GEORGE WASHINGTON: FIRST IN WAR AND PEACE

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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GEORGE WASHINGTON: FIRST IN WAR AND PEACE

In the normal course of events, George Washington would have become an Oxford don, following in the footsteps of his English ancestors. Instead, he never went to college and had the least formal schooling of any of America’s Founding Fathers. That deficiency made him self-conscious all his life.

Washington was robbed of a university education by a revolution in England a century before he was born. Had there been no English Civil War in the 1640s, his family would never have left England to come to the New World.

A descendant of King Edward III through his paternal grandmother, George Washington was the first of his old English family to oppose a king. His English and American ancestors had been staunch royalists, which put them on the losing side in the war. As the proctor of Oxford University, the Reverend Lawrence Washington, George’s great-great grandfather, carried out a thorough purge of Puritans from the faculty. When the Puritans defeated the royalists and beheaded King Charles I, Reverend Washington’s son, John, fled to Virginia. There, he bought land on which he grew tobacco that he traded to Denmark.

His great-grandson, the first president of the United States, showed few signs of being headed for greatness. Born in a small farmhouse known as Wakefield on Popes Creek in Westmoreland County, Virginia, he was the fourth of nine children of the towering Augustine Washington. Gus, as everyone called him, was a tobacco planter, a partner in an iron furnace, and county justice. He was a member of the cash-poor, land-rich gentry, harvesting a modest existence from 10,000 acres, much of it uncleared wilderness.

Gus had three children by the time his first wife died, and he quickly married again to Mary Ball. George was Mary’s first and favorite child. When he was three, his father moved the family to Prince William County, the future site of George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon. Growing up on a farm, George’s boyhood was filled with children, chickens, dogs, pigs, calves, and horses.

In 1738, when George was six, the family moved to Ferry Farm near the new settlement of Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock. By now, Gus owned some 50 slaves and had carved a niche in the upper-middle rank of Virginia society. He sent George’s two older brothers to the school he had attended in northern England, and George seemed destined to go there, too.

On Easter Sunday, in 1743, 11-year-old George’s world suddenly changed. While he was away from Ferry Farm visiting relatives, word came that his father was dying. His older stepbrother, Lawrence, rushed home to manage family affairs. Fourteen years George’s senior, Lawrence had been a captain during King George’s War and adjutant of the American regiment in Britain’s malaria-stricken sieges of Cartagena, Colombia, and other Spanish ports in the Caribbean.

An English-educated officer, Lawrence married Anne Fairfax, daughter of Colonel William Fairfax, one of the wealthiest landowners in Virginia. Colonel Fairfax was the land agent for his uncle, Lord Thomas Fairfax, who owned over 5 million acres. The marriage gave the Washingtons entree to the highest social and political ranks of Virginia. Impressive Lawrence and impressionable George became devoted to each other, with George moving into Lawrence’s home at Mount Vernon.

Though George would study with a series of private tutors off and on for four years at Mount Vernon, his father’s death cut short his formal education. Three surviving notebooks show that he learned some elementary Latin, a good deal of mathematics, and a little English literature. Unlike many of his class, however, George did not go on to The College of William and Mary in the provincial capital of Williamsburg. His lack of formal education later prompted John Adams to comment “that Washington was not a scholar,” adding acidly that “he was too illiterate, unlearned, and unread for his station and reputation.”

Washington’s teenage years were a time of dancing and hearty meals, of hunting for deer, duck, and bear, of wagering on horse and foot races and cockfights, of boxing and billiards, and of engaging in wrestling matches that the powerful young Washington usually won. But if he didn’t go to college, what would he do? Pursue a naval career, Lawrence counseled. George’s widowed mother would hear none of it. She would never give her consent for her oldest son to leave her and go to sea.

In Virginia drawing rooms in the 1740s, gentlemen talked incessantly of fortunes to be made by staking out unclaimed lands west of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Shenandoah Valley. Migrating Native Americans had agreed to bypass the lush valley, whose lands Lord Fairfax had come from England to settle. The opportunity for a young surveyor was unsurpassed - and 15-year-old George was ready to seize it.

He set off on a 33-day horseback expedition through the forests and mountains. His work party slept on the ground, in tents, and in vermin-infested taverns. They encountered Indian war parties. Fascinated, George spent two days and nights talking with the young warriors.

As a surveyor, he matured rapidly. He quickly learned that the secret to success was to scout the best lands along the frontier, buy them with earnings from one of the few cash-paying colonial occupations, and then rent them out for a handsome profit.

Less accomplished on the social front, George was stiff, awkward, and tongue-tied in the company of young women. At Lawrence’s plantation at Mount Vernon (named after the British admiral who had commanded Lawrence’s Caribbean expedition), George learned to play billiards and cards. He especially enjoyed fox hunting and long daily walks. But so shy was he around young women that he wrote dreadful doggerel about his plight:

Ah! Woe’s me, that I should love and conceal,

Long have I wish’d, but never dare reveal, Even though severely

Loves Pains I feel.

It was about this time that he met 18-year-old Sally Fairfax, his neighbor’s bride. George became infatuated with Sally’s graceful bearing, wit, and beauty. Their relationship may never have gotten beyond flirtation, but they had strong feelings for each other and corresponded for years.

His skill and reputation for dependability increasing, the 16-year-old George helped run the surveying lines that Thomas Jefferson’s father used to map the northern boundary of Virginia. When he was 17, George was appointed Culpeper County surveyor. In one month, he earned the equivalent of $3,500 today. At 18, he bought 1,459 acres of choice wilderness land. However, at 19, Washington had to set aside his surveyor’s tools to assume family responsibilities. George’s revered half-brother Lawrence was slowly dying of tuberculosis. In an attempt to regain his health, Lawrence left behind his wife and their newborn baby while he sailed to Barbados with George as his nurse.

It was the only time George Washington left mainland America, and it was a memorable trip. First, he was “grievously seasick” from the ocean voyage. Next, he contracted a near-fatal dose of smallpox that left his face and body permanently pitted with scars. Then came the first of six attacks of malaria. Lawrence went on to Bermuda and later came home to die. George reluctantly left Barbados’s pleasant society, its theater, and the love poems he wrote, but never mailed, to Sally Fairfax, going home to Virginia to recuperate.

Lawrence’s death left Mount Vernon abandoned and sent George back to Ferry Farm, the small plantation his father had left him. He now ambitiously pursued the adjutant’s post Lawrence’s death left vacant. Washington buttonholed influential friends in the House of Burgesses and on the royal governor’s council. He only partly succeeded because Virginia’s governor, Robert Dinwiddie, split the colony into four districts. At age 20, with no military experience, Washington was placed in charge of the southern district, given the rank of militia major, pay of a meager $5,000 a year in today’s money, and the honor he so craved.

To prove himself, Major Washington volunteered for a risky mission. France and Britain were vying for control of the rich Ohio River valley. Pushing down from Canada, French forces were wooing Native Americans and building forts on land England also claimed. Washington set off in icy weather, traveling through more than 1,000 miles of frozen wilderness in less than two months, to carry a warning to the French on Lake Erie and to spy on their forces. His ability to stay calm and sober while French officers drank and boasted, his tact in dealing with native leaders, and his narrow escapes from death created a stir in Virginia when Washington returned with warnings of French mobilization for war.

After five days’ rest and a new assignment from Governor Dinwiddie, Washington left to enlist men in a race to claim the spot in Pennsylvania where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers converge to create the Ohio River before the French could build a fort there. At 22, he was commissioned a lieutenant colonel and given command of a force of militia. Promised 3,000 men, he could only raise 150. Washington got his first taste of combat during a brief skirmish with a French party near Laurel Mountain that killed 10 men, including the French commander, and left 20 more taken prisoner. Calling it, “a most signal victory,” he earned promotion to full colonel, but the battle probably triggered the seven-year-long French and Indian War.

When the French reinforced and counterattacked, young Washington had to take refuge in a hastily built stockade that he christened Fort Necessity. That day, July 3, 1754, taught him many lessons. He had built his stockade at the bottom of a natural bowl that filled with water in a slashing all-day downpour. Surrounded by dense forests that gave cover to the enemy, the fort was raked by deadly French and Indian crossfire. After some of his men broke into the rum supply, Colonel Washington finally had to surrender.

It was a bitter defeat but one that made Washington famous. Even King George II knew his name. To his brother, Washington wrote, “I heard the bullets whistle and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.”

After a spat with Governor Dinwiddie over his pay and rank, Washington resigned his provincial post. But it wasn’t long before he was back in uniform. This time, he was an aide-de-camp to the newly arrived British General Edward Braddock, commander of a mixed force of 2,000 British regulars and American militia sent into the Ohio valley by London to drive out the French. Braddock’s ill-fated campaign against Fort Duquesne would cost him his life. Washington came to scorn the British officer class and regular troops - nearly half of whom were killed and scalped - and to respect the guerrilla warfare tactics used by the Indians.

“The English soldiers behaved with more cowardice than it is possible to conceive,” Washington wrote to his brother. “The Virginia troops showed a good deal of bravery and were near all killed. The dastardly behavior of those they call Regulars exposed all others that were inclined to do their duty to almost certain death.” Washington himself had two horses killed under him, his clothing was torn by four bullets, and another passed through his tricorne hat. The only uninjured officer, Washington commanded the rear guard and buried Braddock in an unmarked grave.

As commander-in-chief of Virginia militia during the next four years of border warfare, Washington became the best-known American soldier, although he felt neglected much of the time and tried unsuccessfully to win transfer to a more active command elsewhere. During this time, he became seriously ill with dysentery and went home, he thought, to die.

Though he was a Virginia hero, he was pestered by his mother as if he were still a boy and there were no war. “I am sorry it is not in my power to provide you either a Dutch man (servant) or the butter as you desire,” he wrote her from camp, “for we are quite out of that part of the country where either are to be had.” And when he was offered the highest commission in Virginia at age 23, she wanted him to refuse it and stay safely at home.

In 1758, after inheriting Mount Vernon, the distinguished young soldier - now owner of more than 5,000 prime acres and a handsome mansion - met the wealthy young widow, Martha Dandridge Custis. His marriage to her made him the stepfather of two small children, John (Jacky) Parke Custis and Martha (Patsy) Parke Custis. He also became an even wealthier man. The following year, he won election to the Virginia House of Burgesses on his third attempt.

In the next 15 years, before he returned to soldiering, Washington built Mount Vernon into one of the colonies’ most successful plantations. He speculated in numerous land companies and staked out 34,000 acres of western land. Having been left 10 slaves by his father, he owned 135 by the time of the Revolution. British historian Marcus Cunliffe, calling Washington “a man of his time and place,” said “he did only what he and his neighbors would have thought proper.”

He turned to manufacturing nearly everything his plantation needed. He fumed at the excessive prices and poor quality of goods shipped from England. The last straw may have come in 1768, when the family carriage broke down. Washington sent a lavish sum to a London carriage maker with instructions for building a new one “in the newest taste . . . to be made of the best seasoned wood and by a celebrated workman.” The gleaming, elegant coach that arrived lasted only two months. The wood hadn’t been seasoned and quickly fell apart.

Washington, who helped organize the first Virginia boycott of British goods, had developed a knack for summing up the American position in a few words. Delivering George Mason’s Plan of Association, the economic embargo against new British customs duties, he told fellow Burgesses, “They should not have their hands in our pockets.”

When nervous colonial leaders converged on Philadelphia at the opening of the Continental Congress in 1774, Washington left little doubt where he stood. He was the only delegate to bring along a uniform. In the risky, radical deliberations, when congressmen had prices on their heads, Washington sat coolly on a dozen committees, giving advice on military preparations. As events in Boston – the British had revoked self-government following the Boston Tea Party - made war inevitable, all eyes turned to the tall gentleman in powdered wig and Virginia colonel’s light-blue uniform to be their commander in chief. Yet Washington insisted he had not sought the post. His inner turmoil was reflected in this letter to his wife at Mount Vernon: “You will believe me, my dear Patsy, when I assure you, in the most solemn manner that, so far from seeking this appointment, I have used every endeavor in my power to avoid it, not only from my unwillingness to part with you and the family, but from a consciousness of its being too great a trust for my capacity.”

Washington brought all the lessons of his Indian-fighting days to bear in his new command. Instead of committing his raw recruits to open combat with a superior enemy force, he encircled the British garrison at Boston with a network of trenches and besieged it. When the surrounding hills were frozen solid and British officers lulled to sleep by the winter winds, Washington ordered his men to make portable fortifications of hay bales, cornstalks, and bundles of sticks. Then, in the middle of the night under a full moon, an army of carts hauled the strange barricades to Dorchester Heights. When the British awoke the next morning, heavy artillery - brought all the way from Fort Ticonderoga in northern New York, where it had been captured by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys - pointed down at them. The British were forced to abandon the city.

Yet, sometimes, Washington’s understanding of a situation arrived only belatedly. In a series of pitched battles on Long Island and in New York in 1776, he allowed his forces to be hopelessly outmaneuvered by fast-marching, well-disciplined troops who steadily drove the Americans across New Jersey.

In the last months of the crucial year 1776, a change had come over Washington. He complained bitterly when Congress refused to allow him to burn New York City as the British army approached. When New York caught fire mysteriously, he was delighted to report to his brother, Samuel: “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do ourselves, as near one fourth of the city is supposed to be consumed [by fire].”

Then, early in December 1776, with British brigades hot on his heels, Washington retreated across the Delaware River to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, seizing every boat and ferry along 80 miles of riverfront. He then resorted to a desperate surprise attack in hopes of shattering British morale.

On Christmas Day, as Hessian mercenaries were recovering from an alcohol-fueled spree in Trenton, New Jersey, Washington struck. Forty-foot-long Durham boats, used in peacetime to shuttle iron products from foundries on the Delaware River to Philadelphia, were loaded first with soldiers and then with artillery. They were rowed through ice packs by fishermen from Marblehead, Massachusetts, under Colonel John Glover.

As was his custom, Washington stayed ashore until the boats made their crossing. Then, with his aides and two horses - his white charger and a sorrel he used in combat - he crossed separately on a ferry. As the Hessians slept off their Christmas party hangovers, Washington’s men infiltrated the streets in what came to be known as the Battle of Trenton, slipping into houses to warm and dry their gunpowder while General Henry Knox and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton lined up men at the ends of the streets. The Hessians stumbled outside at dawn and were cut down in a bloody crossfire. Though the numbers were small, it may have been Washington’s most important victory.

Winter, more than British steel, was Washington’s cruelest enemy. At Valley Forge in 1777-78, half his force of 11,000 men died or deserted, and some of his most trusted officers plotted to replace him. In the winter of 1779-80, the harshest of the century, 1,200 log huts holding 12 men each were buried under 28 snowfalls at Jockey Hollow in northwestern New Jersey. As long as his men had to live and suffer outdoors, Washington refused to take refuge in a heated house. Each winter, wrapped in his blue revolutionary’s cape, he shivered in a white linen tent until the last private had a cabin to protect him.

After years of living on a limited diet, Washington also suffered ill health alongside his men. His teeth had caused him pain and embarrassment since his first extraction at age 22, after the Fort Necessity fiasco. By the 1770s, the Boston goldsmith, Paul Revere, was supplying him with porcelain dentures. Early in June 1781, British agents intercepted a secret message from Washington that had been sent to New York. “A day or two ago,” Washington wrote through the lines to his dentist, “I applied to you for a pair of pincers to fasten the wire of my teeth. I now wish you would send me one of your scrapers, as my teeth stand in need of cleaning.”

Washington frequently posed for portraits with his mouth packed with cotton wadding to fill out the contours of his face. Pierre Du Simitiere, a Swiss painter turned oral surgeon, supplied Washington with several sets of spring-operated dentures made from walrus tusks and hippopotamus teeth.

Morale became a worsening problem as the war ground to a stalemate in 1780. Mutiny and desertions increased, and Washington reacted harshly. Deserters were ordered “shot on sight.” A 40-foot-high gallows was built in camp as a reminder to wavering patriots. When 300 New Jersey troops mutinied, Washington had them draw lots to decide which three would be executed. Twelve others were chosen to form a firing squad. Two died before Washington reprieved the third.

The years of frustration began to wear on Washington. “One year rolls over another, and without some change, we are hastening to our ruin,” he wrote in June 1780. Change came. Five thousand French troops under Rochambeau at Newport, Rhode Island, were reinforced by a French fleet that bottled up the British in Chesapeake Bay. Washington, his Continentals, and the white-uniformed French soldiers quick-stepped southward. The years of drilling in camp and maneuvering in the field had provided ample practice. Now the Revolutionary Army strode confidently to box in the British at Yorktown. Washington personally touched the match that fired the first siege cannon. On October 17, 1781, the British surrendered. Red-coated, red-faced troops marched out with arms shouldered, flags furled, and bands playing, “The World Turned Upside Down.” The fighting was over.

But, as peace talks in Paris dragged on for nearly two years, Washington grew suspicious of the British. He wrote to James McHenry on August 15, 1782: “Tis plain their only aim is to gain time, that they may become more formidable at sea, form new alliances if possible - or disunite us. Be their object what it may, we, if wise, should push our preparations [for renewed fighting] with vigor for nothing will hasten peace more than to be in a condition for war.”

The prolonged impasse and Congress’ inability to pay his officers almost wrecked Washington’s army. As mutiny loomed at his Newburgh, New York, headquarters, only Washington’s clever appeal to emotion saved the Revolution. Taking out a letter to read, Washington stumbled and hesitated as he groped in his pocket for glasses that his closest friends had never seen the proud general wear. “Gentlemen, you must pardon me,” he said. “I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.” The only sound in the room was the weeping of his comrades.

When peace finally came in 1783, Washington assembled his officers at Fraunces Tavern in New York City to say good-bye before he returned to Mount Vernon: “With a heart full of love, and gratitude, I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your later days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.”

Washington went on: “I shall feel obliged if each of you will come and take me by the hand.” One by one, the generals filed up quietly and embraced Washington. And when they were done, he left, boarded a barge, and sailed away.

In November 1783, two months after the formal peace treaty was signed, Washington gave up his virtually dictatorial power, resigning his commission to Congress at Annapolis, Maryland, and returning to the neglected fields of Mount Vernon.

Washington lost half of his net worth in the Revolution. He refused to accept any pay for eight years as commander in chief, while footing his own expenses and feeding up to 16 hungry officers at every meal. He also paid in gold for a network of some 500 spies. When he submitted his expense account at war’s end, the Continental Congress quibbled over $8 before reimbursing him $100,000-plus in nearly worthless Continental dollars that had depreciated by 9,000 percent since 1776.

Shortly after the Revolution ended, Washington’s favorite, the Marquis de Lafayette, visited from Paris. Washington invited him to tour Washington’s western acreage. Lafayette, who was more interested in his own nationwide tour of adulation, declined. Good thing: He would have witnessed Washington haranguing threadbare tenants who couldn’t pay for the gristmill he had subsidized or their land rents, leading Washington to bring suit to evict them in the Fayette County, Pennsylvania, court.

Landowners made up 95 percent of the population in the cashless, post-Revolutionary War slump. Like others, Washington tried to sell or rent his acreage. Bartering for virtually everything he needed, he swapped fish caught in the Potomac River for shingles, planks, nails, and rum for the field hands at harvest time.

Washington abandoned tobacco planting and raised wheat that he sold to neighbors to feed their slaves. He earned cash from those sales and from breeding fees on the mules he introduced to America because they ate less than horses. He used the cash to pay imported English weavers to turn the flax he raised into linen clothing for his workers, white and black, and to pay his taxes. He allowed his slaves to keep muskets to hunt for small game.

Nearly four years would pass before he returned to public life. Elected a Virginia delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, he was chosen its president by unanimous vote. Seeking a solution to the lingering economic crisis, Washington reluctantly agreed to preside, but he had to borrow the cash from his neighbor, George Mason, to get to Philadelphia and to stay there for four months.

Washington’s presence unmistakably signaled that he favored a strong federal government. But when the convention ended, he refused to discuss the new Constitution. Always aware of his enormous influence, he insisted on remaining neutral until it was ratified. Washington was the obvious and unanimous choice as the country’s first president in 1789, carrying every state and all 69 electors.

As he prepared to leave his beloved Mount Vernon and drive to his inauguration in New York City, George Washington dashed off letters to close friends and relatives. He had not sought the presidency, preferring after 15 years of warfare to retire and tend his Potomac acres. To Henry Knox, his old comrade-in-arms, he wrote, “My movements to the chair of government will be accompanied with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.” But Washington had more than an abiding sense of civic duty drawing him back into public life: He was broke.

To his favorite nephew, George Augustine Washington, he confided in writing on March 31 what many of his old friends already knew: “Necessity (if [his unanimous election] had not happened) would have forced me into (frugality) as my means are not adequate to the expense at which I have lived since my retirement to what is called private life.” In other words, he needed the job.

Washington proved to be a cautious, pragmatic president, more chief magistrate than chief executive. He delegated little real power to his handpicked cabinet. Just as he had done as a general, he solicited the opinions of his department heads, then made all the important decisions himself. However, he stood behind his cabinet officers. He believed that his role was to invent the presidency, its style and traditions. Simple, formal appearance was his preference and he chose to be called not “your excellency” or “your high-mightiness,” as some proposed, but, rather, just “Mr. President.”

The dignity of the office was paramount, though, and when he went out even for a carriage ride, it was in a six-horse-drawn state carriage. Yet he rejected living in an opulent mansion in downtown Philadelphia, the temporary capital of the United States, choosing instead a more modest stone house in suburban Germantown, Pennsylvania.

His most important decision may have been to limit his own tenure to two terms. Term limits were not specified in the Constitution. He had intended only one term but returned for a second when it became clear that the government could collapse from infighting between his Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, and the political parties forming around them. But he imposed a two-term limit on himself, establishing a tradition that held until 1940 and is now enshrined in the Constitution. Among the other important precedents Washington set was to ignore seniority and to search widely for new, younger appointees to the Supreme Court.

As president, the former general was an off-again, on-again man of peace. He immediately made peace with the Spanish in Florida by signing the Treaty of New York in 1789. In 1791, as commander in chief, he sent forces under General Arthur St. Clair to subdue Native Americans resisting white settlement in the Northwest Territory. When St. Clair was defeated, Washington sent one of his most aggressive Revolutionary War generals, “Mad” Anthony Wayne, who crushed the natives at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. He also called out a large militia force when western Pennsylvania farmers, protesting Hamilton’s imposition of an excise tax, staged the short-lived Whiskey Rebellion. Personally inspecting the troops, he harshly denounced the rebels, yet when the uprising collapsed without bloodshed, he pardoned the two ringleaders who had been condemned to death.

As Washington aged and his health deteriorated, he longed for Mount Vernon. He had a tumor removed from his hip his first year in office and nearly died of pneumonia the second. Surprised by increasing criticism of his policies during his second term, he resented the nay-saying.

While his government officially held to a strictly neutral stance in the European wars of the 1790s, the bulk of American trade was still with the British. Ironically, the man who had led the rebellion against the British now followed Hamilton’s advice and sided more and more with the British against his old ally, the French. Washington was alarmed by the French Revolution as it devolved into terror. For five years, his dear friend Lafayette was held in jail while thousands of French aristocrats were guillotined. Washington repeatedly sent his own money to help Lafayette’s wife and children and to prevent their beheading.

When Washington came to power in 1789, Americans were singing “God save great Washington” to the tune of “God save our gracious King” (today, it’s the tune for “My Country ’tis of Thee”). But by 1793, a Philadelphia newspaper was calling him “a man in his political dotage,” a “supercilious tyrant” who was “debauching the nation.” While most Americans were much more respectful, the criticism intensified with the Jay Treaty, a pact with Britain that was credited with fending off another war.

Washington was called a “political hypocrite” for favoring the policies of the Federalist Hamilton, who saw cities, banks, a stock market, and industry as America’s future, rather than Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian society. At a 1793 cabinet meeting he called the Democratic-Republican journalist Philip Freneau a “rascal” who should be silenced. The clash led to Jefferson’s resignation as Secretary of State.

Washington raged at the Democratic-Republican societies that supported Jefferson and eventually became the basis of a second political party. He took their criticism personally and considered the Democratic-Republicans irresponsible and evil. Washington’s increasing hostility to changing political views prompted Jefferson to write, “I think he feels those things more than any other person.”

An indignant Washington gave up on winning support from the new Democratic-Republicans. “You could as soon scrub the blackamoor white,” he wrote, “as to change the principles of a professed Democrat.”

Nevertheless, Washington remained the most popular man in America and could have won re-election to a third term had he not refused it. But he did not consider himself indispensable. Just after his sixty-fifth birthday, he left Philadelphia and rode south to Mount Vernon for the last time. There, he happily took over managing his farms. He spent long days in the saddle, offering hospitality to hundreds of visitors and writing hundreds of letters now that he felt free to speak his mind.

When the threat of war with Napoleon’s France loomed in 1798, his successor as president, John Quincy Adams, called Washington back into command to raise an army. Washington was miffed that Adams appointed him without first consulting him, yet he agreed to go off to war again “with as much reluctance,” he wrote, as he would go “to the tomb of my ancestors.” Fortunately, no war developed, and Washington was free to continue his routines at Mount Vernon.

Then, on December 13, 1799, as the eighteenth century drew to a close, George Washington caught a cold. He had a chill and strep throat. The doctor was called. He bled him, as was the custom at the time, and then called in two consultants, who bled him again and again. Washington grew weaker. He refused the advice of the younger doctor, who warned against the bleedings and urged a tracheotomy. But Washington deferred to the senior men.

At 10 o’clock the next night, on December 14, 1799, at age 67, he died. He was as much a victim of his belief in authority as he was of eighteenth-century medicine. The combination proved more deadly than all the bullets and all the plots that had been aimed at him during nearly half a century as America’s most admired leader.

In his will, Washington bemoaned his failure to achieve a personal ambition – to found a national university to avert the regional strife that would lead ultimately to the American Civil War. He granted freedom to his slaves upon the death of Martha, his wife of 40 years, and he provided annuities for their lifelong support when she was gone.

At his funeral, George Washington was eulogized as “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” He is entombed on his beloved Mount Vernon estate on the banks of the Potomac not far from the nation’s capital city named after him.

Questions for Thought and Discussion

How was George Washington’s background unlike that of most other colonial Americans? How was it similar?

Why was Washington chosen as the country’s first president? Was his election a wise choice?

Why was Washington’s decision not to run for a third term as president so significant?

Should Washington be remembered as a hero, or simply as an important figure in the founding of the United States? Explain your conclusion.

Suggested Readings

Cunliffe, Marcus. George Washington: Man and Monument. (Boston, Massachusetts: Little Brown & Company, 1960).

Ferling, John E. The First of Men: A Life of George Washington. (Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 1988).

Knollenberg, Bernhard. George Washington: The Virginia Period, 1732-75. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1964).

Longniore, Paul K. The Invention of George Washington. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1988).

Randall, Willard Sterne. George Washington: A Life. (New York, New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1997).

Smith, Richard Norton. Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation. (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1993).

Wall, Charles Cecil. George Washington: Citizen Soldier. (Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1980).

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

After a successful career as an investigative journalist, Willard Sterne Randall pursued advanced studies in history at Princeton University. Biographer of Benjamin and William Franklin, of Benedict Arnold, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Ethan Allen, he has taught American history at John Cabot University in Rome and at the University of Vermont and Champlain College, where he was Distinguished Scholar in History and a Professor. He is a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History and American Heritage.

Nancy Nahra, award-winning poet, has published numerous articles in scholarly journals in history and the humanities both in the United States and England. With Willard Sterne Randall she has co-authored four volumes of history and biography. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Colby College in Maine, she holds an M.A. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from Princeton. She has studied and been a tutor at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. She has taught literature and language courses in French and in English literature, as well as Latin classics in translation at the University of Vermont and later at John Cabot University in Rome, where she holds a permanent appointment as Visiting Professor of Humanities after being Poet in Residence there. Most recently at Champlain College in Vermont, she was Professor of Humanities and also served as Coordinator for Humanities.

COPYRIGHT

Published by New Word City, Inc., 2011

www.NewWordCity.com

© Willard Sterne Randall, Nancy Nahra

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-61230-579-0

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Table of Contents

GEORGE WASHINGTON: FIRST IN WAR AND PEACE

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

COPYRIGHT