Under the weight of later monuments it is easy to forget that George Washington began as a boy who learned to read the land before he learned to read the law. In the tidewater mornings of Virginia the light rises off water and climbs through trees in a way that makes distance look like promise rather than peril, and a clever boy with a compass and a chain can turn that promise into a profession. Before any sash crossed his chest, before any portraitist cultivated severity in his eyes, Washington’s education was geometry made practical: bearings laid down in wet grass, blazes cut into bark, angles translated into property. That apprenticeship taught him two grammars he never unlearned—the grammar of terrain and the grammar of men. He learned that a ridge is a sentence with meaning for any army that tries to cross it, and that a neighbor’s claim is ...