First among equals
To see it, you need to ascend to the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and wend your way to the northernmost corner. Here is the American art gallery. Slip through the long hall of bottles and vases, and past the earthy and sometimes gritty works of the Ashcan school. Stop in breathtaking ardor before John Singer Sargent’s Madame X, then shuffle, goggle-eyed, past luminous mid-19th-century works by Francis William Edmonds and his ilk into Gallery 760. Then you can’t miss it: Washington Crossing the Delaware is mammoth. More than 12 feet tall and 21 feet wide, it dominates the room, as does its subject: George Washington. The general is resplendent in his military attire and towers above the 11 other men in the boat, a motley crew of officers and ill-clad enlistees. Washington’s face is resolute, his eyes focused on the shores of Trenton, where the enemy lie sleeping. He appears utterly fearless, despite the ice floes and icebergs that threaten to sink them and the American flag they bear. Emanuel Leutze’s painting also captures the audacity of the 1776 Christmas night raid on the 1,500 Hessians camped in Trenton. It was bitterly cold, and Washington and his men had to haul themselves and their war materiel—cannons, horses, muskets, powder—in shallow boats as wind and snow lashed them. Two of Washington’s three raiding parties failed to make the crossing. Nonetheless, the general and his ragtag continentals routed the German mercenaries. How George Washington became that man—a leader of both the revolution and the nascent American nation—is the subject of Washington’s Revolution, which features Leutze’s masterpiece on its cover. Washington’s rise is a fascinating story and a very American one. Washington, in short, made himself, and his rise was not quick nor easy nor inevitable.
George Washington was born to middling stock in Virginia in 1732. He was a “conventional Virginia provincial” whose world had a stable social order and agrarian political economy. A planter class led this stratified society. These gentlemen dressed, spoke and behaved differently from others, and their mores owed much to the English motherland and to Europe. Young Washington aspired to enter this upper echelon, and “two qualities seem decisive in Washington’s character,” observes author Robert Middlekauff. “They were his will and his judgment.”
Washington’s ascent began at age 16. He was asked to join a surveying party led by George William Fairfax, a member of the leading class whose family was friendly with Washington’s. A year later, the Fairfaxes helped get Washington appointed a surveyor for Culpeper County. The Fairfaxes were instrumental as well in starting Washington’s military career. The Council of Virginia named him adjutant of the militia for the colony’s southern district. He was a major at 20.
Washington’s first military experience came in late 1753. Robert Dinwiddie, Virginia’s governor, sent Washington and a small militia to the Ohio country to push out the French. It may have proven a disappointment to the young officer: There was no fight at Fort Le Boeuf, near present-day Waterford, Pennsylvania, and Capt. Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre gently rebuffed his demands, explaining that France had claims to the area and that he was following orders from his headquarters in Canada. Empty-handed, Washington made the 450-mile trek from Lake Erie’s shore back to Williamsburg.
It was an inauspicious beginning to a famous career. For many years afterward, Washington struggled to achieve military glory: He regularly found himself pleading with civilian authorities for better pay for his officers and soldiers, and he was often sent on expeditions with inadequate forces that struck Washington as fools’ errands. His encounters with Indians and the French often went badly. Frustrated, the 22-year-old Colonel Washington resigned his commission in 1754 to life as a would-be planter.
The call of duty, however, soon lured him back into uniform. The newly appointed British commander in the colonies, Edward Braddock, asked Washington to help him battle the French. The first battle occurred in July 1755 at Fort Duquesne—and it was a disaster for the British, as was a subsequent clash just east of Pittsburgh. Braddock was killed and Washington felt humiliated. Returning to Virginia, he contemplated the fiascos and studied the means to professionalize the colonial forces. When Dinwiddie appointed him to a higher command, Washington put his ideas into action: Soldiers were drilled and lazy officers booted from service. His troops performed much better in subsequent battles with Indians.
Of course, Washington greatly bolstered his position by marrying the widowed Martha Custis in 1759, which brought him substantial landholdings. These he added to those he acquired during his early surveys and to the estate at Mount Vernon, which he began to farm after the death of his half brother Lawrence. During his spells away from military service, Washington threw himself into the management of his properties, developing them as profitable enterprises. He had not been trained to do this—nor, for that matter, to lead an army. So he figured it out himself.
The burdens on Washington were immense and unabating, and exacerbated further by others. Friends, soldiers who formerly served under him, and even strangers habitually called upon him for assistance and advice. Robert Cary, the London merchant who received and sold Washington’s tobacco crops at a poor price, drove him to distraction; his stepson, John Parke Custis, had more than his share of misadventures and was a constant source of duress and anguish. Patsy, his stepdaughter, suffered seizures from which she died at only 17. The trials were unrelenting.
But Washington cemented his spot in Virginia’s upper crust by winning election to the House of Burgesses in 1758, where he served until 1775. There he worked regularly with Virginia’s leading lights and deepened his understanding of governance. It was never an easy life, with the competing demands of politics and managing his properties; but these years paled in comparison to the challenges to come. The colonies’ relations with Britain frayed, starting in the late 1760s, and Washington joined others who peaceably contested the new taxes. He joined the Virginia committee advocating the nonimportation of English goods. He did not like the harassment and tarring of tax collectors and was appalled by the Boston Tea Party. (He thought the colonies should offer to reimburse for the damage; it was the honorable thing to do.)
That the Second Continental Congress chose Washington in 1775 to lead its army seems almost foretold: He was renowned as a man of wealth, character and soldiering experience; over 6 feet tall, he radiated strength and poise, and wearing soldierly garb to congressional sessions undoubtedly helped. But Washington faced immense odds. The British were a professional army and his force was exceedingly amateur. The Continentals were chronically short on uniforms, weapons and food. Many troops quit before their enlistments were up. The war began badly; the army was driven from Brooklyn and chased through New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. Yet General Washington made something out of nothing, and six brutal years later, the British surrendered at Yorktown.
George Washington, as Robert Middlekauff shows, became who he was through self-directed effort, experience, and by bravely suffering life’s challenges. He set out to become a member of his colony’s planter class. He pursued this goal through land ownership and serving as a soldier and legislator. He exceeded his initial objective—and exceeded it spectacularly, becoming the great man in Leutze’s painting and the father of his country.
