SMART PEOPLE

An expert may be defined as someone who knows more than you do about a particular thing, and the world is full of such people. (Do you fix your own computer, or grow your own food?) A smart person is someone who knows more than you do about many things, and although there may be fewer of those in the world, depending on how smart you are, a leader will meet his share.

The first smart person Washington knew well and worked with closely was George Mason, a fellow planter who lived on Dogue’s Neck, just down the Potomac from Mount Vernon. George Mason IV, six years older than his neighbor, was a conventional man, immersed in family and private business, who happened to be a genius. He never went to college, and never studied law, but men who had done both were impressed by his knowledge of political and legal theory, and a little afraid of his sharp tongue; his language, wrote Thomas Jefferson, “was strengthened by a dash of biting cynicism, when provocation made it seasonable.” Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, his state’s severance of ties with Britain, which influenced both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, not a bad twofer.

He and Washington were enmeshed in all the ways, great and little, that Virginia gentlemen living a few miles apart could be. They served on the vestry of the same Anglican parish; they were interested in improving the navigation of the Potomac and speculating in Ohio Valley land; they hunted deer together on Dogue’s Neck.

As the relationship of the colonies and the mother country came to a crisis, the two neighbors worked together to assert America’s rights. They brought complementary skills to the task. Mason once defined himself as “a man who spends most of his time in retirement, and has seldom meddled in public affairs.” Mason was the intellectual, versed in colonial charters and English law, and in the theoretical works of John Locke and Algernon Sidney. Washington was the man who put his friend’s ideas, which he shared, before the public. Mason was the formulator, Washington the effectuator.

The Fairfax Resolves showed how the partnership worked. In the spring of 1774, Parliament closed the Port of Boston, as punishment for local tax protests. The Virginia House of Burgesses proclaimed a day of sympathetic fasting and prayer, whereupon the royal governor of the colony sent the burgesses home. Instead, they called for an extralegal convention of delegates from all Virginia’s counties to meet in Williamsburg in August. The voters of Fairfax County met in Alexandria on July 18 to instruct their representatives; Washington chaired the meeting. A committee, dominated by Mason, had prepared a set of resolutions, denying that Parliament had any right to tax the colonies without their consent, and calling for a continental congress to coordinate a response. Mason’s resolutions were approved, and Washington took them to Williamsburg, as a delegate from their county, and then on to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia as a delegate from Virginia.

Mason was happy to let Washington present his ideas; Washington was happy to present them, because he knew his own mind. “Much abler heads than my own,” Washington wrote at the time, “convinced me” that Parliament’s policies were contrary to the British constitution. But “an innate spirit of freedom first told me” that they were “repugnant to every principle of natural justice.” Washington willingly let Mason keep tabs on the innards of the British constitution; he and Mason were equally capable of understanding justice.

Washington met an even more brilliant man in 1777. Alexander Hamilton, twenty-five years his junior, was as remote from his world as Mason was integral to it. Hamilton grew up on the sugar islands of the Caribbean. His mother, a divorcée, and his father, a failed businessman, were not married. Hamilton won the attention of local patrons by hard work as a merchant’s clerk, and by precocious journalism: his first published article in a lifetime of many was a description of a hurricane that he wrote at age fifteen. He was sent to New York to be trained as a doctor, but dropped out of college after two years to become captain of an artillery company. Late in 1776, as the army retreated across New Jersey, an officer noticed “a youth, a mere stripling, small, slender, almost delicate in frame, marching beside a piece of artillery with a cocked hat pulled down over his eyes, apparently lost in thought, with his hand resting on the cannon and every now and then patting it as he mused, as if it were a favorite horse or a pet plaything.” After the Battle of Princeton, he became a lieutenant colonel on Washington’s staff, a position he held for four years.

Hamilton had several dozen peers as a young aide, but none in the freedom with which he offered economic advice to acquaintances and strangers, drawing on his ground-floor experience of commerce and trade and his hit-and-run reading of contemporary economists. A new financial world had been born in Holland and Britain, with a modern understanding of banking and debt, and by a combination of energy and effrontery, he made himself one of a half-dozen people in America who understood it. He had a knack for law as well as economics, nourished by a similar feeding frenzy of irregular study. “There is no skimming over the surface of a subject with him,” an acquaintance wrote. “He must sink to the bottom to see what foundation it rests on.” When he resurfaced, he had to have his hands on all the details. In the postwar years Hamilton became a lawyer, a politician, and an advocate for political reform.

In September 1787, after he had signed the Constitution, he wrote a memo to himself on the pros and cons of the new document. If it was ratified, he thought it “probable” that Washington would be president (that was a very conservative estimate). “This,” he added, “will insure a wise choice of men to administer the government.” One of the wisest choices Washington made, two years later, was Hamilton as treasury secretary.

In the winter of 1781-1782 Washington was in Philadelphia to consult with Congress, where he met a third smart man. James Madison was a thirty-year-old congressman from Virginia who had been doing the best he could for the army. The eldest son of a planter, he was a reserved young man, concerned with his health (though he would live to be eighty-five). A friend called him “sedentary and studious. . . . His ordinary manner was simple, modest, bland and unostentatious, retiring from the throng and cautiously refraining from doing or saying anything to make [himself] conspicuous. . . . [H]is form, features and manner were not commanding, but his conversation exceedingly so.” His conversation commanded attention because he was intelligent, well educated (he burned through Princeton in two years), and able to express himself clearly, carefully, and (in private) with charm.

After the war, he became a delegate to the Virginia Assembly, which brought him together with Washington again, when he served on a committee to commission a statue of the hero. The two men also began to discuss inland navigation and other political problems, Madison consistently pushing the envelope—or urging, as a contemporary put it, “measures of relief to a greater extent than was generally contemplated.” (Madison’s reforming zeal cemented his new friendship with fellow politician Alexander Hamilton.) Madison’s activities over the next five years as a polemicist, wire-puller, debater, and compromiser entitle him to be known as the Father of the Constitution. One of his many tasks, before and after the Constitutional Convention, was serving Washington, as a trainer handles a prizefighter, briefing him and strategizing with him. Madison knew the Constitution needed Washington’s blessing if the country was to accept it; Washington needed to know it would be a serious effort before he would give it his blessing. By 1788, Madison was spending so much time with Washington that when his friends wrote letters to him, they sent them to Mount Vernon.

When Washington arrived in New York in April 1789 to be inaugurated, Madison was already there, as a representative from Virginia. A fellow member of the House called him “our first man.” He was also the first man in Washington’s inner circle, advising him on matters ranging from presidential etiquette to a bill of rights to how to induce Thomas Jefferson to become secretary of state.

Washington worked well with these smart people. If the United States had been a basketball team, it would have had a great first string, and a deep bench. But smart people have a characteristic shortcoming—pride. If they disagree with you, their very talents can make them harder to disagree with.

Washington’s break with Mason was sudden and sharp. Mason emerged from his customary retirement to attend the Constitutional Convention, as part of a powerful Virginia delegation that included Washington and Madison. Yet at the end of the convention, he refused to sign. He had his reasons: he wanted a bill of rights, which the Constitution as originally written lacked (why, went the reasoning, forbid the federal government to do things it has no power to do?); he also wanted sumptuary laws, to regulate luxury and conspicuous consumption. He assailed the Constitution at the convention itself, where he said “it would end either in monarchy, or a tyrannical aristocracy; which, he was in doubt, but one or the other, he was sure,” and back home in Virginia, where it took all Madison’s tenacity and Washington’s silent influence to overcome his opposition. Washington saw motives beyond reason in Mason’s objections: “Pride on the one hand, and want of manly candor on the other, will not . . . let him acknowledge an error in his opinions.” The political fight ended their friendship.

Washington’s break with Madison came later and developed more slowly. By the middle of Washington’s first term, Madison had come to the conclusion that Mason was partly right: though the Constitution was not dangerous, Hamilton at the Treasury Department was laying the foundations of monarchy and aristocracy, by creating a new elite of bankers and merchants (Washington thought Hamilton was digging America out of a debt hole). Foreign policy became another field of disagreement: Madison was enthralled by the French Revolution; Washington, disturbed by French meddling in American affairs, was not. Madison retained his respect for the president only by imagining that he had been bewitched by Hamilton; he could not conceive that his hero honestly disagreed with him. The final clash involved a treaty with Britain that Washington sent to the Senate for confirmation in 1796. Madison, anxious not to offend France by signing a treaty with its enemy, claimed that the House too had a role in ratifying treaties. Washington denied it (“absolute absurdity,” he wrote in private). The congressman and the president both appealed to the Constitution, which they had both signed. Washington’s interpretation prevailed. The two men were strangers thereafter.

The smart man Washington worked with longest was Hamilton—surprisingly, considering what a touchy know-it-all Hamilton could be. He even resigned from Washington’s staff once, in 1781, after a small, meaningless quarrel. The commander in chief told his colonel that he was ten minutes late for a meeting. “I am not conscious of it, Sir,” Hamilton answered, “but since you have thought it necessary to tell me so we part.” Officers are typically conscious of rights and slights; young officers more so; young, self-made, illegitimate officers most of all. After a half hour had passed, Washington sent another aide to ask Hamilton to reconsider his resignation, but he would not. Hamilton was not done with his boss, however; after he left headquarters, he bombarded him with requests for combat duty. Washington looked past the impudence and the inconsistency, and let him command an infantry charge at Yorktown, which he did gallantly.

Hamilton continued to give Washington headaches as treasury secretary—he insisted on slugging it out with his critics in the press. But Washington kept turning to him because of his willingness to give copious advice on all problems, because of the high quality of the advice he gave, and because other intimates, chiefly Madison and Jefferson, gave him even greater headaches. Washington turned to Hamilton a last time in 1798, when he came out of retirement to command the army in case of a French attack. He insisted that Hamilton be second in command, and wrote an eloquent tribute: “That he is ambitious I shall readily grant, but it is of that laudable kind which prompts a man to excel in whatever he takes in hand.” Washington valued the excellence, despite the heartburn.

A leader cannot afford to be intimidated by smart people, and he must not be controlled by them. He can avoid both problems by being confident of his own abilities and clear about his beliefs. Then he will be able to draw on their talents, overlooking personal clashes, though not disagreements about fundamentals.

WEIRD PEOPLE

Sometimes it is hard to tell whether a person is smart—or anything else about him—because he moves through life in a dense cloud of oddity.

At the beginning of the Revolution, America was desperate for experienced officers. Only a few native-born veterans of the French and Indian Wars fit the bill, and some of them were not ideal: Israel Putnam was fifty-eight years old; Artemas Ward suffered from kidney stones. Of necessity we turned to foreigners.

Put yourself in Washington’s shoes, and consider two foreign officers who came his way.

Officer A has been a major in the English army. For the past few years he has lived in America; politically, he identifies with his new homeland, and warmly embraces the patriot cause. Though he is witty and learned, his people skills are zero. His best friends are a pack of dogs, his favorite among them a huge Pomeranian, which he calls Mr. Spada. When he first meets Abigail Adams, he asks her to shake Mr. Spada’s paw. He lived for a time with the Mohawk Indians, who called him “Boiling Water” on account of his temper.

Officer B says he is a baron (many Europeans acquire titles in mid-Atlantic). He has served in the army of Frederick the Great, an excellent credential. He is fluent in German and French; unfortunately, he speaks no English, so his orders, and his curses, have to be translated by aides. Two years after he arrives, Washington gets a letter charging that he is a pedophile: back in Europe, he had “taken familiarities with young boys.”

Officer A was Charles Lee; Officer B was Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. Washington had to deal with both of them since they came to him via Congress: Lee was one of the four original major generals commissioned in 1775; Steuben, newly arrived from Europe, had presented himself to Congress early in 1778, carrying a letter of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin. But organizational charts are one thing, spirit another; the tenor of a leader’s relations with those who are formally his comrades can range from enthusiasm to mere tolerance, or worse. Washington embraced both men, seeing past their peculiarities traits that he and the army needed. Lee had fought as a British officer and a soldier of fortune on two continents, and had military theory and history at the tip of his tongue. Steuben had personal experience of what was still, in the 1770s, the most efficient and effective army in Europe. In order to access their expertise, Washington was willing to put up with courteous dogs and unintelligible swearing.

With Steuben he struck gold. The German knew Prussian military habits, and understood their purpose: drilling led to cohesion and speed on the battlefield; organization made for health and order in camp (see Chapter 1, “Start-ups”). Far more valuable was his ability to modify old rules for a new situation. He stripped down the Prussian drill so that soldiers who were not military lifers could learn it easily. He told his new charges what they were doing and why. “You say to [a European] soldier,” he wrote, “‘Do this,’ and he doeth it, but here I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that’ and then he does it.” His explanations might have to be translated, but they were appreciated; his flamboyant profanity made them intriguing. He understood, finally, the importance of the quasi-paternal bond between officers and men. The “first object” of a captain, he wrote, “should be to gain the love of his men by treating them with every possible kindness and humanity, enquiring into their complaints, and when well founded, seeing them redressed. . . . He should often visit those who are sick [and] speak tenderly to them. . . . The attachment that arises from this kind of attention to the sick and wounded is almost inconceivable.”

What about the charge of pedophilia? Washington ignored it. Historians wonder about Steuben’s sexual orientation: he was a lifelong bachelor, cared for in his old age by devoted younger aides. If he was gay, he had reason to conceal it, for homosexual acts were crimes in the army, then as now. But no accusations of pedophilia arose in America; Washington dismissed the accusation he received as European back-biting. His policy was, “Don’t ask, don’t tell, and don’t listen to gossip.”

Charles Lee, on the other hand, developed into a problem that got worse over time. He helped repel an attack on Charleston, South Carolina, in the summer of 1776. But after the British successfully attacked New York that fall, he began to snipe at Washington behind his back. “A certain great man,” he wrote General Horatio Gates, “is most damnably deficient.” His criticisms ended only when he was captured by a party of British dragoons in December.

Did he turn traitor in prison? He gave the British advice as to how they might win. Was he trying to save his own skin from a British prosecution for treason (he was, after all, a Briton and a veteran)? Or was he trying to plant disinformation? This is a historians’ debate that does not concern Washington as a leader, since he and other Americans were unaware of what was going on. They could only judge Lee by what he did after he was released in a prisoner exchange in April 1778. Lee was unimpressed by the reforms that Steuben had instituted. His performance at the Battle of Monmouth Court House is described above (see Chapter 5, “Management Style”). Washington’s explosion of anger was in part the pent-up rage of a leader who senses that he has been badly served for a long time, but who hasn’t been able to let himself know it until the evidence stares him in the face. Ignoring the increasingly obvious was Washington’s fault; Lee’s bad behavior and bungling were his own. Lee was court-martialed, and died four years later, with his dogs at his bedside.

Oddity is not just an individual trait. Entire subcultures can seem weird to strangers—their accents and their diets, obviously, but also their mind-sets.

Washington had been to New England once before the Revolutionary War, on a visit to Boston in 1756, but he had never dealt with New Englanders as soldiers. Shortly after he returned as commander in chief in 1775, he wrote his cousin Lund Washington that he did not much like them. The embattled Yankees for whom all America had rallied “have obtained a character [reputation] which they by no means deserved. Their officers generally speaking are the most indifferent kind of people I ever saw. . . . I daresay the men would fight very well (if properly officered) although they are an exceeding dirty & nasty people.” Something must have told him that writing this down might be unwise, for he added, “I need not make myself enemies among them by this declaration, though it is consistent with the truth.” Cousin Lund did not rat him out, though Washington shared similar thoughts with a Virginia congressman who did. One of his aides, who happened to be in Philadelphia at the time, heard the resulting gossip and warned Washington to keep quiet. He thanked his aide for the tip. “I can bear to hear of imputed or real errors. The man who wishes to stand well in the opinion of others must do this, because he is thereby enabled to correct his faults.”

Washington wasn’t the only outsider who found New Englanders strange. That winter a Virginia regiment crossed paths with the Fourteenth Massachusetts Continentals, a regiment recruited in Marblehead from the sailors of the north shore, some of them Indian or black. Jeers led to snowballs, then to biting and gouging. Soon there was a regular hoedown. The commander in chief rode to the spot and, in the words of one soldier, “leaped from his saddle . . . rushed into the thickest of the melees, with an iron grip seiz[ing] two tall, brawny, athletic, savage-looking riflemen by the throat, keeping them at arm’s length, alternately shaking and talking to them.” Evidently, the riflemen were persuaded by what he said, for they, and the other rioters, dispersed.

Regional difference often excites derision, and eighteenth-century America’s regions were at least as different as red and blue states now. New Englanders were both pious and shrewd, which could make them seem canting. They did not believe in display, or in being ordered around (hence they looked “dirty & nasty,” in Washington’s eyes). Eastern Virginia, in turn, was a society of deference, whose leaders aspired to be gentlemen. They could seem like blowhards (“Virginian geese are all swans,” complained John Adams). Washington learned, first, to keep his thoughts about these differences to himself, then to change his thoughts as experience showed him the fighting qualities of individuals and units. Henry Knox of Massachusetts and Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island turned out to be two of the best generals in his army, and the Fourteenth Massachusetts, whose fight he broke up, would row his army across the Delaware before the Battle of Trenton.

The lesson for a leader is never to judge a book by its cover. When you read the book, it may turn out to be bad, as in the case of Charles Lee. But you may be pleasantly surprised.