George Washington possessed the gift of inspired simplicity, a clarity and purity of vision that never failed him. Whatever petty partisan disputes swirled around him, he kept his eyes fixed on the transcendent goals that motivated his quest. As sensitive to criticism as any other man, he never allowed personal attacks or threats to distract him, following an inner compass that charted the way ahead. For a quarter century, he had stuck to an undeviating path that led straight to the creation of an independent republic, the enactment of the Constitution, and the formation of the federal government. History records few examples of a leader who so earnestly wanted to do the right thing, not just for himself but for his country. Avoiding moral shortcuts, he consistently upheld such high ethical standards that he seemed larger than any other figure on the political scene. Again and again the American people had entrusted him with power, secure in the knowledge that he would exercise it fairly and ably and surrender it when his term of office was up. He had shown that the president and commander in chief of a republic could possess a grandeur surpassing that of all the crowned heads of Europe. He brought maturity, sobriety, judgment, and integrity to a political experiment that could easily have grown giddy with its own vaunted success, and he avoided the backbiting, envy, and intrigue that detracted from the achievements of other founders. He had indeed been the indispensable man of the American Revolution.
Washington had dominated American political life for so long that many Americans could not conceive of life without him. A widespread fear arose that, deprived of his guiding hand, the Republic itself might founder. One preacher wondered, “Will not darkness now gather in our land? . . . Who knows but [his death] is the loud harbinger of approaching calamity.”31 Perhaps as an antidote to such apprehension, Washington was smothered beneath national piety, and it became difficult for biographers to reclaim the complex human being. The man immediately began to merge into the myth. As the subject of more than four hundred printed orations, Washington was converted into an exemplar of moral values, the person chosen to tutor posterity in patriotism, even a civic deity. In one eulogy Timothy Dwight compared Washington to Moses and noted, “Comparison with him is become almost proverbial.”32 Washington’s transformation into a sacred figure erased his tough, often moody nature, stressing only his serene composure and making it more difficult for future generations to fathom his achievements. Abigail Adams justly rebelled at the idealized portrait: “Simple truth is his best, his greatest eulogy.” 33 She was certainly correct that, to be convincing, Washington’s greatness did not need to be cleaned up or sanitized, only honestly presented.
A popular print called the Apotheosis of Washington showed him ascending to heaven above Mount Vernon. Seated on a throne, resting on a cloud, and caught in a thick shaft of celestial light, he was clad in white robes with an outstretched arm as a winged angel received him. As the Father of His Country evolved into a divinity, some clergymen wanted to insert his farewell address into the Bible as an epilogue. The departed leader’s image sprouted everywhere. “Every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home, just as we have images of God’s saints,” observed a European traveler.34 Later deploring the “idolatrous worship” of Washington, Dr. Benjamin Rush saw it “manifested in the impious application of names and epithets to him which are ascribed in Scripture only to God and to Jesus Christ,” and he mentioned “our Savior” and “our Redeemer” as examples.35
Hagiographic biographies poured from the presses with indecent haste. The first and most influential was by Parson Mason L. Weems, an itinerant book peddler and Episcopal priest who had once been introduced to Washington by Dr. Craik. Weems had already published tracts on the perils of everything from gambling to masturbation. Eager to cash in on Washington mania, he wrote to his publisher in mid-January 1800, “Washington, you know is gone! Millions are gaping to read something about him.”36 Weems rushed out the first edition of The Life of Washington in pamphlet form that year. In that and succeeding editions, he manufactured enduring myths about Washington refusing to lie about chopping down the cherry tree, hurling a silver dollar across the Rappahannock, and praying at Valley Forge. Weems imagined future schoolchildren asking, “What was it that raised Washington to his godlike height of glory?”37 Perhaps sensing something too stern and difficult about the real Washington, Weems tried to humanize him through treacly fables designed to inculcate patriotism and morality. He showed no scruples about inventing scenes whole cloth. Weems claimed that when Washington’s father died, George “fell upon his father’s neck . . . kissed him a thousand and a thousand times and bathed his clay-cold face with scalding tears.”38 To improve sales and with an eye on the main chance, Weems deleted all partisan references, boasting to his publisher, “Adams and Jefferson both will approve our little piece.”39
If Parson Weems foisted a false image of a stiff, priggish Washington on American schoolchildren, Washington did not fare much better at first with more serious biographers. Bushrod Washington had inherited Washington’s papers and knew they would be the ideal source material for a biography. To write an authorized life, he wooed one of Washington’s foremost admirers, John Marshall, who wrote the book after he became chief justice and joined Bushrod on the Supreme Court. Marshall devoted five volumes to inflating Washington into a figure sculpted from marble. For all his deep knowledge of Washington, however, he could not make his old friend come alive, prompting one disgruntled critic to grumble, “We look in vain . . . for any sketch or anecdote that might fix a distinguishing feature of private character in the memory.”40 Like Weems, Marshall edited out Washington’s more turbulent, unruly emotions. John Adams mocked the biography as “a mausoleum, 100 feet square at the base and 200 feet high.”41 The public didn’t warm to the Marshall biography, which presented Washington as a distant figure, and sales flagged. In the 1820s Jared Sparks, later president of Harvard, prevailed upon Bushrod Washington and John Marshall to let him publish the first edition of Washington’s papers, which ran to twelve volumes. So began the scholarly process of disinterring Washington from the many legends that had already encrusted his life.
MARTHA WASHINGTON HAD SACRIFICED so much privacy during her married life that after her husband died, she evened the score by burning their personal correspondence—to the everlasting chagrin of historians. By the standards of her day, her act was neither unusual nor wanton. After Alexander Hamilton died in a duel in 1804, Elizabeth Hamilton burned all her letters to him, although she did take care to preserve, with loving fidelity, his letters to her.
However much Martha sought to be a brave, cheerful widow, she was inconsolable in her grief. “I listened with tender interest to a sorrow, which she said was truly breaking her heart,”reported a British companion.42 A miniature portrait by Robert Field shows her pale, round face closely framed by a frilly white cap and surrounded by the black ribbon that betokened widowhood. Martha was not so much learning to live with bereavement as marking time until she could rejoin her husband. She refused to enter his study or the bedroom they had shared; she took up residence in a tiny attic chamber on the third floor at Mount Vernon, where she met with her sewing circle of slaves. Since Washington Custis kept a room on the same floor, she enjoyed some distraction by doting anxiously on her grandson. She haunted the narrow footpath that ran down to the family vault and often sounded a despairing note. “I always have one complaint or another,” she told a correspondent. “I never expect to be well as long as I live in this world.”43