“What We Still Don’t Get About George Washington”, The New York Times

Years into writing a book on George Washington, I noticed something curious about my collection of the popular biographies already written about our first president: All of them were written by white men.

I’d gotten used to a certain male skew, but I hadn’t quite realized how persistent it was until I ran my observation by experts at Mount Vernon, Washington’s historic home, and the University of Virginia’s George Washington papers: No woman had written a biography of George Washington for adults in more than 40 years, and no woman trained as a historian had written one in far longer.

For nearly two and a half centuries, most of the stories Americans have told themselves about their country’s past have been by and for white men — and it shows, particularly when it comes to presidential history. When female historians have managed to elbow their way in, however, they often remind us that we don’t always know what we think we know.

My own preoccupation with Washington began with an attempt to read between the lines of his major biographies. All of his biographers are obsessed with his body; Ron Chernow’s “Washington: A Life,” to take just one example, sometimes reads like a romance novel: Washington, Mr. Chernow writes, was “powerfully rough-hewn and endowed with matchless strength. When he clenched his jaw, his cheek and jaw muscles seemed to ripple right through his skin.”

After a while, I began to wonder: Why did Washington’s biographers spend so much time on something that did so little to break the first president out of his marble mold — their own stated intention? And if they focused so much on this, had their Great Man worship influenced their interpretation of other aspects of the life of our founding-est founding father? When I dug into the primary sources, I found myself immediately vexed.

Lawrence Washington, the president’s half-brother, is always presented as his god, for example, and Mary, his mother, as his scourge. Lawrence, according to Mr. Chernow, “concocted a plan to spring fourteen-year-old George from his mother’s domination and launch him on a promising career in the Royal Navy.” She doesn’t consent, and Mr. Chernow’s takeaway is that “she seemed to measure her son’s worth not by what he might accomplish elsewhere but by what he could do for her, even if it meant thwarting his career.”

It’s a strange read. Lawrence’s own letters home from service had been harrowing, and Lawrence was an officer. George would be a midshipman, a low-ranking position. About a third of recruits around his age did not survive their first two years. Mary’s refusal set him on a better, safer path: By age 17, George, who loved the outdoors and was good at math, was the youngest surveyor in Culpeper County, and by age 18, he owned thousands of acres of land.

The same thing happened when I looked into his final act. The way his biographers tell it, you’d think that George Washington, who held hundreds of people enslaved at the time of his death, had a change of heart during the Revolution, which led him to free his slaves in his will — a generous read that allows for a redemptive conclusion.

It’s true that the Marquis de Lafayette, a French aristocrat Washington met during the Revolution, spent the rest of his life proposing various ways Washington could free his slaves during his lifetime, setting a powerful example for the infant nation. Instead, Washington freed one man, Billy Lee, upon his death. The 123 other people had to wait until Martha Washington either died or chose to free them — which they were aware of, because Washington’s will was published. Martha, who wrote things like “Blacks are so bad in thair nature that they have not the least Gratatude for the kindness that may be shewed to them,” was terrified, and she signed a deed of manumission a year later.

Washington’s story — all of it, in its entirety — is full of victory and triumph, inhumanity and catastrophe, often on a grand scale. During the Civil War, Confederate and Union soldiers carved their initials into the walls of the vault he was buried in. Both sides, the South and the North, the slave-owning and the free, viewed him as their inspiration. And both were right. They were just starting to learn his story, and in some ways, more than 100 years later, so are we.

Since 2014, the woods near Washington’s vault have been undergoing excavation. In these woods sits a cemetery for the people he enslaved, full of unmarked graves. The area is never mentioned in the thousands of documents Washington left behind, which he protected and readied to be studied. There’s always new information to discover and share, whether it’s found in accepted texts or archives, or well outside of them. That’s how a legacy, like a democracy, avoids corruption and decay.

Alexis Coe is the author, most recently, of “You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington.”

The New York Times