Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

There would always be a cool, quiet antagonism between Washington and his mother. The hypercritical mother produced a son who was overly sensitive to criticism and suffered from a lifelong need for approval. One suspects that, in dealing with this querulous woman, George became an overly controlled personality and learned to master his temper and curb his tongue. It was the extreme self-control of a deeply emotional young man who feared the fatal vehemence of his own feelings, if left unchecked. Anything pertaining to Mary Ball Washington stirred up an emotional tempest that George quelled only with difficulty. Never able to express these forbidden feelings of rage, he learned to equate silence and a certain manly stolidity with strength.

This boyhood struggle was, in all likelihood, the genesis of

the stoical personality that would later define h...

On the one hand, the similarities between Mary Washington and her eldest son were striking. She was a fine horsewoman, enjoyed dancing, reputedly possessed enormous strength, was manic in money matters, tenaciously superintended her farm, and displayed a stubborn independence. Both mother and son exhibited supreme willpower that people defied at their peril. Both were vigorous, enterprising, and exacting in their demands. Yet in many other ways, George Washington defined himself as the antithesis of his mother. If his mother was crude and illiterate, he would improve himself through books. If she was self-centered, he would be self-sacrificing in serving his country. If she was slovenly, he would be meticulous in appearance. If she disdained fancy society, he wou...

Washington was designing his coat down to the smallest detail. Throughout his life, he exhibited a faultless precision in dress, regarding

a person’s apparel as the outward sign of inner order.

Washington’s derring-do even fostered a lasting mystique among the Indians. A folk belief existed among some North American tribes that certain warriors enjoyed supernatural protection from death in battle, and this mythic stature was projected onto Washington. Fifteen years later he encountered an Indian chief who distinctly recalled seeing him at the battle by the Monongahela and told how he had ordered his warriors, without success, to fire directly at him. The chief had concluded that some great spirit would guide him to momentous things in the future.

“System in all things is the soul of business,” he liked to say. “To deliberate maturely and execute promptly is the way to conduct it to advantage.”51

“Be courteous to all but intimate with few,” he advised his nephew, “and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth.”14

When he painted Washington in 1772, Charles Willson Peale observed an instance of Washington’s herculean strength that he never forgot: One afternoon, several young gentlemen, visitors at Mount Vernon, and myself were . . . pitching the bar . . . when suddenly the colonel [Washington] appeared among us. He requested to be shown the pegs that marked the bounds of our efforts; then, smiling, and without putting off his coat, held out his hand for the missile. No sooner did the heavy iron bar feel the grasp of his mighty hand than it lost the power of gravitation . . . striking the ground far . . . beyond our utmost limits. We were indeed amazed, as we stood around, all stripped to the buff . . . having thought ourselves very clever fellows, while the colonel, on retiring, pleasantly observed, “When you beat my pitch, young gentlemen, I’ll try again.”15

Washington kept his hounds kenneled down by the Potomac and developed a breed that became known as the American foxhound.

Protective of his hunting grounds, he was implacable when dealing with poachers. One day when out riding, he encountered a poacher who was furtively slipping away in a canoe. “Raising his gun,” recounts a neighbor, the poacher “took deliberate aim at Washington, expecting to daunt him; but Washington dashed up to the culprit, and seizing his canoe, dragged it ashore. He then disarmed him and gave him a severe flogging, which effectually cured his thieving properties.”22

Many of Washington’s eminent contemporaries, ranging from Marshall to Madison, regarded him as “a sincere believer in the Christian faith, and a truly devout man,” as Marshall attested.19 Some of Washington’s religious style probably reflected an Enlightenment discomfort with religious dogma, but it also reflected his low-key personal style. He was sober and temperate in all things, distrusted zealotry, and would never have talked of hellfire or damnation. He would have shunned anything, such as communion, that might flaunt his religiosity. He never wanted to make a spectacle of his faith or trade on it as a politician. Simply as a matter of personal style, he would have refrained from the emotional language associated with evangelical Christianity. This cooler, more austere religious manner was commonplace among well-heeled Anglicans in eighteenth-century Virginia.

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. Had he died before that winter, he would have left no real record of distinction, aside from youthful bravery in the French and Indian War. That winter changed everything, and he began to evolve into the George Washington known to history. Moving beyond the disputes over self-advancement that had preoccupied his younger, insecure self, he suddenly seemed a larger figure in the nascent struggle against British injustice. All his seething frustration in seeking a royal commission during the war; all his vocal disaffection with Robert Cary and Company; all his dismay over British policies that handicapped him as a planter and real estate speculator—these enduring complaints now crystallized into splendid wrath against the Crown.

They reached the critical conclusion that an assault on one colony was an assault on all.

Still more jarring was a ruling from London that land grants to French and Indian War veterans under the 1763 proclamation would be limited to British regulars, discriminating against colonial officers and reopening an ancient wound for Washington. “I conceive the services of a provincial officer as worthy of reward as a regular one and [it] can only be withheld from him with injustice,” he observed with contempt.7 As we have seen, the ambitious Washington took these slights personally, and they now tipped him over the

edge into open revolt.

but the crisis is arrived, when we must assert our rights or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us.”3

For the rest of his life, Washington remained the prisoner of roles that forced him into secrecy and evasion, accentuating an already reticent personality. His reserve was further reinforced by a view of military leadership that frowned on camaraderie. Abigail Adams made the insightful comment that Washington “has a dignity which forbids familiarity, mixed with an easy affability which creates love and reverence.”27 Washington’s officers admired him, but with the slightest touch of fear.

A subdued Washington knew the stage was set for a major confrontation. “An attack is now therefore to be expected,” he wrote, “which will probably decide the fate of America.”

Their fright was understandable as cannonballs flew thick and fast. One Connecticut soldier recalled how a cannonball “first took the head of Smith, a stout heavy man and dash[e]d it open, then it took off Chilson’s arm, which was amputated . . . it then took Taylor across the bowels, it then struck Serg[ean]t Garret of our company on the hip [and] took off the point of the hip bone . . . What a sight that was to see within a distance of six rods those men with their legs and arms and guns and packs all in a heap.”6

He knew that his men were “very much broken and dispirited,” and with many enlistments ending December 1, he anticipated a catastrophic erosion of soldiers.30 On that date, as Washington feared, 2,000 militia from New Jersey and Maryland drifted away, leaving him with only about 3,800 men in a state crawling with Tories. Around the same time Lord Howe issued a proclamation offering pardons to those who swore allegiance to the king, and thousands of discouraged Americans took up the offer.

Washington knew perfectly how to wield silence as a weapon. The letter was conspicuous for what it omitted, not for what it said, allowing Reed to imagine Washington’s wrath rather than experience it, leaving him in a torment of uncertainty. The refusal to berate Reed only shamed him more. By not fulminating against Reed, Washington concealed what he knew about his machinations with Lee, a cunning device he employed many times in his career. And his response showed how highly he regarded the gentlemanly code of honor. Before anything else, he wanted to account for having opened and read the letter, lest it seem a wanton violation of privacy. It was a mark of Washington’s psychological subtlety that he sent a note of apology to a man who owed him an apology. Finally, by alluding to Reed’s taxing journey and sending regards to Mrs. Reed, Washington stressed that he wouldn’t stoop to anger in the face of provocation.

Mercer himself was knocked off his horse and given a merciless drubbing as he lay on the ground. In capturing the dapper, handsome Mercer—a physician from Fredericksburg and a friend of Washington’s—the British imagined they had taken the commander in chief himself. “Call for quarters, you damned rebel,” they taunted him. To which Mercer retorted, “I am no rebel,” and slashed at them with his sword. 52 The British mauled him repeatedly with their bayonets, carving seven gashes, until he lay near death. For Washington, it was a disturbing preview of the fate awaiting him if ever he were captured.

With command of his tongue and temper, he had the supreme temperament for leadership compared to his scheming rivals. It was perhaps less his military skills than his character that eclipsed all competitors. Washington was dignified, circumspect, and upright, whereas his enemies seemed petty and skulking. However thin-skinned he was, he never doubted the need for legitimate criticism and contested only the devious methods of opponents. Calling criticism of error “the prerogative of freemen,” he still deplored such a “secret, insidious attempt . . . to wound my reputation!”52 For the rest of the war, he didn’t allow these things to cloud his judgment, never told tales indiscreetly, and confined his opinions of intramural feuding to a small circle of trusted intimates, lest such infighting demoralize his army.

Even before Washington arrived there, the Pennsylvania legislature had the cheek to criticize him for taking his men into winter camp, as if he were retiring into plush quarters. “I can assure those gentlemen,” Washington wrote testily, “that it is a much easier and less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fireside than to occupy a cold bleak hill and sleep under frost and snow without clothes or blankets. However, although they seem to have little feeling for the naked, distressed soldiers, I feel superabundantly for them and from my soul pity those miseries which it is neither in my power to relieve or prevent.”4 This was a new voice for Washington, reflecting

a profound solidarity with his men that went beyond Revolutionary ideology and arose from the special camaraderie of shared suffering.

Washington boycotted the execution. He had no special animus toward André and shared the respect felt by his men. “André has met his fate and with that fortitude which was to be expected from an accomplished man and gallant officer,” he wrote to John Laurens.74 Clearly he didn’t relish hanging André, yet he also believed he had to mete out punishment for a heinous crime that might have given the American cause “a deadly wound, if not a fatal stab.”75 For Washington, who never shrank from doing the right thing, however hard or unpopular, it was a lonely moment of leadership. Even as a young officer in the French and Indian War, his justice had often seemed stern and inflexible. As he told Rochambeau, the circumstances of André’s capture necessitated the hanging and “policy required a sacrifice, but as he was more unfortunate than criminal in the affair,

and as there was much in his character to [excite] interest, while we yielded to the necessity of rigor, we could not but lament it.”76

While both Washington and Rochambeau labored to fashion a harmonious facade of Franco-American amity, perceptive observers detected subtle tensions. Their interpreter at Wethersfield, the Chevalier de Chastellux, a man of many parts—soldier, philosopher, member of the French Academy, intimate of Voltaire—was well placed to study their complex interaction. A handsome fellow with watchful eyes, he was gathering material for a book about the United States and was immensely taken with the forty-nine-year-old Washington, applauding him as “the greatest and the best of men.”18 He was chagrined by the treatment Washington received from his French counterpart. Rochambeau, he claimed, handled the Virginian with “all the ungraciousness and all the unpleasantness possible,” and he worried that Washington would be left with “a sad and disagreeable feeling in his heart.”19 Washington secretly carried this grief but exposed it to no one outside a small circle of advisers.

In the shadow of a redoubt near the river, the articles of surrender were signed at eleven A.M. on October 19. At two P.M. the French and American troops lined up on opposite sides of a lane stretching a half mile long. Baron von Closen noted the contrast between the “splendor” of the French soldiers, with their dress swords and polished boots, and the Americans “clad in small jackets of white cloth, dirty and ragged, and a number of them . . . almost barefoot.”61 Led by drummers beating a somber march, thousands of defeated British and Hessian soldiers trudged heavily between the allied columns, their colors tightly folded. As

they ran this gauntlet, they had to pass by every allied soldier. Legend claims that British fifes and drums played “The World Turned Upside Down.” In another reminder of allied revenge for Charleston, General Benjamin Lincoln, who had been refused the honors of war there, led the procession. Even at the end the British evinced a petty, spiteful attitude toward the Americans, gazing only at the French soldiers until Lafayette prodded the band to strike up “Yankee Doodle,” forcing the conquered army to acknowledge the hated Americans. At the end of the line, the British soldiers emerged into an open field, where they tossed their weapons contemptuously onto a stockpile, trying to smash them. Then they filed back past the double column of victors. The entire wonder of the American Revolution was visible for all to see. It wasn’t the well-dressed French Army who were the true victors of the day, but the weatherbeaten, half-clad American troops.

For one woman in the crowd, the contrast between the

splendidly uniformed British troops who had just left and the unkempt American troops in homespun dress who now straggled in conveyed a telling message: We had been accustomed for a long time to military display in all the finish and finery of garrison life; the troops just leaving us were as if equipped for show, and, with their scarlet uniforms and burnished arms, made a brilliant display. The troops that marched in, on the contrary, were ill-clad and weatherbeaten and made a forlorn appearance. But then they were our troops, and as I looked at them and thought upon all they had done and suffered for us, my heart and my eyes were full and I admired and gloried in them the more, because they were weatherbeaten and forlorn.8

The British surrendered only five hundred American prisoners at the end, which attested both to the large number already freed in exchanges and the appalling number who died in captivity. Most had been kept aboard British prison ships anchored in the East River, where they languished in infernal conditions. Stuffed in airless spaces belowdecks, they had been wedged together in vermin-infested holds slick with human excrement and forced to eat worm-infested rations or devour their own body lice. Typhus, dysentery, and scurvy were common scourges. For years afterward the bones of dead prisoners washed up on East River shores. 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.

In the end, he had managed to foil the best professional generals that a chastened Great Britain could throw at him. As Benjamin Franklin told an English friend after the war, “An American planter was chosen by us to command our troops and continued during the whole war. This man sent home to you, one after another, five of your best generals, baffled, their heads bare of laurels, disgraced even in the opinion of their employers.”38

With a genuine yearning for agricultural reform, he experimented with different seeds, grafted fruit trees, tested grapes for a homegrown Virginia wine, and collected cuttings from friends. Not to be outdone by Jefferson, he also devised a new agricultural plow that could seed and harrow fields at the same time. This was the golden age of amateur gentlemen scientists, and when Washington wanted to learn whether spermaceti candles or tallow candles were cheaper, he set up an experiment, recorded how long it took each type to burn, then computed that spermaceti candles were more than twice as expensive as tallow.

As someone who thought people should look to the educated, well-to-do members of the community for leadership, Washington had an instinctive sense of public service. From the time he returned to Mount Vernon after the war, his mind dwelled actively on political problems. He must have sensed he would be allowed only a brief interval of repose before being plunged back into the hurly-burly of politics. As political power reverted back to state capitals, he might have guessed that the nucleus of any future federal government would come from the general staff of the Continental Army, which had experienced so dramatically the perils of an ineffective government. His comforting fantasy of a serene Mount Vernon retirement began to fade. “Retired as I am from the world,” he told Jay during the summer of 1786, “I frankly acknowledge I cannot feel myself an unconcerned spectator.” Then he backed away from the implications of that statement: “Yet having happily assisted in bringing the ship into port and having been fairly discharged, it is not my business to embark again on a sea of troubles.”25

A story told of Washington at Philadelphia that may be apocryphal highlights several truths about his relations with his colleagues. One evening some Continental Army veterans were discussing the general’s aloofness and the way he communicated to people that he didn’t like to be touched or treated familiarly. Gouverneur Morris, dismissing this as nonsense, said he could be as familiar with Washington as with anyone else. Alexander Hamilton proposed a wager: he would buy dinner for a dozen delegates if Morris strode up to Washington, gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder, and said, “My dear General, how happy I am to see you look so well.”57 Morris tried the experiment—and Washington turned and fixed him with an icy glare that made Morris regret his error.

This ponderous speech never saw the light of day. Washington sent a copy to James Madison, who wisely vetoed it on two counts: it was much too long, and its lengthy legislative proposals would be interpreted as executive meddling with the legislature. Instead, Madison drafted for Washington a far more compact speech that avoided tortured introspection. A whirlwind of energy, Madison would seem omnipresent in the early days of Washington’s administration. He drafted not only the inaugural address but also the official response by Congress and then Washington’s response to Congress, completing the circle. This service established Madison, despite his major role in the House, as a preeminent adviser and confidant to the new president. Oddly enough, he was not troubled that his advisory relationship to Washington might be construed as violating the separation of powers.

The inauguration took place at the building at Wall and Nassau streets that had long served as New York’s City Hall. It came richly laden with historical associations, having hosted John Peter Zenger’s trial in 1735, the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, and the Confederation Congress from 1785 to 1788.

Washington’s first days in office were dominated by seemingly trivial symbolic issues that spoke to larger questions about the character of the new government. “Many things which appear of little importance in themselves . . . at the beginning may have great and durable consequences, from their having been established at the commencement of a new general government,” Washington instructed Vice President Adams.4 Every action, he knew, would be subjected to exhaustive scrutiny: “My political conduct . . . must be exceedingly circumspect and proof against just criticism, for the eyes of Argus [the hundred-eyed monster in Greek mythology] are upon me and no slip will pass unnoticed.”5 Washington had long felt those searching eyes trained upon him and would try hard as president to be a paragon.

In choosing those heads, Washington surrounded himself with a small but decidedly stellar group. With his own renown secure, he had no fear that subordinates would upstage him and never wanted subservient courtiers whom he could overshadow. Aware of his defective education, he felt secure in having the best minds at his disposal. He excelled as a leader precisely because he was able to choose and orchestrate bright, strong personalities. As Gouverneur Morris observed, Washington knew “how best to use the rays” given off by the sparkling geniuses at his command. 9 As the first president, Washington assembled a group of luminaries without equal in American history; his first cabinet more than made up in intellectual fire-power what it

lacked in numbers.

In all, George Washington would appoint a record eleven justices to the Supreme Court.

Washington also signed a proclamation for the first Thanksgiving on November 26, declaring that “Almighty God” should be thanked for the abundant blessings bestowed on the American people, including victory in the war against England, creation of the Constitution, establishment of the new government, and the “tranquillity, union, and plenty”