton, rum, or sugar, every state in the Union depended on goods produced by enslaved workers in the South and the Caribbean.