The Diaries of George Washington
edited by . Published for the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1925. 8vo. xvi+1734 pp. 4 vols. Illustrated. $25.00.
IN gathering together and publishing all the existing diaries of George Washington, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union and the editor, Mr. Fitzpatrick, have performed a valuable service. The work has been exceptionally well done. The footnotes identifying almost every person mentioned in the journals, the indexes, the comments, the appearance and quality of the books themselves—all indicate the fine competence and purpose behind the undertaking.
It is possible now for every admirer of Washington to pierce through the legendary aura and determine at first hand what manner of man the Pater Patriœ really was. Heretofore this has not been an easy thing to do. The official biographies are Washington in adulatory variations; the letters and speeches are partly Washington and partly Hamilton and others.
The diaries, for the first time complete, reveal the Washington which Mr. Thayer emphasized in his Life— the country gentleman, the sportsman, the great proprietor. This is due to several causes. In the first place Washington was devoted to the land. The record of his constant experimentation in agriculture, of his careful observation of cause and effect at seed time and harvest, of his constant and laborious attention to the details of management of his great estate, show clearly enough that his heart was in his plantations. He was a countryman always. In the second place, from June 1775 till 1781 and during most of his terms as President, Washington was too busy to keep up his daily record — or perhaps he conceived that it was written in the reports of his office. In any event no journal exists covering most of the crowded and exciting years of his life. With a few exceptions the diaries are concerned with the more workaday, jog-trot years passed at Mount Vernon. As a general thing they are prosaic records of the weather and the day’s work or sport. His account written in 1753 of his trip to the Ohio, the diary of 1781 including the Yorktown campaign, and the interesting records of 1789 and 1790 are exceptions to the long stretches of his commonplace book.
Yet even the most placid of Washington’s diaries has a curious interest. One is constantly intrigued by the things he does not say. For example, on June 15, 1775, George Washington, Esq., was in the Continental Congress unanimously elected General and Commander-in-Chief of all the forces raised, or to be raised, by the United Colonies. His record of that eventful day is as follows: ‘June 15. Dined at Burnes’ in the Field. Spent the Eveng. on a Committee.’ Nowhere does he mention or refer to the causes of Colonial discontents, the reasons which drove him as an individual to oppose the British rule, or the growing, swelling tide of opposition which preceded actual revolution. For that matter he never discusses his own feelings. Rarely indeed does he describe any event concerning which he might feel strongly. Thus the entry for the nineteenth of October, 1781, the day of Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, describes his day of greatest military glory and successes with the following luridly sensational account: —
‘19th. In the morning early I had them (the Articles of Capitulation) copied and sent word to Lord Cornwallis that I expected to have them signed at 11 o’clock and that the Garrison would march out at two o’clock, both of which were accordingly done. Two redoubts on the enemy’s left being possessed (the one by a detachment of French Grenadiers, and the other by American Infantry) with orders to prevent all intercourse between the army and country and the town — while officers in the several departments were employed in taking acct. of the public Stores &ca.’
What a journalist George Washington was not!
In this stern restraint and reticence, this constant cleaving to objective fact, this refusal to consult his soul on paper, it is not fanciful to see a rule of life based on an observation and knowledge of himself. Washington did not hide his sentiments through fear of external effects. Certainly few men have lived a dangerous life with a calmer intrepidity than his. Only a sense of the necessity for unremitting self-control could have dictated such sustained and formidable reticence. He must have known and feared — if he feared nothing else — the strong, smouldering fires of his own nature. Only once or twice they burst forth, breaking through that calm self-control of his, as when they withered and blasted the wretched Lee at Monmouth. The rest of his life was one of iron discipline — these diaries prove it.
RICHARD DANIELSON