In an effort to do less doomscrolling during the COVID-19 pandemic, I have retreated to the past. My present obsession is the Revolutionary War and the early chapters of American history following the war. Two podcasts were my gateway into this era. The first was “The History of US Economics.” The second, and my current morning listen, is American Revolution by Michael Troy, which slowly traces each step of the Revolution. Having spent the last few months listening to these podcasts, I picked up Alexis Coe’s biography on George Washington, titled You Never Forget Your First, to fill in some of the missing details and context surrounding our nation’s first president.
Coe’s title is of course catchy, and the playful imagery of the book jacket reveals that this is not going to be a dry history tome. Clocking in at just over 200 pages, the biography is a quick read filled with helpful charts and graphics. For example, one table offers quotes from several founding fathers illustrating how their fondness for Washington significantly diminished by the time he left office in 1797. Other charts track the lives of the slaves on Washington’s estate and detail the outcomes of some of the slave families who were split up upon Washington’s death. Coe skips all the blow by blow details of battles during the Revolutionary War and quickly passes over much of the time Washington spent in private life at Mt. Vernon.
I learned a great deal from this book, and in our present moment of revisiting the lives and legacies of our founding fathers, Coe’s book has hit the shelves at the right time. She is clearly fascinated with the historiography of Washington and takes to town the legions of male historians who have obsessed over describing Washington’s muscular thighs in great detail while neglecting to fully explore his contradictions on the issue of slavery. The one critique that I am sure will be leveled against the book is that it oversimplifies complex historical events. Coe also clearly finds a lot of issues with historian Ron Chernow and the sometimes broad interpretive license he and others have taken with primary documents from Washington’s era. Despite the short length of the book, Coe offers valuable insights into the source material that has allowed us to reconstruct Washington’s life.
Here are a few of the most interesting things I learned from the book.
1) Washington was cash poor
Upon his death, it was discovered that Washington owned about 50,000 acres of land with his estate at Mt. Vernon only being a portion of his total holdings that stretched into Ohio. While Washington famously forfeited a salary while serving as general of the Continental Army, Coe narrates how Washington consistently found himself cash-strapped throughout his life. The general was one of the richest men in the new country when one included land wealth, but he took out loans on occasion when he didn’t have quite enough cash in the bank.
Coe dives into the great contradiction of Washington’s life in that he opposed slavery but never took definitive action during his lifetime to free the hundreds of slaves he owned. Washington famously freed all of his slaves in his will, something Jefferson did not do despite holding similar beliefs to Washington. While most historians note the need to maintain the support of the South during the Constitutional Convention as the driving factor that prevented Washington from taking a hard stand on slavery during his time in public life, Coe suggests that Washington also did not want to sacrifice his own finances. In addition, Washington seemed to hold the patronizing view that his slaves would be better off under his care then they would be had they been freed. While we often seem to give Washington a pass as a good-man constrained by the society and realpolitik of his time, Coe’s probing into Washington’s personal motivations is powerful. Washington’s misgivings about slavery but lack of action certainly reverberate through history.
2) Washington was almost replaced
While historical lore remembers Washington as a master general, he had serious ups and downs at the beginning of the war that almost saw him replaced. The general lost more battles than he won and was criticized as indecisive at times during the Revolution; nevertheless, he of course won the war. Coe condenses the Revolution down to an extended table listing out the key battles of the conflict. She instead spends her time describing how Washington worked to drum up and strengthen public opinion for the war among colonists. Among his many accomplishments, he built an impressive spy ring and managed to hold together a ragtag army that was almost always without proper supplies and never paid on time.
While he may have been faulted as indecisive during the early stages of the war, Coe notes that Washington was a man of true character who set the critical precedent of deferring to the legislature and rarely expressing his own private disagreements with the body. There was never a doubt that Washington would peacefully resign his command at the end of the war and support the supreme power of the legislature over the military despite his mammoth popularity by 1783. One of my favorite anecdotes from the book is when Coe describes the moving ceremony in Annapolis where Washington resigned his command in late 1783 and returned home to Mt. Vernon.
3) Washington seemed to hate Jefferson
Despite their shared Virginia roots, Washington died in 1799 apparently on very poor terms with Thomas Jefferson. Although he never formally joined the party, Washington shared the views of the Federalists who endorsed a strong centralized government with extensive power over states. Jefferson was one of the founding members of the Democratic Republicans and was an advocate for more state power. This is an oversimplification of each party, but there were ultimately a variety of domestic and international issues where the two disagreed. While we tend to believe the politics of the past were more cordial than today, apparently Jefferson took to writing extensive critiques of Washington in the newspapers under a pseudonym even while he was still in the Washington administration as Secretary of State. Washington and James Monroe really loathed each other as well, and Monroe apparently wrote the first American political tell-all book after Washington recalled him as the ambassador to France.
All this in-fighting should not necessarily be a surprise, but it’s a reminder that politics is a rough game and that the early days of the republic were not necessarily a golden age. If anything, the founding fathers were winging it and figuring it out as they went along. My grade school history book talked about the important precedent of Washington stepping down after two terms, but it failed to mention many of the other precedents his administration set in terms of forming a cabinet and establishing what the communication channels would look like between the legislature and the executive.
I have often found myself to have a significant gap in my historical knowledge regarding the decade of 1780-1790. America wins the war in 1783, and the Constitution is written in 1787. I, and I assume others, take these events as facts and fail to recognize the immense complexity and debate that occurred during this decade as the nascent republic was stood up. I appreciated that Coe spent the bulk of her time in this era and shed a light on how many of the events of this era were not foregone conclusions. Rather, there is evidence that Washington’s distinct character played a key role in shaping the outcome of this time period.
Jeff Cangialosi 