H.W. Brands
Subject: Why George Washington was the Unanimous Choice
Bio: Professor of History at University of Texas at Austin and Author of American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is Why George Washington was the Unanimous Choice.
Our speaker is H.W. Brands who is a Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of the biography American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington.
I want to learn from Hal about why Washington was chosen to be commander in chief of the revolutionary forces, the head of the constitutional congress, and our first president.
I want to hear about Washington’s leadership style and why it was appropriate for his times. I also want to learn about what happened in the Room Where it Happened.
Hal, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
H.W. Brands:
I decided to write about Washington in the context of the 250th anniversary of American independence. I’m a biographer, and biographers are supposed to be able to explain their subjects. I never could figure Washington out, but I decided it was time to take a shot at it. He was Commanding General of the Continental Army and the first President of the United States. His reputation hovered over the entire founding period, from 1775 until his death in 1799. He was eulogized by Henry Lee as first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen, and his fame has remained remarkably steady since, unlike Andrew Jackson or Ulysses Grant, who each had long stretches of being seen as disasters. The secret to his success was the simplest and most enduring thing -- the ability to make good decisions. Presidents can be great speakers or charismatic, but if they make lousy decisions, they become lousy presidents.
The harder question is why he got it right so often. He thought carefully and calmly, and never rushed to judgment, the farthest thing from impulsive. But the real key, and this is almost unique among presidents, is that he was able to separate his personal interest from the interest of the country. Most people who rise to the level of considering the presidency conflate the two. They think the country needs them, and that if the country doesn’t elect them, the country is doomed. Washington could tell the difference, partly because of the man he was, and partly because of the moment in history he occupied.
That points to something that also undercuts the tidy version of the story. Washington made good decisions because he was a very good fit for his particular moment, and he’d be a terrible fit for the presidency today. In the first place, he didn’t need the job. By the time Grant or Eisenhower became president, the office was already a really big deal. Eisenhower was succeeding Franklin Roosevelt, the most important figure of the century. For Washington, the presidency wasn’t a big prize at all. Nobody knew what it was going to become. The men who’d held the office before him, as President of the Continental Congress, were inconsequential, both because of the weak structure of the Articles of Confederation and because nobody knew if the new republic would last. It really wasn’t until the 20th century that the presidency became the center of gravity of the American system, the 19th century belonged to Congress.
Washington was the first president, and the last one who didn’t have to compete for the job, everyone after him, starting with Adams and Jefferson had to. Washington already had his reputation; he assumed his fame would rest on having been the victorious General of the Revolution. Whatever came after that was secondary. The presidency was a victory lap, not the prize he’d been aiming for. For everyone who came after him, the presidency would be the first line of their obituary. For Washington, it wasn’t that big a deal.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to start with Washington as a young man, something that struck me in the book was how young he was at every stage. He takes on huge responsibility in the French and Indian War at age 23. And the scale of the battles were only two hundred British and French troops with 500 Indians on each side, it’s less a serious battlefield than a skirmish, a bunch of kids playing in the woods.
H.W. Brands:
It’s a little bit like that. Remember, this was a frontier community. Even Virginia had no real cities, and the frontier was contested land just a day and a half’s ride from Mount Vernon. Frontier communities create opportunity because the layers of institutions and expectations haven’t congealed yet, it’s why Benjamin Franklin was able to rise so far in the British Empire at the same time Washington was exploring the wilds of what became Ohio and Western Pennsylvania.
Washington accidentally stumbled into the conflict that made his name and made him enemy number one to the French, who believed he’d assassinated an envoy under a flag of truce. After the first skirmish, he wrote to his brother that he’d heard the bullets whistle and there was something charming in the sound, which tells you a lot about his temperament. He’d already been a frontiersman before he was a soldier, going on a surveying trip at 17 and loving the hardship of it. He was born into the Virginia gentry, but as a younger son in a mid-level family, comfortable, but not at the top, so he had to worry about where his reputation was coming from. His life’s goal was to win the respect of his contemporaries, not money. In Virginia, unlike Philadelphia or Boston, money wasn’t really the arbiter of reputation. These were planters, managers of large enterprises at a time when a big American business might have fifteen employees.
Washington had hundreds of people who took orders from him, which built an executive habit early. He also turned out to be a genuinely good soldier who liked being under fire, which most people don’t. He had an air of command, and it helped that he was a big, impressive-looking man and the best horseman of his generation, the equivalent of being a star quarterback, and a more practical skill, since everyone had to ride. He impressed people partly by how he looked, but he cared that people respect him for the right reasons, and he spent much of his life trying to earn that.
Larry Bernstein:
He tried to earn respect from the Fairfax family. Who were they, and why did it matter that Washington endeared himself to them?
H.W. Brands:
Lord Fairfax had received a huge land grant from the Crown, that’s how you got large land holdings back then. Lord Fairfax was not a senior member of England’s aristocracy, but they were a big deal in Virginia, a big fish in a small pond. Washington’s father died when he was eleven, so he didn’t have a father figure beyond his older brothers. He was in the gentry, but at a level where he could use a boost, and when Lord Fairfax put in a good word for him with the Virginia governor, that’s how Washington got his start, first as an envoy to the French in the Ohio country, then as commander of the small force whose skirmish started the French and Indian War.
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned his father died young and his older brothers were educated in England.
H.W. Brands:
That was fairly common, but once his father died, the money for that wasn’t available, and his guardians weren’t inclined to provide it. Washington had surprisingly little formal education. Biographers have been frustrated trying to pin down exactly what he knew. He was tutored in mathematics and geometry for surveying, and he was clearly a wide reader who knew more than his formal schooling would explain.
There’s an apt comparison to other self-educated people of the era, Franklin, and later Lincoln. Formally educated people learn what they don’t have to know, because they know what won’t be on the test. People without that formal education don’t know what they don’t need to know, so Franklin, thinking he had to know everything, learned everything. Washington wasn’t that polymathic; he focused on what interested him. Nobody knew more about scientific farming than George Washington, he considered himself a farmer when he wasn’t a soldier, always trying some new crop or technique at Mount Vernon. And when he became a soldier, there was no West Point, so he taught himself from books and experience.
Larry Bernstein:
You describe him getting a position in the Virginia legislature and being unable to get a sentence out, which is remarkable, compared to Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton or Madison, who could make an argument. He preferred being a general, where he could make decisions rather than speeches.
H.W. Brands:
Less unusual in those days than you’d think. In the Virginia Washington was born into, being a man of weight in the community mattered more for a seat in the House of Burgesses than being able to give a speech. He was expected to serve simply because he was a wealthy landowner, especially after marrying Martha Custis, though he never owned her land; he simply managed it, and it would pass to her children, not his. Unlike Massachusetts, a Burgesses seat in Virginia wasn’t a stepping stone to anything, you weren’t going to become governor, since that was a royal appointment. Washington had no political ambitions there. It was only with independence that Washington rose to the very top of his field, as commander of the Continental Army, with nothing higher to aspire to.
There’s a wonderful example of Washington’s other strength -- recognizing that in a room full of talkers, silence can be your friend. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he was immediately elected president of the convention, and interpreted that role, on the model of the British House of Commons speaker, as simply presiding, never joining the debates. You’d think that would diminish his influence. It did the opposite. While Madison, Hamilton and everyone else argued and neutralized each other, Washington sat in silence at the front, and everyone wondered what General Washington thought. Because he never said, many assumed he knew more than they did, like a Supreme Court justice reserving judgment while the lawyers argue. That silence effectively won him the presidency. When the convention debated the powers of the office, delegates could project onto Washington whatever they wanted the presidency to be. If he’d spoken up about term lengths or specific powers, he’d have won some support and lost other people’s confidence. His silence was strategically an advantage.
Larry Bernstein:
Someone putting together a team needs to be a good judge of talent, and Alexander Hamilton was a prodigy.
H.W. Brands:
A wunderkind, a precocious child. Hamilton had been Washington’s aide during the war, so Washington knew him well personally and unlike Jefferson or Adams, whom he knew mostly by reputation. Adams is a special case. As vice president, he wasn’t a member of the cabinet or considered part of the administration at all. He was President of the Senate, and that was essentially his only real job.
Washington’s cabinet consisted of four people, Secretary of State, Treasury, War, and the Attorney General, and he’d solicit their opinions, sometimes in writing, without betraying his own position. It became clear quickly that Hamilton and Jefferson were on opposite sides of nearly everything, dividing over how powerful the new government should be. Hamilton wanted as much power as possible; Jefferson wanted to keep it as small as necessary. Washington wasn’t dismayed that they disagreed, what dismayed him was that even after a decision was made, they’d carry the dispute into public, lining up allies. But this was probably inevitable. Any system where people can express opinions and vote on them is going to produce factions, since most votes come down to yes or no.
What made Washington different was that, by the time he became president, he knew this was his last office. He wasn’t angling for anything else, unlike Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison, who all had further ambitions. That let him rise above the fray in a way that wasn’t available to the others.
By 1791, Madison, who in Federalist 10 had argued factions were dangerous and that the new Constitution would neutralize them, was already conceding in Congress that factions weren’t going away and had to be managed instead. Hamilton was leading the Federalists, Jefferson the Republicans. Washington disdained to be associated with either, even though on ninety percent of issues he came down with Hamilton. When Congress passed Hamilton’s bill for a national bank, Washington had Madison write him the best argument for signing it and the best argument for vetoing it, and Madison came away with no idea which way Washington would go. He signed it.
Washington had a soft spot for Hamilton, who drove everyone else crazy with his ambition and sharp elbows. The reason Hamilton was never seriously considered for president wasn’t the duel, and it wasn’t that he was born in the West Indies, Washington wasn’t born in “the United States” either, since it didn’t exist yet. It’s that nobody liked him enough to nominate him, even though everyone respected his gifts.
Larry Bernstein:
The musical Hamilton has a number called “The Room Where It Happens,” about the negotiation over whether the federal government should assume state debts. Washington wasn’t in that room.
H.W. Brands:
He wasn’t, because he didn’t see himself as a horse-trader, and he didn’t interfere with Congress’s business, that preserved deniability if the deal fell apart. The two stuck issues were whether the federal government should assume the states’ Revolutionary War debts, and where the national capital would be. Hamilton wanted assumption because it would make the country’s creditors answerable to the national government rather than the states, but that outraged states that had already paid off their own debts through taxation. Meanwhile New York merchants backed Hamilton’s assumption plan, and Southerners, mostly farmers who’d end up paying for it, wanted the capital in exchange. Madison brought Jefferson, representing the South, and Hamilton, representing the Northern merchants, together for a dinner, without Washington, who may not even have known it was happening. Nobody kept notes, which is exactly why there’s room for Lin-Manuel Miranda to write about it. But the outcome was clear -- the South got the capital, the North got assumption, and each side delivered its votes.
Larry Bernstein:
What’s beautiful about that story is that it’s compromise, each side loses something, each side wins something, and it happened entirely within the legislative branch. Washington’s role was secondary.
H.W. Brands:
All the great 19th-century compromises: Missouri, the nullification crisis, 1850, were congressional affairs; the president often didn’t even say where he stood. In his first inaugural, Washington said outright he wasn’t going to send Congress a list of bills to pass, that was their job. By the 20th century, Congress waits for the president to set the agenda. We’ve got it backwards from where we started.
Larry Bernstein:
You keep calling it the American Revolution. Was it really one? The colonists seem to have loved the British system in theory, parliament, the king, and only resented not having seats in Parliament. It looks more like a dispute than a revolution on the scale of France or Russia.
H.W. Brands:
There’s real truth to that. The Americans made their case on the basis of their rights as Englishmen going back to Magna Carta, the British still call it the War of American Independence rather than a revolution. If you look at who ruled America before and after, it’s mostly the same people minus the very top stratum of royal appointees: Washington was a leader in Virginia before the war and after it; Adams became the second president. Nothing like the wholesale overturning you see in real revolutions, except that in making the case for independence, Jefferson summoned into being ideas, like “all men are created equal,” that went well beyond the practical question of separation, and that we’ve been arguing about ever since.
It helped that Americans had effectively been governing themselves for a century, since the Crown and Parliament mostly ignored them, until the 1760s, when Britain decided it needed to monetize the colonies better. Once people started getting hurt, tarred and feathered, shot in the Boston Massacre, tensions and emotions took over, and Jefferson’s language about equality entered the picture.
Not every American backed independence, which is why there was a real fight for hearts and minds. But there’s one more reason the American Revolution wasn’t like the others: the losers had somewhere to go. About 100,000 loyalists left for Canada, the West Indies, England, or West Africa, so the winners never had to figure out what to do with them.
In France, the emigres who didn’t escape lost their heads. As revolutions go, ours was tame, and it created a replica of the English model, unlike the wholesale reinvention of Russia.
Larry Bernstein:
After the Boston Massacre, John Adams defended the British soldiers who’d fired on civilians and won an acquittal on the more serious charges, without paying much of a political price. How do we square that with Adams seeing himself as a revolutionary?
H.W. Brands:
Adams was self-righteous, but he was often right, which is its own kind of insufferable. We know a great deal about him because Abigail saved his letters and he kept a diary. He argued that everyone deserved a fair trial and legal representation under English common law, and that willingness to see justice done actually showed the strength of the American position. That’s part of why the American Revolution never turned as ideological or violent as the French one, the English mode of thinking was pragmatic rather than theoretical, there was no entrenched, generations-old aristocracy to topple, and the questions around religion and the church had already been fought out in England’s own civil wars. It was also simply a much smaller world of people involved than London or Paris.
The most bitter fighting during the war, in fact, was between Americans and Americans, loyalists against patriots, not Americans against British troops. But it was a small enough elite that even bitter opponents often knew each other personally, which took some of the edge off compared to a true civil war.
Larry Bernstein:
There’s a song in the musical 1776, “Sit Down, John,” about how opinionated and insufferable Adams could be to the whole room. It’s interesting that the same qualities that disqualify Hamilton from the presidency in people’s minds, the sharp elbows, being a little full of himself, don’t seem to disqualify Adams.
H.W. Brands:
Hamilton always came across as a climber, when he talked to you, you felt he wanted something from you. Adams had a different profile: more religious, and he had Abigail to confide in, which Hamilton lacked. Benjamin Rush, who corresponded with everyone in that generation, received a letter from Adams that’s very revealing. Adams wrote that the history of their generation would be told as a “tie of lies,” and that the story would be that Dr. Franklin struck the ground with his lightning rod and up jumped General Washington, and between the two of them they conducted all the great affairs of war and peace, leaving unsaid that nobody would give Adams the credit he deserved. He knew he wasn’t Washington and knew he wasn’t Jefferson; he didn’t have their charisma. He won the presidency on Washington’s coattails, beat Jefferson narrowly, then lost the rematch in 1800.
Larry Bernstein:
Another example: in the Paris negotiations, Adams was the diligent one, up at dawn, while Franklin was out carousing late into the night, and yet Franklin was the one who actually got the diplomatic results.
H.W. Brands:
Exactly right. Adams had that Puritan streak and resented Franklin’s late nights, but couldn’t quite acknowledge that Franklin was doing serious diplomatic business at three in the morning in those same salons, that’s how you actually reached the people who made decisions. Adams thought he was the one doing all the work. Maybe he was doing all the detail work, but Franklin was the rainmaker.
Larry Bernstein:
You’ve spent your career writing biographies of major American leaders, and telling the story of the United States through them. Why biography, as opposed to straight history?
H.W. Brands:
I grew up in Portland, and every kid in Oregon learns about Lewis and Clark, so I was attuned early to things that happened before my own generation. I became a historian, but I chose to write biographies because people will buy biographies who won’t buy history books, history sounds like names and dates, but biography is the nonfiction genre closest to the novel, and people like novels about individuals.
I had in mind a series of biographies that would add up to a history of the United States, though I didn’t tell my publisher that at the time. Benjamin Franklin covers the 18th century; Andrew Jackson picks up the story of emerging democracy; Ulysses Grant carries it through the Civil War and Reconstruction; the two Roosevelts get us to the mid-20th century; Reagan is the last one. I hadn’t written about Washington because I thought Franklin was the more interesting, many-faceted story.
Eventually I moved to writing smaller ensemble books, Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, and Henry Clay; Truman and MacArthur; and, most recently, Franklin Roosevelt against Charles Lindbergh over whether America should enter World War II. The isolationist side gets short shrift from history because they lost, but they weren’t dupes or fools, they had a real case to make, and I wanted to recapture a time when the outcome wasn’t foreordained. That’s what I think history and biography are for: making the past understandable to the present, and giving readers the chance to put themselves in the shoes of people who didn’t yet know how things would turn out.
Before Pearl Harbor, it was entirely possible America would stay out of the war, and Charles Lindbergh led that argument. The fact that the Trump campaign adopted “America First,” the old slogan of that movement, was a sign that the debate was no longer so old.
Larry Bernstein:
You don’t mention the Washington myths in the book, the cherry tree, and so on. Why skip debunking them?
H.W. Brands:
Even my students, much younger than the book’s typical reader, have mostly heard about the cherry tree, it’s ancient history to them, but they know it. I could have added a paragraph, but I think most readers are already better informed about these myths than I’d be giving them credit for; setting up that straw man just to knock it down felt unnecessary. The real vogue for a heroic, mythologized Washington comes after the Civil War, when a divided North and South go looking for something they still have in common, and land on the Revolution, and on Washington, a Southerner who became president of the whole country. That’s when you get the multi-volume hagiographies. The early Parson Weems stuff, the cherry tree included, was always understood as material for children; no serious adult took it as history.
Larry Bernstein:
One thing we now reflect on is Washington’s decision not to seek a third term, that idea that an executive should serve his time and go home, the way Truman went back to Independence, Missouri. You quote King George III, who was reportedly astonished that Washington resigned his commission and went home after the war, supposedly calling him the greatest man in the world for it.
H.W. Brands:
He did say that, “if this report is true, Washington is the greatest man in the world.” But I’d point to a quote I like better: John Adams wrote to Abigail after his own inauguration that he looked over at Washington and thought he saw a twinkle in his eye, nobody else ever saw Washington’s eyes twinkle, and imagined Washington thinking, “I am fairly out, and you are fairly in; let us see which of us will be happier.” That gets at the real truth. Washington never wanted to be president in the first place; he had to be talked into a second term by Hamilton and Jefferson after intending to leave following the first. By his second term, he was so disgusted with the direction of politics that he couldn’t wait to get out. This wasn’t selfless restraint; it was someone who couldn’t leave fast enough.
Even the King George anecdote reflects a misunderstanding: George III was judging Washington by an English context, where a general who didn’t seize power after a civil war was remarkable. But there was no real government for Washington to seize. The Articles of Confederation had no taxing power and no authority over the states, if Washington had marched on Philadelphia to take over the Confederation Congress, he’d have found nothing there, the way a NATO commander who marched on Brussels today would find nothing worth taking. If Washington had actually wanted power, he’d have been better off marching on Virginia, which at least had something to seize. It just wasn’t a live possibility in the 1780s the way marching on Washington would have been by the Civil War.
Larry Bernstein:
There’s an old and recurring argument about how much authority the federal government has to send in force against domestic unrest, it came up again recently with the dispute over the National Guard in Minnesota. Washington faced his own version with the Whiskey Rebellion.
H.W. Brands:
He put his old uniform back on, got on his horse, and led militia from several states toward Western Pennsylvania, though he never really intended to fight and never got close to the front. His presence, and the fact that militia were already on the way, was meant to intimidate the rebels into standing down, and it worked. They sent negotiators; Washington made clear the government would fight if it had to, and the rebels melted back into the countryside.
Andrew Jackson later made a similar threat during the nullification crisis, though he arranged a tariff compromise before it came to that. Grant might have done something similar during Reconstruction, sending troops against the Klan in South Carolina.
The earlier parallel that got Washington behind rewriting the Constitution in the first place was Shays’ Rebellion, in western Massachusetts in 1786. Washington became convinced these uprisings could be the end of the republic, since state governments and their militias, often riddled with sympathizers, couldn’t be counted on to put them down, and only a stronger federal government could reliably intimidate a local uprising. Once that principle was established, though, it mostly didn’t have to be exercised again until secession, and that one had to be settled by war.
Larry Bernstein:
We saw versions of that same tension in Reconstruction, when Grant sent troops to protect Black voters in the Carolinas, only for the Hayes administration to curtail federal power over internal state affairs almost immediately after. How should we think about that recurring argument between state and federal authority?
H.W. Brands:
It’s been going on for 250 years, so it’s probably not going away. States preexisted the national government, Madison actually wanted to wipe the slate clean and eliminate the states as sovereign entities entirely, but that didn’t fly, so the Constitution was built with that tension baked in. There’s no intrinsic answer to how much power belongs to the states versus the federal government; people will argue whichever side benefits their politics at the moment. It’s really the fundamental question of politics. How do individual people live together in community? Every political system has to work that out, and every country does it differently at different times. We’ll be arguing about it forever.
Larry Bernstein:
What are you optimistic about, for America at 250?
H.W. Brands:
We’ve made it this far, and there’s every reason to think we’ll keep making it. Every generation has thought the country was falling apart, and it never has, except for one enormous hiccup during the Civil War, which we got past. I tell my students of my year-long American history course: you’re now part of this 250-year experiment in self-government. Don’t screw it up.
Larry Bernstein:
Last question, do you teach that year-long course through biography, or more standard readings?
H.W. Brands:
Not through biography exactly, but I do hang moments in history on individuals, because people are interested in people. When I teach the Revolutionary War, I introduce students to Temple Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, who had to choose between his rebel grandfather, sailing to Paris to negotiate the alliance with France, and his loyalist father, William Franklin, then under indictment in New Jersey. Temple was about my students’ age, and I ask them: what would you have done? Because everyone has to make decisions on incomplete information, without knowing how things will turn out, and Temple Franklin had no way of knowing the rebels would win.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Hal for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast, it was about Rocky’s 50th anniversary.
Our speakers were the What Happens Next Culture Critic Darren Schwartz and a special guest Scott Holstein my friend since kindergarten.
Rocky won best picture in 1976 and now is the time to rewatch it. This franchise is a Stallone production: He wrote it, directed several of the films, and acted in it. We talked about why Sly is the real hero who made these films successful.
Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, Rocky at 50, here.
