George Washington — The Man Behind the Monument

The Art of Manliness - The Art of Manliness

This episode explores George Washington's life through historian H.W. Brands' biography, 'American Patriarch,' highlighting his character, leadership, and relevance today. It examines how Washington’s upbringing, self-ed

Key takeaways

• Washington prioritized reputation through honorable actions

Transcript preview

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George Washington is perhaps the most familiar figure in American history, but most people really only know the image of him they see in marble statues and patriotic paintings. Behind those symbols was a real man, ambitious, self-taught, intensely concerned with honor and constantly wrestling with the immense responsibilities history placed on his shoulders. In celebration, in celebration of America's history placed on his shoulders. In celebration, in celebration of America's 250th birthday, we're taking an extended look at the life of the man more responsible than anyone else for the nation's founding. Here to impact that life for us is H. W. Brands, historian and the author of a new biography of Washington, American Patriarch. Brands traces Washington's journey from a young Virginia surveyor to military commander, founding father and first president. Along the way, we discuss how Washington's upbringing's upbringing shaped his character, why he became a surprisingly effective military leader despite losing more battles than he won, how he held together a fragile how he shaped the presidency through presidency set and whether a leader like Washington can still succeed today. After the show is over check at our show notes at AIM.IS slash Washington. All right, H. W. Brands, welcome back to the show. Delighted to be here. So you got a new biography out about George Washington called American Patriarch just in time for for the 250th anniversary or birthday of America. Washington is one of the most written about American figures. What were you aiming to do with your biography of George Washington that other biographies might not have done? I try to make my readers see the world through Washington's eyes. It's very common for biographers and historians to observe their characters from above or from afar or something. And with no disrespect to them, very good books in this approach, but they kind of sounding like a history lecture. What I'm going to do is immerse my reader in Washington's world. And to this end, I spend as much time as I can with Washington, seeing the world through Washington's eyes. I let Washington tell his story to a very large degree. One of the things I think about history generally is that the major purpose is to allow readers and my students. I'm a teacher of history. To see the world through other people's eyes, to in other people's eyes, to, in this, in this, in this, in this, in this, in this, in this, in this case, in this case, in this case, in this case, in this case, in this case, in this case, in this case, in this case, take my readers back to the 18th century and see the world as Washington saw it. Well okay let's talk about Washington he's this larger than life figure in American history and I hope through this conversation we can get to know a little bit more about the man himself. Let's start with this childhood. How was Washington's childhood different from the childhood of other founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson or John Adams? Well it's not that different from Jeffersons and Madison's and the other member members and the other of what I call, plenty of other people called this, too, the Virginia Gentry. So if you were born into the upper class of Virginia, this is a landed upper class. It's not a hereditary aristocracy like in England, but it kind of approximates that. You had a very different existence than if you were say John Adams. If you grew up in Puritan, Boston, or merchant-oriented New York, for one thing, there were no big cities. And so the communication among the gentry was different, you wrote or you wrote off to hunt foxes with them. So there was a different culture and a different style and the emphasis in that group was not at all the same emphasis in a place like Boston let's say or New York. In that the coin of the realm so to speak was the respect in which you were held by other members of the Gentry. So while a merchant in New York would have a bottom line, literally a bottom line of making a profit. And intellectuals in Boston, hanging around Harvard, Puritan, preachers and the like. There was a different world, but for Washington, it came naturally to him to try to develop a reputation among the members of his class. And it was a reputation that would be based on, in Washington's case, particularly based on doing the stuff that would make people admire you. He was very concerned about his reputation. But again, if you think of reputation, sometimes people, sometimes people do as a veneer that sits above somebody, then that's not what I'm talking about here, that's not what Washington was thinking about. He thought that he would gain the admiration of his peers by doing admirable things. So from a young age, surprisingly, and this would be something that would kind of get lost in the course of American, small, our Republican history. Washington grew up in an age of aristocracy. And this is, this part is really important too. In the age of deference, where members of the Virginia expected to be looked up to by other people in Virginia. But of course they had to do stuff to warrant that looking up. So Washington wasn't exactly an aristocrat, but he turned out to be a good example of what aristocracy can produce at its best. Yeah, he had a very fine-tuned sense of honor, honor in that traditional sense. Exactly. And I would add that it was different from that sharper sense of honor that caused people just at the drop-up drop. of a handkerchief to run up and shoot a duel with somebody. So it wasn't that kind of brittle honor. It was a deeper honor. It came from actually doing honorable things. And this idea of being incredibly concerned about his reputation, you would see this later on, we'll talk about this when he was president, because he started getting criticized. And he didn't like that. He's like, no, you're not supposed to do that. I'm sort of show some deference, I've done great things. What's interesting about. What's interesting about Washington about Washington was in the aristocracy but he wasn't high up in the aristocracy in Virginia. Exactly. He lost his father at a young age and he was the youngest in his family and so he was deprived of formal education. I think oftentimes the Virginians would send their kids over to England to get an education. Yeah he had older brothers who went to England for schooling but he didn't because of the death of his father. And so how do you think that influenced the leader that he would become? Did that shape him anyway? the crucial and here I like in his experience of that of Benjamin Franklin because both of those men and these are the two guys who would grow up to be the two indispensables of the American revolution Washington on the military side Franklin on the diplomatic side but both of them were largely self-educated and having been an education myself for a very long time I know that we teachers like to think in terms of what it is our students need to know but what the students often inferred from this is what they don't need to know and teachers here it all the time. Is this going to be on the test? If it's not on test, I don't need to know it. But if you're self educated, you don't know what you don't need to know. And so you kind of assume you have to know everything. Now, Franklin really took this and ran with it. He became a polymath and he did learn pretty much everything. Washington wasn't that way. But he didn't have the security of knowing. Well, this kind of stuff I don't need to know. So he was a self-educated man largely, and a very good the word. Now in contrast to Franklin who was comfortable as an intellectual and a scientist Washington just had a practical turn of mind but he became a very progressive farmer a planter in Virginia but someone who paid great attention to who read about the latest developments innovations in agriculture and tried them on his farms of Mount Vernon but related to this again is and as you mentioned he wasn't at the top of the aristocracy so he couldn't take for granted the kind of life that he wanted to live. The money wasn't guaranteed to be there. Now later he would marry quite well and so that would ease that part of it. But he realized he had to do something and even for members of the aristocracy they have to do something to fill their time. Now one of the things that pushed Washington in the direction that he went was one of the few things that he was formally trained in was enough mathematics to learn surveying and so his first working life was spent doing surveys in the the western part of Virginia. Virginia in those days spread far across the mountains. They claimed all the way to the Mississippi or in some grandiose moments all the way to the Pacific Ocean. But anyway, he would go out beyond the mountains to survey land. And the point was to acquire title for people who would then sell the land. I mean, there's speculators and sell land to other people and make some money that way. And when he got out there, in fact, the biographer, me in this case, encounters Washington in a detailed way for the first time, when he keeps a And he's a teenager and he and his partner are going out there as late in the fall and it's often raining in 35 degrees or it's sleeting and snowing when they get in the amounts and they're falling through the ice as they try to cross rivers and he has a wonderful time he discovers something about himself that he really likes being outdoors and he does well when he's outdoors. Now another member of the Gentry could have been somebody who might become a lawyer or something like could spend all his time inside not Washington, and as I'm as Washington was this farmer, but he wasn't a farmer who just gave the orders from beside his office. He rode around from field to field from farm to farm. Another thing Washington developed as a young man was an ability as a horseman. Now that might seem like a nice add on to the 21st century mud, but it was really a big deal in those days. It was a big deal practically because a person who could travel well on horse could go places and could get there faster than some of who didn't. If you weren't a good horseman might just have to take a carriage or a wheeled vehicle and that was much slower. You couldn't go to places where a horse could go and a wheeled vehicle couldn't. But it also opened up the possibility of a career in the Army or in the military because that was something outdoors and this of course is something that Washington went into and excelled at. All right so his childhood gave him that sense of honor to do admirable things so he could be admired. His place in the social stand. upper class of gentry but still on the bottom rung of that it gave him some ambition like if I'm gonna make my something to myself I'm gonna have to do it on my own I have to be ambitious and he developed a love of the outdoors and became quite a horseman so by the time he was 20 I mean he was he had a successful career and not only was he surveying but he kind of became a real estate mogul by his 20s he owned something like 2,000 acres in the Shenandoah Valley and so he could have decided to pursue a career in the military and it seemed kind of out of the blue what was going on with that decision the thing that pointed him in the direction of the military was when after his various trips out to the West he came to the attention of the Virginia governor who needed to send a message to whoever was the French military commandant in the Ohio country you know Ohio country in those days referred to everything across the mountains what's now western Pennsylvania the state of Ohio, West Virginia the state of Ohio, West Virginia and beyond because the French were thought to be as in fact they were descending from Canada and ascending from Louisiana to invade as the English saw to invade Ohio the English thought the British thought that Ohio was theirs and so the governor sends Washington out there with this letter from the governor to the commandant saying basically get out of here you have no right to be here be gone but he sends Washington out and Washington nor anybody at that point knows who the French commandant is where the French commandant is where the French is going to go out there and he's got to find it. And this young guy, he's given enough of a budget that he can hire a scout and he's given some presence that he can use to make his way through the Indian tribes. But this young guy shows this remarkable facility, first of all, to handle the rigors of the journey. Because again, it's through bad weather and it's cold and everything else. He can deal with that. He can camp out and the doors that he can hunt for his food. He has to. To. To distinguish friendly Indians. because it was often hard to tell who was which, to keep the hostile ones away and the friendly ones close, to try to maneuver his way through the French and deal with the French officers that they need encountered, to put up with disappointments and the frustrations of people not willing to go along with all of this stuff. And to get the message there and to get the message back. Now, I don't know to this day, I don't know what Washington was thinking in keeping a journal of this. Now, it was a habit. It was a habit with Washington. kept a journal on his earlier trips to the west. So I think it was just a daily habit. But it turned out that this was a big deal for Washington's career because the journal of his expedition out to Ohio out and back and all this group and everything is a great narrative of what amounts to a wonderful adventure tale and the Virginia governor recognized this because when Washington came back and Washington was relating what had happened and showed him the journal, the governor says we got to publish this and so they published it right away. And so Washington down his early 20s has a name that is suddenly known all over the American colonies. In fact, some of the pamphlets made it to England. So here's this guy who becomes famous as a result of this single expedition. Now was that a wonderful expedition? It's still just one deal. Okay, so he does this first mission for the Virginia governor. After this point, is this why when his military career officially started? And when it started, was he put into leadership positions right away? Not. Not quite yet yet yet yet yet yet? The next go round, so he goes out there, delivers the message, brings the message back, and the French common basically says, forget it, we're not getting out of here, we have as much right to this place as you do, at which point, and all this takes months and then adding up to a few years. The Virginia governor and having consulted the British government said, okay, well, we're gonna go stake the British claim to the Ohio country. And the key, the strategic point in the Ohio country was what's now the city of Pittsburgh, the Forks of the Ohio because two rivers the Allegheny, the Monongahela come together to form the Ohio River proper and we're going around there. And so Washington is given command of a Virginia militia unit. It's the Virginia Army. These are part-time soldiers but they're Virginians. And Washington's young guy leading him and off they go. Now, undinownst to Washington until he gets fairly close, there's a French small group doing the same thing coming south. He was trying to get to the forks of the forks of the worn away any of the British. And so going out Washington acquired some Indian allies and scouts and the French have their Indian allies and scouts and by the way this is going to give rise to what becomes called the French and Indian war and it's not because the French are fighting the Indians, because the French and their Indian allies are fighting the British and they're Indian allies. But anyway this French continued and Washington's continued they kind of circle around each other looking for each other and then they get in a fire fight. And in the firefight, side comes out ahead. They kill a dozen of the French soldiers including the commander of him and just a couple of casualties on the Virginia on the British side. Now for Washington at first this is a very exciting moment because it's his first action under fire and he has a response that is going to characterize his approach to being in battle for the rest of his life. He writes to his brother Jack after all this And he says, I have heard the bullets whistle and believe me there is something charming in the sound. Now when I read that, my gosh, anybody who could find the prospect of a narrow escape with your life. You could have been killed if the bullet had been three inches in another direction. And think it charming, this guy has a military career ahead of him. And one of the reason I say that is I did an earlier book on Ulysses Grant and his reaction to his first... was essentially the same thing. And in both cases, these individuals discovered that under circumstances that cause other people to get really confused and afraid and want to run, they become focused. They're better under fire almost than they are anywhere else. This was definitely true with Grant, but it was true to some degree with Washington. So he discovers that under fire, he makes better decisions. He does better things than other people do. And he begins to realize, yeah, I could do, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I military command is something I could do. And in fact, he's rewarded