For all of Washington’s professions of modesty, the thought of his high destined niche in history was never far from his mind. Few historical figures have so lovingly tended their image. As we have seen, he had issued detailed instructions for preserving his wartime papers. When the wagon train loaded with these bulky papers set out for Mount Vernon in November 1783, he fussed over their transport, telling the lieutenant entrusted with the mission that he shouldn’t cross the Susquehanna or the Potomac by ferry if the winds were too high or any other dangers arose. As if the wagons were encrusted with precious jewels, he delivered this warning: “The wagons should never be without a sentinel over them; always locked and the keys in your possession.”57 He experienced vast relief when the papers showed up safely at his home.

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 to write so much myself as I have done since my retirement” from military service.62

Unable to escape fame even in his own home, Washington felt confined to his desk, and his health suffered for lack of sufficient exercise. “I already begin to feel the effect,” he told Henry Knox. “Heavy and painful oppressions of the head and other disagreeable sensations often trouble me.”63 A physician, possibly James Craik, advised him that the worrisome head symptoms resulted from excessive paperwork and that he had to stop. The solution grew crystal-clear to Washington: “I am determined therefore to employ some person who shall ease me of the drudgery of this business.”64 In July 1785, he hired a young man, William Shaw, as his factotum to draft letters, organize his papers, and even tutor Nelly and Washy. But Shaw had a habit of gallivanting about whenever Washington needed him and lasted only thirteen months.

Far happier was Washington’s association with Lieutenant Colonel David Humphreys, who had served as his aide late in the war. A Yale graduate and former Connecticut schoolmaster, he was a husky young man in his mid-thirties with a dense thatch of wavy hair, a soft, jowly face, and an engaging gleam in his eyes. Washington doted on Humphreys to the point that John Trumbull said, with only a touch of mockery, that he was the “belov’d of Washington.”65 Humphreys had turned in such a stellar performance at Yorktown that Washington honored him with a special distinction: he had carried the twenty-four captured British flags to Congress and was presented, in turn, with a commemorative sword. An able writer, Humphreys drafted many of Washington’s remarks at the stultifying round of receptions that followed the evacuation of New York.

After the war Humphreys worked in Paris with Jefferson and helped to negotiate commercial treaties. In July 1785 Washington acceded to Humphreys’s request to write a biography of him. In laying out the conditions of employment, which would include arranging his papers, Washington smothered the younger man with attention, promising to provide him with oral reminiscences and access to his archives: “And I can with great truth add that my house would not only be at your service during the period of your preparing this work, but . . . I should be exceedingly happy if you would make it your home. You might have an apartment to yourself in which you could command your own time. You would be considered and treated as one of the family.”66 By now Washington had guaranteed that objectivity would be impossible for Humphreys, embraced as he was by the American god. In a telling comment, Washington told his prospective Boswell that he would have undertaken his own memoir but lacked the time and was also “conscious of a defective education and want of capacity to fit me for such an undertaking.”67 It is striking that Washington’s earlier insecurity still resided beneath his confident air. One visitor picked up an interesting verbal tic of Washington’s that may reflect a lack of education, the way he tripped over words: “The general converses with great deliberation and with ease, except in pronouncing some few words: in which he has a hesitancy of speech.”68 Such pauses may also have owed something to Washington’s slippery dentures.

Starting in the summer of 1786, Humphreys came to Mount Vernon to compile research for his book. His admiring but incomplete narrative of Washington’s life proved less important than the four-thousand-word marginal commentary penned by Washington on portions dealing with the French and Indian War. At some point after returning to Mount Vernon, Washington had assistants transcribe his letters from that period, and in another instance of old insecurities rearing their head, he corrected his youthful spelling and grammar and polished awkward passages. Addicted as always to self-control, he opposed inadvertent revelations of self.