George Washington's "Remarks"
When I first moved to New York City all those years ago one of my favorite places to visit were the Forbes Galleries on 12th Street and 5th Avenue. Malcolm Forbes was an inveterate collector with disparate tastes, and had the means to satiate his collecting habit. Presidential papers & political ephemera; rare books & documents; autographs; toy soldiers; Fabergé eggs. Nothing seemed beyond his curiosity, interests, or budget. Forbes died in 1990 before I got here but his treasures for some time were still there on view in the galleries, presumably because his heirs were deciding how best to proceed with it all. What is more, it was all free and open to the public. Eventually as the late 1990s turned into the 2000s most of the vast collections went under the hammer. Today the galleries are now closed and the building itself owned by NYU.
I say all this here because today is the 270th anniversary of George Washington’s battle against the French at Fort Necessity in Pennsylvania at the outset of what became the French and Indian War. What that has to do with Malcolm Forbes is that in 1988 the publishing magnate and collector purchased one of the most extraordinary of all documents: the “Remarks” written by George Washington circa 1785 shortly after the Revolution to former aide-de-camp turned would-be-biographer Colonel David Humphreys. In the “Remarks” Washington described his thoughts regarding events that took place when he was a twenty-two-year-old officer in the Virginia militia fighting against the French and their Native American allies. He intended Humphreys to read the pages, incorporate them into his monograph, and then either return or destroy them when he was finished. Thankfully Humphreys did not do that. Instead the “Remarks” passed through several families for two hundred years until Forbes purchased them in the late 1980s. As it happened, in October 2002 his estate via Christie’s sold Washington’s eleven-page “Remarks” for $834,000 to a coalition of Western Pennsylvania museums. The fragile pages then went through a professional conservation process in time for the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War. Though they do circulate, the “Remarks” reside primarily at Fort Ligonier in Pennsylvania. Click here for a look.
(image / The Great Meadows with Fort Necessity in the background, courtesy of National Park Service. The Battle of Fort Necessity, a French victory, took place on July 3, 1754.)