James Thomas Flexner - Washington: The Indispensable Man

A moment at Mount Vernon, drawn on the spot during July, 1796. Washington scans through a telescope his view of the Potomac while Martha bends over the tea table. The young lady in the Grecian pose is Nelly Custis. The other figures are assumed to be Washingtons secretary, Tobias Lear, and Lears son. The dog is unidentified. By Benjamin Henry Latrobe (Photograph courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union)

Life mask of Washington by Jean Antoine Houdon (Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library)

Washington

The Indispensable Man

James Thomas Flexner

To Beatrice, my wife

Preface

When more than a dozen years ago I began my biographical study of George Washington, I intended to encompass his life in a single volume such as this one. But I then concluded that so short a work could not be written without being superficial or incomplete.

Compare, for instance, the magnitude of the tasks faced by biographers of Washington and Lincoln. Washington lived eleven years longer than Lincoln. While Lincoln was a major national figure for only some seven years (from the Douglas debates to his assassination), Washington was for twenty-four years (from his election as commander in chief to his death) the most conspicuous and influential man in the United States. For seventeen of those years, comprising the war, the Constitutional Convention, and the Presidency, he was from day to day actively engaged in great events. Before all that, his role in the French and Indian War made him internationally known when he was hardly twenty, an age at which Lincoln was still an obscure frontiersman.

The scope of my studies was almost doubled by a determination to describe Washingtons indispensable role in the creation of the United States and yet not lose the man in the leader. Events indicative of character were as important to my work as world-shaking decisions. I thus found myself writing a four-volume biography of Washington, published between 1965 and 1972.

After these books had been happily received, pressure on me was renewed to prepare a biography of Washington that would be available to a broader public than any four-volume life could be. And to my surprise, I concluded that all the previous effort had made it possible for me to distill, at long last, what I had discovered into a single volume, one that would, without entirely omitting anything of importance, present in essence Washingtons character and career.

The fact that the longer work stands on many shelves has contributed to the possibility of achieving the shorter. Knowing that further facts, more personal details, deeper analyses, and also justifications for my conclusions can be found in the apposite original volumes, I have felt enabled to move rapidly from one high point to another. The bibliographies and source references, which in the original work totalled 112 pages, make it unnecessary to append here more than a brief essay and list.

Despite its relation to the longer biography, this one-volume life is by no means a series of patched-together extracts. The extreme reduction of scaleto about one fifthdictated that, if the shorter work were to have its own integrity and literary effect, the material would have to be revisualized and rewritten. Except for the account of Washingtons death, the text is almost altogether new.

J.T.F.

Contents

Illustrations

Introduction

During my years of work on a biography of Washington, I have made various unexpected discoveries. Surely the most surprising was that George Washington is alive. Or, to put it more accurately, millions of George Washingtons are alive. Washingtons have been born and have died for some two centuries.

Almost every historical figure is regarded as a dead exemplar of a vanished epoch. But Washington exists within the minds of most Americans as an active force. He is a multitude of living ghosts, each shaped less by eighteenth-century reality than by the structure of the individual brain in which he dwells. An inhabitant of intimate spaces, Washington is for private reasons sought out or avoided, loved or admired, hated or despised. I have come across almost no Americans who prove, when the subject is really broached, emotionally indifferent to George Washington.

The roles played by the mythological George Washingtons fall into two major categories: one Freudian, the other a procession of mirrors reflecting peoples attitudes toward the situation of the United States at their time.

In an essay that had no specific reference to Washington, Freud described how infantile fantasies concerning peoples own fathers can shape their conceptions of historical figures. They obliterate, Freud wrote, the individual features of their subjects physiognomy, they smooth over the traces of his lifes struggles with internal and external resistances, and they tolerate in him no vestiges of human weakness or imperfection. Thus, they present us with what is in fact a cold, strange, ideal figure instead of a human being to whom we might feel ourselves distantly related.

This is an exact description of the marble image of Washington which so many Americans harborand dislike. I have been amazed by the infantile glee with which people I have met made fun of my writing a biography of Washington. Was I recording the clacking of wooden false teeth? Had I ever tried to envision how Washington would have looked in long winter underwear? These mockers often dance up and down with self-satisfaction, like a small child who has dared express an impious thought about his father.

Down the years, Washingtons second mythological role has been as a national symbol, an alternate to the American flag. In periods when Americans were happy with their society, they have thought of Washington with adulation. At times of resentment and self-distrust, the mythological Washingtons have been resented and distrusted. I have discovered, sometimes to my considerable embarrassment, that the current attitude toward Washingtonand toward me as his biographeris often hostile.

My continuing effort has been to disentangle the Washington who actually lived from all the symbolic Washingtons, to rescue the man and his deeds from the layers and layers of obscuring legend that have accreted around his memory during some two hundred years. This involved, in the first place, an act of will. I tried to forget everything I had ever heard about George Washington. Rather than endeavor to emend old images, I determined to start with a blank canvas.

Beginning thus, as it were anew, I found a fallible human being made of flesh and blood and spiritnot a statue of marble and wood. And inevitablyfor that was the factI found a great and good man. In all history few men who possessed unassailable power have used that power so gently and self-effacingly for what their best instincts told them was the welfare of their neighbors and all mankind.

Most of the brickbats now being thrown at Washington are figments of the modern imagination. In being ourselves untrue to the highest teaching of the American tradition, we of this generation have tended to denigrate that tradition, to seek out all that was unworthy, to emphasize whatever justifies national distrust. In so doing, we have discarded an invaluable heritage. We are blinding our eyes to stars that lead to the very ideals many of us most admire: the sanctity of the individual, the equality of all men before the law, government responsive to the people, freedom for all means of communication, avoidance of what Washington denounced as international ambition, the self-determination of people everywhere.