by Alexis Coe
In all likelihood, Washington was left sterile from an illness in his youth. Even here, though, the usual culprits just won’t do for a man of his towering reputation. “A sexually transmitted disease seems unlikely in Washington’s case, given his character and strong sense of moral propriety,” John K. Amory, a professor and practicing physician at the University of Washington School of Medicine, wrote in the scientific journal Fertility and Sterility.8 Chernow agrees that “Washington was noticeably attracted to women, but his steely willpower and stern discipline likely overmastered any fugitive impulses to stray.”9 Amory also argues that Washington was too healthy to suffer from erectile dysfunction (performance anxiety was apparently out of the question), and that watching his siblings multiply, as well as the animals of the farm, left him with a precocious understanding of procreative sex. (To be fair, Washington did become the nation’s foremost mule breeder.) Chernow implores readers to look at the right parts: Washington’s hands were so large that he wore custom-made gloves, and his feet, of course, “were famously huge.” Even his writing was “masculine.”10
After defending Washington, the Thigh Men usually turn their sights on Martha, blaming her for the couple’s childlessness. There’s little to suggest she endured difficult births during her first marriage, but the very notion that such births can be linked to infertility is enough for them to cast a critical eye in her direction. If anything, the fact that Martha had children at all offers convincing evidence that she remained fertile in her twenties, when she married Washington.
In the end, you begin to wonder why so many pages and articles have been devoted to something that won’t help “break” Washington out of that marble mold or decode his legacy. For whatever reason, he didn’t have biological children; no one seemed to care too much about it in the eighteenth century, so why should we?
Mary, Mary, Not So Contrary
Chernow’s biography of the first president, published in 2010, contains a notably dramatic scene between Washington and his only living parent, Mary Washington. (His father, Augustine, died when he was eleven.) It occurs in the spring of 1755, when Washington, then in his early twenties and a soldier in the British militia, was due to meet Captain Robert Orme in Alexandria. Washington’s departure was delayed, Chernow writes, when his mother appeared at Mount Vernon “like the wrath of God.” He had “sparked a family feud” by attempting to recruit John Augustine, his younger brother, to look after Mount Vernon while he was away. That the Washington family was so prone to reality-TV theatrics is surprising, in no small part because it took more than two hundred years for a historian to unearth these sensational details in the archives.
Not quite. “Like Washington’s teeth, his life as told here is less than fully rooted in its surroundings,” Pulitzer Prize–winning author T. J. Stiles wrote in a New Statesman review of Chernow’s book. (Stiles added, “Let’s be clear: Washington is a true achievement. A reader might agree with my criticisms yet thoroughly enjoy the book.” For the record, I am that reader.) In this instance, Chernow doesn’t cite a newly discovered document, but rather the very same letter from April 2, 1755, that practically all Washington scholars have always cited, in which Washington explains his delay to Captain Orme:11
The arrival of a good deal of Company (among whom is my Mother, alarmed at the report of my intentions to attend to your Fortunes)—prevents me the pleasure of waiting upon you today as I had intended; I therefore beg that you’ll be kind enough to make my compliments & excuse, to the Generl . . . 12
That’s it. That’s how Washington describes the scene. Chernow’s portrayal of Mary arriving “like the wrath of God” is the product of his imagination—and it’s not his only foray into creative writing.13
For Chernow, the fact that Mary was already twenty-three at the time of her marriage “may say something about her feisty personality or about Augustine’s hopeful conviction that he could tame this indomitable woman.” But Augustine, Washington’s father, left nothing to indicate he harbored such a “a hopeful conviction,” nor does Chernow offer a source.14 He doesn’t need to: Everyone knows that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, a woman is probably a shrew. And shrews, of course, need taming.
A SAMPLING OF RON CHERNOW’S DESCRIPTIONS OF MARY WASHINGTON
shrewish
stubborn
whining
trying
thwarting
unlettered
self-centered
querulous
headstrong
plain
demanding
disciplinarian
unbending
homespun
crude
forbidding
illiterate
strong-willed
coarse
hypocritical
slovenly
self-interested
strangely indifferent
feisty
crusty
difficult
anxious
complainer15
For the Thigh Men, Mary’s histrionics begin when she declines to enlist her fourteen-year-old son in the navy and continue to the very ends with her griping about elder care.
Like Washington, in fact, Mary has always been a one-dimensional caricature, a prop to be used as others see fit. In the early nineteenth century, when the young nation was obsessed with middle-class values, saintly mothers, and stories about good patriots, there was no greater model than Mary. President Andrew Jackson laid the cornerstone of a monument dedicated to her, and suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton even used her image in an effort to align themselves with “all that a mother ought to be.” But by the late nineteenth century, experts began turning on her. Paul Leicester Ford, an editor of Thomas Jefferson’s papers, argued that the popular version of Mary as the patron saint of republican motherhood “partakes of fiction rather than of truth.”16 He depicted her as the tyrant Washington was constantly trying to escape, and accused her of decidedly unladylike tendencies, like smoking a pipe. That narrative was well received, too; America loves a self-made man, particularly one who overcomes the manipulations of a petty woman to seize his great destiny.
The further from Mary’s actual time period historians are, the more they seem inclined to ignore the prevailing norms and values of her day. In 1929, Shelby Little called Mary “illiterate, untidy, and querulous,” even though we know she was literate, if not especially well read. She stuck to the Bible and books about it, and her letters reflect that: Her vocabulary was limited, her prose artless. We have no idea what she said to Washington in person, or how she spoke off the page, but if her writing is any indication, she thought mostly in terms of death and survival. Biographers have interpreted this as evidence of an unsupportive and even thwarting disposition. On the occasion of Washington’s birthday bicentennial celebrations, Samuel Eliot Morison called her “grasping, querulous, and vulgar” and accused her of “oppos[ing] almost everything he did for public good.”17 By the time Chernow’s take emerged, anything Washington tried to accomplish that wasn’t in his mother’s “immediate service, she attempted to stop.”18 Mary showed “little that savored of maternal warmth,” Chernow adds.19
WASHINGTON’S SPIRITUAL EDUCATION
Mary lacked a formal education, as did most of the women of her time. There is strong evidence, however, that she was not illiterate, as some biographers
have claimed. Some of her letters survive, as do her devotional books, which show her hand throughout. These titles later appear in Washington’s personal library, and he often quoted her favorite passages. Her grandson George Lewis fondly remembered spending Sunday evenings listening to her read from the Bible: “[I] gazed with childish wonder and admiration at the rude representations of saints and angels, and the joys of the redeemed, and shuddered at the sight of the skeleton death and devils with horns and hoofs, holding in their claws pitchforks of fire.”20
The Thigh Men would have done well to review scholarship on early American motherhood with the same amount of interest they had for military history. If they had, they would have considered the average eighteenth-century matriarch, whose primary concerns were keeping her children alive and well and avoiding sin and vice, and who was not sentimental and praising. (As Abigail Adams, born a generation after Mary, once wrote, “I will not say that all my Geese are swans” and “where much is given, much shall be required.” 21) If Mary had boasted, no doubt she would have been called out for it.
As the story goes, George Washington became George Washington in spite of his mother, but in fact he and Mary had an awful lot in common. If you were feeling generous toward Mary, you might even argue that she passed on and cultivated admirable (and sometimes less so) characteristics in her son. They were tall and athletic and moved with notable grace, whether it be on the dance floor or on horseback. They were industrious and anxious, demanding much of those around them. Heaven help the fool who challenged them on anything to do with money.23 Washington had a zeal for bookkeeping, a skill it seems Mary taught him early on. And when Washington decided to sue two girls who allegedly stole valuables out of his clothes while he was “washing in the river,” it was no doubt at his mother’s encouragement. (The sheriff carried one of them “to the Whipping post & Inflict fifteen lashes on her bare back.”24) Mary was never afraid to stand up for herself in court, where few women were present.
MARY’S GREATEST SUCCESS
What if historians have actually missed what Mary considered her greatest parental success?
Archeological digs around Ferry Farm, where Washington and his siblings grew up, reveal that Mary may have been working hard to ensure Betty, her only daughter, married well. The family rooms were equipped to entertain, with the cheapest version of items that visiting gentry would expect to see—tea sets, hooks that point to fashionable needlepoint, an engraved spoon. Betty surely had her charms, but matchmaking and courtship were usually family affairs, and Mary clearly managed those well.22 And if she taught Betty to live the gentry lifestyle, maybe not all of Washington’s manners, flattered throughout his life, came from copying (perhaps just to practice penmanship) the Rules of Civility.
That’s not to say that Mary, who was fiercely independent in an era in which female independence was totally unacceptable, didn’t have a challenging personality. In Chapter 12, Washington’s annoyance with her is palpable on the page, but that’s just how he felt on that particular day, in response to a specific situation; on other days, he appears quite patient with his mother. And when there’s occasion for sentiment, it’s easy to find: In 1789, when Mary died of breast cancer, Washington wrote in a letter to his sister that the loss was “awful, and affecting.”25
A New Biography
And so begins my addition to a crowded bookshelf. In Part I, I describe how Washington—like his successors Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—was raised by a single mother. As he struggles to find his place in the world, he makes mistakes of global consequence and becomes a colonial celebrity. Life becomes happy and settled once he meets Martha and becomes a father to her children. But as his entrepreneurial ambitions (which largely depend on the hundreds of people he enslaved) are repeatedly thwarted by the British, he begins down the path toward rebellion. In Part II, I explore the war he fought without arms. His diplomatic, propaganda, and espionage campaigns greatly contributed to the improbable American victory. And there’s another story, too, about the personal cost of war—to him and his family. In Part III, Washington is pressured out of retirement by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and other founders. He wins election to the presidency by a unanimous vote, becoming the country’s “first.” After eight years of increasing partisanship, near rebellion, and threats from abroad, he’s done. In Part IV, he returns, at long last, to Mount Vernon. This stage in his life, though brief, is often celebrated because it’s when he decides to free the men, women, and children he enslaved. In fact, though, he passes the buck to Martha, emancipating only one man, outright, upon his death. Until the very end, Washington worries about respect and reputation. He needn’t have; the nation hasn’t always remembered him clearly, but we’ve never forgotten our first.
PART I
Reluctant Rebel
CHAPTER 1
His Mother’s Son
When it came to family, Mary Ball Washington, George Washington’s mother, was always unlucky. Her father died when she was an infant. By the time she turned twelve, she had buried her stepfather, her half brother, and her mother. Mary’s two surviving siblings, although grown and married, did not take her in; instead, she became the legal ward of a neighbor.
Her life immediately got worse. The man who had worked for her late family as an overseer successfully sued her for back wages, and Mary, as a girl in early America, would have little opportunity to recover the financial loss. For her, everything depended on marrying well, just as it had for her mother, who had come to America as an indentured servant.
In 1731, at the age of twenty-three, Mary found a promising match. Augustine Washington, an educated widower fourteen years her senior, was a justice of the peace who owned a small tobacco farm, and an increasing number of slaves.1
The details of their twelve-year marriage are scant, but one thing is for sure: It produced six children, whom they raised at Ferry Farm, a modest enterprise outside of Fredericksburg, Virginia.2 George was their first, followed by Betty, Samuel, John Augustine, and Charles Washington. (Their youngest daughter, Mildred, died at sixteen months old.) They lived in a two-story house that looked out on the Rappahannock River and slave quarters, rough wooden structures that housed about twenty people of African descent.3 The tobacco-drying sheds, the dairy barn, the smokehouse, and Mary’s vegetable and medicinal herb gardens lay beyond.
Mary’s husband and stepsons had attended the prestigious Appleby Grammar School in England, and she planned to send her own sons there, too, no doubt with dreams of social advancement in mind. Mary had never left Virginia, but her sons would see the motherland.
And then, in 1743, her husband died. Augustine was buried with his first wife, a sign of things to come for Mary and her five children. His sons from his first marriage, Lawrence, twenty-five, and Augustine, Jr., twenty-three, inherited the bulk of the estate—including Mount Vernon. Lawrence gifted his stepmother a mourning ring, but neither he nor his brother had any legal obligation to her. Mary and her five children were left to manage Ferry Farm on their own. George was never going to Appleby.
Mary, now thirty-five, took up the job of maintaining a property that legally belonged to her eleven-year-old son. Having learned at an early age how it felt to be powerless, she started off decisively, selling off some of the family’s best tracts. The corn, flax, wheat, oat, rye, vegetables, and tobacco grown on the remaining land would have to be enough to feed and support her family, the people she enslaved, and her farm animals. With great luck and even better weather, there might be a big enough yield to sell in Great Britain.
Unfortunately for Mary, the years that followed were recorded as dry. She managed to scrape together enough to sell abroad, but that was only half the battle. British merchants had a monopoly on trade, and they couldn’t be depended on to deal fairly. Their terms stated that no sale was final until the product reached Great Britain. This allowed them to accuse American farmers, and the
y often did, of including inferior crops, especially with small operations. When Mary tried to sell her tobacco, she was twice accused—and twice vindicated. By the 1760s, she had decided the enterprise wasn’t worth the trouble.
And throughout all this struggle, Mary’s efforts, past immediate survival, offered her no long-term guarantees. At the age of twenty-one, Washington would inherit the entirety of Ferry Farm. But that was it. Augustine had made no provisions in his will to educate his younger sons, abroad or at home. Soon, Washington would have to drop out of a local school. He would spend the rest of his life trying to catch up.
* * *
Mary could have remarried. It was such a commonplace practice, in fact, that Augustine’s will anticipated it. A new husband would have offered her some degree of financial security and, presuming she was lonely, companionship, even love. And Mary was a catch: She had a home, however temporary, and a hearty constitution. But Mary wasn’t eager to submit to a new husband’s demands. (Perhaps she had learned a lesson from her own mother’s second marriage. Tellingly, her eldest son would later come to the defense of remarried widows, against husbands who illegally withheld their wives’ property.) Instead, she poured her energy into the farm and her children, especially George and Betty.
Mary remained strategically close to her stepsons. Lawrence, who was ten years her junior, had come back from Appleby with the entitlement and ambition of a colonizer, not of a man born in the colonies. With a commission from King George II, he had served as a captain in the War of Jenkins’ Ear, fighting the Spanish in the West Indies. Lawrence returned the summer after his father died and immediately capitalized on his recent inheritance and glamorous war experience by marrying exceptionally well. Ann Fairfax, daughter of Colonel William Fairfax, lived at Belvoir, the grand estate bordering Lawrence’s Mount Vernon. She offered him entry into what was arguably the colony’s most powerful family.