Washington Read online

  Nevins responded a fortnight later with an equally candid letter. On the one hand, he declared, “detail seems to me the vivifying element in history or biography.” He then conceded, however, that “most readers boggle at a great deal.” Nevins then moved to his main message, unstinting praise for Freeman’s portrait accompanied by some skepticism about the historical subject himself.

  You are admirably successful, I think, in making George Washington seem real; for the first time I realized, I think, just what sort of human being he was. Your analysis of him is masterly. I wonder if you realize that your portrait, so vivid and true, is a little bit disagreeable? He is not a likeable young man. He was too much a careerist, even too much an egoist.”10

  Freeman replied with assent, yet looking ahead he saw a more attractive figure in the making.

  Those who liked him did not know him fully. [Virginia Governor] Dinwiddie, who knew him best, disliked him in the end. The great fact is that Washington grew. I have been very much surprised to see how substantial was the development in his character and the change in what would appear to have been his “temperament” between 1759 and 1775.”11

  By pushing ahead at the fearsome pace that he set for himself—eight hours each day, seven days a week, always completing four hours of work prior to breakfast—Freeman brought the story to 1793 and the close of Washington’s first administration as President. He finished Volume VI at one o’clock on the day he died in June 1953. It appeared in 1954 and a window exhibit in Richmond, arranged for the occasion, included Freeman’s specially constructed wide-armed writing chair, at which he composed all of R. E. Lee: A Biography (1934-1935), Lee’s Lieutenants (1942-1944), and much of George Washington. The exhibit also showed Freeman’s distinctive writing board and the manuscript of the concluding page of Volume VI, just as he left them on his desk when he paused for lunch on his last day.12 The window display did, indeed, have the trappings of a venerable shrine, the cell of a modern saint; but that is how he was regarded in the Old Dominion and by a great many admirers elsewhere.

  In a letter that he wrote to his editor at Scribners in April 1953, Freeman looked ahead to Volume VII and envisioned room at the end for what he called “a final summing up that will be, in effect, an epitome of the entire work.” He then explained his motive and his reasoning.

  I wish it to be elaborate because I have this possibility in mind: When we have done all we can in selling the full set of seven volumes, we might take this epitome, reset it in larger type and, in effect, have a brief one-volume life of Washington, a work that is needed and, I think, desired. Is this a crazy dream or is it practicable and potentially profitable for the firm and for me?. . .

  P.S. Needless to say, while this matter of course can be discussed with your associates, it should be kept a secret among us.13

  For several years prior to Freeman’s death he relied upon a full-time research aide at the Library of Congress named John A. Carroll, a young man of “ability and industry.” Carroll and Mary Wells Ashworth saw Volume VI through the production process and then collaborated in researching and writing Volume VII (1957), which covered Washington’s second administration and his two last years in retirement at Mount Vernon, 1793-1799.

  Richard Harwell, who prepared the one-volume abridgment that follows, had performed a similar work on Lee that first appeared in 1961. A Southerner like Freeman, Harwell was a historian and librarian who at various times held positions at libraries rich in their associations with George Washington: the University of Virginia (Charlottesville), the Huntington Library (San Marino, California), and the Boston Athenaeum. Harwell’s abridgment of Washington first appeared in 1968, a year in which the election for President of the United States was hotly contested.

  Curiously enough, the bicentennial of George Washington’s birth in 1932 proved to be the most popular of all the commemorative observances held in the twentieth century—more memorable than the bicentennials of the American Revolution (1976) and the Constitution (1987), more successful than the Civil War Centennial (1961-1965) and the Centennial of the Statue of Liberty (1986). The extensive activities and observances held in 1932 are summarized in lively fashion by Karal Ann Marling in George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876-1986 (1988), especially Chapter 11. The Washington bicentennial year also saw a number of artistic reinterpretations of the historical figure, most notably Alfred Maurer’s cubist George Washington and Frank Moran’s modernist sculpture of the same name. Maurer’s painting is not a parody of Gilbert Stuart’s famous portrait, but it is perhaps a bit irreverent—and realistic, despite the obvious influence of cubism. This candid realism helps to humanize Washington, and symbolizes America’s desire at the time to demythologize Washington, which is exactly what Douglas Southall Freeman hoped to do in his multifaceted biography.

  In addition to studies of George Washington’s image and reputation in American culture, such as Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (1987) and Margaret B. Klapthor and Howard A. Morrison, G. Washington: A Figure Upon the Stage (1982 [prepared for an exhibition held in 1982 at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., to observe the 250th anniversary of his birth]), books and essays have also appeared in recent years that provide succinct reappraisals of Washington’s political wisdom and character.14 They call our attention to the fact that he virtually created the Presidency as an institution and conferred upon it great dignity. Washington established the standards by which all subsequent Presidents have ultimately been measured—their moral character and political wisdom. Historian Gordon S. Wood, in a lecture presented at the White House late in 1991, asserted that to his contemporaries Washington was the embodiment of classical republican (that is, non-monarchical) virtue, epitomized in 1783 by his circular letter to the states in which he promised to retire from public life and by his resignation as commander-in-chief of the American forces just before Christmas in 1783.15 (See pp. 508-510 below.)

  Washington’s contemporaries understood as well as admired him. They rarely doubted that he always sought to act in a patriotic and disinterested manner. David Humphreys, who lived for a while at Mount Vernon and became one of Washington’s most trusted advisors, wrote a biographical sketch that has recently been published. Although it concentrates primarily on the period from 1756 to 1783, the origins of the Revolution and the War for Independence, Humphreys depicts a very human and engaging man who eagerly wished to retire once peace had been achieved, who struggled with his conscience before accepting the Presidency, and who gladly resigned after his second term despite entreaties that he continue.16

  His countrymen pleaded with him to do so because he seemed to them to embody the cherished values of the nation more than any other individual. At a time when political animosities ran high and conflict threatened to tear apart the very fabric of republican society, Washington alone appeared to be above partisanship and to have at heart only the best interests of the country as a whole. How those perceptions surfaced from a lifetime of public service is revealed in the compelling chapters of Douglas Southall Freeman’s narrative. Altogether Freeman handwrote 3,109 printed pages of text for this project. The condensation that follows will give the reader all of the essentials and then some, complete and fulfilling in its own succinct fashion.

  MICHAEL KAMMEN

  1992

  NOTES

  1. Julian P. Boyd to Douglas Southall Freeman, Jan. 6, 1945, Freeman Papers, box 59, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C. (hereafter LCMD).

  2. Wallace Meyer to Freeman, Oct. 18, 1948, Freeman Papers, box 91, LCMD.

  3. Freeman to Emmet J. Hughes, Sept. 7, 1952, Freeman Papers, box 112, LCMD. See Samuel Eliot Morison to Freeman, Nov. 3,1948, box 91, LCMD: “Congratulations on Washington [Volumes I and II]. I love the way you have handled the background. You have said many things that needed to be said and could only be said by a Virginian.”

  4. This untitled, typed
document is located in the Freeman papers, box 120, LCMD. Although it is undated, it must have been prepared around 1951.

  5. Freeman to Julian P. Boyd, Nov. 8, 1945, and June 4, 1946, Freeman Papers, boxes 59 and 65, LCMD.

  6. See Mason L. Weems, The Life of Washington, edited by Marcus Cunliffe (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), especially the introduction, pp. ix-lxii; William Alfred Bryan, George Washington in American Literature, 1775-1865 (New York, 1952).

  7. The full manuscript of this broadcast is located in the Freeman Papers, box 120, LCMD. The quotation is from pp. 10-11, at the close of the broadcast.

  8. Freeman to Rupert Hughes, Oct. 17 and Nov. 17, 1951, and Hughes to Freeman, Nov. 14, 1951, Freeman Papers, box 106, LCMD.

  9. Freeman to Allan Nevins, Oct. 18, 1948, Freeman Papers, box 91, LCMD.

  10. Nevins to Freeman, Nov. 1, 1948, ibid. This impression of the young Washington has recently been reinforced in persuasive detail by Paul K. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988). Longmore’s emphasis does differ from Freeman’s in one important respect, however. Referring to the years of maturation, 1758 to 1775, Longmore believes that Washington’s biographers “have misunderstood his ambitions and development during those years. He remained active in provincial [Virginia] politics and attentive to colonial-imperial relations. He continued to develop his skills and style as a leader. Contrary to Freeman’s opinion, he underwent a transformation not so much of personal character as of political perspective. At least as important as his emotional maturation was his increasing political sophistication” (p. 56).

  11. Freeman to Nevins, Nov. 4, 1948, Freeman Papers, box 91, LCMD.

  12. A description will be found in ibid, box 120.

  13. Freeman to Wallace Meyer, April 4, 1953, Freeman Papers, box 120, LCMD.

  14. See also Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington: Man and Monument (Boston, 1958); Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (New York, 1978); Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991); Cunliffe, The Doubled Images of Lincoln and Washington (Gettysburg, 1988).

  15. See Gordon S. Wood, “The Greatness of George Washington,” Virginia (Quarterly Review 68 (Spring 1992), pp. 189-207; Edmund S. Morgan, The Genius of George Washington (New York, 1980).

  16. Rosemarie Zagarri, ed., David Humphreys’ “Life of General Washington” with George Washington’s Remarks (Athens, Ga., 1991); Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Walter Jones, Jan. 2, 1814, in Adrienne Koch and William Peden, eds., The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1944), pp. 173-76.

  Editor’s Note

  At the close of many months of working with Douglas Southall Freeman’s George Washington the abridger of it faces a paradox in setting out to write an introduction, however brief, to the shorter Washington. Why should he add words to this volume when he has been trying so long and so hard, sometimes almost desperately, to retain the essence of Dr. Freeman’s work and, at the same time, to subtract as many words as possible from the story of a life so full of meaning to Americans that it should be told as completely as possible? The answer is twofold: First, it is incumbent on one who has worked so closely with a book to give his view of its meaning and relevance; second, it is only fair that the reader know how and to what extent this one-volume biography of Washington differs from Freeman’s monumental and definitive seven-volume biography of him.

  Washington’s life can stand almost any number of books about it. It can also withstand—in Stephen Vincent Benét’s phrase—the “picklock biographer,” the peephole historian, the myth-maker, and the muckraker. It has withstood many bad books. Freeman’s is certainly one of the few that it has deserved. George Washington is the true and complete story—fully researched, felicitously written, and unembellished by foolish myth or by false and pretentious piety. It is a remarkable tribute to Washington that the twentieth-century scholarship of Freeman leads to the same conclusions about him as did the work of his first great biographer, Chief Justice John Marshall.

  Freeman did not live to complete his work on Washington, and his associates, Mary Wells Ashworth and John Alexander Carroll, who wrote its seventh volume, did not presume to include there the kind of summary of the first President’s character which Freeman had written into his narrative at appropriate intervals. At the end of Volume V (in the chronology of the biography, just after the close of the Revolution) Freeman wrote:

  . . . if at the end of the Revolutionary War he had to be characterized in a single sentence, it would be substantially this: He was a patriot of conscious integrity and unassailable conduct who had given himself completely to the revolutionary cause and desired for himself the satisfaction of having done his utmost and of having won the approval of those whose esteem he put above every other reward.

  . . . In accepting the integrity, the dedication and the ambitions of Washington as realities, one does not face an insoluble problem when one asks how this life, at the end of the Revolution, had reached the goal of service, satisfaction and reward. George Washington was neither an American Parsifal nor a biological “sport.” What he was, he made himself by will, by effort, by ambition and by perseverance. For the long and dangerous journeys of his incredible life, he had the needful strength and direction because he walked that “straight line.”1

  Doubtless Freeman used the simple reference to the “straight line” here because it was his general custom to use in writing of each period in Washington’s life only the letters, comments, and other materials relating directly to that period. Quite possibly he used the phrase at this point with the intention of establishing a tie to a full quotation of the letter to Fairfax when he came, in his final volume, to summarize and to characterize the whole of Washington’s life.

  Chief Justice Marshall had written, almost a century and a half before:

  In [Washington], that innate and unassuming modesty which adulation would have offended, which the voluntary plaudits of millions could not betray into indiscretion, and which never obtruded upon others his claims to superior consideration, was happily blended with a high and correct sense of personal dignity, and with a just consciousness of the respect which is due to station. Without exertion, he could maintain the happy medium between that arrogance which wounds, and that facility which allows the office to be degraded in the person who fills it.

  It is impossible to contemplate the great events which have occurred in the United States under the auspices of Washington, without ascribing them, in some measure, to him. If we ask the causes of the prosperous issue of a war, against the successful termination of which there were so many probabilities? of the good which was produced, and the ill which was avoided during an administration fated to contend with the strongest prejudices that a combination of circumstances and of passions could produce? of the constant favour of the great mass of his fellow citizens, and of the confidence which, to the last moment of his life, they reposed in him? the answer, so far as these causes may be found in his character, will furnish a lesson well meriting the attention of those who are candidates for political fame.

  Endowed by nature with a sound judgment, and an accurate and discriminating mind, he feared not that laborious attention which made him perfectly master of those subjects, in all their relations, on which he was to decide: and this essential quality was guided by an unvarying sense of moral right, which would tolerate the employment only of those means that would bear the most rigid examination; by a fairness of intention which neither sought nor required disguise; and by a purity of virtue which not only was untainted, but unsuspected.

  1 Mrs. Ashworth, in her charming Preface to Volume VII of George Washington, elucidates the final phrase quoted here:

  These words of Washington’s also offer the best explanation for his success in the Presidency and for the whole of his adult life. They are from a letter to his friend Bryan Fairfax, written early in 1799: “The favorable sent
iments which others, you say, have been pleased to express respecting me, cannot but be pleasing to a mind [sic] who always walked on a straight line, and endeavored as far as human frailties, and perhaps strong passions, would enable him, to discharge the relative duties to his Maker and fellow-men, without seeking any indirect or left handed attempts to acquire popularity.”

  Thus do the estimates of Washington by his most recent great biographer and by his first great biographer coincide. So, too, have the estimates of the dispassionate historians in all the generations since his death been unanimous in his praise. So it was in his own time, with all but a few—the few who, from their own corruptibility or overweening political partisanship turned praise into its perverted counterpart, invective. Abigail Adams, the wife of Washington’s successor as President, gave the judgment of his contemporaries after her meeting with Washington in 1775. She wrote John Adams her first impression of the General who had come to direct operations before Boston in the initial months of the Revolution. “You had prepared me,” she noted, “to entertain a favorable opinion of General Washington, but I thought the half was not told me. Dignity with ease and complacency, the gentleman and soldier, look agreeably blended in him. Modesty marks every line and feature of his face.” And Mrs. Adams had what might equally well serve as the last word—except there will never be a “last word” about Washington—when she recorded shortly after his death: “Simple truth is his best, his greatest eulogy. She alone can render his fame immortal.”

  The perfection of Washington’s character was marred by only two flaws, his ambition—which was as much a virtue as it was a fault—and his rather incomprehensible lack of strong affection for his mother. His conduct likewise bears two stains—his avoidance of his responsibilities at Fort Cumberland during the time of his over-zealous efforts to assure his supremacy in command over Capt. John Dagworthy and his peremptory treatment of Edmund Randolph during the second term as President. The first is easily excused on the ground of youthful ambition; if not excused, the second can be rationalized as a product of extreme and extenuating circumstances. This having been said, all else must be praise.