His Excellency_George Washington Read online

  HIS EXCELLENCY

  George Washington

  JOSEPH J. ELLIS

  Alfred A. Knopf New York 2004

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PREFACE:

  THE MAN IN THE MOON

  CHAPTER ONE: Interior Regions

  CHAPTER TWO: The Strenuous Squire

  CHAPTER THREE: First in War

  CHAPTER FOUR: Destiny’s Child

  PHOTO INSERT

  CHAPTER FIVE: Introspective Interlude

  CHAPTER SIX: First in Peace

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Testament

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY JOSEPH J. ELLIS

  PHOTOGRAPHIC PERMISSIONS

  COPYRIGHT

  For W. W. Abbot

  PREFACE

  THE MAN IN THE MOON

  My own relationship with George Washington began early. I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, and attended St. Mary’s grade school, about eight miles down Mount Vernon Boulevard from the estate where the great man once walked the earth. Because my school was so proximate to Mount Vernon, my teachers—all nuns—forced us to make frequent pilgrimages to the historic site where the spirit of America’s greatest secular saint resided. Back then the tour was less historically informed than it is now. I don’t recall slavery being mentioned at all. I do recall being told that the story of Washington’s wooden teeth was a myth—my first encounter with the notion that you could not always trust what you read in history books. I remember this clearly because the high point of the tour was Washington’s dentures, which were encased in glass and looked to me like a really gross instrument of torture made of metal and bone. The only other thing I remember is the majestic view of the Potomac from the piazza on the east side of the mansion.*

  *Apparently I am one of several visitors to Mount Vernon in the 1950s who remembers Washington’s dentures on display, despite the fact that, according to official records, they were never exhibited for the general public until the 1980s. The staff at Mount Vernon cannot explain the discrepancy, nor can I.

  In the early 1950s, when I was about ten years old, I was lying on top of a one-story, tar-paper garage with my buddies to watch the annual parade down Washington Street to celebrate the great man’s birthday. We loved the occasion because it got us out of school and allowed us to view the bands from the aptly named George Washington and Washington and Lee High Schools. My mother also gave me a dollar bill—big money then—to spend in those local stores promoting “dollar-day sales” in honor of Washington, whose picture adorned each bill. All this was happening in the shadow of the city across the river that bore his name, where my father went to work each day, and where the dominating feature of the landscape was a massive monument to one man’s memory.

  My point is that Washington was ubiquitous for me as I was growing up, an inescapable presence that hovered all around. But apart from the dentures and the piazza at Mount Vernon, Washington remained a mysterious abstraction. He was like one of those Jeffersonian truths, self-evident and simply there. And the beauty of all self-evident truths was that no one needed to talk about them. They were so familiar that no one felt obliged to explain why they merited an annual parade.

  Washington was more omnipresent for me than Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, but also more distant. If you went to the Tidal Basin or the Mall you could read the magic words on the Jefferson or Lincoln Memorial (“We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”; “With malice toward none, with charity toward all . . .”). But there were no words on the Washington Monument, just graffiti scrawled on the walls along the staircase to the top. Jefferson, it seemed, was like Jesus, who had come to earth and spoken directly to us. Washington was like God Himself, levitating above it all. Or, as I eventually came to describe him, Jefferson was like one of those dirigibles at the Super Bowl, flashing inspirational messages to both sides. Washington was aloof and silent, like the man in the moon.

  You might wish to regard the pages that follow, then, as my attempt at a lunar landing. The technology to reach the moon was not available when I was lying atop that garage on Washington Street. Nor was there a fully annotated modern edition of Washington’s correspondence, providing access to every letter he sent and received, along with extensive editorial notes on all the major players, moments, and controversies. Now there is. To be sure, a perfectly serviceable edition has been available since the 1930s, and anyone wishing to pursue Washington’s life and times has never been wanting for historical evidence. But the modern edition of the Washington Papers is the mother lode, all the scattered pieces of paper in the family attic gathered together, catalogued, and classified. This massive project is complete except for the final three years of the War for Independence and the final term of the presidency, though the crowded character of those years will keep the editors fully occupied for longer than one might guess. Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that we now have at our disposal every surviving remnant of evidence that biographers and historians can ever expect to see. The great American patriarch sits squarely in front of us: vulnerable, exposed, even talkative at last.

  Are we ready to listen? This is not just a rhetorical question. For reasons best explained by Shakespeare and Freud, all children have considerable difficulty approaching their fathers with an open mind. Washington poses what we might call the Patriarchal Problem in its most virulent form: on Mount Rushmore, the Mall, the dollar bill and the quarter, but always an icon—distant, cold, intimidating. As Richard Brookhiser has so nicely put it, he is in our wallets but not in our hearts. And speaking of our hearts, a volatile psychological chemistry bubbles away inside all children in simmering pools of dependency and rebellion, love and fear, intimacy and distance. As every parent can testify, initially our children believe we can do no wrong; later on they believe we can do no right—indeed, in Oedipal terms they actually want to kill us. For most of American history our response to Washington in particular and the Founding Fathers in general has been trapped within the emotional pattern dictated by these primal urges, oscillating in a swoonish swing between idolization and evisceration. In Washington’s case the arc moves from Parson Weems’s fabrications about a saintly lad who could not tell a lie to dismissive verdicts about the deadest, whitest male in American history.

  This hero/villain image is, in fact, the same portrait, which has a front and back side that we rotate regularly. It is really a cartoon, which tells us less about Washington than about ourselves. The currently hegemonic narrative within the groves of academe cuts in the Oedipal direction, making Washington complicitous in creating a nation that was imperialistic, racist, elitist, and patriarchal. While there are some important exceptions to the rule, the reigning orthodoxy in the academy regards Washington as either a taboo or an inappropriate subject, and any aspiring doctoral candidate who declares an interest in, say, Washington’s career as commander in chief, or president, has inadvertently confessed intellectual bankruptcy. (A study of the ordinary soldiers in the Continental army or the slaves at Mount Vernon would be more fashionable.) When not studiously ignored, Washington is noticed primarily as an inviting target for all the glaring failures of the revolutionary generation to meet our own superior standards of political and racial justice. This approach is thoroughly ahistorical and presentistic; but so, for that matter, is its opposite, the heroic-icon tradition. We are back again to the rotating cartoon character. Or perhaps we ought to think of that alluring dockside light in The Great Gatsby, flickering on and off like some synchronized signal of our fondest illusions.

  How can we avoid this hyperboli
c syndrome? To put it differently, once we land on the moon in the vehicle provided by the modern edition of the Washington Papers, how can we accurately map the terrain without imposing the impossible expectations we carried with us on the trip? Well, if we find ourselves being merely celebratory, or its judgmental twin, dismissive, we should rub our eyes and look again. On the one hand, we should begin our quest looking for a man rather than a statue, and any statues we do encounter should be quickly knocked off their pedestals. On the other hand, we should presume that we are engaged in a search rather than a hunt, thereby avoiding the temptation to cast Washington into the ideological abyss where his modern-day detractors—the Oedipal contingent—would like to consign him and his legacy. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was preaching rebellion to the next generation, once observed that the founders were so intimidating because their propitious placement in American history had allowed them to see God face-to-face, while all who came after them could only see Him secondhand. Our goal should be to see Washington face-to-face—or, if you will, as grown-ups rather than children.

  I began my own exploration with two convictions and one question. The first conviction was that I wanted to write a modest-sized book about a massive historical subject. Two of my most distinguished predecessors—Douglas Southall Freeman and James Thomas Flexner—had produced prodigious, multivolume biographies. The monumental size of these projects, so it seemed to me, implicitly endorsed the larger-than-life approach toward Washington and recalled the wicked comment by Lytton Strachey about Victorian biography: namely, that the interminable tomes had become an endless row of verbal coffins. This is not quite fair to either Freeman or Flexner, especially the latter, who never felt obliged to round off the sharp edges of Washington’s personality or to make his biography into an encyclopedia. Let me salute both of them as venerable pioneers on the Washington Trail. In my judgment, and in part because of what they have already achieved, we do not need another epic painting, but rather a fresh portrait focused tightly on Washington’s character. In that sense, the predecessor who taught me the most was Marcus Cunliffe, whose Washington: Man and Monument, though nearly fifty years old, has aged remarkably well. Cunliffe deserves a separate and special salute.

  My second conviction concerned the historical scholarship on the revolutionary era that has altered the landscape around Washington since Cunliffe wrote. We now have a keener sense of the intellectual and even emotional ingredients that came together to create a revolutionary ideology in colonial America, a more robust understanding of the social and economic forces that drove Virginia’s planter class toward rebellion, a more intriguingly complicated appreciation of the strategic options facing both sides in the War of Independence, a more paradoxical recognition of the incompatible version of “the spirit of ’76” that exploded into partisan political warfare in the 1790s. Washington’s life was lived, and his career congealed, within these tangled historical threads and themes, which taken together comprise a new context for assessing his evolution and achievement. Most significantly, the burgeoning scholarship on slavery and the fate of Native Americans have moved topics that were formerly in the background into the foreground. These themes can no longer be treated as peripheral matters. Coming to terms with Washington means making them, especially slavery, central concerns.

  I also began my odyssey with a question that had formed in my mind on the basis of earlier research in the papers of the revolutionary generation. It seemed to me that Benjamin Franklin was wiser than Washington; Alexander Hamilton was more brilliant; John Adams was better read; Thomas Jefferson was more intellectually sophisticated; James Madison was more politically astute. Yet each and all of these prominent figures acknowledged that Washington was their unquestioned superior. Within the gallery of greats so often mythologized and capitalized as Founding Fathers, Washington was recognized as primus inter pares, the Foundingest Father of them all. Why was that? In the pages that follow I have looked for an answer, which lies buried within the folds of the most ambitious, determined, and potent personality of an age not lacking for worthy rivals. How he became that way, and what he then did with it, is the story I try to tell.

  Joseph J. Ellis

  Plymouth, Vermont

  CHAPTER ONE

  Interior Regions

  HISTORY FIRST noticed George Washington in 1753, as a daring and resourceful twenty-one-year-old messenger sent on a dangerous mission into the American wilderness. He carried a letter from the governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, addressed to the commander of French troops in that vast region west of the Blue Ridge Mountains and south of the Great Lakes that Virginians called the Ohio Country. He was ordered to lead a small party over the Blue Ridge, then across the Allegheny Mountains, there to rendezvous with an influential Indian chief called the Half-King. He was then to proceed to the French outpost at Presque Isle (present-day Erie, Pennsylvania), where he would deliver his message “in the Name of His Britanic Majesty.” The key passage in the letter he was carrying, so it turned out, represented the opening verbal shot in what American colonists would call the French and Indian War: “The Lands upon the river Ohio, in the Western Parts of the Colony of Virginia, are so notoriously known to be the Property of the Crown of Great Britain, that it is a Matter of equal Concern & Surprize to me, to hear that a Body of French Forces are erecting Fortresses, & making Settlements upon that River within his Majesty’s Dominions.”1

  The world first became aware of young Washington at this moment, and we get our first extended look at him, because, at Dinwiddie’s urging, he published an account of his adventures, The Journal of Major George Washington, which appeared in several colonial newspapers and was then reprinted by magazines in England and Scotland. Though he was only an emissary—the kind of valiant and agile youth sent forward against difficult odds to perform a hazardous mission—Washington’s Journal provided readers with a firsthand report on the mountain ranges, wild rivers, and exotic indigenous peoples within the interior regions that appeared on most European maps as dark and vacant spaces. His report foreshadowed the more magisterial account of the American West provided by Lewis and Clark more than fifty years later. It also, if inadvertently, exposed the somewhat ludicrous character of any claim by “His Britanic Majesty,” or any European power, for that matter, to control such an expansive frontier that simply swallowed up and spit out European presumptions of civilization.2

  Although Washington is both the narrator and the central character in the story he tells, he says little about himself and nothing about what he thinks. “I have been particularly cautious,” he notes in the preface, “not to augment.” The focus, instead, is on the knee-deep snow in the passes through the Alleghenies, and the icy and often impassably swollen rivers, where he and his companions are forced to wade alongside their canoes while their coats freeze stiff as boards. Their horses collapse from exhaustion and have to be abandoned. He and fellow adventurer Christopher Gist come upon a lone warrior outside an Indian village ominously named Murdering Town. The Indian appears to befriend them, then suddenly wheels around at nearly point-blank range and fires his musket, but inexplicably misses. “Are you shot?” Washington asks Gist, who responds that he is not. Gist rushes the Indian and wants to kill him, but Washington will not permit it, preferring to let him escape. They come upon an isolated farmhouse on the banks of the Monongahela where two adults and five children have been killed and scalped. The decaying corpses are being eaten by hogs.3

  In stark contrast to the brutal conditions and casual savagery of the frontier environment, the French officers whom Washington encounters at Fort Le Boeuf and Presque Isle resemble pieces of polite Parisian furniture plopped down in an alien landscape. “They received us with a great deal of complaisance,” Washington observes, the French offering flattering pleasantries about the difficult trek Washington’s party had endured over the mountains. But they also explained that the claims of the English king to the Ohio Country were demonstrably inferior to those of the Fr
ench king, which were based on Lasalle’s exploration of the American interior nearly a century earlier. To solidify their claim of sovereignty, a French expedition had recently sailed down the Ohio River, burying a series of lead plates inscribed with their sovereign’s seal that obviously clinched the question forever.4

  The French listened politely to Washington’s rebuttal, which derived its authority from the original charter of the Virginia Company in 1606. It had set the western boundary of that colony either at the Mississippi River or, even more expansively, at the Pacific Ocean. In either case, it included the Ohio Country and predated Lasalle’s claim by sixty years. However persuasive this rather sweeping argument might sound in Williamsburg or London, it made little impression on the French officers. “They told me,” Washington wrote in his Journal, “it was their absolute Design to take Possession of the Ohio, & by G they wou’d do it.” The French commander at Fort Le Boeuf, Jacques Le Gardner, sieur de Saint Pierre, concluded the negotiations by drafting a cordial letter for Washington to carry back to Governor Dinwiddie that sustained the diplomatic affectations: “I have made it a particular duty to receive Mr. Washington with the distinction owing to your dignity, his position, and his own great merit. I trust that he will do me justice in that regard to you, and that he will make known to you the profound respect with which I am, Sir, your most humble and most obedient servant.”5

  But the person whom Washington quotes more than any other in his Journal represented yet a third imperial power with its own exclusive claim of sovereignty over the Ohio Country. That was the Half-King, the Seneca chief whose Indian name was Tanacharison. In addition to being a local tribal leader, the Half-King had received his quasi-regal English name because he was the diplomatic representative of the Iroquois Confederation, also called the Six Nations, with its headquarters in Onondaga, New York. When they had first met at the Indian village called Logstown, Tanacharison had declared that Washington’s Indian name was Conotocarius, which meant “town taker” or “devourer of villages,” because this was the name originally given to Washington’s great-grandfather, John Washington, nearly a century earlier. The persistence of that memory in Indian oral history was a dramatic reminder of the long-standing domination of the Iroquois Confederation over the region. They had planted no lead plates, knew nothing of some English king’s presumptive claims to own a continent. But they had been ruling over this land for about three hundred years.6