More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
For Washington, it was a surreal day of curious absences, missed hints, and odd anomalies that he did not piece together into a picture of outright treason.
Arnold blamed American ingratitude for his actions and presented himself as a patriot of a higher order than Washington.
For Washington, who never shrank from doing the right thing, however hard or unpopular, it was a lonely moment of leadership.
Ville de Paris—
The majority of the bodies, he noted, were black, reflecting their importance on both sides of the conflict. Some of these black corpses likely belonged to runaway slaves who had sought asylum with Cornwallis, only to be stricken during the siege with smallpox or “camp fever”—likely typhus, a disease spread by lice and fleas in overcrowded camps.
However ghoulish this trade sounds to modern readers, it was then standard practice for rich people to purchase teeth from the poor. In his advertisements, Dr. Le Mayeur offered to buy teeth from willing vendors and bid “three guineas for good front teeth from anyone but slaves.”8 This suggests a stigma among white people about having slaves’ teeth. We can deduce that Washington’s dental transplant miscarried, since by the time of his presidential inauguration in 1789, he had only a single working tooth remaining.
Since the Continental Army had suffered most from the defective Articles of Confederation, Washington was a natural proponent of national unity and worried about anarchy and bloodshed erupting in the war’s aftermath.
He saw that the states, to protect themselves against European interference, needed to band together in a more effective union and that Congress required an independent revenue source to service wartime debt.
His instincts were the antithesis of a demagogue’s: he feared his own influence and agonized over exerting too much power.
Worried that a weak confederacy would tempt European powers to play off one state against another, he called for “an indissoluble union of the states under one federal head.”
The war had scrubbed quixotic notions from his mind. At a time when many Americans, influenced by Whig ideology, equated centralized power with tyranny, Washington argued that only a supreme central power could safeguard liberty.
In closing, Washington referred to the character of Jesus, “the Divine author of our blessed religion.”32 It was a fitting ending: despite his paean to the Enlightenment, the entire circular had the pastoral tone of a spiritual father advising his flock rather than a bluff, manly soldier making a dignified farewell. The ending rose to the fervor of a benediction: “I now make it my earnest prayer that God would have you, and the state over which you preside, in his holy protection; that he would incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to
...more
Washington ended the war still smarting under the humiliation that he had had to beg for money for his men.
The Americans are a curious, original people. They know how to govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them.”
For years afterward the bones of dead prisoners washed up on East River shores.
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.
The first officer to step forward was Henry Knox, a mere bookseller before Washington had drawn him from obscurity and boosted him to chief of artillery.
Try though he might, Washington couldn’t completely extricate his thoughts from politics and feared that the still immature country would blunder into errors before arriving at true wisdom.
For nine years Mount Vernon had suffered terrible neglect, thinning his fortune. “I made no money from my estate during the nine years I was absent from it and brought none home with me,” he told his nephew Fielding Lewis,
Washington’s debtors paid him in depreciated wartime currency, making it difficult for him to satisfy his own creditors.
The polite Washington was victimized by this tradition as veterans and curiosity seekers descended on his home in massive numbers.
He never resolved the problem of the tremendous expenses he incurred in taking care of visitors. Not only did guests devour his food, but their horses freely ate his forage.
The nation wouldn’t let Washington enjoy the ease of a private citizen, and he had to learn to manage his celebrity.
This mutable personality, reflecting his shifting levels of trust in his listeners, has made it hard for historians to form a coherent sense of his personality.
It did not occur to these tourists that Washington felt burdened by uninvited visitors gaping at him, particularly since he wasn’t a backslapping soul who feigned friendship with total strangers. His modesty disappointed those who expected him to narrate the wartime drama especially for them.
For all of Washington’s professions of modesty, the thought of his high destined niche in history was never far from his mind.
he never really developed a right-hand man or someone equivalent to him in power. Even after George Augustine Washington succeeded Lund, Washington kept a tightfisted grip on operations, monitoring them through weekly reports, a process so rigorous that some detected a military mentality at work.
Less than a year after laying down his commission at Annapolis, the American Cincinnatus, badly strapped for cash, was reduced to a bill collector.
In this wilderness area, Washington’s fame counted for little and even exposed him to heightened danger.
On the frontier, he did not enjoy the veneration he did back east, a rowdy new democratic culture having taken root.
While the dispiriting journey had failed to satisfy his economic objectives, it sharpened his views of policies needed to develop the region.
Rather, he saw the agricultural system of the whole country as bogged down in outdated methods and was especially critical of Virginia planters who exhausted their soil with endless rounds of tobacco, Indian corn, and wheat.
As president, he lent the prestige of his office to espousing a national board of agriculture that could diffuse scientific information to farmers.
Perhaps nothing better illustrated Washington’s pioneering farm work than his development of the American mule, a hardy animal representing a cross between a male donkey (also called a jack) and a female horse.
In addition to his better-known title of Father of His Country, Washington is also revered in certain circles as the Father of the American Mule.
All the talk of liberty clashed with the reality of widespread bondage.
When Washington received Lafayette’s letter, the war was winding down and he was dwelling on his impaired finances. His economic well-being depended on slavery, so that whatever his theoretical sympathy with Lafayette’s idea, he could not have been thrilled by the timing.
He bought a large sugar plantation in Cayenne (French Guiana), on the South American coast, which came with nearly seventy slaves. He promptly began to educate and emancipate them, paying wages to those old enough to work, providing schooling for the children, and banning the sale of human beings. To make this scheme self-perpetuating, Lafayette instructed his agent to keep on adding more lands and freeing more slaves.
Of course, Washington lacked a vote in the state legislature and took refuge in a position that was largely symbolic. The idea that abolition could be deferred to some future date when it would be carried out by cleanly incremental legislative steps was a common fantasy among the founders, since it shifted the burden onto later generations. It was especially attractive to Washington, the country’s foremost apostle of unity, who knew that slavery was potentially the country’s most divisive issue.
In charting Washington’s conflicting statements about slavery after the Revolution, one begins to sense that he had developed a split personality on the issue.
The question remains: Did he really make life for the adult slaves “as easy and as comfortable” as possible and prepare the slave children for a different destiny?
Washington’s temperamental outbursts likely stemmed in part from his unrelenting money problems.
He also suffered from a conceptual blind spot about slavery, tending to regard it as a fair economic exchange: he clothed and fed his workers, and “in return, I expect such labor as they ought to render.”
So intent was Washington on extracting the full measure of work from slaves that he could be shockingly oblivious to their hardships.
Like all other plantation owners, Washington had become so accustomed to slavery that the bizarre began to seem normal.
But the formation of a hereditary society, with membership inherited through eldest sons, awakened the hostility toward aristocracy bred by the Revolution. Blasted as elitist, the society raised the dread specter of a military caste that might dominate American political life.
For Washington, it was a painful contretemps: his first public act since the war had backfired, and it engulfed him in a flaming controversy.
In his inaugural speech, he stated categorically that the Society of the Cincinnati must mend its ways. In notes prepared for the speech, he listed his reform agenda: “Strike out every word, sentence, and clause which has a political tendency. Discontinue the hereditary part in all its connections . . . Admit no more honorary members into the society. Reject subscriptions or donations from every person who is not a citizen of the United States.”
That he often failed to do so was because he preferred to keep his own counsel and reveal only a tiny portion of his thoughts, keeping his options open.
He knew his power before a crowd of people, as shown during the Newburgh uprising, and could turn on the spigot of his oratory at will.
