Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

he lectured a young relative about to enter college that “every hour misspent is lost forever” and that “future years cannot compensate for lost days at this period of your life.”

When the couple rode by the shore one day, John became so enraged at Fidelia that he drove their carriage straight into Chesapeake Bay. When Fidelia asked where he was going, John replied with a sneer, “To hell, Madam.” To which she retorted boldly, “Drive on, sir.”

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.

“I am still determined to be cheerful and to be happy in whatever situation I may be, for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions and not upon our circumstances.”

With this stroke, he endorsed an expansive view of the presidency and made the Constitution a living, open-ended document. The importance of his decision is hard to overstate, for had Washington rigidly adhered to the letter of the Constitution, the federal government might have been stillborn.

“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; first, because you are lost to all sense of shame and to every feeling that ought to govern an honest man, who sets any store by his character; and, secondly, because you have no more command of the people over whom you are placed than I have over the beasts of the forests.”

To vindicate his integrity as a public official, Hamilton confessed to the adulterous affair in a ninety-five-page pamphlet; even his closest friends thought a delicately worded paragraph or two might have done the trick nicely.