Early American Literature

When George Washington was eleven, his father's death left most of the family's property—including sixty-four enslaved people—divided among his two older half-brothers. He was destined to no more than a very minor place in the colonial Virginia gentry. Moving "with seeming ease between the sometimes desperate conditions" of his mother's home at Ferry Farm, and the "genteel abundance" of his half-brother's Mount Vernon estate, he supplemented his minimal schoolroom education by practicing penmanship and the art of polite sociability. As Alexis Coe puts it in her accessible and sprightly new biography, "Washington understood his role" (7). His access to the world of elite wealth and power was conditional. He was the eager, needy relative in search of opportunities to serve his betters—and the colonizing mission to which they were dedicated. At seventeen, with a leg up from his connections, he became a licensed surveyor and [End Page 233] began amassing property in the Shenandoah Valley. It was the start of half a century of acquisition and expansion that made Washington one of the wealthiest, most powerful men on the continent.

You Never Forget Your First raises the question of what it means to take George Washington seriously. Its titular innuendo is paired with a cover illustration that puts a cheeky smile on the first president's face—even if, like most eighteenth-century sitters, his lips remain tightly sealed, keeping his problematic teeth obscured. In the introduction, Coe situates herself as a puckish outsider intent on disrupting the "Dad History" genre. But Washington himself is not the butt of the joke. Coe's argument is that the reverence and worn-out conventions that characterize previous biographies serve to obscure their subject from posterity's careful consideration. Her book, including its unorthodox packaging, is crafted to jolt readers to renewed attention. Coe is also blunt about Washington's life as an enslaver, the "forced-labor camps" we tend to call plantations (43), and his active participation in indigenous "genocide" (75). The idea is not to make light of the man but to treat him as a historical problem, something worthy of investigation.

Washington's uncanny ability to understand his role continued to be central to his success, long after his half-brother Lawrence's death elevated George to a more stable footing in Virginia's plantocracy. It is true that his blundering failure to conduct armed diplomacy among the French imperialists and Native nations in Ohio country helped trigger a global war that would reshape the British empire and set the stage for revolution. But he was a junior officer in his early twenties, keen to cut a figure as a man of action. Prepared by an upbringing among white Virginians who coveted possession of both Black bodies and Native territory, Washington saw no legitimate limit to the colony's western claims, nor any need to compromise with those who saw things differently. It was that spirit that soon brought him, along with many of his fellow colonists, into conflict with the metropole itself. His role—one he never wavered from—was to give firm and manly leadership to this vision of continental, imperial entitlement.

For Coe, what drove Washington was not so much his settler-colonial mindset as the "arsenal of personal grievances" he had stockpiled through years of social climbing. "At his core," she writes, "he was still a man eager to be recognized" (53). On this account, war against Britain gave him a [End Page 234] stage on which to prove himself—including, perhaps, to Sally Fairfax, the impeccably genteel object of his youthful affections. Presentation, appearance, and the dynamics of relative status were always likely to be matters of concern to someone who grew up seeking the charity of...