More than any United States president, George Washington comes across as much more than human. To many, our first Chief Executive is an unapproachable icon, a semi-divine figure in the pantheon of American civil religion. We see him in portraits, busts, and statues, but do we really know him? In His Excellency: George Washington, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis helps readers to understand the human side of Washington, who, like all of us, was a fully human person with flaws and insecurities. Despite these flaws, however, Washington’s many positive character qualities made him the ideal first president.
To the
extent that anyone can understand the thoughts and motivations of a highly
private and reserved person like Washington, Ellis succeeds admirably. Ellis makes a convincing case that despite
his negative characteristics (which were few), Washington was indeed a great
man, fully worthy of the adulation of generations of Americans right down to
the present. As Ellis argues, however,
Washington’s greatness lies as much in what he did NOT do as in what he DID
do. Three examples will illustrate this
underappreciated truth.
First,
Washington’s greatness can be seen in the fact that he did not lose the Revolutionary War. Washington was not the greatest military
tactician in US history by a long shot.
In the whole of the war, he only fought nine major battles, and he lost
six of them. Washington’s greatness as a
commander lies in his ability to save the Continental Army from near
destruction time and again, and to keep the army together in the face of
multiple adversities. By preventing the
army’s destruction from without or within, Washington wore down British
patience to the point where Parliament decided to cut their losses and end the
war.
Second, after
the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, Washington was twice offered the
opportunity to seize absolute power.
Unlike Caesar and Cromwell before him, and Napoleon after him, however,
Washington refused this temptation, opting for retirement instead (a retirement
that, of course, would not last long).
Washington set an important precedent of the military submitting itself
to civilian control and thus avoided establishing a tradition of military coups
that have plagued nearly every other nation of the world.
Having shown
greatness by not seizing absolute power, Washington later added to his
greatness by not attempting to hold on to power for life. In voluntarily stepping down from power,
Washington set another precedent, one that would last until 1940 and would
later be codified in 1951 in the form of the Twenty-Second Amendment to the US
Constitution. Washington could easily
had held on to the presidency until his death, but he chose to hand off the
office to someone else and seek retirement instead.
Consisting
only of 277 pages, His Excellency is
not the most in-depth biography of our first president. If you want a more comprehensive story of
Washington’s life, you will want to read Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life or perhaps even James Thomas Flexner’s
four-volume series. But if you want a brief
and engaging introduction to the life of the “Father of Our Country,” you can
do no better than this outstanding book.
