For years, Peter R. Henriques has served as the scholar's scholar of George Washington. As Washington biographers won the Pulitzer Prize (Ron Chernow) and topped bestseller lists (Chernow, Joseph Ellis, and a host of others), Henriques produced the most insightful analysis of Washington in his essay collections, Realistic Visionary: A Portrait of George Washington (2006) and First and Always: A New Portrait of George Washington (2020). Now Henriques has entered the biography game with George Washington: His Quest for Honor and Fame. Hopefully the work will introduce Henriques to new readers, even if the biography adds little to his earlier studies of Washington.Based on seven lectures at Colonial Williamsburg in the fall of 2023, the book is divided into seven chapters that Henriques argues, persuasively, signify the key stages of Washington's life: young man (1732–1754), Seven Years’ War and marriage (1754–1759), coming of the American Revolution (1759–1775), American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), postwar retirement and Constitutional Convention (1783–1789), presidency (1789–1797), and final retirement (1797–1799). The connective tissue, light at times, is Washington's quest for honor and fame. Henriques writes that “from an early age, George Washington felt a compelling desire to be seen, admired, honored, and, above all else, to be remembered” (2). Washington's passion to be remembered, according to Henriques, is the “Rosetta Stone” for understanding the first president's motivations (3).For such a bold thesis, Henriques provides little analysis or support beyond citing Douglass Adair's seminal essay, “Fame and the Founding Fathers.” Henriques notes, without explanation, that Washington was not alone among the American founders in seeking fame but that a desire for immortality drove his actions even more than it did his peers. Here readers will be served by exploring the final chapter of First and Always, “What Made George Washington Tick,” in which Henriques draws on multiple sources, from early modern honor culture to modern psychology, to present a plausible theory of Washington's relentless drive for secular immortality.At its best, George Washington benefits from Henriques’ peerless command of Washington's life and source material. Similar to Edmund S. Morgan's Benjamin Franklin (2002), which Morgan described at the end of his career as “a letter of introduction to a man worth knowing, worth spending time with,” Henriques approaches Washington like an old friend (xi). The familiarity allows for original insights, such as that Washington's older half-brother Lawrence's influence has been exaggerated and that, instead Colonel William Fairfax and Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie most advanced the fortunes of the young George. And that, despite Washington's sincere love for his married neighbor Sally Fairfax, his marriage to Martha Custis proved “to be the most important choice he ever made” (33). Finally, that “although he Washington succeeded in developing national unity, he failed at promoting political unity,” thus sharing blame for the emergence of partisanship in the early republic (97). Deftly, Henriques exposes how Washington broke the same civil-military division that he did so much to establish by acting irresponsibly as commander in chief of U.S. forces during the Quasi-War with France.Henriques' proximity to his subject also results in the major weaknesses of George Washington. In different chapters, Henriques loses critical distance by referring to Washington as did historical aides and other contemporaries. During the Revolutionary War, Washington is “His Excellency”; after the war, he is “the General.” Moreover, even in acknowledging Washington's mistakes, the book's overall sense is that Washington could do no wrong. “What a remarkable man he Washington was,” Henriques concludes, “and what a gift he gave to mankind and to his beloved country” (122–123). Henriques does not afford other founders such fawning treatment. As a result, George Washington is not so much a work of founders’ chic as it is founder chic.Most regrettably, Henriques ignores slavery throughout most of Washington's life, choosing to cover the topic in the afterword. The choice discredits much of the book's otherwise rich analysis, for Washington's various accomplishments cannot be separated from the massive advantages provided by enslaved labor. Henriques' brief essay on slavery proves illuminating in arguing that Washington came to oppose the institution intellectually but never viscerally—that is, Washington never “felt slavery's evil” (128). As Henriques' analysis shows, slavery was not peripheral to Washington's quest for fame. Washington understood that slavery posed the foremost barrier to realizing the adulation of future generations, and hence freed his enslaved workers in his will more for the sake of posterity than for humanitarian reasons.A book that fully explored this tension between Washington's desire for secular immortality and his addiction to the one practice that most threatened his legacy might have produced spectacular returns. Even if George Washington falls short of this promise, Henriques has reinforced his reputation as the dean of Washington studies and, like his beloved subject, left a solid foundation for others to build on.
Denver Brunsman (Mon,) studied this question.