Book review: Washington: A Life

Published on Monday 29 November 2010 12:56

Washington: A Life Ron Chernow Allen Lane, 928pp, £35

George Washington's corpse was scarcely a month in its grave when an enterprising minister from Maryland named Mason Locke Weems made a pitch to a Philadelphia publisher.

"I've got something to whisper in your lug," Weems wrote in January 1800. "Washington, you know is gone! Millions are gaping to read something about him... My plan! I give his history, sufficiently minute" and "go on to show that his unparalleled rise & elevation were due to his Great Virtues."

Weems was on to something. His sentimental and often fictional biography became a best seller, the first in a seemingly endless stream of studies of the man who led the Continental Army to victory in the American War for Independence and who, as the first president of the United States, did more than anyone else to establish the legitimacy of a national government merely outlined in the Constitution of 1787. Today, books about Washington continue to appear at such an astonishing rate that the publication of Ron Chernow's prompts the question: why another one?

An obvious answer is that Chernow is no ordinary writer. Like his biographies of John D Rockefeller and Alexander Hamilton, his Washington, while long, is vivid and well paced. If Chernow's sense of context is sometimes superficial, his understanding of psychology is acute and his portraits of individ-uals memorable. Most readers will finish this book feeling as if they have spent time with human beings. Given Chernow's considerable literary talent and the continued hunger for tales of Washington, what publisher could resist adding Washington: A Life to its list?

A more complicated answer lies in considering why we still long for news of Washington. To be sure, his life reflected, if it didn't epitomise, the once unimaginable transformation of several British colonies into an imperial Republic whose dominion extended to the Mississippi River. But Chernow and, I suspect, most of his readers are less interested in how the US became the US than in how George Washington became George Washington. Accepting the inevitability of America, they remain perplexed by the pre-eminence of this man. Chernow is far subtler and more sophisticated than Weems. Yet there is a familiar ring to his desire to "elucidate the secrets" of Washington's "uncanny ability to lead a nation" by detailing his acquisition of such "exemplary virtues" as "unerring judgment, sterling character, rectitude, steadfast patriotism, unflagging sense of duty and civic-mindedness". What, we still wonder, was the secret of his success?

Contemporaries, even those rivals who resented him, observed that Washington seemed to be blessed by Divine Providence — or just plain luck. How else to explain the many bullets that whizzed around but never into his body? Or his emergence from a string of catastrophic military disasters in the French and Indian War and the War for Independence with a reputation enhanced rather than ruined? Over the past two centuries, scholars have detailed more prosaic explanations of Washington's "unparalleled rise & elevation", including his acquisition of thousands of acres through fortuitous inheritance and relentless speculation; his marriage to the wealthy widow Martha Dandridge Custis; his connection with members of the powerful Fairfax family, who became important early patrons; his struggle to master his body and his passions within the language and conventions of 18th-century Anglo-American republicanism; and most recently, his creative conflation of his personal ambition with the cause of the Republic. Chernow acknowledges all these interpretations of Washington's life. But because he tends to slide into the biographer's quicksand of identifying too closely with his subject, his particular contribution is to argue for the critical role Washington himself played in becoming George Washington.

Few human beings have ever lived a life more devoted to proving they merited their fame. In retrospect, Washington seems profoundly insecure. Given to dark moods and angry outbursts, especially at those who questioned his intentions, he compensated by studying etiquette, mimicking successful older men, cultivating younger men and displaying an extraordinary sensitivity to what others thought of him. Nothing was more likely to provoke his legendary rage than accusations that he was motivated by a base motive.

Like many of his peers, he made a great show of resisting public office, if only to demonstrate the absence of ambition. Washington fretted at length about the performance he would give from the balcony of Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan when he became president on 30 April, 1789. What should he wear? How should he behave? Knowing that "the first of everything in our situation will serve to establish a precedent," he wanted to avoid acting like a king while respecting the dignity of his office and the Republic it represented. Months earlier, he had decided he ought to say something, thereby inventing the presidential Inaugural Address. In an early draft, of which only fragments survive, Washington, Chernow writes, "spent a ridiculous amount of time defending his decision to become president, as if he stood accused of some heinous crime". This prickliness rarely surfaced in public. Indeed, he tirelessly cultivated an impassive demeanour that suited to perfection his preferred role as a remote, stoic figure towering above the sordid business of ordinary politics.

But of course George Washington was anything but an uninterested observer. He didn't just learn from events; he shaped them to his own purposes. Throughout his career he wanted the gentlemen of Virginia and then the US to master the landscape and peoples of North America as well as their bodies and emotions. Where Thomas Jefferson spent much of his life defying power, Washington imagined using power to improve transportation, encourage education, develop commerce, establish federal authority and unite the diverse regions of the Republic into an whole that transcended the sum of its parts. "The name of AMERICAN," he said, must override any local attachments.

To inspire emulation throughout the world, the US had to balance liberty with order. This breathtaking imperial vision informed virtually everything Washington did. When he decided to provide for the freedom of most of his enslaved Africans upon the death of Martha Washington, he acted in good measure out of a conviction that "nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle".

Washington was concerned with his reputation and that of the nation he helped to found because he wisely understood that he could improve both through close attention to the expectations of others. But we are mistaken if we think he offered himself as a democratic example of how an ordinary person could succeed. The Washington who fashioned his public image did not believe he created the core of his character. To the contrary, his rise, he thought, served as proof that he was an extraordinary man who had always possessed exemplary talent and integrity. If he fretted about what posterity would think of him, it was probably because he doubted our willingness to acknowledge his greatness. On that score, at least, he needn't have worried.