Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader Read Online Free PDF

his early reputation fighting both. Because he was a younger son in a second-level family, he could not find the clear passage to wealth and power that lay before sons of great planters. He was born on the margins of planting society, and if he was not quite an outsider, he was far from the center of the elite.
    Two qualities seem decisive in Washington’s character—neither had emerged fully in his youth, but both were well developed by the time of his marriage. They were his will and his judgment. Whatever their deepest sources, they remained firm throughout his life. They have to be seen together to be understood; only a few men have them in the proportions found in Washington. His will was an independent force, a compound of energy and hardness. He was not aggressive in a violent way, but he possessed a desire, a forceful impulse, to force action and not give way when resisted. In many men, such a will is often violent, at least in verbal expression and sometimes in physical aggression. Countering, or holding down, even controlling, Washington’s will was a sense of restraint—a brake on unrestrained impulse that could yield destructive or self-defeating action. For much of hislife his temperament was peaceful—he was not an angry man, and he seldom if ever gave way to uncontrolled passion. He did occasionally seem reckless in battle, and even to lose control, but these were moments only, and they passed in a minute or two as far as we can tell. (A battle at Kips Bay, New York, in 1776 marked one such episode, but it quickly yielded to the self-mastery that distinguished Washington’s behavior at virtually every critical moment in the combat of the Revolution.)
    Such shifts in conduct may have revealed a glimpse of the passions within him. What comes through in both his inner life and the life visible to others is a prevailing steadiness. He gave no evidence, under almost any circumstances, of deep mood swings. Rather, he seems always to have been given to implacable constancy. The people around him near the end of the French and Indian War, when it seems he gave up all hope of further military service, thought of him in rather romantic terms. He had apparently been a dashing soldier in the war and had shrugged off the dangers of fighting both the French and the Indians. He had in print declared that “I heard Bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.”
    Washington had reached his twenty-second year when he wrote these words. He had wanted to find acceptance in the British army as a commissioned officer, and, failing that, he turned to the traditional role of Virginian planter. He had little idea where such a calling would carry him. At this moment he was a conventional Virginia provincial—not a man who knew the wide world well, but one who had got a taste of it while serving in the wilderness.
    The Revolution would offer much more. At its beginning he was a provincial, and during its course he became an American. But he was a most unusual American by war’s end: He was an established citizen of the world. This membership in the European world pleased him. It owed much to the French, in particular to the French he had come to know in the Revolutionary War, men of the Enlightenment. He was proud of the connection, just as he was proud to be a Virginian and an American. His feeling was fully justified, for there was substance behind it, a commitment clear in his service to enlightenment and liberty.

PART TWO
 
    American

PART THREE
 
    Citizen of the World

Acknowledgments
    Much of my research for this book was done in the rooms of the Mark Twain Project, in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. It should not be assumed that I confused George Washington with Mark Twain, or that I did not know where I was when working on this book. It is true that Peter Hanff, deputy director of the Bancroft, and Robert Hirst, editor of the Mark Twain Project, made the