Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

The acquaintance confirmed that Washington’s intimates thought him “by nature a man of fierce and irritable disposition, but that, like Socrates, his judgment and great self-command have always made him appear a man of a different cast in the eyes of the world.”5

“If ever, however, it broke its bonds, he was most tremendous in wrath.”

Whenever he lost his temper, as he did sometimes, either love or fear in those about him induced them to conceal his weakness from the world.”

So adept was Washington at masking these turbulent emotions behind his fabled reserve that he ranks as the most famously elusive figure in American history, a remote, enigmatic personage more revered than truly loved.

People felt the inner force of his nature, even if they didn’t exactly hear it or see it; they sensed his moods without being told.

“An important element in Washington’s leadership both as a military commander and as President was his dignified, even forbidding, demeanor, his aloofness, the distance he consciously set and maintained between himself and nearly all the rest of the world.”9

During the Revolution and his presidency, the public Washington needed to be upbeat and inspirational, whereas the private man was often gloomy, scathing, hot-blooded, and pessimistic.

A crusty woman with a stubborn streak, Mary Ball Washington made few concessions to social convention. In a lesson internalized by her celebrated son, she didn’t adapt or bend easily to others but stayed resolutely true to her own standards.

That the commoner George could ever aspire to a life as richly consequential as that of King George II, then enthroned in royal splendor, would have seemed a preposterous fantasy in the 1730s.

At the same time, Lawrence retained clear affection for Admiral Vernon and, in a burst of Anglophilia, would rename the Little Hunting Creek estate Mount Vernon, hanging the admiral’s portrait in an honored place there.

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.

“More than most, Washington’s biography is the story of a man constructing himself.”

“For the enlargement of George’s mind and the polishing of his manners, Lawrence was almost an ideal elder brother,” writes Douglas Southall Freeman.2

Mary finally vetoed the idea of George joining the navy and thereby performed a major service in American history, saving her son for a future army career.

George Washington was always a man who monitored his every move.

Throughout his life, he exhibited a faultless precision in dress, regarding a person’s apparel as the outward sign of inner order.

The young man was highly responsive to female charms.

immortalized under her married name of Sally Fairfax.

In retrospect, George’s brush with a mild case of smallpox was a fantastic stroke of luck, furnishing him with immunity to the most virulent scourge of eighteenth-century armies.

The adolescent George seemed to daydream about one rich, unattainable girl after another.

Lawrence’s hope that Bermuda would rejuvenate him turned out to be his last illusion: returning to Virginia, he died at Mount Vernon on July 26, 1752.

What strikes one most about the twenty-year-old George Washington was that his sudden remarkable standing in the world was the result not so much of a slow, agonizing progress as of a series of rapid, abrupt leaps that thrust him into the topmost echelons of Virginia society.

When they reached the Forks of the Ohio, Washington boldly showed the equestrian prowess that would later assume legendary proportions. Where others balked at crossing the frigid, fast-moving Allegheny on horseback, Washington showed no qualms. He vigorously urged his horse into the freezing current, sitting upright as it glided across the water—a magnificent image repeated many times later in his career.

Under the British imperial system, a captain from England with a royal commission could boss around Lieutenant Colonel Washington, even though the latter held a nominally higher rank—the sort of slight that rankled for many years with the proud young Virginian.

An unknown young surveyor two years earlier, Washington was now penning admonitory letters to governors of neighboring colonies.

What converted this local skirmish into a worldwide incident was the identity of one victim: Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de Jumonville, thirty-five, who bore an important diplomatic message to the British, demanding their evacuation from the Ohio Country.

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

This must have come as an extraordinary admission: Washington was canceling a vital military meeting to mollify his overwrought mother.

When Franklin urged the general to beware of Indian ambushes, he retorted, “These savages may be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia, but upon the king’s regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they would make any impression.”

Because of his height, he presented a gigantic target on horseback, but again he displayed unblinking courage and a miraculous immunity in battle. When two horses were shot from under him, he dusted himself off and mounted the horses of dead riders.

In a stupendous stroke of prophecy, a Presbyterian minister, Samuel Davies, predicted that the “heroic youth Col. Washington” was being groomed by God for higher things. “I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto preserved [him] in so signal a manner for some important service to his country.”42

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.

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

Braddock’s defeat spawned a new awareness of the futility of European military practices on American soil, which later emboldened Washington and other colonists to believe that a ramshackle army of rough frontiersmen could defeat the world’s foremost military machine.

Unwilling to tolerate swearing, he warned that offenders would receive twenty-five lashes for uttering an oath, with more severe punishment reserved for second offenses.

In Philadelphia the young colonel, very dashing in his blue regimentals, enjoyed his first taste of a northern city and embarked on a shopping spree for clothing, hats, jewelry, and saddles.

In time, the Crown would pay dearly for Washington’s disenchantment with the fairness of the British military.

On leave from the Virginia Regiment, Washington courted Martha with the crisp efficiency of a military man laying down a well-planned siege.

“She told me she remembered the time when there was only one single carriage in all of Virginia,” said a later visitor to Mount Vernon.

They both believed in a world replete with suffering in which one muddled through with as much dignity and grace as one could muster.

Even after the Revolutionary War, Washington said of this star-crossed episode that his life had been “in as much jeopardy as it had ever been before or since.”17

This was now the fourth time that Washington had traversed the path to the Forks of the Ohio, and each time his military aspirations had been foiled by unforeseen developments.

The British Empire had committed a major blunder by spurning the talents of such a natural leader. It

As John Adams later wondered, “Would Washington have ever been commander of the revolutionary army or president of the United States, if he had not married the rich widow of Mr. Custis?”6

The man who faced bullets with sangfroid never conquered his terror of public speaking.

“I often fancied he was sick or some accident had happened to him,” Martha said.18 Henceforth she traveled with George only if both children came along.

Throughout his life Washington was noticeably attracted to women, but his steely willpower and stern discipline likely overmastered any fugitive impulses to stray.

That he wasn’t a biological father made it easier for him to be the allegorical father of a nation.

As Gouverneur Morris stated in his eulogy for Washington, “AMERICANS! he had no child BUT YOU and HE WAS ALL YOUR OWN.”30

Washington preferred things that were stylish but subdued, denoting his worldly status without showily advertising it.