Revealing the Essential Qualities of George Washington

 Joseph Ellis’ biography of George Washington, His Excellency is a good example, at about 270 pages, how less can be better.  I compare it to the biography of Ronald Chernow, twice the size, but frankly not helping me understand Washington any better and, in some ways, less than I did reading Ellis’ book.

 

Ellis managed to convert Washington from the impenetrable marble bust that we see, or the unbeatable general crossing the Delaware, to a human being of great strengths but flaws like every person and every “great man,” too.

 

You come to the end of the book, the final 10 pages, and Ellis shines a bright light on what made Washington tick.  It was clear from the beginning that his height (6’3”), large body size and regal appearance made him stand out as a leader.  And he carried himself as a leader, with confidence and few uncertainties, at least ones he ever displayed or revealed in his diaries.

 

He was at the center of the two distinctive creative moments in American founding, Ellis writes:  “The winning of independence and the invention of nationhood.  No one else in the founding generation could match these revolutionary credentials, so no one else could plausibly challenge his place atop the American version of Mount Olympus.”

 

Ellis makes clear the errors in judgment and the missteps Washington made along the way.  Participating in the massacre of Indians.  Losing more battles in the Revolutionary War than he won.  Recognizing that the biggest win, Yorktown, was really a French victory.  But somehow or other, it is fair to say, as Ellis writes, that he was “invariably proved prescient as if he had known where history was headed; or perhaps as if the future had felt compelled to align itself with his choices.”  That overstates the reality, I believe, of the situation, but there is truth to it.

 

Washington was a supremely realistic visionary.  Ellis rightly observes that “Washington’s power of judgment derived in part from the fact that his mind was uncluttered with sophisticated intellectual preconceptions.”  Washington’s education was elemental.  From his very first experience on the Virginia frontier, he had “internalized a visceral understanding of the arbitrary and capricious ways of the world...he had concluded that men and nations were driven by interests rather than ideals, and surrendering control to another was invariably harmful, often fateful.  Armed with these basic convictions, he was capable of a remarkably unblinkered and unburdened response to the increasingly consequential decisions that history placed before him.”

 

I think it’s fair to say, as Ellis writes, that Washington had no part of “the grand illusion of the age that there was a natural order in human affairs that would generate perfect harmony.  The Revolution was not about destroying political power as it was for Jefferson, but rather seizing it and using it wisely.”

From the beginning, recognizing the need for a Federally-supported Army, he was with Hamilton in wanting to have a strong national state.  

 

I find a similarity in Washington to Lyndon Johnson.  Like Johnson, “his life was all about power:  facing it, attaining it, channeling it, and projecting it.” 

 

Self-interest was never far from Washington’s mind.  We see that in his accumulating of land from his very earliest days.  We see it in how he handled the slavery issue:  condemning it as a moral aberration but being tentative all the way to his death in actually providing freedom to his slaves.  To be sure, he could not allow for him having an enslaved family broken up.  But he stopped short of freeing his slaves.  After all, for him they were assets. 

 

Washington’s deeply realistic approach to foreign affairs is well-illustrated by his attitude toward France following the onset of the French Revolution.  Although he knew that we probably would not have won the Revolutionary War if it were not for France, he was determined to prevent his affection for Lafayette or his memories of all that the French armies and sailors did to help achieve independence influence his judgment about not forming a long-term supportive relationship with France.  He was focused, like Jefferson, with laser-like intensity, on expanding the nation to the west.

 

His attitude toward foreign relations is well-captured in these key words he uttered, “There can be no greater error to expect, or calculate upon real favors from Nation to Nation.”  He asserted that the relationship between nations was not like the relationship between individuals, which could periodically be conducted on the basis of mutual trust.  Nations always had and always would behave, he believed, solely on the basis of their own interest.

 

A strength of Washington was his willingness to change his mind.  His willingness to do so in the case of the Revolutionary War saved the country from disaster.  In the beginning, every instinct of Washington was to undertake a frontal attack on the British.  In fact, he had tried that in New York with great losses.  General Greene opposed this.  He advocated a “Fabian strategy”: preserve your Army, be selective in attacking the enemy.  After a lot of pleading and cajoling, Washington followed Greene's conviction.

 

Another strength of Washington—he knew when one of his associates like Madison and Hamilton were better equipped than he was to accomplish a job.  A great example of this concerns the Bill of Rights.  He left the writing of that entirely to Madison.  Washington followed the same path when it came to the economy, establishing the Federal Bank and other financial matters.  Here, he followed Hamilton.

 

 

Washington had a very hierarchical view of people.  There was no love lost between him, his fellow senior officers, and the soldiers who spent that brutal winter in Valley Forge.  He enforced very harsh discipline.  Drunkenness received up to a thousand lashes, and deserters faced death by hanging. 

 

He was a tight manager, too.  A stickler for details of how Mount Vernon and his other farms operated.  A supreme and hard-nosed realist in this area, as in all others.