Jill Lepore

This article appeared in the New Yorker in 2010 as a review of Ron Chernow’s biography of George Washington, Washington: A Life.

Jared Sparks, thirty-seven, and known for his editorial eye, reached Mount Vernon by carriage just before sunset on March 14, 1827. He made no note of the grounds, the house, the stables, the slope of the hill. He sought only George Washington’s papers. It had taken him years to get permission to see them, finally securing it from Washington’s nephew and literary executor, the Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington, by pledging discretion, and, no less important, agreeing to split the profits from publishing an edition of Washington’s writings. A former chaplain of Congress, Sparks was the editor and owner of the United States’ first literary magazine, the North American Review, which, under his direction, was distinguished for its judiciousness. A man better suited to the work of editing Washington’s papers and writing his biography would have been hard to find, which makes it all the stranger that what Sparks did to those papers was, in his lifetime, called one of the most flagrant injuries ever inflicted by an editor upon a writer or by a biographer upon his subject—some swipe, even making allowances for hyperbole.

No one could have seen that coming when Sparks made his way from the carriage and into the house where he cloistered himself for more than a month. Diaries, notebooks, scraps, and some forty thousand letters: a biographer’s harem. He wrote to a friend that he was in Paradise. No one bothered him. “I have been here entirely alone,” he wrote in his journal, and you can almost hear his heart beating. In a garret, he pried open a chest: “Discovered some new and valuable papers to-day, particularly a small manuscript book containing an original journal of Washington, written in the year 1748, March and April, when he was barely sixteen years old.” Everything was a find. “It is quite certain that no writer of Washington’s biography has seen this book.” Maybe, at long last, Washington’s secrets would be revealed.

No biographer of George Washington has failed to remark on his inscrutability. In Washington: A Life…Ron Chernow calls Washington “the most famously elusive figure in American history.” Sparks eventually published eleven volumes of Washington’s writings, together with a one-volume biography. In 1893, Worthington C. Ford published the last installment of a fourteen-volume set. An edition of thirty-nine volumes was completed in 1940. Of the University of Virginia Press’s magnificent “Papers of George Washington,” begun in 1968, sixty-two volumes have been published so far. But, for all those papers, Washington rarely revealed himself on the page. Even his few surviving letters to his wife are formal and strained. Those diaries? Here is Washington’s entire diary entry for October 24, 1774, a day that he was in Philadelphia, as a delegate to the Continental Congress, debating, among other things, a petition to be sent to the King: “Dined with Mr. Mease & Spent the Evening at the New Tavern.” Here is how John Adams’s diary entry for that same day begins:

Aside from chucking Washington in favor of writing about Adams, what’s a biographer to do?

5

Washington’s contemporaries saw in him what they wanted to see. So have his biographers, of whom there have been many, including a delegate to the Continental Congress (David Ramsay), a U.S. senator (Henry Cabot Lodge), a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (John Marshall), and an American President (Woodrow Wilson). There have always been Washington killjoys. Abigail Adams was troubled by the beatification of Washington: “To no one Man in America belongs the Epithet of Saviour,” she believed. Mark Twain once said that while Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Twain could, and didn’t, which made Twain the better man. The first Washington-was-a-fraud biography was published in 1926. Its author, William E. Woodward, had, in his 1923 novel, Bunk, coined the word “debunk.” Woodward argued, mostly, that the father of our country was dim-witted: “Washington possessed the superb self-confidence that comes only to those men whose inner life is faint.” The Times called Woodward’s biography tittle-tattle.

Every generation must have its Washington; ours is fated to choose among dozens. Ronald Reagan, in his first Inaugural Address, looked at the obelisk across the Mall and spoke about “the monument to a monumental man.” Since 1990, major American publishing houses have brought out no fewer than eighteen Washington biographies, a couple of them very fine, to say nothing of the slew of boutique-y books about the man’s military career, his moral fortitude, his friendship with Lafayette, his faith in God, his betrayal by Benedict Arnold, his “secret navy,” his inspiring words, his leadership skills, his business tips, his kindness to General William Howe’s dog, and his journey home to Mount Vernon for Christmas in 1783. George, a magazine of celebrity and politics featuring on its cover stars dressed up as Washington, was launched in 1995. By now, just about every Presidential historian and potboiler-maker in the business has churned out a biography of Washington. And still they keep coming. At nine hundred and twenty-eight pages, Chernow’s is the longest single-volume biography of Washington ever published.

George Washington was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, in 1732. His father died when he was eleven. When he was sixteen, he went on a surveying trip in the Shenandoah Valley—during which he kept the diary that Sparks found—and, three years later, travelled to the West Indies. At twenty, he assumed his first military command; his reckless and often failed but indisputably bold campaigns, in the seventeen-fifties, gained him a reputation for invincibility. He was tall and imposing, at once powerful and graceful, and he rode a horse exceptionally well. “Well turned” is what people said in the eighteenth century about a man like that, which makes you picture God laboring at a lathe. More recent descriptions range from the fabulous to the immoderate. Woodrow Wilson, in his 1896 biography, made it sound as if Washington had grown up in Sherwood Forest: “All the land knew him and loved him for gallantry and brave capacity; he carried himself like a prince.” Chernow dwells on Washington’s manliness, describing him, every few pages or so, as “a superb physical specimen, with a magnificent physique,” “an exceptionally muscular and vigorous young man,” with an “imposing face and virile form,” “powerfully rough-hewn and endowed with matchless strength,” not excepting his “wide, flaring hips with muscular thighs.” (Chernow finds even Washington’s prose “muscular.”) The mar to his beauty was his terrible teeth, which were replaced by unsuccessful transplant surgery and by dentures made from ivory and from teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves.

Washington was elected to the Virginia Assembly in 1758 and was married the next year. Until the passage of the Intolerable Acts, he occupied himself managing his vast estate and wasn’t much animated by the colonies’ growing struggle with Parliamentary authority. But then he threw himself into it, serving as a delegate to the First Continental Congress, in 1774. The next year, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and rode to Cambridge to take command. During the war, and, even more, after it, Washington came to embody the new nation’s vision of itself: virtuous, undaunted, and incorruptible. Nothing earned him deserved admiration more than his surrendering of his command at the end of the war. That resignation—relinquishing power when he could so easily have seized it—saved the republic. He returned to public life in 1787, to preside over the Constitutional Convention, where he played a largely ceremonial but nonetheless crucial role. Washington knew the difference between ceremony and pomposity, and kept to one side of it.

He was elected President by a unanimous vote of the electoral college. In his Inaugural Address (likely drafted by James Madison), he said that “the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government” were fated by “the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained” and staked, finally, deeply, “on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” Charged with leading a wholly new form of government, wherein his every decision set a precedent, he began holding, in 1791, what came to be called cabinet meetings.

10

His Presidency was marked by much debate about how he ought to be treated, and even how he should be addressed. (Adams had wanted to call him His Most Benign Highness, and Washington was fond of His High Mightiness.) Owen Wister began his 1907 biography of Washington with a story about what happened on Washington’s sixtieth birthday: “On the 22d of February, 1792, Congress was sitting in Philadelphia, and to many came the impulse to congratulate the President… . Therefore a motion was made to adjourn for half an hour, that this civility might be paid. The motion was bitterly opposed, as smacking of idolatry and as leaning toward monarchy.” (A century later, Washington’s birthday became a national holiday, now commemorated as a great time to buy a new car.)

Washington was a very good President, and an unhappy one. Distraught by growing factionalism within and outside his Administration, especially by the squabbling of Hamilton and Jefferson and the rise of a Jeffersonian opposition, he served another term only reluctantly. His second Inaugural Address was just a hundred and thirty-five words long; he said, more or less, Please, I’m doing my best. In 1796, in his enduringly eloquent Farewell Address (written by Madison and Hamilton), he cautioned the American people about party rancor: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.” And then he went back to Mount Vernon. He freed his slaves in his will, possibly hoping that this, too, would set a precedent. It did not.

Washington isn’t like Adams, effusively cantankerous; he’s not like Jefferson, a cabinet of contradictions. He’s not funny like Franklin or capacious like Madison. If critics said that his inner life glowed but faintly, Chernow, who calls him “the most interior of the founders,” thinks his inner life was red hot, burning with pent-up passion. Washington wasn’t a tortured man, though, nor was he enigmatic. He was a staged man, shrewd, purposeful, and effective. Not surprisingly for an eighteenth-century military man, he held himself at a considerable remove from his men. But he also held himself at this remove from just about everyone else.

He played a role, surpassingly well. He dressed for the part (he was obsessed with his clothes), and studied for it (as a boy, he copied out a set of sixteenth-century Italian “Rules of Civility,” which read like stage directions: “Bedew no mans face with your Spittle by approaching too near to him when you Speak”). Washington’s theatrical reserve can look, now, like mysteriousness. But what he was going for was an imperturbability that had to do with eighteenth-century notions of honor, gentility, and manliness; its closest surviving kin, today, is what’s called military bearing. Chernow’s aim is to make of Washington something other than a “lifeless waxwork,” an “impossibly stiff and wooden figure, composed of too much marble to be quite human.” That has been the aim of every Washington biographer, and none of them have achieved it. Sparks, so far from doing it, only made things worse. “Setting Washington on stilts” is what Sparks was charged with, although, really, Washington was already up there, leaning on legs of wood.

(2010)