It isn’t hard to find George Washington hagiographies. Starting with Mason Locke Weems and the legendary cherry tree, writers have treated Washington as superhuman and above reproach. That is not to imply that he isn’t a great man – his resolve to walk away from the Presidency is probably the best example of his rectitude – but he was not the man many historians would have us admire.
A spate of recent revisionist biographies has done a great deal to open the private Washington up to the public. Books about his relationships with the people around him, about his adroit political maneuvering, even about his spirituality, have made Washington the man more approachable to people who admire his public legacy. With Edward Lengel’s This Glorious Struggle, readers now have the opportunity to hear from the man himself.
Lengel, who is the Associate Editor of the George Washington Papers (which are housed at the University of Virginia), took on a monumental task. Washington wrote 140,000 letters between 1776 and 1782, to friends, family, members of the Continental Congress, admirers, and even opponents. (His terse note to General Thomas Conway, who was trying to have Washington removed from his command, is a masterpiece of understatement.) Lengel excerpts a very few of these letters, selecting the best examples of Washington’s correspondence and putting them in a book that runs fewer than 300 pages. We see Washington in his courageous public mode, inspiring and exhorting the Army. We get reports of the battles he led, and frustrated pleas for increased support from the colonies. We read his affectionate and wistful letters to his wife, and those that admit doubt and failure to his brother.
Lengel has transcribed the letters as they were written – punctuation and spelling idiosyncrasies included, and added minimal commentary that places each letter in its historical and personal context. As an editor, he allows Washington to speak for himself, and the voice we hear has more meaning than all the elementary school tales of his prowess.
We sometimes forget that the people of ‘history’ were flesh-and-blood, filled with uncertainty, and doubting the choices they have made. Many people view history as a series of inevitable events, as if Washington simply walked around waiting for an appointment with Cornwallis at Yorktown. Books like This Glorious Struggle put the lie to that notion. They remind us that we too are living forward into history, and that the consequences of our individual and collective decisions have ramifications for generations to come.
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