Monument: Four Presidents Who Sculpted America

By Robert Dallek

From personal correspondence to presidential speeches and documents, Monument: Four Presidents Who Sculpted America explores the written words of the men forever remembered on the face of Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota. Originally a project to boost tourism, the sculpture received congressional approval in 1925, and construction was completed in 1941, shortly after the death of sculptor Gutzon Borglum. Canterbury Classics has gathered historic documents penned by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt into this beautiful leather-bound volume, and added introductions by learned scholars to outline the contribution each president made to the birth, growth, development, and preservation of the United States. Also included is the story of how Mount Rushmore came to be, and a foreword written by historian Robert Dallek. With more than two million visitors annually, Mount Rushmore lives up to its status as a “Shrine of Democracy,” and this rich piece of U.S. history is preserved in this timeless collectible edition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781684129256

Robert Dallek

Robert Dallek is the author of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 and Nixon and Kissinger, among other books. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, and Vanity Fair. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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INTRODUCTION

MT. RUSHMORE

Mount Rushmore National Memorial is America. The sixty-foot busts of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt carved by Gutzon Borglum into the granite of the Black Hills of South Dakota are a historical document, a testimony to our nation’s past writ in stone. Borglum’s great work, with its likenesses of four figures who inscribed their will not only over what was considered a wild and untamed land, but also over the unruly realm of human politics, memorializes the conquering of what Jefferson once called an empire for liberty. As a monument, it is on par with the pyramids of Egypt or Mayan temples of the Yucatan Peninsula. As a pilgrimage site, it matches the great cathedrals of Europe, attracting over two million visitors annually. It will endure for centuries—possibly millennia—to come.

Borglum had a particular view of American history and the destiny of its people. In this, he embodied many of the paradoxes and conflicts implicit in American history itself. In his drive for self-promotion and his tireless ambition—the two traits that led to his choosing such a grandiose plan for Mt. Rushmore—Borglum was quintessentially American. Similarly, by its very nature, Mt. Rushmore is an endorsement of the great man school of history. This is the idea that it is powerful, visionary personalities who move humanity forward. Its philosophy is individualistic, emphasizing the power of a single person to change the course of civilizations, and it is very suited to a heroic history that makes myths—and monumental sculptures—out of great leaders. However, more recent work in history, including that developed in Borglum’s own lifetime, tends to highlight the role of mass social movements and the contributions of women and people of color. (A 1936 attempt to have Borglum include Susan B. Anthony in the sculptural grouping died in the House Appropriations Committee, and in any case the sculptor himself rejected the idea out of hand.)

To be sure, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt did indeed have profound effects on American history. Without their leadership, this country would be a very different place. However, modern historians have explored their legacies with a more critical eye: While Lincoln is best known for freeing enslaved African Americans, two of the presidents depicted—Washington and Jefferson—were slaveholders. Meanwhile, Roosevelt, whom Borglum had met and campaigned for, was an active participant in America’s military expansion as an imperial power. Similarly, Mt. Rushmore was built on land that was, and still is, sacred to the Lakota people.

Mt. Rushmore today embodies all of these things: It is a shrine of democracy that memorializes four great American leaders, even as it is an implicit testimony to those often left out of the history books. Not only is Gutzon Borglum remembered for his work, so, too, are the everyday men and women who labored to create it. The mountain is a place that is still sacred to the Lakota, even as Gutzon Borglum sought to make a site that would be sacred to all Americans. It is the responsibility of the historian to tell all of these stories, and the National Parks Service does not shy away from telling the bad with the good in their visitors’ center.

This book is much the same. It is a collection of historical documents intended to accompany and bear witness to the accomplishments of the four figures memorialized on the mountain. This introduction will give the history of the monument, while the introductions to the sections on Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt will explore their biographies in the context of the times in which they lived. In so doing, we hope to show that while the arc of American history has had its flaws, tragedies, and injustices, it does, as Martin Luther King Jr., said about the arc of the moral universe, in the end bend toward justice.

JOHN GUTZON DE LA MOTHE BORGLUM

The sculptor who planned and executed Mt. Rushmore, John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum, himself came from a background that was at the same time both unorthodox and quintessentially American. Though he later downplayed the unusual circumstances of his birth, Borglum was born in 1867 near Bear Lake, Idaho, to Danish immigrant parents who were in a Mormon polygamous relationship. Both his mother, Christina Mikkelsen Borglum and her sister Ida were married to Jens Moller Haugaard Borglum, a woodcarver who later became a homeopathic doctor. Jens eventually left the Mormon church, divorced Christina (though he continued to care for their children), and moved away from the Mormon community. During Gutzon Borglum’s formative years, the family lived in places as varied as Nebraska, Kansas, and California. After their last move to California, the young Borglum, having received some art training in Kansas, apprenticed to a lithographer. Choosing to remain in California when his family returned to Nebraska, Borglum soon struck out on his own as an independent artist.

It was soon thereafter that Borglum met Elizabeth Lisa Jaynes Putnam, a divorced painter almost two decades his senior who would become his entrée into the art world. It was also in this period that his monumental ambition, and desire to make the social connections that could help him realize that ambition, first became manifest: His portrait of John C. Frémont, the famous Union general, explorer, abolitionist, and senator who had been the first Republican candidate for president, was completed in 1888 and did much to establish his reputation. Even though Frémont died shortly after the portrait was completed, his well-connected widow Jesse Benton Frémont was able to provide him with introductions to powerful men such as Leland Stanford and Theodore Roosevelt.

Painting was not a medium that could contain Gutzon Borglum’s ego: it was too private, too small, too vulnerable to the ravages of time and accident. For him, it had to be sculpture—large public works that would survive the ages. Borglum’s younger brother, Solon, had already become a successful sculptor; the shared family name and his connection to Frémont’s widow helped advance the young artist’s career. To truly become a great artist, however, would require study, and so Borglum made plans to travel to Paris, marrying Lisa Putnam shortly before his departure. He spent the years from 1890 to 1893 studying at the Julien Academy and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, successfully exhibiting his work and also meeting the great sculptor Auguste Rodin. Borglum’s Paris sojourn was followed by a visit to England from 1896 to 1901. Unfortunately, the travel put too much of a strain on his relationship with his wife, who had accompanied him on his journeys, and they grew estranged. However, on the return voyage in 1901, Borglum met Mary Montgomery, an American woman seven years his junior who had just earned her doctorate in Babylonian history at the University of Berlin. Mary’s intelligence would have been remarkable in any time, but the degree of education she achieved was highly unusual for the late Victorian era: Her parents had been missionaries in Turkey, and she had an incredible talent for languages, mastering Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew, and Sanskrit. It was not until 1909 that Lisa granted Borglum a divorce and he was free to marry Mary. In the intervening years, the two lived in the burgeoning artistic center of New York, where he worked on sculptures for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and other commissions. Two notable pieces he created in this period included the Mares of Diomedes, a sculpture group that was (and still is) shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a colossal bust of Abraham Lincoln exhibited at the White House, which gave Borglum the opportunity to meet Theodore Roosevelt. Today, the sculpture, carved from a six-ton block of marble, is in the Capitol Crypt. In 1910, the newly married Gutzon and Mary moved to Connecticut, and he continued to sculpt and show his work. Their son Lincoln, who would complete Mt. Rushmore, would be born three years later. They also had another son and a daughter.

One of Borglum’s artistic goals was to develop a uniquely American style of sculpture. The art of the new land, he thought, should reflect its character and its meaning. He was particularly interested in using the mass of the stone to convey the emotional impact of volume. Many of the aspects that would later be seen on Mt. Rushmore, especially the idea of size and the sense of impressiveness and weight rooted in the natural materials he was using, can be seen in his art from this period. Rodin’s influence can be seen in Borglum’s style—the French sculptor also emphasized the natural texture of his material—but the American took this further, giving his work an energy and sense of restlessness that reflected the recent closing of the American frontier. What’s more, in a quintessentially American way, Borglum’s work was larger than anything that was being attempted in Europe. Size, to him, was everything. There isn’t a monument in this country as big as a snuff box, he would complain.

BORGLUM AND MONUMENTAL SCULPTURE

Borglum soon had the chance to execute a work on the scale he had hoped for. In 1914, the octogenarian president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, C. Helen Plane, contacted him: Would he like to carve a bust of Robert E. Lee into Stone Mountain in Georgia? Stone Mountain was to be a shrine to the defeated Confederacy and, implicitly, an endorsement of the Lost Cause.

Borglum leapt at the opportunity. He had no special love for Southern revisionist history—he was an unabashed fan of Abraham Lincoln, the great liberator who had defeated the South and after whom he had named his eldest child—but like most men of his era, he accepted racial hierarchies unquestioningly. The most important factor seems to have been that the giant-sized commission, which was larger than any ever attempted and required that he develop entirely new techniques for sculpting, appealed to his immense ambition and ego. Indeed, Borglum’s plans for Stone Mountain ultimately went beyond what was originally envisioned. Ladies, the head of Lee on the side of that mountain would look like a postage stamp on a barn door! he exclaimed, and instead proposed to carve Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis on horseback followed by a line of soldiers on foot, all executed as a high relief frieze.

Work on Stone Mountain began in June of 1923, and the frieze of Lee’s head was ready to display on the anniversary of the Confederate general’s birthday in January of the following year. The project fell into disarray, however, in the late winter and spring of 1925 when the disorganized Stone Mountain Confederate Monumental Association couldn’t raise enough money. In 1924, Doane Robinson, an attorney and the state historian of South Dakota, approached Borglum about the Mt. Rushmore project. Borglum made a trip to see the site of the proposed monument that summer, accompanied by his then 12-year-old son Lincoln. The Stone Mountain project continued to implode, and the organizers fired Borglum in early 1925. A warrant was even issued for his arrest for breach of contract. In response, Borglum destroyed his models for the Confederate memorial and skipped town. The work he had already completed was blasted off the mountain, and a new sculptor, Henry Augustus Lukeman, was hired to begin anew.

As troublesome as it is for Stone Mountain to be part of the history of Mt. Rushmore, Borglum could not have executed the later monument without the experience of the first. For instance, it was in Georgia that Borglum learned how to project plans onto a mountainside and, from a visiting Belgian engineer, to do precision blasting with dynamite.

Mt. Rushmore was different from Stone Mountain in another important way: The first could only have ever been a project of regional interest. Doane Robinson, however, envisioned something of national importance, with historical figures of unusual character from the history of the West—Anglo-Americans, such as Lewis and Clark and Buffalo Bill Cody, as well as Native Americans, such as Red Cloud and Sacagawea. Borglum returned with a bigger idea: Washington, the founder, and Lincoln, the savior, to whom were soon added Jefferson and Roosevelt. These figures, too, had a connection to the history of the West: Jefferson, the first expansionist, had made the Louisiana Purchase and sent Lewis and Clark out to explore the new land all the way to the sea. Roosevelt had fought in the Spanish-American War, which added former Spanish colonies to the United States, and had acquired the land used to build the Panama Canal. In short, Mt. Rushmore was to be a monument to Manifest Destiny, the special role of the United States in human history, the moral rectitude of its imperialistic ends, and the inevitability of its expansion to become a world power. American democracy, wrote historian Frederick Jackson Turner, was made by its frontier; the nation’s character was shaped by its constant expansion. Mt. Rushmore would be the shrine of democracy, a monument to the men that made that expansion possible.

THE BLACK HILLS

The natural setting where Robinson envisioned a shrine to democracy deserves its own biography no less than does its creator. In this case, the medium—the raw stone into which the images of the Presidents were jackhammered and dynamite-blasted—is the message, and Borglum’s ideas of volume called for a suitably impressive starting material. The Black Hills (a translation from the Lakota He Sápa) are a small mountain range rising out of the Great Plains. They were formed by volcanic activity 1.8 billion years ago and formed like a bull’s-eye, with a granite core, ringed by metamorphic rock and a sedimentary border. The creeks are filled with trout, while deer, bighorn sheep, bison, and mountain lions travel the conifer and spruce forests. These forests also lend the Black Hills their name, as the tree cover makes them seem dark when seen from far away.

The Black Hills passed from one Native American people to another, until the Lakota came to protect them after defeating the Cheyenne in 1776. The Lakota were one of the three tribes of the Sioux people, and the Black Hills would soon become a sacred place central to their culture. In the 1800s, however, the Sioux opposed American expansion into the West, which led to a number of conflicts such as Red Cloud’s War (1866–68). The Fort Laramie Treaty that ended Red Cloud’s War in 1868 promised that the Black Hills would remain Lakota property forever. But the promise only lasted about 20 years: George Armstrong Custer’s 1874 expedition discovered gold in the Black Hills, and in 1889, the US Government moved the Lakota to five smaller reservations and sold off over nine million acres of land. The Lakota nation still claims sovereignty over the Black Hills, and has refused financial compensation awarded by the US Supreme Court.

The Lakota knew Mt. Rushmore as The Six Grandfathers (Tunkasila Sakpe) or Cougar Mountain (Igmu Tanka Paha), while white settlers called it by various other names. The wealthy Eastern investor Charles Rushmore, who visited the area on hunting and prospecting trips in the 1880s, joked that it should be named after him. The name Mt. Rushmore was recognized by the United States Board of Geographic Names in 1930, the year before Rushmore’s death.

BUILDING OF MT. RUSHMORE

On August 10, 1927, President Calvin Coolidge, who was spending the summer in South Dakota, traveled at Borglum’s behest to the Black Hills to formally dedicate the Mt. Rushmore site. (There had already been a dedication ceremony in 1925, but Gutzon Borglum relished the idea of one with a sitting president.) Coolidge rode a horse up through the newly blazed path through the woods, mounted a podium, and spoke:

We have come here to dedicate a cornerstone laid by the hand of the Almighty. The union of these four presidents carved on the face of the everlasting Black Hills of South Dakota will be distinctly American in its conception, in its magnitude, in its meaning. No one can look upon it without realizing it is a picture of hope fulfilled. Its location will be significant. Here in the heart of the continent, on the side of a mountain which probably no white man had ever beheld in the days of Washington, in territory acquired by the action of Jefferson, which remained an unbroken wilderness beyond the days of Lincoln, which was especially loved by Roosevelt.

Coolidge symbolically presented Borglum with six steel drill bits with which the artist would start carving the mountain. In return, Borglum asked Coolidge to write the explanatory inscription Borglum envisioned as part of the sculpture.

Speaking fine words was the easy part. Funding still had to be secured, and the Mount Rushmore Commission had to be appointed to oversee the project. Borglum’s personality did not make this any easier: A meeting with President Herbert Hoover was canceled after the sculptor got into an argument with the president’s secretary. South Dakota Congressman William Williamson and John Boland, the secretary of the executive committee of the Commission, managed to smooth things over. Doane Robinson, however, was not nominated for a leadership role, and gradually drifted away from the project.

The project was, of course, immensely expensive, eventually totaling $989,999.32—around 18 million dollars in today’s money. About 84 percent was paid by the federal government, despite Borglum’s earlier belief that he would be able to find matching funds from private donors. Much of the rest came from private individuals. Charles Rushmore himself gave $5,000, the largest single donation. The sculptor was unfazed by the expense: Call up Cheops and ask him how much his pyramid cost, and what he paid the creator—an inferior work to Mt. Rushmore, Borglum said in 1940, even as the country was gearing up for World War II.

Once funding was secured, almost 400 men and women worked on Mt. Rushmore for fourteen years, season after season, in the heat and the cold. Most were working-class miners. I must have men who know how to carve mountains, Borglum said. Washington emerged from the stone first (dedicated in 1930), then Jefferson (dedicated in 1936 in a ceremony attended by President Franklin D. Roosevelt), Lincoln (1937), and Roosevelt (1939). Miraculously, none of the workers was killed on the job, though rock dust inhaled while working may have contributed to later premature deaths from silicosis. As at Stone Mountain, Borglum proved a difficult man to work for. He was a short-tempered, domineering perfectionist. He would fire a worker one day, then demand to know why he wasn’t on the job the next. During the Depression, he feuded with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Parks Commission and the engineer, Julian Spotts, who was appointed as overseer. To him, anything less than complete control was unacceptable.

As always, his wife, the brilliant, highly educated Mary Borglum was an incredible helpmate—running the ranch in the near-wilderness to which her husband’s ambition had dragged her, raising the children, and, of course, putting up with the irascible Gutzon’s rages and moods. Borglum’s son Lincoln also became an object of his ambition: He decided his son would also be his protégé and employed him as a pointer. Though many of the workers saw Lincoln as the boss’s privileged son, the humble, hard-working young man soon won their trust and affection. One of the longtime workers remarked, The Old Man was always trying to push Lincoln along—to make him important. Lincoln never let it go to his head. He didn’t know much about what he was doing at first, but he was such a nice kid that all the other pointers helped him out until he learned to do it by himself, so it all worked out okay. Lincoln was a good guy to work with.

Gutzon Borglum died on March 6, 1941, shortly before his 74th birthday, and the completion of Mt. Rushmore fell to his son Lincoln, who by that time was the general supervisor. Due to the lack of funding, the sculptor’s plans to include the presidents’ torsos and the entablature were never realized, and Lincoln Borglum’s final drilling in October of 1941 left the sculpture as his father had finished it. Lincoln then became the park’s first superintendent from 1941 to 1944. He went on to a distinguished career as a photographer and a sculptor in his own right, and died in 1986 at the age of 74; his grave is in San Antonio, Texas.

THE FUTURE OF MT. RUSHMORE

Gutzon Borglum’s take on his creation’s future place in history is nowhere more explicit than in his plans for the Entablature. This was to have been the story of the United States in 500 words, carved in three-foot-high letters, fit into the shape of the Louisiana Purchase and positioned to one side of Washington’s head. Future generations would have no doubt as to who created the monument, why, or what their beliefs were. Coolidge’s first attempt at the text was quietly withdrawn after Borglum’s edits led to public mockery, and the sculptor instead ran a contest in conjunction with Hearst newspapers. None of the reportedly 100,000 entries met with Borglum’s approval, either, and none were publicly displayed until the one composed by a Nebraska college student named William Andrew Burkett was inscribed on a bronze tablet and erected in 1971. In it, we can see something of the intent behind Mt. Rushmore. Like Coolidge’s dedicatory speech, Burkett’s Entablature is an explicitly religious and Christian endorsement of Manifest Destiny, beginning with the words: Almighty God, from this pulpit of stone the American people render thanksgiving and praise for the new era of civilization brought forth upon this continent. It goes on to express the founding creed of America: That the nation was founded on the principle that life, liberty, equality, and pursuit of happiness were the birthrights of all mankind, and that the sacred Constitution embodies our faith in God and in mankind by giving equal participation in government to all citizens. It then goes year-by-year through ways in which far-sighted American statesmanship acquired by treaties, vast wilderness territories, where progressive, adventurous Americans spread civilization and Christianity: The Louisiana Purchase, the acquisition of Florida, Texas, California, Oregon, Alaska, and the Panama Canal Zone.

While the inscription on the side of the mountain never came to be, Borglum’s idea of history can also be seen in a small door behind Lincoln’s head. The Hall of Records was intended to be a time capsule to future civilizations containing the busts of great Americans (such as Susan B. Anthony), as well as documents, such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Hall of Records was left unfinished as a 75-foot-long tunnel, until Borglum’s ambition was realized, in part, in 1998, when four porcelain tablets telling the monument’s history were installed there, sealed away behind a half-ton slab of rock.

The stories of the Entablature and the Hall of Records say something profound about Mt. Rushmore: No matter what meaning Gutzon Borglum and his contemporaries ascribed to the monument, each generation will reinterpret it in its own right. While future generations may bemoan the lack of women or people of color on the mountain, this is not the final word. Rather, the principles of liberty laid down by Washington and Jefferson, the justice brought by Lincoln, and the universalizing and globalizing tendencies of Roosevelt are alive and being expanded upon even today. The stone of Mt. Rushmore is a living document.

Ken Mondschein,

PhD October 2019

GEORGE WASHINGTON

INTRODUCTION

Perhaps no other historical figure in the history of the United States, or even the modern world, has been as subject to myth-making and secular hagiography as George Washington. Indeed, the writings praising his character, foresight, and judgment approach those of a religious figure such as Jesus, Mohammad, or Buddha. In many ways, this was a deliberate attempt to create a national myth out of the granddaddy of all the Founding Fathers, the first president who led the budding nation through the American Revolution.

To cite one example, the cherry tree myth first appeared in 1806 in Mason Locke Weems’ heavily fictionalized Life of Washington in which he tried to show that the future president’s unparalleled rise and elevation were due to his Great Virtues. Chief Justice John Marshall and the writer Washington Irving tried to pen rather more factually grounded biographies, but they were hardly critical in the modern sense. Modern revisionist historians, who critique him as a man whose fortune was built on slavery, often point out that his final will and testament—while radical for the time in that it provided for the welfare of all the people he owned—did not free his slaves until after Martha’s death. However, to strip off the layers of varnish and find a true portrait of the man is no small task.

What do we know for certain about the man himself? George Washington was tall for his time—six feet, two inches—and his athletic ability was renowned, as were his endurance and strength. However, stories such as his throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac River are exaggerated—silver dollars weren’t widely produced until five years after Washington’s death. According to his step-grandson George Washington Parke Custis, he did, however, throw a piece of slate across Virginia’s Rappahannock River. He also never had wooden teeth, as Weems asserted. Despite his good oral hygiene, his teeth, like those of many of his contemporaries, were bad; the fact that he was fond of sugar, a luxury good grown by enslaved labor in Barbados, could not have helped. Washington lost his first tooth at twenty-four. By the time of his inauguration, he had but one tooth left, which was soon extracted, and he wore dentures for the rest of his life. These were made of materials such as ivory, metal, and human teeth, including those of African Americans.

But what about his famed character? This is harder to know, since it deals with intangibles and opinions. The historian’s task is to use verifiable facts, not to repeat the myths that have only grown in the retelling. Rather than sifting through the much-exaggerated accounts of those who knew and lionized him, we need to look at Washington’s actions.

LIFE OF GEORGE WASHINGTON

Washington was born on February 22, 1732—which was actually a Tuesday, despite the fact that we celebrate his birthday on the third Monday in February. He was the eldest of the six children of Augustine and Mary Ball Washington; he also had three elder half-siblings from his father’s first marriage. The future president came from a privileged background; his grandfather John Washington had immigrated in 1656 from Sulgrave, England, and acquired 5,000 acres along the Potomac River.

His older half-brother Lawrence’s influential father-in-law William Fairfax, who owned the Mount Vernon plantation, acted as a parental figure and patron to the young Washington after his own father died when he was eleven. It was from Fairfax that Washington acquired his taste for the gracious, elegant lifestyle of the Southern gentry. His Rules of Civility, copied into his schoolbook at the age of sixteen, reflect this desire to be accepted in polite society.

Despite his emphasis on manners and gentle living, Washington was also a tireless frontiersman. He worked surveying Fairfax’s property as well as on the frontier and acquired 1,500 acres in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in 1750. The following year he made his only trip abroad, accompanying Lawrence on a trip to Barbados in a vain attempt to cure the latter’s tuberculosis. Washington contracted smallpox on the same trip; the disease likely left him sterile and he would never have children. Lawrence died in 1752, and his widow gained control of Mount Vernon. Washington would acquire the plantation outright in 1761.

Military Career

Serving in the colonial militia was expected of the colonial plantation class, and Washington received a commission as a major in 1752. The militia was a necessity at the time since westward expansion provoked the hostility of Native Americans, and the rivalry between the French and English played itself out in North America in the building of forts and forging of alliances with the indigenous peoples. The frontier was a dangerous place.

Washington’s military career began inauspiciously. After completing a sensitive diplomatic mission in 1753, he was appointed a lieutenant colonel by Virginia Governor Robert Dinwiddie and, in early 1754, assigned to lead an expedition of about 150 men to the Ohio territory where the French were building Fort Duquesne. On May 28, he attacked and massacred a smaller French force in the Battle of Jumonville Glen. As no formal hostilities existed, this act began the French and Indian War; Washington later blamed his translator for the mistake, but Dinwiddie’s instructions seemed to be an implicit order to stop the French by violence. Washington retreated to Fort Necessity, where he was attacked by the French and, outnumbered, forced to surrender and admit that the killing of the French commander, Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, had been an assassination. In the aftermath, Washington resigned his commission rather than accept a demotion to captain.

He was somewhat redeemed the following year by his courageous conduct in July, 1755, when, ill from dysentery, he rallied the survivors of Edward Braddock’s disastrous expedition to expel the French from Ohio and kept a defeat from becoming a rout. Washington had two horses shot out from under him and bullets pierced both his hat and coat; yet, he himself was untouched. This was Washington’s last notable engagement of the French and Indian War. Impatient to take the strategically vital Fort Duquesne, he clashed with both his superiors and those of ostensibly equal rank who held superior royal commissions. The end of the French and Indian War in the Ohio Valley was almost anticlimatic. After a string of British victories, and with their indigenous allies abandoning their cause, the French blew up Fort Duquesne themselves. Washington’s greatest success during this period was in organizing the Virginia militia into a large, well-trained body of 1,000 men and successfully defending the frontier against attack.

Marriage and Rise to Prominence

With the war winding down (though it would not formally end until the Treaty of Paris in 1763), the now-twenty-six-year-old Washington began thinking about marriage. He soon set his sights on the twenty-eight-year-old Martha Dandridge Custis, whom he married in 1759. As the widow of Daniel Parke Custis, a prosperous plantation owner, she brought considerable wealth to the marriage. Since Custis had died without a will, one-third of his estate went to his widow and two-thirds to their children, John Parke Custis and Martha Parke Custis (who died of uncontrolled epilepsy in 1773). As Martha’s husband, Washington had control over the entirety. He was now one of the wealthiest men in Virginia and expanded his fortune by planting tobacco and wheat, speculating on land (including duping veterans of the French and Indian War out of their land bounties), and winning public office by plying voters with alcohol. But no one who reads Washington’s letters to Martha can doubt his love for her. While she destroyed most of the letters after his death in order to preserve their marital privacy, we reproduce the two surviving letters here (see pages 91–93).

The Revolution

By the 1760s, Washington had become a critic of British mercantilist policies, which forced the colonists to export raw agricultural products such as cotton, tobacco, and indigo, and to import manufactured goods at high prices. His growing opposition to British rule may have been related to his own financial troubles. Low tobacco prices and his taste for imported luxuries had left him heavily in debt and prompted him to experiment with a more domestically based economy. When the British Parliament began interfering with colonial self-rule and passed onerous legislation in the 1760s and 1770s, such as the Stamp Act, he added these new grievances to the embarrassments of his military career and his financial difficulties. He and George Mason, a wealthy Virginia planter and lawmaker, authored the Fairfax Resolves calling for a Continental Congress. Washington became a delegate to the Congress, trained the Virginia militia, and helped enforce the boycott of British goods.

At the outbreak of hostilities in 1775, Washington was quickly nominated, and unanimously appointed, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. He successfully captured Boston but made crucial errors that led to a forced retreat from Long Island and New York City in 1776. His famous surprise attack in Trenton in late 1776 provided the poorly equipped Americans with a much-needed morale boost, though the campaign season of 1777 was disastrous with defeats at Philadelphia, Germantown, and Brandywine, leading some (known as the Conway Cabal) to petition to have him removed as commander. The one bright spot was Horatio Gates’s victory at Saratoga, which turned the tide of the revolution in the colonists’ favor.

The winter of 1777, spent at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, was brutal; some 2,000–3,000 of the 11,000-man army died of cold, hunger, and exposure. Washington fruitlessly sought money and supplies from the Continental Congress. In spite of the harsh winter, the Prussian General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben was able to transform the ragtag militia into a formidable fighting force, and additional aid arrived from the French. The years from 1777 to 1781 were marked by no major actions in the north, save for the inconclusive Battle of Monmouth Courthouse. However, there were notable American successes in the southern colonies, culminating in the British surrender at Yorktown. After overseeing the British evacuation, settling the business of the Continental Army, and suppressing a plotted coup known as the Newburgh Conspiracy, he resigned his commission in 1783, returning to Mount Vernon on Christmas Eve. His Letter of Farewell to the Army, which was sent out as a public circular, shows the same concerns that he emphasized throughout his public life. Namely, Washington was concerned that the new nation should be governed peaceably and justly under a strong federal government.

If we are to consider Washington’s military career objectively, we see a man who often ignored sound advice, made mistakes, and acted overconfidently. Yet, he commanded the unquestioning loyalty of those around him and knew how to deploy his subordinates to their best advantage. He tried to emulate the discipline and coordination of professional European armies, but he was a tactical amateur, and many times his commanders were unable to execute his plans. Thus, at times, Washington found himself outmaneuvered on the battlefield, but he learned from his mistakes, kept the army together through trying conditions, and was astute at negotiating the political aspects of the conflict. His final strategic plan—to control the land, deny aid and comfort to the British, conserve his strength, and avoid battle unless it was a sure victory over an outnumbered foe—ultimately resulted in victory.

A MORE PERFECT UNION AND PRESIDENCY

While Washington had been away fighting, the business of his Mount Vernon plantation had suffered. Upon returning to civilian life, he undertook the huge task of repairing his finances and renovating Mount Vernon, but his interest in the nascent nation remained keen. He had long advocated a strong central government for the newly independent colonies. The Articles of Confederation, he wrote, were no more than a rope of sand. It was little surprise that he was chosen—against his own wishes—as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He was unanimously chosen to serve as President of the Convention and lent his prestige to the Federalist project of creating a more perfect union. Although it was considered radical for its time, the new constitution was nothing like what we would recognize as true democracy. In keeping with the prevailing attitudes of the time, it was accepted that the natural aristocracy of wealth, land, and power would rule. Unsurprisingly, the Electoral College appointed by the state legislatures elected the hero of the American Revolution the first President of the newly formed United States of America.

Washington did much to define the new office of the chief executive, from his style—the humble Mr. President rather than His Excellency, the President—to limiting himself to two terms and overseeing a smooth transition of power. (He had originally wished to serve only one term.) Working with Congress, he created cabinet posts and executive offices, established a national bank, and worked to pay off the war debt. Also, of no small importance, he established a permanent home for the federal government, which had been resident in New York and Philadelphia. Washington, D.C., was created and expanded with the Residence Act and his two Proclamations of 1791. In short, it is thanks to Washington’s administration that the first large-scale republican government since the ancient world truly functioned and worked as a national government. The documents from his presidency—the inaugural addresses, Residence Act, and proclamations—reflect these concerns, while his annual addresses began the tradition of the presidential State of the Union address.

Those close to him soon formed the first political parties, which we will explore more in the introduction to Thomas Jefferson’s documents. Rather than being a partisan, however, Washington sought to achieve consensus and delegate power to allies. His Farewell Address warns of the dangers of factions and expresses his fear that, like ancient Rome, the United States might degenerate into civil war. His fears were realized 65 years later, when the southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy. At stake was something Washington himself had been concerned with—the issue of states’ rights versus the power of the federal government, which the question of slavery made painfully clear.

WASHINGTON AND SLAVERY

George Washington inherited the first ten African Americans he owned from his father at the age of eleven in 1743. Before he married Martha in 1759, he purchased at least a dozen more people. Marriage with Martha brought another eighty-four human beings under his control; to them, he added about forty additional slaves that he purchased before the Revolution.

Due mostly to the natural increase in population, slavery was on the rise in the South in Washington’s lifetime. When he took control of Mount Vernon in 1754, 28 percent of the 6,500 people living in Fairfax County, Virginia, were slaves; by the end of the Revolution, the figure was 40 percent. The same held true for Washington’s estate. By the beginning of the Revolutionary War there were 100 people held in bondage at Mount Vernon, and by the time he died in 1799, there were 317 enslaved people at his plantation, of whom 123 were his direct property. Forty were rented from other plantations; the remainder belonged to the estate of his wife’s first husband.

How did George Washington treat his slaves? Sources differ: Richard Parkinson, a visiting Englishman who bore no love for Washington, claimed that he treated them with more severity than any other man, fed and clothed them poorly, and spoke to them harshly. Then again, he also claimed that Washington put the horse that had borne him faithfully through the war up for sale. The Polish poet and statesman Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, on the other hand, stated that Washington treats his slaves far more humanely than do his fellow citizens of Virginia. Most of these gentlemen give to their blacks only bread, water, and blows.

No matter the conditions, slavery is still an inhumane institution, and enslaved African Americans resisted in whatever small ways they could. Theft was one means of resistance, and Washington’s letters are rife with accounts of small items stolen by slaves. Slaves also might shirk work, though they risked being beaten for it, as an overseer named Anthony Whitting did with a hickory switch to a woman named Charlotte in 1793 for the crime of being impudent. (Charlotte protested that she had not been whipped for fourteen years, which suggests such actions were not common, but Washington deemed the punishment very proper.) A number also escaped—and not just field hands. Seventeen Mount Vernon slaves fled in 1781 when a British warship anchored in the river by the plantation. Christopher, Washington’s personal servant, made plans to escape but was found out, and the cook, Hercules, ran away in the winter of 1796–97. Most famous of the escapees was Oney Judge, Martha Washington’s mixed-race maidservant and a skilled seamstress, who simply walked out of the family home in Philadelphia in 1796; her motivation was learning that she would be given to Elizabeth Parke Custis upon Martha Washington’s death. The Washingtons tried, unsuccessfully, to have her recaptured or induce her to return. In newspaper interviews given as late as 1845, Judge defended her choice and was proud that she had learned to read and write and had learned the basics of Christianity.

Washington’s view of slavery changed radically during his lifetime. Not only did the cause of liberty conflict with the reality of enslavement, but he saw free African Americans fight the British with the Continental Army. (Though he initially opposed their enlistment, he relented when the British began allowing free blacks to enlist and they eventually comprised 10 percent of the army.) Lafayette, the French military hero who fought with the colonists, was decidedly against slavery, and he may have had an influence. Furthermore, Washington had grave doubts as to the economic viability of slavery both in his own operations and in the broader economy. Though he would never become a radical abolitionist—the mere question would have been political suicide in the fragile early republic—his sentiments over time turned decidedly against the institution.

During the American Revolution, Washington confided in a letter to his cousin that he wished to to get quit of slavery. In 1794, he wrote to his friend and neighbor Alexander Spotswood of his repugnance toward the idea of selling Negroes, as you would Cattle in the market. Yet, he was careful to rotate the slaves he brought with him to Philadelphia, so they would not be freed after six months’ residency under Pennsylvania law, and he did not cease trying to recapture Oney Judge. However well disposed I might be to a gradual emancipation, or even to an entire emancipation of that description of People (if the latter was in itself practicable at this moment), he wrote, it would neither be politic or just to reward unfaithfulness with a premature preference.

It was Washington’s wish to free the human beings he owned after his death, in addition to—as was required by law—providing for the support of those too old to work. To do so, he sold his Ohio Valley lands and attempted to come up with complicated schemes. But when it came time to write his will, his hands were tied. Since Martha’s first husband Daniel Parke Custis had died without a will, 153 of the enslaved African Americans at Mt. Vernon had to, by law, go to his heirs upon her death—that is, Martha’s four surviving grandchildren by her son, John. Both George and Martha Washington were legally powerless to free them. Therefore, wishing to avoid the most painful sensations, if not disagreeable consequences of splitting up the families, Washington chose to delay manumission until after Martha’s death. (She, however, executed the will early, on January 1, 1801.) The one exception was Washington’s longtime manservant, William Lee, who upon Washington’s death was given immediate freedom and a pension for his faithful wartime service.

Washington also provided for the basic education of enslaved people up to the age of twenty-five—something rare indeed in those times. Also, in contrast to the prevailing abolitionist idea of transporting freed slaves to Africa, he stated his wish to expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of the said Commonwealth, of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever. Craig Bruce Smith of William Woods University suggests that by doing this, Washington boldly suggested that America had the potential to become their home as well.

WASHINGTON AND NATIVE AMERICANS

George Washington had many dealings with Native Americans, from fighting beside them as well as against them during the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War to negotiating treaties as part of his official duties as president. He could be quite cruel when he felt it necessary. In 1779, he had ordered General John Sullivan to inflict total destruction and devastation on Iroquois villages as retribution for raids on American civilians. However, at the beginning of his first term, Washington declared that a policy driven by the great principles of Justice and humanity was a priority. The fact that some tribes had supported the British in the Revolution was used as an excuse to dispossess every indigenous claim to land east of the Mississippi. Washington took the then-novel approach of treating them as if they were foreign powers. At the same time, he dispatched Mad Anthony Wayne to end the Northwest Indian War and negotiated the Treaty of New York to end the conflict between the Creek and the state of Georgia.

Recognizing that the westward expansion of white settlement was unstoppable, Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox agonized over the distinct possibility of Native American extermination. Their solution was a combination of territorial protections—what would become the reservation system—and missionary activity. It was Washington’s belief that Native American civilizations should assimilate to European norms, adopting agriculture and animal husbandry. His view of indigenous peoples as noble savages living in a state of nature was very much in keeping with what educated Europeans believed about Native Americans. Interestingly, recent research shows that before the arrival of the Europeans, Native Americans already lived in sophisticated societies that were devastated by the diseases and disorder introduced by European settlement.

The notion of the noble savage was also deployed in a bit of George Washington propaganda after his death. As Washington’s personal physician James Craik later recalled, in 1770, a Native American chief who had fought against the British in the French and Indian War, and whom Washington later encountered during a trip to the Ohio Country, prophesied that the general would become the leader of a great nation. Martha’s son and George’s stepson George Washington Parke Custis repeated the story and even wrote a play in 1827 entitled The Indian Prophecy. In this way, the founding of America, and the idea of Manifest Destiny, were legitimized with the supposed assent of Native Americans.

WASHINGTON’S LEGACY

George Washington was no demigod, but rather a man like any other, with his flaws, ambitions, and imperfections. Yet, he was also a man of rare talents and uncommon vision. Even as he made many errors, he was in large part responsible for American victory in the Revolution. Likewise, the new Republic was, as we shall see, not without its flaws. In no small part, Washington’s leadership was what made the government workable. In the coming generations, however, the very problems he had wrestled with—the question of slavery, the rise of political parties, and the rights of states and individuals over the necessity of a strong central government—would build towards the crisis of the Civil War.

RULES OF CIVILITY

Traced to their Sources and Restored

BY

MONCURE D. CONWAY

1890

Inscribed

TO MY SON

EUSTACE CONWAY.

THE RULES OF CIVILITY.

Among the manuscript books of George Washington, preserved in the State Archives at Washington City, the earliest bears the date, written in it by himself, 1745. Washington was born February 11, 1731 O.S., so that while writing in this book he was either near the close of his fourteenth, or in his fifteenth, year. It is entitled Forms of Writing, has thirty folio pages, and the contents, all in his boyish handwriting, are sufficiently curious. Amid copied forms of exchange, bonds, receipts, sales, and similar exercises, occasionally, in ornate penmanship, there are poetic selections, among them lines of a religious tone on True Happiness. But the great interest of the book centres in the pages headed: Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation. The book had been gnawed at the bottom by Mount Vernon mice, before it reached the State Archives, and nine of the 110 Rules have thus suffered, the sense of several being lost.

The Rules possess so much historic interest that it seems surprising that none of Washington’s biographers or editors should have given them to the world. Washington Irving, in his Life of Washington, excites interest in them by a tribute, but does not quote even one. Sparks quotes 57, but inexactly, and with his usual literary manipulation; these were reprinted (1886, 16°) by W.O. Stoddard, at Denver, Colorado; and in Hale’s Washington (1888). I suspect that the old biographers, more eulogistic than critical, feared it would be an ill service to Washington’s fame to print all of the Rules. There might be a scandal in the discovery that the military and political deity of America had, even in boyhood, written so gravely of the hat-in-hand deference due to lords, and other Persons of Quality, or had concerned himself with things so trivial as the proper use of the fork, napkin, and toothpick. Something is said too about inferiours, before whom one must not Act ag’tt y’e Rules Moral. But in 1888 the Rules were subjected to careful and literal treatment by Dr. J.M. Toner, of Washington City, in the course of his magnanimous task of preserving, in the Library of Congress, by exact copies, the early and perishing note-books and journals of Washington. This able literary antiquarian has printed his transcript of the Rules (W.H. Morrison: Washington, D.C. 1888), and the pamphlet, though little known to the general public, is much valued by students of American history. With the exception of one word, to which he called my attention, Dr. Toner has given as exact a reproduction of the Rules, in their present damaged condition, as can be made in print. The illegible parts are precisely indicated, without any conjectural insertions, and young Washington’s spelling and punctuation subjected to no literary tampering.

Concerning the source of these remarkable Rules there have been several guesses. Washington Irving suggests that it was probably his intercourse with the Fairfax family, and his ambition to acquit himself well in their society, that set him upon compiling a code of morals and manners. (Knickerbocker Ed. i. p. 30.) Sparks, more cautiously, says: The most remarkable part of the book is that in which is compiled a system of maxims and regulations of conduct, drawn from miscellaneous sources. (i. p. 7.) Dr. Toner says: Having searched in vain to find these rules in print, I feel justified, considering all the circumstances, in assuming that they were compiled by George Washington himself when a schoolboy. But while making this claim it is proper to state, that nearly all the principles incorporated and injunctions given in these 110 maxims had been enunciated over and over again in the various works on good behaviour and manners prior to this compilation and for centuries observed in polite society. It will be noticed that, while the spirit of these maxims is drawn chiefly from the social life of Europe, yet, as formulated here, they are as broad as civilization itself, though a few of them are especially applicable to Society as it then existed in America, and, also, that but few refer to women.

Except for the word parents, which occurs twice, Dr. Toner might have said that the Rules contain no allusion whatever to the female sex. This alone proved, to my own mind, that Washington was in nowise responsible for these Rules. In the school he was attending when they were written there were girls; and, as he was rather precocious in his admirations, a compilation of his own could hardly omit all consideration of conduct towards ladies, or in their presence. There were other reasons also which led me to dissent from my friend Dr. Toner, in this instance, and to institute a search, which has proved successful, for the source of the Rules of Civility.

While gathering materials for a personal and domestic biography of Washington,* I discovered that in 1745 he was attending school in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The first church (St. George’s) of the infant town was just then finished, and the clergyman was the Rev. James Marye, a native of France. It is also stated in the municipal records of the town that its first school was taught by French people, and it is tolerably certain that Mr. Marye founded the school soon after his settlement there as Rector, which was in 1735, eight years after the foundation of Fredericksburg. I was thus led to suspect a French origin of the Rules of Civility. This conjecture I mentioned to my friend Dr. Garnett, of the British Museum, and, on his suggestion, explored an old work in French and Latin in which ninety-two of the Rules were found. This interesting discovery, and others to which it led, enable me to restore the damaged manuscript to completeness.

The various intrinsic interest of these Rules is much enhanced by the curious story of their migration from an old Jesuit College in France to the copy-book of George Washington. In Backer’s Jesuit Bibliography it is related that the pensionnaires of the College of La Flèche sent to those of the College at Pont-à-Mousson, in 1595, a treatise entitled: Bienseance de la Conversation entre les Hommes. The great Mussipontane father at that time was Léonard Périn (b. at Stenai 1567, d. at Besançon 1658), who had been a Professor of the Humanities at Paris. By order of Nicolas François, Bishop of Toul, Father Périn translated the La Flèche treatise into Latin, adding a chapter of his own on behaviour at table. The book, dedicated to the Bishop of Toul, was first printed (16°) at Pont-à-Mousson in 1617, (by Car. Marchand). It was printed at Paris in 1638, and at Rouen in 1631; it was translated into Spanish, German, and Bohemian. In 1629 one Nitzmann printed the Latin, German, and Bohemian translations in parallel columns, the German title being Wolstand taglicher Gemainschafft mit dem Menschen. A comparison of this with the French edition of 1663 in the British Museum, on which I have had to depend, shows that there had been no alteration in Father Périn’s Latin, though it is newly translated. This copy in the library of the British Museum was printed in Paris for the College of Clermont, and issued by Pierre de Bresche, auec privilege du Roy. It is entitled: Les Maximes de la Gentillesse et de l’Honnesteté en la Conversation entre les Hommes. Communis Vitæ inter homines scita urbanitas. Par un Père de la Compagnie de Jesus.

In dedicating this new translation (1663) to the youth of Clermont, Pierre de Bresche is severe on the French of the La Flèche pensionnaires. It is a novelty surprising enough to find a very unpolished French book translated into the most elegant Latin ever met with. M. de Bresche declares that he was no longer able to leave so beautiful a work in such abjection, and had added a translation which preserves the purity of the French tongue, and is proportioned to the merit of the exquisite Latin expressions. We can hardly suppose that Pierre de Bresche was eulogising his own work, but there is no other name in the book. Possibly his criticism on the French of the original edition was only that of an editeur desiring to supplant it. At any rate, as Father Périn wrote the elegant Latin we cannot doubt that the chapter he added to the book was in scholarly French.

The old book of the Jesuit pensionnaires—which, had they not ignored woman, might be called the mother of all works on Civility—is charming as well as curious. It duly opens with a chapter of religious proprieties, at mass, sacrament, sermon, and grace at meat. The Maxims of secular civility open with the second chapter, and it will be seen that they are for the gentry. They are mainly for youths whose environments are portrayed in the interesting frontispiece of the work, where they are seen in compartments—at church, in college, in conversation, at the fireside, in promenade, and at table. We have already seen, from Backer’s Jesuit bibliography, that Father Léonard Périn added a chapter on bienséance at table; but after this there is another chapter—a wonderful chapter—and it would be interesting to learn whether we owe this also to Périn. This last chapter is exquisitely epicurean, dealing with table-setting, table-service, and the proper order of entrees, roasts, salads, and dessert. It closes—and the book closes—with a sort of sugarplum pæan, the sweets and spices being in the end gracefully spiritualised. But this concluding passage of Chapter XI. (Des Services & honneurs de la Table) must be quoted:

"Sugar-plums complete the pleasantness and enjoyment of the dessert, and serve, as it were, to satisfy pleasure. They are brought, while the table is still laid, in a handsome box on a salver, like those given by the ancients to be carried home.* Sometimes, also, they are handed round after the hands have been washed in rose water, and the table covered with a Turkey cloth.

"These are riches which we possess in abundance, and your feasts cannot terminate more agreeably in your quarters than with our Verdun sugar-plums. Besides the exquisite delicacy of their sugar, cinnamon and aniseed, they possess a sweet, fragrant odour like the breeze of the Canaries—that is to say, like our sincerest attachment for you, of which you will also receive proof. Thus you see, then, the courteous advice we have undertaken to give you to serve for a profitable entertainment. If you please, then, we will bring it to a close, in order to devote ourselves more zealously to other duties which will contribute to your satisfaction, and prove agreeable to all those who truly esteem good-breeding and decent general conversation, as we ardently hope.

Praise be to God and to the glorious Virgin!*

The earlier editions of the book do not appear to have been published for the outer world, but were printed in the various colleges where they were used. Another French work on the same subject, but including much about ladies, published about the year 1773, plagiarises largely from the Jesuit manual, but does not mention it. It is probable therefore that the Périn volume was not then known to the general public. The anonymous book just mentioned was translated into English.† Some of the phraseology of the Périn book, and many of its ideas, appear in a work of Obadiah Walker, Master of University College, Oxford, on Education, but it is not mentioned.* Eighteen of the Washington Rules, and an important addition to another, are not among the French Maxims. Two of these Rules, 24 and 42, are more damaged than any others in the Washington MS., and I had despaired of discovering their meaning. But after my translations were in press I learned from Dr. W.C. Minor that an early English version of the Maxims existed, and in this I have found additions to the French work which substantially include those of the Washington MS. Through this fortunate discovery the Rules of Civility are now completely restored.

The version just alluded to purports to be by a child in his eighth year. It was first printed in 1640 (London), but the earliest edition in the British Museum, where alone I have been able to find a copy, is that of 1646, which is described as the fourth edition.† The cover is stamped in gilt, Gift of G. III. The translations are indeed rude, and sometimes inaccurate as to the sense, but that they were the unaided work of a child under eight is one of the things hard to be believed which a Maxim admonishes us not to tell. In the edition of 1651 there is a portrait of Master Hawkins at the age of eight, and the same picture appears in 1672 as the same person at ten.