His Excellency, George Washington

On March 29, 2021, I decided to start reading about the presidents of these United States. You can watch the review on YouTube or Rumble, or listen to it at PodBean, or keep reading below.

 I was having lunch with a friend, and we got to talking about politics and I said something like “I don’t know that Trump was the worst president ever, but then again he might have been, I just DON’T KNOW that much about our former presidents.” I mean outside of the ones in my lifetime, I think I can name like 10 of them out of 46.  And other than Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, I’m not sure I could name key achievements of any of them. So, I decided to read a book a month on a president, in order of presidency.  This also serves as a nice couple years buffer before I have to visit the horrors the dickheads who have served in my lifetime. So, to that end, this week’s book is His Excellency George Washington, by Joseph J. Ellis.

Now, Washington was born on 02/22/1732 and died on 12/14/1799.  In those 67 years of life, he did a lot of living.  And there are books that are considerably more voluminous on the topic of his life, commenting on every move he made practically from birth until his final moments on God’s green earth.  Joseph Ellis stated goal early on was to hit the highlights for a book that basically encapsulated Washington’s life without spending too much time in the weeds of the details, while bringing an element of humanity to this thoroughly iconic individual. And I think he succeeded.  Washington is one of the historical figures that people are prone to canonizing, or villainizing, while forgetting that he was wholly human. Larger than life in many ways, not just in his 6’3” stature, but his character, by all reports, tended to fill the room. And he was without a doubt the pre-eminent figure of the American Revolution and the fledgling country and grew out of the success of that war. For all these things he is canonized.  More recently, he has been villainized for his stance, or lack thereof, on the question of slavery that presented itself even while the nation was forming.  And Ellis does not shy away from this question, tackling it head on in several passages.

Now for the run down. The book is broken into segments of Washington’s life. Early life, when he was a member of the Continental militia under the King. After his early military career, he married Martha Custis and began to build his estate at Mount Vernon. During the war, when he first accepted the position of commander of the continental forces, and then during the war as he shifted tactics to eventually lead us to victory. A brief interlude when he was effectively retired, then when he was called back to service as the first President of the fledgling nation. And finally, his well-deserved retirement, brief as it was before his passing.

Now, Washington was not the oldest child and had no real expectation of inheriting anything, although he did eventually end up inheriting about 2500 acres which is where he built Mount Vernon, from his brother Lawrence who, following family tradition, died fairly young.  In fact, most of Washington’s immediate family died by the age of 50, so outliving that by 17 year was a bit of an accomplishment in itself. Washington spent several years in the military, kicking around the “wilds” west of the Allegheny mountains, where he was an active campaigner during the French and Indian wars.  Here is where one of the themes of his life, as identified by Joseph Ellis, first appeared. Washington was not initially a successful soldier, and reading through this section of the book, it does not appear to be all that promising that Washington would later go on to become the General who led us to victory.  The entire section catalogues one military failure after another.  But, as Ellis points out, Washington had a remarkable character trait, damn near unique back then, and almost as unheard of today. Washington could learn from his mistakes. And following a loss, Washington inevitably did better the next time around, snatching victory from defeat again and again.

This theme, of learning from mistakes and winning after a defeat, repeated throughout Washington’s life. It is very likely that before he married Martha Custis, he was in love with the wife of a friend of his, Sally Fairfax”?” I think that was her name. But he was a man of honor, and as the lady was married, he set his sights on the newly widowed Martha Custis, who brought with her an enormous dower estate, which he added to his ever-growing holdings.  So, in addition to the 2500 acres he inherited from his brother, he now had his wife’s estate to manage, as well as several thousand acres in the Ohio valley and Western Pennsylvania, an apportionment he claimed as part of his military service. So, he was not a poor man by any metric; however, as anyone who holds stock in the market can tell you, there’s a difference between wealth, which he surely had, and cash assets, which were not always immediately available.

It was while he was managing his holdings that Washington came to the conclusion that it was a short trip to the poor house to sink all your crops into tobacco, as the market in Europe was largely managed through agents in England.  Since he couldn’t control the sales himself, and consequently had to pay a middleman, which also cut into his bottom line. So, Washington determined to only plant what could be sold locally and sustain himself and shifted his crops to grains and vegetables. This decision, along with all the land he accumulated over a lifetime, ensured that when he died, his net worth was $503,000, which at the time made him one of the wealthiest people in America.

When the political situation with England reached the boiling point, and war seemed inevitable, Washington was called on to head the army. This is also where he was first called His Excellency, which was a title that he kept throughout the war. Now, throughout the chapters on the Revolution, the pattern repeats, where Washington seems to lose repeatedly, followed by astounding successes. Washington had no delusions of passionate militia being able to take down fully trained British military; he did, however, fairly quickly reach the conclusion that the only hope for winning was a Fabian style of combat.  This tactic dragged the war out, which was necessary since there was virtually no hope that a stand and deliver type confrontation would result in anything other than bloody defeat for the American’s.  The Fabian style of warfare was ultimately successful. And it was after the war, that Washington’s true greatness. He was approached to just…take over. Not retire from the military, but rather set up a government with himself at the head, and the military backing him fully.  He declined. He was given the chance at ultimate power, after Britain had withdrawn but before the colonies had decided what form of government they wanted. And he walked away, a latter-day Cincinnatus. He was set to retire and enjoy his retirement, when he was called in to chair the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.  And immediately after the convention, he received unanimous electoral college votes to become the first President of the United States.

Here, Washington was very aware of the weight of history bearing down on him. His was a newly created position that had never existed before in history. Everything he did would set the tone for how the country would be run.  And he more or less excelled at this. He instituted the cabinet system immediately, basically outsourcing the minutiae of his job to highly qualified individuals.

 Believe it or not, this section is the only sour note in the book for me, and the sourness wasn’t even related to Washington directly.  Among his cabinet members were Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.  While everything started peaches and cream, ultimately these two came to loathe each other. Hamilton was essentially one of Washington’s protégé’s and shared Washington’s vision of a strong central government with overarching fiscal responsibility.  Jefferson eventually splits from this in favor of states’ rights over the central federal government, and used this ideology to found his own political party, the Democratic Republicans, which eventually just became the Democrats. Only Ellis consistently refers to this party as the Republican party, pointing out that one of Jefferson’s particular points of interest was in preserving slavery along with states’ rights.  This struck me as disingenuous. I know the history of the Democratic party. I also know the Republican party did not exist until the mid-19th century, with Abraham Lincoln being the first candidate they put up for president. So, to deliberately refer to the party Jefferson founded on the platform of states’ rights and slavery as the Republican party struck a dishonest chord with me. But truly, this was the only sour note in the book. And I know Ellis wrote a book on Thomas Jefferson as well, so maybe that decision is better explained there.

Washington initially planned to retire for good after one term, but ultimately chose to run for a second term, where he was again unanimously elected. But after 8 years, Washington did retire. And he spent his last years running his estate and planning out his legacy.

One of the major points of concern for him was what to do with the slaves on the estate. Now, this has led to several dilemmas. Washington had determined several years prior that slavery was fiscally infeasible for the long term. This was simply born out in numbers.  There were approximately 300 slaves at Mount Vernon.  Only 100 of them were able to work.  So, 2/3 of his labor force, were incapable of working, due to being too old or too young. Yet Washington was morally obliged to care for them.

He could have just freed them.  Immediately following the war, a Quaker had pressed him to do exactly that. And it seems likely that by that point, Washington had already reached the conclusion regarding fiscal feasibility. And one wonders if the Hero of the Nation had immediately freed his slave’s following cessation of hostilities, what impact would that have had on the direction the nation took? The great Hero living by the ideals the country had fought for. Would that have changed the course of slavery and the country?  Regardless, that is not what happened, and for the remainder of his life, Washington owned slaves. While he may have come to view slavery as morally repugnant, he was also a businessman.  Rather than acknowledging the sunk cost of “ownership” and just freeing them, he was determined that the only fiscally responsible way to relieve himself of the burden was to sell them.  However, he was morally opposed to breaking up families, and his own slaves had intermarried with the Custis dower slaves.

Now, this is an important distinction. He could free HIS slaves. He could sell HIS slaves. But of the 317 slaves at Mount Vernon at his death, Washington only owned 124 with another 40 leased from neighbors.  The remaining 153 were dower slaves belonging to the Custis estate, so that Washington legally could not liberate them or sell them. But in his will, Washington ordered his slaves to be freed on Martha’s death, with the requirement that they be maintained for the rest of their lives on his estate.  Again, Washington did not want to break up families.  He could free his slaves, and there was a risk that without the maintenance provision, his inheritors would kick the slaves off the estate, thus breaking up the families Washington would not sell.

The remainder of Washington’s legacy was broken up equally among his 28 heirs.  This was a massive split from tradition, which held that in order to preserve the estate, it should be handed as a piece to his primary heir. Washington did this quite deliberately. His legacy was the nation he fought for and led. He did not want a family legacy. He did not intend to leave a political dynasty behind.  On 12/12/1799, Washington went for his accustomed daily ride, despite a fierce storm.  When he returned, he sat down to dinner with their daily guests without changing into dry clothes—he didn’t want to make their guests wait.  Several hours later, he announced he was not feeling well to Martha. Doctors were called and within two days he had died. The great man was laid to rest on his estate.

And that’s it. A very full life, succinctly told in less than 300 pages. The story is well told, and aside from the weirdness with Jefferson’s political affiliations, I enjoyed this very much. It covered the high points that made it easy to see why Washington was so revered in his time and well beyond to present day, while not burying the darkness that inhibited him from true greatness, in regard to slavery and his stolidly business-like mien in that area, versus the humanizing factor that had him not wanting to break up families.