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- [00:00]
H.W. Brands
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- [01:10]
Podcast Host
history As it happens, it's the summer of 1776, and the continental Congress has appointed George Washington commander in chief of the Continental Army. Washington wasn't one to sell himself short, writes H.W. brands in his new business biography, American Patriarch, but the duty before him would have daunted anyone. He would command a Continental army if such a thing could be called into existence. Each colony had its militia, over which each colony's assembly had been jealous about relinquishing control. Washington would have to overcome these jealousies. A Continental army would have to be provisioned. Washington had no provisioning authority. He would have to depend on the Continental Congress and the colonies. The provisioning authority of the former was nil. The authority of the latter was hardly greater. As challenging as the political part of his assignment was, writes Brands, the military part was worse. Washington would be taking on the army of the British Empire. As ponderous as that army had sometimes proved in the war against France, it had weight and solidity. Washington's so far notional force wouldn't come close to matching. Britain's soldiers were trained and disciplined. They had fought on many battlefields and defeated many foes. Washington, says Brands, had ample reason for thinking he wasn't up to the task before him. No one was. Yet no one was better qualified than he. The life of George Washington is legendary. The man is venerated. But he was a man. And his life was not a legend. It was real. The hard Part is getting close enough to see the unvarnished truth, if that is even possible. That is what HW Brands attempts in his new book, published right in time for the semi quincentennial. And this is the seventh episode in my series marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. So another book about George Washington? You might ask. Well, why not? And Independence Day is a good time to revisit this story, because without Washington's leadership from the summer of 76 or all the way to the late 1790s, the Republic may have been stillborn. H.W. brands is a historian and biographer who teaches at the University of Texas. He has written more than 30 books about American history. His latest, American Patriarch, the Life of George Washington. HW Brands, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:41]
H.W. Brands
Delighted to be with you.
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Podcast Host
So what brought you to George Washington, besides the obvious answer that this is what you do?
- [03:48]
H.W. Brands
So I write history. Been writing history a while. I've written biographies. I sort of deliberately avoided Washington until now. And the reason for this is that Washington, to me anyway, was a hard person to get my head around to figure out what it was that made him so respected, so esteemed among his generation. Basically, what made him the great person that he was. I've written about other people whose source of rightness was more obvious to a modern sensibility. I wrote about Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin was the great polymath of American history. He knew everything and was really good at all sorts of things. He had a turn of phrase. He was a scientist. He was a diplomat. He was all this stuff. I wrote about Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln. It's pretty obvious what he did with Washington, though. It's true. He guided the Continental army to victory in the American Revolutionary War. That's a big deal. But how exactly did he do it? Because he lost more battles than he won. That's an odd track record for a general. So there's that. And then he's first president of the United States. Well, okay, he's first, and for that reason, he's important. But what did he actually accomplish as president? With Franklin Roosevelt, you can point to the things that Roosevelt accomplished as president, and you can make the argument that the country was dramatically changed by the events of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. With Washington, it's a little bit harder to say because Washington was this guy. He was the first. He set certain precedents. But one of the striking things about Washington is if you ask people, and not just people off the street, but even some historians, what's the most important thing About Washington's presidency. The answer you get back more often than not is that he left office voluntarily after two terms and set the example that presidents would not try to overstay their welcome. And eventually, of course, this would be written into the Constitution of the United states. But for 150 years, that precedent stuck. Now, if you think about it for a minute, that's a pretty sort of negative recommendation for somebody. He is a great president because he left office. You can point to a few other things that he did, but they require a lot of explanation. So it's not so obvious why Washington. Washington appeared in a number of my other books when I wrote about Benjamin Franklin. Washington is a partner with Franklin, the two indispensable men of the American Revolution. I wrote a book about the Revolution per se, about the divisiveness of the Revolution. They called the book Our First Civil War. And one of the things I point out that Washington had to deal with a population that was hardly united behind him and behind the idea of independence. There were almost as many loyalists, that is, advocates of continued attachment to Britain, as there were patriots, people who wanted independence, at least at the beginning. So Washington plays a role there. I wrote a book about the formation of the first parties in American politics called Founding Partisans. And Washington's a big player there. But I never had him sort of squarely in the crosshairs until now. And part of it was I decided if I'm going to call myself an American historian, American biographer, a presidential historian, I need really to come to grips with Washington. And then at the time I made this decision, which was about four years ago, I noticed that there was this big anniversary coming up in 2026. I thought, what better time to do it?
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Podcast Host
You know, Washington is everywhere. He is a legend, and he is venerated, maybe uniquely among all American political figures, although a little less lately. And I think some of this is good, right? A more critical look because of the slavery issue and other things. And I don't think we should venerate any politicians anyway. But even though he's everywhere, he's ubiquitous, and we see that austere face on our dollar bills all the time. Right. I always found him somewhat of a mystery as well, you know, trying to put your finger on him, his character, you know, he didn't write any great books, as you said. You know, what pieces of legislation did George Washington sign during his presidency? I don't think anybody can name any of them until they say, read a book about George Washington. And I have in the past and I still can't name his legislative record, yet there he is at all the important points with this intangible quality that you can't be taught leadership.
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H.W. Brands
Well, there's no question that's the reason that Washington was successful. And the reason he's important was that he was successful. And I would argue this basis for success. His sound judgment, his leadership ability, was something that explains the success of nearly every everybody who is in a public office like Washington. Whether you're a general, whether you're commanding an army, whether you're President of the United States. It's also the hardest to recognize in advance. In some ways, it's the hardest to explain even after you see it. So we Americans, we basically judge or predict the leadership abilities, the judgment of candidates for president. When we go to the polls every four years and we get it wrong as often as we get it right, and even when we get it right, we don't. We aren't quite sure what we got. I mean, partly this is because leadership is something you cannot recognize until after the fact. And leadership consists of making good decisions. Well, making a good decision, you can't tell it's a good decision until it's happened and you see what the consequences are. And even if you're dealing with someone who is the same position over time. So if you're head of a corporation, you might make good decisions for the first 10 years of your tenure, but then stuff comes up and you make bad decisions the second time around. And you can't always tell. There are people who set themselves up to exercise good judgment, who are careful, gather as much information as possible, but still you're dealing with certain impulses, ponderable things. If you're head of a corporation and you launch a new product, well, who knows whether people are going to like it or not. If you're a general of an army, you know, you set yourself up, you put your army in position, but you don't know what the other side's going to do. You don't even know what the people on your side are going to do. You don't know if it's going to rain or shine or whatever it's going to do. So part of it is that things come up that are beyond the control of your individual. And. And then part of it is whether you're a commanding general or you're president of the United States in nearly every case, you've never had this job before. Washington had never been commanding general of the Continental Army. There had never been a Continental army or had Never had a commanding general. He was the only one. And so you don't know exactly what is required until you become President of the United States. So this is why it's so hard to figure out in advance whether somebody's going to be a good president. It's why it's hard to figure out in advance if somebody's going to be a good general.
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Podcast Host
And there hadn't been a large republic anywhere, really.
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H.W. Brands
So that really complicates the matter, because Americans, during Washington's presidency and during Washington's generalship, they were engaged in something that had never been done before. This actually is as much as anything else, why Washington is held in such historical regard. And when I say regard, not that he was a wonderful man, I mean, he was a decent guy, but he was supremely important. The stuff that happened, the American victory in the Revolutionary War, the successful launch of the Constitution of 1787, if that doesn't go well, if it doesn't happen the way it did, then America is a very different place. So Washington's soldiers in the Continental army, they knew they were fighting for something that was of existential importance to the United States. In a very literal way. They lose that war, and the United States goes out of existence. But more than that, this thing had world historical importance because, as you point out, this had never been done before. A country had never created itself just by its own will, its will politically and its will militarily, and never been done. And when they won, they realized we did this amazing thing.
- [11:58]
Podcast Host
Yeah. You can see it in their writings, which you cite in the book. Among the founding fathers, they understood that they were on history stage, and then they would be judged by posterity that they were doing something revolutionary. So I want to talk about Washington's ideas and what he wanted for the new nation in a bit. But I want to ask you about your approach to the book and how you wrote it. You do cite very long passages from Washington's journal, his diary, his official correspondent. He's narrating the story along with others who are eyewitnesses to battles, what have you. So you do a lot of writing, but also it's a lot of Washington's writing. I probably read more of Washington's papers in this book than in any other I've read about this period of time. And in your sources, it's almost entirely primary source documents. Why did you approach the book that way? And what other biographies or histories of the Revolutionary War this period, influenced your work here?
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H.W. Brands
I have made a deliberate decision in Much of what I do to get my readers as close to the moment, as close to the people that I'm writing about as possible. And the way to do that is to show them the world as it existed in the eyes and perceptions of my seven child. Use Washington as example. So I want to know what George Washington's world looked like. One of the most important things that the historian can do is to show what it was like to be alive at a different time. The superpower of the historian is the ability to see the world through other eyes. Now, I would argue this is a superpower of anybody who makes the effort. But historians, we do it by necessity because in order to understand George Washington, in order to understand his generation, I need to know what it looked like to them. It's the other way to do it is to retain my 21st century mindset and go back and look at the stuff that Washington did. That's not especially enlightening. I think sometimes it tends to be kind of self affirming because, well, we know how everything turns out, turned out and we, Washington could have done this, could have done that. It's also tempting to, well, it flatters us both morally, intellectually, because we have the advantage of hindsight. We can say, well, he should have done that. He should have known that wasn't going to work. He should have done this and the other thing. But to me, the important thing, and I would argue the part, at least for me, the part that makes history appealing, is precisely to try to get to know these people. I liken history, history, and I would say historical biography to a novel, that the whole point of a novel is to make the reader get inside the head of this character. If a novel works, if the reader can see, oh, this is why this character does this, that's what I want to do with my works of history. I want to have my reader see what George Washington did, how it looked to him, why he did what he did. If I accomplish that, then I will have succeeded. And with no disrespect to my fellow historians and fellow teacher history teachers, I don't want my books to come across reading like a history lecture, where here's Brand saying this, this, this, this. I want as much as possible to make myself disappear in the reading of the book. I want the reader to feel as though the reader has been transported back to that moment. And here's George Washington saying what happened. It's also, it also reflects something that I've come to appreciate as I've been a historian now These many years, I always, whenever I read anything written by historians. So for listeners who aren't familiar with this, historians have two terms for the the kinds of sources we use. There are primary sources. These are sources were generated by the people who were there. So George Washington, the people he knew, the. The people who are participants and eyewitnesses. This is what in court would be called direct evidence. And then there's what people write about that stuff that's called second, those are secondary sources. In a court of law, it's called hearsay evidence. And hearsay evidence is often thrown out because the jury needs to know the best stuff, what the people who were there actually said and did. So this is why I do what I do. You ask me, what other biographies of Washington have I read. I read one long, long ago, and it was a book that was sitting on the shelf of my father's office. My dad was not a history student. He wasn't a historian, certainly he was a businessman, and he had various books in his office. But he had this one particular history biography of George Washington that I don't know. I didn't even know the circumstances that caused him to acquire. I don't know if he bought it, if it was given to him as a gift. 7 volumes by Douglas Freeman, a Virginian, Virginia journalist who wrote these seven volumes on Washington over a period of decades. And my dad would point at that book and he would say, I've read every page of every one of those volumes, and I can tell you what George Washington had for breakfast every day of his life. Now, I looked at that, I listened to that. I thought, boy, that's overkill. I'm not going to write seven volumes on anybody. But what I wanted to do is to get at Washington as directly as possible. Now, in terms of other biographies, I deliberately avoid reading other biographies. And I do this because I don't want to have to try to keep in mind what this biographer said about Washington and separate that from what Washington said about himself or what Jefferson said about Washington. This is why, if you do look at my sources as you did, you'll see almost exclusively primary documents. When I was starting out, before the Internet, before all the stuff we have available now, before Amazon, I did the whole bibliographical stuff. And so, dear reader, if you want to know here, more information, here's what you can find. But this is so easy to compile. Now, anybody, for example, who wants to get the top 300 books on George Washington, you just go to your favorite AI and it'll spit them out in 30 seconds.
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Podcast Host
Is there a bibliography online where you consulted the secondary literature?
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H.W. Brands
Nope.
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Podcast Host
Okay, I was wondering about that. Nope. Cause obviously the literature on the American Revolution in the early republic is immense. I actually just got into this. I just got into this issue on a recent episode when I spoke to three historians about the legacy of the great Gordon Wood and the many debates his scholarship sparked over the decades. Interpreting the American Revolution. Its meaning, all the different interpretations. Right. You do steer clear of that and you take us by the hand and lead us into George Washington's world. Some of his observations were mundane about the weather, others more important about what a republic should be. Washington was many things. A surveyor, a planter, an enslaveholder, a statesman, a general. He starts as a soldier, really. As a young man, he seemed to subscribe to common notions that war is where you could distinguish yourself in glory. I mean, there are other avenues open to him. But he wanted to be a soldier and he wanted to be an officer, but he never got a commission from the British Army. He was a. A Virginia. Was it colonel or lieutenant colonel during the French and Indian War? Why do you want to be a soldier so badly?
- [19:14]
H.W. Brands
He was good at it. So I. I teach at the University of Texas. And so I'm around young people all the time and they're all trying to figure out, what am I going to do with my life, what am I. What's my profession going to be, what am I going to kind of job I'm going to get, what career will I follow? And I say to them, there are three things you need to know about a career if you can identify three circles that overlap. One is what you are good at, something you're good at. Number two is what you like to do. And third is what somebody will pay you to do. And so if you can find something that falls in all three of those circles together, whatever it might be, then that's your career. With Washington, he discovered as a young man that he was good at the things that were necessary to being a good soldier. He thrived out of doors. I really introduced my readers to George Washington when he's on a surveying trip as a teenager and he's heading out to the western part of Virginia, what's now actually western Pennsylvania and Ohio. He and his partner are surveying this new territory. They're on what amounts to extended camping trip, and they're getting rained on and snowed on. They're freezing to death. They're going hungry. And he loves every minute of it. He really likes being out of doors. And this tells him that, well, I'm not going to be a bookish type. I'm not going to spend my time, you know, in a legislature. I'm not going to spend my time in an office. I'm not going to become a merchant. This. I'm going to be out of doors. So that's the first thing. And soldiers in those days, they were out of doors. Even if you were a general, Generals these days spend their time in offices at headquarters. The generals in those days were in the field, at the front.
- [20:54]
Podcast Host
He didn't start as a private. He was an officer right off the bat. Probably his finest moment during the French and Indian War was during a terrible defeat where the British general he was with, Braddock, is killed. What did Washington do there that was so impressive? And how did he save his reputation during this period?
- [21:13]
H.W. Brands
His first experience under fire before the. The defeat with Braddock, he gets himself in this awkward firefight with a French unit, and they're fighting over who's going to have control of the Ohio country. And this is Washington's first time under fire. The first time people have been shooting at him and trying to kill him. And after the battle, he writes to his brother and he says, I've heard the bullets whistle, and believe me, there is something charming in the sound. Now, I've read something like that in other people who've gone on to military fame. Ulysses Grant. I wrote a book about Ulysses Grant. He had exactly the same reaction in his first occasion under fire. And if that is you, if when you hear the sound of fire, if instead of wanting to run away like everybody else does, you're attracted to it, then you've got the potential for a military career. Some other things. Washington was really good on horseback. People saw Washington ride on a horse, and they said he's the best horseman they've ever seen, the best horseman of his generation. This was something that inspired respect among Washington's peers in the Virginia gentry, the social class of which he was a part, but certainly on the field of battle. And again, it's a matter of how you appear to the world, but it's also very practical because if you're a general in the days before armored warfare, you know, mechanical warfare, you got to be able to gallop here, there and everywhere else. So what did Washington do in the battle with Edward Braddock? So it's a horrendous defeat for British arms, and Braddock is killed. Washington is for his first time going into battle side by side with British officers. And the British army was the army that any young officer, any soldier, would want to measure himself against. So if I can play in the same league as the British, British officers, then I might be good enough. And Washington proved in this battle that he was not simply as good as the British, he was better than the British. Because the British troops, the British rank and file and the officers, they were thrown into confusion by the surprise that they encountered, by the fact that they were being fired upon from undercover. They didn't know how to fight on this frontier. And Washington had to pull the army together and keep this defeat from turning into a rout. And he realized as a result of this, I'm as good as these people are. And it's at this moment that the seeds of Washington's desire for American independence are planted. Because again, as I tell my students, if you can measure yourself against other people who are going into the field that you're going to go in, if you think you want to be a doctor, go follow a doctor around for a while. See if you like doing what they do. See if you're as good as they are in the things that are important. And Washington realized I'm as good as these people are. He thought, well, if they had any sense, they would give me a commission in the British army Because basically he would move from AAA up to the big leagues, and he deserved it. But he didn't. He wasn't given that commission. Now, Washington didn't go around saying, boy, I've really been shortchanged. But it did make him think that the British army, first of all, and the British government generally, is not all it is cracked up to be. For the first time, he begins to realize, we Americans, we could do this better on our own than the British are doing it for us.
- [24:40]
Podcast Host
War is horrifying. And in those days, you saw who you killed. Often the volleys were fired at pretty close quarters, and swords and sabers were still used. It's not clear to me, and you can clarify this right now, whether Washington ever killed anyone himself. But he was in battles. He must have fired his gun or slashed his sword at somebody. In his writings, it didn't seem like he, you know, what we call it today? Post traumatic stress disorder, or that he was personally horrified by what he saw. That's not to say that he was a warmonger, though, and that he had a bloodlust either.
- [25:15]
H.W. Brands
Nobody had post traumatic stress disorder until it was identified as such. Plenty of people had been in battle. Trauma suggests that it's a serious injury that's very difficult to recover from. Washington was a soldier. Soldiers go into battle. People die in battles. But remember, the people died of lots of things. In Washington's day, if you stepped on a rusty nail, you could die of lockjaw or tetanus poison. You could die from everything. And at a time when half of children died before they reached the age of five, death was a common accompaniment. Washington's father had died when he was 11. There's no indication at all that Washington was traumatized by this. But at the same time, there's very little evidence that soldiers who were right in the front lines were particularly traumatized by it. They didn't want to get killed. They sometimes did kill. They were happy if they survived. There's something else, and that is that one of the things that causes people to feel great distress is if they encounter something that makes them different from other people in that they went through this experience that nobody else went through. But for Washington, his soldiers, his army had been through this altogether. Now, the fact that they had been through this altogether, and it was a fairly small group, sometimes Washington is likened to Dwight Eisenhower or vice versa. Eisenhower is likened to Washington, sort of commander this, this army. Yeah, it's the same thing, except that when Eisenhower had an army of millions, millions of troops, Washington had an army of thousands. Washington's army could have easily fitted in the end zone of a decent sized football stadium. So it's important to bear this in mind. And when he. When the war ends and he is taking his leave of the army and he's basically sending all the officers and men home, he gathers the officers together and it's a group that they can all fit in a relatively modest sized tavern in New York City.
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Podcast Host
This is after the Revolutionary War.
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H.W. Brands
Yeah, yeah. And so it's this thing that they all have in common. It's a relatively small group.
- [27:24]
Podcast Host
Yeah. Because I said before the mystique around Washington and we see his face all the time and that austere non smile, it's hard to picture him sometimes laughing or crying or given a war yell in the middle of a battlefield. You know, there's a new movie coming out soon. It looks like an action movie based on the trailer of Washington on a horse firing his gun at somebody on the run. I intend to see that movie soon. Maybe I'll do a podcast about it. Tap. Subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads, enjoy early access and all of our bonus content or go to historyasithappens.com.
- [28:08]
H.W. Brands
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- [28:40]
Podcast Host
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H.W. Brands
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Podcast Host
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- [29:06]
H.W. Brands
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- [29:40]
Podcast Host
as revolutionary Pretty early on in his correspondence he raises the possibility of going to arms, although he says it should be as a last resort. He wasn't an orator like Henry, or a philosopher or a polemicist like Thomas Paine. He did not have the mind of a Jefferson or an Adams. What do you think was his chief contribution toward driving Virginia over or across the Rubicon to all out revolt? Was it his stance as a soldier and his presence in the Virginia House of Burgesses?
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H.W. Brands
To the extent that Washington influenced the votes of other people in favor of independence? It was the fact that Washington himself had come to the conclusion that the Americans needed to defend their rights by force of arms if necessary. He didn't make any speeches about it. He hardly wrote any letters about it. He didn't try to persuade anybody else. But Washington was seen as a man of sound judgment. In fact, Patrick Henry considered Washington to be to have the Soundest judgment of anybody he knew. He was also well respected in his community. He's a big name. And when Washington said we might have to fight, then people took that seriously because they knew that Washington did not arrive at his conclusions easily or lightly. They knew that he thought this stuff over. It also helped that when Washington said we might have to fight, he was clearly saying, I might have to fight. When political people say we might have to fight, what they're really saying is somebody else is going to have to go fight. But with Washington, Washington says we might have to fight. Everybody knew he was going to be the one in the thick of the battle. So it gave his opinion on that score greater weight than it would have had otherwise.
- [31:23]
Podcast Host
He was there in his uniform, and he was sent to the continental Congress in Philadelphia, where there was pretty much unanimity that he should be the commander in chief of the continental army. I did not know, actually, until reading your book that John Hancock was considered. Well, maybe Hancock considered himself possibly to be the commander in chief. I don't know if the revolutionary war would have turned out as well. Nothing against John Hancock, but I think they made the right choice.
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H.W. Brands
Well, the reason that Hancock was considered was that the fighting had begun in Massachusetts. He was a leader in Massachusetts. He had funded much of the Massachusetts militia. He was willing. And Massachusetts didn't have any other obvious military candidate. But there was a strong reason that it wasn't Hancock. It was nothing against Hancock. But John Adams, among others, said, it can't be somebody from Massachusetts because there was this belief in Britain and in parts of the United States, it's not yet United States, the American colonies, that the fight was really between Massachusetts and Britain, not between America and Britain. And what Adams wanted to get across was that, no, this is a fight of all the American colonies. That's why we need a Virginian. Virginia was the most populous of the states of the colonies, and so we got to get a Virginian. And once they decided it's got to be a Virginian, then Washington was the obvious choice.
- [32:49]
Podcast Host
During the war, you mentioned it earlier that he lost more battles than he won. For fortunately, he won the most important one of all, or some of the most important ones of all, including Yorktown. As a tactician, Washington seemed to be okay. He was a better strategist. But even there, he had to learn right. He learned from his mistakes. He wanted a major battle with Howe. Right off the bat, he almost got it. And it would have led to ruin. It would have been the end of the war had he been caught after the Battle of Brooklyn Heights. He got a little lucky to escape there. How do you, I mean, that's my view. How do you judge him as a tactician and then as a strategist, his strategy being avoid that do or die all encompassing battle until it was on the most favorable possible terms.
- [33:34]
H.W. Brands
As a tactician, Washington was mediocre at best. He, as I mentioned earlier, he lost far more battles than he won. Now. One of the reasons he lost battles that he or somebody else in his position might have won was precisely because he had a firm grasp of the strategy of the war. Washington understood that the American Revolutionary War, like all other wars, but peculiarly so, was a war, a conflict that began in politics and would end in politics. It emerged from the political dispute between the British government and the American colonies. It would end when the British government decided they don't want to fight it any longer. And so Washington understood that he could afford to lose battle after battle after battle as long as he held the army together, as long as he maintained the possibility of continuing the war, eventually the British would give up. For the United States, as I mentioned earlier, the American Revolutionary War was an existential war. Lose the war, lose the army, the United States goes out of existence. That's the end of it. But for the British, it was entirely a war of choice. The North American colonies, the ones that became the United States of America, were a bunch of colonies in Britain. They weren't the most important colonies, they weren't the most lucrative of the colonies. It was an embarrassment for the British government. They didn't want to lose the colonies. But if they lose the colonies, they haven't lost anything essential. Not like if they had lost, for example, the West Indies, that's where the money was. Or if they'd lost India, that's where power was going to be. North America was a blow to British pride, which is no small thing when you're talking about politicians. But the British at any time could say we're pulling out and it wouldn't have meant the end of the British Empire. I liken not in the book, but to students and in lectures. I liken the position of the British in America in the 1770s and 70s 80s to the position of the United States in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. In that for the Americans in Vietnam, it was a matter of do we want to keep fighting this? It's not central to the existence of the United States. If we lose, it's embarrassing. But that's not the end of important American interests. And in fact, that's exactly how it turns out. So the North Vietnamese, they discovered they just have to keep fighting, keep fighting. Eventually, Americans would go home with Washington, he knew he didn't have to win any single battle, he just had to win the last one. And even when he lost the last one, that wasn't going to end Britain's capability to continue the fighting, but it would, by virtue of being the last, it would end British political will to fight. So Washington understood if he can keep fighting, America wins the war. This is why you mentioned Yorktown. A big victory on the battlefield for Washington, but his biggest victory of all was at Valley Forge, which of course was not a battle, it was an ordeal. But the fact that he could hold the army together at Valley Forge that winter in Valley Forge and actually come out stronger, more cohesive, better trained than when the army went in, that demonstrated that the Americans win it for the long haul. If the British had been paying closer attention, they might very well have realized, okay, they're not going to win this war at that point. But politically speaking, they did have to suffer a defeat on the battlefield. And this came at Yorktown, which of course required and included the participation, the very strong participation of the French.
- [37:01]
Podcast Host
And the British made a bunch of mistakes too. And as you show by citing Howe, General Howe's correspondence, he kept complaining to London, I don't have enough troops. This is a large landmass. We'll never be able to occupy as much territory as we need. And there were never enough Tories that the than the British believed would be there. I agree that Washington's, his chief contribution here was his ability to hold a ragtag army together, starving naked under the harshest of circumstances, where he is fighting the Congress, the Continental Congress, metaphorically, just as much as he's fighting the British, begging for supplies, begging for food, begging for support, dealing with near mutinies. He was able to hold it together by what his force of will. He just had this innate leadership quality, a presence, maybe a physical presence where people truly respected him. It's almost like a legend. But it happened to some extent.
- [37:59]
H.W. Brands
This was a deliberate, a self conscious performance by Washington. So Washington as a young man decided that he needed to comport himself in a way that would win the respect of his peers. And one of the ways that he would do that is not to become too familiar. Washington cultivated a kind of standoffishness. Now, this is something that worked in Washington's day in Virginia in the 18th century. It wouldn't work as soon as the 19th century. In the 19th century, American attitudes change. Even during Washington's time, almost nobody else could pull it off the way Washington did. It helped that he was rich. It helped that he had the finest carriage that anybody had. He had the best horses that anybody had. And so he carried himself very well. He also was a man of few words. He understood once you start arguing with somebody, you lower yourself to their level. This is very clear in the Constitutional Convention. So Washington's there. In the Constitutional Convention. All the debates are being carried on by these politicians and these lawyers, and Washington says nothing.
- [39:13]
Podcast Host
The respect was nearly universal. But there were some detractors during the war. After some setbacks and after Horatio Gates, I believe, won at Saratoga, there were rumblings and grumblings that Washington should be replaced. How close do you think it came to that actually happening?
- [39:31]
H.W. Brands
It wasn't close at all, in part because Washington was very good at handling his civilian superiors. He answered to the president of the Continental Congress. He answered to them, even though they were often short in supplying what he needed. And even though the Continental Congress had no authority to speak of over the states, he cultivated the governors of the various states. He often wrote to them directly, saying, we need more soldiers, we need more supplies, all of this stuff. He demonstrated a willingness to. Well, what shall I say? To play the part that was assigned to him. He was a general, but the general, the army, they were in the service of the American republic. So he could not seize power. He could sometimes commandeer supplies, but he had to be very careful there. You mentioned the Loyalists. He always understood that if he alienated the population, his job would become that much harder. Washington proved to be a very adept individual in maneuvering among people. He couldn't order around the soldiers who served under him, the officers and soldiers underneath him. He could order them around, but he couldn't order the Continental Congress around. He couldn't order the state governments around, but he could present the case that his army needed supplies to these people. And he did so in a very effective way. He never got as much as he wanted, but he got enough to win. And some of this reflected the fact that he had put his fortune on the line. He was one of the wealthiest people, especially through his marriage to Martha Custis in Virginia. And if the army loses, that's all lost. If he's lucky, he will have to flee into exile, and he will live as an exile somewhere. He made a point of never leaving the army. There were times during the winters when he could have gone home to Mount Vernon. But he didn't. He stuck around, and he was there for the whole time. And so his soldiers, they were fighting for the cause, but as much as that, they were fighting for him. Many of them thought of him as a surrogate father. He didn't have any children of his own, and so it was a natural for that. And when they didn't desert at Valley Forge, some of them did, but most of them stuck around. When they stuck around, it was not so much that they didn't want to let down the American people. They didn't want to let him down.
- [41:59]
Podcast Host
Yeah. There is a scene that you take us through here in the book where the soldiers, I guess this is at Valley Forge and their enlistments are about to end, where he personally approached his men on his horse, went down the line and. And implored them to stay when everyone wanted to go home. Their families were starving, their families were cold. Who knows if you're actually going to win the war. As you mentioned before, the British army was superb in the field. It was scary to fight them. He was able to hold these people together. It really is amazing story, and I'm not one to idealize the past or to make heroes out of people, but this was a heroic effort on Washington's part. At the same time, he was always telling people that he didn't want these jobs. He was sensitive to his public image. Republican virtue. Right. And that's totally absent today. Maybe we'll return to that in a little bit. That ambition had to be tempered or you couldn't look like you were going for a position. For instance, the presidency. How many times did he and Alexander Hamilton go back and forth, with Hamilton imploring him, please become the first president, and Washington saying, no, I'm not up for the job. I want to just stay on my plantation?
- [43:09]
H.W. Brands
This is quite true. The acme of Washington's ambition, to the extent that he was ambitious, was commanding general of the army. That's what he was good at. That's what he thought he should do. And he got that position. He won the war. He was the great hero. After that, politics had no appeal for him. It's important to keep this in mind and also to avoid importing into the 1790s attitudes from the 21st century in the following specific sense. Nowadays. Nowadays, the presidency of the United States is a prize for anybody in politics. It is far and away the most powerful political position in the United States, arguably in the world, and it has been for the last 100 years. But in the 1790s, the presidency was no big deal. It was easy for Washington to say, I don't need the job. He didn't need the job. The job didn't exist until he took it. There had been presidents of the United States before. They were the presidents of the Continental Congress. They weren't independent, and nobody can even remember who they were. Half of the states called their chief executive president. Benjamin Franklin was three times elected president of Pennsylvania. So the presidency wasn't that big a deal. But Washington knew that politics was not his area of strength. He supposed that if he went into politics, if anything, his great reputation as this victorious general would be tarnished because he would basically be descending into the arena where people were taking potshots at each other all the time.
- [44:48]
Podcast Host
And his farm had been suffering. He had been away from it for so long, too. So there was some personal interest there as well. I think one of Washington's most impressive contributions or enduring observations, most valuable, has to do with what he believed the new government should entail and the importance of setting aside local jealousies to create a nation, a strong nation that couldn't be pulled apart by foreign interference. And here on page 415 of your book, you cite Washington here saying he wanted two main things. Number one, and this is Washington's words, that the general government is not invested with more powers that are indispensably necessary to perform the functions of a good government, and consequently, that no objection ought to be made against the quantity of power delegated to it. So there were concerns that federal government, and especially the chief executive, would have too much power. Secondly, that these powers, as the appointment of all rulers will forever arise from the free suffrage of the people, are so distributed among the legislative, executive and judicial branches into which the general government is arranged that it can never be in danger of degenerating into a monarchy, an oligarchy, an aristocracy, or any other despotic or oppressive form, so long as there shall remain any virtue in the body of the people. Pardon my presentism, HW Brands, but I couldn't help but think about the sorry state of American politics today. In the absence of republican virtue, we don't have an oligarchy. We have a plutocracy. It has been said. And what do you make of Washington's words there? I feel like he's speaking to us today.
- [46:32]
H.W. Brands
One of the advantages that Washington and those of his generation had over us is an uncertainty as to how this experiment in self government that they inaugurated was going to turn out. We're at a disadvantage because it's Been going on so long, 25 decades now, that it's tempting for us to think it will go on forever, to think that it was inevitable, that it would carry on and that we can ignore it, we can neglect it, we can abuse it, and it'll still be there tomorrow morning. In Washington's case, Washington and those of his generation understood it hadn't always existed. It was brought into being by the blood and the suffering of the thousands of soldiers in the Continental army and by a whole generation of people who took this bold leap into an unknown future by creating this republic. They understood that the first try at a national government hadn't worked out. This was the Articles of Confederation, and it wasn't sufficient to hold the states together in peacetime. It did hold the country together during the war. But when the war ends and the common enemy is no longer an enemy, then the states begin to fly apart. So a second try was made. It's important to remember this was a second try. It's not as though the Constitution was a creation. Coincident with the Declaration of Independence, they were feeling their way forward. And so Washington was recommending this national government to the American people. We need a stronger government than we've had. Why do I say this, says Washington? Because the one we had wasn't up to the task before it. But don't worry. It's not because people in the center are trying to aggrandize themselves, to bring all power to themselves. This new Constitution is based on checks. The officeholders regularly have to refer to the people and say, okay, do you want me. You want to reelect me? Do you want me to continue in office? And he makes the point. As long as the people persist in this republican civic virtue, then the experiment will continue. But it is on the people. And so this is a challenge that Washington puts to his generation. And the rest of the generation understands that they got to take this seriously. It turned out that Americans were not conspicuously more virtuous than people in other countries. But there was something about those early generations up until the middle of the 19th century, the decade of the Civil War. That's when it comes to an end. But those early generations realized, we've got our differences of opinion. We can argue, we can fight over this stuff, but we're going to stop short of blowing up the Union, because this experiment, it's trying to determine to ourselves, to prove to the world that people can govern themselves. So they understood that this thing that they had created was both resilient, but it was fragile. If they didn't take care of it. If they didn't put the national interest ahead of individual interests, they could lose it all. What would Washington and his contemporaries think if they came back today? In one regard, they would probably be gratified that this republic that they created in the 1770s and 1780s was still in existence and was still a republic. Would they think, as Washington was arguing there, that the federal government needs to be bigger and stronger? There's absolutely no way of saying because the government that they started with was minuscule compared to the government that we have today. I think he would have been pleased that the experiment continues, but we're. That maybe people aren't realizing that this experiment could fall tomorrow.
- [50:17]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I mean, that whole idea of republican disinterestedness. As Gordon Wood pointed out the end of his book the radicalism of the American Revolution, a generation after the Revolutionary War, the aging and old founders were already despondent over what happened to that virtue. We just have a lot of people who are self seeking, wanting to make money, advance their careers, et cetera. So, you know, that's generation to generation, generation. Last thing here. How do you rate or judge Washington's legacy when it comes to slavery?
- [50:49]
H.W. Brands
Washington didn't give slavery a thought one way or the other before the Declaration of Independence. This in part because he was born into a world in which slavery was a part, and also because even if he had thought it was a bad idea, Americans until independence had no control over it, was subject to British law, and the British government was going to make the laws it wanted to make. Once the Declaration of Independence declares that all men are created equal. And Washington is telling his soldiers at that point, he has the Declaration of Independence read to his soldiers as soon as it reaches his camp and he says, we're fighting for freedom, we're fighting for equality. He realizes he's sitting on top of this contradiction and the contradiction is not going to last. Somehow it's going to be reserved, resolved. And he was pretty sure that the contradiction would end with the end of slavery. He was not in a position where he could dictate to other Virginians or Virginia could dictate to anybody else in other states what they could do about slavery. He assumed, as everybody else of his generation assumed, that the states would make their own decisions about slavery. Northern states, they opted fairly quickly to set in placed programs for the termination of slavery. It was relatively easy because slaves weren't a big part of the economies of the north. A state like Virginia was going to be a little bit Harder. But Washington thought it was necessary and it was going to happen. He thought that a big first step was made at the constitutional convention, where a provision was written that would end the importation of slaves to the United States. And that would be a big first step. A second step was something that Washington could and did take himself, and that was to end the cultivation of tobacco. Tobacco was a big cash crop that had caused slaves to be imported into Virginia in the first place. But by the 18th century, by the end of the 18th century, tobacco had worn out the soils of Virginia, making slavery per se essentially uneconomic. In Virginia, Washington thought that slavery would die of its own weight. And he. He could nudge things along, but he couldn't push it more than necessary. Again, he's in a republic. People have to make these decisions themselves. So people would be persuaded. He did not foresee that the cotton gin would make the cultivation of cotton economical, would cause this big boom. He did believe that he would continue to take the steps that he could. Now, Washington himself commanded a large enslaved workforce, but most of the of the slaves that he commanded, he didn't own. And so he could not have freed them if he wanted to. They came to his marriage through Martha Custis, his wife, Martha Custis Washington. But she couldn't have freed them either, because they were tied into a trust agreement for her children and the children of her first husband. So Washington, upon his death, specified that the slaves that he owned, the ones that he could free, would be freed not at that moment, but upon the death of Martha because of the fact that his slaves and Martha's slaves had intermarried. They had families together, and to free half of them leave the other in bondage would create intolerable strains both on the families themselves and on the. The mood at Mount Vernon. So Washington concluded that the best that he could do was to arrange for the freedom of his slaves. Upon the death of Martha, that would be the best that to do. And he would leave to the next generation the decision to free slaves. More generally. Washington understood he wasn't a dictator. And Virginia, even if he had gotten Virginia to go along, couldn't dictate to the other states. It would require a decision of the American people. He thought the decision was coming. He died before he saw that the decision wouldn't come until the 1860s. He would have guessed it was sooner than that, but he did what he could.
- [54:31]
Podcast Host
I think one of the saddest things about this story is that George Washington didn't live to see the 1800s. He didn't get a much of a retirement after all the service to the nation.
- [54:42]
H.W. Brands
So Washington retired after two terms in office. If he had stuck around for a third term and assuming that his health had been what it was, he would have died in office and the example that he set would have been entitled different than the example he actually did set. The example he did set was you leave while you're healthy and could still carry on and show to the world that you're not going to cling to power. To the last if he had accepted a third election, he would have been elected a third time and had died in office. Then the example would have been you get elected once and you stick around until God takes you away.
- [55:17]
Podcast Host
On the next episode of History As It Happens, we'll move from the era of George Washington Washington and Republican virtue to today the absence of Republican virtue in the age of Trump. Damon Linker will be here to discuss the rise and fall of Trumpism in post ideological politics. That is next, as we report History as it Happens and make sure you sign up for my free newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for History As It Happens.
- [55:51]
H.W. Brands
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Podcast Host
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H.W. Brands
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Podcast Host
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H.W. Brands
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Podcast Host
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H.W. Brands
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Podcast Host
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H.W. Brands
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Podcast Host
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H.W. Brands
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Podcast Host
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H.W. Brands
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