“Whenever I set down to write you, I read your letter, or letters carefully over, and as soon as I come to a part that requires to be noticed, I make a short note on the cover of a letter or piece of waste paper;—­then read on the next, noting that in like manner;—­and so on until I have got through the whole letter and reports.  Then in writing my letter to you, as soon as I have finished what I have to say on one of these notes I draw my pen through it and proceed to another and another until the whole is done—­crossing each as I go on, by which means if I am called off twenty times whilst I am writing, I can never with these notes before me finished or unfinished, omit anything I wanted to say; and they serve me also, as I keep no copies of letters I wrote to you, as Memorandums of what has been written if I should have occasion at any time to refer to them.”

Another indication of his own knowledge of defects is shown by his fear about his public papers.  When his Journal to the Ohio was printed by order of the governor, in 1754, in the preface the young author said, “I think I can do no less than apologize, in some Measure, for the numberless imperfections of it.  There intervened but one Day between my Arrival in Williamsburg, and the Time for the Council’s Meeting, for me to prepare and transcribe, from the rough Minutes I had taken in my Travels, this Journal; the writing of which only was sufficient to employ me closely the whole Time, consequently admitted of no Leisure to consult of a new and proper Form to offer it in, or to correct or amend the Diction of the old.”  Boucher states that the publication, “in Virginia at least, drew on him some ridicule.”

This anxiety about his writings was shown all through life, and led Washington to rely greatly on such of his friends as would assist him, even to the point, so Reed thought, that he “sometimes adopted draughts of writing when his own would have been better ... from an extreme diffidence in himself,” and Pickering said, in writing to an aide,—­

“Although the General’s private correspondence was doubtless, for the most part, his own, and extremely acceptable to the persons addressed; yet, in regard to whatever was destined to meet the public eye, he seems to have been fearful to exhibit his own compositions, relying too much on the judgment of his friends, and sometimes adopted draughts that were exceptionable.  Some parts of his private correspondence must have essentially differed from other parts in the style of composition.  You mention your own aids to the General in this line.  Now, if I had your draughts before me, mingled with the General’s to the same persons, nothing would be more easy than to assign to each his own proper offspring.  You could neither restrain your courser, nor conceal your imagery, nor express your ideas otherwise than in the language of a scholar.  The General’s compositions would be perfectly plain and didactic, and not always correct.”