It's a great honor to speak in a building dedicated to celebrating the life of one of our more recent presidents, even as we gather this evening to celebrate the life of our first, and I think, most potent and most consequential of all presidents.

Now, in February 1789, in other words, right before he was inaugurated as our first president, George Washington received a fascinating letter from Europe, written by his friend, Governor Morris. It reported on the sudden madness of King George III. And some of you may have seen the movie of that title.

In the King's delirious state, Morris wrote, he had quote conceived himself to be no less a personage than George Washington marching at the head of the American army. And then Morris added, facetiously, this delusion shows that you have done something or other which sticks most terribly in the King's stomach. Indeed, Washington had.

But who was this commoner George, who was such a legendary figure in his own time? And, of course, ever since, that he actually managed to invade the feverish dream world of the deranged royal George? Well, I first grew interested in this question about 10 years ago, when I was writing my biography of Alexander Hamilton. And I was poring over a series of letters that Hamilton had written in the aftermath of a feud that he had with Washington, late in the war, that led to Hamilton quitting Washington's staff, where he'd been aide-de-camp.

Hamilton felt the need, of course, to defend this rash decision. And he described, in letters to family and friends of Washington, as a moody, irritable, and temperamental boss, even if I can say so, something of a powder keg. As he informed his father-in-law, with more than a touch of youthful bravado, the great man and I have come to an open rupture. He shall, for once at least, repent his ill humor.

I can remember thinking to myself, ill humor? I was stunned. Did Hamilton mean to imply that this sulky, carping, often volatile boss was the saintly Father of our Country?

Now, of course, this was far, far from the whole truth about George Washington. And I hope that, in the book, I devote sufficient and lavish praise to Washington's fortitude, patience, integrity, wisdom, and a thousand other marvelous traits. This is not a debunking book about Washington.

In fact, what I've tried to do, is to recreate the charisma and magnetism that so excited Washington's contemporaries, that somehow had gotten lost in translation to posterity. In fact, it was the reason we put on the cover of the book, Washington on a white horse. Because whenever he approached a town, which he usually did by coach or carriage, he always brought along white parade horses. And on the outskirts of town, he mounted the white parade horse, because that's how people wanted to see the heroic General Washington-- a great sense of political theatre.

Nevertheless, Hamilton tended to pen very perceptive word portraits of people. And his comments opened, for me, an unexpected window into a world of emotion swirling around inside George Washington. Needless to say, emotions that Washington had learned to keep in check with his formidable self-control. What I slowly came to realize was that George Washington was not this bland figure, worthy but dull, that has somehow taken up residence in the American imagination. Revolutionaries, let's face it, are not made of such tame stuff.

And I've got to feel that Washington, seemingly the most familiar person in our history, was perhaps the most elusive and perhaps, at bottom, the most unfamiliar. And I began to wonder, as biographers tend to do whether, in fact, there had been other significant dimensions of his personality that had been overlooked. Dimensions that would not only help me to bring him to a vivid and three dimensional life in my narrative, but would make his whole story far more credible.

Well, after six years of very intensive work on this book and, as Gleaves said, I had to at least scan, if not read, 100,000 pages of material. I'm here to report tonight that George Washington turned out to be a passionate, complex, sensitive man. A man of many moods, of fiery opinions, really a fierce, hard driving perfectionist, who cloaked this tremendous force of personality behind a laconic and stoic facade that we know so well. We know the facade. We don't know the inner man. That's what Hamilton's comments gave me some purchase on.

You see, I think that what's happened with Washington, in our perfectly laudable desire to revere and venerate the Father of our Country, we've sanded down the rough edges of his personality. And we've turned him into this impossibly stiff and lifeless figure. Much like the Gilbert Stuart portrait that hangs in the East Room of the White House, where you see Washington standing there very stiffly with his arm rigidly thrust out. But it stands to reason that that wooden character could never have defeated the British Empire, which had the most powerful military machine of the 18th century. That wooden character could never have presided over the often fractious constitutional convention. And that wooden character could never have forged the Office of the Presidency during a particularly tumultuous period in the early years of the Republic.

The man who did all that, it stands to reason, was quite simply a force of nature. But again, that force was carefully kept hidden from the outside world, kept under wraps all the time. Now, last, in order to fashion a brand new portrait of George Washington, the poor biographer must begin by wielding a machete and hacking his way through a very dense jungle of myths and misconceptions about George Washington. Even very well educated Americans, I have discovered, find it difficult to clear their minds of all the legends that surround and often stifle Washington's memory.

So I'd like to start out by retiring some of the most egregious errors, however trivial they may seem at first glance, so that we can start off on a basis of absolute fact. OK, let's get it over with. The cherry tree story was, of course, invented. It's pure invention. It was dreamed up after Washington's death by a man named Parson Mason Lock Williams. He was an itinerant preacher and book peddler, obviously with the sharp bye on the main chance.

This fictitious story which, unfortunately, has been used to terrorize America's school children for two centuries, has also created a very misleading image of George Washington, as a cold and priggish character when he was, in fact, anything but. And it's really had a very unfortunate effect. Because, think back, at the age of four or five, we can all remember a moment where, suddenly, a parent or parental figure is browbeating us. George Washington would never have told the lie that you've just told. Not the best introduction to a figure in whom you would like to inspire love and reverence.

Another common myth is that he had wooden teeth. A very strange myth, when you think about it, because, obviously, with all the digestive juices, would rot very quickly in the mouth. OK, Washington's dental problems preoccupied more of my time than I had ever bargained for when I was doing this book. By the time he became President, he had only a single tooth left in his mouth. It was a very brave and very, very lonely lower left bicuspid.

He had complete upper and lower dentures that were anchored onto that one poor tooth. You could see there's a little hole drilled for that one poor tooth. I examined one set of the dentures at the New York Academy of Medicine Library in New York. And let me tell you, they were ungainly medieval-looking contraptions. They were very painful to examine. I can only imagine how painful they would have been to wear. They would have been rubbing relentlessly, hour after hour, day after day, against his raw gum. Washington was a man with just an infinite capacity to endure pain. That stoical image turns out to really be true.

The dentures were carved, not from wood, they were carved from either walrus or elephant ivory. And they had human teeth in them that Washington may actually have purchased some of them from his own slaves. It was very commonplace in the 18th century for people to buy teeth from one another. Now what happened, as strange as that seems, the 18th century was a very strange place, as that ivory aged and stained, and cracked, it developed a grainy look, that to future generations, resembled wood. Hence, the historic misunderstanding that neither I nor any of my colleagues can seem to banish. So I am resigned to the fact that 100 years from now, someone will still be standing up here correcting the myth of the wooden teeth.

When I was examining those dentures, I discovered something that I think must have had a direct impact on Washington's presidential conduct. The upper and lower portions of the dentures would connected in the back by curved metal springs. What that meant was that, in order to keep them in his mouth, Washington had to keep his lips firmly compressed. Because every time he opened his mouth to speak, it would relax the tension and release the springs in the back of his mouth. And there was always the distinct possibility that the presidential dentures would come shooting out of the presidential mouth.

Now, you can figure out, it may or may not be coincidental that many the speeches Washington gave as President were only one, two, or three paragraphs long. In fact, I think I'm safe in saying, Gleaves, correct me if I'm wrong, that Washington's second Inaugural was the shortest on record, right? So the speeches actually got shorter with time. And, of course, he had to do an enormous amount of public speaking. You can imagine just how self-conscious this would have made him.

Another myth that I find so common, I'm almost tempted to say, universal, is that Washington wore a wig. I found no evidence that Washington, even once in his life, put on a wig. So how did he get that very distinctive hairdo that very much defines the man? OK. He kind of fluffed out the hair in twin wings on either side. Don't ask me how he got them to stand out horizontally like that. He then powdered his hair.

In fact, if you look closely, particularly at some of the Gilbert Stuart portraits, Washington was often painted wearing a black velvet suit. And you could see on his shoulders a fine grayish dust. The grayish dust was not dandruff. It was actually the portrait artist observing that the hair powder had fluttered down onto Washington's shoulders.

And then what Washington would do, he would take the remaining hairs and he would draw those hairs back in a style that we would call a pony tail, that the 18th century, being a much fancier century, used to call the queue. And they would then be knotted at the nape with a black satin bow. That hairstyle of the pony tail, or the queue, to modern eyes, looks rather quaint, or genteel, or even slightly feminine.

But in the 18th century, that was considered the manly, military look, that anyone who didn't recognize George Washington, which was unlikely, but anyone who didn't know who he was, would have seen him walking down the street, and would have said, there goes a general officer. Because they would've seen that hair pulled straight back.

OK. Finally, everyone repeats ad nauseum that George Washington was six foot two, or six foot three, or six foot three and a half. You know, a myth repeated often enough hardens into a fact. And then when you go back and try to determine what was the evidence of it, sometimes the evidence is surprisingly sparse. as in this case.

It turned out that the evidence all rested on a single fact, which was, when George Washington died, his cadaver was measured for the coffin. And the cadaver measured exactly six foot three and a half. That would seem to settle the controversy, right?

Wrong. I want you all to do an experiment tonight. When you go home, lie down in bed, get on your back and just relax. What will happen is, is that your feet fall forward, your toes point outward, and it can add two or three inches to your height. Rigor mortis sets in. A cadaver can be two or three inches longer than the person because, when we measure people, we measure them with their feet flat on the floor.

I did, during the course of the book, this is one of many obsessions to try to get this right, I collected 35 or 40 different extracts from letters or diaries of people who had met Washington, and in passing, happened to comment on his height. And of those 40 extracts, 35 of the people estimated his height at six feet, one or two shorter, two or three, taller.

But then came the clincher. Before the Revolutionary War, Washington, like all of the Virginia planters, used to order all his clothing from a London tailor. And he had to, in meticulous detail, describe the clothing. He also had to describe, in meticulous detail, his own physique.

And every six months, without fail, Washington wrote to his London tailor, and described himself as a man exactly six feet tall. Now the one person you can't lie to about your height, unless you want to end up as a laughing stock, is your London tailor. So I think that I can say, with absolute certainty, that George Washington was only six foot two. Of course six foot two was relatively tall for the time. And Washington certainly would have towered over the likes of, let's say, John Adams, or Alexander Hamilton, although he would have been a little bit shorter than Thomas Jefferson.

Now I always think that readers of biography can be divided into two camps. There are those people who can't wait to reach the moment in the biography when the struggling, groping subject suddenly finds his or her identity. In other words, when the person becomes the historic personage that we know, or think we know.

And then there are other readers who delight in discovering those early years when the obscure, insecure subject is trying to find his or her identity. For the second group of readers, I think you'll find special delilght in the early years of Washington's life, because he's quite different from the person he becomes.

We, of course, associate Washington with the Revolutionary War. But he was already something of a prodigy during the French and Indian War, when he was in his 20s. He fought in the French and Indian War, in the wilderness, out of the Ohio country for more than five years. In fact, by the age of 23, he was kind of a wunderkind. He was placed in charge of all the military forces in Virginia when he was 23, at a time when Virginia was both the most powerful and populous colony.

His perseverance and bravery were already the stuff of legend, although he made some historic blunders in some of his first military encounters. But when you read these sections, the young Washington will not yet seem to be the wise paragon of later years. He could be crass. He could be dogged in his pursuit of money, status and power.

Interestingly enough, he first rebels against the British, not for idealistic reasons, but for purely personal reasons. The British deny him the royal commission in the Army that he covets. The British sell his tobacco, in London, for what he deems to be inferior prices. They then turn around and sell him shoddy, overpriced goods. The British, after the French and Indian War, banned settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains, just as the young surveyor George Washington wants to amass land there.

The British were simply bad for business. The British were bad for your career. So that in reading these sections, you won't yet feel that you were in the company of greatness, although the precocious Washington already shows some remarkable traits that foreshadow the wondrous things to come.

Now the bane of his early years, I think it's safe to say, was not royal George in London, but someone far more formidable, his mother, Mary Ball Washington. She was, not to put too fine a point on it, something of a holy terror. She was a self-centered, crusty, prickly woman, who took no apparent pride or pleasure, that we can find, in her son's career. Believe it or not, we have no evidence that she attended the wedding of George and Martha Washington.

We have no evidence that you ever visited them all those years in Mount Vernon, although she lived in Fredericksburg, which is very close to Mount Vernon. Historic rumor has even pegged Mary Washington as a possible Tory. Of course, there were many at the time.

Mary always felt that her son George, who was her eldest son, was abandoning her in favor of his career. During the French and Indian War, she suddenly wrote him one of my favorite letters. She wrote that she urgently needed a new Dutch servant and some butter. As if he were supposed to abandon all his regimental duties on the spot and go get his mother some butter. Later in the war, much more pathologically, Washington learns, from a letter, that his mother has filed a petition with the Virginia State Legislature asking for emergency relief. She claimed poverty and hinted at neglect by you know who, her son, the Commander-in-Chief.

Washington was livid when he found out and he writes to his brother, please go to Mother and have her stop saying these terrible things about me. Now in the book, I speculate that the first great general Washington ever encountered was, in fact, his own mother. And then he first learned to govern his temper in dealing with her strange and capricious moods. And I must say that Washington, maybe not an affectionate son, which was difficult with such a mother, was certainly a loyal and dutiful and generous son who bought her this beautiful house in downtown Fredericksburg, Virginia, that's still there, and gave her many hundreds of pounds in loans.

Now, with such a mother, and a father, I should say, who died when George was only 11, it's no wonder that George Washington does not start out as a saint. He simply is a very capable and ambitious young man. But then, in the mid 1760's with the Stamp Act, and the Townshend Duties, and the other oppressive taxes levied on the colonists, something miraculous begins to happen.

Washington realizes that his private grievances reflect the larger public problem, and that the British Empire has decided to stacked the deck against all of the colonists. And suddenly his personal frustrations are gloriously transmuted into universal principles of justice and liberty. And he begins to find his own political voice. And, make no mistake about it, that voice was a strong and militant one.

I think if ever there was a man who was ennobled by circumstances, if ever there was a man who was fired up by a righteous cause, that man was George Washington, who transcended his origins in a way that has few, if any, parallels is in our history. Of course, Abraham Lincoln springs to mind, but George Washington goes so far beyond his origins, he ends up becoming so much better a human being than one would have expected from his earliest years.

Now all of us, if we know even two events of the Revolutionary War, we know Washington crossing the Delaware, and the dreary winter in Valley Forge. Both of these episodes, in their different ways, can be quite misleading. Let me elaborate. Washington deserves full credit, obviously, for his daring in crossing the Delaware and seizing the drowsing Hessians on Christmas night. It must be said, though, that Washington was only, at best, a middling general. He actually lost more battles than he won.

I argue, in the book, that you can't judge him by the usual scorecard of battles lost and won. That this was one of those rare cases in history where what a general was doing between battles was, possibly, more important than what he was doing on the battlefield itself. By strength of will, force of character, clarity of vision, tenacity of purpose, integrity, George Washington singlehandedly held the American Army and, hence, the American cause, the American nation, together. And he did so despite constant nervewracking shortages of everything, manpower, money, clothing, shoes, blankets, gunpowder, et cetera.

Valley Forge was admittedly bleak, but there were other winters during the Revolutionary War that were just as bleak, if less honored in our national mythology. Nobody, but nobody else, but George Washington would have had the courage and fortitude to endure eight and a half years of unspeakable misery as he struggled to keep this army intact.

And remember, he's dealing with 14 political masters. He's not only constantly dealing with the quarrelsome and interfering Congress, but he's also dealing with 13 state governors. He's serving 14 masters.

If you doubt that there's at least a grain of truth in the great man or great women theory of history, then I invite you to read this book and try to identify who else, at the time, might have stepped into Washington's shoes. Almost all the other generals, however talented, and some were, perhaps, his superior in a strategic or tactical sense, but all of them seemed sidetracked by petty bickering and jockeying for power.

Only George Washington had the inspired simplicity, if I could put it that way, the determination, to see the job through. Throughout his life, if you gave Washington a task, he was singleminded in pursuing it. He was a very complicated man, I think, in certain ways, a very enigmatic man. when it came to the supreme quest that defined his life, Washington had a focus and a discipline and a drive that were truly unique.

Now whatever his deficiencies as a general, Washington was an absolute genius as a politician. In fact, he was peerless in our history as a vote getter. Try this record on for size. He is unanimously appointed Commander-in-Chief by the Continental Congress. He is unanimously elected President of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.

He is, then, not once, but twice, elected president by unanimous votes of the Electoral College. I think it's safe to say it's a record that will stand for all time. And, mind you, He does all this without a single focus group or pollster or a political action committee whispering words of advice in his ear.

How did someone amass this kind of power? I think Washington amassed that power because he never seem to be grasping for it. In fact, he often seemed quite burdened by the weight of his own celebrity. And, of course, what happened, the more reluctant he always was to come out of retirement and lead the country anew, the more the country clamored to have him back.

Washington's presence in Philadelphia in 1787 was absolutely vital, often overlooked. The Constitutional Convention, you have to remember, was held behind closed doors. And it was Washington's position at the helm of that convention that reassured a potentially skittish public outside the convention that no sinister plot was being hatched inside.

No less important, the widespread assumption that Washington would be the first president, the job was really his for the asking. That widespread assumption gave delegates the courage to establish a powerful Office of the Presidency despite their natural fears of a reversion to monarchy. And, of course, we had just fought a long war against excessive executive power.

Washington, I think this is something important to stress, in the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum, Washington shaped the Office of the Presidency. And we live with his legacy to this day. What I mean by that is, that most delegates in Philadelphia assumed that Congress would be the preeminent branch of government. That's the reason, you open the Constitution, Article I is about Congress, and there's a long list of enumerated powers. Article II, about the executive branch, is very short and vague in comparison.

Now Washington, having already spent more than eight years dealing with the squabbling Congress, had no illusions about legislative leadership. Washington saw, early on, that only the President could spearhead domestic and foreign policy. It's something that we, nowadays, take for granted, but that it's really George Washington's legacy. Had it not been for Washington, maybe it would have ended up with something somewhat closer to parliamentary democracy.

Washington also, very importantly, creates a Cabinet. There's no reference in the Constitution to Cabinet. There's a passing reference to reports by departmental heads. Washington not only creates a Cabinet, but he sets a benchmark for brilliance and integrity that never been equaled.

OK, he appoints Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Knox, Secretary of War, of course, Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State. I think we can safely conclude that, pound for pound, this was the greatest cabinet ever, that Washington had really put together the American All-Star team. Like all great executives, Washington never hesitated to hire and promote people who were smarter than he was, although he was a very smart man. And he felt fully confident that he could control this team of headstong prima donnas, an assumption, of course, that both Hamilton and Jefferson put to the test.

Washington established so many enduring traditions of the Presidency that we take for granted his gigantic influence. His influence is everywhere, except we fail to see it. Take the matter of Presidential inaugurations, the Constitution mentions only that the President must take the Oath of Office, nothing more.

It was Washington who decided that the occasion should be held in an open-air ceremony before a large multitude of citizens. It was Washington who decided that the President should deliver a broadly thematic inaugural address. And it was Washington who decided that the President should place his hand on a Bible as he took the Oath of Office. There's been a fierce controversy, in recent years, in terms of whether he actually said, so help me, God. So whether that was one of his contributions, we don't know. I think probably not.

Similarly, when it came to stepping down at the end of two terms, and establishing a very important precedent, it wasn't a legal precedent, but it was a custom that was followed by all American presidents until Franklin Roosevelt, under wartime conditions, was elected to a third and then the fourth term. But so powerful was that Washington president, that the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution was enacted shortly thereafter, which gave a legal limit to the President's two terms in office.

Now I know, at the moment, we're all, whatever our political persuasions, we're all feeling rather disenchanted with our political leaders. And so we gaze back, nostalgically, to the founding era as a golden age of brilliant and erudite statesman. But the founders were highly opinionated and argumentative men, and they took keen relish in attacking each other.

Let me give you some examples. John Adams said that Alexander Hamilton was the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler. And he claimed, quote, Hamilton had a super abundance of secretions which he could not find pores enough to draw off. This is our first Vice President talking. Hamilton, I must say, gave as good as he got. He said, of Adams, the man is more mad than I ever thought him, and I feel soon be led to say, as a wicked as he is mad.

Ben Franklin said, of John Adams, he is always an honest man, often a wise man, but at some times, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses. Adams, again, gave as good as he got. And said that Franklin's entire life had been one long, continued insult to decency and good manners.

This was not quite as genteel a period and we think. Don't be misled by the buckled shoes and the powdered hair. Only Washington really rose, and rose quite magnificently, above all of the partisan name-calling. And, again, showed that extraordinary clarity of vision that had made him the ideal wartime leader.

But even George Washington, after a honeymoon period of a year or two, did not escape unscathed in this poisonous political atmosphere. He was accused by a virulent opposition press, of everything from plotting to restore the British monarchy, to having been a British double agent throughout the Revolutionary War. I kid you not. If you think that some of the allegations are ridiculous today, go back and read about the early years of the Republic.

Now one of many big surprises in writing this book was how beleaguered Washington felt by his own fame. As a young man he yearns for fame and recognition. He gets more than any human being could possibly want. Remember, he was a man of innate dignity. Washington was not like a modern politician. He was not a gladhanding, backslapping, sort of character.

And he was understandably oppressed by all the attention he received. He was not a spontaneous speaker. We now think of a politician as somebody who can get up there and give a few well-chosen words, tell a funny story, and get off the stage. Washington was not like that.

In fact, when he was President, he made two long trips, one through all the northern states, the other through all the southern states. And at every stop along the way he, of course, was lionized. The town would send out a delegation of dignitaries to meet them on the outskirts and then they would ride with him into town. And it invariably ended up becoming a parade and the whole town turned out.

You could see, in the diary that Washington kept of these trips, he would say, the delegation was supposed to come out and meet me at 5PM. I deliberately arrived at 3PM in order to avoid them. Or he would write the next day, I got up at 5AM and left town because the delegation was coming to escort me out of town at 8AM. He really kind of sickens of all of the attention, which of course, put tremendous burdens on him socially. And then there was the dentures, right?

Well, I also discovered that the aphrodisiac power operated with full force in the 18th century. When Washington traveled through all of the states, he dazzled the ladies. This is picked up in many newspaper accounts. And interestingly enough, Washington every night was in a different town. And in each town, there would be a ball or assembly or a dinner in his honor. And he would then go back to his room and he would record in his diary, the exact number of women who had been there. Since I arrived in New Haven today, there was a dinner in my honor. There were 53 fashionable, well-dressed ladies in the town. And then the next day he would say, I arrived in Hartford, Connecticut and there was 62 elegant, fashionable ladies of the town there.

Well, he was travelling with a very tiny entourage. And there's no doubt in my mind that the person doing the nightly head count of the fashionable ladies was, in fact, the Father of our Country. Very,very strange. Other historians said to me, don't bother with Washington's diaries. They don't tell you anything. He just recorded things. But what he decided to record is immensely interesting and revealing.

Now, even in the privacy of Mount Vernon, this is sad. Even at Mount Vernon, Washington remained form a public property, something of a prisoner of his own fame. Towards the end of the war, a friend of his said, General Washington, you should go to Congress, and you should get a special expense account because you're going to have a lot of visitors when the war's over.

Washington did not listen. He should have because he no sooner gets back to Mount Vernon than hundreds and thousands of tourists and veterans and curiosity seekers descend upon Mount Vernon. Washington, an impeccable and courteous man, feels obliged to feed an house them all for the tonight. So he becomes really a prisoner.

He writes the following line in his diary, on June 30, 1785, he writes, quote, dined with only Mrs. Washington today, which I believe is the first instance of it since my retirement from the war. Now when Washington wrote that line, he'd been back from the war for a full year and a half. And it was the first time that he had dinner alone with his wife. A year and a half.

So Washington would routinely be sitting there at dinner, dinner being then the midday meal. Washington would routinely be sitting there at dinner with 10 or 20 people, some of them friends, many of them merely acquaintances, and some of them total strangers who were there just to gawk at the great man.

And I said earlier, Washington was not the cold and prudish figure of myth. Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote, mockingly, that Washington, quote, was surely born with his clothes on, and with his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world. But trust me, there was nothing puritanical about George Washington. And I'm not just talking about the famous infatuation with Sally Fairfax on the eve of his engagement to Martha.

Well, Washington had a friend, Colonel Joseph Ward, who remarried at the age of 47. And Washington found 47 a comically advanced age for marriage. And he wrote to a mutual friend, quote, I'm glad to hear that my old acquaintance, Colonel Ward, is yet under the influence of vigorous passions. He then went on to suppose that Ward, quote, like a prudent general, had reviewed his strength, his arms and ammunition before he got involved in action. This was Washington. Let me advise him to make the first onset upon his fair lady with vigor, that the impression may be deep, if it cannot be lasting or frequently renewed. This is not a line by Washington that you're likely to find in the school textbooks, certainly not in the state of Texas.

Now the marriage to Martha, I don't think that it was the lustiest marriage of the 18th century, but it certainly ripened into a very, very deep and important friendship. It gave Washington many things. It gave Washington financial security. Martha was the richest widow in Virginia when they married. It gave him emotional support. Washington was a reserved man and he needed a confidant and Martha was that confidant. And it gave him a social setting. Washington was a cordial host of a semi-detached sort, and Martha Washington was immensely skillful with people.

In short, Martha Washington gave her husband the warm and stable home life that he needed to accomplish his monumental task. And she was wonderful with people. She had a magnificent way of putting people at ease, and making them feel at home.

In the book, I try to give a complete portrait of this remarkably productive partnership and the indescribable sacrifices that both George and Martha Washington made for their country. You know, it's always said in passing, in biographies, Martha spent time with her husband in winter quarters during the war, but that doesn't really tell the half of it. Those winter stays always lengthened into spring, and Martha Washington, we can now compute, spent a full half of the war with her husband. Even though she was a very jittery woman who would often jump when cannons went off.

Now finally, to flesh out the private man behind the public facade, I devote an enormous amount of space in this book to Washington as a slaveholder. And earlier generations' biographers seem to deem it a trivial fact that George Washington owned 300 human beings. He was deeply conflicted over the whole issue. Certainly by the time of the Revolutionary War, he opposed slavery in theory, but he was never able to make a public issue of it, in practice.

Even in the founding era, slavery was the most divisive issue when George Washington, as the embodiment of national unity, could only broach the subject at his peril. We're taught in school that the major split in the Constitutional Convention was between the large and small states. James Madison said, no, that was not true. The major split was between the northern states and the southern states. And that split was already about slavery already back in the 1780s.

I wanted to try to write a book in which Washingtons' slaves are not simply faceless names mentioned in passing, but full-blooded human beings. To that end, I tried to bring to light his valet, a manservant, Billy Lee, who was a great hunter and rider and raconteur. Or Ona Judge, Martha's favorite slave, a very skilled seamstress who escaped to freedom in New Hampshire at the end of Washington's second term. Or the flamboyant Hercules, the master chef in the Presidential household in Philadelphia who also slipped off to freedom at the end of Washington's presidency. Let's face it, slaves constructed every inch of Mount Vernon. They form the basis of Washington's fortune. They deserved, I thought, a central place in the saga.

What I love about George Washington, he was not a perfect man, he was a very great man, but not a perfect man, but he was capable of constant growth and self-criticism. He's born into a world in Virginia where slavery is both commonplace and then questioned by the end of his life. In the will that he wrote a few months before he died, he performed his single most visionary act. He became the only founder to free his slaves, at least those 125 under his direct legal control. It was an enlightened act that, had it been widely imitated, might have spared us the terrible tragedy of the Civil War 60 years later.

I really feel I'm just beginning to scratch the surface of an extraordinarily long and rich and eventful life, but I know a speech about George Washington should not go on as long as either the Revolutionary War or the French and Indian War. So let me stop here because I want to give you all the chance to pose some questions. Thank you.

"Washington - A Life"

Ron Chernow on his new book from Penguin Publishing