In the new United States, two concepts of biography vied for supremacy. Johnsonian theory, in other words, made biography into a branch of moral education. Most early American biographers believed so. Their subjects rarely appeared outside their places on the battlefield or in the councils of state. For the most part, Johnsonian ideas about biography appeared only in literary magazines, some of which took their cues from British quarterlies, while republican ideas dominated biographies themselves.
Private life is always real life.
Nobody had ever told Washington's private life before, Weems wrote. The key distinction here was between private virtues and privacy . In the introduction, Weems wrote that he would not discuss details of Washington's marriage or of Martha Washington's life. Weems meant that there were bounds of propriety that biographers were obliged to respect. These were not the familiar republican boundaries, in which women vanished because they weren't citizens in the classical sense.