Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

Washington knew how to turn himself into an impenetrable monument long before an obelisk arose in his honor in the nation’s capital.

Gouverneur Morris agreed that Washington had “the tumultuous passions which accompany greatness and frequently tarnish its luster. With them was his first contest, and his first victory was over himself . . . Yet those who have seen him strongly moved will bear witness that his wrath was terrible. They have seen, boiling in his bosom, passion almost too mighty for man.”8

So adept was Washington at masking these turbulent emotions behind his fabled reserve that he ranks as the most famously elusive figure in American history, a remote, enigmatic personage more revered than truly loved.

George Washington has receded so much in our collective memory that he has become an impossibly stiff and inflexible figure, composed of too much marble to be quite human.

In studying his life, one is struck not only by his colossal temper but by his softer emotions: this man of deep feelings was sensitive to the delicate nuances of relationships and prone to tears as well as temper.

The goal of the present biography is to create a fresh portrait of Washington that will make him real, credible, and charismatic in the same way that he was perceived by his contemporaries.

During the Revolution and his presidency, the public Washington needed to be upbeat and inspirational, whereas the private man was often gloomy, scathing, hot-blooded, and pessimistic.

Having acquired nearly fifty slaves and ten thousand acres of land, Augustine Washington had planted his family firmly among the regional gentry. Though not born into great wealth, George Washington doesn’t qualify for inclusion in the ranks of self-made Americans.

George developed the deeply rooted toughness of children forced to function as adults at an early age. He discovered a precocious ability to perform many adult tasks, but he probably never forgot the sudden fright of being deprived of the protection of a father.

Mary Washington displayed a powerful capacity to command, and one is tempted to say that the first formidable general George Washington ever encountered was his own mother.

George treated his mother with frigid deference, taking refuge in polite but empty forms. His letters to her would be addressed to “Honored Madam” and end with distant formality, “Your most Dutiful and Obedient Son, George Washington.” This studiously correct tone, likely laced with suppressed anger, only highlighted the absence of genuine filial affection.

Throughout his life, he exhibited a faultless precision in dress, regarding a person’s apparel as the outward sign of inner order.

For the rest of his life, George’s nose was lightly pitted with pockmarks, a defect discreetly edited from many sanitized portraits. The smallpox siege ended with his complete recovery on December 12, 1751. In retrospect, George’s brush with a mild case of smallpox was a fantastic stroke of luck, furnishing him with immunity to the most virulent scourge of eighteenth-century armies.

The young Washington could be alternately fawning and assertive, appealingly modest and distressingly pushy. While he knew the social forms, he could never quite restrain, much less conceal, the unstoppable force of his ambition.

In September 1752 a new Masonic lodge was convened in Fredericksburg, and two months later Washington was inducted as one of its first apprentices. Within a year he progressed swiftly through the ranks to become a Master Mason. We don’t know how Washington reacted to the fraternal group’s arcane rituals and occult signs.

The deaths of those he loved most dearly had, ironically, brightened his prospects the most. Quite contrary to his own wishes, the untimely deaths of his father and his half brother had endowed him with extraordinary advantages in the form of land, slaves, and social status. Every misfortune only pushed him further along his desired path.

Washington’s hair was reddish brown, and contrary to a common belief, he never wore a wig. The illusion that he did so derived from the powder that he sprinkled on his hair with a puffball in later life.

The pleurisy that Washington suffered as a young man left him hollow-chested. Never a superior orator, Washington spoke with a weak, breathy voice that only exacerbated the problem.

George Washington always demonstrated a capacity to learn from missteps. “Errors once discovered are more than half amended,” he liked to say. “Some men will gain as much experience in the course of three or four years as some will in ten or a dozen.”44 It was this process of subtle, silent, unrelenting self-criticism that enabled him to rise above his early defeats.

Washington believed that ambitious men should hide their true selves, retreat into silence, and not tip people off to their ambition. To sound out people, you had to feign indifference and proceed only when convinced that they were sympathetic and like-minded. The objective was to learn the maximum about other people’s thoughts while revealing the minimum about your own.

Washington speculated that he was still alive “by the miraculous care of Providence that protected me beyond all human expectation. I had 4 bullets through my coat and two horses shot under and yet escaped unhurt.”

Everyone in the colony seemed to cheer on George Washington as a bona fide hero except his own mother.

Even as a young man, the complex Washington seldom had a single reason for his actions. His pursuit of self-interest and selfless dedication to public service were often intermingled, sometimes making it hard to disentangle his true motives.

By the age of twenty-six, he had survived smallpox, pleurisy, malaria, and dysentery. He had not only evaded bullets but survived disease with astounding regularity.

On leave from the Virginia Regiment, Washington courted Martha with the crisp efficiency of a military man laying down a well-planned siege.

In the eighteenth century, marriage was regarded more as a practical arrangement than as a vehicle for love, and the Washington marriage may never have been a torrid romance. But that aside, in selecting Martha Dandridge Custis, George Washington chose even better than he knew. She was the perfect foil to his mother: warm and sociable, always fun to be with, and favored with pleasing manners. She would give George the unstinting love and loyalty that Mary had withheld.

Martha Washington enjoyed a steady faith from the time of her childhood. Her father was a church vestryman, and she was an observant member of the Church of England until the Revolution. “After breakfast, she retired for an hour to her chamber, which hour was spent in prayer and reading the Holy Scriptures, a practice that she never omitted during half a century of her varied life,” said her grandson.

Due to his blossoming romance with Martha Custis, he had to deal with one piece of unfinished business: his lingering infatuation with Sally Fairfax. It seems likely that when her husband, George William, was detained in Great Britain on legal matters that winter, Sally frequented Mount Vernon and nursed George through his illness. We will never know whether their affair was consummated. Since Washington had retained the admiration of both his patron Colonel Fairfax and his son George William, it seems hard to believe he had ever lured Sally into outright infidelity. Both George and Sally would have recognized the forbidden, illicit nature of their bond, the fearful price they would pay in Virginia society for any major transgression.

His feelings for Sally Fairfax belonged to that brand of impossible, unattainable love for an older married woman that has filled the amorous fantasies of ardent young men throughout history.

Whatever was the true situation, Sally must have recognized and treasured the frank admission of love, for she retained the letter until she died in 1811—a period of more than fifty years.

In the composition of the human frame, there is a good deal of inflammable matter [this meant flammable in the eighteenth century], however dormant it may lie for a time and . . . when the torch is put to it, that which is within you may burst into a blaze.” Washington went on to say that this mighty blaze “ought to be under the guidance of reason, for although we cannot avoid first impressions, we may assuredly place them under guard.”26 The author of these lines seemed knowledgeable about ungovernable emotions and how to tame them.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of tobacco culture was its labor-intensive nature, making it a natural match with slavery. No aspect of his life would so trouble Washington or posterity as his status as a major slave owner. Had he not started with tobacco, he might never have become so enmeshed with a reprehensible system that he learned to loathe.

Washington’s opposition to slavery took the form of a gradual awakening over many decades. He seldom uttered the word slavery, as if it grated on his conscience, preferring polite euphemisms such as “servants,” “Negroes,” “my people,” or “my family.”

Although he stopped buying slaves in 1772, his slave population swelled from natural increase so that he owned 135 able-bodied slaves when tapped to head the Continental Army. Ironically, his growing scruples about slavery and his refusal to break up families by selling them off saddled him with a fast-growing slave community.

Washington’s adopted granddaughter saw his self-effacing religiosity as consistent with a hatred of pretension: “He was not one of those who act or pray ‘That they may be seen of men.’”

For Washington, morality was so central to Christianity’s message that “no man who is profligate in his morals or a bad member of the civil community can possibly be a true Christian.”

Patrick Henry, rose amid the dark wooden benches and brandished fiery resolutions. “Resolved,” he announced, “that the taxation of the people by themselves or by persons chosen by themselves to represent them . . . is the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom.”

“If this be treason, make the most of it.”6

The reliance upon foreign vendors fostered constant tension. To fill Washington’s orders for goods, Robert Cary and Company drew upon a network of forty London shops. An invoice from April 1763 shows a small army of suppliers to Mount Vernon that included a linen merchant, woolen merchant, grocer, spice maker, shot maker (gunshot), pipe maker, pickler, rope maker, porter (beverage supplier), apothecary, toolmaker, haberdasher, cheesemonger, stationer, milliner, hosier, tin maker, plate maker, iron maker, wine merchant, turner (potter), and shoemaker.14 However much Washington emphasized, for political reasons, the potential self-sufficiency of the colonies, he could never curtail his taste for luxury goods from London.

One can argue plausibly that the events of the winter of 1768-69 converted George Washington from a rich, disaffected planter into a rabid militant against British policies.

Unlike the French Revolution, the American Revolution started with a series of measured protests by men schooled in self-government, a long, exhaustive search for a diplomatic solution, before moving toward open rebellion.

Each day, after an hour dedicated to prayer and meditation, she supervised servants in cooking and cleaning and presided over her sewing circle of slaves, who produced up to twelve hundred yards of homespun cloth yearly.

From an hour of daily prayer to supervising slaves. How scary that we can deceive ourselves to this degree in thinking that we are righteous

Remarkably, in this fierce letter he argued that the colonists should refrain from purchasing British imports, but not renege on paying debts owed to British creditors, “for I think, whilst we are accusing others of injustice, we should be just ourselves.”18 It was this steadfast sense of fairness, even at the most feverish political moments, that set George Washington apart.

Jefferson’s pamphlet A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which took dead aim at the notion that the colonies existed to benefit the mother country. Jefferson ended with a dire warning for George III: “Kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.

in this conclave of talkative egomaniacs, Washington’s understated style had an inevitable appeal. Amid gifted talkers, he was a masterful listener who characterized his role as that of “an attentive observer and witness.”28 It was slowly becoming clear that, in a fractious, boisterous gathering, a calm figure of sound judgment such as Washington could inspire confidence and serve as a unifying figure.

“When we assumed the soldier, we did not lay aside the citizen.”

“I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting of a command under such circumstances, I had taken my musket upon my shoulder and entered the ranks or . . . had retir[e]d to the back country and lived in a wigwam.”

Few have experienc[e]d such care and attention from real parents as I have done. He best deserves the name of father who acts the part of one.”

George Mason, drew up an eloquent Declaration of Rights that featured the lines “That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights . . . among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”13 Thomas Jefferson would prune and shape these words to famous effect.

Washington’s letters to John Hancock had hinted at mounting exasperation with his men, but now his frustration burst into the open. The man of consummate self-control surrendered to his emotions. Fuming, he flung his hat to the ground and shouted, “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?”44 According to another account, he swore, “Good God! Have I got such troops as these?”