The New Criterion

I herewith confess to having had an unpatriotic thought: as a youth, I was dismissive of the Father of His Country. I grew up as an impressionable boy in the age of generals Marshall, Patton, Bradley, and Eisenhower. Each of their great World War II battles in the 1940s was—or so it seemed to me—a relentless advance on the road to the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers, something every American wanted desperately. But in nine engagements with the British in an eight-year war, General Washington won only three! This was an embarrassment to national pride! A patriotic boy wants a general to win every battle and reckons little the value of strategic withdrawals, exhausting attrition, and the ultimate prize—winning the war.

Then, too, George Washington (1732– 1799) always seemed so much more remote and inaccessible than most national military heroes, even though his picture, a reproduction of the portrait by Rembrandt Peale, hung on the schoolroom walls. Grant and Sherman, Lee and Jackson were nearer: one could still speak to the children of the soldiers they had commanded. Indeed, in the South, where I was reared, that war wasn’t quite over in the 1940s—and may never be for certain hotheads. As to World War I, my own father, who had served in the tank corps, could tell a great many personal stories about “Black Jack” Pershing and the American Expeditionary Force in France. Washington, though, was lost in an eighteenth-century mist, and the recorded stories about him were either so preposterous (“I cannot tell a lie”) or so absolutely boring that he did not inspire passionate identification and boyish enthusiasm. He was so upright and virtuous, so stiff and wooden, that national ardor had, for a boy, little of the attractively personal to fix upon.

A string of biographies, read in later life, were of little additional help to me in understanding why Washington should have generated such reverence among the revolutionary patriots who founded this nation. Parson Weems—the biographer to whom we owe the dubious story of the chopped-down cherry tree—simply apotheosized the Founder, inventing virtues and achievements that never were on land or sea. Washington Irving’s five-volume Life (1855–1859) was considerably more reliable, but the elderly Victorian writer who produced it never really got inside his subject, although he had “met” him. This meeting occurred when his Scottish nursemaid, seeing the president on the street in New York, presented the baby Irving to Washington with the words: “Please, your honor, here’s a bairn was named after you.” Washington, who had no children of his own (a fact he lamented in a rough draft of his “First Inaugural Address”), is said to have touched the young Irving on the head and given him thereby the paternal blessing. A grateful nation gave him many children. My own great-great-grandfather, Washington Tuttleton, out on the frontier, was one of them —though he was not lucky enough to receive a personal blessing. Nor, for obvious reasons, did his twin, Columbus Tuttleton. But such namings were an index of the enthusiastic nationalism—now lost—that permeated American life in the first half-century of the existence of the republic.

The modern lives of Washington—the seven-volume life by Douglas Southall Freeman (1948–1957), James Thomas Flexner’s George Washington (1965–1972), and the one-volume studies by Garry Wills (1984) and Paul K. Longmore (1988)—have more authenticity than the early hagiographies. But there is really no substitute for getting to know Washington directly, and the Library of America has now made that possible in a convenient one-volume compilation, George Washington: Writings.[1]

Washington, it should be said at once, did not have, like many of the Founding Fathers, the benefits of a university education. After the Revolutionary War, he was urged to write his memoirs. But, as he told David Humphreys, “I am conscious of a defective education, & want of capacity to fit me for such an undertaking.” He grew up amid the Virginia gentry, but he had lost his father early, and the family was always in want of money. The youth was an excellent horseman and had a natural bent for the military. He served in the British army during the French and Indian Wars and even, at age twenty-two, earned the attention of King George II. A letter of 1754 to his brother, describing Britain’s first engagement with the French, made its way into London Magazine: “I fortunately escaped without a wound, tho’ the right Wing where I stood was exposed to & received all the Enemy’s fire and was the part where the man was killed & the rest wounded. I can with truth assure you, I heard Bulletts whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.” Horace Walpole reported the response of the king: “He would not say so, if he had been used to hear many.”

He did hear a great many at the British attack on Fort Duquesne in 1755, where General Braddock was mortally wounded and the British defeated. Washington had two horses shot from under him, and four bullets ripped through his uniform. But he survived, negotiated a difficult British retreat after Braddock died, and was promoted to Colonel for his gallantry in action. Advancement in the British army was hit or miss for able American colonials, no matter how loyal to the Crown: London preferred English-born officers. So Washington retired to private life in 1758 and devoted himself to the life of a Tidewater planter. He had married by this time Martha Custis, a wealthy widow with thousands of acres and hundreds of slaves. He told Richard Washington: “I am now I beleive fixd at this Seat with an agreable Consort for Life and hope to find more happiness in retirement than I ever experiencd amidst a wide and bustling World.”

During these years he farmed (unprofitably) and ran up large debts by importing expensive English goods, while at the same time making his political counsel heard in the Virginia Assembly and House of Burgesses. Although he was a slaveholder, he had no clear thoughts about slavery before the Revolution, but afterward his unvarying position was that gradual, legal emancipation was the only remedy for it: “I hope it will not be conceived from these observations, that it is my wish to hold the unhappy people who are the subject of this letter, in slavery. I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it—but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, & that is by Legislative authority: and this, as far as my suffrage will go, shall never be wanting.”

He complained to his English agent that “The Stamp Act, imposed on the Colonies by the Parliament of Great Britain engrosses the conversation of the speculative part of the Colonists, who look upon this unconstitutional method of Taxation as a direful attack upon their Liberties, & loudly exclaim against the violation.” When Britain closed the Boston Harbor in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party, Washington joined in the call for a general congress of colonial governments to protest English economic tyranny. As he noted in a letter to George William Fairfax,

the Ministry may rely on it that Americans will never be tax’d without their own consent that the cause of Boston the despotick Measures in respect to it I mean now is and ever will be considerd as the cause of America (not that we approve their condt in destroyg the Tea) & though god only knows what is to become of us, threatned as we are with so many hoverg evils as hang over us at present; having a cruel & blood thirsty Enemy upon our Backs, the Indians, between whom & our Frontier Inhabitants many Skirmishes have happend, & with whom a general war is inevitable whilst those from whom we have a right to Seek protection are endeavouring by every piece of Art & despotism to fix the Shackles of Slavry upon us.

To another friend, George Mason, he observed that “at a time when our lordly Masters in Great Britain will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprivation of American freedom, it seems highly necessary that something shou’d be done to avert the stroke and maintain the liberty which we have derived from our Ancestors; but the manner of doing it to answer the purpose effectually is the point in question.” The manner of doing it was prescribed by the second Continental Congress, which declared independence from Great Britain and appointed Colonel Washington as Commander in Chief of the American forces.

It would be tedious to rehearse here the many skirmishes, blockades, and battles that American colonials fought under Washington during a revolution that stretched from the “shot heard round the world” to the peace treaty with England in 1783. Suffice it to say that, in the Library of America volume, editor John Rhodehamel has given us—in addition to many private and personal letters—a splendid selection of Washington’s general orders, accounts of battle, reports to Congress, and the like. These documents prove that the style is the man. Washington’s prose is formal, serious, elevated, latinate, and Ciceronian in its copia. It is the style of an American who has absorbed the periods of Addison and Steele rather than of Laurence Sterne.

The calculated strategy of Washington and his generals was that, “on our side the War should be defensive, It has been even called a War of posts, that we should on all occasions avoid a general Action or put anything to the risque unless compelled by a necessity into which we ought never to be drawn.”

But only a callow youth could fail to be moved by the reasons why the war had to be a defensive one. The problems of the commander were ruinous. He had to wheedle and cajole a powerless continental congress and thirteen different colonial governments into giving him the men and supplies they had sworn, on their sacred honor, to provide. Washington had to deal with local militias that wanted to fight on their own terms, with large-scale desertions at harvest time or in winter, with poor housing, smallpox and dysentery, mutinies over pay, and insufficient ordnance. There were never enough cartridges, for instance, and those that were provided were often of odd sizes that did not fit the militia rifles.

General Washington was an energetic advocate of army needs, telling John Banister in 1778 that “to see Men without Cloathes to cover their nakedness, without Blankets to lay on, without Shoes, by which their Marches might be traced by the Blood from their feet, and almost as often without Provisions as with; Marching through frost and Snow, and at Christmas taking up their Winter Quarters within a day’s March of the enemy, without a House or Hutt to cover them till they could be built and submitting to it without a murmur, is a mark of patience and obedience which in my opinion can scarce be parallel’d.” But the several colonies were dilatory in assisting Washington. As the war dragged on, some were beginning to think that the Revolution had been a mistake and that peace ought to be sought, but Washington was adamant: “Nothing short of Independence, it appears to me, can possibly do.”

Washington’s defeat of Cornwallis at the battle of Yorktown in 1781 sealed the end of British rule in the colonies. There was great fear in America of a postwar standing army, but Washington, in retiring to Mount Vernon, reassured the colonies by maintaining that “as the sword was the last Resort for the preservation of our Liberties, so it ought to be the first thing laid aside, when those Liberties are firmly established.” His victories and this indifference to political power transfigured Washington into the savior of his country. While the colonial authorities deliberated in the 1780s on what kind of constitution and republican government should be drafted, Washington urged a strong federal government.

It now rests with the Confederated Powers, by the line of conduct they mean to adopt, to make this Country great, happy, and respectable; or to sink into littleness; worse perhaps, into Anarchy and Confusion; for certain I am, that unless adequate Powers are given to Congress for the general purposes of the Federal Union that we shall soon moulder into dust and become contemptable in the Eyes of Europe, if we are not made the sport of their Politicks; to suppose that the general concern of this Country can be directed by thirteen heads, or one head without competent powers, is a solecism, the bad effects of which every Man who has had the practical knowledge to judge from, that I have, is fully convinced of.

A relatively strong federal government the Founders produced, and it was a foregone conclusion that Washington would not only be elected the first president but that he would be reelected by unanimous votes of the Electoral College (the only president so honored). The years of his presidency (1790–1798), full of rough-and-tumble sectional politics, are splendidly represented in the Library of America collection, which gives us inaugural addresses, messages to congresses, and presidential proclamations, as well as extensive correspondence. Washington was so beloved of the people that he could do no wrong, a fact that vexed to livid irritation more mundane politicians like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. Washington, on whom was lavished the popular reverence once accorded to the king, shrewdly exploited his exemption from criticism, even while rivals like Vice President John Adams would jealously complain that “he was too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station and reputation.” These are the years splendidly recounted in Richard Norton Smith’s new paperback version of Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation. [2] Smith wishes to reclaim Washington as a central intellectual force in the formation of constitutional theory and presidential prerogative. Certainly the Library of America documents make plain that Washington considered his every move in the light of its precedent-setting implication.

A somewhat different intention animates Richard Brookhiser’s book Founding Father, which has also recently appeared in paper covers. [3] For Brookhiser, Washington’s mind and his relation to the ideas that motivated his private and political conduct are well worth knowing. But more important to him are Washington’s moral qualities, those aspects of unimpeachable character, that made him beloved of the nation. Brookhiser’s work is “a moral biography, in the tradition of Plutarch,” that tries to account for Washington “by looking at his nature, his morals, and his ideas.” He gives us an excellent account of Washington’s “nature” —his stature (six feet three), his oval face and fair complexion, his bad teeth and stoic temperament, his reserved demeanor, his explosive temper, etc. But of preeminent importance to Brookhiser are the principles which Washington brought to bear on this nature and their effect on the formation of his character.

When he was about fifteen, Washington appears to have copied out a translation of “Bienséance de la Conversation entre les Hommes,” a list of 110 prescriptions compiled in a French Jesuit treatise of 1595 and translated into English by Francis Hawkins, whose London text, called “Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation,” went through some ten editions between 1640 and 1672. These rules established some of the forms of polite behavior that would have been essential knowledge to a rising young Virginian. George Washington: Writings offers the “Rules of Civility” as the first document in the collection, even though Washington is not its author.

These rules are such as one might imagine: “Shift not yourself in the Sight of others nor Gnaw your nails”; “Shake not the head, Feet, or Legs rowl not the Eys lift not one eyebrow higher than the other wry not the mouth, and bedew no mans face with your Spittle, by approaching too near him when you Speak”; “Put not your meat to your Mouth with your Knife in your hand neither Spit forth the Stones of any fruit Pye upon a Dish nor Cast anything under the table.”

But a great many other rules suggest the fundamental sensitivity to others that defined Washington’s true character. The first rule is “Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.” From this follow other forms that come to signify gentlemanly behavior: “Superfluous Complements and all Affectation of Ceremonie are to be avoided, yet where due they are not to be Neglected”; “When you deliver a matter do it without Passion & with Discretion, however mean y~spe Person be you do it too”; and “In the Presence of Others Sing not to yourself with a humming Noise, nor Drum with your Fingers or Feet.”

These rules were not only useful in forming the character of our first president, according to Brookhiser, they are still pertinent today—especially since public civility seems to have gone up in smoke. In fact, so valuable are these rules to Mr. Brookhiser that he has separately edited and published them, adding a commentary indicating their modern pertinence. [4] For instance, Rule 2: “When in company, put not your hands to any part of the body not usually discovered. A rule often flouted by rap singers, and pitchers.” (Need we reflect on Madonna or Michael Jackson?) Or Rule 72: “Speak not in an unknown tongue in company but in your own language and that as those of quality do and not as the vulgar. Sublime matters treat seriously. ‘Unknown tongue’ also applies to jargon, or the slang of one age group. Don’t go on and on about Woodstock to kids, or ’zines to adults.” Obviously many of Washington’s rules would improve the quality of public life today, but it seems hopeless to try to educate an American public in thrall to the coarsest offenders against taste who can be found. Mr. Brookhiser wonders, “What use is etiquette in an age of daytime televison and drive-time radio?” Even so, he gives a spirited defense of good manners. I was convinced until he pointed out that nowadays “presidents are seen in jogging shorts, and even tell us about their underwear.” How remote—but increasingly attractive—seems Washington in his Augustan dignity.

Although Washington’s personal civility seems lost on the modern age, he taught the nation two lessons that have sustained the republic. The first rule every military commander (with the exception of the Confederates and General MacArthur) has scrupulously obeyed. And that is the rule that military power remains subordinate and standing before the elected and seated civil authority. When Washington, at the height of his wild popularity, resigned his commission to the Congress and retired to Mount Vernon, a veritable Cincinnatus of his age, he made possible a popular republican, rather than a one-man, dictatorial style of government. Likewise, his decision not to extend his term as president in the “Farewell Address” of 1796, brought home to his countrymen that it would be disastrous for “the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an Individual,” an individual who then might try to maintain “his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.” Washington’s repeated expressions of unworthiness and diffidence and his conspicuous surrender of appointed and elected power made it plain that, in a republic, power derives from the consent of the governed, is transiently exercised by those so entrusted, and in due course must be handed on to others whom the people, in their political wisdom, choose to name.

Notes
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1. George Washington: Writings, edited by John Rhodehamel; Library of America, 1,149 pages, $40. Go back to the text.
2. Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation, by Richard Norton Smith; Houghton Mifflin, 424 pages, $15 paper. Go back to the text.
3. Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, by Richard Brookhiser; The Free Press, 230 pages, $12 paper. Go back to the text.
4. Rules of Civility: The 110 Precepts That Guided Our First President in War and Peace, edited by Richard Brookhiser; The Free Press, 90 pages, $16. Go back to the text.