At the close of many months of working with Douglas Southall Freeman’s George Washington the abridger of it faces a paradox in setting out to write an introduction, however brief, to the shorter Washington. Why should he add words to this volume when he has been trying so long and so hard, sometimes almost desperately, to retain the essence of Dr. Freeman’s work and, at the same time, to subtract as many words as possible from the story of a life so full of meaning to Americans that it should be told as completely as possible? The answer is twofold: First, it is incumbent on one who has worked so closely with a book to give his view of its meaning and relevance; second, it is only fair that the reader know how and to what extent this one-volume biography of Washington differs from Freeman’s monumental and definitive seven-volume biography of him.
Washington’s life can stand almost any number of books about it. It can also withstand—in Stephen Vincent Benét’s phrase—the “picklock biographer,” the peephole historian, the myth-maker, and the muckraker. It has withstood many bad books. Freeman’s is certainly one of the few that it has deserved. George Washington is the true and complete story—fully researched, felicitously written, and unembellished by foolish myth or by false and pretentious piety. It is a remarkable tribute to Washington that the twentieth-century scholarship of Freeman leads to the same conclusions about him as did the work of his first great biographer, Chief Justice John Marshall.
Freeman did not live to complete his work on Washington, and his associates, Mary Wells Ashworth and John Alexander Carroll, who wrote its seventh volume, did not presume to include there the kind of summary of the first President’s character which Freeman had written into his narrative at appropriate intervals. At the end of Volume V (in the chronology of the biography, just after the close of the Revolution) Freeman wrote:
. . . if at the end of the Revolutionary War he had to be characterized in a single sentence, it would be substantially this: He was a patriot of conscious integrity and unassailable conduct who had given himself completely to the revolutionary cause and desired for himself the satisfaction of having done his utmost and of having won the approval of those whose esteem he put above every other reward.
. . . In accepting the integrity, the dedication and the ambitions of Washington as realities, one does not face an insoluble problem when one asks how this life, at the end of the Revolution, had reached the goal of service, satisfaction and reward. George Washington was neither an American Parsifal nor a biological “sport.” What he was, he made himself by will, by effort, by ambition and by perseverance. For the long and dangerous journeys of his incredible life, he had the needful strength and direction because he walked that “straight line.”1
Doubtless Freeman used the simple reference to the “straight line” here because it was his general custom to use in writing of each period in Washington’s life only the letters, comments, and other materials relating directly to that period. Quite possibly he used the phrase at this point with the intention of establishing a tie to a full quotation of the letter to Fairfax when he came, in his final volume, to summarize and to characterize the whole of Washington’s life.
Chief Justice Marshall had written, almost a century and a half before:
In [Washington], that innate and unassuming modesty which adulation would have offended, which the voluntary plaudits of millions could not betray into indiscretion, and which never obtruded upon others his claims to superior consideration, was happily blended with a high and correct sense of personal dignity, and with a just consciousness of the respect which is due to station. Without exertion, he could maintain the happy medium between that arrogance which wounds, and that facility which allows the office to be degraded in the person who fills it.
It is impossible to contemplate the great events which have occurred in the United States under the auspices of Washington, without ascribing them, in some measure, to him. If we ask the causes of the prosperous issue of a war, against the successful termination of which there were so many probabilities? of the good which was produced, and the ill which was avoided during an administration fated to contend with the strongest prejudices that a combination of circumstances and of passions could produce? of the constant favour of the great mass of his fellow citizens, and of the confidence which, to the last moment of his life, they reposed in him? the answer, so far as these causes may be found in his character, will furnish a lesson well meriting the attention of those who are candidates for political fame.
Endowed by nature with a sound judgment, and an accurate and discriminating mind, he feared not that laborious attention which made him perfectly master of those subjects, in all their relations, on which he was to decide: and this essential quality was guided by an unvarying sense of moral right, which would tolerate the employment only of those means that would bear the most rigid examination; by a fairness of intention which neither sought nor required disguise; and by a purity of virtue which not only was untainted, but unsuspected.
1 Mrs. Ashworth, in her charming Preface to Volume VII of George Washington, elucidates the final phrase quoted here:
These words of Washington’s also offer the best explanation for his success in the Presidency and for the whole of his adult life. They are from a letter to his friend Bryan Fairfax, written early in 1799: “The favorable sentiments which others, you say, have been pleased to express respecting me, cannot but be pleasing to a mind [sic] who always walked on a straight line, and endeavored as far as human frailties, and perhaps strong passions, would enable him, to discharge the relative duties to his Maker and fellow-men, without seeking any indirect or left handed attempts to acquire popularity.”
Thus do the estimates of Washington by his most recent great biographer and by his first great biographer coincide. So, too, have the estimates of the dispassionate historians in all the generations since his death been unanimous in his praise. So it was in his own time, with all but a few—the few who, from their own corruptibility or overweening political partisanship turned praise into its perverted counterpart, invective. Abigail Adams, the wife of Washington’s successor as President, gave the judgment of his contemporaries after her meeting with Washington in 1775. She wrote John Adams her first impression of the General who had come to direct operations before Boston in the initial months of the Revolution. “You had prepared me,” she noted, “to entertain a favorable opinion of General Washington, but I thought the half was not told me. Dignity with ease and complacency, the gentleman and soldier, look agreeably blended in him. Modesty marks every line and feature of his face.” And Mrs. Adams had what might equally well serve as the last word—except there will never be a “last word” about Washington—when she recorded shortly after his death: “Simple truth is his best, his greatest eulogy. She alone can render his fame immortal.”
The perfection of Washington’s character was marred by only two flaws, his ambition—which was as much a virtue as it was a fault—and his rather incomprehensible lack of strong affection for his mother. His conduct likewise bears two stains—his avoidance of his responsibilities at Fort Cumberland during the time of his over-zealous efforts to assure his supremacy in command over Capt. John Dagworthy and his peremptory treatment of Edmund Randolph during the second term as President. The first is easily excused on the ground of youthful ambition; if not excused, the second can be rationalized as a product of extreme and extenuating circumstances. This having been said, all else must be praise.
As a military man Washington did not burst upon the world as a genius nor did he ever achieve distinction deserving of the appellation, but he heeded his own advice written to his youthful captains on the frontier in 1757: “. . . devote some part of your leisure hours to the study of your profession, a knowledge in which cannot be obtained without application; nor any merit or applause to be achieved without a certain knowledge thereof. Discipline is the soul of an army.” So was self-discipline the soul of Washington’s success. In military matters, as in all things, he constantly improved himself. (It can be appropriately added that in self-discipline lay also much of the reason for the success of Douglas Freeman. It can be written of him, as he wrote of Washington: “He never could have finished all his duties—to say nothing of keeping his books and conducting his correspondence—had he not risen early and ordered his hours.”)
Washington had a pragmatic view of history. “We ought not to look back,” he said, “unless it is to derive useful lesson from past errors and for the purpose of profiting by dear bought experience.” Certain it is that Americans have much to learn about their present and for their future by looking back on him and on his “dear bought experience.” There are lessons in the history of every day of the Revolution; there is wisdom in every line of Washington’s Farewell Address; there is example in almost his every act. There is advice for the present in the Count d’Estaing’s letter to Washington after rash moves on the part of Gen. John Sullivan had threatened a rupture of the Americans’ relations with their French allies:
If during the coming centuries, we of America and France are to live in amity and confidence, we must banish recriminations and prevent complaints. I trust the two nations will not be forced to depart from moderation in their conduct but that they will reflect in all their public affairs that firmness and consideration for public interests necessary to unity between two great nations.
And in the words Washington spoke to a minority group—in that case the Jewish Congregation at Newport—on his visit to Rhode Island in 1791:
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
What “straight line” Washington would mark for America in a time of a foreign war longer than the Revolution, of unprecedented social unrest, and of a degree of personal danger to public figures never known to him is speculation. Would his admonishment against American involvement in European affairs in a period when a youthful America had much to fear from older and stronger powers be repeated in a world grown small and an America grown large; would it be extended into argument against involvement in Asia? “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations,” he wrote, “is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connexion as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. . . . Here, let us stop.” Would he say, in the face of demands from the socially and economically disadvantaged, what he wrote “Light Horse Harry” Lee in 1786 concerning the malcontents led by Daniel Shays? He told Lee that grievances should be corrected, but that if the uprising in western Massachusetts represented no valid complaint the force of the government should be employed against it: “Let the reins of government . . . be braced and held with a steady hand, and every violation of the constitution be reprehended: if defective let it be amended, but not suffered to be trampled upon whilst it has an existence.” Can public men any longer say what Washington said on his arrival at New York for his inauguration as President in April of 1789? He declared, when he met the officer in charge of a guard that had been arranged for him: “As to the present arrangement, I shall proceed as is directed, but after this is over, I hope you will give yourself no further trouble, as the affection of my fellow-citizens is all the guard I want.”
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When Mrs. Ashworth and Dr. Carroll undertook Volume VII of George Washington, Wallace Meyer, their editor and long Dr. Freeman’s editor at Scribner’s counselled them: “Keep your sights on biography, holding hands with history.” The emphasis in this Washington is necessarily heavily on biography; to emphasize the story of Washington, the background descriptive of his time has been reduced as much as possible. Certainly the history of Washington’s time and those who worked with, or against, him is of importance. But if Freeman’s seven volumes were to be reduced to one, his text would manifestly (as he would say) require some major excisions, and a great many small ones. The text was compressed everywhere. Second and third examples of what Washington did, reiterative and corroborative quotations were dropped. Many details had to be omitted, especially those which, as Freeman noted of Washington’s tour of the Northeastern States, were “delightful to experience but dull to read about now.” Some details “dull to read about now”—and especially in their reduction to a bare-bones narrative—were retained because of their importance in the interlocking story of Washington’s life. All of the appendices, all of the footnotes were eliminated. Even style was altered in minor ways when doing so would save a few words. The total of changes is large; it had to be to reduce the original 3582 pages of narrative text to the present 754. I hope the abandonment of details has not distorted the record. I hope Dr. Freeman, who wrote carefully and did not waste words, would forgive me for creating from his words sentences he would never himself have written. At least the words are his—very few mine—even if they have sometimes been reordered. I have tried to retain Freeman’s interpretation as well as his words. In general his sections which evaluate Washington have been reduced less drastically than others. I hope most of all that I have done no disservice to the reader. This is a volume for the reader who had rather read one volume than seven. For the student who wants all the facts: The facts and all their substantiation are there in the seven-volume George Washington.
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Gratitude to those who have helped in the course of this work is due many. First, of course, it is due the original work of Dr. Freeman and of Mrs. Ashworth and Dr. Carroll and to the editorial work of Mr. Meyer. I am particularly indebted to Mrs. Ashworth for advice and encouragement and to Mrs. Inez Goddin Freeman and the other members of Dr. Freeman’s family for their willingness that I should undertake this condensation. I am little less indebted to Mr. Charles Scribner, Jr., to Mr. Wayne Andrews, to Mr. Thomas J. Davis, III, and to Miss Elsie Koeltl at Charles Scribner’s Sons. They have been patient with my delays. To my sister Mrs. Marion B. Harwell of Greensboro, Georgia, thanks are due for a fast and massive job of typing. For other favors and help in the preparation of this volume I thank Mr. Stafford Kay of Madison, Wisconsin; Mr. Arthur Monke and Mrs. Lena E. Browne of Brunswick, Maine; Dr. James S. Coles of New York City, formerly President of Bowdoin College; Mr. Philip N. Racine of Atlanta; Mr. Roger E. Michener of Stilling, New Jersey; Dr. Wilbur Jacobs of the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the Henry E. Huntington Library and its staff, particularly its Director, Dr. James Thorpe, its Senior Associates, Drs. Allan Nevins, A. L. Rowse, and Ray Billington, its Librarian, Robert O. Dougan, and staff members Carey S. Bliss and Mary Isabel Fry.
In writing this introductory note I have tried to avoid repeating what I said in my introduction to Lee, a similar one-volume version of Freeman’s R.E. Lee. I cannot forbear however, recalling once more how Dr. Freeman liked to speak of the pleasure of his years of work on R. E. Lee and George Washington as time spent in “the company of great gentlemen.” So has it been with me, but the great gentlemen have been three: LEE, WASHINGTON, and FREEMAN.
RICHARD HARWELL
Bowdoin College
24 June 1968