|
|
|
| Mon, Nov. 09 - - Mobile - RSS | |
|
|
George Washington in Fredericksburg
Much research still needs to be done about George Washington's earliest years in Fredericksburg.
Date published: 4/19/2003 By Gwen Woolf Part 6 in a series GEORGE WASHINGTON'S youthful years in Fredericksburg have been understudied and our local records underutilized by his biographers. There are understandable reasons why this has happened. It would take a great deal of time and effort to search painstakingly through the minutiae and details in potential sources to assemble a thoughtful portrait. Most of this scholarship still remains to be accomplished. Also, there were memorable milestones that properly warranted attention--the beginning of his military career (1752); his seasoning in the French and Indian War, which prepared him for his historic role in the War for Independence; the achievement of his dream--his inheritance of Mount Vernon when his brother Lawrence's heirs were eliminated by death or disinterest; his marriage at the end of the decade. The result has been a patching together of subjective conclusions about other aspects of his early life by historians who were eager to place him on the larger stage that they knew by hindsight he was destined for. Douglas Southall Freeman set the standard for future scholarship on his Fredericksburg years. He characterized George's childhood and youth principally as having to put up with a selfish, demanding, and controlling mother. She was "a poor manager," Freeman wrote; and "a thousand trifles were her daily care to the neglect of larger interests." "When her complaints frequently drew money from the purse of her son, it somehow was spent to no purpose and forgotten as a gift." These are only some of his disparaging remarks. Subsequent biographers have simply cited Freeman's comments as their "original source," giving no other documentation but frequently embellishing their own versions. Flexner portrayed George as a young man "flying from his mother to war" and his mother as having "a basic conviction that he was being unfaithful to his duty to her." Another author described Mrs. Washington as arriving at Mount Vernon "to stage a brief and unsuccessful tantrum, before returning unappeased and unheeded to Ferry Farm." (Emery). The military historian Samuel Eliot Morison dismissed George Washington's mother as grasping, querulous, vulgar, exacting and selfish. Mary Washington-bashing has certainly been the vogue for the past half-century. And it made for a dramatic story line to get the biographers past the years for which they had done little or no research.
Date published: 4/19/2003
|
 |
|||
|
|||
