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The Bibliophile

Our first president remains the focus of research by historians 290 years after his birth. These books by older authors shed light on fascinating aspects of his multifaceted life.

First and Always: A New Portrait of George Washington, by Peter R. Henriques, 240 pages, University of Virginia Press hardcover, 2021

Historian Peter Henriques has spent a distinguished career studying the life of George Washington. In First and Always, he reveals insights into the man in eight erudite and highly readable essays. An appendix cites 60 quotations attributed to Washington.

Henriques explores the founder’s temperament and behavior as culled from decades of in-depth research. He devotes one essay to the issue of slavery, and writes in detail about seven of Washington’s enslaved workers and his treatment of them.

He discusses the five Virginians with whom Washington severed deep friendships due to rifts over private matters, politics and policy.

Other fascinating topics include the partisan Federalist he became in retirement, his sensitivity to criticism, his difficult relationship with his widowed mother, and the little-remembered Asgill Affair — his threatened revenge killing of a British officer.

Henriques, in his final chapter, posits a bold and unique interpretation of Washington as a man driven by ambition, arguing that the choices the childless first president made were based on a yearning for fame that would endure beyond his lifetime.

Henriques is professor emeritus at George Mason University. The octogenarian lives in Gainesville, Virginia.

Surveying in Early America: The Point of Beginning, An Illustrated History, by Dan Patterson and Clinton Terry, 155 pages, University of Cincinnati Press paperback, 2021

George Washington’s first profession was as a surveyor. He was appointed surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia, in 1749 at age 17, three years before joining the colonial militia.

The authors of Surveying in Early America contend that to fully understand Washington, we must consider his early career as a surveyor as a key to the later qualities of leadership he exhibited.

Familiarity with geography was paramount to his military strategy on the battlefield. Indeed, the Continental Army created an Office of Geographer to map terrain.

Washington’s exactitude and deliberate nature may be traced to the field of surveying, which combined outdoor trekking through the wilderness, knowledge of mathematics and meticulous use of specialized tools.

Surveying explains the tools of the time and how calculations were made. More than one dozen archival maps and land surveys as well as hand drawings are among the illustrations. There are 70 color photographs accompanying the text.

American Revolutionary reenactors of the Department of the Geographer are photographed by Ohioan Dan Patterson, who has published more than 40 books.

The book’s author, septuagenarian historian Clinton Terry, is associate professor of history at Mercer University.

Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership, by Edward J. Larson, 352 pages, Custom House paperback, 2021

Washington and Ben Franklin were 28 years apart in age, yet had much in common. These two founding fathers were reluctant revolutionaries who eschewed the extremist rhetoric of the anti-British radicals in their midst. They each saw the lack of representation in Parliament as the basis for disengagement from the Mother Country.

Both Washington and Franklin espoused a strong central government in the wake of the immediate chaos during the first years of independence.

Washington gained fame as a courageous soldier, but was renowned in his day for his war journal — published in England during the French and Indian Wars.

Franklin was famous as a scientist, essayist and publisher, but is less remembered today for his active involvement in the Pennsylvania militia in procuring supplies, conjuring strategy during the colonial period, and as a legislator and executive in the local representative assembly.

Read about Franklin’s little-remembered diplomatic mission that failed to incorporate Canada into the United States during the Revolution. Gain insight into Washington’s decision to change Mount Vernon from a tobacco-growing plantation to one that grew wheat as its primary crop.

The scientist and the gentleman farmer diverged on the issue of slavery. Franklin was an abolitionist; Washington was not, although he freed his slaves in his will.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author, historian and legal scholar Edward Larson, who is in his late 60s, teaches at the Pepperdine School of Law.