Review of His Excellency: George Washington

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.