Suggest a Washington biography

Cafe Society
1

Reading the 1776 musical thread and watching the John Adams miniseries has reminded me of what I feel is a strange oddity among our Founding Fathers - Washington is such a blank slate! Does anybody really feel they have an understanding of Washington as a human being? The other guys have public personae that can be encapsulated in a moment - John Adams is “obnoxious and disliked”, Jefferson was the smartest dude in the White House when he “dined alone”, Franklin “fart[ed] proudly”, etc. But Washington? “Father of his Country”? He had bad teeth? What? Chopped down a cherry tree? Pitched some coins around?

So are there any biographies that you really feel give you the character of the man? Let you feel you know the guy? Was it just that he was exactly what he appeared to be, is that it? Because thinking about it, it’s an incredible accomplishment - he Didn’t Screw It Up. This was the guy who had to figure out exactly what it is that a President of the United States does, and he didn’t screw it up for the rest of them. In fact, he did better than anybody thought he would by standing by his word and going home after two terms. I can’t point to anything particular as a signifying event of his terms in office, except maybe the Jay treaty, but it was obviously an important eight years… an eight years which as a casual yet interested observer of history are completely devoid of personality.

There’s a fantastic display in the folk art museum in Colonial Williamsburg of Washington mourning memorabilia, needlework, and other “Oh God Washington Is Dead What Shall We Do” things - but honestly I don’t think those people, his contemporaries, had any more idea what the guy was about than I do. So can anybody suggest a biography or any other source that offers any real insight?

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Check out Parson Weems. A lot of GW’s biographers cover up the cherry tree incident but Weems presents it in all its deforesting squalor.

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And while you’re at it, imagine anything that you would have liked Washington to have done and said, write it up, and tack it into Weems’s book – it’s bound to be as true as anything Weems wrote.

I recommend James Thomas Flexner’s Washington: The Indispensible Man, a short one-volume biography that’ll get you an idea. There’s several multi-volume works out there (oh so many…Washington Irving wrote a five-volume piece in the 1840s, and there’s a more recent two-volume thing that I haven’t read yet), but Washington’s basic inscrutability, I think, Flexner will reveal well enough.