Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

On April 12, 1743, Augustine Washington died at forty-nine in a manner that eerily prefigured George’s own demise at century’s end:

The eleven-year-old also found himself the juvenile owner of ten human beings.

Whether to improve his penmanship or perhaps as a school assignment, he submitted to the drudgery of copying out 110 social maxims from The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation, a handy guidebook of etiquette that traced its origins to a French Jesuit work of the sixteenth century.

In a 1761 letter, he informed his remote tailor that “my stature is six feet, otherwise rather slender than corpulent,” and he never deviated from that formula.1 Obviously, Washington couldn’t afford to tell a fib about his height to his tailor.

The coquettish Sally seemed to be feeding his amorous fantasies while simultaneously holding him rigidly at arm’s length.

He seemed to be saying that their love, defeated by the practical circumstances of life, was simply not meant to be.

“Human affairs are always checkered and vicissitudes in this life are rather to be expected than wondered at.”

The couple possessed a copy of Conjugal lewdness: or matrimonial whoredom by Daniel Defoe and The lover’s watch: or the art of making love by Aphra Behn.2

Do not then, in your contemplation of the marriage state, look for perfect felicity before you consent to wed. Nor conceive, from the fine tales the poets and lovers of old have told us of the transports of mutual love, that heaven has taken its abode on earth.

Slaves were ubiquitous in this rich, populous colony, making up 40 percent of Virginia’s population.

He was cold-blooded in specifying instructions for buying slaves, telling one buyer, as if he were purchasing a racehorse, that he wanted his slaves “to be straight-limbed and in every respect strong and likely, with good teeth and good countenances.”5 He favored adolescent females who could maximize the number of slave children, urging one planter who owed him money to sell some slaves in the fall “when they are fat and lusty and must soon fall of[f] unless well fed.”

In 1767, when four slaves were executed in Fairfax County for supposedly colluding to poison their overseers, their decapitated heads were posted on chimneys at the local courthouse to act as a grim warning to others.

This sexual division meant that only a little more than a third of Washington’s slaves enjoyed the luxury of living with their spouses and children.

Under Virginia law, slaveholders could freely abuse or even murder their slaves in punishing misbehavior and still avoid legal repercussions.

This made up part of a strictly limited market economy at Mount Vernon in which Washington allowed slaves to till their own garden plots, keep poultry, and sell eggs, chicken, fruits, and vegetables. On Sunday mornings he even permitted them to travel with passes to nearby Alexandria and peddle their wares in the open marketplace.

A month earlier, he recorded that he had killed five mallards and five bald eagles in one day—a curious triumph for the Father of His Country.

“Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause.”27

I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me in the elegant lines you enclosed. And however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyric, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical talents.”

“If you should ever come to Cambridge or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favour[e]d by the Muses and to whom nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. I am with great respect your obed[ien]t humble servant.”

Major James Wilkinson credited his “stentorian lungs” as essential to the operation.18

Nothing pleased Washington more than unconditional loyalty, and Lafayette served it up in abundance. The

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina remembered his patent frustration: “I heard him bitterly lament that Coll Bland had not sent him any information at all and that the accounts he had received from others were of a very contradictory nature.”

“But if deranged during the course of the action,” Jefferson noted, “if any member of his plan was dislocated by sudden circumstances, he was slow in readjustment.”26 With a mind neither quick nor nimble, Washington lacked the gift of spontaneity and found it difficult to improvise on the spot.

“He is the most amiable, obliging, and civil man but, as a general, he is too slow, even indolent, much too weak, and is not without his portion of vanity and presumption.”

IN THE SPRING OF 1780 Washington’s most immediate concern was the uncertain fate of the threatened American garrison in Charleston, South Carolina. Sir Henry Clinton and Lord Cornwallis had set sail with a large flotilla from New York and besieged Charleston as the main theater of war shifted irreversibly to the South.

such optimism had been exposed as a delusion.

On January 17 Brigadier General Daniel Morgan pulled off a spectacular victory at Cowpens, South Carolina, routing a veteran army under the notorious Tarleton.

Washington at fifty-one was much older and more haggard than the young planter who had taken charge of the Continental Army in 1775.

Perhaps he sensed that a deity couldn’t step down from the clouds more than once without dispelling his mystique.

According to Mary Thompson, Washington bought nine teeth in 1784 from certain nameless “Negroes” for thirteen shillings apiece.7 Whether he wanted the teeth implanted directly in his mouth or incorporated into dentures, we cannot say. However ghoulish this trade sounds to modern readers, it was then standard practice for rich people to purchase teeth from the poor.

For all the austerity of war, they weren’t a terribly lean bunch: Washington weighed 209 pounds, Henry Knox a robust 280 pounds, and eight of eleven officers tipped the scale at more than 200 pounds.

The Americans are a curious, original people. They know how to govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them.”

The American Revolution was never a bloodless affair, as is sometimes imagined. Of 200,000 Americans who served in the war, about 25,000 died, or approximately 1 percent of the population, making it the bloodiest American war except for the Civil War.

cannot come to each of you,” he said tenderly, “but shall feel obliged if each of you will come and take me by the hand.”14 The moment was legendary, not for any feat of oratory, but for the simple heartfelt emotion palpable in Washington’s words. The

As Benjamin Tallmadge wrote, “Such a scene of sorrow and weeping I had never before witnessed . . . The simple thought . . . that we should see his face no more in this world seemed to me utterly insupportable.”

Having slept in 280 houses during the war, he must have had a special craving for the banal comforts of home.

Washington had served as commander in chief for eight and a half years, the equivalent of two presidential terms.

His military triumphs had been neither frequent nor epic in scale. He had lost more battles than he had won, had botched several through strategic blunders, and had won at Yorktown only with the indispensable aid of the French Army and fleet.

I will move gently down the stream of life until I sleep with my fathers.”

An uncommon structure in rural Virginia, this enclosure enabled Washington to grow palm trees and semitropical plants as well as lemons, limes, and oranges.

In addition to his better-known title of Father of His Country, Washington is also revered in certain circles as the Father of the American Mule.

This was no mean feat: slaves made up 40 percent of the population in Virginia, for instance, and 60 percent in South Carolina.

Casting their votes on February 4, 1789, they vindicated Lee’s prediction: all 69 electors voted for Washington, making him the only president in American history to win unanimously.

Nonetheless, Maclay left some priceless glimpses into the social world of George and Martha Washington, whom he satirized as boors and bumpkins, overshadowed by more elegant couples they were trying to impress.

Washington initially oversaw a larger staff of slaves and servants at Mount Vernon than he did as president of the United States—but the new government quickly overshadowed his estate in size.

Jefferson faulted Randolph as a weak, wavering man, calling him “the poorest chameleon I ever saw, having no color of his own and reflecting that nearest him.”

“where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, it is best to be silent, for there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.”

leading to yet another tradition: that the State of the Union speech (then called the annual address) would feature leading figures from all three branches of government.

To Arthur Young, he made the revealing (if questionable) point that farmers who had only two or three slaves lived not much differently from their slaves. He

Having fought in the Revolutionary War and studied dentistry with Paul Revere, he had an excellent patriotic pedigree and crafted several sets of dentures for President Washington. The dentures that Greenwood fashioned during Washington’s first year as president used natural teeth, inserted into a framework of hippopotamus ivory and anchored on Washington’s one surviving tooth.