One can’t help but surmise that Washington’s life would have been vastly different had he attended college. He lacked the liberal education that then distinguished gentlemen, setting him apart from such illustrious peers as Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and Madison. He would always seem more provincial than other founders, his knowledge of European culture more secondhand. A university education would have spared him a gnawing sense of intellectual inadequacy. We know that he regretted his lack of Latin, Greek, and French—the major intellectual adornments of his day—since he lectured wards in later years on their importance. The degree to which Washington dwelt upon the transcendent importance of education underscores the stigma that he felt about having missed college. As president, he lectured a young relative about to enter college that “every hour misspent is lost forever” and that “future years cannot compensate for lost days at this period of your life.”¹⁵

Without much formal schooling, Washington was later subject to condescension from some contemporaries, especially the snobbish John Adams, who disparaged him as “too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station and reputation.”¹⁶ Washington has suffered from comparisons with other founders, several of whom were renowned autodidacts, but by any ordinary standard, he was an exceedingly smart man with a quick ability to grasp ideas. He seized every interval of leisure to improve himself and showed a steady capacity to acquire and retain useful knowledge. Throughout his life, he strenuously molded his personality to become a respectable member of society. As W. W. Abbot aptly expressed it, “More than most, Washington’s biography is the story of a man constructing himself.”¹⁷

As an adolescent, Washington dabbled in fiction, history, philosophy, and geography. An avid reader of periodicals, he sampled The Spectator by the age of sixteen. With the novel flowering as a literary form, he was to purchase copies of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle in coming years, and he was especially drawn to military history. As he experienced the first stirrings of an abiding passion for theater, he read Joseph Addison’s Cato, a paean to republican virtues that he quoted repeatedly throughout his life. It is often said, with truth, that Washington absorbed his lessons from action, not books, yet he came to own a vast library and talked about books as if he were a serious reader, not a dilettante. When his adopted grandson entered college, Washington lectured him thus: “Light reading (by this, I mean books of little importance) may amuse for the moment, but leaves nothing solid behind.”¹⁸

Never an intellectual who relished ideas for their own sake, he mined books for practical wisdom and delighted in dredging up handy aphorisms. At seventeen, he possessed an English compendium of the principal Dialogues of Seneca the Younger and took to heart his stoic beliefs: “The contempt of death makes all the miseries of life easy to us.” Or: “He is the brave man . . . that can look death in the face without trouble or surprise.”¹⁹ As his life progressed, Washington would adhere to the stoic creed of governing one’s passions under the most adverse circumstances and facing the prospect of death with serenity.

In trying to form himself as an English country gentleman, the self-invented young Washington practiced the classic strategy of outsiders: he studied closely his social betters and tried to imitate their behavior in polite society. Whether to improve his penmanship or perhaps as a school assignment, he submitted to the drudgery of copying out 110 social maxims from The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation, a handy guidebook of etiquette that traced its origins to a French Jesuit work of the sixteenth century. This humorless manual preached against assorted social gaffes that would have haunted the nightmares of an insecure youth who daydreamed of venturing into fashionable drawing rooms. Number four warned: “In the presence of others, sing not to yourself with a humming noise, nor drum with your fingers or feet.” Number eleven: “Shift not yourself in the sight of others, nor gnaw your nails.” Number twelve: “Bedew no man’s face with your spittle by approaching too near him when you speak.”²⁰ Number one hundred: “Cleanse not your teeth with the tablecloth, napkin, fork, or knife, but if others do it, let it be done with a pick tooth.”²¹

Many of these rules, which talked about showing due respect for one’s superiors, tread a fine line between self-abasement and simple humility. Number thirty-seven: “In speaking to men of quality, do not lean, nor look them full in the face, nor approach too near them; at least keep a full pace from them.”²² Or thirty-nine: “In writing or speaking, give to every person his due title according to his degree and the custom of the place.”²³ This is a crib sheet for a world shot through with class distinctions and informed by a deep terror of offending one’s betters. This guidebook “taught modesty, deference, and submission to authority,” writes William Guthrie Sayen, who notes that it would have instructed Washington on how to control his temper and learn “the importance of managing his body, his facial expressions, his speech, and his moods.”²⁴ The book must have spoken to some inborn sense of decorum in Washington, soothing his schoolboy fears of committing a faux pas. If thoroughly heeded, The Rules of Civility would have produced a cool, pragmatic, and very controlled young man with genteel manners—exactly the social facade Washington wished to project to conceal the welter of stormy emotions inside him.

Though respectful of education, George Washington was never a bookish boy. He loved to swim in the smooth, deep waters of the Rappahannock. He excelled in riding, liked to hunt, later learned fencing, attended a dancing school, played billiards, frequented cockfights and horse races, and experimented with his first flirtations. Despite a certain underlying roughness, he would perfect the social graces that prepared him to enter well-bred society. At the same time, he was an unusually sober and purposeful young man. In countless letters in later years, he advised young relatives that adolescence was a risky time when evil influences lurked nearby, ready to pounce: “You are now extending into that stage of life when good or bad habits are formed. When the mind will be turned to things useful and praiseworthy or to dissipation and vice.”²⁵ He issued warnings against young male companions who “too often mistake ribaldry for wit and rioting, swearing, intoxication, and gambling for manliness.”²⁶ The young George Washington seldom seemed to show a truant disposition, as if he were already preparing for bigger things.

CHAPTER TWO

Fortune’s Favorite

IN THE ABSENCE OF A FATHER and with a mother who doled out criticism more freely than encouragement, George Washington turned naturally to his three younger brothers for recreation and to his two older brothers, Lawrence and Austin, for guidance. Of the younger brothers, John Augustine or “Jack” was decidedly his favorite, “the intimate companion of my youth and the most affectionate friend of my ripened age,” as George remembered him.¹ It was his outgoing and older half brother Lawrence, however, who fired his ambitions and steered him firmly in the direction of a military career.

After his father’s death, George found asylum from his difficult mother in periodic trips to stay with Lawrence at Mount Vernon, which would always beckon invitingly on the far horizon of his life. From time to time he also escaped to his brother Austin’s place at Pope’s Creek, though he was never as close to him. In a surviving portrait of Lawrence Washington by an unknown artist, he is clad in the uniform of a British Army officer but seems made of gentler stuff than George. He has boldly marked eyebrows, full lips, a cleft chin, and receding brown hair. The dark eyes are large and sensitive, evoking a poet or a scholar more than a bluff soldier. Indeed, the cultivated Lawrence presented an appealing model of urbanity for his younger brother. “For the enlargement of George’s mind and the polishing of his manners, Lawrence was almost an ideal elder brother,” writes Douglas Southall Freeman.²