GEORGE WASHINGTON
1st President, 1789–1797
Overall Rank: 2
Total Score: 868
Historians have awarded George Washington 2nd position in the C-SPAN surveys since 2009, when he moved up from 3rd place, passing FDR. He is ranked 1st in economic management, moral authority, and performance within context of times. Like other slaveholding founders, his lowest rank is in pursued equal justice for all (13th).
No party
b. February 22, 1732, Westmoreland County, Virginia
d. December 14, 1799, Mount Vernon, Virginia
First Lady: Martha Dandridge Custis Washington
Age entering office: 57
Historian: Ron Chernow
Biographer and historian Ron Chernow joined C-SPAN’s Q & A on August 23, 2010, for a two-part interview on his 904-page Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of our first president, Washington: A Life.
What we have done—in the very understandable, very laudable desire to venerate George Washington—is we’ve sanded down the rough edges of his personality, and we ended up making him bland and, dare I say, even a bit boring. People at the time saw Washington as this very dynamic and charismatic figure. I would love for contemporary Americans to share that excitement that Washington’s contemporaries shared.
Washington, as a young man, has an amazing perseverance and doggedness about him—you could already see glimmers of a future leader. He is somebody who was pursuing money, status, and power. He’s not a particularly attractive character in certain ways when he’s younger, but he so transcends his past. He is someone who is so ennobled by circumstance that under the pressure of the Revolutionary War and then the Constitutional Convention, and the creation of the federal government—these monumental challenges bring out this greatness. This is a man who ends up so much greater than anyone would have predicted who had read about his adolescence or his early adulthood. It’s a tremendously inspirational story at a time in our history when we all need a little bit of inspiration.
His was a difficult boyhood. His father dies when George is eleven.… Then he’s left at the tender mercies of his mother, who is something of a holy terror. There was a lot of financial stringency at the time, which stayed with him—Washington was always very tense about the subject of money. That came from his boyhood. So, it was a troubled [youth], but he starts surveying, so it’s also a period of great accomplishment.
Washington was a prodigy. By the time he is twenty-three years old, he’s the head of… all the armed forces in Virginia. It’s quite astounding. Virginia was the biggest, most populous, richest colony at the time. We still associate Washington with the Revolutionary War, but he had a whole other life as a young man in the French and Indian War [1756–1763].
He had dysentery in the French and Indian War during the famous defeat of General Edward Braddock on the Monongahela River. It caused diarrhea, and, not going into details, it was very painful for him to sit on his horse. It was an extraordinary example of Washington’s bravery, riding in this battle. He was tall; he was a very conspicuous target on a horse. He took four bullets in his clothing—one in his hat and three in his coat. He had two horses shot out from under him. A Presbyterian minister, Samuel Davies, said afterwards that it looked like the heroic youth George Washington was being preserved by Providence for some important future service for his country, which was certainly one of the great calls of any sermon in history.
[His relationship with Martha Custis] started back in 1758. Washington was going to Williamsburg to consult a doctor. He had a friend, Richard Chamberlain, who knew this young widow, Martha Dandridge Custis, who was living, ironically enough, in a house on the Pamunkey River called the “White House.” She was a wealthy widow. It was a whirlwind courtship. They met only two or three times before they decided to marry. I don’t think it was the lustiest or most romantic marriage in history, but it was one of those marriages that ripened into a very deep friendship. Martha Washington is absolutely invaluable to George Washington. She gave him financial security. She gave him emotional support, and he really needed a confidante—he was a reserved character. She was a real social asset. She was a great hostess, a very good conversationalist. You have a sense with Washington—as often happens with single men—that once they marry, they go from having a rootless life to suddenly being settled. And God knows, Washington, who is going to achieve these monumental things, really needed a very settled home life in order to do that. Martha gave that to him.
[Their home was Mount Vernon on the Potomac River in Virginia.] Mount Vernon, which consisted of five separate farms, was eight thousand acres. On top of that, he had about forty or fifty thousand acres out west, which he was constantly trying to sell to pay off his debts. This sounds like a lot, but at the time there were a lot of people who were amassing large amounts of land. In fact, one of Washington’s grievances against the British Empire is that at the end of the French and Indian War, they banned settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains. There were a lot of Virginians, like Washington, who were snapping up all of this land in western Virginia, and they felt that the British Empire was suddenly thwarting their ambitions—and there was no ambition that burned more brightly in the breast of a true Virginian than land. Everything revolved around land at that time.
At the height, [the Washingtons had] about three hundred slaves. Of those, about 125 were legally under the direct control of George Washington. That is important, not on a day-to-day basis, but important because in his will, Washington does something that no other founder does: he frees those 125 slaves. The other 175 slaves, who were known as the dower slaves, were brought to the marriage by Martha and pledged to the Custis heirs.… Washington legally could not emancipate those slaves.… He was always frustrated as a slaveholder. As illogical as it sounds, he always talked about them as if they were salaried employees, and he’s paying them room and board, and why can’t he get a full day’s work in return? He can’t understand that the slaves have no rational reason for performing well. So, he’s constantly frustrated because he’s a very efficient man, and he’s always trying to introduce new scientific production methods at Mount Vernon.… If you’re a slave, the best response is to be passive-aggressive. You do enough to get by, but there’s nothing in it for you by performing with maximum intensity.
The Revolutionary War really starts in April 1775 at Lexington and Concord—“the shots [heard] ’round the world.”… By Lexington and Concord, Washington has already… attended both the First and Second Continental Congresses. One of the reasons that he was such a successful general and president, he’d had long political experience. He’d been serving the House of Burgesses since 1758. He’d been very involved in the protest of the Stamp Act in 1765, the Townshend duties in 1767, and in opposing the Intolerable Acts later on. And so, this was a man who was very well versed in parliamentary government by the time that he is in a position of responsibility.
The Second Continental Congress appointed him [commander of the Revolutionary Army] by a unanimous vote. It was the first of four significant unanimous votes: Washington is unanimously appointed commander in chief; he was unanimously appointed president of the Constitutional Convention; and then both times that he ran for president, he was unanimously elected by the Electoral College. That’s a record that we can safely say no one will ever duplicate.
Why did people want to follow him? Washington inspired a lot of confidence. In part, you want to give power to people who don’t seem to be grasping at power. This was a lesson that Washington had learned very well. Also, when he was chosen as commander in chief, people were very impressed that someone of his wealth was going to risk all of it for the sake of the cause. Washington was a very good listener. He wasn’t an egomaniac. There was a tremendous fear that whoever became commander in chief would then become the so-called man on horseback who would become very puffed up with his own power. There was a modesty and humility about Washington’s demeanor, combined with a large degree of self-confidence as well.
The colonies were very fractious and very fractured throughout the contest. [For] most generals, their greatness is what they do on the battlefield. Arguably, Washington’s greatness was as much what he did between battles, simply holding the Continental Army together. We tend to think of Valley Forge as the nadir of the Continental Army, when they’re shivering and they’re suffering and they’re starving. Valley Forge in many ways was more the rule than the exception. This was an army that was constantly short of men, money, blankets, shoes, clothing, gunpowder, et cetera. George Washington not only had to hold this often-disgruntled army together, but he had to be a brilliant politician in dealing not only with the Congress but in dealing with thirteen separate states. Washington’s story is a heroic story, and ditto for the Continental Army. But he got precious little cooperation from a lot of the states. His correspondence is one long jeremiad of complaint and grievance that nobody is helping him.
The Congress was constantly in arrears on paying people, to the point where at the end of the revolution there was a mutiny among the officers that they’re owed so much back pay.… Money permeates the whole war. There’s a constant shortage of money.
This is an important [experience] in terms of the development of Washington’s political philosophy. The Continental Congress had no independent source of revenue. There was no executive branch at the time; there was just the legislature, the Congress. Congress could request that the states give them money, but Congress could not demand that the states give them money—so the states competed to see who could give the least money. For Washington, Hamilton, the other officers, this was really the beginning of their nationalistic philosophy. They realized that you needed a powerful federal government with a strong executive, that it must have taxing powers and independent sources of revenues. Washington’s policies as president are a direct outgrowth of his frustrations during the Revolutionary War.
He goes up [to Boston] in July 1775 and takes control of the Continental Army.… It’s a moment where the redcoats, the British, are bottled up in Boston. They’re really under siege from the Continental Army, and Washington manages to drive them out of Boston, and he has his first great victory. It may be a little bit of beginner’s luck because then he has an enormous amount of difficulty duplicating that feat.
He goes to New York, and that’s where he suffers a string of disasters. In the Battle of Brooklyn, the British Expeditionary Force, the largest of the eighteenth century, is about to pounce on the Continental Army, not only to wipe it out, but wipe the whole revolution out. Washington evacuates his entire army across the East River overnight and flees up to northern Manhattan. Unfortunately, it’s not the last disaster. Washington loses twin forts on opposite sides of the Hudson, Fort Washington and Fort Lee, and this begins this long bedraggled, demoralized retreat across New Jersey and across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.
In Philadelphia, what happens is that because there’s always a fear that the British are going to take Philadelphia, Washington and his troops first fight the British at Brandywine Creek hoping to stop them. It’s one of the battles, unfortunately, that Washington blunders because of faulty strategy and intelligence. He was far from a faultless military leader. The British occupied Philadelphia until the spring of 1778.
Washington believed strongly in leadership by example. He made a point in every battle that he fought that he was right smack in the thick of the battle. He was often the most conspicuous target. Also, when they got to Valley Forge, precisely to avoid that situation where the generals seemed to be back in a warm house, Washington lived in a tent. He lived in temporary quarters, and then they started building huts. He wanted to show the men that he was sharing their suffering.
What he wanted was independence from England. Exactly what form the government would take was a subject that was postponed. He was gradually developing his nationalistic philosophy through his critique of the Congress. In terms of his military strategy, Washington realizes early on that he lacks what the British have in spades, which is sea power. He is up against arguably the greatest navy in the world.… They can rapidly move troops up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Washington doesn’t see a way, nor do his generals, that he can defeat the British. And so, it becomes a war of attrition, an opportunistic war, where Washington tries to evade the British and, where opportunity presents itself, attack.… There are long stretches in the Revolutionary War where, in terms of battles, nothing is happening. Sometimes many months go by and there’s no major battle. And then what happens later is that the war shifts to the south, but Washington stays in the north… [and] George Washington, the hero of the Revolution, is pretty much a distant spectator in the north. It’s only when the French alliance started in 1778, culminating in the Yorktown victory three years later, that American land power, combined with French sea power and the French army, finally bottle up Cornwallis at Yorktown, and that becomes the climactic battle.
Washington said that the bane of his life [as commander in chief] was that never in history had there been an army that was disbanded at the end of every year and then had to be reconstituted. At various times he had two or three thousand men under his command; at the time of Yorktown it maybe went up to fifteen or sixteen thousand. There are altogether twenty-five thousand Americans who died in the Revolutionary War, which sounds small compared to, let’s say, the Civil War at more than six hundred thousand. But the [colonial] population was only three million, so that’s a very significant number of fatalities given the population at the time.
… On November 25, 1783, Evacuation Day in New York City, George Washington and Governor George Clinton, at the head of eight hundred men, ride into Manhattan. As they are riding south into the city, the British are leaving onboard ships. Washington is greeted by delirious crowds. In terms of what was happening on the ground, that was the official end of the Revolution. Washington submits his resignation to the Congress in Annapolis in December 1783, a moment immortalized by John Trumbull in a great painting. At the time, that was in many ways considered the most important act that Washington ever took. Benjamin West, a portrait artist, told King George III that General Washington was planning on resigning his commission and going back to Mount Vernon. And George III says, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” This was considered unheard of for somebody not to try to parlay that kind of military success into postwar political power.
He’s somewhat reluctantly drawn to the Constitutional Convention [in Philadelphia], but his position there is vital for a couple of reasons. Number one, the Constitutional Convention is conducted behind closed doors. In order to convince the public outside of those doors that some nefarious plot is not being concocted inside, the public is reassured by the presence of George Washington; they know that no evil cabal is going to form if Washington is the president of the Constitutional Convention. The other thing that’s very important in the writing of the Constitution: given the fact that we had just fought a revolution against the uses of executive power, Article II—which details the powers of the presidency—is far and away the most difficult part for these delegates to write; they kept fearing abuses of executive power.
Everyone knew that if he wanted it, George Washington would be the first president, and so the delegates were emboldened to create what turned out to be a very strong presidency because they imagined George Washington, or someone like George Washington, holding the office. They were well advised in that because Washington was quite a brilliant president.
Washington didn’t like to be touched.… When he had a reception as president, he would go around the room and nod to people. Whether this was borrowed from royal practice, because royalty didn’t touch people, we don’t know. It was certainly alleged by his political enemies that this was an aping of royal ways, which was a common criticism of the opposition party while he was president. But he had this sense of personal dignity that was very much part of his power and very much a part of his mystique. Washington would never make it as a politician today because he didn’t press the flesh. He was not this glad-handing, backslapping character that you have to be in politics today. There’s something very attractive about the formality and the innate dignity of the man.
There are a lot of examples of Washington losing his temper.… For me, it suggests all of these emotions boiling under the surface. Gouverneur Morris said Washington was such a passionate man, “he had passions boiling in his breast almost too mighty for any human being to control.” This is very different from the way that we see Washington. But the people closest to him sensed this tremendous intensity under the surface that would periodically, like a volcano, boil over.
He was also prone to tears. The evidence is everywhere in his story.… He was a highly emotional man, but he was somebody who was always very reluctant to show those emotions and someone who was always afraid of becoming a captive to those emotions.… He became an almost overly controlled personality, emotionally muscle-bound in a certain way. This was also a man who in his dealings with political associates, with military officers, could be, and often was, exquisitely sensitive and courteous. I don’t want to paint the portrait of him as tyrannical but rather somebody who was very sensitive in dealing with people. He had a tremendous sense of tact and courtesy. He was an exemplary figure in that way. He was a very complicated man. This is a very tough nut to crack sociologically and psychologically.
During his first term as president, he decided that first he would visit all of the Northern states, and then he would visit all the Southern states. He traveled from town to town by carriage, but… he would always bring along a white parade horse, and when he was a mile or two outside of town, he would dismount from the carriage. He would get on the white parade horse and enter town. Why did he do that? He had a great sense of showmanship. He knew that he looked great on horseback. It’s not coincidental that we have all these equestrian statues of George Washington. He had a theatrical sense, but he’s a contradiction because, on the other hand, he feels so burdened by his own celebrity. This same man who rides into town on a white horse will then inform us in his diaries that, let’s say, the following morning in leaving he learns that a procession of dignitaries would accompany him out of town at 7:00 a.m. Washington would write in his diaries, “I got up at 5:00 a.m. and left before this escort could accompany me because I’m tired of all of these adulations and the receptions.” He constantly had to make speeches and make nice with people.
Washington had many virtues, but one virtue that he did not have was spontaneity. Nowadays we think of a politician as somebody who can, on the spur of the moment, come up with a funny anecdote, a few well-chosen words. George Washington was not like that. It was a torment to him; wherever he went, not only did people want to see him, but they wanted to lionize him. He got very, very tired of it. Whatever ambitions he had as a young man, and his ambitions were quite enormous as a young man, he had more than his fill as time went on. And then he began to feel oppressed by the whole thing.
The most interesting thing I learned about his presidency [is this:] sometimes it’s portrayed that George Washington somehow floated above the fray, that he was a figurehead and that Hamilton was running it. Not at all. Washington was absolutely on top of everything that was going on. Even Jefferson marveled at the way that not only everyone was reporting to Washington, but that Washington wanted to review all outgoing letters. Jefferson marveled at the way that Washington was aware of absolutely everything that was happening in the administration. He was a much stronger president than people realized and very creative. Remember, he’s forging the office of the presidency. He establishes a benchmark in terms of appointing people of brilliance and integrity. He is really the one who’s defining the system of separation of powers and checks and balances. And then, most importantly, we’re still living with George Washington’s presidency. What I mean is that unlike the framers of the Constitution, Washington decides that the engine of foreign and domestic policy is going to be the presidency. It’s not going to be the Congress.
Washington really forges the office of the presidency. Let me give you some examples: there’s no mention in the Constitution of cabinet; there is a reference to reports from departmental heads. Washington creates the first cabinet. He chooses Alexander Hamilton as secretary of Treasury, Thomas Jefferson as secretary of state, and Henry Knox as the secretary of war. So, he establishes a very, very high benchmark for a talent and intelligence and integrity. The framers of the Constitution devoted Article I to the Congress because that was the people’s house, and they expected that to be the most important branch of government. Washington, early on, discovers that Congress is really too large and unwieldy a body to shape policy. Washington decides that it is the president who is going to initiate policies that the Congress then reacts to. [That’s] very important. We take this for granted, but in fact, it was not really the intention of the people who met in Philadelphia in 1787 to have that powerful of an executive. Washington really creates the office of the presidency that we have today.
He goes a long way to defining the relationship of the executive branch both to the legislative branch and the judiciary, where again, he makes a brilliant choice: John Jay becomes the first chief justice. George Washington appoints eleven Supreme Court justices, more than any other president. The Constitution mentions the Supreme Court, of course, but doesn’t specify the number of justices, so the first court has six justices. Washington sends all six names to Congress at the same time. They all breeze through in forty-eight hours, which seems comical now where you can get one through in a process of many weeks and months. Washington said that he devoted more painstaking effort to the choice of judges than to anything else he did. He said that he felt that the independent judiciary was the cornerstone of the whole constitutional structure.
One of the things I loved about George Washington is that Washington always challenged people to match up to his high standards. He didn’t stoop. He didn’t bend. It’s very interesting if you read Washington’s farewell address, he’s not flattering the American people; he’s challenging the American people. I hope that people will see that George Washington was somebody who always, as a general and as a president, stuck to his principles. He never confused leadership with a popularity contest. He always felt the important thing was not to be loved but to be respected. Of course, if people respect you, in the long run, they would… love you as well. He was really an exemplary leader who had a vision of American greatness, but not simply a vision of America being strong and rich and powerful. He… also saw the country as an honorable country, a respectable member of the community of nations. Washington, from the time that he’s commander in chief, is trying to mold the character of the country as well as the strength of the character. During the Revolutionary War, Washington as general is always telling them, “Don’t swear. Don’t drink. Don’t pillage crops from the farmers. Respect human rights. Respect property.”
In terms of the less attractive side of George Washington, any time he was dealing with money, Washington could be quite testy, quite acerbic. He was a very difficult and, at times, nasty person to deal with in a business situation. I also tried to get a very long and searching look at what it meant to be a benevolent slave master. There were good sides to Washington as a slave master—if one could say that—that he honored slave marriages, he honored slave families, that he made sure they got adequate medical treatment, et cetera. But,… he was intent on extracting a profit from these slaves.… After the Revolutionary War, he goes back to Mount Vernon, and it’s the coldest winter on record in Virginia. It’s so cold that he writes in his diary it was too cold for him to go out riding, and he was a very hearty specimen. Yet, he also was checking with his overseers to make sure that all of the slaves were out in the fields, draining swamps, pulling up tree stumps. This is really quite brutal work. You want to say to him, “George, if you can’t go outside, is it really fair to expect that of the slaves who are doing this very heavy manual labor?” So, I love Washington, but it’s not to say that I love him on every page of my book or in every phase of his life.
He was a scofflaw—I was quite shocked by that. One of the paradoxes of Washington, it’s commonly said he was maybe the richest man in the colonies. Whether he was, or he wasn’t, one thing that I’m certain is that he was land rich, and he was certainly slave rich, but he was cash poor. I discovered that he had to borrow money to go to his own inauguration in New York in 1789. At the end of his second term as president, he had to borrow money again to take his family and slaves back to Philadelphia. So, this is a man who is constantly weighed down by concerns over money. It runs throughout his entire life. Unfortunately, like a lot of the Virginia planters, he was not only constantly in debt, but he was a real spendthrift. He was a compulsive shopper, George Washington.
[Washington stepped down from the presidency on March 4, 1797, and returned to Mount Vernon. He died there on December 14, 1799.]
[In today’s world] I think he would not be surprised that things were as partisan as they have become because he was subjected to that himself. Things could be very nasty and partisan back in the founding era. In the founding era, even though the polemics were often quite vitriolic, there was a brilliance to the level of discussion. Even though people expressed themselves very vehemently, this was coming out of their own passions and their own political views. He would see a lot of mediocrity today—not everywhere; we have a lot of fine public servants, but the general caliber is lower than it was. It would disturb him to see people pandering to party. It would disturb him to see people pandering to lobbyists because he expected that politics derived from your personal principles and passions. One important thing to stress is that back in the eighteenth century, public service was honorable.… It would be wonderful, if maybe a forlorn hope, to try to revive that sense of public service that we had in the early days of the country.
… What I loved about writing about Washington was that he was somebody who had a real vision of the country. Not just a vision of American power and riches, but a real vision of American morality—what we stood for, what the character of the country was. Washington, like all great presidents, was one of those real leaders. He had this mythic faith in the public. He had this mythic connection with the country. Interestingly enough, although he was always optimistic about the country in the long run, he was frequently very pessimistic about the country in the short run. I keep reminding myself of that because Washington felt that the American public would often be misled for brief periods of time, but in the long run things would come out right. I hope that his faith is borne out.