The Man Behind the Myth : GEORGE WASHINGTON: Writings.<i> Edited by John H. Rhodehamel</i> .<i> Library of America: 1,149 pages, $40</i>
George Washington remains both the most familiar and the least understandable of our presidents. Only Abraham Lincoln can rival him as a figure universally studied in elementary and high school history classes, and even Lincoln cannot claim equal standing in a popular culture that for two centuries has rung changes on the cherry tree, a silver dollar flung across the Potomac and the Valley Forge winter. So familiar indeed is he that familiarity itself impedes our ability to see him as human. Washington is more myth than man, and probably always will be.
It is not for want of skilled biographers that this is the case. The problem is rather that detailed factual knowledge of his life makes him more remote than ever. The formidable quality of his public achievements, together with what seems the almost incredible austerity of his private character, make it impossible for most modern Americans to imagine him as a living person.
Indeed, to make him seem even remotely sympathetic, the producers of the television biography that starred Barry Bostwick felt compelled to concoct a grand passion for him. Confronted with the fact that the real Washington married a plain-looking widow who was both older and far richer, they took an awkwardly flirtatious letter he wrote to a neighbor’s wife, shortly before his marriage, and made it the excuse for Bostwick-Washington to have an affair with the glamorous Sally Fairfax. Historians might harrumph (and did), but what was an honest screenwriter to do? What, if not sex, could turn George Washington into flesh and blood?
Oddly enough, the Library of America may have succeeded where the brightest talents of the Columbia Broadcasting System failed. The 446 letters and other documents that John Rhodehamel has chosen and annotated for “George Washington: Writings” do a good deal more to make the father of our country an accessible figure than can either a TV miniseries or another biography. In them, the reader will not find a man who moved inevitably from obscurity to greatness. What stands out much more clearly is the story of an insecure man, “conscious of a defective education, & want of capacity,” whose efforts to master his emotions and serve the public good--behavior that his age called “virtue” and deemed the mark of a true gentlemen--existed in tension with a relentless ambition for public approval and striving to increase his estate.
To make Washington’s acquaintance requires a certain amount of effort. As is the case with all Library of America volumes, this one has no introduction and relegates the editorial apparatus and an excellent chronology to the end of the book. Because readers encounter Washington’s writings so directly, they must be their own historians, imagining a story to connect the documents. To have an interpretive framework in mind at the outset may prove useful, however, and a few introductory remarks may therefore be in order.
Washington began life well down the Virginia gentry’s pecking order. A younger son, he stood to inherit only modest properties; when his father died, George’s portion of the 10,000-acre estate amounted to 260 acres, 10 slaves and change. For good reasons, the older brother who took responsibility for him favored training in land surveying and husbandry over a classical education. These skills effectively bounded his potential development. He could remain in the Tidewater, plant tobacco in a modest way and manage an estate for one of the colony’s great planters. If he had brains and drive, however, land speculation offered a means to clamber up the scale of wealth. Surveyors, working for speculative syndicates, could locate and buy promising plots for themselves, picking up backwoods acreage cheaply and reselling it to would-be farmers. To rise from surveyor to gentleman required hard work and planning, but the payoff could be a plantation and membership in the elite of a frontier county.
The latter was the route that the young Washington chose when his education ended at 15. Over the next five years, he became an accomplished surveyor, making the first purchases in a lifelong speculative career. Had nothing changed, Washington would probably have become a prosperous Western planter. But in 1752, the death of his older brother brought a substantial estate, Mount Vernon, into his hands; two years later, the coming of the French and Indian War changed everything else.
Military service gave Washington educational experiences analogous to those that more fortunate gentlemen received at the College of William and Mary. Four years of danger and hardship expanded his horizons, shaped his opinions and prepared him for his role in the Revolutionary War. The war taught him the superiority of properly disciplined soldiers over militiamen. While book-learned republicans feared professional armies as instruments of tyranny, Washington understood them as tools for the exercise of power. Like any other tool, they had to be used carefully by men who knew what they were doing.
Hence the war’s second lesson: Only men of good family and character--gentlemen--should be trusted with command. Officers needed to care paternally for their men but above all had to understand them as a breed apart; any officer who hesitated to discipline his men could not expect them to withstand the rigors of campaigning or the terrors of battle. These were views indistinguishable from those of the British officers alongside whom Washington served, but these redcoats, whose professionalism he so admired, disdained American officers as rustics and amateurs. Thus, military service taught Washington much about power and its uses but made him wary of the men who exercised power on the king’s behalf. When he resigned his commission in 1758, he knew he would never be more than a junior member of the empire’s elite.
His role as Virginia’s leading military commander, however, raised his local reputation to heights it could have attained in no other way. When he married the colony’s richest widow in 1759 and resumed private life, Washington had not yet celebrated his 27th birthday. He had risen further, and faster, than any other man in Virginia’s history.
For that reason, perhaps, he worried more than ever about his public reputation--and his debts. In the postwar depression, he lost money as a tobacco planter and turned increasingly to land speculation to preserve his fortune. By 1774, he had secured rights to tens of thousands of acres of land in the Ohio River Valley, lands he could not sell because the British government prohibited white settlement beyond the Appalachians. Frustrated, and fearful of what seemed a conspiracy within the British government to tax Americans without their consent, he became active in opposition politics.
But he never became a radical. When fighting finally broke out in 1775, he accepted command of the Continental Army not because he longed to spill enemy blood but because he feared that declining the offer would destroy his reputation for selfless public service. “May God grant,” he wrote to his brother-in-law, “that my acceptance of it may be attended with some good to the common cause & without injury [from want of knowledge] to my own reputation.”
He was reluctant to embrace independence and feared revolutionary social upheaval. Indeed, he took it as his mission to ensure that the army remained an obedient instrument of civil power, not an independent actor. So determined was he that his Continentals should not threaten property rights that he refused to allow soldiers to confiscate food when they were half starved or clothing when they were freezing.
The Revolutionary War amplified the lessons he had learned in the previous conflict. Endlessly, he lamented shortages of soldiers and excesses of undisciplined, under-equipped militia. He begged Congress to enlist soldiers for the duration of the war, pleaded for salaries and perquisites that would attract gentlemen to serve as officers, asked for the power to inflict draconian punishments by lash and noose. He appealed to Congress to keep individual states from pursuing their self-interest at the expense of the common good.
He never got what he wanted. The Continental Army remained a body Congress feared as much as needed; congressmen persisted in believing that militiamen threatened liberty less than highly disciplined professionals. Financially strapped gentlemen quickly resigned their commissions, and he reluctantly promoted men from the ranks to replace them. Congress never got the states to adequately support the hungry, ragged Continental Army, on whose continued existence the revolution depended.
To read Washington’s wartime orders and letters is to see the extraordinary fragility of the revolution. It is also to see the origins of political principles that would structure the rest of his life. The army’s sufferings and the razor-thin margin of the revolution’s survival convinced him that disunity posed the greatest threat to the survival of the United States. “Thirteen Sovereignties pulling against each other, and all tugging at the Federal head, will soon bring ruin on the whole,” he wrote in 1786, expressing the faith that would make him an advocate of the new Constitution in 1787 and form the foundation of his later policies as president. If the French and Indian War taught Washington how to be a leader before he had an army, the Revolutionary War made him a nationalist before the nation existed.
The revolution did not efface the influences of his earlier education and character but altered them. He still worried about his reputation, still speculated in Western lands, but now he worried about his reputation among Americans, not just among Virginians, and justified his land speculations in terms of national benefits. His great postwar project, one that would occupy him for the rest of his life, was a canal that would link the Potomac River and Monongahela-Ohio drainage, capturing the trade of the Midwest. The people who flooded across the mountains into the Ohio Valley, he believed, needed firm economic ties to the eastern states; without these, they would inevitably follow the course of the rivers westward toward Spanish territory and lose their loyalty to the United States.
These strands of temperament, experience and conviction converged in the odd episode that climaxed the development of his character, if not his career: the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Oppressed by the factionalism that would soon create the Republican and Federalist parties and facing severe crises in relations with Britain and France, Washington knew precisely how to respond when a loose coalition of farmers refused to pay the federal excise tax on distilled spirits. Declaring the western counties of Pennsylvania in a state of insurrection, Washington federalized the militias of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia and Maryland, formed an army of 12,000 men and summarily crushed the rebellion.
Washington asserted federal authority in a principled, instinctive act that arose from nationalist convictions, devotion to hierarchy and order, concern for keeping westerners firmly attached to the Union and a sense of when and how to exercise power decisively. He never tried it again. To employ force repeatedly on such a scale would have aggravated the partisanship engulfing the nation, and that prospect filled him with despair. The revolution he had played so great a part in making had created a new world of democracy he had not wished to inhabit.
Readers will encounter much more than this, of course, in the book. They will see Washington as consumer, creditor, debtor; kinsman, adversary, friend; confidant, schemer, supplicant; planter, slaveholder and--finally--emancipator. Above all, they will meet the fallible, anxious, remarkable man without whom the United States as we know it could not exist. To read more than 1,000 pages of his writings is not too steep a price to pay for the privilege of making his acquaintance.