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The rest of Young Washington is chiefly the story of George's effort to fight a nightmarish war against able enemies, with insufficient men and supplies. Freeman's accounts of Washington's volunteer trip to warn the French away from the Ohio, the disastrous defeat at Fort Necessity and the slaughter of Braddock's army are easily the soundest and most complete in print.
For his men, more often cowards than heroes, Washington had little respect. Of one group of 400 recruits, 114 deserted. More than once they broke and ran as soon as enemy were reported near. Washington hanged two deserters who had been sentenced to death by shooting and wrote to the Governor: "Your Honor will, I hope, excuse my hanging instead of shooting them. It conveyed much more terror to others; and it was for example sake we did it."
Bitterly, at the end of the next year, he resigned his commission. Not until he was called to command the Continentals in 1775 did he wear a uniform again.
On short acquaintance and after two calls, he had proposed to Widow Martha Custis, yet, engaged to her, he could still write to his best friend's wife: "You have drawn me, dear Madam, or rather I have drawn myself, into an honest confession of a simple fact. Misconstrue not my meaning; doubt it not, nor expose it. The world has no business to know the object of my Love, declared in this manner to you, when I want to conceal it . . " Sally Fairfax answered his letter at once, but tactfully avoided any mention of his romantic confession.
Not Love, but Justice. The young Washington that Freeman has exhumed will give many a superpatriot the twitches. Freeman knows that his portrait of a proud and selfseeking Virginian has ruthlessly kicked Washington, the Eagle Scout who could not tell a lie, off his pedestal for keeps. Most men of Washington's rank, writes Freeman, "considered him ambitious and not particularly likable or conspicuously able . . ." Washington's favorite disciplinarian was the cat-o'-nine-tails: 25 lashes for profanity, 100 for drunkenness. His letters to superiors were often fawning, too prone to dwell on his own belief that he was "open and honest and free from guile."
He never hesitated to ask influential friends to advance his cause, resented being second in anything and lived in constant fear of losing "preferment, character, credit, esteem, honor . . ."
Yet in the end, Freeman, and consequently the reader too, is impressed by a strength of character, an almost fierce sense of justice and principles of conduct rare in Washington's time or any other: "The foundations of that code were not love and mercy, faith and sacrifice, but honesty and duty, truth and justice, justice exact and inclusive, justice that never for an instant overlooked his own interests."
After four years of research and writing, Freeman can make this measured judgment: "The patriot emerged slowly. Two generations ago this statement would have been considered defamation. The integrity of the United States was assumed, for some reason, to presuppose the flawlessness of Washington's character and vice versa . . . More Americans will be relieved than will be shocked to know that Washington sometimes was violent, emotional, resentful."