The Man Behind the Myth

by

Nicki Leone

Here are some things you might not have known about George Washington: He had a fondness for pretty women. He loved to dance. Bullets apparently could not touch him. He created the first Purple Heart medal. He was a master horseman (possibly, the reason bullets seemed not to touch him). He was fond of the theatre. His dentures were not made of wood. He wanted to build a canal to connect the Potomac River to the Ohio. He never wore a wig. He sometimes received secret messages during the Revolutionary War written in invisible ink. He refused to be painted in a toga. His favorite author was Cato. His wife had dentures too.

And here is one thing you did know: He did not, as a rule, tell lies.

The George Washington most Americans know is so over-laid with canonical garb that the real man—whoever he was—is all but buried under the reverence, the worship, the tawdry symbolism of dollar bills, presidents' day sales, and one strangely enigmatic monument—the most enduring associations most will ever have of the man who, author Ron Chernow seems to think, is the only reason we are able to sit in our living rooms today and bitch about the government, secure in the protection and superiority of our Constitution.

Chernow, already known for having written what may be the seminal biography of the much-maligned and misunderstood Alexander Hamilton, has now turned his attention to Washington, hoping to bring depth and clarity to a figure that for most people has remained as flat as that engraved image on the dollar bill. His book Washington, A Life is ambitious in the way that the Transcontinental Railway was ambitious. The way the Apollo moon shot was ambitious—you can see where you mean to go, but getting there is a near-impossible task. It may have been near impossible for Chernow, but if the book has its flaws, well so did Washington. It is, nevertheless, still well worth reading and Chernow proves beyond a doubt that Washington is a man well worth reading about.

“My intention,” writes Chernow, “is to produce a large-scale, one-volume, cradle-to-grave narrative that will be both dramatic and authoritative, encompassing the explosion of research in recent decades that has enriched our understanding of Washington as never before. The upshot, I hope, will be that readers, instead of having a frosty respect for Washington, will experience a visceral appreciation of this foremost American who scaled the highest peak of political greatness.”

Dramatic, the tale certainly is. Authoritative, is open to question. Despite the “explosion of new research” available the transformation of George Washington from a socially ambitious young man—eager to make his way into the ranks of the colonial upper crust—to a revolutionary idealist committed to the concept of civil, democratic rule remains out of reach. Just how ambition became idealism, how the idealism was forged into a political pragmatism is documented, but not elucidated. If Washington ever experienced a moment of epiphany, a moment when he could say “I see now that monarchy is moribund and liberty is a cause worth the sacrifice of my lands, my livelihood and my life,” we are not a party to it. We suffer, perhaps, from Washington’s own care in preserving his papers and his legacy for future generations. Conscientious to the point of obsession, Washington understood almost immediately upon his acceptance of the position as leader of the Continental Army that if the Americans won the day, his papers and war correspondence would be a national heritage. He spared no expense or effort to make sure all was preserved. The result is a treasure-trove of personal papers that are complete, but not intimate. We see everything Washington wants us to see, and yet only what he authorizes us to see. And we are left with only with an apparently endless series of official portraits that document his rising power and his declining health, and yet tell us nothing of how he got from there to here.

Washington, A Life suffers from the author's enthusiasm—I might even call it hero-worship—for his subject, and this has the effect of casting a decidedly one-sided view to many aspects of Washington’s life that might have benefited from a more sober, objective approach. “Paranoid,” “duplicitous,” “disingenuous”—these are terms commonly applied to people at various points in Washington’s life who opposed him or contested his wishes. In some cases such terms are well deserved, such as in the instance of the “Conway Cabal,” in which envious men attempted to undermine his military authority as Commander of the Continental Army. But most of the time the language serves to erase or obscure the complexities of the situation. This is true, for example, in Chernow’s lop-sided account of the growing split between the Federalists and the Republicans that reached such an acrimonious fervor by Washington’s second term. And especially true of his portrayal of Jefferson and Madison’s role in the opposition. There is a wild, wild west air to the tenor of the political debate of the era (which feels oddly comforting—some things just never change) that resulted in outrageous accusations being hurled in all directions. But Chernow never acknowledges that the cause of the opposition may have been rooted in valid fears over the direction of the country's future—never acknowledges, for example, that Jefferson’s fear of the spectre of an Alexander Hamilton (regarded as a natural successor to Washington) in charge with nothing to check him—was grounded in legitimate alarm at the way Hamilton wielded power.

Another example of this one-sided perspective is Chernow’s account of the General’s difficulties with an ineffectual Continental Congress as he struggled to feed and clothe (and pay) his army during the Revolutionary War. That the army suffered from civil mismanagement is never a question. That greedy people engaged in price gouging, wartime profiteering, and were more willing to sell high to the cash-rich British than low to the cash-poor Continental Army was a source of deep frustration. But to read Chernow, one can only come to the conclusion that the noble, suffering army persevered whilst all around them the farmers whose liberty they were fighting for got rich off selling supplies to the enemy, while in Philadelphia the congressional delegates frittered away their time in petty disputes and spent their evenings attending lavish dances and dinners. Which of course, were hardly the only things that could be said about either farmers, politicians, or the feelings of the people on whose lands the war was being fought.

This tendency towards blatant bias is, I think, the book’s major flaw—a greater flaw even than Chernow’s habitual psychologizing, which is an easily-flagged narrative device. It is little trouble for the cautious reader to set aside statements of what Washington was thinking—or more to the point, feeling—during any given crisis since such things are so clearly speculation. It’s harder to sort out a coherent understanding of, for example, the controversy surrounding the Jay Treaty (which normalized commercial relations between the United States and Britain, but with few real concessions from the British) from the antipathy the author obviously feels towards the factions that opposed it and used it to attack Washington’s competence and even his patriotism.

Notwithstanding Chernow’s effusiveness, he is an excellent writer who knows how to tell a good story. Washington, A Life is by turns vivid, captivating, engaging, and enlightening. As long wary readers keeps a weather eye open and arm themselves against credulity, then they will be rewarded. The extensively detailed account of Washington’s attitude towards slavery, and his relationships with the slaves he owned alone makes the book worth reading.

And here I should say that Chernow may be willfully blind or resentful towards Washington’s enemies, but he is not blind to Washington’s own follies and flaws. It is clear that the author made a Herculean attempt to document, name, place, and clarify Washington's relationship with every slave with whom he had regular or significant contact. From his loyal aid and manservant Billy Lee, who stayed by Washington’s side throughout the war and even appears in some of his portraits, to the dandyish cook Hercules, who set the tone for the first Presidential household’s hospitality, to Martha Washington’s runaway maid, Ona Judge, who preferred freedom to a favored place in the most important household in America, Chernow is careful to create as full a history as possible for the men and women owned by the man widely regarded as the father of “liberty.”

Nor does the author shy away from exposing the troubling, conflicted actions of Washington himself regarding his slaves. In fact, Chernow calls Washington’s attitude towards slavery “schizophrenic”—his theoretical disapproval of the institution continually at odds with his practical application. Washington would not sell slaves or split up slave families, but he was diligent, even relentless in his pursuit of runaways. He did not want slaves to be whipped and he was conscientious about providing medical care, but he also demanded that even sick or injured slaves give a full day’s work—once even insisting that a man with a broken arm could still wield a hoe with his other hand. He attempted to abuse his position as President to use government resources to recapture the runaway Ona Judge when it was discovered she was living in New Hampshire. He thought slavery untenable morally and unprofitable practically, but went to great (and secretive) lengths during his first term to circumvent a local law in Philadelphia that would have freed all his household slaves after six months of living in the presidential residence by shuffling them back and forth across state lines on the flimsiest of pretexts. Even Washington’s final “brave act”—which Chernow calls “courageous,” freeing his slaves in his will—even this is diluted by his qualification that the slaves should not obtain their liberty until the death of his wife, so that she would have full use of them during her lifetime. (A position, Martha Washington later noted, that left her feeling in fear for her life from approximately a hundred men and women all of whom knew that they would be emancipated the moment she died).

Ironically, it is in his conflicted dealings with his own slaves that we get the best picture of Washington, the man; principled but pragmatic, idealistic but also blind to his own prejudices. A man who revered family, but found himself continually rationalizing his ownership of human beings. A man who, and perhaps this is key, believed in freedom, in liberty, but also in loyalty and duty. And who, in fact, rated the latter more highly than the former.

In the end I’d say that Chernow does much of what he sets out to do with his biography, even if his subject remains somewhat unknowable. Washington has often been portrayed as cold and aloof, as not very bright, and frequently a pawn of other men. Chernow shows us a man who, far from being “cold” was given to violent passion and spent his entire life struggling to govern his emotions. (Not to mention a man who liked to stay up all night dancing with pretty women). A man who was neither dull nor in the habit of allowing himself to be manipulated, but grew into a sharp political mind who thoroughly understood the kind of power he wielded and made sure to do so with greatest possible effect.

I said at the beginning that Chernow had a kind of hero-worship for his subject. It is hard to fault him. It is sometimes mystifying to be able to account for the almost fanatical devotion Washington commanded from his peers and his countrymen, and pretty much every subsequent generation of Americans for the next two hundred years. As a military man he rarely won a battle and quite often was responsible for losing them. As a member of the 1787 Continental Congress, he almost never participated in the debates, wrote none of the words that ended up becoming the Constitution of the United States. As first president of the country, his terms  in office were marred by constant acrimony and debate, as well as considerable periods of ill health. He was no Alexander the Great or Hannibal in generalship, no Elizabeth I in statesmanship. No Socrates in philosophical debate, no Cicero in oratory. (And no Thomas Jefferson or James Madison in eloquence and intellectual training).

But we are profoundly grateful for this. Instead, Washington is one of the few people who can be called great for what he did not do. At every point where he is handed power, he accepts it reluctantly and hands it back with relief as soon as possible. When his army was freezing and starving, he did not use it to over-run the countryside and force the civil authorities to bend to a military dictatorship. When the war was won and he was at the height of his popularity, he did not stage a military coup (although he had the discretely-offered support), but rather resigned his commission and returned to his plantation. When asked to preside over the 1787 Continental Congress, he went out of his way to remain strictly neutral, conscious that his opinions and favor carried an immense amount of weight. When he was elected president, he was almost fanatic in his care to preserve the separation of powers and both a geographic and ideological diversity of opinions in his cabinet even though once again, his reputation and popularity were such that he could have steered the new government in any direction he wanted. And what he wanted was a strong executive branch, having never forgot what his army suffered under the petty inefficiencies of an ineffectual legislature. But once again, although he could have been president for life and no one—not even James Madison—would have opposed him, once again Washington stepped away. Washington’s reputation for integrity was so entrenched that he could have proposed he be made “Provisional Emperor” and everyone would have trusted him. But instead he handed back the mantle all were so willing to drape across his shoulders and declined to become the republican equivalent of a king.

If there is one conclusion to be drawn from the events of the life of George Washington, it is that we wouldn’t have the nation we do if he had not been exactly who he was—that rarest of creatures, the idealist who is also a pragmatic. And whatever qualms one might feel on reading Ron Chernow’s frankly adoring biography of the man, we cannot disagree with his ultimate proposition—that George Washington entirely deserves the title “the Father of Our Country.”

Books mentioned in this column:
Washington, A Life by Ron Chernow (Penguin Press, 2010)
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (Penguin Press, 2004)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this with the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.