Washington: A Life

Ron Chernow follows George Washington from a Virginia childhood cut short by his father's early death, which denied him the formal English education his older half brothers received, through a career as a self taught surveyor whose early wilderness commissions built the connections and, later, the land holdings that made him one of Virginia's wealthiest men after his 1759 marriage to the widow Martha Custis. Chernow follows Washington through the French and Indian War, where an early defeat at Fort Necessity taught him hard lessons about command that shaped his later leadership, and into the Continental Congress's decision to name him commander in chief in 1775, a choice made partly because a Virginian could unite colonies that otherwise distrusted each other.

The book gives full weight to the war years, the crossing of the Delaware and the victories at Trenton and Princeton that revived a collapsing cause, the brutal winter at Valley Forge, and the final combined French and American victory at Yorktown in 1781, then follows Washington through the Constitutional Convention he presided over and the presidency he shaped almost entirely by precedent, since no one before him had held the office. Chernow traces the friction between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson that Washington worked constantly to manage, the 1789 congressional fight over how to address the president, which ended in the plain Mister President rather than the grand titles the Senate had proposed, and his voluntary retirement after two terms, a precedent that held for a century and a half before it became law.

Chernow does not separate Washington's public greatness from his private failures, giving direct attention to the more than one hundred enslaved people who worked Mount Vernon and built his fortune, and to the will, drafted near the end of his life, that provided for their eventual emancipation, a step almost none of his fellow slaveholding founders took. Reading the book means meeting an anxious, ambitious, genuinely private man behind the marble monument, and it suits a reader who wants Washington's real character, insecurities and all, restored underneath two centuries of myth.