Awareness of Self: The Papers of George Washington By W. W. Abbot W hen writing to George Washington on January 20, 1787, to advise him not to attend the convention at Philadelphia in May, David Humphreys made this point: "I know your personal influence & character, is, justly considered, the last stake which America has to play. Should you not reserve yourself for the united call of a Continent entire?" Although Washington in the end rejected Humphreys' advice and went to Philadelphia, no one knew better in 1787 than he that his "character," his reputation, his hard-won Fame, could well become crucial in a "last dying essay" to avoid there being "an end put to Foederal Government" in America.2 In a letter to Humphreys that he wrote on December 26, 1786, before deciding to go to the convention and in another that he directed to Edmund Randolph on April 9, 1787, after deciding to attend, Washington expressed his fears that the convention might fail, and then, in effect, acknowledged the force of Humphreys' words, first to Humphreys: "This would be a disagreeable predicament for any of them [the delegates] to be in, but more particularly so for a person in my situation"; and then to Randolph: "under the peculiar circumstances of my case, [this] would place me in a more disagreeable situation than any other member would stand in." An attentive reader of the letters that George Washington wrote beginning with those to Governor Robert Dinwiddie in 1756 and continuing to, for instance, his letter to Dr. James Craik of October 25, 1784, has to be struck by the man's uncommon awareness of self: his strong sense that what he decided and what he did, and how others perceived his decisions and deeds, always mattered. These things mattered to Washington so intensely not because he had any grand sense of destiny as many have surmised, or that he had a nasty itch. for power as others might suspect, but because he saw life as something a person must make something of. More than most, Washington's biography is the story of a man constructing himself. Even the increasing care with which he guarded his words after 1776 so as not to reveal more of the inner man than he intended shows Washington at work on Washington. Washington with his troops at Trenton. As commander in chief of the Continental Army, Washington ordered the uniform copying and docketing of all valuable documents both for ready access during campaigns and for possible future needs. For a while in the 1750s the young Washington was determined to make his reputation in the British Army; he hoped to find honor and perhaps even glory as a military man. What reputation he earned as a colonel of the Virginia troops in Britain's war against the French and their Indian allies was not enough to secure for him a place in Britain's army, but it was enough fifteen years later to gain for him command of the forces fighting the British in a war for American independence. As commander in chief of the Continental Army for more than eight years, he won abundant honor and glory. Then, the war over, in December 1783 he gave up his command to become a private citizen at Mount Vernon, and in an instant also attained the immortality that fame bestows. And he knew it. He knew too that at any time an unworthy or ill-considered act of his could diminish his stature and tarnish his fame. The speed and decisiveness with which he as president of the Society of the Cincinnati moved in 1784 to eliminate the unpopular features of the society's constitution is only one of the earliest and most public occasions when Washington acted to protect his reputation as hero of the Revolution-and so to defend the Revolution for which the hero had fought. That Washington ardently sought fame, "the spur that the clear spirit doth raise... To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes" (John Milton, "Lycidas")—and also that once it was his he was ever after at pains to preserve it-have often been noted and can be demonstrated over and over by his own words. At no time is he more explicit than in the fall of 1788 and in early 1789 when he writes to friends of the possibility, and then of the certainty, of his becoming President. In a letter to Henry Lee on September 22, 1788, in response to Lee's insistence upon the inevitability of his friend's election to the presidency, Washington wrote: "Should the contingency you suggest take place, and (for argument sake alone let me say it) should my unfeigned reluctance to accept the Office be overcome by a deference for the reasons and opinions of my friends; might I not after the Declarations I have made (and Heaven knows they were made in the sincerity of my heart) in the judgment of the impartial World and of Posterity, be chargable with levity and inconsistency; if not with rashness & ambition?" After continuing in this vein for some space, he then wrote: "And certain I am, Whensoever I shall be convinced the good of my country requires my reputation to be put at issue; While away at war, Washington expressed concern for the safety of his wife, Martha, and wrote of his hope that Lord Dunmore would not "think of siezing Mrs Washington by way of revenge." regard for my own fame will not come in competition with an object of so much magnitude." To go beyond his words for confirmation that Washington valued and sought to safeguard his fame after 1783, we have only to look at the record of his willingness to sit for any artist who wished to paint his portrait, to correspond with any French, German, English, Dutch, Irish, Italian, Swedish, or American man or woman who wrote him a letter, and to open the doors of his house to any stranger, foreign or domestic, who came to pay homage or only to have a look. But Washington reveals perhaps most clearly, if indirectly, the sense he came to have of the importance that his life held for history, for posterity, in his attitude toward his papers. Writing from Cambridge outside Boston on August 20, 1775, he told his cousin Lund Washington, who managed affairs at Mount Vernon for the general during his eight-year absence in the war: "I can hardly think that Lord Dunmore can act so low, & unmanly a part, as to think of siezing Mrs Washington by way of revenge upon me"; but I "desire you will if there is any sort of reason to suspect a thing of this kind provide a Kitchen for her in Alexandria, or some other place of safety elsewhere for her and my Papers." The papers that Washington was speaking of those that he left at Mount Vernon when he went off to war-included detailed records of his extensive farming, trading, and land interests and activities, and also the voluminous letter books that he had kept in the 1750s while he was the wartime commander of the Virginia Regiment. Although the papers in the end, like the house at Mount Vernon, escaped the British torch, the general and the estate manager agitated the matter of their safety for the next year or so, and at one point Mrs. Washington even gathered them together and crammed them into a trunk for removal. 3 To value the safety of one's papers second only to the safety of one's wife at a juncture such as this perhaps was no more than any prudent man of affairs would have done; yet the range and sheer volume of Washington's pre-Revolutionary War papers bespeak something more than the successful Virginia planter. They are |