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- [00:00]
H.W. Brand
You're always interested in the first of the first of anything. And including the first president, the first victorious general, the person, quite arguably, Washington is more responsible for the creation of the American republic than any other person.
- [00:15]
Yasha Monk
And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. America, as many of you will know, is about to celebrate its 250th birthday. And so I thought this was a great opportunity to examine the life and times of perhaps the most important American founder, George Washington. I invited onto the broadcast to do this. H.W. brand, the Jack S. Blanton Senior Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin and Pulitzer Prize finalist for many of his biographies, who has a new book out called American the Life of George Washington. I was particularly interested in finding out the early upbringing of Washington, how he fit into the social structure of a time, how he went from being a loyal British subject to an American revolutionary leader, how an originally small rebellion spiraled and spiraled into a much more ambitious undertaking, and how Washington's trans choice to relinquish power twice shaped the norms of the early American republic. In the last part of this week's conversation, we talk not about Washington's presidency, but how he relinquished his presidency, how that set the norm for future American presidents, by and large, with one notable exception, leaving office and after two terms how Washington fought about the rise of political partisanship, which was happening as he became president and really took center stage in the first election to succeed him, and what all of that teaches us about the fragility of American political institutions today. To listen to this part of the conversation, to support this patriotic publication on this 250th anniversary of America, please go to writing.yashamonk.com 2026for 30% off your first year subscription to this podcast. Or go to persuasion.community to help us run our magazine and community devoted to defending the ideals of a free society. Bill Brands, welcome to a podcast.
- [02:50]
H.W. Brand
Delighted to be with you.
- [02:51]
Yasha Monk
George Washington is, you know, I guess, the most famous figure in American history. There's been many, many biographies written about him. Looking at him with a vantage point of 2026 as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of America's founding. What stands out to you about George Washington that may be different from what other historians emphasized when they wrote biographies or when they just wrote about Washington in other contexts throughout American history?
- [03:21]
H.W. Brand
Sure. I guess the principal thing, since you mentioned the vantage of the 250th anniversary is Washington's staying power. So Washington was celebrated in fact, upon his death, in one of the eulogies, he was described as first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. It's hard to say where Washington sits in the hearts of his countrymen today, but he's one figure from that era who has survived most of the revisionism that has eventually gone into people like Thomas Jefferson and any number of other folks from that era. Now, some of it is just. It's not an accident of history, but it's an important part. The capital of the United States, the capital city of the United States is named for George Washington. So it'd be pretty difficult to deplatform Washington. But.
- [04:11]
Yasha Monk
And I'm sure some people have tried, or want to try.
- [04:13]
H.W. Brand
Yeah, the people who live in Washington are more concerned right now with getting a state out of their district, and they know that that wouldn't get him anywhere to say for.
- [04:23]
Yasha Monk
By the way, I mean, there's some people who still don't understand that. I mean, there is obviously a state of Washington as well as the District of Columbia. And I was. Sorry, this is a complete tangent, and I don't normally start podcasts with tangents. Perhaps I work up to them. But I recently was giving a talk in Wisconsin, and the closest airport to the time where I was giving this talk was Minneapolis. And so I drove from the Minneapolis airport to my talk, and I got pulled over by a Wisconsin state trooper. And since I'd just come off a flight, I hadn't had a drink in three days or something, but since I'd just come off a flight and taken a nap, I guess my eyes were a little bit red. So she insisted that I do a field sobriety test, which I was happy to do, but they ran my license, and they said, do you have some kind of special license? Is there something, you know, like, what's going on with your license? And I'm like, no, I just have a normal Washington, D.C. license. I don't know. You know, nothing special about it. So we go through a whole field sobriety test, which I passed, and the Breathalyzer, which comes out as 0.00. And I. I asked, well, what. Do you ever figure out what happened to a license? Like, oh, yeah, yeah, my. My. My colleague told me. I. I ran it wrong. I didn't realize this was in Washington state. So apparently not. All. Not all state troopers in Wisconsin understand the difference between Washington state and Washington, D.C. right?
- [05:32]
H.W. Brand
Anyway, so Washington wears. Well, he has. He's got sort of a level of gravity with which he fulfilled his roles as president that seem to last. They've got a long shelf life. And any complaints that people might make about Washington are easier to make about other figures from the founding. Again, Jefferson is the one who said all men are created equal and on slave Washington own slaves too. But he didn't say all men are created equal. And so he seems to be a very solid guy. And you know, the. You're always interested in the first of the first of anything. And including the first president, the first victorious general, the person, quite arguably Washington is more responsible for the creation of the American republic than any other person. If his continental army had lost to the British, American independence wouldn't have happened. At least it wouldn't have happened. Then we can talk about whether it would have happened eventually. May probably. Probably would have, but. So he's an important figure and he is somebody who's easy to come back to again and again.
- [06:40]
Yasha Monk
Yeah, I mean, there's many aspects of his rule that I want to get into and obviously many aspects of his childhood and upbringing and so on, which you portray very interestingly. If he's responsible for the American republic, it is in part because he won the military victory that make it possible. It's probably in part because he clearly did not have the ambition to become a dictator or a monarch. And I feel like the longer history goes on, the more positive a light that puts him in. If you look at many of the newly independent republics around the world that threw off colonial shackles and became independent, the number of times in which the courageous, charismatic independence leader who leads the rebellion against the colonial forces, becomes the first president of a country and then stays there for 50 years, making the country corrupt and concentrating power in their own hands is enormous, especially in the 20th century. And so actually, I feel like with more knowledge of how easy and how tempting it is for those kinds of figures to say, I am indispensable. I want to stay in this position of power. The fact that Washington gives up power after two terms sets the informal norm. That presence should be limited to two terms is even more significant than it may have looked at the time.
- [08:05]
H.W. Brand
So your point is very well taken. We can get to it. Some of the complications and subtleties of that a little bit later. But I'll say this, that when King George III of Britain heard that Washington, upon the end of the Revolutionary War, had resigned his command and returned it to the Continental army, to the Continental Congress, George III is said to have said, well, if that report is true, he is the greatest man in the world for doing exactly what you said, you know, not being beguiled by political ambition. Now, when we get to there in the narrative, I'll explain why it was. It would have been a different thing for Washington to attempt that than, say, any number of other victorious generals later on. But certainly serves his reputation well that he did that. In fact, as you suggest, he did twice. Once at the end of the Revolutionary War when he resigns command of the army, and then after two terms as president, when he retires and goes back to Mount Vernon.
- [09:03]
Yasha Monk
Well, so that's a great cliffhanger. I should try to have more cliffhangers like this in the podcast. Let's go back to the beginning and then work our way back up to these later stages. Washington is often portrayed as the consummate patrician, as somebody who's born at the top of a social hierarchy and who is, you know, even though he's a revolutionary leader in some ways to the manner born. You argue that that is an oversimplification, that even though he is obviously born into a kind of reasonably privileged cast of Lenin gentry, even though he's born in a slaveholding family, he is not nearly as elite as some of those portrayals have made him out to be.
- [09:45]
H.W. Brand
That's exactly right. And so both parts of that story are crucial. Washington was born into the Virginia gentry. Okay, so this is the upper class of Virginia in the early 18th century. So compared to the people around him, Washington was privileged. Washington did not have to worry about where the next meal was going to come from. On the other hand, though, this was a colonial gentry, this was a frontier gentry. And so members, the serious members of the aristocracy of the British Empire, they all lived in England. Now, actually, the Fairfax family was one that was sort of transatlantic. And Washington was fortunate enough to have got to know the Fairfaxes, Thomas Fairfax and other Fairfaxes, when he was young. And so it gave him sort of one leg up on climbing the ladder even within the gentry. So even within an aristocracy, there are always gradations. And Washington was not born at the top of that. And so he had to aspire. He had to work to ascend. He wasn't born particularly wealthy, certainly wealthy by comparison with the yeoman farmers of Virginia and certainly by the enslaved population of Virginia. But he couldn't simply rest on his inheritance. He wanted to make more of it. And a continuous theme in Washington's life was his desire to acquire more land. And this is what you did. Everybody in Virginia essentially made their living by the land, and Washington was A landowner, but he wanted more land. And this is what took him on his first adventures to the West. And it's important that although Washington was born in Virginia and grew up in Virginia, and Virginia was the first permanent colony and has a seaboard, Washington was associated with the west, the western part of Virginia. And I should add here that the western part of Virginia included what's now West Virginia and Kentucky and parts of Ohio. So we're not talking about just the Virginia on the map today. And so he's constantly heading out to the west. And it's as this person who has been to the west that he comes to the attention of the government of colonial Virginia and eventually to the British government in London.
- [12:07]
Yasha Monk
And so what does he do in the West? He's a surveyor. What precisely did that mean? I mean, when I picture a surveyor today, I picture sort of somebody in a high visibility vest with some weird machine standing around suburban London for some reason, I don't know why, that's my mental image.
- [12:20]
H.W. Brand
On the other hand, if you were surveying property, let's say in Alaska, you know, they would be going out in the wilderness and they would have to do some serious measurement. If you survey stuff in the city today, all the things are measured and you just find the post is already located. So Washington went out into western Virginia, which had never been surveyed before. And he did so in part because he was looking for the best land in a large grant that had been given to the Fairfax family. So he was hired by the Fairfax family. He went out with one of the Fairfax younger men on this surveying trip. And it was his first expedition into the wilderness. And Washington at that point began something that would be his great gift to biographers and historians. He kept a diary, a journalist, and Washington essentially kept a diary or a journal almost every day of his whole life. But it starts now. And so it's possible to find out what he's doing on each day and how he's responding to the challenges that he faces. And one of the things that Washington learned about himself on this journey and the biographer and the reader of biographies learns about Washington is he's somebody who thrives in the out of doors. Now, this was not a given for a member of the gentry. Many of them were more comfortable in parlors and salons. But Washington really liked being out of doors. It was a great adventure. He was camping out, he was getting rained on and snowed on, and he's falling in rivers and nearly freezing, and he thought it was the greatest thing in the world. So he was good at it. So he was good at it and he liked it. And this is going to serve him very well because he keeps his journal, he comes back and the surveying was fine. But he also develops this reputation as a young man, he's a teenager, of somebody who's resourceful, who could find his way in the wilderness, who can get along with the various Indians and frontiersmen who are out there and accomplish what needs to be accomplished. And so when the Virginia governor requires somebody to carry a message to the French who are trying to colonize the Ohio country, again, it's claimed by Virginia, but it's also claimed by the French to send a message, he says Washington's the guy to do it. And he develops this reputation of somebody who can take on challenges, who can figure a way to get through wherever he has to get through and get the message to where the message has to go. So he discovers that he is an outdoorsman. I should add here. He's also a wonderful horseman. He's great on horseback. And this is a big deal in those days. It's a big deal simply for getting around, because that's the way you got around, but also for winning the admiration, even the envy of your fellows. Because a man especially who was good on a horse, cut a commanding figure. It didn't hurt at all. Washington was big for his age. He was tall, he was well built, and put him on a horse and he cuts a commanding figure. Now, that's often a metaphor, but in Washington's case, it's going to be the actuality, because Washington on a horse becomes a very persuasive military commander. And that's eventually how.
- [15:38]
Yasha Monk
And of course, it's how he's often still portrayed when you look at statues and so on, like many other people of the age, he's shown on his horse.
- [15:44]
H.W. Brand
Precisely. And the fact that so many military figures are portrayed on horseback is testament to the impression that a man on a horse made. Because a guy on a horse, especially if you're a tall guy like Washington, when you're on a horse, you are head and shoulders and torso above everybody else. And in those days, before walkie talkies or radio communications, your soldiers had to be able to see you. And the fact that the enemy could see you, too, and level their guns at you and perhaps kill you made it the more impressive when you survived. So Washington did cut an impressive figure on a horse, and that that was quite important in his day. Another thing, Washington figures out at an early age that he has to develop A character he has, he will ascend by reputation. And reputation was really the coin of the realm among the gentry. Did you have a reputation as a brave man, as a capable man, as an honorable man, as a generous man, all this stuff? And so Washington decides that he needs to win the reputation. And how do you win a reputation? Well, you do the things that conduce to the reputation. So Washington creates this public character, and he basically sets this model for himself, this goal for himself. I'm going to become this person. And he takes the steps and he takes the actions to allow him to live up to the reputation he's aiming for for himself. And he does this his whole life. And one of the things it does shows the degree to which virtue of this kind, civic virtue, public virtue, can be developed. It's not by any means innate. You say, this is the man I'm going to become. And then you strive to become that man.
- [17:42]
Yasha Monk
Part of what's striking about this, again looking at it from 2026, is that clearly the incentives towards a good character, or at least what was at the time regard as a good character, were aligned. Which is to say that an ambitious man like Washington, who was born into some privilege, but who was very conscious of wanting to rise the social hierarchy from his starting point, thought that both appearing to have a good character and cultivating the virtues that really did give him a good character, which would be conducive to that goal. It's not clear to me that if you are born on, let's say, second or third base today, you're not born with a home run, but you're born with some social advantages. And you think, how do I score a home run? How do I. This is a horribly mixed metaphor. How do I really get ahead in life? Cultivating the best possible character is probably not where the incentives lie. If what you want is fame, renown, political power, the incentives go in a different direction. So tell us a little bit about this society that produced this. Tell us a little bit about what it meant to have a gentry, because Americans, I think, are a little confused about this. We have a sense that there was a kind of gentry in the 18th century, but we also have a strong sense that, unlike in Britain, there was not an aristocracy. So how should we think about this and how should we think about this world, which I think is a little bit more subtle than we sometimes make it out to be as well? It is a world in which virtue is rewarded, in which certain kind of character traits are highly regarded. But it's Also a world in which people are scheming to get more land. It is also a world, of course, in which people justify slavery. It's also a world in which there is a lot of partisan contestation, different factions, different groups plotting against each other. How should we understand the kind of social background against which Washington's rise takes place?
- [19:37]
H.W. Brand
So the first thing to keep in mind is that this was a pre capitalist world. So the world that Washington lived in was one in which not everything had been monetized. And so Washington was. He made his living as a planter. So he planted crops, he harvested the crops, he sold the crops with tobacco, for the most part. That was the largest cash crop. But tobacco was hard on the soil, so he shifted to wheat and oats and other just ordinary farm crops. One of the things he did not get into was cotton. I mean, cotton's going to come later, and that's really going to change the face and the economics of the South. But Washington comes along before cotton becomes a useful commercial crop. So since it's a pre capitalist society in which things are not particularly monetized, people don't compete on how large your bank account is. People don't. They wanted to have a handsome, let's say, home. And so Washington inherited a home. They gradually enlarged it, but it was one that you had to share with others. People competed in terms of hospitality. So it was expected if you were a landowner, if you were a member of the gentry, and I should add here, if you're a member of the gentry, you were in a relatively small class. We're talking about a few hundred people. And then add in the relatives, and it gets a little bit larger than that. In Virginia, where the economy was based largely on slavery, you were a slave owner, or I should say also maybe a slave manager. And we should talk about this because most of the slaves that Washington controlled, he didn't own. And so he couldn't have sold them if he wanted to. He couldn't have emancipated them if he wanted to. We'll get to that. But you were also expected to be a gracious host. And because of the nature of Virginia society, the fact that there were no cities in Virginia, it was all in the countryside. And travelers around Virginia, they couldn't expect to find a hotel and inn at the city. So they stayed in the private homes. And so Washington had open house pretty much every day. So anybody traveling from the southern part of Virginia toward Maryland would stop in at Mount Vernon and they would expect to be given dinner if the weather were poor or if they. They couldn't continue on, they would expect a room and they would go on the next day. And this was also the way that news traveled. This is the way Washington kept informed about things that were going on in the world. And so somebody in the virgin, in the gentry, for example, might appear to be very wealthy, but also could be deeply in debt. And this is, I mean, maybe the best example. This is Thomas Jefferson, who had this wonderful place at Monticello outside of modern Charlottesville. And he was constantly rebuilding, and he seemed to live the life of a wealthy man. But he was always deeply in debt. And at the time he died, everything that he owned had to be sold off to pay the debts. And so in Washington, in fact, at times, even though he had, he was one of the largest landholders in Virginia, couldn't come up with the cash to pay a relatively small cash debt. And so he had to ask for more time to pay. This is kind of a mortifying thing for a man of Washington's reputation, but that's the way it worked. And so one of the things that being a planter, being a member of the gentry did was it gave you practice in being, I might as well use the term, a commander. Because you were the commander of your little village, the people who lived on the plantation. You were literally a commander of the enslaved peoples who worked under you, and you were the boss. There were free people who worked under them. So you were their boss. You made the decision. So you had executive experience in a way that somebody who was a lawyer in Massachusetts, to take John Adams, second president, didn't have that kind of experience. It's not an accident that of the American presidents before the Civil War, a majority had been slaveholders, had been planters, because they had the advantage of dealing with large operations and making decisions in those operations.
- [23:56]
Yasha Monk
I've been thinking about a similar point in a totally different context, which is that I'm working on some questions around artificial intelligence at the moment. And there's sometimes a kind of line of argument that if artificial intelligence should displace a lot of human work, that's fine, because we'll be in a very affluent society and we'll give people universal basic income, and they'll be kind of like latter day aristocrats. Right? We'll just, you know, enjoy our leisure and cultivate our skills like aristocrats always did. And I always felt that that slightly mischaracterizes what the life of the average aristocrat was like, not just in the context of the American gentry, but of European aristocracy as well, where of course, you could not look after your lands and not look after the peasants who were cultivating your land in Europe or the enslaved people in the United States. And then you would probably end up with a lot less money than you were passed down and pass on a lot less money to your offspring. And you could do that for a generation. But that constituted a deep failure of honor. There was not. You were supposed to take care of your lands in a way that at least preserved them. And if you did actually want to be a good steward of your inheritance, of the chain of family that you occupied, the position of the chain of your family that you occupied, then you are actually kind of running a small to mid sized business. And I think that's true not just in the American context, but in the European context as well. So the kind of idea of a completely leisured aristocrat bears some resemblance to reality. There was obviously a lot of honor and status to be gained in, certainly not engaging in paid employment and of spending a lot of times playing cricket and going hunting and all of those things. But there was actually a real day job of running the estate. And if you were bad at it, that might be fine for a generation, but it really was to your discredit and created a significant problem. To return to the 18th century, Washington really starts off as a British loyalist. He thinks of himself as a kind of extended part of British aristocracy and part of the. The project of building the British Empire. How does that change? How does he turn from a British loyalist to an American revolutionary?
- [26:23]
H.W. Brand
So this is one of the principal tasks that a biographer of Washington, a historian of the period of the American Revolution, has to tackle and come to terms with. And it's important to remember that when the United States declared independence in 1776, that did not signify by any means that all people living in America were in favor of independence. There were a large category of. They were called Loyalists or Tories at the time. These are people who said, wait a minute, this independence is a terrible idea. And some of them, many of them, took up arms against George Washington and the Continental Army. They fought on the side of the British against American independence. And so the question is, why would somebody like George Washington come out in favor of independence? Why would he become a rebel? Why would he become a traitor? And this is an important question, because typically people who turn against their regime, their system, are people who are not succeeding in that. The successful ones are happy enough and they stay around and so Washington was quite successful. By the time of the American Revolution, he is even farther up the hierarchy of the Virginia gentry. He is married very well. He married a wealthy widow, acquired a great deal more land, more slaves, more property, and all this other stuff. He is well respected by this time. He has a reputation as Virginia's top soldier. It's important to keep this in mind. Not America's top soldier, but Virginia's top soldier. When we talk about America, America, I mean, talking about America in 1770 was like talking about Asia today. Asia. What do you mean by Asia? There are a lot of different countries in Asia, a lot of different peoples in Asia. And we talked about America was the same. There were Virginians, there were New Yorkers, there were Pennsylvanians. And people who lived in Virginia thought of themselves as Virginians and then perhaps as subject to the British crown, but not as Americans. So they thought they had more in common with people living in London than they had with people living in Boston. And so this is important to remember. The realm is some is relative to
- [28:34]
Yasha Monk
when it comes to Boston specifically. I still sometimes feel that way, but go ahead.
- [28:38]
H.W. Brand
People say the same thing about New York. And I live in Texas. Many people in the rest of the country think that same way about Texas. Texas thinks that way about the rest of the country. Anyway, so Washington is in this position where things are going well for Washington, but there are certain annoyances, and this is the part. Annoyances are annoyances, but grievances that rise to the level of sedition, treason, overthrowing the country. So what are these? Well, Virginians, like other people living in the American colonies over a period of about 100 and 150 years, had gotten used to the idea that they would pretty much govern themselves. This was due primarily just to inattention or laxity on the part of the British government. When colonists left England and went off to America, they pretty much fell out of sight and out of mind, and they were allowed to do more or less whatever they wanted. They came.
- [29:40]
Yasha Monk
And obviously the distances involved were so enormous. But it was very hard. You know, it's a form of principal agent problem. The principal in London had great difficulty instructing even the agent of a British crown sitting in Virginia exactly what the preferences were. And so some amount of self government was inevitable as a result.
- [29:57]
H.W. Brand
Precisely there was that. And there was also the fact that from the standpoint of London, there was very little of interest in North America. Now, if you look further south to the West Indies. Aha. Now we're talking about something that was great Interest, because there were sugar plantations and there was money to be made out of that, but out of North America, not much at all. And so decades would go by, and the colonists in America would have very little to do with what was going on in London or vice versa. And they got of a mind that we run our own affairs, and they interpreted this in ways that serve themselves as people do. So they thought, for example, that they ought to have the right to raise money the way they wanted, to spend money the way they wanted. If they got dragged into one of Britain's wars, they did so sometimes with less than perfect grace. So when the government in London said, we're going to go to war with France over something that has nothing to do with America, but Americans found themselves drawn into the war. And usually the war would spill over into America because the French controlled Canada and then Louisiana and parts of the West Indies. And so Americans would find themselves dragged into a war that they had no part in starting, they had no benefit from the end of. And it got kind of annoying. And. But. But then. But then when Americans wanted British protection. So, for example, we'll get to the. What began in America as the French and Indian War, and it's not the French against the Indians, it's the British and their Indian allies against the French and the French and the. And France's Indian allies. Anyway, it was a war that was of crucial importance for Washington, for people who lived in Virginia, for people who lived in Pennsylvania. It's a war that, in fact, Washington helped start because it was over control of the Ohio country. It's roughly where Ohio State is today, but including western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and so on. And the reason this was important, especially to somebody like Washington, was that the Virginians and the Pennsylvanians had their eye on that western territory, particularly the land in the western territory. The population of the American colonies was growing rapidly. Benjamin Franklin about this time did a calculation to show that the population doubled about once a generation. And they were almost all farmers. So they needed land to make a living, to bequeath to their children. And land in the west was cheap. So Washington joined up with Franklin and others in something called the Ohio Company. And it was a speculative venture. And the idea was that they would acquire title to a large tract of land in Ohio, and almost none of them would go out and live on the land. They would simply sell the land, survey the land, which is why Washington got involved, survey the land, and then sell it to somebody else. And so this. This, in fact, over time, this habit of purchasing land and reselling it at an appreciated value. More fortunes were made in American history by this means than by any other means. And Washington was in on the start of this. And so if the French took control over the Ohio country, then these dreams of speculative fortunes would go out the window. And so the Virginians had a real stake in this. So they were more than happy to join the British in the French and Indian War. But it segues into what becomes called the Seven Years War. And the last several years of the war have nothing to do with North America anymore. It's all about empire and what's happening in Europe. And so from the American standpoint, the fighting ends in the late 1750s, but there's no peace treaty until 1763. And then at the end of that, Americans are rather miffed to be sent what amounted the bill for their part of the war.
- [34:01]
Yasha Monk
And what does the bill look like?
- [34:03]
H.W. Brand
Well, they say, okay, you're going to pay more in taxes. Oh, and you're also going to get less in services. So the British, they ran up a very large debt fighting the French in the Seven Years War. And so at the end of the war, they said, okay, we got to pay back the debt because otherwise our lenders are not going to lend any money to us and we won't be able to continue our business. So they do two things that governments do when they have to shrink a debt or deficit. They try to reduce spending, and they try to increase revenues. And reducing the spending meant, for example, reducing the number of troops in the west in the territory that just had been won in the fighting against France and that people like Washington had expected. Now we can finally go out there and we can survey it and we can settle it, and we can make a bunch of money. And the Americans are told, nope, you can't do that because we are not going to station any troops out there. Oh, and by the way, to make sure you don't get into any trouble with the Indians, we are going to forbid you from settling in that Western territory. So after all this effort to try to settle, to survey, to colonize the western half, they're told, you can't go in there. The policy was articulated in something called the Proclamation of 1763. And this got people like Washington, oh, wait a minute, what's this all about? And then. And then Parliament passes the stamp first, the Sugar act and the Stamp Act, a series of taxes. So we fought this war, we won the war, and now we're being told we can't enjoy the benefits of winning. And moreover, we're going to have higher taxes as a consequence of this. And this isn't what we signed up for, they said. And because now the idea of being taxed by Parliament, it wouldn't have surprised anybody who lived in England, anybody who lived in Britain. But it did surprise the people living in America, because it hadn't been the case before. The idea was local taxes. Yeah, we fund our own local taxes. We vote on our own local taxes. And they allowed that the British could levy taxes on imports. This is a way of regulating trade, but internal taxes. And so this is when people in America start thinking, maybe this connection with Britain isn't such a good idea after all. And for the American colonists to think, maybe we don't need the British. It wasn't unthinkable at all if you'd been living, you know, in the southern part of England and said, no, we don't want to be governed by London. Well, you can't do that. But if you're living in Virginia, if there's 3,000 miles away. And for the previous three generations, the British show up only rarely. Yeah, we could go on our own. And so this is what somebody likes, Washington gets to thinking. And so resistance begins. There's opposition protests against the Stamp Act. There's a boycott that is initiated against British imports. The thinking is that we will employ economic sanctions against Britain. So economic sanctions, they've been around forever and ever, and it takes the form of we won't buy anything from Britain. And those British merchants, they will feel the pain and they will go to Parliament. And they said to Parliament, you got to make the Americans happy again so we can actually do business in the colonies.
- [37:24]
Yasha Monk
And so at this point, just to be clear, this is a rebellion against the fact that the deal has changed, that suddenly the colonists are supposed to pay a lot more tax and they're not getting its good services.
- [37:37]
H.W. Brand
We shouldn't use the term rebellion yet. We should say protest.
- [37:40]
Yasha Monk
Because at this point, that's what I'm trying to get at. At this point, the people involved in this are like, we need to resist this. We need to send a message. But they're not yet thinking we are the founders of a new nation.
- [37:52]
H.W. Brand
Correct? Yes. In fact, they make a point of saying, we are loyal Englishmen and we are standing on our rights as Englishmen to be free of taxes, except those that we vote upon ourselves. This had roots all the way back to Magna Carta in English history. And so when it served their purposes, the Americans said, we are Englishmen. We must be treated as Englishmen. We must have the rights of Englishmen. And this didn't always work for the folks back in Britain because they thought, wait a minute, you guys are colonists. And there's no question that in the minds of many people of the ruling class in London and in England generally, the colonists were considered second class subjects, not even citizens. They were provincials. You know, they had gone out, and these are the, the rubes who live on the frontier. And so there was a certain disdain that developed on the part of the English folks in Parliament, for the most part. And this attitude toward the colonists and the colonists felt this, and this enters into.
- [39:04]
Yasha Monk
And was there something sort of provincial about American life at this juncture? I mean, in the sense that, you know, if you were in Mount Vernon and Monticello and so on, were you sort of 10 years behind the fashion that was in London and you were, you know, a few years behind the literary trend? I mean, did it feel like London was a metropole and you have a periphery, or was there a kind of tuck Tunis culture that had really started to grow up even before 1776?
- [39:27]
H.W. Brand
Now here it really did depend on where you lived. If you lived in or around Boston, you thought, Boston, we're pretty up to date. Because Boston had University College, Harvard College, and it had a literary circle, it had libraries, it looked like a miniature version of London. And in part as a result of this, people in Massachusetts were even more annoyed by the disdain that was showed to them by people who lived in London who say, well, that's merely Boston, but somebody like Washington in Virginia I mentioned before, Virginia didn't have any cities, anything like Boston or New York. And so they tended to deal directly with their agents. If you were a planter like Washington, you had this, an agent in London who handled the sales of your produce, tobacco, for example, and who handled the purchase of the stuff that you wanted. And so Washington would say, ah, that carriage I've been using for a while, it's wearing out. Okay, send me the latest carriage. And here are the specifications. And Washington, or Jefferson in particular, would say to his agent, go to the local booksellers and get me the 50 most important books that have been published in the last year. And so they, they did certainly try to keep up this way. As of yet, there was almost. There was little in the way of higher education. There's little in the way of arts or the sciences in America. There's a beginning of it. Benjamin Franklin helped establish the American Philosophical Society, which gets going in that direction. I mentioned Harvard College and Yale College and there's a College of William and Mary in Virginia. But still, if for example, you were a wealthy family and you wanted your son to be a lawyer, you might very well send them to London. They'd go to the Inns of Court in London. And so it was really clear that London was the cultural capital of the realm that included the North American colonies. Boston would make partial exception to this. New York was kind of a world of its own, having been founded by the Dutch. And so it was more commercially bourgeois minded. But Virginia, Virginia was in many ways it should have been the most loyal of the colonies.
- [41:54]
Yasha Monk
It has been a long winter, but now finally summer is here. As I'm recording this in New York it really feels like mid July and I'm trying to figure out what to wear. When I'm just going to the gym I usually just wear a Persuasion T shirt which looks pretty good. But when I want to go to a social occasion and look nice but not overly formal, I always struggle to figure out what I should wear. Well, I have started wearing really nice linen pants and shirts from a company called Quince. They are perfect for the summer season. They are really nice and soft, they're lightweight and everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% cheaper than comparable brands. A few weeks ago I got a lovely 100% European linen relaxed long sleeve shirt. It's, it's really casual but elegant and I've been wearing it for our mini Heatwave. I strongly recommend it. If you want to look good without spending a fortune, Quince is the way to go. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com good fight for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's Q U I N C E for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quinns.com Good fight. So part of this, I mean you know, this conflict starts as a dispute over taxation and so on. A little bit of what's involved is the sense of feeling disrespected, of saying, you know, we actually have a rights of Englishmen but we're not to going being treated as equals, we're treating as these second class subjects. How does this conflict escalate and in retrospect is it inevitable that it did escalate? Or do you think that other choices by London could have kept America within the British Empire for decades or centuries longer or perhaps indefinitely?
- [44:07]
H.W. Brand
I'll take that last question first. It's very difficult for me to think that in the year 2026, the United States might remain part of a British Empire. Empires have gone out of fashion now, long ago. But it's not impossible for me to imagine that there would have been a change of government in London in the 1770s before the American Declaration of Independence said, you know what? It's better to keep the Americans around as friends than to have them as enemies. So we can compromise on this stuff. And if they were willing to compromise, then they would have found people in the Americas who were willing to compromise. There were very few people before about 1774 who said, We've got to become independent. There was really no groundswell in favor of independence until relatively late in the game. And so the United States might. What would become the United States might very well have evolved as Canada evolved. So Canada was invited by the American colonies upon independence to join their revolt against Britain. And the Canadians said, no, thank you. We're doing okay within the British Empire. And they got gradually more and more home rule until in the 1860s. So now we jump, you know, eight decades ahead. And from then, effectively, Canada has been independent, not. Not quite. Canada still recognized the British crown and all that, but to all intents and purposes. So, and I should add that, yes, America breaks with Britain in the 1770s and then basically makes it effective as of the 1780s. And there's about 12 decades to the beginning of the 20th century when the United States and Britain are often. Well, in fact, they're formally at war in what Americans call the War of 1812, but they're kind of at odds with each other for a while. But since 1900, the United States and Britain have been the closest of allies, and in some ways, the United States. I mean, leaving aside the last 10 years, where things have gotten rocky again, but leaving that aside, the United States and Britain were, in fact, closer allies to each other than Britain and Canada were to each other. And so today, if there hadn't been an American Revolution, or if there had been an American Revolution and it had failed, we probably would end up. We'd probably be about where we are today, but we would have arrived in a different timetable and by somewhat different means. Now, I will say that if the different means includes not having a war in which thousands of people died, that could be a good thing. If you can avoid wars, you should really try to do so.
- [46:41]
Yasha Monk
Right? I mean, it could also, of course, have led to a much later war that perhaps would have been much more bloody with more modern technology, and perhaps would have Soured relations between Britain and America much more strongly. I mean, counterfactual history is always difficult in the arsenal to do counterfactual history, but you could imagine, in a sense, sort of, it's healthy for adolescents, for teenagers to separate themselves from their parents a little bit, because then it's easy in early adulthood to come back and develop a strong relationship. If you delay the period at which you create autonomy for yourself, A relationship can get much more complicated and rocky later on.
- [47:19]
H.W. Brand
True enough, but there's one other thing to consider here, and that is that the British Parliament in the 1830s decreed an end to slavery within the British Empire. This is in the 1830s. The United States is not going to end slavery within the United States until 1865 with the passage of the, the end of the Civil War, the 13th Amendment. So if America had been part of the British empire in the 1830s, slavery in America might have ended 30 years before it actually did. Now, this is a little bit difficult because there would have been this. Ending slavery within the British Empire would have been a bigger deal if the British Empire at that time had included the cotton growing American southern states. So it might have been more difficult, but it was the thing that made it so hard to end slavery in the United States was the fact that the people who owned the slaves and who benefited from slavery had to vote. Slavery ended. They had to take.
- [48:25]
Yasha Monk
If a decision had been made by people in London, it would have been easier to say precisely so there weren't
- [48:30]
H.W. Brand
any slaves in London when parliament set an end to slavery and just hit folks in the West Indies. And so they could have said, okay, South Carolinians, you know, you guys get rid of your slaves. So, yeah, it's useful as an exercise to consider these things, but one shouldn't.
- [48:48]
Yasha Monk
One other possibility is that at that point, the war of independence and the war to preserve slavery might have then coincided. So rather than having a revolutionary war and a civil war, you might have had a number of states break away from Britain over the issue of slavery in the 1830s. And if they prevailed, then perhaps they would have preserved slavery. So the possibilities are many.
- [49:14]
H.W. Brand
One last thing on that, though. If the slave states had broken away in the 1830s, they would not have been opposed merely by the northern states in the United States, they would have been opposed by the northern states and the rest of the British empire.
- [49:25]
Yasha Monk
Or they might have been able to forge a coalition with a northern state because the conflict would not have been about the nature of the future political settlement within an independent republic. But they might have been able to wed the issue of slavery to the issue of self determination for the colonies. And so perhaps they might have been able to forge a coalition over northern states against Britain. We can play this game forever, but let's get back to actual history. So what's the phase shift? Where does this protest turn into a rebellion, turn into a revolution?
- [49:58]
H.W. Brand
When the Americans protest, the British instead of saying let's compromise, they double down and they say let's teach these Americans an example. And some of this just reflects politics in Britain. And so within British politics, the party that says act tough on the Americans, they win. And it's very often the case that when you're campaigning in politics you say, we're going to be strong, we're going to enforce a law, we're going to do all this, it's a popular thing. And so when the British escalate, the Americans escalate and the Americans stage violent protests and then the British send troops to America and then there are more protests. And when the Americans see that the British troops are coming to be used not against the French, not against the Indians, but against them, they say, wait a minute, we're being invaded by this country. And it makes Britain start to look like a foreign country with an army of occupation. And the fighting in America begins when a Massachusetts militia, and by the way, every colony had a militia, its own army, because they didn't have a combined army before this. Each one had its own army of part time soldiers and they had stashes of weapons and this is, they had their armories and this is where they stored the weapons. They'd be out farming during the day, but then if trouble arose, they'd go get their arms and go off and fight. And the British decided that they were going to seize one of these armories and so that the, the Massachusetts militia would not be able to use them against British troops. It would be the natural thing to do if you were the general of the British troops in Boston. But the Americans, the Massachusetts militia said, wait a minute, you're disarming us so you can oppress us even further. And when the militia said to the British coming, you can't have our weapons, then the battles of Lexington and Concord took place. Whereas a firefight between these two groups and that's the start of the American Revolutionary War. But at the time, nobody realizes it's a war, nobody realizes it's going to last a long time and nobody quite knows what it's about yet. Washington, just two months after this is Appointed commander of a new army, a continental army. There was no American army before this. The Continental Congress, which was an ad hoc group, self appointed. It wasn't authorized by British law or anything, but they get together, they meet in Philadelphia, the largest city in the colony, centrally located. And they say, we have to have an organization among the different militia. And so we can all defend, and this is key, we're talking 1775, so we can defend our rights as Englishmen, not as Americans, but our rights as Englishmen. And they look around. So who is the most accomplished soldier that we have? And their eye lights on George Washington, who from the time he began as a surveyor in western Virginia, then became head of the Virginia militia, the commander of the Virginia regiment. He won a reputation and various honors fighting in the French and Indian War. And here's a crucial thing we were talking about the evolution of Washington's thinking. Washington served right next to right alongside British officers during the French and Indian War. And he and his men performed much better under fire than the British troops and their officers did. And until that time, it was possible for the British to sustain the mystique that the British army was the best army in the world. They had the best uniforms, they really knew how to drill, they marched in rank and all of this stuff. But when they came under attack, when they came under attack in conditions that existed in America, they fell apart and they ran where Washington's soldiers and his fellow officers, they were the ones who saved the day. To the extent that this battle didn't turn, this particular battle in the French and Indian War didn't turn into an even worse route. And at that point, Washington realizes, wait a minute, these British soldiers are not 10ft tall. In fact, I'm better than their officers, and my men are better soldiers than their men. And he begins to imagine, okay, I can do this. When people are trying to figure out what they're going to do with their lives, what their options are, one of the best ways of determining this is you get yourself in a position where you see where other people who do that, how you match up with them. And Washington saw this, and he realized he matched up very well with them. Now, at one point in the French and Indian War, Washington sought a commission in the British army. He was a colonial officer, but the British soldiers who were fighting alongside him against the French, they refused to take orders from a mere provincial. So Washington went to the British commander in chief, an American, Sid, and he went with a recommendation from the governor of Virginia, saying, you got to give this Guy a commission in the British army, and that way his orders will have weight. And the commander in chief, for his own political reasons, said, no, I'm not going to do that. He did tell the British, guys, you got to listen to Washington. But he didn't give Washington that commission. Now, various people have thought, you know, if the British had seen what was coming, they would have been really smart to commission Washington as an officer in the British army. And so then Washington's loyalties would have shifted. They wouldn't have stayed with Virginia. They would shift it to the British government and the crown. And Washington, if push continued to come. Now, this, the events I'm describing, they happened 10 years before the events that lead up to independence. So a lot of stuff could have happened in between. But nonetheless, this showed to Washington that there was a ceiling on what he could accomplish, on the reputation that he could acquire, on how he would be seen in the eyes of others as long as he remains part of the British empire. He might be the greatest man in Virginia, but he would always be looked down upon precisely because he was a provincial and Washington wasn't especially ambitious. Washington didn't really care what people in London thought of him. But still, the idea that people could lord it over him for no good reason, it made him think, I could get along without the British. Now, eventually it would come to. And I won't put it this way, because Washington isn't thinking these terms exactly. But if you don't need Britain, if it's just another level of overhead you can do without, then it's tempting to think we ought to then on Washington's side. So Washington is appointed commanding general of this new continental army. He is sent to Boston, where the British are besieged inside Boston by the colonial militias. Now, the fighting has developed a momentum of its own. Nobody could have told you what they're fighting about. The British. Well, they don't want to get surrounded and captured and taken prisoner. And the Americans haven't cornered the British in Boston. They don't want them to get away. And it's just, you know, however this thing started, it's like a sports game, a contest. You want to win, you know, what's the big purpose of winning any particular sports contest? I don't know. But once you're playing it, you want to win, and that's the way it was here. But it did mean that Washington, for the first more than a year of his command, didn't know what the war aims were. He was going to try to, well, you know, keep from Being captured by the British and try to keep the British from getting away. Well, the British did get away. They sailed away from Boston, so that wasn't good. But then. So he retreats to defend New York. But defend New York for what? Why? Well, again, so the British can't take it. But why did the British want to take it? What is this all about? And this is finally.
- [58:14]
Yasha Monk
So what is this last step? Right. So just to keep track here, you know, we have a protest that turns into a kind of rebellion that turns into a war in which you're trying to win. How does that then turn into the revolution? How is it that those war aims clarify? And they clarify in the form of, we need to fight for magnanim.
- [58:36]
H.W. Brand
Yeah. So in the middle of this winter. And it's worth bearing in mind that in those days, fighting generally ceased during the winter because the roads turned to mud, nobody could move, and it's easier. We just wait till spring. So Washington is largely hanging around in the winter of 1775, 1776. And what are we going to do once the fighting season begins in the spring? And how's that going to happen? How's that going to work out? And in the middle of this, Thomas Paine, who's a recent arrival from England himself, comes over and he writes a pamphlet called Common Sense. And the common sense conclusion is that Americans, you've been fighting now for several months, and you better figure out what you're fighting about. And the only thing that makes any kind of common sense to be fighting about is independence. Because if you don't become independent, you could win this particular campaign. And two years from now, you have to refight the same battle because you wouldn't have established the principle that Americans make laws for Americans. And so this pamphlet, it becomes a hit immediately, one of the fastest selling pieces of political propaganda in American history. And all of a sudden, all sorts of Americans are nodding their head. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's what we ought to be doing. So when the Continental Congress meets in the spring of 1776, now it doesn't take long for this question of independence to come to the fore, but everybody realizes it's a big step. Because to say until this point, we are simply defending our rights as Englishmen, that's acceptable. That's something that George III can understand, even if he disagrees with. But if you say, now we are fighting for independence now, you are committing treason. And it means that the people who sign this Declaration of Independence, when it comes to that, they're putting their heads in the noose. And if they lose this war, they could lose their lives. So this is a big step. And from Washington's standpoint, it's a big step. He's in favor of it. And it also clarifies things dramatically, because now when he goes to talk to his soldiers, he can say, you are fighting for your own country. You are fighting for your own rights. You're fighting for your own destiny. If we win this, we will no longer be subject to the whimsical of these rulers far away and of that distant king. And we are going to create, and this is a big deal. We're creating a republic. This is a political system where authority emanates from the people, not from above, not from a king, but from you. You are now the right, the equal of King George. Now go out and fight and win. So Washington is able to rally his troops. And when the news arrives in Washington's camp that the Declaration of Independence has been successfully passed by the Continental Congress, there are celebrations there to say, okay, now we know what we're fighting for. And so this is the big step. But it's interesting to stop at that point, say when the protests began in 1765 against the Stamp Act. We're now 11 years past that. Did anybody back then know where this was going to end? And the answer is, I mean, there were some people maybe who thought about it, but they weren't. They didn't have loud voices that other people were hearing. But it's an example of one thing leads to another leads to another. There were plenty of people in 1760. I'm sorry, 1776 in America, the ones that I mentioned earlier, the Loyalists who said, this is too big a step. You know, this is really over correcting that those laws, the taxes and all that, those are bad laws. But it doesn't mean you break up the British Empire just over these bad laws. Just vote in new people in London and change the laws. And there were people in London who said, boy, if we had known this is what it was going to come to, then we would have been more willing to compromise earlier. It's important to note that just as the Americans were not unified behind the Declaration of Independence, people in Britain were not unified behind this campaign to suppress the Americans. There were plenty of people in Britain who said the Americans, they actually got grounds for their complaints. And so. And this is crucial to the way the war is handled. It was a war that began in politics, and the politics. The political question for Americans was, where do your Political loyalties lie. The political questions for Britain was, how much pressure do we put on the Americans? How big a deal is it to have these colonies as formerly subservient to the British Empire? Because I mentioned the war begins in politics, and the war is going to end in politics. And Washington understands this. And this is one of the keys to Washington's success as a military commander, because he realizes that he doesn't have to defeat the British army, he doesn't have to win the war in a positive sense. He simply has to avoid losing the war, because as long as he can keep his army intact, then the British will have to keep fighting him. And Washington knows that people in Britain have the option at any given moment to say, wait, that war in America, that's getting too expensive. That's getting too much trouble. Let's just end the war. And that's the way the war finally ends. I mean, to put it over simply, Washington loses almost every battle except the one that matters. The last battle at Yorktown. And he knew this all along. He can lose and he can lose and he can lose. But if he wins the last battle, he wins the war because it's the last battle that will convince the British, finally, enough is enough. We're going home.
- [64:17]
Yasha Monk
And then the Americans is not worth our while fighting.
- [64:20]
H.W. Brand
Precisely.
- [64:22]
Yasha Monk
So we've walked a little bit through the evolution of thinking about whether or not this is a war of independence or not, how the colonists got to the point of saying, we're no longer British, subjects of a British crown, we actually want to found our own country. Obviously, there's a whole parallel set of debates about what should the nature of this country be? Should it be a republic or a monarchy? Should it be a very loose federation of states? Or should it be the United States of America with a stronger federal element? What role does George Washington play in those debates? To what extent is the picture of him as somebody who stays sort of above the fray, certainly of partisan fights, of ideological battles like that between Jefferson and Hamilton and so on? Accurate. And to what extent is he really sort of just one more partisan player within one more ideological, I guess, combatant within these fights over what nature this new state should have?
- [65:32]
H.W. Brand
George Washington was no political theorist, and he was surrounded by political theorists. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, all sorts of other people. Thomas Paine, they were writing political treatises. And this is the way it ought to be, from first principles, going back to the Roman republic, places like that. Washington wasn't one of those. But Washington was an example of military and Then political leadership. And between the theory and the practice of leadership, there sometimes is a big gap. And Washington's example, first as commander in chief of the army and then as president, gave the advocates of republicanism the idea that this is going to be a republic and not a monarchy, gave them cause for confidence that, in fact, this American people can actually govern itself. Now, it was a big step because there was very little historical evidence, certainly in the last 2,000 years, there was a Roman republic. So there was. The idea of a republic wasn't created out of whole cloth, but there weren't active Republics in the 18th century, none that really counted enough that Americans used them for an example. And so the Americans were saying, okay, they're going to try something never been done before. How can we create a country just by sitting down together in Philadelphia and having this convention and writing down this constitution? And this is the country. Now, the government that the Americans created for this new republic, the one that we know is the second try. The first try was one that had to deal with 13 separate countries. And this is crucial to understanding how this came about and, in fact, why the American government today is what it is. So the country began as 13 separate countries to the extent that the chief executive officer of several of the newly independent states was called a president, not a governor. So South Carolina had a president and Georgia had a president. This is the president of those states. And the states all considered themselves sovereign and independent, and they didn't owe anything to each other except proximity and maybe neighborliness, but they didn't owe any allegiance to any of the other states. So this is important. And the incentives of winning the war against Britain provoked enough, elicited enough cooperation among the states, voluntary cooperation, that they were able to make it work, because they all realized, we got to cooperate to get Britain out of here. But in some ways, the victory over Britain was the worst thing that could happen for this new. This nascent republic, because with the British threat gone, then the separate states go their own way, and they begin bickering among themselves. They begin imposing levy on tariffs, taxes on imports from other states. They begin treating each other as an enemy rather than this continued ally. And Washington, in particular, became very dismayed at this, because he had spent eight years of his life risking his life trying to create this newly independent country. And then in the few years after the war, he saw it begin to fall apart. And so he became convinced that what was needed was a stronger central government. And he was talked into. Although he had no political ambitions, he thought after Ending after winning the American Revolutionary War, his public career was over. He handed in his commission and he went back to Mount Vernon intending to be a plant or a farmer for the rest of his life. That's what he really wanted to do. But five years later, he was talked into. Four years later, he was talked into joining this convention at Philadelphia to write a new constitution that was gonna strengthen the central government. And Washington was immediately elected president of the convention. But all that meant was presiding officer. One of the things it did was it alleviated, spared Washington the necessity to speak in the Constitutional Convention.
- [69:24]
Yasha Monk
Right. Rather than having to take a position on the most contentious questions about constitutional provisions, he was the person organizing the.
- [69:32]
H.W. Brand
This brings out a secret of Washington's success. Washington understood the power of silence. If you don't speak, people cannot draw negative conclusions about clarification.
- [69:45]
Yasha Monk
I mean, is this a brilliant strategy or is this just his personality that, as you're saying, he was surrounded by these political skewers who love to argue about these things, and he personally is just not as interested in them.
- [69:56]
H.W. Brand
That's right. He was not interested in doing it. He wasn't good at it. But it also enhanced his reputation because put yourself among all of these lawyers and politicians in this small room in Pennsylvania, and they'll are all arguing with each other. And as soon as they're arguing with each other, they all basically lure themselves to each other's level. And Washington's sitting there silent at the head table, and people are imagining, so what's Washington thinking? And he doesn't say. And they all can imagine that. So he is wiser. You know, he's. He's got the answers to this.
- [70:30]
Yasha Monk
But obviously it's always very tempting to think he's wise. And obviously I know what's best, so he must agree with me.
- [70:36]
H.W. Brand
There's.
- [70:37]
Yasha Monk
That he may not be at liberty to say it, but since there's also this, he must have the same opinion as me.
- [70:43]
H.W. Brand
There's also the very practical matter that whichever side wins a particular aspect of the debate, it can, as you say, can claim Washington. And Washington doesn't have to disavow something that he said. So he's. He's the one who's best positioned at the end of this to become the first president, because there's no record of him opposing anything that was approved or disapproving, you know, of voting for something that wasn't approved. So his silence serves him well. And there's also, and this is crucial, he had the reputation of being the victorious general and no one else there did. And so this by itself put him head and shoulders above everybody else. There's something else as well, and that is, with the exception of Benjamin Franklin, who was 20 years older than Washington, 25 years old in Washington, he was a generation older than almost everybody else in the room. So, you know, he's. If they were founding fathers, he's a founding grandfather. And so he has this edge. And here's the last thing on this. And this really gets at Washington's attitude toward being president and crucially, leaving the presidency. I talked earlier about Washington's desire to have this reputation that people admire. Washington recognized that his reputation was as high as it was ever going to get at the end of the Revolutionary War. He was the victorious general. He was the father of the country. He realized that anything that he did after that would tarnish his reputation. And so he had every incentive to stay out of politics. There's one last thing. So when I mentioned earlier that George III called Washington the greatest man in the world for relinquishing command. Well, suppose the counterfactual. Suppose Washington had said in 1783, I'm not giving up command. I'm going to take over the government. What would he have taken over? There was no government to take over. There was this. The America was an alliance. It would be sort of like today if, let's say, a German general, a British general, a French general decided to take over NATO. You know, what do you do? You march on Brussels. And what do you got when you're there? You know, all the power, all the wealth is elsewhere.
- [73:17]
Yasha Monk
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of A Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, we talk not about Washington's presidency himself, but about how he relinquished his presidency and how that set a very important norm for American political institutions. We talked about his views on political partisanship, on the rise of political parties that hadn't really been anticipated in the Constitution and which was much lamented by Washington. And we talked about what these developments tell us about the political fragility of the American system today to listen to that part of the conversation to support this podcast, to make sure that you get access to all full episodes of A Good Fight, please go to writing.yashamunk.com and become a paying subscriber. That's writing.yashamunk.Com.