In the fall of 1796, a host of issues plagued President Washington. From a diplomatic standpoint, the United States still faced the threat of being pulled into the war between Great Britain and France. At home Washington could not keep cabinet advisers. After Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Henry Knox resigned their respective posts, Washington not only found second-rate candidates, but they refused his offers in rapid succession. Meanwhile, the partisan attacks from the Republicans’ menacing press grew more vicious. Washington, however, had one headache that eclipsed all of the official ones that came with the burden of his office — his step-grandson George Washington Parke Custis. As a child Washy was a delight to his grandparents, who reared him, but as the boy grew into an adolescent, he began to display the same worrying personality trait toward indolence that his deceased father had exhibited years earlier.
As a grandfather Washington was determined to not make the same mistakes with Washy that he had made with his father, Jacky Custis. When Jacky was a boy, Washington was a new husband and stepfather, who, fearful of offending his wife, deferred to her in the disciplining of her son. Martha doted on the boy, and her spoiling him took its toll. Jacky grew up knowing that one day he would inherit the Custis fortune, so he therefore found no need to apply himself in his studies. Washington did what he could to curb the boy’s worst excesses, but he was unable to mold Jacky into the man that he wanted him to be. With Washy, however, he had a second chance.
Washington wanted his grandson to grow into a good citizen of the new republic and not become just another rich young fop. He was determined that the boy should have the best American education possible and decided that when Washy was old enough he would enroll at the College of New Jersey, which was sufficiently conservative without being too puritanical and was far enough away from the diversions of the big cities New York and Philadelphia that could lure the boy from his studies. The College of New Jersey was also an ideal selection for placating Martha, who worried incessantly whenever Washy was away from home. The school was not so far that Washy would be out of reach of the presidential mansion.
Once Washy was enrolled, his grandfather kept in close contact with him and with his tutors to monitor his progress. With regard to study, Washington assured his grandson, “It is yourself who is to derive immediate benefit from these [studies]. Your country may do it hereafter. The more knowledge you acquire, the greater will be the probability of succeeding in both, and the greater will be your thirst for more.”1
Washy reassured his grandfather that he was working hard, to which Washington replied with a mixture of enthusiasm and relief: “The assurances you give me of applying diligently to your studies, and fulfilling your obligations which are enjoined by your Creator and due to his creatures, are highly pleasing and satisfactory to me. I rejoice in it on two accounts; first, as it is the sure means of laying the foundation of your own happiness, and rendering you, if it should please God to spare your life, a useful member of society hereafter; and secondly, that I may, if I live and enjoy the pleasure, reflect that I have been, in some degree, instrumental in effecting these purposes.”2
Washington’s advice to his grandson captures the meaning that reading had in his own long life. Although Washy did eventually abandon his studies when he found living in his grandfather’s shadow too difficult, his grandfather’s message did not entirely fall on deaf ears. When Washy published his memoir of life with his grandfather, he included his grandfather’s letters, thereby communicating to a wider reading public of young Americans that the father of the nation had placed a premium on education.
Study, in part, made Washington an effective public servant. Moreover, the newly developed concept of republican citizenship mirrored Washington’s life. What is most interesting about this fact is that the majority of Washington’s admirers, even those who were somewhat close to him, were largely unaware of the extent of his self-directed reading and the significance that it played over the course of his long life in the public spotlight. When considering that Washington consistently occupied positions wherein he was surrounded by individuals who were more qualified than he was, his achievements take on a greater significance. Reading was the way that he compensated for his limited childhood education, and for the most part it served him well.
This book demonstrates the value that Washington placed on reading. Over time Washington absorbed the knowledge that he gleaned from his reading material, and he effectively put it to use. He also learned another lesson from his reading, however, that was equally as important: Washington came to understand the power of the printed word and how that power influenced society and current events.
This book begins with the question of why Washington developed certain reading preferences. Losing his father at age eleven cut short Washington’s educational career, and from a young age he had to make his own way. As such, he was careful, especially in his earlier years, to keep this shortcoming hidden from those he was trying to impress. Although Washington could not have known it at the time, his never having had the chance to study abroad the way his older half-brothers did was actually a blessing, for Washington then took a very practically oriented path in terms of his intellectual development that served him well.
Washington was driven. He was always ambitious and was relentless in the pursuit of his goals, a personality trait that never diminished with the passage of time. After his father’s death, he set about mastering the knowledge required to become a surveyor so he could earn money and purchase land. His older half-brother Lawrence mentored the young Washington and whetted his appetite for a military career. As a militia officer, Washington turned his intellectual energies briefly toward the rapidly emerging field of the military arts, for he recognized that he was completely unprepared for the rank and position he held. He began reading the books that his British counterparts read; however, when tasked with raising a new Virginia Regiment, Washington turned away from military history and theory in favor of more practical texts on tactics and small unit organization. When it became clear that he was not to get the British commission he had pursued so desperately, Washington abandoned military studies forever, or so he thought.
Instead of military science, Washington developed a keen interest in the science of agriculture, which became one of his great passions. He embarked on a new career as a planter and set his sights on a new goal of making it to the top of provincial Virginian society. After his marriage, he was charged with managing multiple plantations spread throughout Virginia, many of which were not profitable. He therefore studied every available treatise on agriculture with scholarly intensity, making notes and engaging in experiments that would enable him to abandon the unprofitable practice of tobacco cultivation. Washington’s goal of ascending to the top of the social ladder was only partly based on economic success. As an elite planter, he was expected to play a role in the public life of the colony. He became a burgess and a vestryman and quickly saw that lawyers and career politicians with considerably more education and experience surrounded him in the House of Burgesses. Washington, who was never comfortable with political power, worked his way up through the ranks of the burgesses by serving on committees on military issues. He took time to do some targeted background reading on some of the major issues of the day, such as the bishop controversy, before speaking up more in the spirited legislative sessions. Eventually he got off the backbench and became one of the more respected burgesses in the assembly.
When tensions began to flare between Great Britain and the colonies, Washington evolved into a revolutionary ahead of many of his contemporaries. His experiences with the British military bureaucracy and the utterly unregulated system of exchange between planters and their British agents had shown him that the British never considered the colonists as fellow subjects with the same rights as native-born Englishmen. In recognition of his status within Virginia, he was selected a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1774 and again in 1775. When the Second Continental Congress convened in 1775, the colonies clearly were on a collision course for war, and in discussions about raising an army, the delegates debated who should command it. Washington seemed an obvious choice as he was a native-born American with military experience. Other candidates were more qualified, to be sure, but none of them were Americans by birth. Washington was aware of the talk buzzing about him, and the familiar feelings of inadequacy began to build in his mind. He scoured Philadelphia’s bookshops, purchased every military treatise he could find, and read them. He would not have long to wait before that useful knowledge was put to the test.
Washington’s military reading during the American Revolution is perhaps the most significant because it highlights both his shortcomings and the key to his ultimate success. Always the practical reader, he wasted no time with high-flown military theory and the histories of Europe’s greatest wars. He devoted the little spare time he had to reading field manuals and attempting to learn how to raise and maneuver entire armies on wide-open battlefields. His first real attempt to put this knowledge into practice after the British abandoned Boston was in New York, but the battle was a disaster for Washington’s fledgling army. This enormous defeat, however, did have a silver lining. The experience of the New York campaign left Washington more than humbled as his glaring shortcomings as a field commander were revealed. In the long term, it was a blessing, for Washington’s awareness of his own inadequacies as a tactician kept him from becoming overconfident and risking his precious soldiers in large-scale battles that would have overwhelmed his force. His shortfalls as a commanding general forced him to arrive at what was the correct strategic conclusion: he did not have to win the battles in order to win the war. As Washington was aggressive by nature, he might have been prone to let his fighting spirit rule over his common sense if he had had the European military educational pedigree. The secret to his strategic thinking was that thanks to his lack of a European military education, he was able to evolve into a general who went against the grain of eighteenth-century military convention.
The confederation period saw Washington work to preserve the reputation that he had so carefully constructed over the course of his public life. In this effort, Washington actively sought to become involved in the world of print media, collaborating with historians and biographers who were attempting to generate the first chronicles of the American Revolution. Here Washington did his part to shape the mythology that was already growing up around him. When the time came for him to put his reputation at stake at the Constitutional Convention, Washington was among the first to advocate taking the ratification debate to the newspapers to ensure that the case for the Constitution reached a wider audience. Washington made this suggestion because as a voracious newspaper reader, he understood the power of the press in shaping debates. He never suspected that the same press would one day turn on him.
When he served as the nation’s first chief executive, Washington needed to know how the public viewed his presidential performance, for he had no precedent to guide him. He turned first to the newspapers for this information. As an opposition press developed and a fierce newspaper war broke out between the Federalists and Jeffersonians, Washington came under personal attack. Feeling burned, he concluded that he could not trust the papers, so he looked beyond them to printed sermons to ascertain how the people were responding to his policies. The presidency took a significant physical and emotional toll on Washington, who, on entering his final retirement, determined that he had to shore up his legacy for posterity.
One of Washington’s chief concerns in his final years was setting the historical record straight. He assembled a massive archive of government documents and records from every phase of his public career. Combined with his voluminous correspondence, this collection would have amounted to the first presidential library had he lived to complete the project. In an extraordinary example of the maturation of his thinking, Washington also decided after years of study, experience, and reflection to emancipate his slaves in his will and support their transition to free society. In this act of manumission he was generations ahead of his time. Washington further sought to make a lasting impact on education by setting up endowments at the primary and university levels so that as he himself had done, future generations would learn to think as Americans.
This book finally explores where Washington did his reading. His library tells us a great deal about his attitude toward the practice of reading and what he expected to derive from it. Understanding Washington’s design for his library provides a broader context for examining what he read and how he used the knowledge he gained from it. He sought to gain the most useful information contained in his specially selected reading as rapidly as possible and quickly put it to direct use without distractions. The library at Mount Vernon was Washington’s refuge, a place where he could read, think, and plan for the future out of the public eye.
Washington was a practical reader. Previous biographers including Paul Longmore had established that much. The seriousness with which Washington approached the act of reading, however, has been largely overlooked until now. While the purpose of this book is not to remake Washington’s image into a sort of closeted scholar, it does argue that reading was a key component behind Washington’s success. The real contribution that this volume makes is that it takes one step closer to understanding how Washington’s mind worked. While his self-directed reading was not anywhere near that of Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, Washington outshone them all by combining the knowledge he gained from his reading with his natural talent for leadership into a masterful performance. Washington has always been held up as a shining example of the quintessential American leader. With this book, the understanding of how he rose to that status now has a new dimension. So too does our understanding of how he shaped a new national identity.