Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

From boyhood, Washington had struggled to master and conceal his deep emotions. When the wife of the British ambassador later told him that his face showed pleasure at his forthcoming departure from the presidency, Washington grew indignant: “You are wrong. My countenance never yet betrayed my feelings!”

Lawrence would function as both a peer and a parental figure for his half brother, and his youthful adventures operated so powerfully on George’s imagination that the latter’s early life seems to enact a script first drafted by his older brother.

“I was often there with George, his playmate, schoolmate, and young man’s companion,” said Lawrence Washington of Chotank, a distant relative. “Of the mother I was more afraid than of my own parents; she awed me in the midst of her kindness, for she was, indeed, truly kind.”

Never an intellectual who relished ideas for their own sake, he mined books for practical wisdom and delighted in dredging up handy aphorisms.

he was an unusually sober and purposeful young man. In countless letters in later years, he advised young relatives that adolescence was a risky time when evil influences lurked nearby, ready to pounce: “You are now extending into that stage of life when good or bad habits are formed. When the mind will be turned to things useful and praiseworthy or to dissipation and vice.”

The young Washington could be alternately fawning and assertive, appealingly modest and distressingly pushy.

He knew the western country from surveying; had the robust constitution to survive the winter woods; was mostly unflappable; had a mature appearance and sound judgment; and was a model youth, with no tincture of rowdiness in his nature. In certain ways, he was a very old young man.

He also engaged in some youthful boasting. “I can with truth assure you, I heard bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.”18 Instead of being traumatized by battle, he wanted to illustrate his coolness under fire. When King George II encountered Washington’s blithe comments about the “charming” sound of bullets in a London periodical, he detected a false note of swagger. “He would not say so if he had been used to hear many,” the king said acerbically.

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.”

Washington instinctively trod the fine line between showiness and austerity, defining a characteristic style of understated elegance.

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.”

“Human affairs are always checkered and vicissitudes in this life are rather to be expected than wondered at.”18

Washington had a more relaxed style with girls and used to say ruefully that he could govern men but not boys.

Everything was perfectly sorted, classified, and slotted in his compartmentalized mind and 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.

On one occasion he capitulated to the drinking of a talented gardener whose sprees he agreed to tolerate so long as the man confined them to certain holidays. In his employment contract, Washington stated that he would be given “four dollars at Christmas with which to be drunk four days and four nights; two dollars at Easter, to effect the same purpose; two dollars at Whitsuntide to be drunk for two days; a dram in the morning and a drink of grog at dinner at noon.”40 It was typical of Washington’s thoroughness to pin down such an agreement in writing.

The young man who had worked so hard to ingratiate himself with his superiors in the British Army was suddenly breathing fire. Washington was always reluctant to sign on to any cause, because when he did so, his commitment was total.

At times Jacky wrote about King’s College as if it were a swank resort staffed with servile employees hired to wait upon him, assuring his mother that “there has nothing been omitted by my good friend Doctor Cooper which was necessary to my contentment in this place.”

Lafayette showed a courtier’s love of compliments, was a master of flattery, and liked to hug people in the French manner. Perhaps Washington doted on the young man because he dared to express emotions that he himself stifled, thawing his frosty reserve and opening an outlet for his suppressed emotions.

Washington presented a rare case of a revolutionary leader who, instead of being blinded by political fervor, recognized that fallible human beings couldn’t always live up to the high standards he set for them.

Since the siege had been the handiwork of gunners and engineers, affording little opportunity for swashbuckling heroism, a spirited competition arose to lead the charges.

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.

He believed that “commercial connections, of all others, are most difficult to dissolve,”

Washington had become so accustomed to slavery that the bizarre began to seem normal.

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.

Washington initially oversaw a larger staff of slaves and servants at Mount Vernon than he did as president of the United States—but the new government quickly overshadowed his estate in size.

People did not always realize how observant he was. “His eyes retire inward . . . and have nothing of fire or animation or openness in their expression,” said Edward Thornton, a young British diplomat, who added that Washington “possesses the two great requisites of a statesman, the faculty of concealing his own sentiments, and of discovering those of other men.”