His Excellency: George Washington (45 page)

A second memorable eulogy, this one delivered by Gouverneur Morris, made an intriguing connection between Washington’s grasp of the dynamics of power and his grip on himself. Morris observed that Washington’s legendary calmness and statue-like stolidity masked truly volcanic energies and emotions. Anyone who knew him well could testify, Morris claimed, that he was a man of “tumultuous passions” and could “bear witness that his wrath was terrible.” Intimate acquaintances felt the explosive energy lurking beneath the surface “and have seen boiling in his bosom, passions almost too mighty for man.” In Morris’s formulations, the potency of Washington’s vaunted capacity for self control derived from the virulence of the internal demons he had been required to master.
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The image of a volcanic Washington seething with barely contained emotions and ambitions flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which emphasizes the serenity of the man who would not be king. But no less a source than Gilbert Stuart, who brought a trained artist’s eye to the subject, confirmed the Morris assessment. “Had he been born in the forests,” Stuart observed while painting Washington, “he would have been the fiercest man among the savage tribes.”
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If we adopt the Morris and Stuart perspective, all kinds of lights go on up and down the line of Washington’s life: the frequent harangues against his overseers at Mount Vernon; the tirade against the retreating Charles Lee at Monmouth Court House; the outburst against Philip Freneau’s journalistic diatribes during a cabinet meeting; the secluded seething against James Monroe’s attacks on the Jay Treaty during his final retirement. These discernible leaks suggest that a massive reservoir of emotional intensity remained pent up inside the mature Washington, and that his interior wrestling match to subdue them never resulted in a conclusive triumph, as Morris suggested, because the ambitions never died. This is a man, after all, who kept coming back to center stage and who, despite his thoroughly sincere protestations in the Ciceronian vein, remained obsessed with imposing his will even after his death.

The clearest evidence that we are talking about a truly monumental ego with a massive personal agenda comes from the early years before and during the French and Indian War. At this youthful stage the internal editing process had yet to develop its later strength, and the record more fully reveals the self-made man feverishly striving to become a self-made hero, which is the chief reason Washington kept returning to his early correspondence to edit out the evidence. Though George III and his ministers did not decide to place their empire in North America at risk in order to provide a Virginia squire with a larger stage on which to display his talents, that is precisely what happened. And it happened, at least in part, because Washington was alert to the opportunity the political crisis presented, much as he had been alert to the availability of Virginia’s wealthiest widow. Ambitions this gargantuan were only glorious if harnessed to a cause larger than oneself, which they most assuredly were after 1775. But even in the glorious rendition of “His Excellency” serving “The Cause,” a leader driven by such internal propulsion needed to be aware of arrogant appearances. Two of Washington’s abiding characteristics—his aloofness and his capacity for remaining silent—were in all likelihood protective tactics developed to prevent detection of the combustible materials simmering inside.
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Of course, Morris’s main point was that the passions that stirred Washington’s soul required the creation of control mechanisms that subsequently served the nation so well when Washington voluntarily stepped away from power, first in 1783, and then again in 1796. Morris was saying that his psychological struggle for self-control prepared Washington to perform the crowning political achievement of his career. What we might call Washington’s internal muscularity is, of course, impossible to see, though Morris implied that it was just as impressive as his marvelous physique. We can only describe its visible manifestations. And on that score there were five self-denying decisions that stand out: the rejection of his love for Sally Fairfax; the adoption of a Fabian strategy against the British army in 1777, despite his own aggressive instincts; the symbolic surrender of his sword at Annapolis; the refusal to serve a third term as president; and the dismemberment of his estate in his will. While Morris’s formulation focuses attention on what Washington was prepared to give up in each instance, we should also notice that all the surrenders paved the way to larger acquisitions: a great fortune; victory in the war; and secular immortality. All the disciplined denials were also occasions to catch the next wave forward.

We might nudge Morris’s line of thought in a slightly different direction, focusing not on the dramatic displays of self-control themselves but on the ongoing internal struggle as a lifelong educational process in which Washington hammered out, on the anvil of his own ambitions, his elemental convictions about political power. His insistence, for example, on a powerful Continental army and a wholly sovereign federal government become projections onto the national screen of the need for the same kind of controlling authority he had orchestrated within his own personality; a recognition that he could no more trust the people to behave virtuously than he could trust his own instincts to behave altruistically. One of the reasons, to take another example, he eventually found Jefferson dishonorable was that, unlike Hamilton, Jefferson could never acknowledge the depth of his own political ambitions.

A final example, his trademark decision to surrender power as commander in chief and then president, was not, as Morris insisted, a sign that he had conquered his ambitions, but rather that he fully realized that all ambitions were inherently insatiable and unconquerable. He knew himself well enough to resist the illusion that he transcended his human nature. Unlike Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell before him, and Napoleon, Lenin, and Mao after him, he understood that the greater glory resided in posterity’s judgment. If you aspire to live forever in the memory of future generations, you must demonstrate the ultimate self-confidence to leave the final judgment to them. And he did.

At the very least, the eulogies of Lee and Morris, composed when the great man’s body and the memories of him remained warm, allow us to conjure up the outlines of a more potent, less iconic, portrait. Even at that moment of mourning, however, more legendary renderings were being fabricated by Parson Weems and his legion of imitators in the cherry-tree mode. And over the ensuing years the mythology that a new and more democratic nation required of its symbolic hero arose around him to form a smothering blanket of lullabies more impenetrable than Washington’s contrived silences and more wooden than his alleged teeth. But that, as they say, is another story.

NOTES

The notes that follow represent my attempt to adopt a policy toward citation that is both scholarly and sensible. All direct quotations are cited, most of which come from primary sources. All secondary sources that directly influenced my thinking or shaped my interpretation have also been identified. And my assessments of the secondary literature are littered throughout the notes, giving them the occasional flavor of a bibliographic essay. On the other hand, I have not attempted to provide an exhaustive account of all the scholarly books and articles related to Washington that I consulted, believing that such an accounting would burden the book with scaffolding that most readers would find excessive. If I have thereby slighted the contributions of my many predecessors, let me offer a blanket apology here. Let me also acknowledge that, when it comes to Washington, no one can claim to have read everything, and anyone who tried to do so would make another contribution to that venerable library of unwritten books. I have done all the research myself—with no research assistants—and made the modern edition of the
Washington Papers
the central focus of my inquiry and the home base from which all other explorations were launched. My dedication of this book to the founding editor of that massive project is both a personal and professional expression of my indebtedness.

ABBREVIATIONS

CHAPTER ONE

 1. 
Diaries
1:127–28.

 2. Ibid., 130–61, for the entire journal.

 3. Ibid., 153–57.

 4. Ibid., 146–47.

 5. Ibid., 144–51.

 6. 
PWC
1:56–62;
Diaries
1:183–84. The spelling of the Half-King’s Indian name varies. I have followed the version adopted by the editors of
PWC.
For background on the Indian cultures of the Ohio Country, see the following: Fred Anderson,
Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America
(New York, 2000), 11–32; Erick Hindesaker,
Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley
(New York, 1997); Daniel K. Richter,
The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization
(Chapel Hill, 1992).

 7. 
Diaries
1:136–40.

 8. John Marshall,
The Life of George Washington,
5 vols. (Philadelphia, 1805–07), 2:1; Marcus Cunliffe, ed.,
The Life of George Washington by Mason L. Weems
(Cambridge, MA, 1962). Among the hundreds of books on the Washington legend, three stand out: Marcus Cunliffe,
George Washington: Man and Monument
(Boston, 1958); Richard Brookhiser,
Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington
(New York, 1996); Barry Schwartz,
George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol
(New York, 1987). The most reliable study of Washington’s early years is Bernard Knollenberg,
George Washington: The Virginia Period
(Durham, 1964).