George Washington is perhaps the most familiar figure in American history. But most people really only know the image of him they see in marble statues and patriotic paintings. Behind those symbols was a real man: ambitious, self-taught, intensely concerned with honor, and constantly wrestling with the immense responsibilities history placed on his shoulders.
In celebration of America’s 250th birthday, we’re taking an extended look at the life of the man more responsible than anyone else for the nation’s founding. Here to unpack that life for us is H.W. Brands, a historian and the author of a new biography of Washington, American Patriarch. Brands traces Washington’s journey from a young Virginia surveyor to military commander, founding father, and first president. Along the way, we discuss how Washington’s upbringing shaped his character, why he became a surprisingly effective military leader despite losing more battles than he won, how he held together a fragile revolutionary army, how he shaped the presidency through the precedents he set, and whether a leader like Washington could still succeed today.
Resources Related to the Podcast
H.W.’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:Episode #696: Theodore Roosevelt, The Last RomanticEpisode #908: Would You Have Been a Patriot or a Loyalist?AoM Podcast #223: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and Valiant AmbitionAoM Podcast #366: Teach Yourself Like George WashingtonAoM Podcast #719: The Surprising Pessimism of America’s Founding FathersAoM Article: George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and ConversationConnect With H.W. Brands
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Transcript
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AoM Podcast. George Washington is perhaps the most familiar figure in American history, but most people really only know the image of him they see in statues and patriotic paintings. Behind those symbols was a real man, ambitious, self-taught, intensely concerned with honor, and constantly wrestling with the immense responsibilities history placed on his shoulders. In celebration of America’s 250th birthday, we’re taking an extended look at the life of the man more responsible than anyone else for the nation’s founding. Here to unpack that life for us is H.W. Brands, the historian and the author of a new biography of Washington, American Patriarch. Brands traces Washington’s journey from a young Virginia surveyor to military commander, founding father, and first president. Along the way, we discuss how Washington’s upbringing shaped his character, why he became a surprisingly effective military leader despite losing more battles than he won, how he held together a fragile revolutionary army, how he shaped the presidency through precedents he set, and whether a leader like Washington can still succeed today.
After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/washington. All right, H.W. Brands, welcome back to the show.
So you got a new biography out about George Washington called American Patriarch just in time for the 250th anniversary or birthday of America. Washington is one of the most written about American figures. What were you aiming to do with your biography of George Washington that other biographies might not have done?
I try to make my readers see the world through Washington’s eyes. It’s very common for biographers and historians to observe their characters from above or from afar or something and with no disrespect to them, very good books in this approach, but they come off sounding like a history lecture. What I’m going to do is immerse my reader in Washington’s world. And to this end, I spend as much time as I can with Washington, seeing the world through Washington’s eyes. I let Washington tell his story to a very large degree. One of the things I think about history generally is that the major purpose is to allow readers and my students, I’m a teacher of history, to see the world through other people’s eyes, to, in this case, take my readers back to the 18th century and see the world as Washington saw it.
Well, okay, let’s talk about Washington. He’s this larger than life figure in American history. And I hope through this conversation we can get to know a little bit more about the man himself. Let’s start with this childhood. How was Washington’s childhood different from the childhood of other founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson or John Adams?
Well, it’s not that different from Jefferson’s and Madison’s and the other members of what I call, plenty of other people call it this too, the Virginia Gentry. So if you were born into the upper class of Virginia, this is a landed upper class. It’s not a hereditary aristocracy like in England, but it kind of approximates that. You had a very different existence than if you were say John Adams. If you grew up in Puritan, Boston or merchant oriented New York, for one thing, there were no big cities. And so the communication among the gentry was different. You rode over to their house or you stayed overnight, you rode off to hunt foxes with them. So there was a different culture and a different style. And the emphasis in that group was not at all the same emphasis in a place like Boston, let’s say, or New York.
In that the coin of the realm, so to speak, was the respect in which you were held by other members of the gentry. So while a merchant in New York would have a bottom line, literally a bottom line of making a profit and intellectuals in Boston hanging around Harvard and Puritan preachers and the like, it was a different world. But for Washington, it came naturally to him to try to develop a reputation among the members of his class. And it was reputation that would be based on in Washington’s case, particularly based on doing the stuff that would make people admire you. He was very concerned about his reputation. But again, if you think of reputation, sometimes people do as a veneer that sits above somebody, that’s not what I’m talking about here. That’s not what Washington was thinking about. He thought that he would gain the admiration of his peers by doing admirable things.
So from a young age, surprisingly, and this would be something that would kind of get lost in the course of American small or Republican history. Washington grew up in an age of aristocracy. And this part is really important too, in an age of deference where members of the Virginia Gentry expected to be looked up to by other people in Virginia. But of course they had to do stuff to warrant that looking up. So Washington wasn’t exactly an aristocrat, but he turned out to be a good example of what aristocracy can produce at its best.
Yeah, he had a very fine-tuned sense of honor, honor in that traditional sense.
Exactly. And I would add that it was different from that sharper sense of honor that caused people just at the drop of a handkerchief to run up and shoot a duel with somebody. So it wasn’t that kind of brittle honor. It was a deeper honor that came from actually doing honorable things.
And this idea of being incredibly concerned about his reputation, you would see this later on, we’ll talk about this when he was president because he started getting criticized and he didn’t like that. He’s like, “No, you’re not supposed to do that. Show some deference, I’ve done great things.” What’s interesting about Washington too though is that he was in the aristocracy, but he wasn’t high up in the aristocracy in Virginia. He lost his father at a young age and he was the youngest in his family. And so he was deprived of formal education. I think oftentimes the Virginians would send their kids over to England to get an education.
Yeah, he had older brothers who went to England for schooling, but he didn’t because of the death of his father.
And so how do you think that influenced the leader that he would become? Did that shape him in any way?
I think it’s absolutely crucial. And here I liken his experience to that of Benjamin Franklin because both of those men, and these are the two guys who would grow up to be the two indispensables of the American Revolution, Washington on the military side, Franklin on the diplomatic side. But both of them were largely self-educated. And having been in education myself for a very long time, I know that we teachers like to think in terms of what it is our students need to know. But what the students often infer from this is what they don’t need to know. And teachers hear it all the time, “Is this going to be on the test? And if it’s not on the test, I don’t need to know it.” But if you’re self-educated, you don’t know what you don’t need to know. And so you kind of assume you have to know everything.
Now, Franklin really took this and ran with it. He became a polymath and he did learn pretty much everything. Washington wasn’t that way, but he didn’t have the security of knowing, well, this kind of stuff I need to know and that kind of stuff I don’t need to know. So he was a self-educated man largely in a very good sense of the word. Now, in contrast to Franklin, who was comfortable as an intellectual and a scientist, Washington just had a practical turn of mind, but he became a very progressive farmer, a planter in Virginia, but someone who paid great attention to, who read about the latest developments, innovations in agriculture and tried them on his farms at Mount Vernon. But related to this again is, as you mentioned, he wasn’t at the top of the aristocracy, so he couldn’t take for granted the kind of life that he wanted to live.
The money wasn’t guaranteed to be there. Now later he would marry quite well, and so that would ease that part of it. But he realized he had to do something. And even for members of the aristocracy, they have to do something to fill their time. Now, one of the things that pushed Washington in the direction that he went was one of the few things that he was formally trained in was enough mathematics to learn surveying. And so his first working life was spent doing surveys in the Western part of Virginia. Virginia in those days spread far across the mountains. They claimed all the way to the Mississippi or some grandiose moments all the way to the Pacific Ocean. But anyway, he would go out beyond the mountains to survey land. And the point was to acquire title for people who would then sell the land.
I mean, theirs was speculators and sell land to other people and make some money that way. And when he got out there, in fact, the biographer, me in this case, encounters Washington in a detailed way for the first time when he keeps a journal of his first trip out to the West. And he’s a teenager and he and his partner are going out there. It’s late in the fall and it’s often raining at 35 degrees or it’s sleeting, it’s snowing when they get into the mountains and they’re falling through the ice as they try to cross rivers. And he has a wonderful time. He discovers something about himself that he really likes being outdoors and he does well when he’s outdoors. Now, another member of the gentry could have been somebody who might become a lawyer or something could spend all his time inside, not Washington.
And as I say, when Washington was home at Mount Vernon, he was this farmer, but he wasn’t a farmer who just gave the orders from inside his office. He rode around from field to field, from farm to farm. Another thing Washington developed as a young man was an ability as a horseman. Now that might seem like a nice add-on to the 21st century mine, but it was really a big deal in those days. It was a big deal practically because a person who could travel well on a horse could go places and could get there faster than somebody who didn’t. If you weren’t a good horseman, you might just have to take a carriage or the wheeled vehicle and that was much slower. You couldn’t go to places where a horse could go and a wheeled vehicle couldn’t. But it also opened up the possibility of a career in the army or in the military because that was something outdoors.
And this of course is something that Washington went into and excelled at.
Alright, so his childhood gave him that sense of honor to do admirable things so he could be admired. His place in the social standing, upper class gentry, but still on the bottom rung of that. It gave him some ambition. If I’m going to make something of myself, I’m going to have to do it on my own. I have to be ambitious. And he developed a love of the outdoors and became quite a horseman. So by the time he was 20, I mean he had a successful career. And not only was he surveying, but he kind of became a real estate mogul. I think by his 20s, he owned something like 2000 acres in the Shenandoah Valley. And so he could have stuck with that, but he decided to pursue a career in the military and it seemed kind of out of the blue. What was going on with that decision?
The thing that pointed him in the direction of the military was when after his various trips out to the West, he came to the attention of the Virginia governor who needed to send a message to whoever was the French military commandant in the Ohio country. The Ohio country in those days referred to everything across the mountains, what’s now Western Pennsylvania, the state of Ohio, West Virginia and beyond. Because the French were thought to be, as in fact they were, descending from Canada and ascending from Louisiana to invade as the English thought to invade Ohio. The English thought, the British thought that Ohio was theirs. And so the governor sends Washington out there with this letter from the governor to the commandant saying basically, “Get out of here. You have no right to be here. B gone.” But he sends Washington out and Washington nor the governor nor anybody at that point knows who the French commandant is, where the French commandant is located.
He’s just going to go out there and he’s got to find it. And this young guy, he’s given enough of a budget that he can hire a scout and he’s given some presence that he can use to make his way through the Indian tribes. But this young guy chose this remarkable facility, first of all, to handle the rigors of the journey because again, it’s through bad weather and it’s cold and everything else. Got to deal with that. He can camp out under doors, he can hunt for his food if he has to, to distinguish friendly Indians from hostile Indians because it was often hard to tell who was which, to keep the hostile ones away and the friendly ones close, to try to maneuver his way through the French and deal with the French officers that he encountered, to put up with disappointments and the frustrations of people not willing to go along with all of this stuff and to get the message there and to get the message back.
Now I don’t know to this day, I don’t know what Washington was thinking in keeping a journal of this. It was a habit with Washington. He had kept a journal on his earlier trips to the West. So I think it was just a daily habit. But it turned out that this was a big deal for Washington’s career because the journal of his expedition out to Ohio, out and back and all the script and everything is a great narrative of what amounts to a wonderful adventure tale. And the Virginia governor recognized this because when Washington came back and Washington was relating what had happened and showed him the journal, the governor says, “We got to publish this. ” And so they published it right away. And so Washington now in his early 20s has a name that is suddenly known all over the American colonies. In fact, some of the pamphlets made it to England.
So here’s this guy who becomes famous as a result of this single expedition. Now it was a wonderful expedition. It still is just one deal.
Okay. So he does this first mission for the Virginia governor. After this point, is this when his military career officially started and when it started, was he put into leadership positions right away?
Not quite yet. The next go around. So he goes out there, delivers the message, brings the message back, and the French comment basically says, “Forget it. We’re not getting out of here. We have as much right to this place as you do. ” At which point, and all this takes months and then adding up to a few years. The Virginia governor and having consulted the British government said, “Okay, well, we’re going to go stake the British claim to the Ohio country.” And the key, the strategic point in the Ohio country was what’s now the city of Pittsburgh called the forks of the Ohio because two rivers, the Allegheny and the Mongahila come together to form the Ohio River proper and we’re getting route there. And so Washington is given command of a Virginia militia unit. It’s the Virginia Army. These are part-time soldiers, but they’re Virginians.
And Washington’s young guy leading them and off they go. Now, unbeknownst to Washington until he gets fairly close, there’s a French small group doing the same thing coming south who’s trying to get to the forks of the Ohio and worn away and he’s British. And so going out, Washington acquired some Indian allies and scouts, and the French have their Indian allies and scouts. And by the way, this is going to give rise to what becomes called the French and Indian War. And it’s not because the French are fighting the Indians, because the French and their Indian allies are fighting the British and their Indian allies. But anyway, this French contingent and Washington’s continued. They kind of circle around each other looking for each other and then they get in a firefight. And in the firefight, Washington’s side comes out ahead. They kill a dozen of the French soldiers, including the commander of him, and just a couple of casualties on the Virginia, on the British side.
Now for Washington at first, this is a very exciting moment because it’s his first action under fire. And he has a response that is going to characterize his approach to being in battle for the rest of his life. He writes to his brother Jack after all this, and he says, “I have heard the bullets whistle and believe me, there is something charming in the sound.” Now, when I read that, I thought, my gosh, anybody who could find the prospect of a narrow escape with your life, you could have been killed if the bullet had been three inches in another direction and think it charming. This guy has a military career ahead of him. And one of the reasons I say that is I did an earlier book on Ulysses Grant and his reaction to his first battle was essentially the same thing. And in both cases, these individuals discovered that under circumstances that cause other people to get really confused and afraid and want to run, they become focused.
They’re better under fire almost than they are anywhere else. This was definitely true with Gran, but it was true to some degree with Washington. So he discovers that under fire, he makes better decisions, he does better things than other people do. And he begins to realize, “Yeah, I could do this. Military command is something I could do. ” And in fact, he’s rewarded with promotion, except in the moment his moment of pride, his moment of epiphany doesn’t last very long because there’s a larger French group behind the French group that he tangles up in. And this larger French group comes in and thrashes Washington and he is captured and he is persuaded to sign what is basically he thinks is a statement regarding what happened in this first skirmish, the one in which the French command who was killed. Washington claimed afterwards that because of the circumstances of the negotiation, it was in the middle of night in the dark, it was pouring rain.
It was in French, which he didn’t read. Well, the French interpreter is that he confessed to assassinating and that’s the term, the French version of the term of assassination of the French commander. And so Washington basically says, “I murder the guy.” And Washington, when he learns about this, at least so he says when he learns about it, “That’s not what I thouh. I didn’t assassinate anybody. It was a fair fight. He just happened to get killed and I didn’t. But it made Washington notorious, certainly among the Fringe, but it also made Washington, what shall I say, celebrated maybe in a notorious way a little bit among the British because this turns out to be the first action in the French and Indian War, which is actually going to grow into the Seven Years War, which in some ways is the first world war of the Western European North Atlantic.
And Washington was there firing the first shot.
Yeah, he started as a 22-year-old kid.
Yeah. And so to have this sort of weight of world history on his soldiers. Now, when people raise this question with me, I point out that if Washington hadn’t been the first one, somebody else would’ve been the French and the British were going to tangle over Ohio. It was going to happen because they both claimed it and neither one was going to give it up without a fight. So the fight would have occurred. Washington happened to be there as the first. But if those bullets, that first bullet hadn’t been so charming and in fact had killed Washington, of course we wouldn’t be talking about Washington, but we still would be talking about the equivalent of French and Indian war.
What did his military career look like after that? What was he doing?
So he ascended through the ranks of the Virginia militia until he became the commander of the militia. So Virginia’s army and Virginia was the most populous of the British colonies in North America. He was their top soldier. And as time went on, his Virginians became attached to British regulars. So once it became a regular war, the British government in London sent British regulars, that is full-time British soldiers with the British officers to Pennsylvania and Washington joined them and they march off again to try to seize control of the forks of the Ohio. And Washington doesn’t have a formal commission with this group, but he wants to ride along kind of as an attache. The commander of the British Army is a guy named Edward Braddock. And Braddock is a fairly well-meaning guy, but like so many British officers who is trained and experienced in warfare in Europe where typically the fighting took place on some broad open field and the British tactic of lining up in their bright red coats and lining up and marching acros a field and marching, marching, marching even though the other side fires at them and if the fire kills somebody in British line, a person falls down, but somebody else steps right in and they just march unstoppably across the field until the other side breaks and runs.
And that’s their way of thinking. Something else regarding officers in the British Army. The officers typically had to buy their commissions. So these were a valuable kind of thing. It was a little bit like the system of taxi cab medallions in New York City. Not anybody can be a cab, but you got to buy the medallion, basically get it from somebody else. Well, that was the way it was with commissions in the British Army. And it ruled out provincials like Washington. So he goes off to battle and in this key battle, the Battle of the Menagahila, the British side is routed by the French. And it’s routed primarily because the British commander, Braddock, doesn’t listen to Washington. The officers, the British officers don’t listen to Washington or the Virginians. They treat the Virginians as they don’t know anything, but in fact, the Virginians know how to fight in the forest, how to deal with the Indians, what to do about all this stuff.
And so while the British regulars, they break and run, Washington and his fellow Virginians, they have to step in and keep the battle from becoming an utter route. They sort of hold the army together through the army retreats, but doesn’t fall apart entirely. And at that moment, Washington has a revelation. He realizes that I’m pretty good at being a soldier. And not only am I pretty good, I’m better than most of the British officers. And the British were sort of like the New York Yankees of the day for somebody in the military field. Britain had this great empire and this powerful army. These soldiers had been places and won lots of battles. And he had stood up and battled beside them and done better than they had. So for Washington, this says two things. It makes him realize, “Hey, I could be a good soldier.
That’s one.” But it also makes him realize at a deeper sense that’s going to be more significant as the thought spreads that these British are not all we thought they were. Because the American colonials, they tend to think the folks in Britain know more, they’re better, and we’re just the rustics. But now it turns out that Washington says, “No, we’re just as good as they. In fact, we’re better and we’re better at the stuff that matters most to us.” So from this particular battle, you can see the seeds of Washington’s conviction that America needs to govern itself, that America needs to be independent. You can see them planted at this point.
Could you also see maybe a bit of the resentment that could go along with that, that, oh look, hey, I’m better than these guys, but because I was born in the colonies and I don’t have the connections to London and the aristocracy that it takes to become an officer, I’ll probably never become an officer of the British Army.
Well, in fact, that becomes explicit because during the course of the French and Indian War, the Virginia governor, who’s appointed by the British government back in London, realizes that it would be a good thing if Washington actually had a commission in the British Army because as I suggested earlier, the British soldiers didn’t respect and they certainly didn’t obey a Virginia officer. They would obey their own officers. But even though Washington had a higher rank than some of the British officers, they would just ignore his orders. And when he was given the assignment to secure the Virginia frontier as the war developed and the British officers wouldn’t listen to him, then the governor says, “You know what? You need to go and see the British commander-in-chief who was in Boston at the time. You need to go see him and I’ll give you a letter of recommendation saying that you should be given a commission in the British Army and that way it would clear up this confusion and it would make the Virginia border safer.” So Washington goes off and he makes his case.
And the British commander for reasons of his own said, “Nah, I don’t think so. ” He did write a letter directly to the British officers who were giving Washington trouble saying, “You obey Washington to be didn’t give him the commission. Now, some of this may have had to do with the fact that Washington didn’t have the money or the connections that were expected to become an officer. I don’t think it was because the British thought that Washington wasn’t any good as a soldier. No, politics was at play here.
Now, when Washington came back from this, I can’t say that Washington was resentful exactly because he wasn’t somebody who tended to resent insults. But what it did do was it continued. It added to that belief that the British really don’t know what they’re doing. And as he applied it to himself, if they did know what they were doing, they would give me this commission, but they didn’t. And so we are stuck in Virginia with these inferior officers who take precedence over the people who know what they’re doing. And so Washington again begins to think this simply isn’t good for the future of Virginia if we’re going to be stuck with this second class government system. And so that’s going to lead into conclusion. We’re going to have to govern ourselves.
Yeah. All right. So he distinguished himself as a soldier early on in his 20s. After his active service in the French and Indian War, he married a woman named Martha Custis and she was a widow, but she was a wealthy widow. I think the wealthiest in Virginia, I believe. Did Washington just marry her for the money or did he have genuine affection for her, you think?
He was affectionate toward her. Did he fall head over heels in love? I don’t know about that. That wasn’t a common thing in those days. And even if you did, that didn’t determine who you would marry. So marriage for love was a later thing. I mean, he realized that he and Martha could get along. She was looking for a solid guy to be a husband. She was married to an older guy, a very wealthy guy named Daniel Custis, and he died. And so she’s a widow who’s two years older than Washington. So they’re still pretty knowing her in their mid-twenties. She has two kids that she’s going to have to raise. In those days, it was very difficult to be an unmarried woman because English law hardly recognized property owning in women. It was a cultural thing. It was a political thing. It was an economic thing.
It was hard for a woman as a woman to manage a plantation that in her case included hundreds of slaves and thousands of acres. Women didn’t do it. So she was looking for a husband. He was looking for a wife. He had had some romantic notions. It’s hard to document that he had had any kind of really romantic relationship in part because he was busy off on the frontier and spent most of the time out there, but it was awaiting the right moment and the right moment came along. And from the perspective of both of them, this was a really good match in the sense that she got a husband who was an up and coming military officer in Virginia. And this was a big deal. She certainly didn’t need a husband who brought a lot of wealth to the marriage. She had all she needed.
But for somebody who could bring respect that she could go out in public with Washington’s great. It helped a lot. He was a handsome guy, a big strapping guy. This is worth remembering that Washington was a big guy, physically big for his time. He was 6’2″, 6’3″. He was a strapping guy. He was muscular, well-built. He wasn’t skinny by any means. People who know this stuff a lot better than I do though that he had a physique that was designed to be on horseback. He had long legs and he could really grip the horse well. He was generally considered to be the best horseman in Virginia at a time when being good on a horse was a big deal. It got you around, but it also was something that engendered respect. It was a talent and it was an important talent. But also you could make a good impression if you were good on horseback.
Washington was a big guy. He could ride a big horse and he could ride it well. And so that by itself made a strong impression on people. And it’s one of the reasons that he was given these military commands because when you’re the commander, you’re on horseback, you’re above the other soldiers. You’re a very visible figure when you go into battle because even generals in those days, they were often riding around the front so they were easy targets for the people to see. So if you made that impression, it went a long way toward getting people to decide this is somebody we’re going to follow. So she was a good match because she brought wealth and she seemed to be a very nice person. And he was quite willing to be the stepfather. I mean, technically he’s the guardian of her kids and it gets a little bit complicated legally because she brings to the marriage all this property.
He becomes the manager of that property, but not the owner of the property. So he can’t sell Martha’s land. He can’t sell or for Free Martha’s slaves if he had chosen to. Indeed in a complicated way, not even Martha could have done that because the property was held in dower, D-O-W-E-R, as the term in law was, basically in trust for her children. And so if Martha had said, “You know what? Let’s sell off that plantation. Let’s free those slaves.” Legally, she couldn’t do that either. So English law in those days was set up to hold together large properties and large fortunes. So that’s always behind the marriage, but it seems to have been a faction. I have to say it seems to have been because the correspondence that George and Martha Washington shared was burned at her order upon his death. She decided going to burn the letters.
Now, I did not begrudge her of the right to burn the letters. He wrote letters to her, not to me a nosy biographer coming along 200 years later, but I wish I’d seen the letters because that would reveal a side of Washington that’s really hard to pin down.
How did the wealth of Martha, how did that set up Washington to become the public figure that he would become?
It’s a little bit difficult to answer specifically because he became a very large landowner, but land was cheap. Everybody had land. And sometimes the cash flow from the land could, well, sometimes it could go up, sometimes it can go down. And although Washington was in effect about the largest landowner in Virginia, as I say, he didn’t really own it, but he had control of the property. Sometimes he was so cash poor that eventually, in fact, after his presidency, he had to borrow money from people to pay his creditors. So it’s an odd thing. He was very well respected because if you owned a lot of land, that connoted a certain kind of gravity in this Virginia Gentry group. And it gave him, well, it gave him command of the lives of the hundreds of people, mostly slaves, some hired workers on his property. So there’s that.
Here I’ll point out that because he had management, he had responsibility for management of this very large set of properties at a young age, he marries when he’s in his mid-twenties, Washington had more executive experience, that is experience making executive decisions about stuff. “You’re going to do this, you’re going to do that, we’re going to hire this, we’re going to plant that, we’re going to do this, that than almost anybody else in America. And it’s not an accident that several of the first presidents in the United States were Virginia planters who found themselves in pretty much the same position as Washington. If you run Mount Vernon with Jefferson, if you run Monticello, you’re running the equivalent of a larger operation by far than the federal government was when Washington and Jefferson was president.
Wow. Yeah, so land rich, cash poor. And another thing you point out about Washington, when he did become General of the Army, we’re going to talk about that in a bit, and even when he served as president, he didn’t take a salary because I think it was the honorable thing. Well, I’m doing this as a service. All I want is my expenses. And that often got into trouble because sometimes the Continental Congress, they were pretty slow in paying expenses. So Washington was just taking on personal debt fighting this war.
Yeah, there’s no question about it.
And in fact, it was not an unusual thing for Washington to do. As you say, when he accepted the commission, giving me a command of the Continental Army to say, “Don’t pay me a salary, just cover my expenses.” And it seemed like a generous offer to make. Now, Washington almost wouldn’t have known what to do with a salary. He had never had a salary before. He’d lived off the produce from the farm, the plantation. I think, but also it’s hard to know how far Washington saw into the future. It’s certain that he did not see how long the Revolutionary War was going to last. In fact, one of the few, if not the only letter from Washington to Martha that survived is a letter that Washington wrote shortly after he received the commission giving him command of the continental arm. He had gone from Mount Vernon where he lived to Philadelphia where the Continental Congress was meeting.
And this was in response to news that there had been fighting at Lexington Concord in the spring of 1775. So Washington shows up and he showed up in his military uniform from Mr. Virginia Regiment as a way of saying, “If you need me, I’m ready.” And in fact, he got the appointment as Commander General. And upon that, he wrote home to Martha. When he had left Mount Vernon, apparently he had told Martha, “I’ll be gone a couple weeks maybe.” So now he writes letter home saying, “Dear Martha, I’m not going to be home in a couple of weeks. I’ve been given this command. I probably won’t be home before.” This is in June when he’s writing, “I probably won’t be home before September.” Now Washington’s thinking, “Okay, this fight against the British started in April. It’ll be over by September and then he’ll go home.” Washington didn’t get home in September of 1775.
He didn’t get home until 1783. He had no idea how long the war was going to last. Neither did anybody on this side. And this is very typical of wars. If people knew how long the war’s were going to last, they’d think a lot more seriously about should we even start this thing? But that’s the way it goes. But there was a weird thing about it for Washington and that is he’s given command of this army now, go fight the British. But he wasn’t told, “What are you fighting for? ” Because nobody knew what he was fighting for. They were fighting because the British had tried to disarm the Massachusetts militia and the militia said, “Forget it, we’re holding onto our arms.” And I would point out this is why we have a Second Amendment in the Constitution of the United States. Don’t take away our arms.
Anyhow, so Washington goes and takes command of originally a militia force. Now there is supposed to be this continental army that’s in the making, but it’s going to take months for it to come together. But he’s there and he takes a position. The British are now inside Boston. He’s on the outside. He’s trying to figure out what to do. Do I attack Boston? Do I try to destroy their army? Do I try to get them to surrender? Do I try to drive them off and they get on the ships and sail away? And what’s the end of all of this? He doesn’t know because the Continental Congress hasn’t decided. Americans don’t know what they’re fighting for. They know what they’re fighting against. They’re fighting against what they perceive as British oppression. But if the Parliament had said at this point, okay, set the clock to before the standback, let’s say, of 1765, one of the first actions by Parliament that triggered this resentment and protest in America, wind it back and we’ll guarantee you the rights you’ve had for the 150 years that there have been colonies in America.
If the British had said that at that point, there probably wouldn’t have been a revolution, a revolutionary war. And Marshall said, okay, we win. Everybody goes home and that’s that. But they didn’t. Parliament in fact doubled down on its authority and Parliament didn’t know exactly what it was fighting for either. It’s just that, well, you guys broke the law, our law, so we’re going to enforce the law. So Washington spends the period from June of 1775 to July 1776 in this limbo about what in the world are we fighting for? Only when the Continental Congress on July 4th, 1776 adopts the Declaration of Independence, which Washington then reads to his soldiers. Is it clear? Ah, we’re fighting for American independence.This clears things up and it makes it a lot easier for Washington to make the case to his soldiers. This is why we’re fighting. Before then it was, well, we have to fight to resist the British.
And plenty of the soldiers in his army would say, well, British haven’t oppressed me. What am I fighting for? Because they had families, they had homes, they had hungry kids, they had to do something. But now we’re fighting for independent people, fighting for a country of our own.
And Washington sincerely believed that.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And this is really a striking thing about Washington, and it’s a challenge to the biographer of Washington. How does he reach this conclusion? Because Washington becomes a rebel. He becomes a traitor to the British government. He becomes an avowed foe of the British crown. How does he come to these positions? It’s unusual in that typically rebels, revolutionaries are people who are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. The status quo is not working for them and so they say, “We got to fix it. ” And if you just looked naively at Washington from the outside, you would say, “Oh, he’s doing pretty well under the status quo. He’s this rich guy and he could do whatever he wants. So what’s his big beef? But Washington remembers some of the things we were talking about, the fact that the British didn’t govern as well as they thought or claimed to, that they looked down on the colonials, that they were more intent on what they could get out of the colonies than what the colonies could get out of the relationship between the colonies and the mother country.
In all of this, Washington thought that there was a pattern. And the conclusion that he drew was that if we Americans do not stand up for our rights, we will be no better than slaves. Now, I remember the moment when I read that passage in one of Washington’s letters and I thought, George, this is awfully rich coming from somebody who has hundreds of slaves, real slaves under his control. Are you just using this metaphorically? And if so, don’t you realize the incongruity of this metaphor? But the more I read and the more I became aware of Washington’s thinking, he meant it precisely, precisely in the following way. The essence of being a slave is not being poor or maybe sometimes being beaten or not doing what you want. It is being unfree. You are subject to the will of somebody else. And Washington didn’t want to be subject to the will of somebody else speaking for Americans generally.
Americans and their ancestors had come out from England in the early 17th century and established these colonies, many of them precisely because they didn’t like the way they were being treated in England. When the Puritans go out to America, they want to get out from underbat. And for the first roughly 150 years, the British let Americans handle their own stuff. The Americans essentially have home rule self-government in matters that relate directly to them. Yeah, it matters the trade with the empire and wars. There is a connection there. But most of the Americans can do stuff on their own. And Washington grew up in a world where that was the case, but things changed in the 1760s and 1770s after the end of the French and Indian War when the British began to intrude more into the daily lives. We had talked, you mentioned that Washington was a speculator in land in the Ohio country and he had big plans along with some of his brothers, Benjamin Franklin, William Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s son, other distinguished figures in Virginia.
They would go out, they would gain legal title to this land, they would survey it, and then they would sell it to the next wave of settlers and they would make money. And Washington spent a lot of time and energy in this project, the Ohio project. It was part of something that was called the Ohio Company. It was a land speculation company. And then at the end of the French and Indian War, the British government says, “Nope, nobody gets to acquire land titles in the Ohio country in the Western region. Nobody gets to go out and settle there. Your whole plan, Washington and all you other people, poof, it’s gone up in smoke. Why? Because it’s too expensive for us to administer that. ” And Washington again thinks, “Wait a minute, they’re making laws based on the convenience and profits of people living in England rather than the interests of us.
So we’re going to have to figure out a way to gain control of our own affairs or we will be no better than slaves.”
All right, so he takes command of the army. What was his strategy? I mean, he’s going against, like you said, like the New York Yankees of the time, the most powerful military in the world, the British military. And here he was this sort of leader of this ragtag colonial army made up of militias from different colonies. What was his strategy for taking on this Goliath?
Okay, so this is the big question that I had, and it’s one of the reasons I didn’t write about Washington for a long time. I’ve written about other people and I’ve written about history and moments of history, but I stayed away from Washington in large part because I couldn’t figure out the answer to the question you posed. So what made him a good general? And later on, we’re getting there, but what makes him a good president? Because he’s ranked as the best general in American history and one of the three best presidents in American history. And naively looking upon Washington, I didn’t get it. He didn’t do stuff that was so obvious, so dramatic as other generals did. So he didn’t capture Vicksburg the way Ulysses Grant did. And he didn’t head the D-Day invasion the way Dwight Eisenhower did. His battles were the merest skirmishes by the standards of the American Civil War, certainly of World War II.
And furthermore, as a general, Washington lost far more battles than he won. If you just count up his victories, well, he won this surprising attack against a small group of drunken Hessian soldiers at Trenton and he won a follow-up a little bit. It’s kind of almost a toss-up who won in Princeton several days later. And then he won at Yorktown and that’s about it. So meanwhile, he lost at dozens of places. He lost the American Capitol. The government of the United States was driven from Philadelphia and the British Army moved in and spent a nice cozy winter there. It was 1777, 1778 in Washington and his army was stuck on the hillside out in the open at Valley Ford. So how does he do it? He turns out to win the war, but he couldn’t win any battles. And this because the Washington was mediocre, not even mediocre at tactics at running a single battle.
Here’s your army, here’s the other army. How do you maneuver you guys and take advantage of the other guys? Washington lost battles that he could have won. He lost individual battles that, well, Brandy won, for example, a critical battle ahead of the loss of Philadelphia that many other generals would have won, that Ulysses Grant would’ve won it. Robert E. Lee would’ve won. He lost them. So how does he get this reputation? And the answer is very simple. If you are the commanding general, you’re not just a theater general, not just a general of a particular unit, but if you’re commanding general, you got to keep in mind the big picture. And the big picture is to win the war. So because I’ve written about Ulysity Grant, I often find myself in debates, “Well, is Grant a better general than Lee?” And my answer is always simply yes, because he won the war.
And so with Washington, yes, he won the war. Why did he win the war? Because as undistinguished as he was as a tactical commander, he was brilliant as a strategic thinker. He understood what this war was all about and he understood the fundamental asymmetry between the American position and the British position. He understood that he did not have to win a single battle except for the last one. He could lose every battle and he nearly did as long as he wins the last one. He did win the last one at Yorktown because Washington understood something that’s profound about politics but is often forgotten. And that is wars, including the American Revolutionary War, begin in politics and they end in politics. And Washington understood that the war in America was for the British, a decision made by Parliament, go enforce the law against these American colonials.
And Washington understood that the war would end when Parliament essentially reversed that decision. When they said, “Okay, we spent too much. We spent too much time. Let’s just call an army home and get onto other things.” So Washington was aiming for that final result. And this contributed to the fact I’ve really overstated Washington’s mediocrity in tactics. One of the reasons Washington lost all those battles that he did was that he never was willing to put his army in a position where it might lose the battle. Now other commanders would’ve taken that chance, but not Washington. For Washington, the big deal was preserving the army. As long as there is an army, then the British will have to keep fighting us and the British public and the British parliament will have to keep sending money and resources to America. This is an odd war of attrition that Washington is fighting, not atrition in the sense of killing more British soldiers than they killed Washington.
That’s the typical definition of attrition. No, attrition of British political morale and support for the war. So it’s really as much a matter of keeping the war going as it is of winning anything. And so it’s not an accident. The war lasted as long as it did. If Washington had been bolder, if Washington had had the temperament, say, of the Ulysses Grant, he probably would’ve had it out earlier with the British. But he didn’t because he didn’t think he had the capacity to defeat them decisively only after the alliance with France, when French soldiers joined Washington’s army, when friendships bottled up the British army in this case at Yorktown, could he go there and stand for the fight and deliver the final blow? So Washington’s strategy is exactly the way the war played out. We just keep fighting, we keep fighting, keep fighting. Eventually the British weary and they call it off and we win.
Yeah. And part of what he did as a general to keep the war going for as long as it did, he had to, you talk about this a lot in the book, manage his own troops. There’s a lot of turmoil and conflict within his own troops, mutinies or people wanting to mutiny because they weren’t getting paid, they weren’t getting supplies. And Washington had this knack, this skill to quell those upheavals.
Yeah. So this is absolutely crucial. And indeed the epitome of Washington’s challenge in holding the army together is at Valley Forge. So in fact, it’s often thought that Washington’s great victory was the victory at Yorktown, which is big deal, no question about it. But in a deeper way, his greatest victory was at Valley Forge, which was not a battle. It was an ordeal. But the fact that he came out of that ordeal with the army intact and in fact, in better shape and better training than when it had gone into the camp at Valley Forge meant everything. It meant that the war would continue. The American side would get back its capital because the British would have to come out of Philadelphia to fight. And when I was trying to assess, okay, how did Washington do that? This gets back to Washington’s character. This gets back to the impression Washington made.
Now, Washington by this time is in his forties. So he’s sort of the prime of mid-adulthood for a male, and he’s still a big, strong, impressive guy. He’s galloping all around the battlefield. His soldiers are seeing everywhere. It’s crucial that in the time at Valley Forge, when he could have gone back to Mount Vernon, spent the winter there, he stayed with his troops. He stayed with his troops the whole war. They saw that he was there, this rich guy who could have been elsewhere. He was living as they were living. Not quite. He had better rations than they did. He commandeered a real house and they had to build their own cabins, but still he really put himself out there. They understood that he put a lot more on the line than they did. If the American side lost this war, they would probably just go home and go back to what they were doing.
He might very well be hanged as a traitor or drawn and quartered or whatever they were going to do to traitors in those days, but he was there. And because he was older than they were, he became a father figure to many of them. And it helped in this regard that he did not have any children of his own. So some people became almost explicitly surrogate sons. Alexander Hamilton was one. Marquis de Lafayette was another. These people who were a generation younger than Washington who they were looking for this fatherly figure, this fatherly advice and model. But Washington in some ways became a model for the soldiers in general. It’s a commonplace of military history and affairs that while soldiers might be drawn to join the ranks for a cause, for the cause of freedom or independence or layer freeing of slaves or whatever it is, once the campaigns get going, they fight for each other.
They fight for their commanders. And in the case of Washington, that was really a big deal because what kept the soldiers at Valley Forge, many of whom were sorely tempted to leave, and some in fact did, they were sorely tempted to leave because they weren’t getting paid very often. Congress wasn’t paying them what Congress had said was going to pay them. And so they couldn’t send money to their wives and children. They got letters instead from home saying, “We’re hungry. The kids don’t have clothes. What are you going to do? How can we hold ourselves together?” And some of them said, “Well, I’m going to just go take leave and go spend the winter with my family. Maybe I’ll come back in the spring.” But most didn’t. Washington held them together. And the reason they stayed was they believed with Washington in the cause, but what they really believed in was their commander.
And they didn’t leave in part because they didn’t want to be untrue to the cause, but mostly because they didn’t want to disappoint Washington. And this emotional attachment of Washington’s men for him and vice versa became clear at the end of the war when finally the American side has won. News of the Peace Treaty in Paris has arrived at Washington’s camp, which is in Newburgh, New York, above New York City. And so, okay, now it’s time for everybody to go home. So they go down and they reoccupy New York City Hibbing, which had been controlled by the ritish the whole war. They reoccupied New York City in the news. They said, “Okay, time for the army to break up.” And Washington takes leave of the army and his officers hold a going away party for him at a tavern in Waldo Francis Tavern in New York City.
And at this party, at this reception, Washington one by one brings up his junior officers and they come up and they shake hands. And in every case, they embrace each other. And eyewitnesses there, they commented on the fact that Washington was weeping as the other officers were. And they realized they’ll probably never see each other again. They’ve been through all this and now they’re taking leave and they’ve done this thing that banded them together. So they’ve been through hardship, they’ve been through war and peace. They’ve suffered, they’ve seen comrades die, the whole thing. But in addition to that, they have done this thing that is of world historic importance. They have created this new country and they didn’t realize it, they didn’t think of it in these terms exactly, but they did this thing that people 250 years later would still be talking about as indeed we are.
And so it was that. It was this connection between Washington and his soldier, and especially his officer court that was key to his leadership and his success in leading the army forward.
All right, so the Americans win. Washington resigns his commission. He gives it back to the Continental Congress. And King George even said, I mean, if he did that, he’s the greatest guy in the world because he has so much power, no one would give away power. And he just wanted to go back to Mount Vernon and be a planter, or something. He’s like, “I got all this debt. I just want to retire from public life. I’m done.” But he gets called back into public service because they’re developing the Constitution. He takes part in the Constitutional Convention. And then they say, okay, we need a president. Washington, you’re the guy. You’re the only one who could be president. Why did people think… I mean, were there any other contenders to be president or did everyone agree Washington’s the guy who’s going to be the first president in the United States?
There were a few people who imagined that they’d make a good president, but the consensus was that Washington was the guy because Washington was by far the most admired figure in the United States, most famous figure in the United States. Benjamin Franklin may be, but Franklin quite clearly was declining. He was a generation older than Washington and he was essentially dying. So he wasn’t going to be President of the United States. But if not Franklin, it had to be Washington because Washington was his big name. And this new government had no guarantee that it was going to do better than the government that it replaced. The articles of Confederation were adopted by the American states in 1781. They were overthrown by the Constitution in 1787. So it lasted six years. Will this new constitution do any better? Nobody knew. But it would have the best chance possible if it had Washington at its head because Americans trusted Washington.
They knew about Washington. They trusted Washington. They had seen that Washington after the end of the war had given up military power voluntarily. He didn’t have to be pried out of his position. He handed it off. And as you said, when George III King of Britain heard about this, he says, “Greatest man in the world for doing it. ” So Americans, including the people at the Constitutional Convention and the people who all went to Washington say, “You got to be president.” They were quite comfortable with Washington taking charge of this new government. They had a stronger executive than the previous government and a really ambitious, a power hungry new executive, that is a president might cause problems, but they didn’t worry about that because Washington at another moment when he could have retained power, when he had control of an army, had not. So he wouldn’t overstay his welcome.
And they also understood that here was somebody who made good judgements, made good decisions. This is really crucial. If there’s a single key to Washington’s success, it’s this. And it’s a really nebulous thing. It’s an elusive thing to figure out. But time and again, Washington makes good decisions. And that’s what you’re looking for in any executive. That’s what we’re always looking for when we choose presidents from Washington today until now. Will this person make good decisions? You don’t know ahead of time because you don’t know what the decisions are going to be. And in many cases, they’re going to be decisions unlike any that the candidates for officers have had. But people figured if decisions are going to be made and we won’t have Washington making them.
So stepping into the presidency, there was no instruction manual on how to be president except for some vague guidelines in Article two of the Constitution. Was Washington aware that every single action of his was going to set a precedent for subsequent presidents? And then if so, how did he navigate that pressure?
He understood the potential of that. And he was at the Constitutional Convention. He was the presiding officer. He was called the president of the convention. He didn’t take part in the debates, partly because he wasn’t a debater, partly because he interpreted his office as being more like the speaker of the House of Parliament where you just bang the gavel and you don’t actually join the debate. But the presidency, the executive branches described in Article two of the Constitution, which is far shorter than Article one. Article one is what their convention spent all their time arguing about. Article two, this is how we’re going to choose him. That was kind of complicated. But in terms of what it’ll do, he’s going to take this oath of office and then he’s going to see that the will of Congress is carried out and he’s going to faithfully preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States.
That’s it. And one of the reasons that they’re so sketchy about this is one is that the convention was running out of time. They’d been in Philadelphia for a hot four months and they wanted to get home, but also because they looked across the room where Washington was sitting and they said, “Well, he’s going to be the first president. We’ll let George figure it out. ” And they had both they and Washington himself in answer to your question, they understood that the first president was going to go a long way toward shaping this particular office.
And it was really interesting you talked about, I mean, they even thought about things like, “What should we call the president? His excellency, your majesty? No, that reeks too much of British aristocracy.” And they’re just like, “Mr. President, we’re going to settle with Mr. President.”
At the very beginning, Congress demonstrated its ability to spend a lot of time blowing a lot of hot air about trivial things. Excellency, magnificence. What are we going to call him? Well, so Washington says something. Mr. President. We’ll leave it at that.
We’re still calling president, Mr. President. So he steps into being president. Being a president is kind of like being a commander of an army. You’re an executive, but it’s different in a lot of ways. What were the biggest problems he faced during his presidency and what was his approach to managing them?
Well, the fundamental problem with being president after you’ve been general is that like being a general, you have all sorts of responsibility. But unlike being a general, you don’t have any authority. So you can’t order people around. The executive branch in those days consisted of about a dozen people. So his four cabinet secretaries and their personal secretaries and that’s about it. It’s not like the huge executive branch we have today. And so Washington, he responded to what Congress did. He left the proposal of programs up to, well, primarily Alexander Hamilton who proposed things like a bank of the United States and the decision of the federal government to assume the debts of the states and so on. And so Washington was kind of this referee. Is this measure, is it unconstitutional or not? Should I veto it or should I not? So there’s that part of it.
He did have to deal with differences, debates, disagreements among members of his cabinet. It soon became clear that Hamilton and Jefferson, Hamilton is Secretary of the Treasury, Jefferson is Secretary of State, they had a philosophical difference about what a government is supposed to do. And Hamilton was in favor of stronger government, a stronger president. Stronger, stronger, bigger, stronger, more powerful. Jefferson was very suspicious of power. The president ought to be kept under control. Congress ought to be kept under the control. He In deciding whether power ought to be exercised by the feds or by the states, leave it to the states. So he’s got this fundamental difference, by the way, it’s a difference that has separated people in America from then until now. For a long time, the people who advocated bigger government, well, it’s kind of hard to call them conservatives, although they were Hamilton and his side, the Federalist Party.
They were the big government conservatives of the day. And Jefferson and the original Republican party, they were the small government. Well, does that make them liberal or conservatives for the day? That part would change. What you call them would change. But at any given time, there are some people who have confidence in government, so want government to act, and other people who are skeptical of government say government ought to stay up. And that division was there. What Washington had not anticipated, what really nobody had anticipated, was that these differences of opinions would give rise to effectively permanent parties. They weren’t surprised that on any given issues people would line up on one side or the other. If you’re having a yes or no vote on something, then you line up and people bring a bunch of different views to the yes side and other people would bring different views to the no side, but you have this binary split, one or the other.
But what Washington didn’t see and what he really didn’t like when he began to see it was that the difference of opinions would give rise to political parties. Originally they called them factions and they thought that factions were this blight on the body politic and it would be bad, that the country needed to be guided by virtue where individuals will put the interests of the nation as a whole ahead of their own or their own group’s interest. Whereas if you are a partisan, if you believe in party government, you think that you must put ahead the interest of the party because the party then will serve the national interest. And Washington grew very impatient with what he saw as this emerging partisanship. When he agreed to become president, he sort of though that he would just preside over at a high level over everything and occasionally he would just sign this bill or maybe veto that bill, but that he wouldn’t have to really descend very far into the realm of politics.
He didn’t like politics. He knew he was not good at politics. He didn’t have the patience for politics. He didn’t have the speaking skills necessary for politics. But in the course of his presence, he found himself drawn into politics. He found himself caught in the firefight, the crossfire between Jefferson and Hamilton. He found himself criticized, slandered even in this new partisan press that emerged as the political parties formed. And he got more and more fed up with it.
Yeah. I mean, so Washington tried to stay above the fray, never aligned with any of the parties, but people would say, “Well, look, Washington kind of went along with this Federalist idea. He must be a federalist even though he doesn’t publicly say so. So we’re just going to go after the guy and sling mud at him for being a Federalist.”
Yeah. And so in fact, in the early days, sometimes the parties or the factions were denoted as the administration faction, the anti-administration faction. But even that is a little bit vague because Jefferson was part of the administration, but he was opposed to most of the legislation, the policy that was put out by the administration. In effect, in philosophy, Washington was a federalist. He wouldn’t have admitted to being a federalist. He wouldn’t have said ahead of time, “I will always agree with Hamilton.” But in effect, he did. And so naturally, those people who disagreed with Hamilton, including Jefferson, they thought that Washington was a partisan and so they came out and attacked Washington.
Yeah. I mean, for the most part, he seems like he managed it pretty well during those two terms as president. And then he finally is ready to retire. He’s like, “I’m done with this. I did my part.” And he gives his farewell address. And I mean, what do you think his mindset was when he was giving this farewell address? Do you think he was optimistic about the republic he helped build or was he kind of thinking this thing could probably fall apart because of the partisanship?
Well, the first thing that I will say is that he was glad to get out of office. In fact, John Adams, who was his successor, and had to fight his way to the top, that is in defeating Thomas Jefferson and a contested election. On the inauguration day, Washington as the outgoing president was there and Adams caught Washington’s eye. And as Adams wrote home to his wife Abigail that night, he said the general was there. And I think I saw a gleam in his eye, a twinkle in his eye. Now this is unusual. Washington’s eye did not twinkle, but this was Adam’s inference because Adams went on to say, “And I thought I heard him thinking, I am fairly out and you are fairly in. Now let’s see which of us will be the happier?” So Washington was thrilled to be out of office. What did he think about the future of America?
I think that he realized that he was coming to the end of his life. He didn’t have any degenerative disease. He couldn’t say, “I will be dead within six months.” In fact, the affliction that carried him off came on within 24 hours. It was a sudden infection of his throat that basically choked him. But he realized that his public life was over. Looking back on what he had accomplished, he thought, “Well, I and my generation have accomplished some great stuff. We made this independent country. We embarked for America, for the states of the United States on this audacious experiment to determine whether ordinary people can govern themselves. Is self-government even a possibility? There were no self-governments of any size or distinction in the world in that day. Maybe Switzerland and there had been some Italian city states. And if you go way back to Athens, but everybody else, everywhere else, people had been governed by somebody else as the age of kings and emperors and czars and the like.
But for people to govern themselves, they created a republic where authority wells up from the people. Will this even work? A lot of people around the world said no. In fact, a lot of people in Europe were rooting for the American Republic to fail because they’re trying this radical new thing that’s going to challenge everything that we believe in. So we hope it fails, otherwise we’re going to have to change our stuff. So Washington looked back, we won independence and he was very proud of his role and that of his army in winning the war. He always though of himself primarily as a general, as a military commander, as a soldier. He was secondarily a politician as our president. And looking back on his presidency, he was proud that the country had survived eight years under this new constitution. Already had gone farther than the country had under the Articles of Confederation.
That was a good thing. Americans were settling into this new rhythm. They had created this government. They had more authority at the center and he thought that was necessary. And so he thought that was a good thing, but he wouldn’t have presumed to promise that the Republic was going to persist for a long period of time. I often get asked as a teacher and a writer, so what would the founding generation have though if they came back today? And I generally answer that I think they would’ve been of two months. One is they would’ve been gratified that this experiment in self-government that they started still going on because it’s always kind of on a knife’s edge in that the experiment can never succeed definitively because if we’ve succeeded in governing ourselves for 250 years, we might fail in the 251st year. But it can fail definitively.
If we lose it, we lose it and it’s gone. So they would’ve been happy that this thing that they had started still going on. I think he would’ve been surprised that we’re operating still under the constitution that was written then. As I say, their first constitution, articles in federation lasted less than a decade. We’re on 25 decades and counting. That’s pretty amazing, a little bit less, but over 22 decades in counting. But I think they might have, and maybe not Washington so much, he was a very practical guy, but somebody like Jefferson, for example, in Madison, I think they would’ve been surprised. They would be surprised that we’re still using that constitution, that we haven’t had the imagination or the gumption to write something more appropriate for our times. They believed in self-government. And that means you govern yourselves. You’re not governed by a generation that lived 250 years ago.
So I think they would’ve been both gratified that we’re still a Republic, but I think they would’ve been puzzled that we haven’t devised government more to the likings and the needs of our own specific time.
So what do you think Washington can teach us about being an American citizen 250 years after America’s founding? What specific qualities of his do you think are still worth emulating today?
Well, I’ll answer the question in two ways. One, that’s kind of the obvious thing you might expect somebody of Washington, but then one that maybe is not so expected. The first thing I would say is that a person of character, a person with good judgment, a person who engenders respect of him in this case on the part of other people is really a blessing to any group that he’s with. Definitely a blessing to a republic. If you’re going to have public servants, and you do in any kind of government, to have public servants, whether they’re in the military like Washington first or in politics as Washington was subsequently, if they’re able to put the interest of the country ahead of themselves and give it their best thought, their deepest consideration and make their decisions without calculating what it’s going to mean for them individually, then that’s great.
Looking back on Washington when he was young saying, “I want to be an honorable man. I want to be a man of principle. I want to be a man that people will look up to. ” Well, a young person today can take that kind of model and apply it to himself or herself today and it would be just as valuable. So developing character, living up to character in principle, that is as good a goal today as it ever was. But the other side of it is that it doesn’t really work out in politics today the way it did for Washington. Washington in the 1790s became president because he had been this victorious general and everybody looked up to Washington and he was coming out of an age of deference where people were willing to look up to their betters as they often would call them.
Within 30 years after Washington left office, America went from being a republic to being a democracy. And a democracy is a version of a republic, but it’s one where equality is the guiding principle. And by the time Andrew Jackson became president in the 1820s, Americans insisted that their president speak no better than them and that they’d be able to look the presidents right in the eye. Moreover, and this is natural in a free country with a First Amendment where people get to speak their minds, where people have strong minds and want to put their ideas into politics, there’s going to be competition. Washington was handed the presidency. So Plato wrote about a philosopher king. Washington was in effect America’s philosopher king. And the reason Plato is drawn to it is that the king doesn’t have to seek the approval of the people to be a king.
He can rule them, but he also has the best interest of the people. Washington was in effect the closest thing America had to a philosopher king because he didn’t have to run for office. He was the first president. If he hadn’t been the first president, he wouldn’t have ever been the second president or the third or any subsequent president because he wouldn’t put up with the kind of stuff that people who seek office have to put up with. The closest analogies to Washington as president were the other generals who became president. Jackson, Grant, Eisenhower. They became president because they had been famous generals. So the rules of competitive politics don’t apply to that group. But even there for somebody like Eisenhower, Eisenhower had to run for office, he had to run for the Republican nomination, he had to defeat a Democratic opponent. Washington had none of that stuff.
So Washington, the man of character, that’s a good role model for today as it was back then, but you’re not going to find somebody who has that sense of self, somebody who has those values. That person’s not going to be effective in the politics that we have. Our system has changed so other skills are selected for, not the skills that Washington had.
Yes, we work with what we got, I guess.
Well, H. W., this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
About the book. They can go to penguinrandomhouse.com. And for my work generally, they can find me at hwbrands.substack.com. I got a Substack column.
Fantastic. Well, HW Brands, thanks so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
My guest today was H.W. Brands. He’s the author of the book, American Patriarch. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can learn more information about his work at his Substack, hwbrands.substack.com. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.
