Gumption (2 page)

FREEMASONS

GEORGE WASHINGTON

B
efore I began reading about Washington in preparation for this book, I had a loose idea of his life and achievements based upon a mixed bag of remembered stories and images. The Emanuel Leutze painting of Washington’s historic crossing of the Delaware River on the night of December 25, 1776, has always stuck with me as a clear representation of his military chutzpah. Having rowed a lot of boats in my day, I was astonished to see these men rowing in a river full of large chunks of ice, which would obviously be incredibly uncomfortable and difficult, especially long before the advent of “boat fuel” (canned beer).

It was that image that cemented in my child’s mind the hardships that this man endured in the securing of our original freedoms, because if you had to row across an icy river at night, it meant that shit was pretty rough. Besides that noble image, I have always appreciated the two most well-known stories about Washington, which are the chopping down of the cherry tree and the story of his wooden teeth. Long before I knew that wood, especially American cherry, would play
such an important role in my own life, I was charmed, along with the rest of the suckers, by the tale of Washington’s famous honesty in the great cherry tree caper.

The story has it that as a young boy, Washington was given a new hatchet. Now, I can tell you from experience that there is really nothing more fun for a young person who likes to spend time in the woods than either a sharp knife, for obvious reasons, or, just as obviously, a hammer, and by crikey, a hatchet combines the two into one devastating tool of destruction. There are very few surfaces inside the house or out that cannot be thoroughly butchered with an energetically brandished hatchet.

Our little George knew what he was about—he set to chopping everything within reach with his new hatchet, including his father’s favorite cherry tree. When questioned on the subject, George answered truthfully, “I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down the cherry tree.” His father was reportedly so moved by his son’s integrity, he chose not to punish him, stating that “honesty is worth much more than any number of cherry trees.”’Twas a winning anecdote, however apocryphal, displaying Washington’s pith from the get-go, written well after his death as part of a lionizing tribute to the great man.

Now, in hindsight, I could have shot holes in this story all day long. First of all, for a cherry tree to develop enough character, size, and, presumably, fruit yield to make it anybody’s “favorite” would take many years, with said tree developing a trunk that would be much too thick and sturdy to fall easy prey to a boy’s hatchet, no matter how robust the lad.

Second, the father of our country exhibited an adherence to the principles of gentility and politeness just about as soon as he could pee standing up (three months of age, legend has it). Little George would have known better than to destroy a fruit tree near the house, particularly one to which a family member had taken a shine. With his trademark good sense, he would have simply detoured several yards to the left of the cherry tree in question, entered the nearby forest, and made vast piles of wood chips with the chopping action of his hatchet upon any number of forest trees, deciduous or conifer, and nobody’s feelings would have been bruised in the least. I consider this particular tall tale debunked.

Now on to those storied wooden teeth. Everyone knows George Washington had terrible dental trouble, and so he had dentures made of wood, right? Wrong! Our first president did have a terribly rotten set of original teeth—while they lasted, that is, because he had lost them all by late middle age. His final lower molar served as the anchor for a full set of hinged dentures, upper and lower, until it, too, finally fell victim to the barber’s pliers, rendering our finest statesman completely toothless. As an avid eater of foodstuffs who loves to masticate red meat, not to mention the occasional churro, I shudder to imagine the complete loss of my chewing tackle.

Dentures of the period were often constructed of hard materials such as hippopotamus ivory, bone, or even actual human teeth, often “purchased” from slaves. Some of the organic materials used in eighteenth-century false teeth are suspected to have stained in a grainy pattern similar to wood, which seems to be the detail from whence that “wooden teeth” rumor sprang. More aggrandizing!

Whatever the story’s origin, I have to wonder why we would ever even begin to feel the need to mythologize this man, whose real-life accomplishments were so goddamn impressive that I wet myself seven times reading Ron Chernow’s amazing, Pulitzer-winning biography,
Washington.
I suppose this is how we as a society end up remembering these larger-than-life figures, tucking them neatly into a file drawer using landmarks like “wooden teeth”—Hoover: “wore a dress”; Woody Allen: “played clarinet”; Margaret Thatcher: “had three testicles”—satisfying a need to make these historical characters more iconic. In the case of George Washington, such embroidery was entirely unnecessary, as the reality of the complex and emotional man behind his steely visage was much more engaging than a mere accessory like false pearly not-so-whites.

As a teenager, young George transcribed, as a writing exercise, some 110 “Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation.” I dislike very much the contrast of this task with the diversions I see pursued by modern sixteen-year-olds. That accusation includes myself, by the way. As a teenager, I didn’t have a video game in my pocket but instead ran obsessively to the bowling alley or the pizza parlor, where stood the noisome machines of escapism with names like
Donkey Kong
and
Frogger
.

Instead of burying his attention in his smartphone or video-gaming system, our nation’s future father sat laboriously scribing phrases like “3d. Shew Nothing to your Freind that may affright him.” (Translation: “Don’t freak me out, dude.”) “35th. Let your Discourse with Men of Business be Short and Comprehensive.” (“Wrap it up, asswipe.”) “54th. Play not the Peacock, looking every where about
you, to See if you be well Deck’t, if your Shoes fit well if your Stokings sit neatly, and Cloths handsomely.” (“This ain’t a fashion show, brah.”) “56th. Associate yourself with Men of good Quality if you Esteem your own Reputation; for ’tis better to be alone than in bad Company.” (“Steer clear of the mall.”) “89th. Speak not Evil of the absent for it is unjust.” (“Why’n’t you say that to my face, Chad?”) “92. Take no Salt or cut Bread with your Knife Greasy.” (I believe this one to be a sexual euphemism.) “101st. Rince not your Mouth in the Presence of Others.” (“Say it, don’t spray it.”)

I mean, come on! Those are amazing and also chock-full of terrific advice. Since I read these, my wife, Megan, has commended me on keeping my “knife” much less “greasy.” My own parents did an excellent job of teaching me good and decent manners, despite my irrepressible desire to this day to lie back on a table or car hood, legs in the air, and light up a fart in a most bewitching fireball. Still, I can’t help but think that we could all benefit from having to write out these simple but effective phrases, to better commit them to our respective remembering parts (noggins).

Had Washington lived in our era, he would have undoubtedly been the leader of a troop of elite Eagle Scouts as well as the star of the local football team, with a side business building post-and-beam barns. He was a renowned physical specimen in his young manhood, often impressing his family and friends with feats of incredible strength and fortitude, whilst training for a career as a surveyor of land.

The journeys he would undertake for the purpose of land speculation, sleeping on little more than a handkerchief, truly entailed the
most badass of arduous outdoor living, a full century before the Thermos bottle came onto the scene with its savory payload of hot stew.

He and his peers were rugged, far beyond any toughness we might imagine today, sitting in our air-conditioning, whining about how long it’s taking Zappos to deliver our new UGG slippers from Australia. A strapping man jack like Washington would have shot and cleaned a buck, cured its hide, and sewn himself two pairs of boots in the time it would take us to update our credit card information on Amazon.

In the journal he kept of his journey over the mountains, floridly entitled
Journal of My Journey over the Mountains
, George Washington firmly established his lifelong habit of chronicling the important events of every campaign to which he applied his considerable energies. The sheer volume of written correspondence he produced in his lifetime is staggering, especially to the urbanized inhabitants of this modern age, to whom handwriting letters seems as farfetched as scraping leather out in the tanning shed for harnesses, belts, and shoes.

The University of Virginia houses a program entitled the Papers of George Washington, which will inventory more than 135,000 documents, a project so vast they don’t expect to be done collating and annotating it until 2023! If Washington started writing the day he leapt from his mother’s womb, that would have been five-and-a-half letters a day over his sixty-seven years of life. That magnificent bastard could write, and he did so centuries before there was a Bic to click. No, nor roller-ball, felt-tip, Sharpie, or even that old standby, the Ticonderoga no. 2 pencil!

George scribbled those many thousands of letters and journal
pages with a quill and ink, folks. And not only was his body of work prolific, but he was quite the wordsmith as well. As I perused selections of his letters, I was delighted by adjectives such as
scurrilous
,
acidulous
,
obdurate
,
opprobrious
,
contumelious
, and
vituperative
, almost all used to exclusively criticize or dress down others who had fallen short of his high standards on the battlefield or in the statehouse.

I, for one, greatly enjoy stumbling upon such colorfully descriptive wordings (even when they’re directed at me), because they require me to seek out their meanings and pronunciations in the dictionary. (This is how I had learned, by the ripe age of seven, words like
misconduct
,
shenanigans
,
insubordination
, and then as a result of those, the subsequently juicy
confiscation
,
misdemeanor
,
castigation
,
retribution
, and, finally,
paddle
,
bludgeon
, or
glory-board.
)

As mentioned earlier, his manners were impeccable, as he strove to succeed not only among his Virginian neighbors and peers but in the eyes of the British Crown as well, since King George still controlled the activities of his colonies from across the wide ocean. Knowing no other governmental entity in his life, our young protagonist naturally aspired to impress the Crown in hopes of rising to a place of esteem. Unbeknownst to either party, the fates were crafting in George Washington the perfect weapon to be brandished against Britain herself in the impending, inevitable war for America’s freedom.

In 1753, Washington was thrown into the fray in a very substantial way. Colonial France and England were both laying claim to the enormous Ohio Country (modern-day Ohio, Indiana, and parts of Pennsylvania and West Virginia), desiring not only to claim the land but also to secure the lucrative fur trade with the Native Americans.

An order came to the colonies from none other than King George II himself, calling for a valiant envoy to hustle west to see if the French were building forts where they shouldn’t be. If so, the bearer of the orders was instructed to ask them to peacefully depart. Makes sense, right? “Oh, apologies, monsieur. We did not realize zat you British fellows would like zis land. Allow us to just collect our accoutrements and we will scoot along, begging your
pardonnez-moi
.”

In the quite likely event that the French would not just meekly vamoose at the invitation of the British colonists, the envoy was then instructed to “drive them off by force of arms.” As you may have surmised, these orders fell to none other than our virile, vigorous hero, who was a mere twenty-one years of age. Can you imagine the weight of this responsibility? I cannot. I am forty-four at the time of this writing; I like being trusted by my superiors (my wife, my director, my publisher) with responsibility, and I can’t begin to fathom it. At twenty-one, I was impressing my playmates by successfully discerning between my butthole and a sizable gopher hole in the ground, say, four to five out of seven tries on the average.

Remember, at the time, Washington’s superiors were the British royalty. He had no inkling that he was soon famously to become the loyal servant of the citizens of a fledgling country. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to fathom the complications involved in the settlement/conquering/theft of North America by the three main European strengths—England, France, and Spain—with the added factions of myriad indigenous tribes trying their level best to literally hold their own against the avaricious white newcomers.

Washington’s ability to navigate these treacherous hinterlands
successfully and arrive safely back on the East Coast gave the strapping young buck a galvanized, heroic sheen, which played no small part, one assumes, in his subsequent appointment to command the Virginia regiment in the French and Indian War, part of which was known as the Seven Years’ War. Washington distinguished himself as a leader of men, not so much through any one clear performance but more through his perseverance and discipline, costing the Virginia settlers less in casualties than the other colonies. It was during this conflict that he began to accumulate knowledge of British military maneuvers, information that would serve him very well in the coming Revolution.