George Washington

by David O. Stewart

  Yet a few days after writing those weary, humble words, Washington was restored as a forceful man of action. Over the next several weeks, he twice visited the country home of Martha Dandridge Custis, a pleasingly rich widow about his age. In those two visits, he wooed her and won her.13 He made it to Williamsburg in mid-March, where he reported to Acting Governor Blair and again wrote stinging letters to his British suppliers. By early April, he had returned to command the regiment at Winchester while ordering cloth for his wedding suit. Martha, in her turn, ordered “genteel” cloth for a new gown, “to be grave but not to be extravagant.”14

  Washington’s transformation was complete. With self-deprecating humor, he admitted to a merchant, “You will perhaps think me a crazy fellow to be ordering and counterordering goods almost in a breath.”15 He wrote no more about leaving the army. Rather, he avidly sought preferment in a new offensive. He would “gladly be distinguished,” Washington confided to Stanwix, “from the common run of provincial officers; as I understand there will be a motley herd of us.”16

  This reversal in Washington’s spirits is not easy to explain. Restored physical vigor may account for much of it. When he reached Williamsburg in March, he consulted a doctor who proclaimed Washington nearly recovered. The encouraging prediction may have helped Washington to reclaim his vitality.17

  Also, the new British expedition aimed to follow the strategy that Washington had been urging. Early in the war, he concluded that Virginia’s frontier posts were too small to resist attack and too widely dispersed to protect settlers. The better strategy, he insisted, was to drive the French from Fort Duquesne (today’s Pittsburgh, where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers combine to form the Ohio), thereby severing French support for their Indian allies. By mid-March, Williamsburg buzzed with news that the British advance would target Fort Duquesne.18

  But more was happening by March of 1758 than Washington’s return to health, or his engagement to Martha Custis, or even the shift in British war strategy. Through that prolonged period of forced introspection, Washington evidently resolved on a fundamental change of direction, one previewed in his letter to Stanwix. He had spent nearly five years trying to build a military career. Repeatedly, he sought either an officer’s commission in King George’s army, or the absorption of his Virginia Regiment into the British military. Each plea had withered under British contempt for colonists. Moreover, in 1758 British officers purchased their commissions. A lieutenant colonelcy, one rank below Washington’s position with the Virginia Regiment, cost £3,400.19 Washington could not imagine having so much cash in hand, equivalent to roughly fifty years of a teacher’s annual salary in Virginia, or close to $300,000 today. He would never hold a British Army commission.20

  Nor could Washington expect a career as a soldier for Virginia. For seventy years before the current conflict with France, the colony had maintained no military force. Whenever this fighting ended, Virginia again would rely on citizen militia to defend against Indian raids and slave insurrections.

  His military ambitions blocked, Washington charted a new path that began at Mount Vernon. The estate included enough acreage to establish him as gentry. He would remodel the house and improve its farms. A good marriage could bring more farmland.

  And he would turn to the west. Like many Virginians, Washington saw frontier lands as the likeliest source of wealth. The war with France had stalled westward migration, but peace would reignite it. From soldiering and surveying, Washington knew the west. By examining new lands early, surveyors could acquire choice parcels to resell at a profit. Thomas Jefferson’s father did that, as did Patrick Henry’s and John Marshall’s. Washington meant to do it too.

  And he would turn to politics. Washington’s grandfather and great-grandfather had served in the House of Burgesses. So had his brother Lawrence. His surviving older brother, Augustine Jr. (called Austin), had just won a seat from Westmoreland County. With Fairfax support plus his military reputation, Washington would be a strong candidate. Three years earlier, he had been on the ballot in a Frederick County contest, though he did not campaign for the office. In October 1757, struggling with dysentery while commanding the regiment, he brought a court proceeding to confirm that he was qualified to represent Frederick County.21 Brother Lawrence had been justice of his county court and a member of his parish vestry. Washington could aim at those positions too.

  When a revived Washington reached Winchester in April 1758, he knew his remaining time in uniform would be short. He had a fiancée to wed, an estate to improve, an economic fortune to create, and political aspirations to follow. If the expedition against Fort Duquesne succeeded, Washington could resign with a sense of accomplishment. If it failed, the British would mount no other offensive on the Virginia frontier for years. Washington had a plan. It would take him beyond even his high ambitions.

  * * *

  Shortly after his death in 1799, George Washington stopped being a real person for Americans, dissolving into a hazy, godlike figure. His first biographer invented stories about his virtues, and those fictions (chopping down his father’s cherry tree, throwing a dollar across a river) became better known than the historical facts. For more than a century, accounts of Washington’s life approached idolatry. In a typical example from 1898, the writer gushed that “his was a moral grandeur, joined with practical wisdom, never surpassed amongst the most renowned figures in the world’s history.”22

  The conversion of Washington into a marble caricature was nearly complete. His monument in Washington, DC, is a massive stone phallic symbol. His name is everywhere, not only on his country’s capital, but on the only state named solely for a person, and at least seven mountains, eight streams, eight parks, four bridges, ten lakes, thirty-three counties, and more than one hundred towns and villages. For more than two centuries, Americans have celebrated his birthday and appropriated his name as a badge of membership in a community of liberty—writer Washington Irving, scientist George Washington Carver, and educator Booker T. Washington.

  Washington built barriers to conceal the man behind the myths. In the second half of his life, he crafted his public image as steady, disinterested, and wise. His self-restraint could lapse into aloofness. As the flesh-and-blood person receded from view, Americans were left with the titanic, impeccable Washington, both superhuman and tedious.23

  Eventually, the clichés about his perfection wore thin. His status as a major slaveholder became uncomfortable. When the hunt for the real Washington began several decades ago, only cold records of his life remained.

  There was a real man named George Washington, one who stuffed his sixty-seven years with remarkable achievements. This book examines a principal feature of his greatness that can be overlooked: a mastery of politics that allowed him to dominate the most crucial period of American history. For the twenty years from 1776 to 1796, he was a central force in every important event in the nation; often, he was the determining factor. A former British soldier, far from an admirer, wrote in 1784 that Washington’s “political maneuvers, and his cautious plausible management,” had raised him “to a degree of eminence in his own country unrivalled.”24 One measure of Washington’s political skill was that when he denied having political talent or ambitions, people mostly believed him, and have continued to believe him ever since.

  That those denials were disingenuous is beyond dispute. Washington won several major elections in his life: In 1775, the Second Continental Congress selected him as commander in chief of the Continental Army; his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 made him presiding officer of that pivotal effort to invent a system of self-government; then the new nation elected him as its first president, and reelected him. As pointed out by others, the fact to linger over is that Washington did not merely win those four critical contests; he won them unanimously.25 Unanimous election was no more common in the late eighteenth century than it is today.

  Washington did
not achieve such preeminence due to natural advantages or happy accidents, or because he was tall, rich, brave, and married to a rich woman. Nothing about Washington’s success was easy. He had modest inherited wealth, so had to acquire the money that made his career possible. He had a meager education, a temper that terrified those who saw him lose it, a cockiness that could make him reckless, and a deep financial insecurity that could lead him close to greed.

  Washington studied his flaws. From a young age, he struggled against his own nature. His early missteps might have crippled the prospects of a person with less dogged commitment to self-improvement. He ruthlessly suppressed qualities that could hinder his advancement and mastered those that could assist it. Washington’s story is not one of effortless superiority, but one of excellence achieved with great effort.

  That Washington was the paramount political figure of the turbulent founding era may be enough to deem him a master politician. Yet the appellation applies even more firmly because of the restraint and even benevolence with which he exercised the power his contemporaries placed in his hands. Acclaimed at countless public ceremonies through the last quarter century of his life, he never became grandiose or self-important. Often called “affable” by those who knew him, despite a personal reserve he maintained in public, his intense modesty and sense of his own fallibility allowed him to seek the advice of others on difficult decisions without preventing him from following his own judgment. As the embodiment of the republican ideals of his time and place, he defined the expectations that Americans would have of their leaders for many generations.

  This book explores Washington’s political mastery from two perspectives. First, it examines his first forty-three years, years in which Washington learned hard truths about the world, about leadership, and about himself. The George Washington who arrived at the First Continental Congress in 1774 is almost unrecognizable when compared to the man who led the Virginia Regiment two decades before.

  The second part of the book studies five treacherous political minefields that Washington navigated in his mature career:

  Bringing his army through a winter of despair at Valley Forge in 1778, while thwarting a combination to supersede him as commander in chief, then winning a crucial battle at Monmouth Court House.

  Persuading mutinous, unpaid soldiers and officers to lay down their arms and embrace peace in 1783, then playing the crucial role in the effort to resolve the nation’s political chaos with a new constitution that created a framework of self-government in 1787.

  Leading the new federal government as it was created from next to nothing, then guiding the bargain for a financial program that restored the nation’s credit and ensured its solvency.

  Keeping the nation out of the European war that followed the French Revolution, cooling the passionate American adherents of both France and Britain.

  Struggling, in his final years, with America’s original sin, human slavery—his own sin, too—hoping to point his countrymen toward repentance and even redemption.

  The book’s ultimate goal is to explore how George Washington became the titanic, near-legendary figure of the American Founding. The answers are necessarily as complicated as the man was.

  In navigating his life’s obstacles, Washington’s strategies and tactics were often subtle. Although he presented himself as a straightforward military man, he was capable of maneuvering worthy of a Richelieu or a Borgia. When he acted, he moved with a sure sense of drama and performance. Yet his maneuvers were not ordinarily designed to win personal power or wealth, but rather to bring independence, self-government, and union to Americans. At critical moments, it was Washington who exercised the judgment and the leadership that carried the nation through dark troubles. Washington gave the United States something every nation needs, but few get: a national hero who understands that heroism includes giving up power and trusting your neighbors, that integrity and virtue—old-fashioned concepts even in the eighteenth century—are a greater legacy than personal aggrandizement and national conquest.

  The recurring debate over whether the United States was created as a Hamiltonian or Jeffersonian society largely misses the point; we are Washingtonians.

  Chapter 2

  Beginnings

  The first Washington in America arrived in 1657. He did not intend to stay, but then his ship sank in the Potomac River. He met that adversity by marrying a rich man’s daughter, acquiring land, and winning a seat in the House of Burgesses, as a county court justice and as a parish vestryman.1

  Virginia welcomed settlers then. Game was abundant and crops grew readily on land that was wet and soft enough that poor men did not shoe their horses. The previous residents of the land—more than thirty Indian groups sometimes called the Powhatan Confederacy—had been decimated by disease and war. One-sided treaties took their land and drove them west.2 Oceangoing ships plied Chesapeake Bay and the colony’s eastward-flowing rivers, docking at the wharves of riverside plantations to carry away crops for distant markets.3

  The ships brought laborers: at first, poor English and Germans, Scots and Irish who signed indentures to work for a term of years. Then the ships brought Africans in chains to labor for no pay. The gentry lived well enough, while laborers—white and Black—did not. The laboring class knew the rage and despair of those who have masters, but only the Africans were property, expensive assets with fearsome potential for violent revolt.4

  The grandson of that first Washington, called Gus (for Augustine), was tall and fair. An acquaintance claimed that Gus could lift into a wagon a load that would overmatch two ordinary men. After inheriting a thousand acres, Gus invested in an ironworks and acquired land on Little Hunting Creek that became Mount Vernon.5

  When his first wife died, Gus took another, twenty-three-year-old Mary Ball. His two sons, Lawrence and Austin, were attending the Appleby School in the north of England, where Gus had been educated. His young daughter stayed with the newlyweds in a modest house where Popes Creek enters the brackish waters of the Potomac in Westmoreland County. On February 22, 1732, a new son arrived. They named him George.

  * * *

  In 1732, British America consisted of twelve colonies, plus part of Nova Scotia and several Caribbean islands where sugar cultivation produced tremendous profits. It was a world of agriculture and trade. Depending on wind and weather, Atlantic crossings could take five weeks or five months. Shipwrecks happened. Travel on land was no faster than a horse could trot or a team could pull a coach. Roads, most of them bad, crossed innumerable rivers and streams. News spread slowly. British immigrants brought with them the old class structure and attitudes. One Virginian of common birth recalled the gentry as “beings of a superior order.”6

  Tobacco was the cash crop, sometimes doubling as a medium of exchange, but it was a hard crop, demanding constant care while wearing out the soil. Pests or too little rain would ruin it. So would too much rain. Some called it “the chopping herb of hell.”7 Many Virginians moved west for new land, but that way was not easy. Native tribes fought back. American forests held European rivals—Frenchmen and Spaniards—who were as violent and unscrupulous as any Virginian.

  After the birth of a daughter and another son, Gus Washington built a house at Little Hunting Creek, closer to his ironworks and distant from neighbors. The new home had four rooms on the main floor plus a garret level with two sleeping chambers, a storeroom, and possibly more. It was the first home George would remember.8

  With his father often away on business—Washington recalled his father as affectionate, but offered no other memories—mother Mary loomed large. For years, Americans exalted her as a Madonna figure, mother of the great Washington, but then the pendulum swung. A leading biographer described her as a money-grubbing termagant. Others have piled on with “harpy” and “harridan,” insisting that Washington viewed her with “frigid deference.” That there are few written re
membrances of her, one biographer wrote, suggests “a conspiracy of silence” to conceal her appalling qualities.9

  Mary was a strong and independent woman, unusually so for her time. She was orphaned at twelve and never remarried after Gus died. Either she preferred her independence and freedom from pregnancies, or received no offers to wed. She held the household together, managed modest farmlands with some twenty slaves, and raised five children. Most of her children turned out well; one spectacularly so.10 One of George’s cousins remembered her with respect, and a small shudder:

  Of the mother I was ten times more afraid than I ever was of my own parents. She awed me in the midst of her kindness . . . I have often been present with her sons, proper tall fellows too, and we were all as mute as mice; and even now, when time has whitened my locks, . . . I could not behold that remarkable woman without feelings it is impossible to describe. Whoever has seen that awe-inspiring air and manner so characteristic in the Father of his Country will remember the matron as she appeared [as] the presiding genius of her well-ordered household, commanding and being obeyed.11

  That Mary could be stern was confirmed by the Marquis de Lafayette, a fervent Washington enthusiast. Meeting Mary when she was old, the Frenchman found her “in force of character rather resembling the matrons of Rome or Sparta.” He attributed her son’s achievements to “above all, her Spartan discipline.”12