George Washington’s education can be summarized briefly. First, he received a home-based education by tutors who trained him in the topics that were essential for his success as a leader in colonial Virginia. His superlative penmanship and his poor spelling are legendary. Fortunately, his grammar continued to improve throughout his life. His childhood education included extensive instruction in applied mathematics, business law, as well as the teachings of Christianity. His education not only enabled him to become skilled in surveying, real estate law, and land acquisition, but also in local leadership of the Anglican Church. His mother, his church, and his teachers imparted to him a substantial knowledge of the Bible that was manifested in his writings by a high level of Bible literacy.
Second, although he never received a college education, given his disciplined and methodical temperament, he never stopped learning. As author Frank Grizzard, Jr. put it, Washington was “conscious of a defective education.”1 Nonetheless (or perhaps because of this), he strove to overcome it by the continual self-improvement of reading, experimenting, and correspondence. The legacy of his commitment to learning was seen in his extensive library,2 the many scholarships he gave to young scholars,3 his generous endowments of schools and universities,4 as well as a persistent advocacy of the formation of schools of higher education.5
In spite of his limited education, he learned enough to make a tremendous mark on the world. The traits of the mature Washington which most impressed his contemporaries were his consistent character and astute and wise judgment. Thomas Jefferson remarked:
His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a Newton, Bacon or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion. Hence, the common remark of his officers of the advantage he derived from councils of war, where, hearing all suggestions, he selected whatever was best; and certainly no general ever planned his battles more judiciously.6
Furthermore, the Duke of Wellington, the great British military leader (a generation or so after the American Revolution) described George Washington with these words: “The purest and noblest character of modern time—possibly of all time.”7 We already noted Jefferson’s sense of Washington’s judgment. He went on to describe his character in terms consistent with the Duke of Wellington:
His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest of consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was, indeed, in every sense of the word, a wise, a good, and a great man. His temper was naturally irritable and high-toned; but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendancy over it. ...
On the whole, his character was, in its mass, perfect, in nothing bad, in few points indifferent; and it may truly be said that never did nature and fortune combine more perfectly to make a man great, and to place him in the same constellation with whatever worthies have merited from man an everlasting remembrance.8
A page of young George’s geometry notes from school
.
He was remarkably skilled in penmanship and mathematics
.
As we will see, there is evidence that it was a Christian education that formed his great character.
Author Frank Grizzard, Jr. well summarizes the state of the research on George Washington’s early education.
David Humphrey’s biography of Washington contains the tantalizing but cryptic statement that “his education was principally conducted by a private tutor.” Although many have sought to identify the unnamed tutor, Washington himself edited Humphrey’s draft in 1786 without commenting on the passage. It is known that Washington attended school with George Masons’ “Neighbour & Your old School-fellow, Mr. [David] Piper,” a planter who lived in the vicinity of Washington and Mason’s estate but who had been raised in Washington Parish, Westmoreland County, near Washington’s birthplace, and a school stood at the nearby Lower Church of the parish.9
It is interesting to note that two of George’s brothers studied in a way that would have made them less inclined to join the American cause (in the divide between America and Great Britain) had they lived until that time. Indeed, Joseph D. Sawyer writes, “an English college education confirmed the two elder sons of Augustine Washington in Toryism; while plain American schooling, somewhat crudely started by Master Hobby at Falmouth, furthered at the Marye School in Fredericksburg and supplemented by Mr. Williams at Oak Grove, seated George firmly in the colonial saddle. When coupled with sound home training, his modest education turned him into a thoroughgoing American. George Washington never went to college—a fact he is said to have regretted in adult life; his youth was too full of action, perhaps too burdened with responsibility, to allow for a college career. Had his father lived, he would probably have entered Brasenose College, Oxford, the alma mater of his half-brothers and of those earlier Washingtons in England,—including Lawrence, the allegedly drunken Vicar—all of whom enjoyed the advantages of a liberal arts education.”10
GEORGE WASHINGTON’S CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
The details of George Washington’s early education are sketchy. The family moved to Fredericksburg in 1738, when George was six years old. Later, he may have been a student at the Reverend James Marye’s school, which had begun in 1740.11 Reverend James Marye was notable for his evangelical views and sincere piety.12 Another possibility is that after George’s father died, he lived for a time with his older half brother, Augustine, Jr., at his birthplace on Pope Creek farm and went to a school operated by Henry Williams.
We don’t have definitive facts on Washington’s childhood education. We do know that during the war, someone who wanted to discredit the commander in chief did so in part by ridiculing his childhood schooling. This critic was Reverend Jonathan Boucher, the tutor Washington himself had hired for his stepson John Parke Custis, affectionately called “Jacky.” Reverend Boucher, an Anglican clergyman, wrote with evident disdain, “George, who, like most people thereabouts at that time, had no other education than reading, writing and accounts, which he was taught by a convict servant whom his father bought for a schoolmaster.”13 Boucher wrote these words after he and Washington had parted company over loyalty to the crown. Prior to the politically motivated rupture of their relationship, they had enjoyed an extensive correspondence.14 As an Anglican clergyman, Boucher’s ordination vow included loyalty to the King, a King that Washington viewed as a tyrant and destroyer of American liberty. Boucher’s loyalty to the King became so controversial in revolutionary Virginia, that his final sermons preached before leaving for England were delivered from a pulpit graced with two loaded pistols!15
In Fredericksburg, on the Washington side of the Rappahannock River, there still exists an eighteenth century, small school building adjoining a cemetery. It is a small log cabin structure, with a cemetery and the remains of a church nearby. Tradition holds that Washington received his education in this “field school” from one Master Hobby (sometimes identified as William Groves), who also served as the parish’s sexton.
A Field School similar to the one in which Washington was educated by his tutor Master Hobby
.
Evidence exists that there was at this time a church sexton who had also held a higher position in the church’s life, but had to relinquish it because his legal record in England became known.16 Boucher’s claim that Washington’s tutor was a “bought servant” comports with the fact that indentured servitude was a common practice to get a new start on a new life in the New World. Moreover, it is conceivable that an educated person could have run afoul of the common law in the mother country for a non-heinous crime such as debt.17
Even author Rupert Hughes (who is generally skeptical of the Christianity of George Washington) supports the notion that young George was taught by a Christian layman, a Mr. Hobby: “This sexton, William Grove, may have been nicknamed ‘Hobby’ or there may have been another teacher named Hobby. M.D. Conway, in Washington and Mount Vernon states that Reverend Dr. Philip Slaughter’s researches led him to believe that Hobby was sexton at Fallmouth, two miles above the Washington farm, and that the Washington Children went to school there.”18
Washington biographer Benson Lossing provides additional information about Hobby. “The sexton of the chapel was Master Hobby, the first school-teacher of George Washington. He reigned over an ‘old field’ school-house—a log building—as a pedagogue for many years. He had a sort of bullet head and a vast amount of self-esteem. Master Hobby was regarded with great reverence by his pupils as ‘wondrous wise,’ and as they gazed at him while quaint words of wisdom dropped from his lips, ‘Still the wonder grew, How his small head could carry all he knew.’ When Master Hobby became an old man he often boasted that he was ‘the making of General Washington.’”19
But whether these accounts of Hobby are factual or not, the foundational claim they make is substantiated by the evidence. Washington was educated in the context of the Anglican Church. Whether it was by a sexton, a clerical tutor, or simply home education, all of the available evidence resoundingly demonstrates this fact.
The handwritten record of Washington’s baptism and godparents from the family Bible.
The religious education of Washington began in the customary Anglican fashion—by baptism with sponsors. In the Washington family Bible is found:
George William, son to Augustine Washington, and Mary his wife, was born the eleventh day of February, 1731-2, about ten in the morning, and was baptized the 3rd April following, Mr. Bromley Whiting, and Captain Christopher Brooks godfathers, and Mrs. Mildred Gregory godmother.20
Whether George himself wrote this record in the Washington family Bible has been debated.21
George’s training would have included one of the clergy as his religious tutor. Working with his parents—his father the vestryman and his deeply religious mother—the clergyman helped teach George and his siblings the historic Anglican Catechism, which included statements such as “I heartily thank our heavenly Father, that he hath called me to this state of salvation, through Jesus Christ our Saviour. And I pray unto God to give me his grace, that I may continue in the same unto my life’s end”22 as well as the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, a statement on the doctrine of the Trinity, the Lord’s Prayer (the Our Father), and comments on the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Table. It articulated that we should love God and love our neighbor:
My duty towards God, is to believe in him, to fear him, and to love him with all my heart, with all my mind, with all my soul, and with all my strength; to worship him, to give him thanks, to put my whole trust in him, to call upon him, to honour his holy Name and his Word, and to serve him truly all the days of my life....
My duty towards my Neighbour, is to love him as myself, and to do to all men, as I would they should do unto me: To love, honour, and succour my father and mother...23
The mature Washington clearly remembered these duties to God and man.24
WASHINGTON’S CHILDHOOD SCHOOL BOOKS IN HIS OWN LIBRARY
If you investigate Washington’s own library, which we have sought to do, we can see the influence of his Christian education on him. The Boston Athenaeum has done a superlative job keeping Washington’s library intact for the most part. Washington’s earliest extant signature, portending his famous penmanship and flowing elegant signature, is in a book designed to teach a person to use the Book Of Common Prayer.25 This childhood script is dated by a note of a family member as indicating he was around thirteen years old. A careful examination of this work reveals that portions of its text are stained, perhaps even tear-stained, particularly one of the highly used sections that seeks to bring comfort at the time of death. The book has long been considered one of the textbooks of Washington’s early education.
William Coolidge Lane writes, “The volume has been rebacked, otherwise it is in the same binding of old calf as it was when Washington handled and probably studied it in his boyhood.”26 The book certainly seems to have been precious to Washington. It contained a signature of his father, Augustine Washington, dated 1727, along with the signature of his mother, Mary Washington. Washington, the student, also signed his father’s name and drew several doodles of the kind that young scholars indulge in when finding their work less than engaging. The above evidences of use corroborate the fact that Washington was carefully instructed in the Book Of Common Prayer as part of his education.
