Washington: A Life

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ALSO BY RON CHERNOW

 

 

 

 

THE PENGUIN PRESS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

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First published in 2010 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Ron Chernow, 2010

All rights reserved

 

Illustration credits appear on pages 869-72.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chernow, Ron.

Washington : a life / Ron Chernow.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-44418-4

1. Washington, George, 1732-1799. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. I. Title.

E312.C495 2010

973.4’1092—dc22

[B]

2010019154

 

 

 

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TO VALERIE, IN MEMORIAM

Simple truth is his best, his greatest eulogy.

—ABIGAILADAMS,
speaking of George Washington after his death

Since I quote extensively from George Washington’s vast correspondence, I have taken the liberty of modernizing the spelling and punctuation of the eighteenth-century prose. A biographer hesitates to forfeit the special period flavor that comes from preserving all the oddities of contemporary writing. But all too often, Washington’s muscular style can seem awkward and stilted to modern readers because of the way he distributed his commas, for instance, whereas the writing suddenly becomes smooth and flowing with more familiar punctuation. Occasionally I retain the quirks of the original spelling in order to highlight the eccentricity or lack of education of the personality in question. Throughout the text, the actual wording has been exactly reproduced.

IN MARCH 1793 Gilbert Stuart crossed the North Atlantic for the express purpose of painting President George Washington, the supreme prize of the age for any ambitious portrait artist. Though born in Rhode Island and reared in New-port, Stuart had escaped to the cosmopolitan charms of London during the war and spent eighteen years producing portraits of British and Irish grandees. Overly fond of liquor, prodigal in his spending habits, and with a giant brood of children to support, Stuart had landed in the Marshalsea Prison in Dublin, most likely for debt, just as Washington was being sworn in as first president of the United States in 1789.

For the impulsive, unreliable Stuart, who left a trail of incomplete paintings and irate clients in his wake, George Washington emerged as the savior who would rescue him from insistent creditors. “When I can net a sum sufficient to take me to America, I shall be off to my native soil,” he confided eagerly to a friend. “There I expect to make a fortune by Washington alone. I calculate upon making a plurality of his portraits … and if I should be fortunate, I will repay my English and Irish creditors.”
¹
In a self-portrait daubed years earlier, Stuart presented himself as a restless soul, with tousled reddish-brown hair, keen blue eyes, a strongly marked nose, and a pugnacious chin. This harried, disheveled man was scarcely the sort to appeal to the immaculately formal George Washington.

Once installed in New York, Stuart mapped out a path to Washington with the thoroughness of a military campaign. He stalked Washington’s trusted friend Chief Justice John Jay and rendered a brilliant portrait of him, seated in the full majesty of his judicial robes. Shortly afterward Stuart had in hand the treasured letter of introduction from Jay to President Washington that would unlock the doors of the executive residence in Philadelphia, then the temporary capital.

As a portraitist, the garrulous Stuart had perfected a technique to penetrate his subjects’ defenses. He would disarm them with a steady stream of personal anecdotes and irreverent wit, hoping that this glib patter would coax them into self-revelation. In the taciturn George Washington, a man of granite self-control and a stranger to spontaneity, Gilbert Stuart met his match. From boyhood, Washington had struggled to master and conceal his deep emotions. When the wife of the British ambassador later told him that his face showed pleasure at his forthcoming departure from the presidency, Washington grew indignant: “You are wrong. My countenance never yet betrayed my feelings!”
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He tried to govern his tongue as much as his face: “With me it has always been a maxim rather to let my designs appear from my works than by my expressions.”
³