Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

The first Washington to claim our attention was, ironically, the casualty of a rebellion against royal authority.

At seventeen, he possessed an English compendium of the principal Dialogues of Seneca the Younger and took to heart his stoic beliefs:

As his life progressed, Washington would adhere to the stoic creed of governing one’s passions under the most adverse circumstances and facing the prospect of death with serenity.

it was the first of many times she seemed to measure her son’s worth not by what he might accomplish elsewhere but by what he could do for her, even if it meant thwarting his career.

This was a raw, violent world such as Washington had never experienced before, but he adapted to it with remarkable speed and aplomb and quickly grew inured to hardship.

he remained trapped in an adolescent dependence on his mother, which cramped his social style,

Even amid the trip’s escapist pleasures, George had a conspicuous habit of improving himself, turning everything into an educational opportunity.

Whatever credence he gave to Masonic ideals, the young George Washington, a born joiner, was likely drawn to the group as a convivial place to hobnob and expand his social contacts.

To encourage settlers and protect them from French encroachment, Lawrence Washington and his colleagues advocated establishing a fort and trading post at the Forks of the Ohio (the site of present-day Pittsburgh), which would act as the flash point of imperial conflict for many years.

In certain ways, he was a very old young man.

But having traversed the Allegheny, Washington also worried that it was “a very rapid swift-running water,” and he came to prefer the navigation of the Monongahela River, which would offer a calmer waterway for Virginia’s frontier settlers.

He had a visceral dislike of the French, claiming that they had murdered, cooked, and consumed his father.

At this stage of his life, he trusted implicitly in the wisdom and benevolence of the British Empire.

In his first political assignment, he had overcome a punishing array of obstacles, both physical and psychological, without losing sight of his primary objectives.

Thirty years later the horror of that night—the black woods, the ghastly cacophony of sounds, the unspeakable heaps of corpses—was still engraved on his memory.

Washington inspired considerable fear in the region,

Washington’s methods, seemingly cruel to modern eyes, were standard practice in the British Army of his day.

Like his mother, Washington tended to stint on praise, reflecting his stoic belief that officers didn’t need encouragement since they were simply doing their duty.

The prolonged mourning rituals that came with the Victorian era would have seemed like futile self-indulgence in the eighteenth century.

Martha had the cheerfulness to lighten his sometimes somber personality and was the one person who dared to kid her “Old Man,” as she teasingly referred to him.

Her industrious nature must have pleased George Washington. Both of them were early risers, used every moment profitably, and stuck to the same daily routines.

Even though Washington won permission to assume Indian dress, he still acknowledged the incontestable superiority of Indian warriors: “I cannot conceive the best white men to be equal to them in the woods.”

His advice to young relatives revealed that he had known the storms of passion as a young man but understood that they were fleeting and couldn’t form the foundation of a lasting relationship; one had to enter into a match based upon practical factors, such as personality, character, temperament, and money.

In a century of sterling wits, George Washington never stood out for his humor, but he had a bawdy streak and relished hearty, masculine jokes.

ordering from Robert Cary six busts of great military figures in history: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charles XII of Sweden, Frederick II of Prussia, Prince Eugene of Savoy, and the Duke of Marlborough.

slave masters in the eighteenth century seldom rationalized or romanticized slavery as a divinely sanctioned system, as happened before the Civil War.

In written agreements with new overseers, Washington exhorted them to treat ailing slaves with a modicum of kindness.

Often the first sight that greeted visitors was slave children playing near the front of the mansion, and Washington frequently grumbled that they disturbed his shrubs.

His love of ritual, habit, and order enabled him to sustain the long, involved tasks that distinguished his life.

Washington benefited from the unvarying regularity of his daily routine and found nothing monotonous about it.

Prior to breakfast, he shuffled about in dressing gown and slippers and passed an hour or two in his library, reading and handling correspondence.

An active presence, he liked to demonstrate how things should be done, leading by example.

books. Washington’s contemporaries recognized that this compulsive note taking, this itch to record his every action, went to the very essence of this well-regulated man.

Washington exemplified the self-invented American, forever struggling to better himself and rise above his origins.

“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.”

On hunting days, his ritual was to rise before sunrise, breakfast by candlelight, then ride off with his hounds while it was still dark outside.

However ecumenical in his approach to religion, Washington never doubted its signal importance in a republic, regarding it as the basis of morality and the foundation of any well-ordered polity.

“Let no one go hungry away . . . provided it does not encourage them in idleness.”

Whether hiring overseers or appointing army officers, Washington insisted upon sobriety and saw no greater sign of weakness than a man’s inability to control his drinking.

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.

George Washington liked to say that “Virginia ladies pride themselves on the goodness of their bacon,” and Martha derived special pleasure from the ham and bacon cured in their smokehouse.

Clearly, for these rank amateurs in warfare, Washington’s military résumé was neither sketchy nor irrelevant—and he was suddenly deemed the fountainhead of wisdom.

Many southerners feared that the New Englanders were a rash, obstinate people, prone to extremism, and worried that an army led by a New England general might someday turn despotic and conquer the South.

Washington was nominated by Thomas Johnson of Maryland and elected unanimously, initiating a long string of unanimous victories in his career.

There was nothing despotic in Washington’s nature, making him the ideal leader of a republican revolution, but he still had to learn when to trust his instincts and overrule his generals. It was both Washington’s glory and his curse that he was so sensitive to public opinion, so jealous of his image, and so willing to listen to others.

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.”

Even Frederick the Great added his congratulations: “The achievements of Washington and his little band of compatriots between the 25th of December and the 4th of January, a space of 10 days, were the most brilliant of any recorded in the annals of military achievements.”

Equipped with keen powers of judgment rather than originality, he was at his best when reacting to options presented by others.

Relatable.

With a mind neither quick nor nimble, Washington lacked the gift of spontaneity and found it difficult to improvise on the spot.