January 26, 2005
The Indispensable Pragmatist
by Craig Bernthal
Private Papers

A review of His Excellency George Washington by Joseph Ellis, (Knopf, 2002).

As Iraq heads into a violent election and we ponder democracy’s chances there, our own improbable history takes on sharp-edged significance. Joseph Ellis’s His Excellency, George Washington, provides not only an exciting and lucid biography of Washington, the truly indispensable man, but a sober account of our nation’s founding. How, you have to marvel, did we ever persist through 7 years of revolution and 6 years of ineffectual government under the Articles of Confederation? How did a country so divided by region and faction ever produce a viable constitution? Why didn’t the institution of slavery and the growing dispute between Hamilton and the Federalists on one side and Jefferson, Madison, and the Republicans on the other rip the young country apart? The answer, to a large part, is Washington’s pragmatism and integrity.

Ellis’s portrait of Washington reveals a stubborn, passionate, and ambitious man, of amazing vitality and resilience, with no formal education past grade school, who learned, sometimes slowly, on the job. Washington’s great strength, Ellis tells us, was to see the men and nations for what they were and to act accordingly. Washington was the best kind of pragmatist, capable of distilling truth from experience and applying it.

Washington’s public career began with a “crash course in soldiering” just before the start of the French and Indian War. In 1753, as a 21-year old major, he successfully carried a message from Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to the commander of the French Garrison in “the Ohio Country,” the vast, wild territory south of the Great Lakes and west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Washington kept a detailed journal during this trek, which Dinwiddie encouraged him to publish. The Journal of Major George Washington, published in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, brought Washington to the public eye. But Washington’s early military career was more characterized by mistake than success. Washington was unable to control Indians who were nominally under his command, and they butchered a French messenger and soldiers who were on the same kind of diplomatic mission as Washington had been the year before. It is arguable that Washington fired, albeit unintentionally, the first shot of the French and Indian War. Washington attempted to construct and defend “Fort Necessity” early in the conflict but did not clear forest far enough from the fort’s palisade to deny the enemy cover while they fired, and as a result, the fort was, from the start, indefensible and had to be surrendered. (After this debacle, Washington cleared forests from forts to the range a musket could fire.)

Washington more than redeemed himself by saving the remnants of Braddock’s army in the calamitous engagement with the French in 1755. During the battle, Washington had two horses shot from under him and four musket balls pierced his coat, yet he was not hurt, a kind of luck which remained with him throughout the Revolutionary War, when he entered the thick of battle on many occasions. Washington was never a great tactician or strategist; Horatio Gates, whom he envied, and Nathaniel Greene, who he admired, were both better soldiers in those respects. But Washington’s rock bottom practicality and courage made him a great leader. During the revolution he vaccinated his army against smallpox, a move which Ellis rates as his single most important strategic decision. He had a great capacity for recognizing talent, and surrounded himself with brilliant young officers. Though fixated on New York, he finally recognized the need to shift the war to the south, thus capturing Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown.

I found Ellis’s portrayal of Washington the plantation owner and president even more instructive than that of Washington the soldier. Washington’s early experiences as a soldier, and his continuing experience in dealing with English merchants radicalized him. Washington resented the British refusal to grant him a commission in the regular army, and he constantly suspected that London merchants and factors were cheating him. Ellis offers this psychological analysis, which becomes the thematic core of his book: “If we are looking for patterns of behavior, then the combination of bottomless ambition and the near obsession with self-control leap out. What will in later years be regarded as an arrogant aloofness began in his young manhood as a wholly protective urge to establish space around himself that bullets, insults, and criticism could never penetrate…. Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust. For the rest of his life, all arguments based on the principle of mutual trust devoid of mutual interest struck him as sentimental nonsense.”

Washington’s assessment that people can only be expected to act out of self-interest was reinforced during the Revolutionary War as he found himself with an army whose rank and file was largely composed of poor men with poor prospects—those who had nothing much to lose by soldiering in a desperate cause. These were the only men who stuck with the cause, and he them kept under control through severe discipline. Most significantly, his evaluation of people guided his presidential career, in which he recognized the nation needed two things to survive: a much stronger central government and a foreign policy which avoided European conflicts for at least a generation. Both of these positions brought him into conflict with those who saw the establishment of strong national institutions, such as Alexander Hamilton’s federal bank, as a homegrown version of British tyranny. Thomas Jefferson, who felt we owed a debt to the French and wanted the United States to support and spread the French Revolution, became a bitter enemy.

Washington’s greatest achievement consists in what he did not do, which was make himself an American Cromwell. He was a genuinely reluctant president, who would have happily stepped down after one term and could not be persuaded to a third. Washington’s Farewell Address encapsulates his understanding of human motivation from individual to nation. While individuals could sometimes base relations on mutual trust—Washington certainly saw his relationship with Lafayette as such a friendship—nations could not: “There can be no greater error to expect, or calculate upon real favours from Nation to Nation. ‘Tis an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.”

The last part of the book is devoted to Washington’s last attempts to extricate his fortunes from the institution of slavery, which he early understood to be morally wrong, inconsistent with the principles of the revolution, and economically disastrous. However, because he had charge not only of his own slaves, but slaves acquired through the dower of his wife, Martha Custis, which he could not sell or free, and because he did not want to separate family members, he never found a way out during his life. Finally, he freed his own slaves in his will.