A president, not a king
About 10 o’clock I bade adieu to Mount Vernon, to private life, and to domestic felicity, and with a mind oppressed with more anxious and painful sensations than I have words to express, set out for New York … with the best dispositions to render service to my country in obedience to its call , but with less hope of answering its expectations.
—From George Washington’s diary for April 16, 1789; a section describing his first inaugural journey.
George Washington looms large over this nation’s origin myth; an American Moses delivering a chosen people from the tyranny of an Imperial England.
The father of his country, the cardinal personification of the United States; we carry his portrait in our wallets. Our capital city, a state, and at least 33 counties and seven mountains are named for him. Every February his image is trotted out to sell used cars and washing machines.
But Washington is the least human-seeming of American saints. What do we know about him beyond the kit of facts presented us in grammar school?
Maybe that he was physically imposing, between 6 feet 3 inches and 6 feet 5 inches tall and more than 200 pounds, with auburn hair that went gray during the Revolution. (Washington never wore a wig.) Perhaps we believe he had wooden teeth (in fact his various dentures were made of ivory, cow teeth, hippopotamus tusk and human teeth) and that—although he chopped down the cherry tree—he could not bring himself to mislead or prevaricate. It’s said he threw a dollar across the Potomac. He had a troubled relationship with his mother, was on his own early, became a surveyor, and suffered some ignominious defeats in the French and Indian War.
Washington’s paternal mystique causes us to regard him more with awe than affection. He is a figure apart, a stranded Olympian, entangled in legend. Washington exists most naturally as statuary, familiar yet impenetrable. He has none of Jefferson’s intellectual magnetism, none of Hamilton’s romance, none of Lincoln’s preternatural sadness. In his martial gravitas, with his great leonine head (John Adams referred to him as Old Muttonhead), Washington is more marble monument than man.
Even during his lifetime, Washington was difficult to know. He understood prestige could only be undermined by familiarity, so he purposefully held himself apart. His famous aloofness might partially be attributed to health problems: His hearing, eyesight and memory were failing. By the time he assumed the presidency, he was well past his peak. During that presidency some thought he enjoyed the royalist trappings of his office too well; he kept a sumptuous executive residence in New York, and while he had offered to serve without pay, once Congress insisted on paying him he spent every cent.
Gilbert Stuart, who painted the most famous portrait of Washington, thought him an impossible subject whose personality was irreducible to canvas. Washington did not particularly like Stuart but sat for the portraits in the understanding the value his image had for the country. (The Stuart painting unflatteringly portrays the president’s mouth as an ichthyoid slit, the result of stuffing it with cotton in place of his ill-fitting, troublesome dentures.)
A prolific but prosaic writer, reading Washington’s extensive diaries and letters is hardly helpful. He comes across as an ever-pragmatic military man, direct and blunt. He did not like windy preachers or profligate speculators. He worried his servants were drinking his Madeira. He treasured his dignity. He accepted the adoration of the freshly liberated Americans with weary noblesse oblige. It is a bit surprising to discover in him a sense of humor.
In a 1787 employment contract he drew up for his new gardener Philip Bater (or “Bates”), he allowed that Bater should “conduct himself soberly, diligently and honestly, that he will faithfully and industriously perform all and every part of his duty as a gardener, to the best of his knowledge and abilities, and that he will not, at any time, suffer himself to be disguised with liquor except on Christmas with which he may be drunk four days and four nights, Easter [and] at Whitsuntide, to be drunk for two days; a dram in the morning and a drink of grog at dinner or at noon.”
This glimpse of humanity is rare. Washington more often seems stilted or withering.
While he had many of the same interests as Jefferson—he was no less the architect of Mount Vernon than Jefferson of Monticello— he seemed to lack the intellectual confidence of the American da Vinci. America’s beginnings as a world agricultural power can be traced to Washington, perhaps the most successful American farmer of his day. He developed and popularized new strains of wheat and devised machines for threshing grain. He also operated a profitable fishing fleet in the Potomac and harvested lumber in the Great Dismal Swamp.
Washington was more than a general, more than a leader of soldiers, or guerrilla genius. He was a self-constructed Ur-American, a rugged stoic with his well-documented lust for land and social standing. Washington might never have agreed to lead the Continental Army had he ever secured the royal commission he sought again and again during the French and Indian War. But then again, he could have installed himself as emperor and did not. Who knows why? Who knows Washington?
He was a childless husband who reared his wife’s grandchildren, a slave owner who freed some of his chattel at his death, a man of his time but also a transcendent figure—the strong leader of a weak country who somehow was able to imagine a new kind of greatness. Washington walked away from power after his second term, which established a convention that was followed until FDR and subsequently made into law.
Before Washington, to be great was to be triumphant, to be the conqueror. A great man was ruthless, a sponge for power. In an age when the prevailing political ideology held that the right to rule was vested in special men selected by God, Washington walked away from the kingdom laid at his feet.