Man of Integrity

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow.  Penguin.  904 pp. $21.00.

I brought this massive volume with me to our cabin in Asheville because I wanted to be occupied in our self-isolation, and occupied I have been.[1]  It is not, I would say, quite the masterpiece that Grant is, but that may be because Grant was a more interesting and conflicted human being, or perhaps because we know more about him.  The man wrote his memoirs, after all.  Washington did not.

Washington in fact was somewhat defensive about the fact that he never went to college, and wasn’t as educated as some of the people who surrounded him, like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  His much older half-brothers had gone to college, but George’s father died when he was a young man and he had to go to work.  Nevertheless, he had a library of a thousand books at Mt. Vernon, including some very good literature, which he apparently read, at least when he had time.  He tried to make up for lost time after the Revolutionary War.

That war stretched out forever.  1775 to 1783, and one major reason is that the two sides rarely clashed.  It is surprising how leisurely an activity war seemed to be in those days.  It’s also true that Washington figured out early on that this was a war of attrition, he was facing a much more powerful foe and could only win by entangling him for so long that Great Britain just gave up.  At the beginning of the war, in fact, Washington had to face the bizarre fact that he didn’t have the gunpowder to engaged the British.  He’d been told he had much more, but when he joined his forces in Massachusetts he only had enough for a few rounds of fighting.  For thirty minutes after he got that news he didn’t say a word.

I have a memory like a sieve, and though I had a superb American history teacher in high school, also in college, I remember almost nothing from those courses, as interesting as they were.  I was focused on being a writer and did other things dutifully.  Settling down to a long biography like this is an opportunity to make up for those deficiencies.  I have a lot to learn.

The truth is that Washington didn’t fight that much in the French and Indian war.  He primarily engaged in one battle (at the future site of Pittsburgh, my hometown), then went back to Mt. Vernon—a place which he’d inherited from his family—until the fighting was over.  From that one success, however, he had a great reputation in the colonies, and when the time came to rebel against the British, Washington was an almost unanimous choice to head the forces.  No one else was seriously considered.

He wasn’t that great a commander.  He made one tactical error after another, really only had one major success in the war, at Yorktown, and one could easily argue—and Comer does—that it was primarily his French allies who engineered that victory.  Washington was the nominal head of things, but followed their lead.  That was the battle, in 1781, that more or less won the war.  It took a couple more years to get the peace agreements worked out.  But the fighting, at least for Washington, was pretty much over.

The thing Washington did do was stick with his forces through eight long years and inspire loyalty in his men.  I vaguely remembered that the winter in Valley Forge was famously difficult, but to read what that was like was devastating, a winter in Pennsylvania when the men were housed in unheated shacks which they had constructed themselves, and many didn’t have shoes, some didn’t even have clothes, and there was almost no food.  One doesn’t see how they survived, and how they continued.

The thing Washington did have—and person after person mentions it—is physical presence.  I’m not sure how else to put it.  People were impressed, sometimes overwhelmed, when they met him.  He was six feet all and well built, at least when he was young, and he was an amazing physical specimen: he could throw stones or rocks further than anyone he met, and Thomas Jefferson described him as the best horseman he had ever seen.  He wasn’t arrogant.  He wasn’t overbearing.  He wasn’t terribly eloquent.  But he inspired confidence.  If he said let’s go fight, people wanted to fight.  They’d lay down their lives for this man.

That was almost a problem for him once the war finally ended.  Everywhere he went people wanted to meet him and shake his hand.  There was no way to hide, really.  Women were as drawn to him as men, even though the war had worn him out and he had aged during it.  (He was 51 as it ended.)  When he got back to his beloved home at Mt. Vernon, which he had dreamed of for the whole eight years, everybody and his brother wanted to visit and meet him, and a number of them did.  In an age when there weren’t a lot of taverns—there weren’t any around Mt. Vernon—a host was expected to welcome people and feed them and put them up.  Washington did that, though he had neglected the place for eight years and he was short of funds.  He was beyond being a media star.  He was a legend.

Most victorious generals in world history would have capitalized on their renown to amass more power and achieve something, but Washington genuinely wanted to return to Mt. Vernon and live as a private citizen.  George III could hardly believe it, and said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”  That is what Washington wanted.  It was not to be.

Friends eventually convinced him to attend the First Continental Congress as a delegate just because it wouldn’t be the same without him, and once he had done that his path to becoming our first President was almost secured.  He was selected, and elected, almost by acclamation, and the early years of his Presidency were fairly stable, as he more or less created—by various small things he did—the office of President of the United States.  As before, he wasn’t brilliant, but had great judgment.  He could hold things together as no one else could.

I was honestly surprised, though, at how early our country’s political vituperation started (it took two or three years, despite the fact that they had no social media).  The constant point of contention was whether there would be a strong federal government or whether things would be left up to the states.  Though most people from his home state favored states rights—especially his first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson—Washington had fought a long war when it sometimes seemed no one was in charge, and he favored a strong federal government.  His primary ally in that was his young brilliant secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton.  Washington had the good sense to choose these two men for his cabinet, and to always listen to both sides.  By his second term things got truly nasty.  And I must say that, at least in Chernow’s telling, Jefferson came across as devious and two-faced.[2]

Washington endured various health problems as he aged.  He seemed to get old before his time, and almost died in office during his second term.  Also during his second term there was an epidemic of yellow fever that raged through Philadelphia, the capital city, and killed ten percent of the population (an event that caught my eye during this pandemic).  Washington fled to Mt. Vernon, and most of the lawmakers took off as well.  For a time it was as if there were no government at all.

The only person who didn’t admire him unreservedly was his mother.  She didn’t want him to be a public man at all, just take care of his land, take care of his holdings, and take care of her, and she was utterly unimpressed with all he accomplished.  When he went to Fredericksburg after the war to see her she didn’t even attend the ball with which people honored him.  She stayed at  home.

He and Martha had no children; they couldn’t, somehow, though she had had children with a previous husband.  But they wound up caring for the orphaned children of various relatives (a common practice in those perilous days); they actually had children around all the time.  Washington was a good, if somewhat distant, father, but his loyalties were divided.  He was the father of his country.

[1] Like everyone else, I assume, I’m reading more than ever during self-isolation.  We’ve moved the dinner hour up a little, and have a stretch of maybe three hours every evening when we’re reading, except on our movie night, which is Friday.  I don’t like to read on screens, and I’m tired of the computer by the end of the day.  Also, I try to confine my reading of the news to my morning encounter with the Times.  I don’t want to keep up with this virus 24/7.

[2] Chernow of course is the author of the famous biography of Hamilton that eventually led to the musical.  You can see as you read this volume that Hamilton would be his next subject.  The man was just too intriguing.