Bosom friends: the intimate world of James Buchanan and William Rufus King

than in standard biographies, and more, proportionally, on how spycraft outsmarted the British. (Coe’s omission of the indispensable role of French sailors and soldiers at the Battle of Yorktown reinforces, unfortunately, an outdated view of Washington’s generalship and the prowess of the Continental Army.) Like other recent biographers, Coe shows that Washington was more involved in the messy party politics of the 1790s than one might glean from high school textbooks. She implies, perhaps more than Chernow, that Washington’s vanity and desire to lead should engender skepticism regarding his oft-expressed wish to return to life as a farmer. Coe does redeem Washington’s mother, Mary, from the condescension of earlier (male) historians. In Coe’s strongest challenge to our nation’s civic myth about Washington’s virtue, she consistently recounts his role as an “enslaver,” noting, for example, that as many as fifty persons this Founder held in bondage tried to escape. But, as Coe acknowledges, this analysis draws heavily from recent monographs by Erica Dunbar and Mary Thompson; Coe herself breaks no new scholarly ground. Moreover, she makes only passing reference to Washington’s extensive western land-holdings, which inevitably affected his policies toward Indians, poorer whites, and government power. In the end, Coe only partially fulfills her claim that she would “correct the record” on “understudied issues.” Coe adopts some scholarly conventions, such as footnotes for quotations from Washington and his contemporaries, most drawn from Founders Online, an extraordinary, newly available National Archives database. (Most of these quotations, including those about slavery, were also in Chernow’s biography, from printed or manuscript sources.) Many of Coe’s other assertions, however, lack clear citations, and she exhibits some carelessness even when criticizing Chernow. Editing should be sharper, both on substance (the Continental Army was not a “militia” [xiii]) and grammar (too many pronouns lack clear antecedents). You Never Forget Your First is insufficiently rigorous for most college courses, but general readers and high school students will find it an illuminating and engaging introduction to George Washington’s life and times.