The True George Washington 10Th Ed

The True George Washington is a popular biography by Paul Leicester Ford, first published in 1896 and reissued in many editions across the following decades. The tenth edition designation indicates the book’s long commercial life and the substantial readership it found among American readers interested in the founder generation.

Ford’s approach to Washington was unusual for his period. He aimed to present Washington as a human being rather than as the marble statue that nineteenth-century American patriotic biography had produced. The earlier biographical tradition had treated Washington with such reverence that the actual personality, the actual moods and frustrations, the actual private life had largely disappeared behind the official statesman. Ford set out to recover the human Washington.

The book is organized topically rather than chronologically. Separate chapters treat Washington’s physical appearance, his temperament, his religious views, his relations with his family, his views on slavery, his financial affairs, his behavior in social situations, and various other dimensions of his personal life that the conventional biographies had glossed over. The treatment draws on Washington’s own letters, on the recollections of contemporaries who had known him personally, and on the various documentary sources that Ford had access to as a serious scholar of early American history.

Some of what Ford uncovered was uncomfortable for American patriotic taste. Washington’s serious anger when crossed, his complex relations with slavery as a working planter who owned hundreds of enslaved people, his financial difficulties across most of his life, his strong language when frustrated by incompetent subordinates, all received fuller treatment than earlier biographies had allowed. The book provoked some hostile reviews from readers who wanted Washington kept in the marble.

The approach proved influential. Subsequent twentieth-century Washington biographies including those by Douglas Southall Freeman, James Thomas Flexner, Ron Chernow, and the various others have all worked in the more candid biographical mode that Ford helped open. The book itself is now somewhat dated in particular interpretations but remains readable as a pioneering attempt at honest founder-generation biography.

It runs about three hundred pages and pairs with the modern Washington biographies and with Ford’s editorial work on Thomas Jefferson.