Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

The hypercritical mother produced a son who was overly sensitive to criticism and suffered from a lifelong need for approval.

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

reddish brown,

it is in my power to avoid going to the Ohio again, I shall. But [if] the command is pressed upon me by the general voice of the country and offered upon such terms as can’t be objected against, it would reflect dishonour upon me to refuse it and that, I am sure, must, or ought, to give you greater cause of uneasiness than my going in an honourable com[man]d.”1 One notes the pointed rebuke tucked into that word “ought.” Everyone in the colony seemed to cheer on George Washington as a bona fide hero except his own mother.

he may have entered into a romantic dalliance with Robinson’s sister-in-law, Mary “Polly” Philipse. The twenty-six-year-old Polly would have been a prime catch for an upwardly mobile young man:

Exitus Acta Probat (“The outcome justifies the deed”).

Washington exemplified the self-invented American, forever struggling to better himself and rise above his origins.

“Be courteous to all but intimate with few,” he advised his nephew, “and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth.”

He also quoted Shakespeare frequently, and his letters are filled with passing references to Hamlet, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest. Not surprisingly, in wartime, he plucked timely quotes from the Roman and history plays, including Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Henry V.

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.

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.

Patsy when she suffered her first full-scale seizure.

The hallmark of Washington’s career was that he didn’t seek power but let it come to him. “I did not solicit the command,” he later said, “but accepted it after much entreaty.”

Whatever his motivations, it was a water-shed moment in American history, opening the way for approximately five thousand blacks to serve in the Continental Army, making it the most integrated American fighting force before the Vietnam War.

He best deserves the name of father who acts the part of one.”

It was owned by Roger Morris, who had been Washington’s successful rival for the hand of Mary “Polly” Philipse.

The Americans are a curious, original people. They know how to govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them.”

Order of the Cincinnati,

So taken was Washington with his unblemished chargers that he had grooms rub them with white paste at night, bundle them in cloths, then bed them down on fresh straw. In the morning the hardened white paste gleamed, its paleness accentuated by black polish applied to the horses’ hooves. For command performances, the animals’ mouths were rinsed and their teeth scrubbed. In another fancy touch, Washington set his saddles in leopard skins edged with gold braiding.

though he sometimes made exceptions on public holidays to set an example for the citizenry. After he designated Thursday, November 26, 1789, as the first Thanksgiving Day, for example, he contributed beer and food to those jailed for debt.

May 11, 1789, was his all-time satirical favorite, Richard Sheridan’s The School for Scandal.

tumor appeared on his left thigh.

“I am not afraid to die and therefore can bear the worst,” he told Bard evenly. “Whether tonight, or twenty years hence, makes no difference. I know that I am in the hands of a good Providence.”

“where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, it is best to be silent, for there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.”

‘that honesty will be found, on every experiment, the best policy.’”

“Presents . . . to me are of all things the most painful;

If Washington was self-conscious about smiling in later years, it may also have been because his dentures grew discolored. When he sent Greenwood a pair of dentures for repair in December 1798, the dentist noted that they had turned “very black,” either because Washington had soaked them in port wine or because he drank too much of it. Greenwood gave Washington a terse lesson in denture care: “I advise you to either take them out after dinner and put them in clean water and put in another set or clean them with a brush and some chalk scraped fine.”8 For someone who took inordinate pride in his appearance, the highly visible dentures must have been mortifying, especially since public speaking and socializing were constant, obligatory duties for a president.

An 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.

“May it please your highness, I John Jay / Have traveled all this mighty way, / To inquire if you, good Lord, will please, / to suffer me while on my knees, / to show all others I surpass / In love, by kissing of your———.”

he said, had “expired without a struggle or a sigh!”22

“First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,”

“We look in vain . . . for any sketch or anecdote that might fix a distinguishing feature of private character in the memory.”

“our first and greatest revolutionary character, whose preeminent services had entitled him to the first place in his country’s love.”