Washington [326]
No sooner had these documents arrived than a would-be biographer, John Bowie, and a would-be historian of the Revolution, Dr. William Gordon, emerged from the woodwork. In an extraordinary tribute, Congress had given Washington access to its secret papers on the same terms as its members, enhancing the value of his cooperation to future historians. To maintain the tradition of military submission to civilian authority, Washington decided not to open his papers until Congress did likewise with its archives. Washington wasn’t reluctant to disclose the historical record; he just thought it might seem conceited and presumptuous to do so first and that a congressional decision would make it seem less self-aggrandizing. Of the two projects, Washington was more troubled by the biography, fearing his cooperation might smack of vanity. “I will frankly declare to you . . . that any memoirs of my life, distinct and unconnected with the general history of the war, would rather hurt my feelings than tickle my pride whilst I lived,” he told Dr. James Craik. “I had rather glide gently down the stream of life, leaving it to posterity to think and say what they please of me, than by an act of mine to have vanity or ostentation imputed to me.”58
Washington looked favorably upon William Gordon’s history, as long as Congress first gave him license to open up his papers. A dissenting minister from Roxbury, Massachusetts, Dr. Gordon had been a staunch supporter of the independence movement. When Congress gave Washington its approval to unseal his papers, the indefatigable Gordon spent more than two weeks at Mount Vernon in June 1784, reading himself blind all day, pausing only for meals. In a letter to Horatio Gates written soon afterward, he summarized the scope of Washington’s extraordinary literary repository: “thirty and three volumes of copied letters of the General’s, besides three volume of private, seven volumes of general orders, and bundles upon bundles of letters to the General.”59 When Gordon’s multi-volume history appeared in 1788, Washington bought two sets for himself and urged friends to buy it.
Despite the years of work devoted to conserving his papers, Washington thought they had not yet attained an acceptable state and planned to dedicate the winter of 1784-85 to rescuing them from “a mere mass of confusion.”60 To his dismay, he never had time to tidy the letters or “transact any business of my own in the way of acco[un]ts . . . during the whole course of the winter or, in a word, since my retirement from public life.”61 He remained the prisoner of a clamorous procession of visitors. Even more time-consuming were the reams of mail that arrived daily, badgering him for recommendations, referrals, and answers to war-related queries. Feeding this flood tide of correspondence was a well-meant congressional decision to exempt from postage all mail to and from Washington. Someone else of Washington’s Olympian stature might have simply ignored unsolicited letters, but with his innate courtesy, he replied dutifully to all of them, even at the expense of his business. Duty had long since become a deadly compulsion that he was helpless to conquer, however much it exhausted him. During the war his large staff of quick-witted young aides had handled his correspondence; and now he complained that “not in the eight years I served the public have I been obliged