Learning to be George Washington

NARRATOR: “I conceive a knowledge of books is the basis upon which other knowledge is to be built.” Thus, George Washington writes to his stepson's tutor in 1771. While Washington's formal education ended at the mere age of 11, his self-education through books and periodicals continues throughout his entire life.

Washington owned over 1,300 titles in his personal library. Of those, the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon holds over 100 volumes. Among this collection are some of the most pivotal and influential books he owned over the course of his life. The textbooks he studied from as a teenager, the books given to him by ambassadors and scientists, and the novels and prayer books adored by his family.

Welcome to the Secrets of Washington's Archives. Through conversations with library staff, we'll uncover secrets and stories hidden in the pages of these books and reveal new insights into the life and character of George Washington.

JOSEPH STOLTZ: Washington will come back from that mission realizing, basically, he got a free pass. And that's when you really start to see his book buying and book acquisition pattern begin, I would argue, because he writes to a friend in London, he says basically “Go get me the syllabus for British Infantry Officer 101, I don't want to screw up at this again.”

ALEXANDRA MONTGOMERY: Oh, he was a map nerd. That man loved maps.

LESLEY PARILLA: He's taking that scientific method, the birth of science and enlightenment and rationalism and trying things out and maybe making mistakes that honestly, I think is so important to what happened with the birth of our government.

NARRATOR: And now introducing your host, Dr. Anne Fertig.

ANNE FERTIG: Welcome to the Secrets of Washington's Archives. In this podcast, we're celebrating the tenth anniversary of the George Washington Presidential Library by exploring George Washington's life through his books, as they're held here at Mount Vernon. A book tells more stories than just the ones written on its pages. Washington himself owned a library of over 1,000 books, and while his contemporaries may have considered him a light reader, his diverse and fascinating collection of books can reveal new and humanizing aspects about his life. And I can think of no better way to start this series than with one of the oldest books in our collection here at the Washington Library.

This is The Compleat Surveyor by William Leybourn.

While the first edition of this book was published in 1653, the edition owned by Washington was the fourth edition published in 1679. And this book isn't just a testament to early modern book production, but an early George Washington as well, who borrowed this book from the Fairfax family during his teenage years and never returned it. Today, to talk about book preservation and young George Washington's education is Dr. Dana STEFANELLI, Curator of Special Collections at the Washington Presidential Library.

Dana is basically in charge of all of the books that we're going to be talking about in this podcast, as well as the manuscripts and the maps that belonged to Washington that we hold here at Mount Vernon. So first of all, welcome, Dana.

DANA STEFANELLI: Thank you, Anne.

FERTIG: Really, really excited to have you here today, especially as we talk about The Compleat Surveyor, which is such a cool book in many ways, one, because it is so old, and two, because it was something that was owned by Washington at such a young age.

So to start us off, I was wondering if you could explain what your role is here at the Washington Presidential Library and what it means to work with such an eclectic collection of books and manuscripts.

STEFANELLI: I oversee the collection, all books and documents from before 1900, as you mentioned, including all of the documents that we have that were created by George Washington or Martha Washington and the Washington family, and all of the books that George Washington owned, as well as the books that we are trying to acquire that are matches to the books that George Washington owned as part of our effort to recreate George Washington's library.

FERTIG: And this “matching editions” project, as we call it, sometimes we can't get a hold of the books that Washington himself owned, but we can tell from other sources what edition he might have owned, or we know from other collections. And so we'll try to find those exact editions.

STEFANELLI: That's exactly right. George Washington was really interested in documenting his own library. So I should say that straight away, he did three inventories over the course of his life, and then a fourth inventory was done after he died. And those are not the sort of comprehensive inventories that you would really need to recreate a library like we're trying to, but subsequent to his death people became even more interested in George Washington's library than George Washington himself was and began recording in great detail information about all the books, all the publication information and in a lot of cases what might have been written in the books by George Washington and others over the years. So his nephews inherited that library and a group of it was sold off to the Boston Athenaeum and then there was a big sale where many of the other books were scattered far and wide. And most of the books that we have reacquired that were George Washington's were part of that bigger sale of books. And so for those, a lot through auction records and other documentation is how we know exactly what George Washington owned over the years.

I should clarify briefly that The Compleat Surveyor is the oldest George Washington book that we own, but we do have some older titles here than that. And George Washington had a few titles older than that in his own library.

FERTIG: That's such a good point, because as you put it, you're in charge of all the books from before 1900. And that can stretch back quite a ways. Like I said here, this is a book from 1679, which is before Washington was even born.

STEFANELLI: Like I said, we've acquired matching editions. But his family, we also have some of his parents' books, and those stretch back a number of years. So we have a number of 17th century books, a couple of 16th century books and then lots of 18th and 19th century books.

FERTIG: And to give just a little bit of a preview to some of our future episodes, some of these books have found their way back to Mount Vernon in very exciting ways. They've been found in lost and forgotten trunks. They've been donated by members of the Custis family who were descended from Washington's stepchildren. They all have unique and interesting stories attached to them both from the time that Washington and his family owned them and in the generations that came thereafter.

STEFANELLI: And we'll take them. I mean, we want that stuff. So if you have something to donate, we're interested. Trust me.

FERTIG: So this is interesting. It's great to be able to talk to you as a curator. I myself am a book historian. We've both taken a long, hard look at all of these books that we're going to talk about in this series. So for you, when you're looking at these books that are owned by Washington, what do you look for both as a curator and as a historian?

STEFANELLI: Well, that's a complicated question. I will say that I look for some of the things that book collectors, any book collector looks for. In the case of Washington books, you like that George Washington bookplate at the front of the book that he typically pasted into all of the books that he owned. Also, he usually signed the title page of his books. So if there's a George Washington signature there, sometimes you get one, the book plate, or the other, the signature and sometimes you get both. In the case of The Compleat Surveyor, we have neither, which is kind of unusual, but it's a book that is well-documented as part of George Washington's library. So there's no doubt in our mind that it's part of it.

But a lot of the things that are in The Compleat Surveyor are also things that we look for. So we have the names of known associates of George Washington. And of course you mentioned that, this is on a very long-term loan, this book, from the Fairfax family. We have William Fairfax's signature in there. Perhaps some people think that Washington may have written that signature in there himself.

So we do look for things like that. Did George Washington write anything in the book? Did his associates write anything in the book? Is there any kind of marginalia that might give you a sense of what George Washington was thinking or what anyone was thinking while they were reading the book? How was it important to a person's intellectual development? And then we looked at the book as an artifact as well. It's publication history, is it similar or different to the same edition of that book and other editions of the book? What can we tell about how it's been handled and treated over the years? And what does that tell us about the significance of the book as a part of book history and as a part of the intellectual history of, in this case, what we think of as its most important owner, George Washington.

FERTIG: That's such a fantastic answer. There are so many little details you can pull from these books, from their bindings to the markings on the page, to any hints of use in the books that might still survive. And The Compleat Surveyor is such an interesting one in particular because it's one of these books that formed Washington's very early education.

So just to give a very brief summary, Washington's father died when he was 11, and after that point, Washington did not have the same educational opportunities as his older half-brothers, who were sent abroad for their education. His formal education pretty much stopped, but he didn't stop reading.

And in many ways, he became more of an autodidact by borrowing books, by copying from books that his friends and families had. And in particular, when he borrowed this book, it was for a very specific purpose. The Compleat Surveyor teaches one how to survey or how to make maps as Washington was training to become a surveyor himself. Isn't that right?

STEFANELLI: Yeah, that's right. And you get a glimpse into George Washington, the mapmaker, you get a glimpse into George Washington, the autodidact, the man who taught himself most of the important things that he needed to know in life. You get a glimpse of George Washington, the mathematician, and the tinkerer, a man who I think was pretty data-driven or at least observation and evidence-driven over the course of his life. People have been paying, I think, more attention to that aspect of George Washington lately, scholars have. And so if you take The Surveyor as a formative book, not just of George Washington's skills or knowledge, but of him as a person, I think you can infer a lot about the way he approached the world and problems and problem-solving in both a literal way, with the math, but also a figurative way that he approached the challenges that he found in life as things that could be solved and it was about a way of solving them.

FERTIG: What's really interesting is we know that Washington didn't leave behind a lot of marginalia and by marginalia we mean those writings in the books. And he left some behind, but not as extensive as other people of his era. The Compleat Surveyor, though, does have marginalia in it. Somebody, at some point in this book's lifetime, was going through and doing math problems in this book. They are throughout the entire book. I believe the front and end pages have the most of it. Do we know who that belongs to?

STEFANELLI: It may be George Washington marginalia, it may be Fairfax marginalia. It seems to be a lot of numbers related to what's being discussed in the book. Maybe it'll be helpful if I give an overview of the book and what's included in there. The title is The Compleat Surveyor. And I think that's an important way of thinking about it, because there's math education in there. There's “How do you do geometry?”, so it's a geometry textbook. There's trigonometry. It's a trigonometry textbook. There's tables to help with the calculations involved in those kinds of math. There's sort of the nuts and bolts of surveying activities. How do you conduct surveys over great distances across difficult terrain? How do you deal with, you know, if you have to drop a line, if you'd have to take a measurement in marshes, or streams, or bogs across forested land? And then how do you get that all down on paper? There's some discussion of the legal issues involved. If you're measuring common land, that's on privately owned land, how does that impact the measuring? Where do the boundaries end? Where should the surveyor say that the boundaries end? And then where is all that situated on a globe? How do you calculate latitude and longitude? How do you move from what they call cadastral surveying, just surveying plots of land, so to speak, to the map making aspect of things? Where do these plots of land go on a globe or on a map?

So all of those sorts of things Washington learned, and some of the marginalia involved there is that sort of basic working through the whole point of the book. How do you do this math? There's examples, there's problems, like what if you're here and how do you calculate this? And it's just like a kid's math textbook in some ways, what you would see in a high school mathematics textbook. And then things like how do you represent a body of water or a bog on a map? There's some coloration in there. This is a good way to show water or a stream or a swamp, something like that.

So, who made all of those notes? Some of the writing does look like Washington's writing, some of the numbers do, but it's hard to tell with numbers and it really could be anyone who was using it as a textbook.

FERTIG: You mentioned the coloration. One of my favorite details about this book is in that section on how to mix your paints and how to color. Somebody has clearly practiced on the page. Whether that was Washington or one of the Fairfaxes, we don't know, but you can still see those little watercolor stains on the book to this day.

STEFANELLI: That's an amazing detail that you don't see in a lot of books. And to think about essentially Washington training himself how to be a map maker, that could very well be what's happening there.

FERTIG: And that is very significant too in Washington's life. His journey to becoming a surveyor and practicing surveying throughout his life, even though he was really only an official professional surveyor for a little bit more than a year. He really did take these skills throughout his life. He was making maps during the Revolution. He was making maps up to a week or two before he died. So really, when we talk about this being a formative text, it was teaching him skills that he would return to time and time again.

STEFANELLI: Absolutely. Think about the advantages of being a military commander, a general, commanding troops over varied terrain, especially if it's familiar, but if you're unfamiliar with the terrain, how do you read a map? How do you create a map for that? How is that going to impact the way people move over the land? That's a big part of being a surveyor is learning how best to move over the land in ways that are conducive to doing your job, to doing things speedily and accurately. In a lot of ways that was basic and essential training for that aspect of his life. And of course, later he becomes president and you worry about boundaries and things like that when you are president too. So all of it is important later in life.

FERTIG: And it's important early in life too because for a young man who was not really set to inherit a lot of the large land estates, like his older brothers were, who lost his father rather young, did not have as good a formal education as other young men of his standing becoming a surveyor would have been a very important step for him in getting a respectable job and also something to pay the bills.

STEFANELLI: Yeah, it was a profession on par with the law or medicine or the clergy or perhaps military service which is something that Washington was also very interested in. There's often talk of how he wanted to join the Navy when he was young. I actually think that there's a tie in here with The Compleat Surveyor, the mathematical calculations. There's another George Washington book in our collection, which is about learning navigation, and that involves math, trigonometry, calculating distances. And we can see that it's a book that Washington read thoroughly, not because he wrote a whole bunch in it. He wrote one note where he notices on page 106 of the book that the author made a mistake in calculating when objects appear on the horizon, how far away they are.

So he makes that essentially the only note in the book, which you might think he's not reading because there's no indication that he does accept that. But apparently he was reading it very closely because he noticed an error that the author had used a wrong line in a table at the back of the book. So there does seem to be a close relationship between what he wanted to do with his life and what he learned from this book.

FERTIG: That's one of my favorite details about Washington as a reader, in fact, is that although he did not leave behind much marginalia, when he did, it was usually to correct a mistake.

STEFANELLI: Well, that's right. Who knows, that was reflex or what it was, but it was something that he definitely liked to do. As you mentioned, this was a path forward for him. Now his life got overtaken by other things and he wasn't in the surveying business very long, but it continued to be a useful skill for him as a landowner. And as a friend, like he did it for friends and family and things like that later in life.

FERTIG: And it's interesting to bring that back around to friends because this book was loaned to him by the Fairfax family who were very close friends. And so to just talk a minute about who the Fairfax's were, there was William Fairfax who was a land agent for his cousin Thomas Lord Fairfax and a member of the House of Burgesses representing what we know today as Fairfax County. And so he was the neighbor of George Washington who lived in the nearby house Belvoir, which is no longer around, although Fort Belvoir is there today.

STEFANELLI: The memory of it survives.

FERTIG: And there's connections even with their family. George's older brother Lawrence ended up marrying William's daughter Anne, so the two families did intermarry. And listeners may be most familiar with the story of George Washington's friends, George William of Fairfax, and his wife Sally Carey, who some have alleged George Washington was in love with, or at least had a youthful flirtation with. So the Fairfaxes were clearly a family that were very close to Washington. They were the ones who helped him get his first position as a surveyor, and they were the ones to loan him this book.

STEFANELLI: Yeah, you can't overstate the importance of the Fairfax connection. Thomas Fairfax was one of only a handful of peers of the realm who chose to live in America and the American colonies. And I think the estimate on his estate, the Northern Neck proprietary in Virginia, is something like 5 million acres. And Washington helped survey the Western boundary of that with George William. So they were good friends. But of course, the Fairfaxes remained loyalists during the Revolutions. So you might have thought there was a complete splitting of ways there. But no, George Washington continued to be friendly with the Fairfaxes in the years after the Revolution. So while the friendship took a hiatus, there's a lot of self-interest involved in what Washington could gain from his connection to the Fairfaxes. But there seems to have been a genuine affection between George and the Washington family and the Fairfaxes.

FERTIG: And it's interesting to note, The Compleat Surveyor isn't the only instance of the Fairfaxes helping George out with his self-education. When he was 16, he actually visited Greenway Court, which was the home of Thomas Lord Fairfax, the peer. And he wrote in his diary about reading the History of England, The Spectator, which was a popular periodical that contained essays on current events. They really helped support him in a lot of different ways. Even though he lacked access to that formal education, they were lending him use of their library, which would have been a very big deal for a young man like him.

STEFANELLI: That's right. Obviously, they saw something special in George, right? Partly because of this library connection and his reading. But there's not a lot of evidence that there were a lot of books in the Washington family estate when he was young, maybe about 50 or so. So when you think about how enormously that collection grew, at least 1,300 titles by the time George Washington dies. And that's someone who took a keen interest in books and learning. And we know from his library that a lot of the books that he read were directly relevant to the jobs that he did over the course of his life as a military commander and a politician and an agriculturalist, a farmer and planter. But that curiosity about the wider world definitely seems to have been imparted from a young age and partly because of his associations with the Fairfaxes and others.

FERTIG: So, with a book that is this old, 1679, older than George Washington himself, we have a lot of books around this age, right? We have books from the 17th century, we have books from the 18th century. As curator, what practices do you take here at the Washington Presidential Library to protect these books that belonged to George Washington and his family?

STEFANELLI: Well, we have a controlled environment for all of our special collections materials. And we worry about temperature and humidity and the dangers of fire and pests. Those are our chief concerns. You don't want mold to form on the books. You don't want silverfish gnawing at the paper or the covers. And then we employ conservators, professional restorers, as necessary for books that are in particularly bad condition. And you know, you have to be careful in the handling of the books. There is that balance between preservation, and access. We are a library, we're not a museum. Although we employ museum quality practices in the preservation of these items, we do want people to be able to use them for scholarship and education. And I think those remain our core concerns.

FERTIG: So do we know if The Compleat Surveyor has undergone any sort of conservation over the course of its life?

STEFANELLI: We did some when the library purchased it. We had a conservator look at it.

But it seems to have been rebound probably in the 1870s, around the time of those estate sales. There is what they call waste paper-pasteboard used in the covers and on the endpapers of the book. So you can see the endpapers are that fancy pretty marbled paper. But through that pretty paint, you can see the printing of a Philadelphia City Commissioner's Report from 1832.

Which I think is super interesting because people knew that this was a George Washington book. And yet, they used this old waste paper, this old Philadelphia City Report waste paper as the binding. They weren't particularly concerned about using fancy end papers or boards for the rebinding. And I can only speculate, but I can't help but think that that's because people were still thinking of this as just a textbook. This is not that significant a book.

FERTIG: Yeah, that was very common in the Victorian era. And as much as we might lament it, it is a fascinating artifact in its own right, because now we have attached to this George Washington book some newspaper articles as well from the 19th century, which are a historical source in and of themselves.

STEFANELLI: Well, that's exactly right. The book's history is written or printed on its pages, on its form. That makes it even more interesting.

FERTIG: So as we begin on this adventure of exploring George Washington's life through his books, and especially since you are the Special Collections curator, I'd love to get your opinion. Let's say you walked into a library today and you had no idea who it was, and you saw all of these books owned by George Washington on the shelf. You saw The Compleat Surveyor. You saw some of the books we're going to talk about, like The Botanical Magazine, Essays on Field Artillery, Guthrie’s Geography, gothic novels like Children of the Abbey or even the Book of Common Prayer. Just this very eclectic collection. What conclusions would you draw about the person who owned that library?

STEFANELLI: In a word, I'd say curious. Curious about the world around them. Just wants to learn more about the world that they're born into. We go back to this autodidact thing. This is not a man that was situated to be given a lot of knowledge. He had to acquire it himself. So those basic foundational elements of how to live his life, those were things that he acquired through books and the books in front of him.

FERTIG: And he really does have such an eclectic collection. I think sometimes people characterize him as a strictly practical reader, somebody who read mostly agricultural or military texts. But as we're going to show in this series, George Washington and his family read a very wide variety of books, books that would have been considered to be must-reads of the era, but also some very interesting choices as well. And each and every one of these books can tell us something new about the life, the interests, and the qualities of George Washington.

Thank you so much, Dana, for joining me today. This podcast is not just a podcast. If you want to see The Compleat Surveyor for yourself, go to georgewashingtonpodcast.com or the Mount Vernon YouTube page to see The Secrets of Washington's Archive video series. That's right. We have taken all of this wonderful information distilled it down into a five-minute video where you can get up close and personal with each and every one of these books, including The Compleat Surveyor. So be sure to check that out once again at georgewashingtonpodcast.com. And thank you so much. We look forward to going on this wonderful literary journey with all of you.

NARRATOR: The book featured in today's podcast is The Compleat Surveyor by William Leybourn, currently held at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. This book was purchased in 2018 with funds provided by Eleanor Seaman, Vice Regent for Wisconsin, in honor of Sarah Miller Colson's time as regent.

Did you know? Mount Vernon members get new episodes of Secrets of Washington’s archives two weeks early. And that’s not the only benefit. Members can enjoy other exclusive bonuses, including bonus episodes, members-only events, and a subscription to Mount Vernon Magazine, full of articles about George Washington and early American history. To learn more, go to georgewashingtonpodcast.com and click Members.

The Secrets of Washington's Archives is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association and CD Squared, hosted by Dr. Anne Fertig. Narration and audio production by Kurt Dahl at CD Squared. The music featured in this podcast is from the album No Kissing Allowed in School produced by the Colonial Music Institute. You can listen to more from this album and other productions of the Colonial Music Institute on Spotify.