George Washington

Born at Popes Creek on the Potomac and buried at Mount Vernon, the home he loved his whole life. Between those two ends is the war — and the object that made it real for me was his own field tent, the marquee he slept and planned in through most of the Revolution, now preserved at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. I later came across a second campaign tent at Jamestown.

A detail I finally sorted out on this trip: Washington wears a red-trimmed uniform in some early portraits because that is his pre-Revolution Virginia Regiment uniform (1755–58). Once he took command of the Continental Army in 1775, he deliberately chose blue-and-buff to contrast with British "redcoats." He met the poet Phillis Wheatley at his Cambridge headquarters, the Longfellow House, in 1776, ended the Siege of Boston on Evacuation Day, and commissioned Portland Head Light in 1791.

A Washington first I only traced later: today's Purple Heart began as his 1782 Badge of Military Merit. The full story — and the memorial trail that starts at his home — is over at Mount Vernon.

The part Mount Vernon doesn't let you look away from: Washington enslaved people his entire adult life. The 1799 farm census he compiled himself listed 317 enslaved men, women, and children at Mount Vernon — but only about 123 were legally his to free. Most of the rest were "dower" slaves tied to the estate of Martha's first husband, which he managed but did not own, along with a few he rented. His will freed his own 123 — but only after Martha's death; she signed their freedom on January 1, 1801. Just one man, his valet William Lee, was freed outright and immediately.

My question, standing there: why not free them sooner — or free them all? The tangled answer historians give is that decades of marriages had bound his own enslaved people to the dower slaves he had no legal right to touch, so freeing only his would have split families down the middle; and he leaned on their labor, financially, to the very end. I still couldn't square the man who led a revolution for liberty with the man who waited until death to grant a little of it, and only to some.

Visited: his birthplace at Popes Creek, his home at Mount Vernon, and the Washington Monument in DC — plus his war tent at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, and a second campaign tent at Jamestown.