What we still don’t get about Washington

Years into writing a book on George Washington, I noticed something curious about my collection of the popular biographies already written about our first president: All were written by white men.

I’d gotten used to a certain male skew, but I hadn’t quite realized how persistent it was until I ran my observation by experts at Mount Vernon, Washington’s historic home, and the University of Virginia’s George Washington papers: No woman had written a biography of George Washington for adults in more than 40 years.

For nearly two and a half centuries, most of the stories Americans have told themselves about their country’s past have been by and for white men — and it shows, particularly when it comes to presidential history. When female historians have managed to elbow their way in, however, they often remind us that we don’t always know what we think we know.

My own preoccupation with Washington began with an attempt to read between the lines of his major biographies. All of his biographers are obsessed with his body; Ron Chernow’s “Washington: A Life,” to take just one example, sometimes reads like a romance novel: Washington, Mr. Chernow writes, was “powerfully rough-hewn and endowed with matchless strength. When he clenched his jaw, his cheek and jaw muscles seemed to ripple right through his skin.”

After a while, I began to wonder: Why did Washington’s biographers spend so much time on something that did so little to break the first president out of his marble mold — their own stated intention? And if they focused so much on this, had their Great Man worship influenced their interpretation of other aspects of the life of our founding-est founding father? When I dug into primary sources, I found myself immediately vexed.

The way his biographers tell it, you’d think that George Washington, who held hundreds of people enslaved at the time of his death, had a change of heart during the Revolution, which led him to free his slaves in his will — a generous read that allows for redemptive conclusion.

It’s true that the Marquis de Lafayette, a French aristocrat Washington met during the Revolution, spent the rest of his life proposing various ways Washington could free his slaves during his lifetime, setting a powerful example for the infant nation. Instead, Washington freed one man, Billy Lee, upon his death. The 123 other people had to wait until Martha Washington either died or chose to free them — which they were aware of, because Washington’s will was published.

Washington’s story — all of it, in its entirety — is full of victory and triumph, inhumanity and catastrophe, often on a grand scale. During the Civil War, Confederate and Union soldiers carved their initials into the walls of the vault he was buried in. Both sides, the South and the North, the slave-owning and the free, viewed him as their inspiration. And both were right. They were just starting to learn his story, and in some ways, more than 100 years later, so are we.

Since 2014, the woods near Washington’s vault have been undergoing excavation. In these woods sits a cemetery for the people he enslaved, full of unmarked graves. The area is never mentioned in the thousands of documents Washington left behind, which he protected and readied to be studied. There’s always new information to discover and share, whether it’s found in accepted texts or archives, or well outside of them. That’s how a legacy, like a democracy, avoids corruption and decay.

Alexis Coe is the author of“You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington.” This first appeared in the New York Times.