Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

This boyhood struggle was, in all likelihood, the genesis of the stoical personality that would later define him so indelibly.

While the folks at home embraced him as an improbable hero, Washington was denigrated in England as a reckless young warrior and in France as an outright assassin.

“The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.”

Dinwiddie also condemned the “monstrous” failure of other colonies to shore up the Virginia forces—a failure that gave Washington his first powerful proof of the need for continental unity.

Washington had witnessed something hitherto unthinkable for loyal colonials: the British Empire could be defeated on a distant continent.

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

Washington was suddenly asserting that the imperial system existed to serve the king, not his overseas subjects. The equality of an Englishman in London and one in Williamsburg was purely illusory. In time, the Crown would pay dearly for Washington’s disenchantment with the fairness of the British military.

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.

When the couple rode by the shore one day, John became so enraged at Fidelia that he drove their carriage straight into Chesapeake Bay. When Fidelia asked where he was going, John replied with a sneer, “To hell, Madam.” To which she retorted boldly, “Drive on, sir.”

Beneath the hard rind, Washington was far more sensitive than he appeared, and this heartfelt message from his men “affected him exceedingly,” he admitted.

Had Washington’s military career ended with the French and Indian War, he would have earned scarcely more than a footnote in history, yet it is impossible to imagine his life without this important preamble. The British Empire had committed a major blunder by spurning the talents of such a natural leader.

he had acquired a powerful storehouse of grievances that would fuel his later rage with England.

In fact, slavery had acquired such a firm grip on the colony that one minister maintained in 1757 that “to live in Virginia without slaves is morally impossible.”

Benjamin Franklin was asked how British soldiers sent to enforce the new taxes would be received. “They will not find a rebellion,” he replied curtly. “They may indeed make one.”

His zeal for businesses beyond agriculture also gave him an expansive economic vision that would predispose him to support the audacious manufacturing schemes of Alexander Hamilton.

By 1772 Mount Vernon’s fishery netted almost a million herring per year.

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.

In many ways, Washington’s letter to Mason foretells the success of the American Revolution: he tried to be law-abiding, endorsed incremental change, and favored violence only if all else failed. 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. Later on, nothing incensed Washington more than the notion that the colonists had proved unreasonable during the run-up to war.

“Shall we, after this, whine and cry for relief?”

Money, the nerve of war, was wanting.” But the colonists had something much more precious: “the unconquerable resolution of our citizens, the conscious rectitude of our cause, and a confident trust that we should not be forsaken by heaven.”

“The battle of Lexington on the 19th of April changed the instruments of warfare from the pen to the sword.”

Things seldom happened accidentally to George Washington, but he managed them with such consummate skill that they often seemed to happen accidentally. By 1775 he had a fine sense of power—how to gain it, how to keep it, how to wield it.

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.

John Adams summed up the case succinctly: “In general, our generals have been outgeneralled.”

In this bizarre conduct, Nathanael Greene saw a suicidal impulse, contending that Washington was “so vexed at the infamous conduct of his troops that he sought death rather than life.”

When visited by a congressional delegation, Washington snapped that he “never had officers, except in a few instances, worth the bread they eat.”

Reassurance came from Colonel John Glover, the maritime wizard behind the East River retreat, who reassured the gathering “not to be troubled about that, as his boys could manage it.”

One consistent thread from his earlier life had prefigured these events: Washington’s tenacity of purpose, his singular ability to stalk a goal with all the resources at his disposal.

He could never decide whether French aid was a rope with which to hang the British or a leash to restrain the Americans.

“With respect to the Count’s desire of a personal interview with me, you are sensible, my dear Marquis, that there is nothing I should more ardently desire than to meet him. But you are also sensible that my presence here is essential to keep our preparations in activity, or even going on at all.”26 It was an extraordinary commentary on his army’s enfeebled state. In late August the bread shortage grew so alarming that he faced the severe dilemma of whether to dismiss the militia because he couldn’t feed them or accept new recruits and let them “come forward to starve.”27 In early September, in order to conserve food, he sent home four hundred militiamen.

“We may be beaten by the English; it is the chance of war; but behold an army which they can never conquer.”34

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. But he was a different kind of general fighting a different kind of war, and his military prowess cannot be judged by the usual scorecard of battles won and lost. His fortitude in keeping the impoverished Continental Army intact was a major historic accomplishment. It always stood on the brink of dissolution, and Washington was the one figure who kept it together, the spiritual and managerial genius of the whole enterprise: he had been resilient in the face of every setback, courageous in the face of every danger. He was that rare general who was great between battles and not just during them.

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.”

Benjamin Franklin so distrusted executive power that he pushed for a small executive council instead of a president. In advancing this idea, he had the courtesy to note, with a figurative nod toward Washington, that the first president would likely be benevolent, but he feared despotic tendencies in his successors.

For Washington, the beauty of the document was that it charted a path for its own evolution. Its very brevity and generality—it contained fewer than eight thousand words—meant it would be a constantly changing document, susceptible to shifting interpretations. It would be left to Washington and other founders to convert this succinct, deliberately vague statement into a working reality. He also knew that the American public needed to contribute its share; the Constitution “can only lay the foundation—the community at large must raise the edifice.”

To simplify his life and set a high standard for future presidents, Washington refused to favor friends or relations in making appointments.

To the end of her life, Martha Washington would speak forlornly of the presidential years as her “lost days.”83

John Adams would render a glum assessment: “My country has, in its wisdom, contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of a man contrived or his imagination conceived.”31

George Washington desperately wanted to think well of himself and believed he was merciful toward the slaves even as the inherent cruelty of the system repeatedly forced him into behavior that questioned that belief.

“If I could not go to heaven but with a party,” Jefferson opined, “I would not go there at all.”2 Yet the first factions arose from Jefferson’s extreme displeasure with Hamilton’s mounting influence.

Three years later Washington told Edmund Randolph that, if the Union were to break up into North and South, “he had made up his mind to remove and be of the northern.”35 That Washington now identified with northern finance, commerce, and even abolitionism would have major consequences for American history. Had he sided with Jefferson and Madison, it might have deepened irrevocably the cleavage between North and South and opened an unbridgeable chasm seventy years before the Civil War.

At the end he struck a note of serenity, a faith that the American experiment, if sometimes threatened, would prevail. While fearful of machinations, he told Trumbull, “I trust . . . that the good sense of our countrymen will guard the public weal against this and every other innovation and that, altho[ugh] we may be a little wrong now and then, we shall return to the right path with more avidity.” 15 It was an accurate forecast of American history, both its tragic lapses and its miraculous redemptions.

Then, when strong nervous sobs broke loose, when tears covered the faces, then the great man was shaken. I never took my eyes from his face. Large drops came from his eyes.”19 It was one last proof, if any were now needed, of just how emotional the man of marble was beneath the surface.

He acknowledged the many extraordinary events he had lived through, then abruptly declared that none of these events, “not all of them together, have been able to eradicate from my mind the recollection of those happy moments—the happiest of my life—which I have enjoyed in your company.”21 This unexpected line offered the ultimate romantic compliment: Washington had won a long war, founded a country, and created a new government, but such accomplishments paled beside the faded recollections of a youthful love affair.

After Dick and Brown left the room, Craik lingered by his old friend. “Doctor, I die hard,” Washington said, “but I am not afraid to go.”

Several times this most punctual of men asked what hour it was. Orchestrating matters until the very end, he had the presence of mind to take his own pulse and felt the life suddenly ebbing from his body. At that moment he perished. “The general’s hand fell from his wrist,” wrote Tobias Lear. “I took it in mine and put it into my bosom. Dr. Craik put his hands over his eyes.” Washington, he said, had “expired without a struggle or a sigh!”

By the time of his death, Washington had poured his last ounce of passion into the creation of his country. Never a perfect man, he always had a normal quota of human frailty, including a craving for money, status, and fame. Ambitious and self-promoting in his formative years, he had remained a tightfisted, sharp-elbowed businessman and a hard-driving slave master. But over the years, this man of deep emotions and strong opinions had learned to subordinate his personal dreams and aspirations to the service of a larger cause, evolving into a statesman with a prodigious mastery of political skills and an unwavering sense of America’s future greatness.