Getting to Know GW (13): Slavery, Again

I posted earlier about Washington's discomfort with the institution of slavery. For a number of reasons he was uncomfortable with the practice and worked to mitigate some of its harshness on his own estates, but he refused to ever speak out candidly against slavery. This position put the leader of a nation striving towards individual freedom and liberty in not a little hypocritical position. George Orwell said famously in Animal Farm, "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others," and something like this sentiment abound in early America as it surely does in every other political system in one way or another (Orwell was, of course, satirizing communism). 

One of the great myths of Southern slavery is that the abuses and excesses are overblown by our retroactive moralistic judging of the institution and that most slaves were treated well. What's more, they were content in their position and it was only abolitionist agitators that stirred up in their docile minds notions of freedom. Washington held to this notion as well. He believed if he treated his human chattel well and extended a certain amount of liberty to them they would be content in their status as human chattel. 

Washington was disabused of this notion toward the end of his life when two of his most trusted slaved, not to mention the two that had the easiest go of it, ran away as soon as they had opportunity. One was the personal chef named Hercules that Washington had brought from Mount Vernon to the presidential mansion in Philadelphia. The other was Martha's attendant Ona. Both decided they would rather have a harder life and be free than an easy life with bondage.

One of the little known facts of Washington's life (at least I had never heard it before) is that he wrote a will in his final months that set all of his slaves free. I couldn't help but wonder if the disappearance of two beloved slaves whom he assumed with all of the blithe ignorance of the wealthy member of a privileged class were happy in their estate finally caused Washington to see through all of the b.s. his society had constructed to justify slavery. 

Certainly part of his motivation in this benevolent act was to rectify his image with posterity. He had to know that slavery as a system was unsustainable in the long term and that future generations would judge harshly its practitioners. Washington, as we have seen, was hypercritical of his public image. But part of me thinks that there was a more human concern playing out with the old man. He had always felt uncomfortable with slavery and the disappearance of the two best treated slaves put flight to the notion that well-treated slaves will be content in their confinement. The last moral card he held in his deck was shredded. And he did what was in his power hoping that it would make a positive example to other slaveholders in the region. It did not, and 65 years later America finally had its bloodletting that Washington had helped it avoid during his remarkable career. 

Getting to Know GW (12): Parties, and Not the Fun Kind

Most everyone knows that Washington was elected unanimously to the office of the president for the first, last, and certainly only time in our nation's history. He did not campaign, deliver rousing speeches, kiss babies, or try to reach out to Joe Sixpack. He was just like, "Look, who else would it be?" and people were like, "Yeah, you right." There were no challengers and there were no parties.

Washington saw himself as above the idea of a party politician and actively hoped that the partisan spirit would not take root in the United States. Ha! Politicians love arguing and politicians also love being able to blame some other people if stuff goes bad. Parties were bound to happen. None of us can conceive of politics without parties for a reason. The alternative is hard to imagine. Also, you need people to disagree about stuff. You need people to say, "Government is bad! Businesses never do anything shadily or excessively." And you need other people to say, "Government is good. Government can solve all of our problems. You like roads, dontcha?" Both people are idiots but they provide a nice balance to each other.

Anyway, Washington's high-mindedness aside, parties were always going to happen, but Washington was probably pretty p-o'd that the first real division was within his own cabinet. On the federalist team we have Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, who was like, "Remember how we needed a national army to win the war? Maybe we need a strong federal government." On the republican side we have Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State, who was like, "We must be debt free as a nation, but taxes levied to pay those debts are evil. Oh, and the states pretty much have things covered, you snooty northerners." These guys hated each other. They each funded newspapers to sling mud at the other side. The dude Jefferson hired even castigated Washington for owning slaves. Thomas Jefferson, plantation owner of Monticello, baby daddy to Sally Hemings, berating another man for owning slaves. Pot, kettle, etc. It was weird stuff.

Washington's own affections were more of a Federalist nature. The war had impressed upon him the need for a strong federal government, without which the unity and cohesion needed to win another war would be severely lacking. Washington was not a big government Democrat, by today's standards, just convinced that the nation needed an identity as a nation and not merely a conglomerate of states geographically related.

Given this bent, much of Washington's implicit and explicit support was directed toward Hamilton. This, of course, earned him the ire of Jefferson and Madison and some of the other republicans. Which Washington hated. People could badmouth him in that purple prose eighteenth century style and he just had to take it. It frustrated him to no end, but he held the dignity of his office as of more value than scoring political points. Though he vented his exasperation in private, he never let it spill over to the public. He was a good man.

Getting to Know GW (11): What in the World Does the President Do?

By now in our country's history we are all familiar with the role of the president: you promise a bunch of stuff on the campaign trail (maybe you mean it, maybe you don't, frankly it is hard to tell), get elected and realize how hard it is to get stuff done and change things, become a punching bag for whichever side is now out of power, get really gray hair, get one or two things accomplished that because of the weight of partisan opposition suck anyway, have people in your own party disown you for this or that (usually because you don't realize how totally great they are and how much you should be listening to them), convince yourself to run for a second term, usually win it, and then do mostly nothing while contenders in your own party and across the aisle ready themselves for the next election. Then you write a book, smile for some photographs, and pretend like you still give a tinker's damn about this country (sometimes you might even paint pictures of yourself in the bathtub).

But when Washington took office no one had really figured any of this out yet. He was a trailblazer in the role, there was hardly even a historic precedent to look to within the previous 1500 years. Cromwell's Commonwealth? Not a great example.

From my readings of these chapters, and from the perspective of a biographer who is very compassionate towards the challenges Washington faced, it seems like he was competent. When he was a general he didn't win many battles but he won the war by holding things together. The same thing sort of played out in his presidency. He had a number of strategic victories and perhaps amplified the constitutional intent for the role of President, but for the most part he left personally frustrated and with a deeply divided nation.

As to the adjective competent, though, I don't want this to seem as if I am damning with faint praise. Competent is fantastic for a president. It has been awhile since we have gone there as a nation. Maybe it is from going to business school when the book Good to Great was all the rage, but the transformative, charismatic leader usually sets up his successor to fail. Washington refused to become a demigod. Though his ultimate goal was to rise above the fray he was forced to get his hands dirty.

Perhaps his ultimate accomplishment was serving as an emotional ballast in a heady time for revolutions. The French revolution bathed Paris in blood, but there was no similar bloodletting for the United States in the wake of victory. Washington's calm demeanor, however carefully crafted, saved what could have been the almost universal tendency to replace one sort of tyranny with another. Washington restrained the worst impulse of revolutionaries, both in his role as general and as president, and I don't think we can underestimate what an amazing accomplishment that is in light of what could have been.

Some additional thoughts on his presidency to come. Until then, have a wonderful holiday weekend.

Getting to Know GW (10): The General, Retired

I knew in some distant, ill-used corner of my brain that there was a time lapse between the end of the Revolutionary War and Washington's election as the first president of the United States. But I had forgotten that it was nearly six years, roughly the amount of time Obama has been president. Which is to say, quite a while. Six years ago I was child-free, roaming the deserts of west Texas and New Mexico, just starting to read books again. In other words, a not insignificant period of time.

There was a lot of speculation about what role Washington would take. The Constitutional convention that paved the way for the presidency had not yet taken place and there were many who were eager to crown Washington as a sort of new king for the newly-minted nation. If the temptation to receive endless accolades and humbly accept the role of monarch was ever entertained by Washington we have no record of the fact. By all appearances, both public and private, Washington was eager to lay down the mantle of national figurehead and retire to managing Mount Vernon and live out his days in peace and prosperity.

The historical figure Washington very intentionally called to mind was the Roman general Cincinnatus. In ancient Rome, with the fledgling nation under attack by the Aequi, an emergency counsel named Cincinnatus temporary dictator of Rome. He rose to the challenge, soundly defeated the Aequi, and then relinquished the powers he was given the very next day. He held them for less than two weeks.

Washington's reticence to claim power and willingness to retreat to a rural life exemplified the ideals of sacrifice for the nation without a view to personal gain. I mentioned in the last post the degree to which Washington crafted and manipulated his public image and there is no doubt that some of that was at play here. However, with one eye on his public perception, it is nevertheless true that Washington feared a monarchy and aristocracy arising in infant America and was hellbent on resisting the human impulse to crown a king.

While content to play a marginal role in national affairs, it is safe to say that Washington could have had no conception of the ultimate role he would be asked to play as the father of his nation.

Getting to Know GW (9): Self-Fashioning, Then and Now

Self-fashioning is something my generation knows very well. We have been trained to cultivate our lives on social media to the point where it depresses a lot of people to go to these sites. No one ever posts a picture of themselves working a job they hate, having a fight with their spouse, yelling at their kids, or going to bed lonely on Facebook. You only put the good stuff, which distorts people's notions of your life. Even when we put the bad stuff in a post we are really only looking for affirmation ("He IS a jerk"; "Being a mom IS so hard, but you're doing great!"; "I can't believe someone called you [fat, ugly, stupid], you are simply wonderful"; etc.).

Sometimes I am tempted to think that this current malaise is unique. Certainly to a degree it is. Never before have people on such a scale been so careful to present to the world an idealized picture of their life. But a fastidiously guarded care about how we are perceived is nothing new, it simply used to be mostly confined to the upper classes. Nor has it been uncommon to assume that other people--coworkers, friends, fellow parishioners--have it better than you. "The grass is always greener" wasn't coined in 2005, after all.

Washington was convinced of his place in history. He knew this war he was leading was an epochal event. His desire was that posterity have a sense of his management of the colonial forces. As such he was conscious with every letter he wrote that it would one day be read by historians of the war. In fact in the middle of the conflict he assembled a team whose sole duty was to transcribe and bind his correspondence. He gave meticulous directions for how to copy it out and make it look presentable. There was certainly vanity to this, but there was also a desire for a measure of control.

Another aspect of Washington's self-fashioning is found in the number of times he sat for a portrait. This was a tedious and time-consuming affair yet Washington found time in an already overly-packed schedule to sit for numerous portraits. There is no record if he did the duck face for any of these.

Washington carefully molded and often manipulated his public image. By all accounts he was a naturally temperamental and passionate man who subdued himself at all occasions to become the staid, dignified figure demanded of the Father of his nation.

Getting to Know GW (8): The War and the Troops

The Revolutionary War has been called a bloodless affair, an assertion that is true, of course, only in comparison. At least 25,000 American soldiers were killed in the conflict, which puts it on par with Antietam which lasted for one day. But it is far more than we have lost in 11 years in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. Number games like that are silly anyway. The intensity or whatever of a conflict is not necessarily answered by the number of deaths.

What gives this impression more than any relative disparity in the death toll is the long periods of time in which absolutely nothing happened. That is what is most striking about the war to me. Wars were still fought in seasons in the eighteenth century. Troops moved by foot or by boat, if available. As many died from disease as died on the battlefield. Brutal stuff, even if there was not day to day fighting.

Another striking feature of the war is the frequently cited difference between the colonial troops and the French and English regulars. The French in their blue, the English in their red. The military discipline to their life. The French and English officers, though on different sides of the war, had more in common than the French did with their American comrades. America was a provincial backwater and hardly worth the efforts expended by the soldiers of great empires.

What was so remarkable about Washington's performance in the war was not his military skill and battle acumen. He lost far more battles than he won. His true genius lay in keeping the army together at all. For this he was widely lauded by both sides. There was no regular army, no standing continental army, just a ragtag group of militias with varying terms of employment. Washington kept this army together and kept it moving. It was his singular accomplishment in the war.

This ability to keep rival factions together is what paved the way for Washington to become our first president and what allowed our fledgling nation the time needed for the French to mastermind the brilliant siege of Cornwallis at Yorktown that ultimately led to victory. Sometimes you really do win by just not actively losing.

Getting to Know GW (7): Valley Forge

Valley Forge is easily one of the most iconic places in American lore. For anyone who has set through civics classes in high school or social studies in elementary school we can well remember the tale of the beleaguered continental troops and their harrowing winter in Pennsylvania. 

As I read through the chapter in the Washington biography on this time, though, something struck me which didn't when I was a kid, because when you are a kid things like this never occur to you. Or, I should say, when you are a pampered American kid things like this never occur to you. That was a freaking miserable winter.

It was one of the coldest in history and there were lots of people that did not even have a blanket. It was 40 degrees here the other night and we put an extra blanket on our bed. In our heated house. Upstairs, where warm air tends to congregate anyway. Didn't want my toesies to be cold. 

Think of the coldest you have ever been. Then imagine that, unbroken, for four months. Now imagine you are the hungriest you have ever been. Also, imagine that unbroken for four months. To top it off picture a well-trained army settled snugly in New York that when the ground thaws is going to come and try to kill you with a musket ball or a bayonet.

Washington and his staff shared a tiny house with men literally sleeping in piles on the wooden floor. Firewood was rationed. There was no food. Thank God for rum.

You can understand why Washington's grasp on the army was often tenuous and why the threat of mutiny was omnipresent. Here are men who have abandoned their homes and fields to starve or freeze to death on some godforsaken clearing. 

Wars back then were matters of attrition. One side outlasted the other side as much as they beat them. In fact, there were very few battles, so to speak. Washington's army went almost three years without a significant engagement. But when troops freeze to death or drop dead of sunstroke or dysentery or just give up hope and leave, that changes the whole face of war.

I cannot imagine what those men went through, what they endured. I have never had to be cold. Most of the coldest times in my life have been because I decided voluntarily to go to the mountains in the winter and strap a piece of fiberglass to my feet and rocket down a hill. Not exactly noble. But deep, bone-chilling cold, gut-wrenching hunger, and myriad other privations were the struggles that built this country. It really does make it hard to not feel as if we are squandering everything away.

On Torture, Briefly*

The U.S. has routinely tortured enemy combatants since we began fighting the War on Terror (I thought we would have won that thing by now, kind of like our stunning success in the War on Drugs; ambiguous wars are always a great idea). Some captives have been high level targets with intimate knowledge of future plans, probably, though we have no clear picture on what if any potential attacks have been stopped because of torture. For anyone who has seen Zero Dark Thirty you will know that even waterboarding, which is variously labeled "stress positions" or "enhanced interrogation techniques" is flat out torture. If you dispute that I question your logic and your humanity as well as assume you simply enjoy nice Orwellian phrases like "enhanced interrogation techniques."

I am not writing now to debate whether or not we have tortured enemy combatants and others unlucky enough to get caught in the intervening years of the conflicts in the wake of 9/11. I am writing to address a two-pronged comment I have heard from torture defenders, which has always struck me as falling well short of any American ideal I hold: war is hell, and they torture our captives so there is reciprocity there.

First of all, I am not sure I have heard the war is hell defense being used by anyone who has fought in a war. Moreover, torture isn't taking place on a battlefield but in a black site prison camp hundreds of miles from the conflict. It is not a question of someone snapping under the strain of battle and collecting scalps like Brad Pitt's character in Legends of the Fall. This is cold, calculated torture of a defenseless combatant. So war is hell is a true sentiment in the abstract but doesn't really play any part in justifying the torture of prisoners by people not even in the military to begin with.

Second, as to the question of reciprocity, this one holds even less weight for me than the war is hell obstruction. Isn't the very point of America that we are different, morally and ethically, than those we oppose? That we hold ourselves to a higher moral standard than our enemies. Hitler tortures American GIs, we treat German prisoners humanely. We don't respond in kind, because our moral calculus isn't that of the people we fight. We do not play down to their level. For people who believe in American exceptionalism to argue that we should be just as brutal to our enemies as they are to us is an argument that collapses on itself. What makes us exceptional if we do that?

What prompted me to write this post was an excerpt I read in Chernow's George Washington biography I am working my way through. The British were brutal with American captives, the mercenary Hessians even worse, decapitating soldiers, quartering them, hanging them and not letting them die. Brutal, nasty stuff. When the colonials win their first victory and capture hundreds of Hessian and British troops Washington makes the decision to treat them humanely, personally escorting two injured officers to quarter in a house and directing his surgeon to perform life-saving amputations.

When asked why he was refusing to respond in kind to the British and Hessian provocations, Washington told a fellow officer that "British captives should have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren" (282). That is how our nation started, that is what we used to be about. Do we have more to fear from the specter of Islamic terrorism than Washington did from British and Hessian brutality? If he was to be captured, he would have been one to be hung, brought down from the noose, gutted while still alive, then drawn and quartered with his body parts sent throughout the colonies and his head mounted on a spike in front of some commandeered colonial mansion. Yet he refused to descend to the level of his enemy.

Proverbs 25:21-22 tells us "If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty give him water to drink, for you will heap burning coals on his head, and the LORD will reward you." The British wanted to paint the colonial insurgents as a mass of uncivilized and barbaric insurrectionists, but Washington refused to allow his army to be portrayed thus. His sterling conduct won our fledgling nation the admiration of the world. Can we say the same about our prisoner policies today?

*I wrote this post over the weekend and automatically set it to post today. I wondered as I wrote if it was still relevant. I mean, how much do we talk about torture these days? But I decided to go ahead with it and lo and behold Sarah Palin dropped this bomb at a recent NRA convention. Now even if you concede that in some situations torture is warranted (which I don't), to flippantly compare it to one of the most sacred sacraments of the church can only be considered massively disrespectful. Yet people in the audience ate it up. Disgusting. I have never been a Palin fan, having always felt her aw-shucks, down-home conservative Christian bit was an act, and this confirms it for me. How can one claim Jesus as Lord and gleefully defile the image of God in another human being (yes, terrorists are also made in the image of God in the same way as an American) and at the same time jokingly compare it to the very symbol of our new life in Christ. Despicable.

Getting to Know GW (6): The War Begins

The colonial troops were at a massive disadvantage at the start of the war. Not only were they untrained and unseasoned in combat, but there was not even a proper continental army. Regional militias with various time commitments ruled the day and almost cost the fledgling nation the war before it even began.

Did you know that one of the earliest significant engagements of the war was in New York City? I had no idea, or that knowledge was sacrificed to make room for something else in my mind. It was a disaster for the American troops. New York played well into the British superiority at sea, with its multiple intersecting waterways. Buoyed by 8,000 Hessian mercenaries the British landed in Long Island and soon pressed their advantage, routing our troops in Brooklyn through an inexplicably unguarded pass. The Hessians were brutal in their slaughter, decapitating soldiers and wielding their heads on spiked.

Washington was incredibly demoralized. Troops retreated at random, the officers had no control. He felt everything slipping. In a stroke of genius and providence Washington led the 9,500 members of the continental contingent across the East River to lower Manhattan (roughly where the Brooklyn Bridge is today) in a single night. Notoriously difficult, the river that night was calm as a sea of glass. The sailors put cloth over their oars to mute the sound. In the morning, without everyone yet across a thick fog rolled over the waters. One soldier claimed visibility at around six feet. The rest of the troops made it across, all 9,500 without a single incident.

Despite the miraculous retreat to Manhattan, the colonials were still hemmed in on all sides by British boats and troops. Washington and his generals fled north to the Harlem Heights and left a thin line of troops along the riverbanks from lower Manhattan up to Harlem. More disaster, and more tactical blunders, lay ahead. 

Fort Washington, at the upper end of Manhattan island, was another poorly conceived fortress. It was meant to serve as a bulwark against the British navy, but proved inferior to that task. Moreover, there was no water supply in the fort, requiring colonials to go to the river for water. Obstinately, the continental army attempted to hold the fort. Though they rained artillery on to the charging Hessians, the fort was quickly overrun and the British claimed 3,000 prisoners of war.

At this time the forces of the continental army were split with Washington rushing to New Jersey in an attempt to head off any British advance on Philadelphia. The army fractured and in disarray it is difficult to imagine the tumult in Washington's mind as he watched his beleaguered forces sullenly retreat into New Jersey, burning bridges behind as they went. The British offered pardon to those who swore fealty to the crown and thousands in New York and New Jersey rushed to do so. Everything was falling apart. Washington knew with certainty that he would be executed as a traitor if he was to be captured.

Yet by all accounts he cut a stunningly noble figure as he led the army, tail between its legs, across New Jersey. It made such an impression on Thomas Paine that he wrote that if people still venerated heroes as gods Washington would unquestionably be worshiped.

The debacle in New York also proved to Washington that it would do the continentals no good to challenge the might of the British navy. The war must be fought inland. His back up against the wall, the contracts of the militia expiring at the end of the year, he steeled his resolve for the Christmas Day crossing of the Delaware and a desperate effort to change the momentum of the war and restore morale to the colonies.

Getting to Know GW (5): Odd Providence

George Washington was a man who benefited enormously from the death of people he loved. That is an odd sentence, but undoubtedly true. Without the death of his father, elder brother, elder brother's wife and children, and Martha's daughter from her first marriage there is simply no way that Washington becomes the man we know him to be. 

What the death of each provided was not some psychic boost, of course, but financial. Washington was only born into marginal privilege. He was ambitious and dedicated and a workhorse, but there is only so much one can do without means, especially in as rigorously hierarchical a world as colonial Virginia. It was the untimely deaths of each of the people above that gave Washington the means to lead the life of a gentleman planter, inherit Mount Vernon and turn it into the now famous landmark, dress in the highest fashion, and ultimately earn a seat on the Continental Congress that eventually catapulted him to the commanding generalship of the Continental Army.

In one of those odd turns of providence, then, it was the suffering he endured and the deaths of those he loved that paved the way for Washington to become General Washington and then President Washington. What was painful for a season catapulted him to his ultimate calling. 

This world is a strange place.

Getting to Know GW (4): George and Martha

Ever since watching Dazed and Confused my opinion on the relationship between George and Martha Washington will forever be filtered through this clip.

Now, I am not sure of the accuracy of that statement, but it is undeniable that Martha Washington was a hip, hip, hip lady and a loyal copartner with her famous husband. By all accounts they had a wonderful marriage, built on trust and loyalty and respect and love. Though the love between them was not the intensely romantic love that our culture idealizes.

George experienced that type of infatuation with another woman, a married woman, Sally Fairfax, the wife of one of his good friends. There is absolutely no evidence that the emotional affair between the two was ever consummated in any way, but the young George Washington was clearly smitten with the beautiful and sensual Fairfax. Shortly before his engagement to Martha he wrote an ambiguous letter to Mrs. Fairfax which he could plausibly say was written about Martha, but was definitely written to declare his love for Sally Fairfax. The intensity of the letter undermines the notion of Washington as solely a cold and calculating, unfeeling man. But it also underscores his control over his emotions.

The letter is a farewell letter, not a plea for reciprocation. Sally Fairfax was bound to his friend William, he is binding himself to Martha. Providence had something else in mind for them. Thus George gladly married Martha. And while passion can hardly be said to be the bedrock of their love, their companionship and mature love helped steady Washington through the many trials he endured and through the many roles he would serve in the founding of our nation. Passion alone, which wanes indelibly, would not have been fit to serve in that capacity.

Plus, isn't facility with weed more important anyway?

Getting to Know GW (3)

George Washington was a life-long slaveholder. He was a landowner and a tobacco farmer, and in eighteenth century Virginia it was difficult, if not impossible, to be both of those things and now own slaves.

There are some who look at this fact and jump immediately to the judgment that Washington was therefore a terrible person and one whom we have need of taking seriously in any other respect. These people seem to believe that if they were inserted into Washington's situation they would have adopted an abolitionist stance and toiled in their fields with the help of unionized farmhands. These are people for whom, in other words, history essentially does not exist.

I do not follow this stringent ethic, because it would relegate most of our ancestors as deplorable people for one thing or another. But it is problematic in another regard. Washington, like Jefferson, was deeply ambivalent about the morality of slaveholding. He saw the evils therein, but had no idea how to move beyond it. Jefferson famously compared slavery to holding a wolf by the ears. You don't like it but at the same time you don't dare let go.

Ambivalence noted, it was also immensely profitable to have a workforce that was paid in a quart of corn per day and twenty anchovies a month, with one new set of clothing per annum, as our first president's slaves were allotted. If I am ambivalent about the inequities and immorality of pornography but watch it every night, what exactly has my ambivalence gained me? Moreover, ever concerned with efficiency, part of Washington's problem with the institution was that it was hard to get quality labor from an unpaid and unmotivated workforce. Presumably, an industrious slave would be of more value to him and would have erased a measure of his moral qualm.  

There is plenty of evidence that Washington was a conscientious slaveholder. Visitors to Mount Vernon remarked upon Washington's benevolence and relative charity to his slaves.  He refused to break up slave families and honored the slave marriages that had no legal standing in the colony. He instructed the overseers to be lenient and spare the whip when possible. He struggled to be fair-minded in disputes and was reticent to go to the extent of the law (which was essentially non-existent; murder was legal as long as there was wrongdoing on the part of the slave). However, there were limited instances that recalcitrant escapees were sold to Caribbean sugar plantations both as punishment for their wrongdoing and to set an example to other indolent slaves that it could always be worse.

Overall, Chernow treated this topic quite fairly, refusing to castigate Washington for defying the prevailing morality of his time, nor neglecting the fact that this is problematic for any attempted hagiography of the Founder of Our Nation. Perhaps what needs to be said here was best said by Tobias Lear (good name), Washington's presidential secretary: "The negroes are not treated as blacks in general are in this country. They are clothed and fed as well as any laboring people whatever and they are not subject to the lash of a domineering overseer--but they are still slaves."

Getting to Know GW (2)

(This post is part of a series about our first president that I am writing as I work through Ron Chernow's epic one volume biography of the man. If you find yourself like me, knowing next to nothing about Washington and his life then I invite you to read on.)

I remember as a kid some legend of Washington as almost impervious to bullets. I remember some story of an Indian chief instructing his warriors to take aim at Washington and somehow missing. It is the kind of story that smacks of myth-making, a piece of just-too-goodedness. It is also true.

I wrote last time of Washington's disastrous defeat at Fort Necessity, in what was to come to be the first real skirmish of the French and Indian War. Washington was a part of another devastating defeat in that conflict in the summer of 1755. Washington was under the command of General Edward Braddock. Braddock would be a member of a growing list of British military that underestimated the difficulties of waging war in America.

French and Indian forces met the British at what became known as the Battle of the Monongahela. The British, who outnumbered the French by 2 to 1, were absolutely routed. By the evening of the ninth of July, the British forces were in full retreat back up the road they had just built. Braddock would die from wounds sustained in battle during the retreat.

Braddock had been injured early in the battle and Washington had taken over default command, riding the length and breadth of the British lines and trying to rally his men. Of the 300 British casualties, over 100 were officers. The opposing forces trained their guns on Washington. Upon retreat he noticed four bullet holes in his coat and had two horses he had been riding shot out from underneath him.

Fifteen years later he met one of the chiefs who had been fighting with the French at Monongahela. He told Washington that he had specifically ordered his warriors to fire directly at Washington, to no effect. The chief had concluded that some great spirit had protected Washington and would guide him to momentous things in the future.

At the very least, this story ought to train the skeptic in each of us to quiet it down a bit. Sometimes things happen that are too good to be true.

Getting to Know GW (1)

I recently came to, what was to me, an appalling realization: I know next to nothing about George Washington. I remember a few anecdotes from civics lessons as a kid--the cherry tree, crossing the Delaware, Mount Vernon, that wig*--but I have no solid idea of the man. To me he is a wooden figure, not mythic exactly for in my mind's eye there is nothing very fetching about him that might shroud him in myth. He was simply a Great Man, the reluctant first president of our fledgling nation.

Ron Chernow, over the course of 900 or so pages, is helping both to soften the wooden image into more human materials and to disabuse me of the notion of Washington being anything other than stunningly ambitious for power and prestige throughout his life (at least his young life. This dadgum book is 900 pages and this world weary father of two young ones only has so much reading time day by day.)

I am thinking of blogging a bit through this Great Man's Great Life on the assumption that there are others out there equally ignorant of the details as me. Allow me to proffer one story to begin:

As a young man, Washington rose quickly through the twin engines of self-promotion and lofty friends to head a regiment of the colonial army in Virginia. Still a loyal servant to the crown, Washington led his contingent along with a small company of British regulars and assorted other colonials westward into the Ohio territory (part of modern day Pennsylvania) to counter the incursion of French forces into the region. Washington had previously acted as an ambassador to the French in this burgeoning conflict, basically telling them to scram or face the fury of England. The French, emboldened by broad Indian support and a greater feel for the realities of warfare in the New World rebuffed the challenge and continued to press into Ohio.

Thus Washington was dispatched to fortify the frontier defenses with a woefully small contingent. And here's the thing: he failed many, many times. Foremost was the location he chose for what he called Fort Necessity. It was low-lying and subject to becoming a swamp when it rained. It was too close to a dense forest from which French sharpshooters could hide and shoot relatively unhindered. It was also too small for his garrison. 

When the French attacked the colonials were thrown into disarray. Then it started to pour. Their trenches filled with water as did the grounds of the fort. It was a miserable and humiliating defeat. The French viewed the attack as the response to a provocation by Washington when he had earlier ambushed a group of French soldiers a few miles from the fort. Washington maintained that his attack was justified because the French contingent was spying on Washington's fortifications, but there is little to show how that might be the case. Moreover, one of those killed in the attack was a French ambassador to the English on a diplomatic mission. In a weird way, then, Washington fired the first salvo in what turned into the bloody French and Indian War. That the French saw this as retaliation and not a proper battle is why Washington and the rest of the colonials were allowed to march back to Virginia with their colors.

Colonel Washington was 21 years old.

*It also turns out that Washington never wore a wig. He powdered his hair. File this under mildly interesting.