George Washington

Paul Johnson

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061744174
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

By far the most important figure in the history of the United States, George Washington liberated the thirteen colonies from the superior forces of the British Empire against all military odds, and presided over the production and ratification of a constitution that (suitably amended) has lasted for more than two hundred years. Yet today Washington remains a distant figure to many Americans—a failing that acclaimed author Paul Johnson sets out to rectify with this brilliantly vivid, sharply etched portrait of the great hero as a young warrior, masterly commander in chief, patient lawmaker, and exceptionally wise president.

Chapter One

A Young Gentleman’s Youth in Virginia

AS THE CENTRAL ACTOR in the American Revolution, George Washington was one of the most important figures in world history. As America’s commander in chief throughout the eight-year struggle against Britain he effectively liberated the thirteen colonies from imperial rule. He then presided over the process whereby the new nation drafted, ratified, and enacted its federal Constitution. Finally, for eight years he directed the administration that put the Constitution to work, with such success that, suitably updated and amended, it has lasted for nearly a quarter of a millennium.

The Revolution he thus led to success was the first of a series that created the modern world in which we live. Its spirit was animated by the same love of representative government and respect for the rule of law that had produced England’s unwritten constitution over many centuries. Thanks to Washington’s genius, that spirit was successfully transferred to the new American nation. Subsequent revolutions, in France in the 1790s, and in Latin America during the following quarter century, were marred by tragedies of violence and ambition that led to lasting instability, in which the rule of law could not take root. This pattern was repeated, all too often, in the revolutions of the twentieth century, whereby the peoples of Asia and Africa became independent. Throughout this whole period, however, the United States clung to the principles for which Washington fought, and followed during his administrations. They enabled it to survive a near-fatal civil war, to become the world’s largest economy, to take in the poor of the planet and turn them into the richest people in history, and finally, at the end of the twentieth century, to emerge as the sole superpower. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States seems set to play the leading part in making the earth secure and democratic. In this immense process, then, Washington played, and still plays, a unique role, both as founding father and exemplar of moderation and wisdom.

What sort of man was Washington, and how did he achieve so much? There ought to be no difficulty in answering this question if documentation alone could supply an answer. For more than a third of his life he worked in the service of his country, and all that he did officially is recorded in the National Archives on a scale no European state could then equal. The American nation-state was born, in public, as it were, and minutely recorded. In addition, from the age of about fourteen, Washington deliberately preserved every scrap of paper belonging to him, including diaries, letters sent and received, accounts, and other day-to-day transactions. As he grew older, he arranged these papers in chronological order, and by name and subject. He seems to have known from an early stage in his career that he would be a figure in history, and he therefore wanted the record to be preserved accurately with the particular object of demonstrating that the offices he held were undertaken from duty, not pride. His overwhelming ambition was to be thought unambitious. His obsession with his papers was thus a strange combination of modesty and self-awareness. He took his archive with him when he went to war, and his personal guard was under strict instructions to protect it with their lives and hustle it to a secret place of safety if the headquarters came under threat. After the war it went to his house, Mount Vernon, and was later hugely augmented by his papers as a president, preserved and sorted by a private secretary and archivist. When Washington died, his assistant Jared Sparks took the entire archive to Boston whence, in 1832, it was delivered to the Library of Congress, which had bought it from the heirs. Mounted, one document per page, hinged at left, and bound in leather, the papers occupy 163 linear feet of shelving, and are sold on 124 reels of microfilm, now on disc. Taken together, they constitute the most complete record of a life in the entire eighteenth century, exceeding by far the vast quantities of memorabilia left behind by James Boswell, for instance, or Horace Walpole.

Despite this, and despite the innumerable accounts of him by contemporaries, and the mountainous literature compiled by historians, so vast that probably no one person can read and digest it, Washington remains a remote and mysterious figure. He puzzled those who knew and worked with him, and who often disagreed violently about his merits and abilities. He puzzles us. No man’s mind is so hard to enter and dwell within. Everyone agreed, and agrees, he was a paragon. But a rich or an empty one? A titan of flesh and blood or a clockwork figure programmed to do wisely? Let us inquire.

The first important fact is that Washington was of impeccable English ancestry and came from the class he admired the most: the independent gentry who owned land. All his life he aspired to behave like a gentleman and to own as much land as he could farm. These gentlemen farmers came from Northampton in the heart of England and were hugely loyal to the monarchy, though Northampton the city, a haunt of shoemakers, is also notorious for producing rebels. In 1657 John Washington, second officer on the ketch Sea Horse, of London, sailing to Virginia to pick up a cargo of tobacco, was wrecked on a Potomac shoal, near where Washington the city stands. He decided to settle in Westmoreland County, married Anne Pope, daughter of a substantial man serving in the Virginia House of Burgesses, and so acquired seven hundred acres at Bridges Creek, plus the capital to begin farming. He became vestryman, burgess, magistrate, and militia colonel, helped to suppress Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, and died owning more than eight thousand acres, including an estate at Hunting Creek, higher up the Potomac, said to be twenty-five hundred acres. This became Washington’s Mount Vernon, the fixed center of his life, which he personally and meticulously surveyed and found to encompass 2,126 acres.

By the time Washington was born, February 22, 1732, his family had been established for more than three generations and nearly a century, as members of the Virginia elite, self-governing and practicing representative (though not democratic) rule in the English parliamentary tradition. It is important to grasp that Washington saw himself, from boyhood, as part of a ruling class that had run its own affairs as long as anyone could remember, or as the English had always put it, “from time immemorial.” Any change, therefore, from without, was usurpation, and to resist it was a moral duty, as well as obvious self-interest.

Washington’s father, Augustus or Gus Washington, had ten children by two wives, not unusual in eighteenth-century Virginia, an enthusiastic philoprogenitive colony, whose population increased from 125,000 in 1732, the year Washington was born, to nearly 500,00 in 1775, the year he became commander in chief. Gus, who died when Washington was eleven, was only moderately well off, though he owned ten thousand acres and forty-nine slaves, and operated six iron forges. His household possessions were modest: his silver was worth £125.10 (colonial money was based on the pound sterling till the end of the 1770s) and consisted of eighteen “small” spoons, seven teaspoons, a soup spoon, a watch, and a silver-hilted sword. He had two china tea sets, worth £3.6d, a fine hall looking-glass, a desk or “screwtoire,” one armchair, and eleven leather-bottomed chairs, three “old chairs,” an “old desk and table,” thirteen beds scattered about the house, window curtains, six pairs of “good” sheets, ten inferior ones, seventeen pillow cases, thirteen tablecloths, and thirty-one napkins. Working in and around the house were thirteen slaves, seven of them “able bodied” (adult and fit). Gus was rich enough, however, to send his sons Augustus and Lawrence to his old school in the north of England, Appleby, which, under its famous headmaster Richard Yates, was the best school in the country. Gus also had his clothes made in England, a practice followed by Washington himself up to the Revolution. Life among the Virginian gentry at that time was simple. Washington’s wife, Martha, reminiscing in 1798, said only one family had a carriage, ladies traveled on horseback, and a quarter pound of tea was “a very great present.” Gus was a blond giant, and Washington inherited his physique. Otherwise he left little ostensible impression on his famous son. The story of the hatchet and the cherry tree is an invention (1800) by Washington’s first hagiographer, “Parson” Weems, a Bible salesman. In the thousands of pages of Washington’s personal correspondence, he mentions his father only twice. By contrast, his mother, Mary Ball, Gus’s second wife and a wealthy woman in her own right, was a formidable creature whom Washington treated with the greatest possible respect—and reserve. He referred to her publicly as “my revered Mother, by whose Maternal hand (early deprived of a Father) I was led from childhood.” A cousin and schoolfellow of Washington’s wrote: “Of the Mother I was ten times more afraid than I ever was of my own parents…I have often been present with her sons, proper tall fellows too, and we were all as mute as mice.” She was “commanding,” used to being obeyed.

She was long-lived, being forty-six years a widow, hardy, adventurous, and indefatigable in good family works. Washington inherited from her sound health and the ability to endure great hardships. From his father he inherited his physical appearance. From the measurements sent to his tailor in London and taken after death for his coffin, we learn he was six feet three inches tall. This was, by eighteenth-century averages, enormous. There was nothing gross about him: he was slender, with straight shoulders and wide hips, weighed about 220 pounds, and learned to be a graceful dancer, as well as an enthusiastic one. But his stature was, in a way, the key to his success in commanding men. He never had to shout to be obeyed—except in the noise and heat of battle, when eyewitnesses show him not only shouting but flaying the backs of cowardly officers who were running to safety, using his cane or even a horsewhip (Oliver Cromwell did the same). But, as a rule, his calm, slow, measured—sometimes soft—voice was enough. Benjamin Latrobe, a former aide and highly observant painter, noted: “Washington had something uncommonly majestic and commanding in his walk, his address, his figure and his countenance.” Washington’s French friend, the Marquis de la Fayette, wrote: “He had the largest pair of hands I ever saw” and could “hurl a stone a prodigious distance.” He loved to play baseball, a passion he shared, oddly enough, with his enemy George III (who called the game, English fashion, “rounders”). His stepson Jacky Curtis described his complexion as “fair but considerably florid.” His hair, until it lost its color, was red or reddish.

We do not know exactly where he was born. For the bicentenary celebration of 1932 the U.S. Government claimed to have identified his birthplace and the houses he lived in before his settlement at his lifelong residence, Mount Vernon. But such claims are unproven and may be wrong. However, he was certainly born near Pope’s Creek, Washington Parish, Westmoreland County. He was called George either after his mother’s guardian or (more likely in my view) after George II. Of the years up to eleven, when his father died, we know virtually nothing. His father chose not to send him to his old school in England—probably could not afford it—and Washington, as it turned out, only once left his native America. This was a matter of huge regret to him. He wrote later of “the longing desire, which for many years I have had, of visiting the Great Metropolis of that Kingdom…but I am now tied by the leg and must set that inclination aside.” In this respect—travel—his horizon was narrow; but less so than that of his antagonist, George III, who never left England, not even to go to Hanover, of which he was king, and who did not even see the sea until he was middle aged.

Instead, Washington was educated within the family or on the estate by one Henry Williams. His notebooks and the evidence of schoolmasters show that in addition to English grammar, he did arithmetic, bookkeeping, geography, geometry, trigonometry, and surveying. His handwriting became, and remained, copybook clear and readable—the neatest of that of any of the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dismissed him as largely uneducated. By his death he had accumulated a library of 734 books, all of which he had bought himself, read, consulted, or dipped into. His formal education was severely practical but well assimilated. Like his younger contemporary Napoleon Bonaparte, Washington was an excellent mathematician with a positive gift for logistics. His accounts were always reliable (unlike Jefferson’s which, though copious, often do not add up or make any sense). When John Adams sneered: “That Washington was not a scholar was certain—that he was too illiterate, unread, unlearned for his station is equally past dispute,” he misled everyone. Washington’s education was in fact well suited, as it turned out, for both civilian and military life. Learning surveying and geography meant that, like Bonaparte, he became an expert map reader, an accomplishment few senior officers in any country possessed; and his logistical skills, acquired in youth, meant he ran his far-flung estates—when he was there—as well as his ragtag army, with growing success, defeating a world power in the field and ending up one of the dozen richest landowners in the country.

It says a lot for Washington’s high seriousness when young, and his determination to get on, that after the death of his father, his natural mentor in gentlemen’s manners, he acquired and copied out a handbook containing 110 maxims of conduct, originally compiled by the Jesuits, those superb educators of youth, but anglicized and then Americanized in different translations. They included: “Sing not to yourself with a humming noise nor drum with your fingers and feet.” “Kill no vermin, as fleas, lice, ticks etc. in the sight of others.” “When accompanying a man of great quality, walk not with him cheek by jowl but somewhat behind him, but yet in such a manner he may easily speak to you.” This habit of trying to reduce gentility to a set of rules was of the essence of the eighteenth century, as writers such as Tobias Smollett, Benjamin Franklin, and Denis Diderot attest. Indeed, the central fact about Washington’s character was that he was Eighteenth-Century Man writ large. He was born in the same year as those two superb exponents of eighteenth-century culture, Fragonard and Haydn. He was a man for all seasons, and ages, but he in no way anticipated the romanticism of the nineteenth century. He did not read Rousseau or any literature after Pope and Addison, whose Cato was his favorite work.

But neither did Washington look back to the seventeenth century and its religious zeal. As an adult he became a vestryman as befitted his landed status, but for social reasons. His record of church attendance, about 50 percent or less, suggests decorum rather than enthusiasm. On one occasion he wrote jokingly to his friend Burwell Bassett: “Could you but behold with what religious zeal I hye me to Church on every Lord’s Day it would do your heart good.” But he was impatient with long sermons and never read religious works. In his twenty volumes of correspondence there is not a single mention of Christ. In no surviving letter of his youth does the name Jesus appear, and only twice thereafter. “Providence” occurs more frequently than God. He was never indifferent to Christianity—quite the contrary: he saw it as an essential element of social control and good government—but his intellect and emotions inclined him more to that substitute for formal dogma, freemasonry, whose spread among males of the Anglo-Saxon world was such a feature of the eighteenth century. It was introduced into the colonies only three years before his birth. The first true Masonic Lodge in America was founded in 1734 in Philadelphia, and Franklin, characteristically, became its Master. Washington became familiar with the externals of Masonry as a boy, and in 1752, when he reached the age of twenty, he was inducted as an Entered Apprentice Mason in the Fredericksburg Lodge. Thereafter, Masonry plays an important, if discreet, part in his life, as it did among many of the Founding Fathers. Indeed, it is true to say that Masonry was one of the intellectual building blocks of the Revolution. Washington allowed lodges to flourish in several of his war camps. It was a link with advanced thinking in France: when Lafayette visited him in 1784, he gave him a Masonic apron of white satin, which the marquise had embroidered. Washington swore the oath of office as president on the Masonic Bible and when he laid the cornerstone of the capitol in 1793 he invoked the lodges of Maryland and Virginia. Indeed at his funeral all six pallbearers were Masons and the service followed the Masonic rite.

There were two other respects in which Washington reflected the deepest instincts of his century: his conviction of the paramountcy of land, and his notion of “interest.” He was a soldier and statesman but, above all, he was a landed gentleman. This was what he wished to be; in a sense all he wished to be. There was a saying of his time: “the king may ennoble you but only God (and land) can make you a gentleman.” Washington did not like shaking hands, which he regarded as an urban vulgarism, the act of a “citizen,” a word just creeping in from Paris. He never thought of himself as a citizen. When greeting you he bowed, and a Washington bow was worth having, a gesture of deliberative elegance. He never wore a wig, which he thought unbecoming and a nuisance, but dressed with great care like a well-to-do English squire, powdered his hair neatly, and tied it with a velvet ribbon called a solitaire. He “looked his land,” as they said. He held it to be the central fact of economic life that land was the most valuable of possessions, bringing respect, even power, as well as comfort, and “the commodity most likely to rise in value.”

Closely related to actual possessions was “interest.” This was another eighteenth-century concept that obsessed him. Interest was a connection, through family ties, friendship, local ties, or clan, which put a man ahead of his immediate competitors in getting something he wanted—a place, a promotion, a contract, a favor. In public service or private enterprise, in the army or navy, in the law, in mercantile deals, it was the key to “getting on,” making money, raising your status and income. An exceptional man, such as Franklin, might rise without interest. But for all except the ablest and most industrious interest was essential; without it, a man was doomed to the treadmill of life. Interest also meant motive. It was a term Washington used repeatedly in his letters and other writings. It reflected the lack of sentimentality and idealism so marked in the eighteenth century. He called it “the only bonding cement.” He wrote: “Men may talk of patriotism…but whoever builds upon it as a sufficient basis, for conducting a long and bloody war will find themselves deceived in the end…For a time it may of itself push men to action, to bear much, to encounter difficulties, but it will not endure unassisted by interest.” Revolutionary soldiers might enlist from love of their country but they went on fighting only from love of pay and promotion. It was the same with nations. Two n...