Searching for the Real Young George Washington

No biographer has ever been able to say much about the young George Washington. He never discussed his childhood or youth. What he thought of his mother and father remains unrecorded. To many of his contemporaries, and to many of his first biographers, George Washington seemed sui generis — in a class by himself and impregnable. He appeared to be all of a piece, a national monument, saved from the rude probing of biographers, a marble man, it has often been said. “The history of our Revolution,” John Adams fretted, “will be one continued lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electric rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod, and thenceforward these two conducted all the policy negotiations, legislatures, and war.” An irked Nathaniel Hawthorne declared that GW was “born with his clothes on and his hair powdered and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.”