The First of Men
The First of Men
A LIFE OF GEORGE WASHINGTON
JOHN E. FERLING
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Copyright © 1988 by The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville
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First published in hardcover in 1988 by The University of Tennessee Press
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2010
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ferling, John E.
The first of men: a life of George Washington / John E. Ferling.
p. cm.
Originally published: Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, c1988.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-539867-0 (pbk)
1. Washington, George, 1732–1799.
2. Presidents—United States—Biography.
3. Generals—United States—Biography.
4. United States. Continental Army—Biography. I. Title.
E312.F47 2010 973.4′1092–dc22 [B] 009033423
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Frontispiece: Clay bust of Washington, by Jean Antoine Houdon (1785).
Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union.
The American Revolution . . . is fixed forever.
Washington began it with energy,
and finished it with moderation.
—LOUISE FONTANES, 1800
Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Soon bears us all away;
We fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the op’ning day.
—ISAAC WATTS
Contents
Preface
PART ONE
1 Young George Washington
2 The Frontier Warrior
3 The Acquisitive Planter
4 Patrician Revolutionary
PART TWO
5 Commander of America’s Army
6 At the Brink
7 Washington’s War Begins
8 The Campaign of 1777
9 The New Continental Army
10 The Character of General Washington
11 The Forgotten Years: 1778–1780
12 Victory and Retirement
PART THREE
13 A Brief Retirement
14 An End to Retirement
PART FOUR
15 The Early Presidency
16 The End of the First Term
17 The Second Term Begins
18 Last Years in Office
PART FIVE
19 The Last Years
Afterword
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Clay Bust of Washington, by Jean Antoine Houdon
Lawrence Washington, by an Unknown Artist
John Parke Custis, by Charles Willson Peale
George Washington at Age Forty, by Charles Willson Peale
Joseph Reed, by Charles Willson Peale
Thomas Mifflin, by John Singleton Copley
George Washington in 1776, by Charles Willson Peale
Martha Washington at Age Forty-five, by Charles Willson Peale
George Washington at Princeton, by Charles Willson Peale
Washington, Lafayette, and Tilghman, by Charles Willson Peale
Mount Vernon, East Front, by an Unknown Artist
Mount Vernon, West Front, by an Unknown Artist
George Washington in 1787, by Charles Willson Peale
George Washington at Age Fifty-eight, by Joseph Wright
Alexander Hamilton in 1790, by John F.E. Prud’homme
George Washington at Age Fifty-eight, by Edward Savage
Martha Washington at Age Fifty-nine, by Edward Savage
George Washington in 1797, by Gilbert Stuart
The Washington Family, by Edward Savage
MAPS
Young Washington’s West
The Siege of Boston
The New York Campaign
The Pennsylvania–New Jersey Theater
The Siege of Yorktown
Preface
John Adams doubted that an accurate history of the great events of his lifetime could ever be written. The story of those events would be “one continued lie from one end to the other,” he once predicted in a not uncustomarily bilious moment. “The essence of the whole,” he went on, “will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod, and thenceforth those two conducted all the policy, negotiations, legislatures, and war.”1
George Washington expressed greater confidence in the capabilities of future historians, and he was even sufficiently realistic to imagine “the darts which I think [will] be pointed at me” by those who would come to write of him and his age. However, he did expect high standards of his biographers. He hoped they would have a “disposition to justice, candour and impartiality, and . . . [a] diligence in investigating” the source materials.2
Washington might have been surprised by what was written in the years following his death. For a century or more his biographers were unable to cut through the legends that had come to surround the man. If Adams’s ideas about the folklore likely to surround Washington and Franklin were exaggerated, the human Washington did indeed seem to be elusive, and he was handed from generation to generation as a stylized, fanciful figure, as lifeless as the image of the man that peers out from the myriad paintings suspended on quiet museum walls. In a sense, it was as though Washington was too monumental to contemplate, save in the most heroic terms. But in another sense it was as if Washington could not bear scrutiny, for fear that he would prove to be all too human.
My introduction to Washington, fortunately, came after historians had begun to penetrate the mists of heroic legend. A work by Marcus Cunliffe, which I read while still an undergraduate, first made me aware that Washington was, after all, arrestingly human, even though the author confessed his inability fully to distinguish the man from the myth. Later, in graduate school, I read Bernhard Knollenberg on Washington’s early years, as well as some of the voluminous works of Douglas Southall Freeman and James Thomas Flexner, each of whom had played an important role in the mortalization of Washington.3
Still, something seemed to be lacking. Too often the engines that drove the private man seemed out of sync with the forces that pushed the public figure. Illogically, there seemed to be two Washingtons, and the inclinations of the one appeared never to intrude upon the actions of the other. This added another intriguing element to the endless fascination of this man, but it was not until my resear
ch led me rather circuitously into a study of early American military history that I first began to try to come to grips with Washington. From that beginning I was led to this study, drawn in the hope that I might fathom what I perceived to be an incompleteness to the figure of the historical Washington.
From the outset it was my intent to write a one-volume biography. My goal was to produce something less grand than a man-and-the-times study, yet to probe Washington’s era in sufficient depth that I might draw on the explosion of studies set off by the recent celebration of the American Revolution Bicentennial.
Not every reader will agree with my assessment of Washington, particularly with those sections that are less than flattering in their judgment. In fact, in the course of the years required to complete this study, some of my own assumptions about Washington were changed, and I came to a greater admiration of many facets of the man, particularly of his courage, his realization of his limitations, his ability to make difficult decisions, his diligent striving for self-improvement, his willingness to work, the gentle love and abiding steadfastness which he exhibited toward his family, and, with one or two glaring exceptions over a long lifetime, the sense of loyalty and constancy he manifested toward those who remained faithful to him. Of course, there were “darts”—the harsh appraisal that Washington anticipated—but I am confident that these arrows were unsheathed only after I had adhered to the guidelines for fairness that Washington had asked of biographers.
This study could not have been completed without the assistance of many others. Considerable financial support was provided by the Learning Resources Committee of West Georgia College. Albert S. Hanser and Ted Fitz-Simons generously cooperated by providing teaching schedules that facilitated the completion of the study, while the Arts and Sciences Executive Committee and Dean Richard Dangle of West Georgia College assisted by granting my request for a reduced teaching schedule.
I am indebted to numerous people who provided kind assistance in the course of my research. Long days and nights away from home were made more pleasant by the courteous and friendly aid I received from librarians and historians in many libraries. I am grateful for the guidance and encouragement offered by W.W. Abbot, Dorothy Twohig, Philander Chase, and Beverly Runge of the George Washington Papers at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia. The cordiality with which I was welcomed at the Mount Vernon Library made the hours I spent in that bucolic setting all the more pleasurable. The same can be said of my work at the National Archives, Library of Congress, Massachusetts Historical Society, Connecticut State Library in Hartford, the New York Historical Society, and the New York Public Library.
Several librarians at the Irvine Sullivan Ingram Library of West Georgia College provided considerable assistance, beginning with Anne Manning who oversaw the purchase of the John C. Fitzpatrick edition of Washington’s papers for my use. Charles Beard authorized the acquisition of additional items of importance, and Diane Atwater, Genevieve Cooksey, and Nancy Farmer somehow remained friendly and cheerful despite my repeated entreaties for still more materials through their interlibrary loan office.
Pat Giusto and Linda Wagner helped immensely in the preparation of the manuscript, and over the years each remained a source of encouragement by displaying a ready and unabated interest in the progress of this endeavor. Robert J. Masek kindly read portions of the manuscript and offered valuable insight into Washington’s character and personality. The manuscript certainly was strengthened as a result of the cogent written critiques provided by historians Paul David Nelson and Dorothy Twohig.
I am indebted to Lee Campbell Sioles for her masterly attention to detail, and I will always be grateful to Cynthia Maude-Gembler, who believed in this project from its infancy.
I am especially indebted to two quite different confidants and friends, R. Gregg Kaufman and Virginia Channell, each of whom provided sustenance and a loving kindness that shepherded me through many moments of doubt and despondency.
The First of Men
PART ONE
1
Young George Washington
“My willingness to oblige”
In 1732 George II sat on the throne of England, a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church directed the foreign policy of France, and almost every member of the Pennsylvania Assembly was a Quaker. George Frederick Handel’s operas Esio and Sosarme were produced for the first time, while perhaps the most important scientific publication of the year was Jethro Tull’s New Horse Hoeing Husbandry. Thirty days, or more, were required to cross the Atlantic in the best sailing craft that could be built, though that was only a little longer than it took to travel from Paris to St. Petersburg by land conveyance. An epidemic of yellow fever ravaged New York City that year, just as smallpox had swept over Boston a few months before, leaving more than two thousand dead in its wake. Johann Sebastian Bach and Alexander Pope still were alive, but many of those who now are remembered as among the most powerful and influential personages of the eighteenth century were not yet born in 1732, people like Robespierre and Marie Antoinette, George III and Lord North, Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
That year, at 10:00 A.M. on February 22, a cold winter morning in the Northern Neck of Virginia, George Washington was born. At a time when most inhabitants of Great Britain’s American colonies were foreign born, Washington was a fourth-generation colonist.
John Washington, George’s great-grandfather, was the first of the family to settle in America. Like many of his descendants, he combined native acumen with a tenacious zest for material gain, traits that served him well in the combative wilderness of seventeenth-century Virginia. The son of an Anglican clergyman, well educated and looking upon the world from a comfortable, gentlemanly social stratum, he had seemed to have a bright future in England. Then the Puritan Revolution erupted, and his father was stripped of his parish. Cast adrift, John tried his hand at several pursuits over the next half dozen years. By 1756 he was a merchant seamen, and, on a cruise to the New World for tobacco, he landed in Virginia.
Evidently he liked what he saw. Largely still a frontier wilderness, tidewater Virginia offered a vista of opportunity to the dreamer and the adventurous. Land was plentiful. Tobacco still fetched a good price. There were few restraints to bridle a man bent on gaining wealth. With luck, and with an adequate supply of labor, an iron-willed planter could prosper as he could never hope to in England.
Within a few months of landing in the colony, John Washington took his first important step. He married into a class above his own, an act that was to become almost habitual among his descendants. Through his marriage to Anne Pope, John acquired seven hundred acres and a loan of £80 from his affluent father-in-law. In less than a decade he had parlayed his holdings into more than five thousand acres and several lucrative public offices, one of which was a lieutenant colonelcy in the Virginia militia. In no time he had replicated in America the social status the family once had enjoyed in England. By the time he died he had been married four times and had fathered several children, some of whom he had sent to England to receive a formal education.
One of these children was Lawrence Washington. The first son of John and Anne, he received the largest share of his father’s estate, a generous grant of thousands of acres and a flour mill. But the law, not farming or business endeavors, interested him. He represented English business interests in Virginia, served as a justice of the peace, and, at age twenty-five, was elected to the House of Burgesses. He died young, before his fortieth birthday, a fate that would haunt many others in this clan.
Lawrence left behind three children, one of whom, Augustine, was to be the father of George Washington. As the second child, Augustine—or Gus as everyone called him—was due a more modest inheritance than his older brother; even so, he received eleven thousand acres. Following his father’s untimely death, Augustine’s mother remarried and the family moved to England, where the boy attended the Appleby School in Westmoreland until he was nine years old. But
after his mother’s death, Augustine and his brother and sister were returned to Virginia. They grew up in the plantation house of their cousin, John Washington of Chotank, a prosperous farmer who lived on the south shore of the Potomac.
Gus bore more traits of his grandfather than of his father. He married Jane Butler, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a prosperous planter, and set about to produce a family and a fortune. Three children, two sons and a daughter, were born in rapid succession. Meanwhile, Gus traded and speculated in land, mostly acquiring tracts along the Little Hunting Creek and Pope’s Creek, both tributaries of the Potomac in the Northern Neck. In 1726 or 1727 he built a rude country farm house on the Pope Creek site, a dwelling that he rather ostentatiously named “Wakefield.”
Tobacco was only one means to affluence for Gus. Like his ancestors, and like many other planters, he accumulated sinecures from the friendly colonial government, offices that required little work, paid a modest salary, and kept both the benefactor and the beneficiary happy. Gus’s major source of income, however, resulted from the discovery of iron ore on land he owned near Fredericksburg. Seizing this heaven-sent opportunity, he entered into a partnership with the Principio Iron Works, a company owned by English Quakers, to mine the mineral and to erect a furnace on his lands.
By 1730 Gus seemed to be on top of the world. He lived comfortably, affluently, in fact, by the standards of this primeval, backwater enclave. Certainly he was wealthier than his father, and he enjoyed a coveted position in the society of the Northern Neck. But that spring he returned to Wakefield from a business trip in England to find that his world had changed drastically. His wife was dead, he discovered when he reached Pope’s Creek, probably the victim of some fever that had scourged the region during his absence. Unable now to manage the family business and his commercial affairs simultaneously, he dispatched his two sons to the Appleby School. Meanwhile, he set out looking for a new wife. He found her a few miles upstream along the Potomac. Only a few months after he learned of his first wife’s death, he remarried.
First of Men Page 1