Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

As time passed, a petulant tone crept into Washington’s communications to his London factors, and he began to rant about the shoddy, overpriced goods fobbed off on him.

Like many of his affluent neighbors, Washington was land rich and cash poor and spent a lifetime scrounging for money.

It comes easy and is spent freely and many things indulged in that would never be thought of, if to be purchased by the sweat of the brow. In the mean time, the debt is accumulating like a snowball in rolling.”

As he worked to remedy matters, restocking the plantation and constructing new buildings, he ended up squandering part of Martha’s fortune.

No aspect of his life would so trouble Washington or posterity as his status as a major slave owner.

Slaves were ubiquitous in this rich, populous colony, making up 40 percent of Virginia’s population.

Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other Virginia planters acknowledged the immorality of slavery, while confessing perplexity as to how to abolish it without producing mayhem and financial ruin.

the four distant farms held mostly field hands who, contrary to stereotype, were largely female.

Many slaves who fled were favorites of George and Martha Washington, who invariably reacted with a sense of shock and betrayal.

One startled visitor expressed amazement that the master “often works with his men himself, strips off his coat and labors like a common man.”

“Nor nothing hurts me more than to find them otherwise and the tools and implements laying wherever they were last used, exposed to injuries from rain, sun, etc.”

“You would be surprised to find what a uniform life he leads,” wrote John Hancock’s nephew after a visit to Mount Vernon. “Everything he does is by method of system . . . He keeps a journal where he records everything . . . he is a model of the highest perfection.”

LONG BEFORE he achieved great fame or renown, something about Washington’s bearing and presence bedazzled people.

In an age that gloried in horse racing and hunting as gentlemanly pursuits, Washington’s virtuosity with horses excited comment throughout his life.

One witness recollected how when Washington dismounted, he “gave a cut of the whip to his horse, which went off by itself to the stable.”

A month earlier, he recorded that he had killed five mallards and five bald eagles in one day—a curious triumph for the Father of His Country.

Great Britain was simply bad for local business, a fact that would soon foster the historical anomaly of a revolution inaugurated by affluent, conservative leaders.

He was a fantastically creative businessman and Mount Vernon evolved into a miniature polity, a self-contained economic universe.

One can argue plausibly that the events of the winter of 1768-69 converted George Washington from a rich, disaffected planter into a rabid militant against British policies. Had he died before that winter, he would have left no real record of distinction, aside from youthful bravery in the French and Indian War.

Washington provided here a key insight into the psychology of debt: fear that any attempt at a more frugal existence would disclose the truth about a person’s actual wealth.

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.

When Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon completed their survey of the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, he foresaw that it would trigger a mad scramble for prime frontier acreage.

The White Mingo bestowed upon Washington a ceremonial string of wampum, then stunned him with a vivid recollection dating back to the French and Indian conflict. Washington noted the gist of this speech in his diary: “that as I was a person who some of them remember to have seen when I was sent on an embassy to the French and most of them had heard of, they were come to bid me welcome to the country and to desire that the people of Virginia wou[l]d consider them as friends and brothers linked together in one chain.”44

A toadying character straight out of a Jane Austen novel, Boucher, with a tug of the forelock, answered in an unctuous manner: “Ever since I have heard of Mast[e]r Custis, I have wish[e]d to call him one of my little flock.”

Cognizant of the exorbitant wealth he would inherit, Jacky saw little need to apply himself to studies, which couldn’t help but distress his stepfather with his nagging work ethic.

In dealing with his stepson, Washington betrayed the exasperation of a hardworking man coping with a spoiled rich boy.

Patsy Custis’s death, paradoxically, set up George and Martha Washington for their shining moment in history.

In 1773 the main house was still a plain, nondescript building, small and unadorned and not particularly attractive. Now Washington decided to double the mansion’s size, adding those trademark features—a cupola, the pediment over the west entrance, the spacious piazza on the river side—that we associate with it today.

She didn’t think it proper to attend the wedding in mourning dress, so her husband carried a congratulatory letter from her to the newlyweds.

Still more jarring was a ruling from London that land grants to French and Indian War veterans under the 1763 proclamation would be limited to British regulars, discriminating against colonial officers and reopening an ancient wound for Washington.

With the Fairfax Resolves, Washington emerged as a significant political leader a full year before being named to head the Continental Army. No fence-sitter, this conservative planter was a true militant.

I think the Parliament of Great Britain hath no more right to put their hands into my pocket without my consent than I have to put my hands in yours for money.”

On Friday, August 5, 1774, George Washington’s life changed forever when he was elected one of seven Virginia delegates to the general congress that would meet in Philadelphia, to be known as the First Continental Congress. When these statesmen were selected, Jefferson said, a “shock of electricity” flew through the air.

The taciturn Washington, at forty-two, found himself in an assembly of splendid talkers who knew how to pontificate on every subject. John Adams left this slightly mocking commentary on the verbose gathering: “Every man in it is a great man—an orator, a critic, a statesman, and therefore every man upon every question must show his oratory, his criticism, and his political abilities.”

Nonetheless, in this conclave of talkative egomaniacs, Washington’s understated style had an inevitable appeal.

The delegates clung to the pleasing fiction that a benevolent George III was being undermined by treacherous ministers, and they implored the king as their “loving father” to rouse himself and rescue his colonial subjects.

Although George Washington scarcely needed further reasons to detest British rule, Lord Dunmore inflicted one last blow. Back at Mount Vernon, Washington heard a distressing report that Dunmore planned to annul the land patents that Washington had received under the 1754 proclamation.

The delegates were both thrilled and flustered by news that colonial troops, spearheaded by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold, had overrun a British garrison at Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain in upstate New York, producing a huge windfall of cannon and military stores.

John Adams enjoyed the curious distinction of being Washington’s most important advocate at the Congress and one of his more severe detractors in later years.

Things seldom happened accidentally to George Washington, but he managed them with such consummate skill that they often seemed to happen accidentally.

Expecting Adams to nominate him, Hancock watched with smug satisfaction until Adams named Washington instead—at which point the smile fled from his face.

Washington didn’t learn of his appointment until the Congress had adjourned for the day, and suddenly he encountered delegates who saluted him as “General.”

When he ran into Patrick Henry after his appointment, an emotional Washington seemed full of foreboding. “Remember, Mr. Henry, what I now tell you: from the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation.”

Another major general was the patrician Philip Schuyler, a wealthy landlord with extensive holdings along the Hudson River.

the dispatch reported that on June 17 more than two thousand British troops, led by General William Howe, had stormed fortified patriot positions on Breed’s Hill, forcing an American retreat. (The battle was incorrectly labeled Bunker Hill.)

“Before there was a nation—before there was any symbol of that nation (a flag, a Constitution, a national seal)—there was Washington.”55

This proposal was vetoed since it clashed with republican ideology, which romanticized militias as superior to standing armies, a dilemma that was to bedevil him throughout the war.

HAVING HAD FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE with smallpox, Washington was farsighted in his efforts to stem its spread among the troops through inoculation.

By January 1777 he ordered Dr. William Shippen to inoculate every soldier who had never had the disease.

This enlightened decision was as important as any military measure Washington adopted during the war.