George Washington: Anguish and Farewell
by James Thomas Flexner
Summary
Anguish and Farewell is the fourth and final volume of James Thomas Flexner's life of George Washington, and it covers the years no earlier biographer had made so painful or so human: the second term, 1793 to 1799, when the unanimous hero of the Revolution became the target of a partisan press that accused him of monarchism, senility, and treason. Flexner follows Washington through the crises that invented American politics, the war between Jefferson and Hamilton inside his own cabinet, the neutrality fight as revolutionary France and Britain went to war, the Whiskey Rebellion, the furor over Jay's Treaty that brought the abuse to its peak, and the decision to walk away from power, sealed in the Farewell Address, that did as much to define the presidency as anything he did in it. The last chapters take him home to Mount Vernon, to the management of an estate whose slavery increasingly troubled him, to the will in which, one of the few slaveholding founders to do so, he provided for the freedom of his slaves, and to the December death scene recorded almost hour by hour. Flexner writes as an independent scholar with a narrative gift, and his Washington is deliberately not marble: thin skinned about criticism, hot tempered under control, anguished in the book's exact sense, and greater for it. The volume won the 1973 National Book Award in Biography, and the four volume series received a special Pulitzer Prize citation the same year. Flexner's single volume distillation, Washington: The Indispensable Man, carried the portrait to an even wider audience.
Historical Context & Significance
Flexner published the volume in 1972, into a country losing faith in its presidency, and reviewers read the story of a founder savaged by the press and desperate to surrender power with Watergate era eyes. The special Pulitzer citation of 1973 honored the completed series as a whole, a rare gesture. Flexner, who never held an academic post, had begun as a historian of American art and medicine, and his Washington volumes set the modern pattern of humanizing the founders without diminishing them; the 1984 television adaptation of The Indispensable Man put Barry Bostwick's Washington in millions of living rooms. Later scholarship has gone deeper on slavery at Mount Vernon, a subject Flexner opened honestly for his time, and his four volumes remain the narrative standard against which each new Washington biography gets measured.