It was more than a century ago that George Washington died at Mount Vernon. “I die hard,” he said, “but I am not afraid to go.” Motley’s true words of the death of William the Silent may be aptly quoted of Washington: “As long as he lived, he was the guiding-star of a whole brave nation, and when he died, the little children wept on the streets.”
If, as Professor McMaster has boldly said, “George Washington is an unknown man,” it is not, as might be inferred, because the man himself was an enigma to his own generation, or that which immediately succeeded him; it is because the General and the President have been remembered by us, and the man, forgotten. If this is true, it is because our school histories, the principal source from which the mass of the people receive their information, are portraying only one of the fractions which made the great man what he was. It is said: “He was as fortunate as great and good.” Do our school histories inform the youth of the land why he was “fortunate” to the exclusion of why he was “great and good?” If so, George Washington is, or soon will be, “an unknown man.”
One hundred years ago he was not unknown as a man. “Washington is dead,” exclaimed Napoleon in the orders of the day, when he learned the sad news; “this great man fought against tyranny; he consolidated the liberty of his country. His memory will ever be dear to the French people, as to all freemen in both hemispheres.” Said Charles James Fox, “A character of virtues, so happily tempered by one another and so wholly unalloyed by any vices, is hardly to be found on the pages of history.” And these men spoke of whom—the General, the President, or the man? If, as legend states, “the Arab of the desert talks of Washington in his tent, and his name is familiar to the wandering Scythian,” what of other “fortunate” heroes, of William of Orange, Gustavus Adolphus, and Cromwell, who, like Washington, consolidated the liberties of their countries, and with an éclat far more likely to win the admiration of an oriental?
Half a century ago, the attention of multitudes was directed to the man Washington in the superb oratory of Edward Everett. Quoting that memorable extract from the letter of the youthful surveyor, who boasted of earning an honest dubloon a day, the speaker set before his audiences “not an ideal hero, wrapped in cloudy generalities and a mist of vague panegyric, but the real, identical man.” And, again, he quoted Washington’s letter written to Governor Dinwiddie after Braddock’s defeat, that his hearers might “see it all—see the whole man.” Was Edward Everett mistaken, are these letters not extant today, or are they unread? Surely, the last supposition must be the true one, if the man Washington is being forgotten.
And look back to the school histories of Edward Everett’s time. The “reader” and “history” were one text-book in that day, and one of the best known, “Porter’s Rhetorical Reader,” lies before me, prefaced May, 1831. From it notice two quotations which must have influenced youthful ideas of Washington. One is the last verse of Pierpont’s “Washington:”
“God of our sires and sons,
Let other Washingtons
Our country bless,
And, like the brave and wise
Of by-gone centuries,
Show that true greatness lies
In righteousness.”
The other, from the address “America,” of the Irish orator Phillips; having exalted Washington as general, statesman, and conqueror, he continues:
“If he had paused there, history might have doubted what station to assign him; whether at the head of her citizens, or her soldiers, her heroes, or her patriots. But the last glorious act crowns his career, and banishes the hesitation. Who, like Washington, after having emancipated a hemisphere, resigned its crown, and preferred the retirement of domestic life to the adoration of a land he might be almost said to have created? Happy, proud America! The lightnings of heaven yielded to your philosophy! The temptations of earth could not seduce your patriotism!”
A candid review of the more popular school histories will bring out the fact that the man Washington is almost forgotten, in so far as the general and the statesman do not portray him. In one, “Young Folks’ History of the United States” (to name the production of an author whom criticism cannot injure), there seems to be but one line, of five words, which describes the character of Washington. Could we not forego, for once, what the Indian chieftain said of the “charmed life” Washington bore at Braddock’s defeat, to make room for one little reason why Washington was “completer in nature” and of “a nobler human type” than any and all of the heroes of romance?