The gloves came off at Wednesday night's Democratic debate — we were watching along with the rest of you as two of the last three women candidates standing made a forceful show. Sen. Elizabeth Warren issued a searing attack on Mike Bloomberg for refusing to release an untold number of women from nondisclosure agreements (“They signed the agreements, and that’s what we’re going to live with," Bloomberg said), then defended Sen. Amy Klobuchar for not remembering the name of Mexico's president ("I understand she forgot a name. It happens to everybody on the stage," Warren said.). And Klobuchar's post-New Hampshire surge made her a prime target for attacks from all sides. Next up: South Carolina, where Editor-at-Large Errin Haines will be on the ground to see how the candidates are faring post-debate. 

Meanwhile, as the nation prepares to mark the birthday of George Washington, born February 22, 1732, a new book by historian Alexis Coe paints a fuller portrait of the nation’s first president. Slyly titled “You Never Forget Your First,” Coe’s biography explores the story of the man who has shaped our democracy’s imagination for more than two centuries. The 19th recently sat down with Coe and spoke to her briefly about her reexamination of George Washington’s story. A condensed interview is below.

The 19th: What does it mean for a woman to look at the legacy of our most famous founding father?

Coe: The men who have [previously] written about Washington are  not just men; they’re white men of a certain age with a certain background. They bring to the work a kind of veneration and a defensiveness. They need the story to go a certain way. What I found is that the primary sources disagreed with this dominant and repetitive narrative. 

I don’t necessarily think it has any more to do with me being a woman than a person of color writing a biography about Washington. This is territory that has been dominated by white men. And we need women and people of color to write micro-histories and biographies. So, as usual, we have to do double duty.

Right. We’ve already been telling ourselves a gendered narrative about Washington. Why is it important that women and people of color expand our understanding of the origin story of our nation?

Our founding is the story of George Washington. The presidency is the story of George Washington. He as a person shaped our country. It’s not just that he’s the father of the nation; it’s that we are, essentially, his children. The way that this history has been written has both projected a white male perspective and it has also alienated people outside of it. 

This projection of the founders as all-knowing for hundreds of years in advance is completely false. They expected future generations — who they certainly didn’t think would look like you or me — to make sure that the democracy did not become corrupt and therefore decayed, because that’s the entire reason they rebelled against the British.

Who was Ona Judge and why was her story important to your telling of who George Washington was?

Ona Judge was one of several enslaved people who Washington brought to Philadelphia, the second location of the president’s house. Philly had a law that stated that after six months, enslaved people would be set free. Washington and members of his cabinet worked very hard to keep that knowledge from the enslaved people. Washington in letters quite openly concocted a plan to rotate enslaved people out of Philly right before the six-month mark, even if it meant just going across state lines. And [he] made it known that if anyone suspected they could procure freedom in the city, they immediately be returned to Mount Vernon, [in New York]. 

[Judge escaped from Washington’s Philadelphia mansion and fled to New Hampshire in 1796 after learning she would be given to Martha Washington’s eldest granddaughter upon the First Lady’s death. George Washington tried for years to bring Judge back to Mount Vernon — and bondage — but was unsuccessful as Judge held her ground and refused to return.]

“He as a person shaped our country. It’s not just that he’s the father of the nation; it’s that we are, essentially, his children.”

Those stories are as important to include as the invention of his cabinet, because that’s what he thought of on a daily basis, all of these things. It’s a whole story and it can only be told if it is complete.

What would Washington make of the existence of women’s suffrage? Landowning, white male planters were the voters of his day.

Abigail Adams certainly made it known that she would like the right to vote. And Washington was friends with politically influential women like Elizabeth Powell. She, for example, told him not to leave the presidency after one term in a beautiful letter that is elegant and expansive and hilarious. At the end she says, “You don’t even know what makes you happy.” 

So he certainly was open to women’s intellect, but he was also paternalistic. When something was going on that he knew would upset Martha, he simply didn’t tell her. The most benign example of that is when their son, Jacky, got inoculated for smallpox. The most extreme example is, I’m not convinced she knew about the second will and what it said, which was that his slaves were emancipated upon her death or at her discretion. Which means that as soon as he died, hundreds of people knew that their freedom rested on her death. 

I think Washington would be fairly surprised by a lot of things. It’s hard to answer the question, Would he be okay for women to vote or for people of color to be equals in society. A stoplight would blow his mind! But the thing he would’ve thought was craziest was Trump. In Washington’s farewell address, he warned the country that if partisanship got out of control, men who only cared about power and not about citizens would do anything to maintain it, including invite foreign interest. It’s the only thing I can almost say he saw into the future. Everything else was accidental, but it’s the thing that really resonates with me.