The Project Gutenberg EBook of George Washington, by William Roscoe Thayer

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Title: George Washington

Author: William Roscoe Thayer

Release Date: June 6, 2004 [EBook #12540]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GEORGE WASHINGTON ***

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The Riverside Library

George Washington

By

WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER

1922

TO

HARRIET SEARS AMORY

WITH THE BEST WISHES OF HER OLD FRIEND

THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

To obviate misunderstanding, it seems well to warn the reader that this book aims only at giving a sketch of George Washington's life and acts. I was interested to discover, if I could, the human residue which I felt sure must persist in Washington after all was said. Owing to the pernicious drivel of the Reverend Weems no other great man in history has had to live down such a mass of absurdities and deliberate false inventions. At last after a century and a quarter the rubbish has been mostly cleared away, and only those who wilfully prefer to deceive themselves need waste time over an imaginary Father of His Country amusing himself with a fictitious cherry-tree and hatchet.

The truth is that the material about George Washington is very voluminous. His military records cover the eight years of the Revolutionary War. His political work is preserved officially in the reports of Congress. Most of the public men who were his contemporaries left memoirs or correspondence in which he figures. Above all there is the edition, in fourteen volumes, of his own writings compiled by Mr. Worthington C. Ford. And yet many persons find something that baffles them. They do not recognize a definite flesh and blood Virginian named Washington behind it all. Even so sturdy an historian as Professor Channing calls him the most elusive of historic personages. Who has not wished that James Boswell could have spent a year with Wellington on terms as intimate as those he spent with Dr. Johnson and could have left a report of that intimacy?

In this sketch I have conceived of Washington as of some superb athlete equipped for every ordeal which life might cause him to face. The nature of each ordeal must be briefly stated; brief also, but sufficient, the account of the way he accomplished it. I have quoted freely from his letters wherever it seemed fitting, first, because in them you get his personal authentic statement of what happened as he saw it, and you get also his purpose in making any move; and next, because nothing so well reveals the real George Washington as those letters do. Whoever will steep himself in them will hardly declare that their writer remains an elusive person beyond finding out or understanding. In the course of reading them you will come upon many of those "imponderables" which are the secret soul of statecraft.

And so with all humility—for no one can spend much time with Washington, and not feel profound humility—I leave this little sketch to its fate, and hope that some readers will find in it what I strove to put in it.

W.R.T.

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS June 11, 1922

CONTENTS

I. ORIGINS AND YOUTH II. MARRIAGE. THE LIFE OF A PLANTER III. THE FIRST GUN IV. BOSTON FREED V. TRENTON AND VALLEY FORGE VI. AID FROM FRANCE; TRAITORS VII. WASHINGTON RETURNS TO PEACE VIII. WELDING THE NATION IX. THE FIRST AMERICAN PRESIDENT X. THE JAY TREATY XI. WASHINGTON RETIRES FROM PUBLIC LIFE XII. CONCLUSION INDEX

ABBREVIATIONS OF TITLES FREQUENTLY REFERRED TO

Channing = Edward Channing: History of the United States. New York: Macmillan Company, III, IV. 1912.

Fiske = John Fiske: The Critical Period of American History, 1783-1789. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1897.

Ford = Worthington C. Ford: The Writings of George Washington. 14 vols. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. 1889-93.

Ford = Worthington C. Ford: George Washington. 2 vols. Paris: Goupil; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1900.

Hapgood = Norman Hapgood: George Washington. New York: Macmillan Company. 1901.

Irving = Washington Irving: Life of George Washington. New York: G.P. Putnam. 1857.

Lodge = Henry Cabot Lodge: George Washington. 2 vols. American Statesman Series. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1889.

Marshall = John Marshall: The Life of George Washington. 5 vols. Philadelphia. 1807.

Sparks = Jared Sparks: The Life of George Washington. Boston.

Wister = Owen Wister: The Seven Ages of Washington. New York: Macmillan Company. 1909.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

CHAPTER I

ORIGINS AND YOUTH

Zealous biographers of George Washington have traced for him a most respectable, not to say distinguished, ancestry. They go back to the time of Queen Elizabeth, and find Washingtons then who were "gentlemen." A family of the name existed in Northumberland and Durham, but modern investigation points to Sulgrave, in Northamptonshire, as the English home of his stock. Here was born, probably during the reign of Charles I, his great-grandfather, John Washington, who was a sea-going man, and settled in Virginia in 1657. His eldest son, Lawrence, had three children—John, Augustine, and Mildred. Of these, Augustine married twice, and by his second wife, Mary Ball, whom he married on March 17, 1730, there were six children—George, Betty, Samuel, John Augustine, Charles, and Mildred. The family home at Bridges Creek, near the Potomac, in Westmoreland County, was Washington's birthplace, and (February 11, Old Style) February 22, New Style, 1732, was the date. We hear little about his childhood, he being a wholesomely unprecocious boy. Rumors have it that George was coddled and even spoiled by his mother. He had very little formal education, mathematics being the only subject in which he excelled, and that he learned chiefly by himself. But he lived abundantly an out-of-door life, hunting and fishing much, and playing on the plantation. His family, although not rich, lived in easy fashion, and ranked among the gentry.

No Life of George Washington should fail to warn the reader at the start that the biographer labors under the disadvantage of having to counteract the errors and absurdities which the Reverend Mason L. Weems made current in the Life he published the year after Washington died. No one, not even Washington himself, could live down the reputation of a goody-goody prig with which the officious Scotch divine smothered him. The cherry-tree story has had few rivals in publicity and has probably done more than anything else to implant an instinctive contempt of its hero in the hearts of four generations of readers. "Why couldn't George