His Excellency: George Washington
By Joseph J. Ellis
Knopf, 320 pages, $26.95
When it came to details–and following his direct orders–George Washington was a stickler. Although he didn’t leave an abundant paper trail behind about his privileged growing-up years in Virginia, during the so-called French and Indian (Seven Years’) War of 1754 to 1763, while serving the British Crown as a colonel, he composed thousands of military orders. If Benjamin Franklin was the master of self-help prescriptions, Washington was his sure-footed equal when it came to wilderness survival tips. Whether he was evaluating how to harvest corn or erect stockades or avoid an ambush, Washington exuded supreme self-confidence in his utilitarian verdicts. Constantly shot at by the enemy but never wounded, Washington, it seemed, could demand all-encompassing respect from his rag-tag recruits by merely clearing his throat. The accountant-like rosters he kept of his enlisted men during the Seven Years’ War illustrate his overwhelming penchant for exactitude. He learned the backgrounds and temperaments of all his men. He knew whether they were bricklayers or carpenters or tanners. Even physical descriptions didn’t escape his pen: “Dark Complexion & Hair, lame in his right thigh by a wound”; “Fair Complexion, sandy Hair, well-made”; “Red face, pitted with the small pox, Red hair.”
Such ordinary observations may not hold up favorably to John Adams’ “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States” or Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia,” but so what. The keen, observant Washington never claimed to be a highbrow scholar. Everyday men, real working people, were his specialty. He could judge the moral fiber and pain threshold of a peach-fuzzed teenager by just looking him over from top to bottom. If one didn’t know better, or hadn’t read Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis’ brilliant biography “His Excellency: George Washington,” one would be tempted to view the unflappable Washington as the best populist politician of his day, a thoroughbred anti-intellectual, a tall and handsome leader of men. But Washington wasn’t blessed with a silver tongue or friendly demeanor or mild temper. As a military leader, in fact, he was a harsh disciplinarian. If he found one of his men drunk or engaging in lewd behavior, the man was whipped into bloody unconsciousness. In the summer of 1757, for example, when he learned men were deserting, he ordered them killed. He knew no mercy. Even if a deserter changed his mind and voluntarily returned, his punishment would still be brutal.
“I have a Gallows near 40 feet high erected,” Washington bragged to a British officer, “and I am determined . . . to hang two or three on it, as an example to others.” As Ellis notes in “His Excellency,” Washington–like Harry Truman after dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki–“suffered no sleepless nights after endorsing the executions.” To the contrary, Washington even ignored the pleas of condemned men who had previously fought gallantly at his side in various Ohio Country campaigns. “There were clear lines in his mind,” Ellis writes, “and if you crossed them, there was no forgiveness.”
So much for patriarchal kindness emanating from our benevolent Founding Father, the seemingly benign man who stares at us daily from our dollar bill and quarter. Washington was a warrior. With unwavering courage he entered into our history books by marching down a road of bones. He lost battles but, in the end, won the Revolutionary War. “For Washington, the American Revolution was not about destroying political power, as it was for Jefferson, but rather seizing it and using it wisely,” Ellis writes. “Ultimately, his life was all about power: facing it, taming it, channeling it, projecting it. His remarkably reliable judgment derived from his elemental understanding of how power worked in the world.”
One of the questions Ellis answers in “His Excellency” is what made Washington so durable as a military figure. The answer deals with loyalty. For although Washington, the elitist son of Virginia gentry, didn’t fancy the Yankee Doodle crudeness of his ruffian troops, he seldom, if ever, played the prima donna. He believed in democracy by example. He easily could have taken a hiatus from his weary men at Valley Forge or Morristown when smallpox and frostbite and starvation were rampant. A few weeks rocking in front of a Mt. Vernon fireplace would have been a welcome reprieve. Instead, he stuck it out. They were the Continental Army, and he was their indomitable commander in chief. They were loyal to him, and he, in turn, would stand by their side even when the temperature dropped below zero and lice-infested soldiers were dying in front of his eyes. “To see men without Cloathes to cover their nakedness, without Blankets to lay on, without Shoes, by which their Marches might be traced by the Blood from their feet,” he wrote to his friend John Bannister shortly before the Battle of Monmouth, “is a mark of Patience and obedience which in my opinion can scarce be parallel’d.”
A surveyor by training, Washington didn’t just read maps of America’s western frontier, he made them. He knew where all the secret caves and wild cherries were throughout the Appalachian wilderness. As an indigenous guerrilla fighter, he played by the rules of necessity. Take, for example, his Christmas Eve raid of 1776. While Hessian forces were drinking rum and singing Yuletide songs, Washington crossed the Delaware River and, in a sneak attack, filled them with musket fire and grapeshot. Eight days later he again launched a surprise attack on Gen. Charles Cornwallis’ forces at Princeton. “What had appeared to be a lost cause now enjoyed a new lease on life,” Ellis writes about these turning points in the Revolutionary War. “The two actions also served as defiant gestures by Washington himself that fight was still in him. Having made that point, though his aggressive instincts would remain a dangerous liability, he never again felt it necessary to risk his entire army in one battle. It was as if he had successfully answered the challenge to duel, and now could afford to adopt a more defensive strategy without worrying about his personal honor and reputation. He also began to realize that the way to win the war was not to lose it.”
After the Revolutionary War, Washington returned to his beloved Mt. Vernon, amazed that the British had left his estate “miraculously intact.” Although Washington wasn’t an abolitionist, he did entertain ideas proposed by South Carolina state Rep. John Laurens and Marquis de Lafayette about freeing slaves. Seldom moved solely by moral or ideological motives, Washington, for business reasons, decided to sell his slaves and hire free men. “Washington’s decision to abandon slave labor,” Ellis concludes, “fit sensibly into a larger pattern of decisions driven by his acute appreciation of the bottom line and his personal obsession with economic independence.” Unlike Jefferson, when Washington died, he freed his slaves. Over the years, he had transformed his Virginia plantation into something more akin to a diversified Pennsylvania farm.
When Washington was inaugurated as president in New York on March 4, 1789, his political struggles began. Former members of the Continental Congress now bowed in his presence while sticking verbal knives in his back when he was out of view. Such jealous shenanigans didn’t faze Washington. He was comfortable–if at times fatigued–as a one-man pinnacle of power, rejecting the anti-government rhetoric of Jefferson and James Madison. Washington blamed these ambitious politicians–too young to remember the French and Indian War–for nearly starving the Continental Army to death. When he had begged for provisions at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777-1778, he was rejected because there was no viable federal government to raise funds. An unforgetting Washington, as president, stood for a strong central government–he was, along with Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist. This caused Jefferson, in particular, to snipe at him.
The Jefferson who emerges in “His Excellency” mocks Washington for his declining health and mental capacity. “Be upon your guard,” one anonymous supporter wrote Washington about Jefferson. “You have cherished in your Bosom a Serpent, and he is now endeavoring to sting you to death.” For the most part Washington ignored such warnings, preferring to treat Jefferson as a “prodigal son.” When Jefferson got too vainglorious, however, Washington knocked him off the pedestal. Even as an aging icon, he could evoke fear in those who foolishly betrayed him.
What becomes crystal clear when reading this well-written, chronologically driven biography is that Washington’s genius was in his sterling judgment. During his military years he always knew when to hold fire and when to exhaust the ammunition. Metaphorically speaking, the same quality was evident during his eight-year stint as president. He was also a strategic master of retreat–the primary reason, in fact, he is studied today in Clausewitz-like fashion at West Point and the War College. And unlike Jefferson, whom Ellis wrote about in his fine 1997 book, “American Sphinx,” Washington, conscious of his role in history, didn’t believe that what got you remembered and memorialized was having future generations read your mail. Before he died he edited, and then destroyed, many of his papers. His wife, Martha, after his death in 1799, burned almost all of the correspondence between them.
Ellis, however, does a tremendous job of mining the published, multivolume “Papers of George Washington” in their sanitized entirety. He also has mastered the vast cottage industry of Washingtoniana that began when U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall wrote the first serious biography of our towering, intimidating icon. But his real accomplishment, in my opinion, the reason that Ellis is one of the four or five great popular historians writing today, is that he is largely accurate and never dull. Like everything in life, biography is an imperfect endeavor. Let’s face it: It’s impossible to place a figure as robust as Washington between two covers. But Ellis, by avoiding the pitfalls of psycho-biography, does, in some profound way, allow us to understand how Washington cleverly outfoxed his opponents in both combat and politics.
