Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

the absentee candidate engaged in the popular, if technically illegal, custom of intoxicating local voters.

“the old fox was too cunning” for the preachers and replied to all their points except the one about his personal faith.15

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.

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.

Jefferson ended with a dire warning for George III: “Kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people. Open your breast, Sire, to liberal and expanded thought. Let not the name of George the Third be a blot in the page of history.”

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but

as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

“Unhappy it is . . . to reflect that a brother’s sword has been sheathed in a brother’s breast and that the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with blood or inhabited by slaves.”

“the dispute had been left to posterity to determine, but the crisis is arrived, when we must assert our rights or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us.”

1807 John Adams would write a scathingly funny letter in which he listed the “ten talents” that had propelled George Washington to fame in June 1775.

The first four dealt with physical attributes—“a handsome face,” “tall stature,” “an elegant form,” and “graceful attitudes and movements”—traits that the short, rotund Adams decidedly lacked.

Two others concerned Washington’s extraordinary self-possession: “He possessed the gift of silence” an...

Washington generalized this perception into an enduring truth of foreign policy, noting that “it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest.”

ONE AMERICAN WHO ALMOST NEVER acknowledged Washington’s wartime heroism was his mother, who left behind scarcely a single memorable sentence about her son’s outsize success. With more to brag about than any other mother in American history, she took no evident pride in her son’s accomplishments.

(After a lapse in its use, the Purple Heart was revived by presidential order in 1932,

The American Revolution 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.

“Envious of none, I am determined to be pleased with all, and this, my dear friend, being the order for my march, I will move gently down the stream of life until I sleep with my fathers.”6

Celebrity may for a while flatter one’s vanity,” he wrote, “but its effects are troublesome.”32

One unspoken trick he used to

deter unwanted visitors was to post inadequate signs indicating the way to his house, erecting a natural barrier against intruders.

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.

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.

John Adams also went on the warpath against the Cincinnati, damning the group as “the deepest piece of cunning yet attempted . . . the first step taken to deface the beauty of our temple of liberty.”4

the new constitution “is provided with more checks and barriers against the introduction of tyranny . . . than any government” previously devised by mortals.

George Washington refused to appoint anyone to the new government who had been overtly hostile to the Constitution that brought it into being.

all 69 electors voted for Washington, making him the only president in American history to win unanimously.

the tradition of having slaves in the presidential household unfortunately lasted

until the death in 1850 of Zachary Taylor, the last of the slaveholding presidents.

After he designated Thursday, November 26, 1789, as the first Thanksgiving Day, for example, he contributed beer and food to those jailed for debt.

virtually all of the founders, despite their dislike of slavery, enlisted in this conspiracy of silence, taking the convenient path of deferring action to a later generation.

His failure to use the presidency as a bully pulpit to air his opposition to slavery remains a blemish on his record. He continued to fall back on the self-serving fantasy that slavery would fade away in future years.

During his final weeks Franklin had insisted that liberty should extend “without distinction of color to all descriptions of people.”

Washington grasped the need for these instruments of modern finance. It was also a decisive moment legally for Washington, who had felt more bound than Hamilton by the literal words of the Constitution. With this stroke, he endorsed an expansive view of the presidency and made the Constitution a living, open-ended document.

“Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth,”

“The checks [the king] endeavors to give it . . . will, more than probably, kindle a flame which may not easily be extinguished, tho[ugh] for a while it may be smothered by the armies at his command.”

“I think it probable this country will, within two or three years, be in the enjoyment of a tolerably free constitution and that without its having cost them a drop of blood.”13 Perhaps because of his association with enlightened Parisian intellectuals, Jefferson missed the bloodthirsty spirit of the French Revolution, its lust for gore and its gratuitous butchering of innocent victims.

“The constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to use it,” he wrote.

“It has accordingly, with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature.”36 Executive power in foreign affairs would grow steadily during the next two centuries, perhaps confirming the truth of Madison’s warning.

the yellow fever epidemic that lashed the capital during the summer of 1793. Later on John Adams was adamant that “nothing but the yellow fever . . . could have saved the United States from a total revolution

late August the sights and smells of death saturated the city, especially the groaning carts, stacked high with corpses, that trundled through the streets as their drivers intoned, “Bring out your dead.”4

“I know full well,” Washington told him, “that to speak to you is of no more avail than to speak to a bird that is flying over one’s head;

“A good riddance of bad ware . . . He is as ambitious as Oliver Cromwell . . . His soul is poisoned with ambition.”

In March 1794 Congress approved a proposal, backed by Washington and Knox, to build six frigates “adequate for the protection of the commerce of the U.S. against Algerian corsairs.”16 This action officially inaugurated the U.S. Navy,

essential difference between the American and French revolutions was that the American version allowed a search for many truths, while French zealots tried to impose a single sacred truth that allowed no deviation.

In sallying forth to command the troops, Washington, sixty-two, became the first and only American president

ever to supervise troops in a combat situation.

although the lone congress-man from the new state of Tennessee, Andrew Jackson, who was enraged by the Jay Treaty, refused to salute the departing chief or join in the congressional response applauding him.

1796 election was the first contested presidential campaign in American history. With 71 electoral votes, Adams became the president, narrowly edging out Jefferson, with 68 votes. Since Jefferson nosed out Adams’s “running mate,” Thomas Pinckney, with 59 votes, he became vice president under rules governing the Electoral College at the time.