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You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington Hardcover – February 4, 2020

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• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Viking
• Publication date February 4, 2020
• Dimensions 6.2 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• ISBN-10 0735224102
• ISBN-13 978-0735224100
• See all details

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His Mother's Son

When it came to family, Mary Ball Washington, George Washington's mother, was always unlucky. Her father died when she was an infant. By the time she turned twelve, she had buried her stepfather, her half brother, and her mother. Mary's two surviving siblings, although grown and married, did not take her in; instead, she became the legal ward of a neighbor.

Her life immediately got worse. The man who had worked for her late family as an overseer successfully sued her for back wages, and Mary, as a girl in early America, would have little opportunity to recover the financial loss. For her, everything depended on marrying well, just as it had for her mother, who had come to America as an indentured servant.

In 1731, at the age of twenty-three, Mary found a promising match. Augustine Washington, an educated widower fourteen years her senior, was a justice of the peace who owned a small tobacco farm, and an increasing number of slaves.

The details of their twelve-year marriage are scant, but one thing is for sure: It produced six children, whom they raised at Ferry Farm, a modest enterprise outside of Fredericksburg, Virginia. George was their first, followed by Betty, Samuel, John Augustine, and Charles Washington. (Their youngest daughter, Mildred, died at sixteen months old.) They lived in a two-story house that looked out on the Rappahannock River and slave quarters, rough wooden structures that housed about twenty people of African descent. The tobacco-drying sheds, the dairy barn, the smokehouse, and Mary's vegetable and medicinal herb gardens lay beyond.

Mary's husband and stepsons had attended the prestigious Appleby Grammar School in England, and she planned to send her own sons there, too, no doubt with dreams of social advancement in mind. Mary had never left Virginia, but her sons would see the motherland.

And then, in 1743, her husband died. Augustine was buried with his first wife, a sign of things to come for Mary and her five children. His sons from his first marriage, Lawrence, twenty-five, and Augustine, Jr., twenty-three, inherited the bulk of the estate-including Mount Vernon. Lawrence gifted his stepmother a mourning ring, but neither he nor his brother had any legal obligation to her. Mary and her five children were left to manage Ferry Farm on their own. George was never going to Appleby.

Mary, now thirty-five, took up the job of maintaining a property that legally belonged to her eleven-year-old son. Having learned at an early age how it felt to be powerless, she started off decisively, selling off some of the family's best tracts. The corn, flax, wheat, oat, rye, vegetables, and tobacco grown on the remaining land would have to be enough to feed and support her family, the people she enslaved, and her farm animals. With great luck and even better weather, there might be a big enough yield to sell in Great Britain.

Unfortunately for Mary, the years that followed were recorded as dry. She managed to scrape together enough to sell abroad, but that was only half the battle. British merchants had a monopoly on trade, and they couldn't be depended on to deal fairly. Their terms stated that no sale was final until the product reached Great Britain. This allowed them to accuse American farmers, and they often did, of including inferior crops, especially with small operations. When Mary tried to sell her tobacco, she was twice accused-and twice vindicated. By the 1760s, she had decided the enterprise wasn't worth the trouble.

And throughout all this struggle, Mary's efforts, past immediate survival, offered her no long-term guarantees. At the age of twenty-one, Washington would inherit the entirety of Ferry Farm. But that was it. Augustine had made no provisions in his will to educate his younger sons, abroad or at home. Soon, Washington would have to drop out of a local school. He would spend the rest of his life trying to catch up.

Mary could have remarried. It was such a commonplace practice, in fact, that Augustine's will anticipated it. A new husband would have offered her some degree of financial security and, presuming she was lonely, companionship, even love. And Mary was a catch: She had a home, however temporary, and a hearty constitution. But Mary wasn't eager to submit to a new husband's demands. (Perhaps she had learned a lesson from her own mother's second marriage. Tellingly, her eldest son would later come to the defense of remarried widows, against husbands who illegally withheld their wives' property.) Instead, she poured her energy into the farm and her children, especially George and Betty.

Mary remained strategically close to her stepsons. Lawrence, who was ten years her junior, had come back from Appleby with the entitlement and ambition of a colonizer, not of a man born in the colonies. With a commission from King George II, he had served as a captain in the War of Jenkins' Ear, fighting the Spanish in the West Indies. Lawrence returned the summer after his father died and immediately capitalized on his recent inheritance and glamorous war experience by marrying exceptionally well. Ann Fairfax, daughter of Colonel William Fairfax, lived at Belvoir, the grand estate bordering Lawrence's Mount Vernon. She offered him entry into what was arguably the colony's most powerful family.

Mary made sure that Washington was a frequent visitor at Mount Vernon, and thus also at Belvoir, where he could observe elite masculinity up close. Washington supplemented his fieldwork by studying Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation, a sixteenth-century book on etiquette. He likely copied down all 110 lessons merely to work on his penmanship, but what he managed to absorb didn't hurt his reputation among the gentry.

The Abridged Rules of Civility 

2  When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usualy Discovered.

7  Put not off your Cloths in the presence of Others, nor go out your Chambers half Drest.

24  Do not laugh too loud or too much at any Publick [Spectacle].

54  Play not the Peacock, looking every where about you, to See if you be well Deck't, if your Shoes fit well if your Stockings sit neatly, and Cloths handsomely.

56  Associate yourself with Men of good Quality if you Esteem your own Reputation; for 'tis better to be alone than in bad Company.

73  Think before you Speak pronounce not imperfectly nor bring ou[t] your Words too hastily but orderly & distinctly.

82  Undertake not what you cannot Perform but be Carefull to keep your Promise.

90  Being Set at meal Scratch not neither Spit Cough or blow your Nose except there's a Necessity for it.

92  Take no Salt or cut Bread with your Knife Greasy.

100  Cleanse not your teeth with the Table Cloth Napkin Fork or Knife but if Others do it let it be done wt. a Pick Tooth.

Washington understood his role. He moved with seeming ease between the sometimes desperate conditions of Ferry Farm and the genteel abundance of Mount Vernon. On one occasion, however, he could not make the two-day ride to visit Lawrence because there wasn't enough corn to feed his horse. According to Washington, the animal was "in very poor order," a startling admission in Virginia, where men who traveled even the shortest distances on foot were understood to be poor. If the animals were hungry, then the future president and his family-and most of all, their slaves-were likely suffering, too.

The masters of Mount Vernon and Belvoir knew that Washington was not one of them, but they recognized that he was a quick study. His eagerness to be helped no doubt flattered their egos, and he became a kind of pet project. They decided that he was in need of travel and adventure, and that the only way to get it was by sea. But since Washington could not pay his own way, they concluded he would have to join the British Royal Navy as a midshipman. They then launched an almost conspiratorial campaign to achieve their goal.

Mary Washington was no fool. At first, she seemed open to the idea of Washington's enlistment in the navy, but it didn't take long for her to realize she was being set up. She had learned in her youth to view the world with a critical eye, and in her time running a small farm, that eye had sharpened. Would Washington really find opportunity at sea? Was it better than what he would find at home? And what were the risks to her fourteen-year-old son?

Mary had good reason to believe they were great. Lawrence's own letters home from service had been full of tales of disease, deprivation, and death. His brother-in-law had lost his life in a naval battle with the French. And both had been officers; Washington would be a midshipman, one of the lowest-ranking, subjugated positions on a vessel. (As it happens, her instincts were right. Of the recruits who joined the navy at Washington's age, about a third did not survive their first two years in the navy-and there was little chance of promotion before then.)

It seems Mary tried to discuss these concerns with Lawrence's co-conspirators, but they had no patience for them. Robert Jackson, the executor of her late husband's will, dismissed them as "trifling objections such as fond and unthinking mothers naturally suggest."

Others, however, agreed with her. Joseph Ball, Mary's half brother in England, thought the whole thing was a terrible idea:

I think he had better be put apprentice to a tinker, for a common sailor before the mast has by no means the common liberty of the subject; for they will press him from ship to ship where he has fifty shillings a month, and make him take twenty-three, and cut and slash and use him like a negro, or rather like a dog.

And with that, the matter was settled. Whether Mary handed down her decision or she reached it in consultation with her son, we'll never know. But in the aftermath, no one seemed at odds over it. Washington visited Mount Vernon just as often, and Lawrence called on Joseph Ball the next time he went to England. He even brought back presents for Mary.

If  Washington had ever truly wanted to become a midshipman, his interest was probably less about the experience than the twenty-three shillings a month he would have earned. The situation at Ferry Farm was increasingly dire. "With much truth I can say, I never felt the want of money so sensibly since I was a boy of 15 years old," he would later write. But his mother wouldn't sacrifice him to the navy, no matter how bad things got.

Mary's children stayed at home with her until there was a good reason for them to leave. In 1750, Washington gave away his sister, Betty, age seventeen, to Fielding Lewis, the son of a respectable merchant in town. Like her mother and grandmother, she pushed the boundaries of wifehood in early America: Her mark and signature can be found alongside her husband's on business transactions, from land purchases to tobacco shipments.

Washington, meanwhile, was becoming Mary's business partner more than her child. An appetite for land ran in his father's family, a side he seemed eager to emulate, and so Mary encouraged him to become a surveyor. The job attracted young men precisely because it offered upward mobility; a surveyor might earn a hundred pounds annually, and he was first on the scene, able to buy the choicest properties for himself. The profession suited Washington's personality: He liked the outdoors, he was good at math, and he could use his father's surveying tools. (He later brought some of those tools on his presidential tours of the northern and southern states.)

Lawrence and the Fairfaxes were supportive, too. They hired Washington to look after their western holdings, allowing him to skip a long apprenticeship. They also talked him up among the local gentry. By age seventeen, he was the surveyor of Culpeper County, the youngest ever hired, and by eighteen he had purchased thousands of acres of land in the Shenandoah Valley. Thanks to him, there was finally steady money coming in at Ferry Farm.

"Pleases My Taste"

While Washington was thriving, his half brother was failing. Lawrence's misfortunes began in 1749 with a cough so bad that he had to sail to England for medical care. It was tuberculosis, which only worsened during the trip. Nor did his illness improve the following year when he traveled to the spa town of Warm Springs, Virginia, to bathe in its reputedly restorative waters. Facing another long, frigid Virginia winter, during which he would most likely be quarantined from his wife, who had just given birth to a baby girl and had already lost three newborns, Lawrence set his sights on the Caribbean.

He chose to risk hurricane season in the West Indies in hopes that a few warm months of rest and relaxation in Barbados would help. He invited Washington, who had never been outside of Virginia, and together they boarded the Success, a small trading ship. For six weeks, Washington distracted himself from the "fickle & Merciless Ocean" by recording the weather and by fishing for barracuda, mahi mahi, and shark. (He rarely caught anything.) Finally, at four o'clock in the morning on November 2, 1751, they arrived in Barbados, a diminutive land mass that had become the economic and political hub of the British Empire.

The nineteen-year-old Washington was immediately taken with the flora and fauna. He sampled avocados, guavas, and pineapples for the first time, writing "[N]one pleases my taste as dos the Pine." But he was most interested in the people-though not the enslaved Africans who were brought there in chains to grow and harvest sugar. "[A] Man of oppulent fortune And infamous Charactar was indicted for committing a rape on his servant Maid," he reported, "and was brought in Guiltless and sav'd by one single Evidence." Washington watched the "not overzealously beloved" governor in action and dined with the island's elite. They invited him to their "Beefsteak and Tripe Club," where he met judges and admirals and listened to the concerns of wealthy merchants and commodores. It was a far more diverse and worldly set of men than Lawrence knew back home.

Washington hardly mentions Lawrence, then thirty-four, who was usually too weak to leave his quarters. Soon enough, illness came for Washington, too. "Was strongly attacked with the small Pox," he wrote in his diary on November 16, 1751. Although he emerged with some scarring on his face, he also acquired the gift of immunity. Smallpox was rare in the Colonies, and his resistance to the virus would serve him well during the Revolution.

Washington recovered quickly. Lawrence did not. In late December 1751, they parted ways in Barbados. Lawrence boarded a ship for Bermuda, and Washington headed home on the Industry. He spent nearly the entire trip seasick and was at one point robbed by a fellow passenger, but he was a changed man. He had survived a great illness and traveled what would ultimately be the farthest distance of his life.

When Washington returned home, he delivered letters from the gentry of Barbados to Robert Dinwiddie, the British governor of Virginia, who welcomed him with a dinner invitation. He seemed to finally feel like a person of distinction, confident enough of his prospects to court one wealthy, unattainable young woman after another. When Elizabeth Fauntleroy rejected him, he wrote to her father, who owned a considerable amount of land, seeking a visit with "Miss Betcy, in hopes of a revocation of the former, cruel sentence and see if I can meet with any alteration in my favor." During a visit to Belvoir, Washington wrote to a friend that he'd flirted with George Fairfax's sister-in-law, Mary Cary. She's "a very agreeable Young Lady," he said, but one who "revives my former Passion for your Low Land Beauty." (The identity of the Low Land Beauty has never been confirmed.) If Miss Betcy's wary father wrote back, Washington did not keep the letter-but it is safe to assume that Fauntleroy, a member of the Richmond elite, was uninterested in a young man of no fortune or great estate.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Viking; First Edition (February 4, 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0735224102
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0735224100
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.06 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.2 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• #563 in American Revolution Biographies (Books)
• #1,642 in U.S. Revolution & Founding History
• #1,727 in US Presidents

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About the author

Alexis Coe an award winning historian and New York Times Bestselling Author of YOU NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST and ALICE+FREDA FOREVER (which will soon be a major motion picture). She appears in and was a Consulting Producer on the History Channel's WASHINGTON, Executive Produced by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Alexis is the host of NO MAN'S LAND, The Wing's podcast on women's history, and co-hosted PRESIDENTS ARE PEOPLE TOO! from Audible. Alexis has contributed to the New Yorker, New York Times, Atlantic, Slate, the Paris Review Daily, the Guardian, and many others. Her work has appeared in various editions of BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS. She holds a graduate degree in American history, and was a research curator at the NYPL.

www.alexiscoe.com

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Customers find the book informative and enlightening. They say the author does a wonderful job interweaving facts with relevance to today. Readers also appreciate the tables of information and the fresh perspective.

"...It's certainly digestible, and a good read for anyone wanting an accurate - if brief - history of GW without committing to the larger, exhaustive..." Read more

"...This biography, these 200+ pages, were entertaining, informative , and downright fun. Are there items we can quibble over? Listicles of dubious value?..." Read more

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"...of Washington's relationship with enslaved people was noteworthy and important ...." Read more

Customers find the book enjoyable, interesting, and engaging. They say it's fun for historians and non-historians alike. Readers also mention it's a quick read and an important read for young adults.

"...This biography, these 200+ pages, were entertaining , informative, and downright fun. Are there items we can quibble over? Listicles of dubious value?..." Read more

"...All in all it was worthwhile , but a bit of work to keep the ends together...." Read more

"...The book was in great condition and was delivered quickly . Not my normal type of read but for class it was good." Read more

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Customers find the book well-written, readable, and easy to understand. They say it's a tremendous read and the author is amazing. Readers appreciate the unique viewpoint and concise asides.

"...This is a tremendous read ." Read more

"... Coe is an amazing writer . I already knew that, which is why I pre-ordered. (And if you haven't read Alice & Freda Forever, you should.)..." Read more

"A short, readable , biography of George Washington...." Read more

"...It's an easy read and sometimes I laughed out loud. Very frank and honest--to me that's the best part." Read more

Customers find the content engaging and interesting. They appreciate the perspective and concise review of the life of our first President. Readers also say the book reads like a captivating fictional novel.

"...could actually be a page-turner, but this is way, way better than much excellent fiction I have read (and most Netflix I have watched--it's true)...." Read more

"Really enjoyed this one! It's easily digestible and very interesting . I flew through it. Especially loved the comparison charts throughout the book...." Read more

"...extremely informative and enlightening, and yet to me read like a captivating fictional novel ...." Read more

" Fantastic retelling of history by a female historian that’s almost always been told by a male perspective (whom Coe calls the “Thigh Men.”)..." Read more

Customers find the humor in the book witty, cheeky, and irreverent. They say it's written with a lighthearted tone that makes it more enjoyable.

"...This is the perfect mix of thoughtful and irreverent --it will satisfy readers who are on the hunt for facts as well as for those who are on the..." Read more

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"...Coe is insightful, funny , and shares new tidbits that make Washington more accessible to a 2020 audience and more nuanced than any other biography..." Read more

"...of the longer biographies of Washington, while funny at times, seemed a bit petty and unnecessary...." Read more

Customers find the book amazing, enlightening, and unforgettable. They appreciate the charts and images. Readers also mention the book is old-fashioned and historical, but still engaging and entertaining.

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A New Book About George Washington Breaks All the Rules on How to Write About George Washington

Alexis Coe’s cheeky biography of the first president pulls no punches

History Correspondent

No one would describe Alexis Coe’s unconventional biography of conventional biographical subject George Washington as boring. Starting with its cover illustration, a playful Washington grinning at the reader, You Never Forget Your First is a wink of sorts, at Washington biography and at the ways that Americans have very consistently misremembered the first president. Coe sets herself apart from the historians she refers to as the “Thigh Men” of history: biographers like Joseph Ellis, Harlow Giles Unger, and Ron Chernow, esteemed writers in their own rights but ones who seemingly focus on Washington as a marble Adonis (with impressive thighs—we’ll get to that), rather than as a flawed, but still impressive, human being.

Coe mixes up genre and presentation, beginning with a preface composed of listicles, with the first a set of basic things to know about Washington (“jobs held”). And the book is compact. While “weighty tome” is the typical format for founder’s biographies, this one comes in at just 304 lively pages. (Chernow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Washington was an astounding 904 pages.) But Coe’s offering is still a full biography, covering birth to death and the highlights of his life and career between. And, because it’s a biography, George Washington remains at the center. For Smithsonian magazine, I sat down to talk at length about Washington, Washington biographies, and where You Never Forget Your First resides in the founder’s canon. The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You describe that when you told people you were writing a biography of George Washington, they would assume you’re writing about his social life and you would respond, “No, it’s a biography , like a man would write.” And I’ve seen elsewhere you’ve referred to this as a feminist biography. Is it? Or is this what it looks like when a feminist writes biography?

That happened all the time; in the doctor’s office, at Mount Vernon when I went to research. And I actually borrowed that phrase, I realized later, from my first book [about a murder case involving young, female lovers]. When newspapers would try to describe same-sex love and they were at a loss for a word to identify it because lesbian was still 40 years into the future, they would simply say, “You know, like a man would do.”

And so I know that when all else failed, and people seemed to be grasping at the concept, I remind them that women are fully formed humans who are interested in the presidency as much as they are interested in his marriage.

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

New York Times bestselling co-author of Notorious RBG Alexis Coe takes a closer look at our first--and finds he is not quite the man we remember

The book really just jumps up and asks you to pay attention; it’s not a book that you ease into. The preface presents a series of charts, like of the jobs Washington had, or the animals he raised, or the false information that still circulates about him. Other chapters begin with similar infographics. What was your approach to these?

If history is boring, it’s the historian’s fault. Obviously, the title is so provocative; it can get them to pick up the book, but how can I make them feel like they are well equipped to dive into George Washington’s life, the Revolutionary Era, to understand how someone fights for the British Army and ends up leading a rebellion against them? To understand Jefferson, Hamilton, the presidency?

I make these lists for myself [when researching], and it’s sort of like being [with me] in the archives. I wish readers could see everything, and they don’t get to. This is an offering from me to the reader, telling them, “You know how to read this book. You have everything you need to feel as though you’re an expert,”

And so there’s a ton of front matter, as I call it, that really introduces you to Washington as a whole person. We know that he’s the general, but we also have to acknowledge that another title he held was master. We should know that he was very into animals. We should know this his body was amazing not because he had great thighs, but because he survived so many things. There’s front matter in the beginning of the book and then there’s front matter in front of each section and then there are charts and graphs throughout the chapters.

I want this book to be a sort of equalizer and to be fun. History is fun, even when it’s difficult subject matter.

I was interested in your saying that people ask you, “Didn’t you approach Washington with reverence?” And you just didn’t have this reverent posture that previous biographers did. You just thought, “He’s a guy.”

I sometimes think that when Ellis and Chernow and all of these famous Pulitzer-Prize-winning historians were writing a book on Washington, they had to take an oath. Like, “I will write book in the exact same way. I will declare him too marble to be real, and then I will proceed just as the person before me did.”

The reverence jumps off the page. They’re so protective of him and are so impressed by him and his masculinity. I take [his masculinity] as a foregone conclusion. The diseases he survived taught me that, [as did] the war and the way that he was regarded by other people. I just don’t see why historians need to talk about it for pages and pages.

I don’t feel a need to protect Washington; he doesn’t need me to come to his defense, and I don’t think he needed his past biographers to, either, but they’re so worried about him. I’m not worried about him. He’s everywhere. He’s just fine. President Trump went to Mount Vernon and said, “Unless you put your name on things, nobody remembers you.” His name is everywhere. His name is on the city that Trump works in.

Instead of calling me irreverent, we should question why these men are so reverent and why we trust them to tell stories because that is, to me, a disconcerting bias. And a blind spot. My god, did they miss things. And they just repeat each other. In this pursuit of idolatry, they completely miss things and they have zero curiosity outside of what has been covered. They’re not interested in women. There’s just not variety, really until you look at Erica Dunbar and Never Caught . [Dunbar’s 2017 history, a National Book Award finalist, focuses on Ona Judge, an enslaved woman who ran for freedom and was pursued by George and Martha Washingto.] They’re not interested in considering other perspectives. I honestly didn’t know why certain people write books about him except to just have another book, to sort of write a book about Washington as if it was a check mark.

Do you think that this is a problem with biographies as a genre? After all, it was a genre designed to be about exemplary men!

I have a lot of issues with presidential biographies. This is not a problem particular to Washington, but it is acute when it comes to Washington biographies. If you read a biography on John Adams, they’re going to have a little bit of fun with it. They’re going to have fun with how verbose he is, his relationship with Abigail, his children. Everything is a little bit more comfortable.

What are Washington’s biographers missing, then?

Washington biographies need to be very different, going forward. And I hope that that is a contribution that I’ve made, that it is the start of change. It’s really important that, in a biography about Washington, we talk about what we know as historians, that we’re really honest, intellectually honest about what we saw in the archive. And that includes putting in anecdotes about Washington slapping an enslaved man because he could not lift a log on his own. Past biographers, and particularly Chernow, cannot deny that he was a slaveholder. They cannot deny that he would say he didn’t want to separate families, but sometimes did. Washington would say that his thoughts about slavery were changing, but he would talk about enslaved people in ways that showed that they were not.

Something that these biographers talk about is that Washington had very high expectations of other people, but if you just say that, I don’t know what that means. Does that mean that I expect you to be on time? Expecting someone to meet your needs, saying that generally—okay, I’d understand that quality. Imagining Washington assaulting someone he owns because he couldn’t lift a giant log on his own, that paints a very different picture and we need that there alongside all the other things that enable him to lead and win the Revolution and become the first president.

I loved the way you talked about Chernow and these other guys and their emphasis on Washington’s manly thighs.

To tell you the truth, I really never noticed Washington’s thighs in portraits, but [male biographers] wouldn’t stop talking about them. I’d never read a biography on a woman where they talked about her legs constantly. I’d never thought about a woman ... I’m thinking about someone like Sylvia Plath. I’d never looked at a photo of her and thought about her legs.

And the way that they would describe them, “He gripped the saddle with his thunderous thighs.” It was a little inappropriate, sometimes read like a romance novel. And I couldn’t really figure out why. Did they just really love his thighs? Were there a lack of great thighs in early America?

I Googled a portrait of Hamilton’s, just to see how they compared. They were also very nice, but ... why this fixation on [this part of] Washington’s masculinity. Then I would think about the things around sexuality and around reproduction that they also focused on. And together, what it told me was that they were very nervous about something. An example is, well, Washington had no biological children,but [the Thigh Men] don’t immediately say that he was the father to 15 wards during his lifetime.

He wrote them all very long letters. He was full of advice, so much advice. He was a really active father. He considered Martha’s children and grandchildren, he raised them, Washington considered them his own. So why don’t we?

And then [the Thigh Men] feel the need to explain [his lack of biological children], when it seems really obvious to me that Washington was unable to have children as a result of smallpox. And instead of just accepting that, they have to talk about his masculinity. They have to talk about how the reason that they didn’t have children was probably Martha’s fault, even though she had children so we know that she could, and there’s absolutely nothing to suggest that they were difficult childbirths. And yet, they introduce that as if it’s an option, so it’s misleading to the reader.

And from there, they really go off the rails. They start talking about how he was ... God forbid, anyone should suspect that he was gay or asexual or impotent. They jump ahead of you ten steps and start telling you why he isn’t, before you’ve even thought it because, honest, I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t care enough, but they’re really nervous about this.

This defensiveness of Washington and of his masculinity is so conspicuous that I needed to point it out. And when you’re defending something, it also means you’re attacking something. So, they tend to defend men and attack women. And they attack his mother, and they really don’t want to attack Martha because she is a perfect foil to his mother, but when they have to, they’ll go after her ability to bear children, even though, again, she demonstrated that she could perfectly well.

I wanted to ask about race and slavery, too. You have these powerful moments in the book where you talk about Billy Lee, an enslaved man who was quite an important character in the life and exploits of Washington. But Billy Lee kinds of stands in for Washington’s attitude towards enslaved people in significant ways. What role do race and racism plays in the book?

Billy Lee is Washington’s best friend, his right-hand man. And it’s true, he was the exception in Washington’s mind, but to introduce him into the narrative whenever you need to make sure that people know that he could see black people as humans is a disservice to the entire production. There is a misconception that Billy Lee had always been owned, for example, by Washington because of the way that they talk about him.

[Other historians] also often say that Billy Lee was sold to Washington, which I hate. No, Washington went and bought [Billy Lee]. He was looking for slaves to purchase and that’s what he did. It’s a funny way of sort of shifting responsibility just a little bit to make them feel better.

Billy Lee served Washington during the Revolution and was injured in Washington’s service. He injured his knees twice, once during a fox hunt, once during the Revolution. And as a result, he couldn’t keep up. And when he couldn’t keep up, Washington retired him. But upon his death, Billy Lee was the only enslaved person who Washington liberated.

I know you know this, but the reason I review it is because we’re talking about one man out of hundreds of people he enslaved, and yet all I see throughout the narratives is Billy Lee. So if we’re going to talk about how exceptional Washington thought Billy Lee was, then we also have to talk about all the times he wrote that black people just didn’t work hard, that they didn’t seem to have much pride in their appearance when, in fact, he wasn’t giving them enough clothing sometimes to shield their bodies. Women were observed as being in tattered clothing. Their breasts were sometimes visible.

If we’re going to talk about Billy Lee, then we’re going to talk about the other people, too. And we’re going to say how he only saw someone who was dark skinned as human, as human as he was, when they literally almost killed themselves in service to him.

There’s a lot of magical thinking when it comes to Washington’s road to emancipating his slaves upon Martha’s death. The declaration that’s usually made is that Washington began to think differently during the Revolution, which I challenge. It’s not that he began to think differently. It’s that he became the most famous person in the world and was exposed to people who he respected, like the Marquis of Lafayette, who were telling him, “Listen, this is terrible and you could change the world and everyone would love you for it.” He was well aware from that moment forward that it did affect his legacy. Let’s be realistic about this, and let’s also talk about the times that he could’ve emancipated them.

And didn’t.

The [Thigh Men] often talk about how hypocritical Jefferson was. He wrote these beautiful words and then he enslaved people, including his own children. [But] Jefferson could not have changed the trajectory of America; he wasn’t important enough. Sure, he became really important, but Jefferson was not as important as Washington. He was not as famous as Washington. He was not as well-respected as Washington.

I interviewed Annette Gordon-Reed [a historian best known for her searing analysis of the Jefferson-Sally Hemings relationship] a few years ago and she told me that, had Jefferson emancipated his slaves, or argued for the emancipation of slavery immediately upon America’s independence, that we wouldn’t know his name. That’s not true for Washington. He could’ve done it, he didn’t. And had he done it, it could’ve changed the trajectory of America.

Washington biographers have shaped and really kind of mediated all understanding of George Washington, but I wonder about how George Washington did that himself. How is he the curator of his life and how are we, in a sense, receiving what Washington wanted us to have?

Washington wanted to shape his legacy, but he didn’t totally understand what we would think about him. I do feel as though the paving the road to emancipation for the people he enslaved [as he famously did in his will] was mostly legacy building, but it’s interesting to look at instances in which he didn’t know that he would be judged. He knew that he would be judged on slavery, but he didn’t know that he would be judged, for example, on [his treatment of Native] Americans. So as Washington was preparing his letters, his documents, he did not take anything out about how he didn’t trust Indians because they couldn’t fundamentally be trusted or how they basically just needed to give up their way of life.

He didn’t think that we would be horrified by any of that. And so he left it right there for us. So I think he was self-conscious, but he also couldn’t [completely self-censor] ... not about everything because he simply didn’t think it was bad.

In some sense he is his own archivist. His first introduction to the world is the journal that he writes about his experience in what would be the opening of what’s referred to as the French and Indian War in North America. During and after the Revolution, he is so particular about the care and preservation of his papers. I wondered how that struck you.

Washington did his best to shape the narrative. His journal was published when he was a young man, when he started a world war , and it got away from him a little bit. He became quite famous, but he was very sensitive, he did not like being ridiculed. Certain members of Parliament thought he was a dumb kid; he learned the importance of archives, at that moment. And he was also very aware that this was an incredible moment in history, as they all were. They were all careful with their papers. They sold their papers later. They knew the importance of it.

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Karin Wulf | | READ MORE

Karin Wulf is the director of the John Carter Brown Library and a historian at Brown University. She was previously the executive director of the Omohundro Institute of American History & Culture and a professor of history at William & Mary.