The first Washington to claim our attention was, ironically, the casualty of a rebellion against royal authority. During the English Civil War, Lawrence Washington, George’s great-great-grandfather and an Anglican minister, was hounded from his parish in the Puritan cleansing of the Church of England under Oliver Cromwell. This shattered a cozy existence that intermingled learning with modest wealth. Lawrence had spent the better part of his childhood at the family residence, Sulgrave Manor near Banbury in Oxfordshire, before earning two degrees at Brasenose College, Oxford; he later served as a fellow of the college and a university proctor. Persecuted by the Puritans as one of the “scandalous, malignant priests,” he was accused of being “a common frequenter of alehouses,” which was likely a trumped-up charge. ² His travails may have spurred his son John to seek his fortune in the burgeoning tobacco trade with North America. After landing in Tidewater Virginia in late 1656, John Washington settled at Bridges Creek, hard by the Potomac River in Westmoreland County. Less a committed colonist than a temporary castaway, John was stranded when heavy squalls grounded his ship and soaked its precious cargo of tobacco, prompting him to tarry in Virginia.

One marvels at the speed with which the young man prospered in the New World, exhibiting certain traits—a bottomless appetite for land, an avidity for public office, and a zest for frontier combat—that foreshadowed his great-grandson’s rapid ascent in the world. John also set a precedent of social mobility through military laurels after he was recruited to fight Indians in Maryland and was rewarded with a colonel’s rank. In this rough-and-tumble world, he was accused of slaughtering five Indian emissaries and cheating tribes of land, activities that won him the baleful Indian nickname of Conotocarious, which meant “Destroyer of Villages” or “Town Devourer.” ³ He also found time to woo and wed Anne Pope, whose well-heeled father favored the newlyweds with seven hundred acres of land. John piled up an impressive roster of the sort of local offices—justice of the peace, burgess in the Virginia assembly, lieutenant colonel in the county militia—that signified social standing in colonial Virginia. Most conspicuous was his omnivorous craving for land. By importing sixty-three indentured servants from England, he capitalized upon a British law that granted fifty acres to each immigrant, and he eventually amassed more than five thousand acres, with the single largest property bordering the Potomac River at Little Hunting Creek, the future site of Mount Vernon.

After his wife died, John Washington married, in quick succession, a pair of lusty sisters who had been accused, respectively, of running a brothel and engaging in adulterous relations with the governor. Coincidentally, both scandal-ridden women had appeared before him in his guise as justice of the peace. In 1677 John succumbed at age forty-six to a fatal disease, likely typhoid fever, setting an enduring pattern of shortened life expectancy for Washington males in America. By then he had struggled his way up to the second-tier gentry, an uncertain stratum that would endow George Washington with a modicum of money, while also instilling a restless yearning to advance into the uppermost ranks of Virginia grandees.

It was John’s eldest son from his first marriage, Lawrence Washington, who inherited the bulk of his father’s estate and became paternal grandfather of the first president. With the monarchy restored in England, Lawrence had been educated in the mother country before settling in Virginia, where he, too, collected an array of local posts—justice of the peace, burgess, and sheriff—that complemented his work as an attorney. If John furnished the family with a tenuous foothold in the gentry, Lawrence added a patina of social distinction by marrying Mildred Warner, daughter of a member of the prestigious King’s Council. When he expired in 1698 at thirty-eight, Lawrence perpetuated the grim tradition of Washington men dying young.

Lawrence Washington’s untimely death occurred when his second son, Augustine—the future father of George Washington—was only three or four years old. After his widow, Mildred, married George Gale, a British ship captain from Whitehaven, a port on the Cumberland coast, she sailed there with him and her three children in late May 1700. Already pregnant during the voyage, she died in January 1701, not long after her arrival in England, and her newborn daughter followed her shortly thereafter. For the next two or three years, Gale placed Augustine and his older brother John in the Appleby Grammar School in County Westmorland, a scenic spot east of the English Lake District. The school provided a classical education, with a heavy emphasis on Latin. When Mildred’s three children were ensnared in a protracted legal tussle over their inheritance, they were shipped back to Virginia under a court order.

Raw-boned and good-natured, Augustine Washington remains a shadowy figure in the family saga, little more than a hazy but sunlit memory for his famous son. A strapping man, six feet tall with a fair complexion, he was favored with that brand of rustic strength that breeds backwoods legends. The sole contemporary description avers that he could “raise up and place in a wagon a mass of iron that two ordinary men could barely raise from the ground,” yet he balanced this notable brawn with a mild-mannered demeanor that made his manly strength the more becoming. ⁴ No less community-minded than his Washington forebears, he was named a justice of the peace and sat on the county court.

From spotty early records, Augustine emerges as a remorseless, hard-driving businessman. He started with 1,100 acres that he inherited along the Potomac and augmented that with 1,750 acres from the dowry of his first wife, Jane Butler. He specialized in tobacco farming until he began snapping up properties rich in iron ore at Accokeek Creek, near Fredericksburg. In 1729 he traveled to England to seal a contract with the Principio Company, which owned iron operations in Virginia and Maryland. By the time he returned to Virginia, his wife had died, saddling him with the care of three small children: two sons, Lawrence and Augustine Jr. (often called Austin), and a daughter, Jane. Minding children on his own wasn’t an option for a hard-pressed colonial widower, and Augustine may not have been overly fussy in his urgent quest to find a country bride. On March 6, 1731, the thirty-seven-year-old Augustine married Mary Johnson Ball, a pious, headstrong woman who would exert a profound formative influence on her son George. At twenty-three, Mary was already slightly old for marriage, which may say something about her feisty personality or about Augustine’s hopeful conviction that he could tame this indomitable woman.

Mary Ball was born in 1708 into a situation that skirted the edge of local scandal. Her English-born father, Joseph Ball, a thriving businessman, had settled on the Potomac, married, and raised several children before his wife’s death. Lonesome at fifty-eight, he then shocked propriety and threatened his children’s inheritance by wedding an illiterate woman named Mary Johnson. Their daughter, Mary Ball, was only three when her elderly father died, leaving her with a bequest of four hundred acres, fifteen head of cattle, three slaves, and a sackful of feathers from which to fashion a bed. Her mother remarried but then died, converting Mary into an orphan at age twelve. The girl was farmed out to an obliging family friend, George Eskridge, who treated her so humanely that she would honor his memory by naming her first son George after him. It was probably Eskridge who acted as go-between in matching up Mary and Augustine Washington.

A crusty woman with a stubborn streak, Mary Ball Washington made few concessions to social convention. In a lesson internalized by her celebrated son, she didn’t adapt or bend easily to others but stayed resolutely true to her own standards. We can only assume that her forlorn childhood, characterized by constant loss, left innumerable scars and insecurities, producing an anxious personality. With flinty self-reliance and iron discipline, she ran a thrifty household and was sparing in her praise and very definite in her opinions. A plain, homespun woman who may have smoked a pipe, she betrayed little interest in the larger world, confined her attention to the family farm, and shunned high society. Since her own mother was illiterate, Mary probably received scant education. Her few letters are replete with spelling errors, dispense with all grammar and punctuation, and confirm the impression of an unlettered countrywoman.

The thick family Bible at Mount Vernon records that George Washington was born around ten A.M. on February 11, 1732, at the family farm at Pope’s Creek in Westmoreland County, an area of bucolic beauty less than a mile from the Potomac River. The modest birthplace later went up in flames. The newborn boy was reputed to be a baby of unusual heft. His original birthday derived from the Julian, or Old Style, calendar, which remained in effect in Britain and its colonies until the mid-eighteenth century, when the new Gregorian calendar deferred it by eleven days to February 22. Until the end of his life, some of Washington’s admirers in Alexandria insisted upon celebrating his birthday on February 11.

Baptized in early April, the boy was reared amid the rich, open farmland of Tidewater Virginia, the eastern territory washed by four broad rivers: the James, York, Rappahannock, and Potomac. Broad tobacco fields flourished in tidal flats broken only by a scattering of tiny, isolated towns. George Washington entered a strictly hierarchical universe, ruled by simple verities and dominated by a distant monarch. That the commoner George could ever aspire to a life as richly consequential as that of King George II, then enthroned in royal splendor, would have seemed a preposterous fantasy in the 1730s. Hugging the eastern seaboard, the loyal British colonies were tightly lashed to the trading world of London by commerce and culture. The all-powerful planters in this provincial sphere strove to ape their English cousins, who remained the unquestioned model of everything superior and cosmopolitan. As the economic basis of this undemocratic world, slavery was commonplace and unquestioned, fostering an idle, dissolute existence for rich young Virginians. As one German visitor sniffed of the average Virginia adolescent, “At fifteen, his father gives him a horse and a negro, with which he riots about the country, attends every fox hunt, horse race and cockfight, and does nothing else whatever.” ⁵

As the eldest of Augustine Washington’s second set of children, George straddled two families, perhaps forcing him to hone some early diplomatic skills. His older half brother, Lawrence, was sent to the Appleby Grammar School before George was born and was shortly followed there by his brother Augustine Jr. while George was still a toddler. Death first encroached on George’s life when, right before his third birthday, his older half sister Jane died. As the eldest of Mary Washington’s children, George probably helped to care for his gaggle of younger siblings, which grew to include Betty, Samuel, John Augustine, Charles, and Mildred. That only two of Gus Washington’s nine offspring perished in an era of elevated mortality rates for children speaks to hardy family stock.

Later on, irked by the sanctimonious moralizing about Washington’s perfections, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote mockingly that Washington “was born with his clothes on and his hair powdered and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.” ⁶ But there was nothing cosseted about his provincial boyhood, and he had little exposure to any pampered society that might have softened the rigors of his rural upbringing. Nor would the unforgiving Mary Washington have tolerated such laxity. She drilled habits of thrift and industry into her children, including rising early with the sun, a strict farmer’s habit that George retained for the rest of his life.

The childhood was a roving and unsettled one. In 1735, when George was three, Augustine relocated his family sixty miles upstream to his 2,500-acre tract at Little Hunting Creek on the Potomac, an unspoiled area of pristine forests. Perched on a hilltop at a scenic bend of the river, the house he constructed was more ample than the earlier one, with four ground-floor rooms bisected by a central hallway and warmed by four fireplaces; a row of smaller bedrooms upstairs accommodated the growing clan. So sturdy was the new house that its downstairs rooms were later embedded into George’s expanding mansion at Mount Vernon, turning the building into an archaeological record of his life.

In 1736 Augustine Washington sailed to England and negotiated a one-twelfth ownership share of the Principio Company. To aid his performance as manager of their iron furnace in Virginia, Gus uprooted his expanding family again in 1738 and moved them south to a sylvan 260-acre spread on the Rappahannock River, directly opposite Fredericksburg and a convenient ride away from Accokeek Creek. Poised on the brow of a hill and slightly recessed from the river, the farm had woods nearby for firewood; broad, level fields for growing tobacco, wheat, and corn; and several pure streams for drinking water. Since access to the ferry later ran straight through the property—to George’s annoyance, crowds flocked gaily down the footpath during fair days or when courts were in session—the house would be dubbed Ferry Farm.

Touted in a newspaper advertisement as a “handsome dwelling house,” the two-story clapboard residence was a dark reddish-brown color, roofed with wooden shingles and flanked by brick chimneys. ⁷ With its seven rooms—four downstairs and three upstairs—the house counted as a substantial affair for the time, and recent excavations have disclosed many unexpected touches of gentility. Among the artifacts unearthed have been wig curlers, bone-handled toothbrushes, and a Wedgwood tea set, betokening an unmistakable air of affluence. The Washingtons must have entertained a steady flow of visitors, for they had curtained beds sprinkled throughout the house. Other details of their home inventory—thirteen tablecloths, thirty-one napkins, twenty-six silver spoons—conjure up a sociable, highly prosperous clan. Having acquired nearly fifty slaves and ten thousand acres of land, Augustine Washington had planted his family firmly among the regional gentry. Though not born into great wealth, George Washington doesn’t qualify for inclusion in the ranks of self-made Americans.

Ferry Farm provided George with his first treasured glimpses of a world beyond his boyhood haunts. The newly incorporated hamlet of Fredericksburg, with its courthouse and stone prison, was already an active port featuring rudiments of a more developed society. The young George Washington could peer across the river and see a perfect tableau of the British Empire in action. Moored at town wharves, ships bulging with tobacco, grain, and iron gave glimmers of the lucrative transatlantic trade with London that enriched the colony.

Around the time the Washingtons settled into their new home, changes occurred in the composition of the family. George’s baby sister Mildred was born and soon died, and he also set eyes for the first time on his older half brother Lawrence, a quasi-mythical figure who suddenly materialized in Virginia, polished by years at the Appleby Grammar School. Tall and debonair, Lawrence must have radiated a mature, well-traveled air of worldly sophistication for George, who was fourteen years his junior. Since Lawrence had stayed at Appleby until age twenty, he had probably graduated to the status of an “usher,” or assistant teacher, at the school. Lawrence would function as both a peer and a parental figure for his half brother, and his youthful adventures operated so powerfully on George’s imagination that the latter’s early life seems to enact a script first drafted by his older brother. When Augustine assigned Lawrence to superintend the Potomac River property recently vacated by the family, it immediately became the most desirable destination in George’s eyes.

George’s first exposure to war came vicariously through the exploits of his idolized brother. In 1739 Great Britain clashed with Spain in the Caribbean in a conflict styled the War of Jenkins’ Ear—Robert Jenkins being a British ship captain whose ear was allegedly mutilated by the Spanish. To bolster an amphibious force the following year, the Crown enlisted colonial subjects into an American Foot Regiment, and Lawrence landed a coveted spot as the captain of a Virginia company. In the major offensive of this expeditionary force, Admiral Edward Vernon hurled nine thousand men against the Spanish at Cartagena, on the northern coast of South America, in what degenerated into a bloody fiasco. Lawrence and his men never disembarked from their ship, which was ravaged by yellow fever and other tropical diseases no less efficiently than their colleagues were mowed down by enemy bullets. Some perished from sunstroke in sweltering heat. In the gruesome account he sent home, Lawrence detailed how “the enemy killed of ours some 600 . . . and the climate killed us in greater number . . . a great quantity of officers amongst the rest are dead . . . War is horrid in fact but much more so in imagination.” Amid the gloom, Lawrence struck a cavalier note that George mimicked years later: “We there have learned to live on ordinary diet, to watch much, and disregard the noise or shot of cannon.” ⁸

In these thrilling, if sanguinary, tales of war, Lawrence must have communicated mixed impressions of his British superiors. On the one hand, he had to brook the condescension of Brigadier General Thomas Wentworth, who sneered at colonial troops and kept them cooped up aboard the ship. At the same time, Lawrence retained clear affection for Admiral Vernon and, in a burst of Anglophilia, would rename the Little Hunting Creek estate Mount Vernon, hanging the admiral’s portrait in an honored place there. Thus the name of a forgotten British admiral would implausibly grace America’s secular shrine to the revolt against British rule. However frustrated with his British superiors, Lawrence earned the royal commission that would always elude George’s eager grasp—a precedent that could only have sharpened the latter’s keen sense of inequitable treatment at British hands. In his flourishing career, Lawrence was also named adjutant general of Virginia, which brought him the rank of major and entrusted him with the task of molding militia companies into an effective fighting force.

In June 1742 George’s other older half brother, Augustine Jr., also returned from a lengthy stay at Appleby. George must have expected that he would shortly follow suit, but that dream was rudely dashed a year later, when he was summoned back from a cousin’s home by news that his father was ill. On April 12, 1743, Augustine Washington died at forty-nine in a manner that eerily prefigured George’s own demise at century’s end: he had ridden out in a storm, gotten sick, and expired. This early death underscored a central paradox of George Washington’s life: that although he was a superb physical specimen, with a magnificent physique, his family’s medical history was blighted by truncated lives. He subsequently lamented, “Tho’ I was blessed with a good constitution, I was of a short-lived family.” ⁹

The most significant bequest fell to Lawrence, who inherited Mount Vernon and the iron mine, while Austin received the family farm at Pope’s Creek, where George was born and would spend much time after his father’s death. George himself inherited Ferry Farm, a half share in an upriver parcel called Deep Run, and assorted lots in Fredericksburg. The eleven-year-old also found himself the juvenile owner of ten human beings. Since he could not claim this property until he reached maturity, George’s newfound wealth was purely theoretical and placed him at the mercy of his strong-willed mother, who would not relinquish Ferry Farm for another thirty years. Augustine’s early death robbed George of the classical education bestowed on his older brothers, leaving him with an enduring sense of stunted, incomplete schooling. His father’s death threw the boy back upon his own resources, stealing any chance of a lighthearted youth. From then on, George grew accustomed to shouldering weighty family burdens. Because Mary never remarried—unusual in a frontier society with a paucity of women—George developed the deeply rooted toughness of children forced to function as adults at an early age. He discovered a precocious ability to perform many adult tasks, but he probably never forgot the sudden fright of being deprived of the protection of a father. One wonders whether he resented his mother for her failure to find a second husband, which imposed inordinate burdens on him as the eldest son. Quite naturally, George turned to older men as sponsors and patrons, cultivating the art of ingratiating himself with influential figures.

If Mary Ball Washington comes across as an unbending, even shrewish, disciplinarian, one can only imagine the unspoken dread that she, too, experienced at being widowed at thirty-five. She had to manage Ferry Farm, tend five children ranging in age from six to eleven, and oversee dozens of slaves. Gus’s death forced Mary to eliminate any frills of family life, and her spartan style as a businesswoman, frugal and demanding, had a discernible impact on her son. “In her dealings with servants, she was strict,” writes Douglas Southall Freeman. “They must follow a definite round of work. Her bidding must be their law.” ¹⁰ With more than a touch of the martinet in her forbidding nature, Mary Washington displayed a powerful capacity to command, and one is tempted to say that the first formidable general George Washington ever encountered was his own mother.

This trying woman inspired a healthy trepidation among George’s companions. “I was often there with George, his playmate, schoolmate, and young man’s companion,” said Lawrence Washington of Chotank, a distant relative. “Of the mother I was more afraid than of my own parents; she awed me in the midst of her kindness, for she was, indeed, truly kind.” ¹¹ There was nothing especially gentle about Mary Washington, little that savored of maternal warmth. Gus’s death removed any moderating influence between mother and eldest son, who clashed with their similarly willful personalities. Always a dutiful but seldom a loving son, George treated his mother with frigid deference, taking refuge in polite but empty forms. His letters to her would be addressed to “Honored Madam” and end with distant formality, “Your most Dutiful and Obedient Son, George Washington.” This studiously correct tone, likely laced with suppressed anger, only highlighted the absence of genuine filial affection.

There would always be a cool, quiet antagonism between Washington and his mother. The hypercritical mother produced a son who was overly sensitive to criticism and suffered from a lifelong need for approval. One suspects that, in dealing with this querulous woman, George became an overly controlled personality and learned to master his temper and curb his tongue. It was the extreme self-control of a deeply emotional young man who feared the fatal vehemence of his own feelings, if left unchecked. Anything pertaining to Mary Ball Washington stirred up an emotional tempest that George quelled only with difficulty. Never able to express these forbidden feelings of rage, he learned to equate silence and a certain manly stolidity with strength. This boyhood struggle was, in all likelihood, the genesis of the stoical personality that would later define him so indelibly.

On the one hand, the similarities between Mary Washington and her eldest son were striking. She was a fine horsewoman, enjoyed dancing, reputedly possessed enormous strength, was manic in money matters, tenaciously superintended her farm, and displayed a stubborn independence. Both mother and son exhibited supreme willpower that people defied at their peril. Both were vigorous, enterprising, and exacting in their demands. Yet in many other ways, George Washington defined himself as the antithesis of his mother. If his mother was crude and illiterate, he would improve himself through books. If she was self-centered, he would be self-sacrificing in serving his country. If she was slovenly, he would be meticulous in appearance. If she disdained fancy society, he would crave its acceptance. If she showed old-fashioned religious fervor, he would be devout in a more moderate fashion. And if she was a veteran complainer, he would be known for his stiff upper lip.

Unable to afford a fancy education for her children, Mary Washington did her best to pound moral precepts into them, reading daily portions from a volume entitled Contemplations Moral and Divine by Sir Matthew Hale. Many speculative theories have been floated about Washington’s education. Before his father’s death, he may have received a limited education in math, reading, and writing at a day school taught by a Mr. Hobby, one of his father’s tenants, who boasted that he had “laid the foundation of [Washington’s] greatness.” ¹² He may also have attended a school in Fredericksburg run by the Reverend James Marye, the rector of St. George’s Parish. According to one classmate, George applied himself to math while the others played at field hockey, his sole indiscretion being that he was caught “romping with one of the largest girls.” ¹³ Finally, when he stayed with Austin at the Pope’s Creek farm, he may have been schooled in the rudiments of math and surveying by a schoolmaster named Henry Williams. Oddly for a towering personage in history, Washington never cited an early educational mentor, suggesting that his boyhood lessons were pretty humdrum. He left behind more than two hundred pages of schoolboy exercises that focused on geometry lessons, weights and measures, compound interest, currency conversions, and other skills necessary for business or surveying. Almost by osmosis, he absorbed law and economics by monotonously copying out legal forms for bail bonds, leases, and land patents, stocking his mind with a huge fund of practical information. The furnace of ambition burned with a bright, steady flame inside this diligent boy.

With painstaking effort, Washington learned to write in a round hand that lacked elegance but had great clarity. It took time for him to compose clean, declarative sentences—his teenage prose was often turgid and ungrammatical—but by dint of hard work, his powers grew steadily until he became a writer of considerable force, able to register his wishes with precision. It was in Washington’s nature to work doubly hard to rectify perceived failings. Writing in 1807, the biographer David Ramsay said of the young Washington that “he was grave, silent, and thoughtful, diligent and methodical in business, dignified in his appearance, strictly honorable in his deportment.” ¹⁴

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.