Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

Wary of Law’s motives, Washington wrote on the sly to Elizabeth’s stepfather, David Stuart, suggesting a strong prenuptial agreement that would have Law “make a settlement upon her previous to marriage, of her own fortune, if no more.”

Like Jacky, Washy apologized profusely for his misdemeanors and promised to reform. He assured Washington that “like the prodigal son,” he would be “a sincere penitent,” but such noble intentions lasted only as long as it took the ink to dry.57 However good-natured and ingratiating in his letters, Washy was, at bottom, feckless and incorrigible. He would say all the right things, then do all the wrong things, and he lasted only a year at Princeton.

On February 1, 1796, he posted advertisements for the sale of thirteen tracts along three western rivers—the Ohio, Great Kanawha, and Little Miami—amounting to a whopping 36,000 acres. These ads were posted in Philadelphia papers and well-frequented taverns in western Pennsylvania. The properties dated from the distant period when the young Anglophile officer had received bounty lands for service in the French and Indian War and had cornered aggressively the rights of fellow soldiers. In undertaking these sales, Washington harbored a secret agenda, hoping to use the proceeds to help emancipate his slaves.

Patrick Henry was shocked at his slanderous treatment: “If he whose character as our leader during the whole war . . . is so roughly handled in his old age, what may be expected of men of the common standard?”2

As Joseph Ellis has written, “In the Farewell Address, Washington reiterated his conviction that the centralizing impulses of the American Revolution were not violations but fulfillments of its original ethos.”

He warned against an unreasonable aversion to taxes, without which the debt could not be retired—a jab at those Jeffersonians who loudly took issue with the funded debt, then opposed the whiskey tax and other measures designed to whittle it down.

In a still more paranoid vein, Adams surmised that Washington had retired because a malign Hamilton wielded veto power over his appointees: “And this necessity was, in my opinion, the real cause of his retirement from office. For you may depend upon it, that retirement was not voluntary.”

Beyond moral scruples, Washington found slave ownership a political embarrassment. During his second term, the Aurora taunted him by declaring that, twenty years after independence, Washington still possessed “FIVE HUNDRED of the HUMAN SPECIES IN SLAVERY.”39 On another occasion it mocked him as a hypocritical emblem of liberty, arguing that it “must appear a little incongruous then that Liberty’s Apostle should be seen with chains in his hands, holding men in bondage.”40 This was a dangerous game for Bache to play, since it could easily backfire on Jefferson and Madison, two sizable slaveholders who figured as his populist champions.

The protracted hunt for Ona Judge began when a young woman, Elizabeth Langdon, who had befriended Nelly Custis, spotted her in Portsmouth. When Langdon realized that Martha Washington was nowhere to be seen and that Judge had escaped, she asked Judge, “But why did you come away? How can Mrs. Washington do without you?” “Run away, misses,” Judge replied. “Run away!” said Langdon. “And from such an excellent place! Why, what could induce you? You had a room to yourself and only light nice work to do and every indulgence.”“Yes, I know, but I want to be free, misses; wanted to learn to read and write.”48 Ona Judge, who had stored up grievances that Martha Washington could little comprehend, afterward complained that she had “never received the least mental or moral instruction of any kind, while she remained in Washington’s family.”

52 Perhaps contributing to Washington’s vigilance in hunting down Judge was that she was a dower slave, which meant that he would have to reimburse the Custis estate for her loss.

For the most part, the speech was well received, although the lone congress-man from the new state of Tennessee, Andrew Jackson, who was enraged by the Jay Treaty, refused to salute the departing chief or join in the congressional response applauding him.

anecdote speaks volumes about the lethal political atmosphere. After Washington published the farewell address, Federalists in the Virginia House of Delegates introduced a motion hailing “the virtue, patriotism, and wisdom of the President of the United States.” In a deliberate snub, the Republicans lobbied to delete the word wisdom from the resolution, prompting John Marshall to lead the battle to retain the disputed noun. “Will it be believed that the word was retained by a very small majority?” he later said. “A very small majority in the legislature of Virginia acknowledged the wisdom of General Washington.”

By 1814 Jefferson would arrive at a more balanced verdict on Washington: “On the whole, his character was, in its mass, perfect, in nothing bad, in few points indifferent; and it may truly be said, that never did nature and fortune combine more perfectly to make a man great.”

Washington’s catalog of accomplishments was simply breathtaking. He had restored American credit and assumed state debt; created a bank, a mint, a coast guard, a customs service, and a diplomatic corps; introduced the first accounting, tax, and budgetary procedures; maintained peace at home and abroad; inaugurated a navy, bolstered the army, and shored up coastal defenses and infrastructure; proved that the country could regulate commerce and negotiate binding treaties; protected frontier settlers, subdued Indian uprisings, and established law and order amid rebellion, scrupulously adhering all the while to the letter of the Constitution.

The enterprising Anderson devised the concept of taking grain grown at Mount Vernon and converting it into corn and rye whiskey at a commercial distillery on the estate. For Washington, always rabid on the subject of alcoholism, it was an ironic turn of events, to put it mildly. Although the distillery started modestly, by 1799 it had five gleaming copper stills and produced eleven thousand gallons yearly, so that it may have ranked as the largest whiskey producer in America. Nevertheless, when Anderson talked of quitting in 1798, Washington chided him for having coaxed him into assuming “a very serious expense in erecting a distillery of which I had no knowledge . . . But do as you please in this matter. I never did, nor ever shall, wish to retain any person in my employ contrary to their inclination.”24

The letter gave the world a peek into a very different Thomas Jefferson: not the political savant but the crafty, partisan operative marked by unrelenting zeal.

Although Hamilton’s career survived, albeit in a diminished state, he began a long, tragic descent. He had achieved his most stellar feats under Washington’s benign auspices and seemed to lose his moral compass when he no longer operated under his direct guidance. For all his brilliance, Hamilton’s judgment was as erratic as Washington’s seemed unerring.

In Paris Talleyrand waited five months to meet with the three American commissioners and, when he did, complained about anti-French innuendos that, he claimed, had pervaded Washington’s farewell address. For a long time the American public was kept ignorant about the fate of this diplomatic mission. “Are our commissioners guillotined,” Washington wondered aloud to James McHenry, “or what else is the occasion of their silence?”39 In early March 1798 one of the commissioners, John Marshall, alerted Washington to the scandalous news that the French had tried to extort money from the American diplomats, in what would be billed as the XYZ Affair, named for the three nameless agents employed by Talleyrand to extract the payments.

Here lay the dilemma in a nutshell: neither Hamilton nor Washington would serve without Hamilton being the main deputy, while Adams found this intolerable.

As the political atmosphere became ever more combative, Federalist overreaching arrived at its apex with passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which tried to squelch criticism of war measures that President Adams and his congressional allies had undertaken during the undeclared Quasi-War with France. Among other things, these repressive measures endowed the government with broad powers to deport foreign-born residents deemed a threat to the peace; brand as enemy aliens any citizens of a country at war with America; and prosecute those who published “false, scandalous, or malicious” writings against the U.S. government or Congress, with the intent of bringing them “into contempt or disrepute.”

The Alien and Sedition Acts reflected a prevalent Federalist assumption, shared by Washington, that American “Jacobins” colluded with France in treasonous fashion. While these acts were enacted on Adams’s watch, Washington lent them his quiet sympathy.

Washington often seemed blind to the perils of the Alien and Sedition Acts, arguing that Republican criticism was just another partisan maneuver to discredit the government and “disturb the public mind with their unfounded and ill-favored forebodings.”3

As proof of his unswerving commitment to the city, Washington purchased lots in various locations to avoid accusations of favoritism toward any section. After hearing criticism that the neighborhood near the Capitol would lack housing for congressmen, he bought adjoining parcels on North Capitol Street, between B and C streets, and constructed a pair of attached three-story brick houses designed by Dr. William Thornton. Boasting that they stood upon “a larger scale than any in the vicinity of the Capitol,” he said they would be capable of housing “between twenty and thirty boarders”—an excellent example of Washington’s take-charge spirit.

“Upon the decease [of] my wife, it is my will and desire th[at] all the slaves which I hold in [my] own right shall receive their free[dom].”

Mindful of the young and elderly slaves who might have difficulty coping with sudden freedom, Washington made special provision that they “shall be comfortably clothed and fed by my heirs while they live.”

Washington ordered that the young slaves, before being freed, should “ be taught to read and write and to be brought up to some useful occupation.”

Unlike Jefferson, Washington did not wish to banish free blacks from Virginia and made no mention of colonizing them elsewhere, as if he foresaw them becoming part of a racially mixed community. Nor did he express fear of racial intermingling once his slaves were emancipated. He must have had a premonition that Martha or other family members would water down or bypass these daring instructions, so he expressly said that they should be “religiously fulfilled” by the executors.

By freeing his slaves, Washington accomplished something more glorious than any battlefield victory as a general or legislative act as a president. He did what no other founding father dared to do, although all proclaimed a theoretical revulsion at slavery. He brought the American experience that much closer to the ideals of the American Revolution and brought his own behavior in line with his troubled conscience. On slave plantations, the death of a master usually unleashed a mood of terror as slaves contemplated being sold to other masters or possibly severed from their families. Now Washington reversed the usual situation, relieving the dread and making the death of the master and mistress an occasion for general rejoicing among the slaves—at least if one set aside the thorny complexities of the intermingling through marriage of Washington’s slaves and Martha’s dower slaves.

Though he never complained, Washington was expiring in a particularly gruesome fashion and constantly gasped for air. Climbing into bed beside him, Lear kept gingerly turning him over to try to relieve the congestion. “He appeared penetrated with gratitude for my attentions and often said, ‘I am afraid I shall fatigue you too much.’ And upon my assuring him that I could feel nothing but a wish to give him ease, he replied, ‘Well! It is a debt we must pay to each other and I hope when you want aid of this kind, you will find it.”19 Even in death, Washington never lapsed into self-absorption and remained singularly attuned to other people’s moods, showing the same sensitivity that had made him a uniquely effective political leader.

All the while, at the foot of the bed, Martha Washington had sat in a motionless vigil, very much the Roman matron with her marble composure. “Is he gone?” she asked. With his hand, Lear indicated that Washington had died. “ ’Tis well,” Martha replied, repeating her husband’s last words. “All is now over. I shall soon follow him! I have no more trials to pass through.”23 This last line speaks volumes about the suffering she had silently withstood, the perpetual sacrifices she had made for her husband and her country. Haunted by this moment, she never slept in that bedroom again.

George Washington possessed the gift of inspired simplicity, a clarity and purity of vision that never failed him. Whatever petty partisan disputes swirled around him, he kept his eyes fixed on the transcendent goals that motivated his quest.

A year after George Washington’s death, on January 1, 1801, Martha Washington signed an order freeing his slaves.