You Never Forget Your First

How do we rediscover the human being behind America’s most mythologized face? In You Never Forget Your First, historian Alexis Coe invites you to meet George Washington—not as the marble man of textbooks, nor the untouchable patriarch found on currency, but as a complex, anxious, ambitious, and contradictory figure. Coe’s central argument is simple yet revolutionary: Washington was a man, not a monument, and understanding the real him—his relationships, insecurities, and contradictions—helps us better understand the nation he shaped. Rather than celebrating his perfection, she challenges readers to examine his entire life, from his difficult childhood and deep emotional wounds to his uneasy presidency and entanglement with slavery.

Coe calls out what she playfully names the “Thigh Men of Dad History,” a tradition of male historians who, for centuries, have obsessed over Washington’s physicality, ambition, and supposed stoicism, reducing him to a heroic archetype while ignoring the women, enslaved people, and social context that truly define his story. She sets out to rewrite the script—using fresh humor, empathy, and sharp research to bring George Washington down from the pedestal and back into human proportions.

The Human Behind the Hero

From the start, Coe shows that Washington’s life was marked by grief and precarity. His mother, Mary Ball Washington, lost nearly everyone she loved early in life and struggled as a widowed mother with five children. Her tough pragmatism—and reputation for severity—shaped young George’s worldview, teaching him that survival required appearances of control. Unlike the dutiful “republican mother” later mythologized by patriotic historians, Coe’s Mary is complicated: literate but not highly educated, self-reliant, and constantly maligned by male biographers. Her relationship with her son is foundational to understanding his anxieties around respect, recognition, and reputation.

Washington’s early years oscillated between failure and social aspiration. He dreamed of joining the British Navy, but his mother forbade it after realizing the harsh life of midshipmen. As a result, Washington learned to navigate ambition within constraints—an early hint of the stately composure that later defined his public persona. From a surveyor in the Shenandoah Valley to a young, reckless officer whose fateful ambush ignited the French and Indian War, Washington’s formative experiences taught him to hide uncertainty behind discipline and to equate control with survival.

Unmasking the Myths

Coe skillfully debunks myths that have calcified over generations. The cherry tree, the wooden teeth, the near-divine restraint—each served to turn a fallible man into a national deity. But Washington did not have wooden teeth; he wore dentures made from the teeth of enslaved people and animals. He was not born a self-sacrificing saint; he was deeply ambitious, strategic, and image-conscious. And while he longed for retirement from public life, he also meticulously managed his own legend—editing his letters, guarding his likeness, and even preparing his slave-manumission legacy as a final act of reputation management.

By peeling back the mythology, Coe reveals a leader who was often insecure, sometimes petty, and occasionally cruel. He was a self-taught man obsessed with refinement, social hierarchy, and control—traits that helped him hold together a fragile new nation but also blinded him to his own contradictions.

Reconsidering Power, Legacy, and Contradiction

Coe structures the biography around Washington’s evolving relationship to power—first his craving for it, then his discomfort with it, and finally his attempt to stage-manage its surrender. From his youthful battlefield blunders and uneasy military heroism to his reluctant but precedent-setting presidency, Washington continually wrestled with control: over his troops, his image, and his enslaved labor force. He helped define republican virtue while personally benefiting from exploitation.

Most notably, Coe confronts the complicated truth about Washington and slavery. Although his final will freed some of his slaves, he spent his life buying, selling, and pursuing them—and actively sidestepped emancipation laws during his presidency. The story of enslaved people like Ona Judge and Hercules, who risked everything to escape him, reframes the familiar tale of the Founding Father as a story of theft, denial, and moral evasion.

Why Washington Still Matters

In redefining Washington, Coe invites you to rethink the founding myths of America itself. The same contradictions that marked Washington—idealism mixed with ambition, freedom born alongside slavery, humility coupled with control—still echo in American identity. Recognizing his humanity doesn’t diminish his greatness; it makes it intelligible. As Coe insists, to understand how the United States began and why its ideals remain contested, you have to see Washington not as a statue of perfection but as a man navigating power, privilege, and the limits of his own understanding.

Washington’s early life was not the gilded beginning of a national hero—it was a constant negotiation with insecurity. Coe paints young George as a fatherless son of modest means whose ambition was forged from deprivation. Raised by a widowed mother running a small Virginia farm, he lacked the elite education of his half-brothers who studied in England. Mary Ball Washington’s suspicion of the gentry and tight control over the family finances frustrated him, yet it also sharpened his determination to climb beyond provincial limits.

Learning Power Through Imitation

Denied his dream of joining the Royal Navy, Washington absorbed lessons from his half-brother Lawrence and the powerful Fairfax family next door. He became a self-made gentleman by imitation, copying out 110 rules of civility and apprenticing himself in manners, posture, and persuasion. His surveying career at seventeen introduced him to the language of property and power—a training ground for the planter aristocracy and future revolutionaries like Jefferson and Madison.

In the wilderness, Washington learned both independence and hierarchy: he commanded hired men and enslaved laborers while also answering to British colonial authority. Coe shows how this balance between obedience and command shaped his lifelong relationship to power—he always deferred upwards yet demanded deference from those below him.

War as an Education—and a Warning

During the French and Indian War, Washington transformed from eager subordinate to frustrated colonist. His bungled ambush in 1754, which triggered a global conflict, was followed by humiliation under British generals who denied him rank and respect. The experience convinced him that American merit was not valued by the crown, seeding resentment that would later bloom into revolution. Yet it also taught him emotional restraint—after public failure, survival meant the appearance of composure.

Coe notes that this pattern—wounding, learning, perfecting—defined Washington’s life. Each setback became a rehearsal for future leadership. Every humiliation deepened his belief that dignity could be manufactured through discipline. That drive to control perception—first to mask insecurity, later to preserve authority—became his defining skill as general and president.

Washington’s ascent from provincial officer to American aristocrat happened through marriage. In 1759, he wed the wealthy widow Martha Dandridge Custis, a union that brought not only affection but immense property, social access, and, crucially, hundreds of enslaved men, women, and children. Coe emphasizes that this marriage solidified his place among the elite but also tethered his prosperity to slavery—an entanglement that would haunt his moral legacy forever.

The Partnership Behind the Public Man

Martha was far more than the dutiful wife portrayed in patriarchal histories. A savvy landholder, manager, and social strategist, she ran Mount Vernon during her husband’s long absences. Her correspondence shows emotional warmth and witty intelligence often missing from depictions of a silent first lady. Coe restores Martha’s agency, describing her as a woman who “never wanted to be first, but learned to play the role to perfection.”

Wealth Built on Enslaved Lives

Washington’s growing estate relied on human bondage. Coe carefully documents how he bought, rented, punished, and pursued enslaved people who worked his fields and kitchens. Enslaved artisans made his furniture; enslaved cooks prepared his favorite hoecakes “swimming in butter and honey.” The book highlights figures like Hercules, his talented chef, and Ona Judge, Martha’s maid who famously escaped to New Hampshire. Washington’s relentless attempts to recapture Judge—using newspaper ads and government contacts—expose the hypocrisy of the man who fought for liberty while hunting a young Black woman for reclaiming her own.

Moral Blindness and Economic Dependence

Although Washington occasionally wrote about hoping for “gradual abolition,” he never risked his comfort to achieve it. Mount Vernon operated like a forced-labor camp: hundreds toiled daily under overseers’ whips. Coe notes that his so-called emancipation came only in his final will and even then delayed freedom until after Martha’s death. The financial entanglement of slavery undercut his public image as a moral leader. Through these stories, Coe reframes the founding myth: the father of liberty was also a man unable to imagine freedom without profit.

When revolution arrived, Washington’s experience made him an obvious—if reluctant—choice to command the Continental Army. But Coe dispels the notion that he was a flawless military genius. He lost more battles than he won, and his army nearly collapsed multiple times. What made Washington indispensable was not his tactics but his endurance, symbolism, and ability to hold a fractious cause together.

From Failure to Resilience

At New York, Trenton, and Valley Forge, Washington faced hunger, disease, and desertion. He often blamed local governments and Congress for incompetence, but his strategy evolved from set-piece battles to attrition and propaganda. He enlisted espionage networks like the Culper Ring, realizing that narratives could be as powerful as bullets. His command became as much about image management as warfare—rebranding defeats as moral victories and turning a ragtag force into the embodiment of perseverance.

The Revolutionary Brand

Coe shows how Washington’s insistence on titles—‘His Excellency,’ the formal dress, the dignified silence—wasn’t arrogance but strategy. It unified a country without aristocracy by giving people a new language of respect. Yet his need to control every detail bred paranoia: he feuded with subordinates like General Gates and was slow to reward others’ achievements. Even allies such as Thomas Paine later accused him of vanity. Coe’s Washington is a man trapped by the expectations of myth before the myth even forms.

By the war’s end, Washington’s greatest act wasn’t victory in battle—it was surrendering power. When he resigned his commission after Yorktown, he became the rare conqueror who chose obscurity over monarchy. This voluntary renunciation stunned Europe and set the democratic precedent on which the American presidency was later modeled.

When Washington took office in 1789, he was stepping into an undefined experiment. There was no guidebook for republican leadership. Coe recasts his presidency as a period of improvisation and stress, where the old general balanced honor and order amid division and debt. His cautious dignity became a political language for a fragile nation learning how to behave.

Setting Precedents Under Pressure

Every gesture was precedent: how he bowed to the public, when he vetoed legislation, even his two-term limit. Surrounded by bold personalities like Hamilton and Jefferson, Washington served as referee and symbol of unity. Yet unity was an illusion—factions were already forming. Coe describes cabinet meetings as cockfights between Jeffersonian democracy and Hamiltonian federalism, with the president’s silence concealing alarm more than control.

Controlling Image and Public Ritual

Public adoration became a burden. Martha referred to herself as “a state prisoner,” confined by etiquette in a nation obsessed with her husband’s virtue. The performative ceremonies—the levees, inaugural bows, and stiff addresses—mirrored monarchy even as Washington sought to avoid it. Coe likens these early years to an awkward national adolescence: America was testing what freedom looked like when embodied by authority.

Contradictions of Freedom

Throughout his presidency, Washington’s decisions on slavery, Native policy, and dissent revealed the paradox of liberty limited by power. He signed the Fugitive Slave Act while hosting the Gradual Abolitionist elite of Philadelphia; he advised diplomacy with Native nations even as his agents waged expansionary wars. By his second term, partisan newspapers vilified him as aloof and monarchical. His decision to retire after eight years—against pleading allies—was his final moral gesture, proving that republican power could end voluntarily.

One of the most powerful threads in Coe’s book is how enslaved lives at Mount Vernon illuminate Washington’s humanity—and hypocrisy. By following the stories of Ona Judge, Hercules, Billy Lee, and many others, Coe turns what traditional biographies treated as background labor into the moral center of Washington’s life story.

Ona Judge’s Escape

Ona Judge, Martha’s maid, engineered her own liberation in 1796 when she learned she was to be gifted to a volatile granddaughter as a “wedding present.” Slipping away during dinner in Philadelphia, Judge fled north, aided by the city’s free Black community. Washington’s subsequent pursuit—placing wanted ads, dispatching federal officials, and blaming her flight on a French seducer—reveals his entitlement and denial. Even from his seat as president, he could not fathom that she simply wanted freedom.

Hercules, The Chef Who Vanished

Hercules, Washington’s renowned chef, managed to navigate between privilege and captivity until he snapped. After being demoted from the kitchen to harsh field labor, he escaped on Washington’s birthday in 1797. The irony was inescapable: the man who symbolized national liberty was losing his most trusted servant to it. Coe recounts how, to Washington, these escapes seemed like personal betrayal rather than moral indictment—proof of how slavery warped the perceptions of both enslaver and enslaved.

Voices Silenced, Then Recovered

By weaving their stories throughout the narrative, Coe restores the humanity that earlier biographers erased. The enslaved people’s courage reframes the Revolution itself: they were America’s first freedom-seekers. Their resistance laid bare the contradiction between republican ideals and racial bondage, showing that Washington’s legacy was built not only on leadership but on the labor and defiance of those he called property.

Coe closes with Washington’s final months, when the hero who spent a lifetime staging his legacy found himself overtaken by the one thing he couldn’t control: death. After retiring to Mount Vernon, he resumed micromanaging his estate and correspondence, still anxious about finances and reputation. His letters betray exhaustion and isolation—he feared time, illness, and irrelevance more than enemies.

The Death of a Symbol

In December 1799, a winter ride in freezing rain led to a fatal throat infection. Coe’s account of his death is chilling and intimate: the household slaves witnessing medical mutilation by bloodletting, Martha pacing silently, Lear taking dictation of his will. Washington’s last words, “’Tis well,” sounded serene, but Coe hints at their irony—he died surrounded by the system he never confronted.

Afterlife and Legacy

Even in death, his myth was curated. Martha destroyed their letters; Congress planned a monumental tomb; the legend of incorruptible virtue hardened. Meanwhile, the enslaved community faced terror and dispersal upon the Custis heirs’ inheritance. Martha freed her husband’s slaves only out of fear of revolt, not conscience. Coe ends by tracing the later discovery of their unmarked graves near the family vault—a physical reminder that freedom’s founding story was written beside bondage’s silence.

By juxtaposing the private decay of Washington’s body with the growing permanence of his image, Coe reveals his final contradiction: the man who feared being remembered as too powerful ensured he would never be forgotten. In exposing this paradox with empathy and precision, Coe achieves what centuries of marble failed to do—she gives George Washington back his pulse.