The Art of Manliness - George Washington — The Man Behind the Monument

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00:02:01.860 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AOM podcast, which since 2008 has featured

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00:02:30.820 strenuouslife.com. Now on to the show.

00:02:41.440 George Washington is perhaps the most familiar figure in American history,

00:02:44.840 but most people really only know the image of him

00:02:46.680 they see in marble statues and patriotic paintings.

00:02:49.360 Behind those symbols was a real man,

00:02:51.400 ambitious, self-taught, intensely concerned with honor,

00:02:54.620 and constantly wrestling with the immense responsibilities

00:02:56.700 history placed on his shoulders.

00:02:58.580 In celebration of America's 250th birthday,

00:03:01.280 we're taking an extended look at the life of the man

00:03:03.420 more responsible than anyone else for the nation's founding.

00:03:06.500 Here to unpack that life for us is H.W. Brands,

00:03:08.800 the historian and the author of a new biography of Washington,

00:03:11.680 American Patriarch.

00:03:13.380 Brands traces Washington's journey from a young Virginia surveyor to military commander,

00:03:17.620 founding father, and first president.

00:03:19.660 Along the way, we discuss how Washington's upbringing shaped his character,

00:03:23.180 why he became a surprisingly effective military leader despite losing more battles than he won,

00:03:27.580 how he held together a fragile revolutionary army,

00:03:30.180 how he shaped the presidency through presidents he set,

00:03:32.720 and whether a leader like Washington can still succeed today.

00:03:35.740 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Washington.

00:03:42.600 all right hw brands welcome back to the show delighted to be here so you got a new biography

00:03:55.580 out about george washington called american patriarch just in time for the 250th anniversary

00:04:01.960 or birthday of america washington is one of the most written about american figures

00:04:08.100 what were you aiming to do with your biography of George Washington that other biographies might

00:04:13.960 not have done? I try to make my readers see the world through Washington's eyes. It's very common

00:04:21.220 for biographers and historians to, to observe their characters from above or from afar or

00:04:27.160 something. And with no disrespect to them, very good books in this approach, but they kind of

00:04:32.880 sounding like a history lecture. What I'm going to do is immerse my reader in Washington's world.

00:04:39.020 And to this end, I spend as much time as I can with Washington, seeing the world through

00:04:44.480 Washington's eyes. I let Washington tell his story to a very large degree. One of the things I think

00:04:50.580 about history generally is that the major purpose is to allow readers and my students, I'm a teacher

00:04:56.160 of history, to see the world through other people's eyes, to, in this case, take my readers back to

00:05:01.300 the 18th century and see the world as Washington saw it. Well, okay, let's talk about Washington.

00:05:06.200 He's this larger-than-life figure in American history, and I hope through this conversation

00:05:11.240 we can get to know a little bit more about the man himself. Let's start with his childhood.

00:05:17.480 How was Washington's childhood different from the childhood of other founding fathers like

00:05:22.660 Thomas Jefferson or John Adams? Well, it's not that different from Jefferson's and Madison's

00:05:29.140 and the other members of what I call them, plenty of other people call it this too, the Virginia

00:05:33.080 Gentry. So if you were born into the upper class of Virginia, this is a landed upper class. It's

00:05:39.920 not a hereditary aristocracy like in England, but it kind of approximates that. You had a very

00:05:45.940 different existence than if you were, say, John Adams. If you grew up in Puritan, Boston, or

00:05:51.080 merchant-oriented New York. For one thing, there were no big cities. And so the communication

00:05:57.160 among the gentry was different. You rode over to their house or you rode off to hunt foxes with 1.00

00:06:03.880 them. So there was a different culture and a different style. And the emphasis in that group

00:06:09.320 was not at all the same emphasis in a place like Boston, let's say, or New York. In that,

00:06:16.480 the coin of the realm, so to speak, was the respect in which you were held by other members

00:06:21.660 of the gentry. So while a merchant in New York would have a bottom line, literally a bottom line,

00:06:26.840 of making a profit. And intellectuals in Boston, hanging around Harvard and Puritan preachers and

00:06:34.180 the like, it was a different world. But for Washington, it came naturally to him to try to

00:06:40.640 develop a reputation among the members of his class. And it was a reputation that would be

00:06:46.700 based on, in Washington's case particularly, based on doing the stuff that would make people

00:06:51.140 admire you. He was very concerned about his reputation. But again, if you think of reputation,

00:06:57.480 sometimes people do as a veneer that sits above somebody. Then that's not what I'm talking about

00:07:03.880 here. That's not what Washington was thinking about. He thought that he would gain the admiration

00:07:07.560 of his peers by doing admirable things. So from a young age, surprisingly, and this would be

00:07:14.960 something that would kind of get lost in the course of American small or Republican history,

00:07:20.980 Washington grew up in an age of aristocracy, and this part is really important too,

00:07:26.600 in an age of deference where members of the Virginia gentry expected to be looked up to

00:07:31.820 by other people in Virginia. But of course, they had to do stuff to warrant that looking up. So

00:07:37.960 Washington wasn't exactly an aristocrat, but he turned out to be a good example of what

00:07:43.700 aristocracy can produce at its best yeah he had a very fine-tuned sense of honor honor in that

00:07:50.660 traditional sense exactly and i would add that it was different from that sharper sense of honor

00:07:57.620 that caused people just at the drop of a handkerchief to run up and shoot a duel with

00:08:02.500 somebody so it wasn't that kind of brittle honor it was a deeper honor that came from actually

00:08:09.220 doing honorable things. And this idea of being incredibly concerned about his reputation,

00:08:15.420 you would see this later on. We'll talk about this when he was president because he started

00:08:19.380 getting criticized and he didn't, he didn't like that. He's like, no, you're not supposed to do

00:08:23.920 that. I'm supposed to show some deference because I've done great things. What's interesting about

00:08:28.020 Washington too, though, is that he was in the aristocracy, but he wasn't high up in the

00:08:33.460 aristocracy in Virginia. Exactly. He lost his father at a young age and he was the youngest

00:08:39.080 in his family. And so he was deprived of a formal education. I think oftentimes the Virginians would

00:08:45.260 send their kids over to England to get an education. Yeah. He had older brothers who

00:08:49.820 went to England for schooling, but he didn't because of the death of his father. And so how

00:08:54.300 do you think that influenced the leader that he would become? Did that shape him in any way?

00:08:59.140 I think it's absolutely crucial. And here I liken his experience to that of Benjamin Franklin.

00:09:03.460 because both of those men, and these are the two guys who would grow up to be the two

00:09:07.480 indispensables of the American Revolution. Washington on the military side, Franklin

00:09:12.360 on the diplomatic side. But both of them were largely self-educated. And having been in education

00:09:18.180 myself for a very long time, I know that we teachers like to think in terms of what it is

00:09:23.860 our students need to know. But what the students often infer from this is what they don't need to

00:09:29.160 know. And teachers hear it all the time. Is this going to be on the test? If it's not on test,

00:09:33.180 I don't need to know it. But if you're self-educated, you don't know what you don't

00:09:38.400 need to know. And so you kind of assume you have to know everything. Now, Franklin really took this

00:09:43.980 and ran with it. He became a polymath and he did learn pretty much everything. Washington wasn't

00:09:48.940 that way, but he didn't have the security of knowing, well, this kind of stuff I need to know

00:09:53.860 and that kind of stuff I don't need to know. So he was a self-educated man largely in a very good

00:09:59.440 sense of the word. Now, in contrast to Franklin, who was comfortable as an intellectual and a

00:10:05.240 scientist, Washington just had a practical turn of mind. But he became a very progressive farmer,

00:10:11.900 a planter in Virginia, but someone who paid great attention to, who read about the latest

00:10:16.760 developments, innovations in agriculture, and tried them on his farms at Mount Vernon. But

00:10:21.960 related to this, again, as you mentioned, he wasn't at the top of the aristocracy. So he

00:10:26.760 couldn't take for granted the kind of life that he wanted to live. The money wasn't guaranteed to

00:10:33.440 be there. Now, later he would marry quite well, and so that would ease that part of it. But he

00:10:38.180 realized he had to do something. And even for members of the aristocracy, they have to do

00:10:42.080 something to fill their time. Now, one of the things that pushed Washington in the direction

00:10:46.920 that he went was one of the few things that he was formally trained in was enough mathematics

00:10:52.260 to learn surveying. And so his first working life was spent doing surveys in the western part of

00:11:00.760 Virginia. Virginia in those days spread far across the mountains. They claimed all the way to the

00:11:05.040 Mississippi River and some grandiose moments all the way to the Pacific Ocean. But anyway, he would

00:11:08.880 go out beyond the mountains to survey land. And the point was to acquire a title for people who

00:11:14.240 would then sell the land. I mean, there's speculators and sell land to other people and

00:11:18.420 make some money that way. And when he got out there, in fact, the biographer, me in this case,

00:11:23.080 encounters Washington in a detailed way for the first time when he keeps a journal of his first

00:11:29.060 trip out to the West. And he's a teenager and he and his partner are going out there. It's late in

00:11:35.360 the fall and it's often raining and 35 degrees or it's sleeting and snowing when they get into the

00:11:40.560 mountains and they're falling through the ice as they try to cross rivers. And he has a wonderful

00:11:44.860 time, he discovers something about himself, that he really likes being outdoors, and he does well

00:11:51.160 when he's outdoors. Now, another member of the gentry could have been somebody who might become 0.89

00:11:55.680 a lawyer or something like to spend all his time inside, not Washington. And as I say, when Washington 0.75

00:12:00.240 was at home with Mel and Vernon, he was this farmer, but he wasn't a farmer who just gave the

00:12:05.720 orders from beside his office. He rode around from field to field, from farm to farm. Another thing

00:12:11.240 Washington develop as a young man was an ability as a horseman. Now, that might seem like a nice

00:12:17.720 add-on to the 21st century mind, but it was really a big deal in those days. It was a big deal

00:12:24.140 practically because a person who could travel well on horse could go places and could get there

00:12:29.040 faster than somebody who didn't. If you weren't a good horseman, you might just have to take

00:12:32.860 a carriage or the wheeled vehicle, and that was much slower. You couldn't go to places where a

00:12:37.940 course could go and a wheeled vehicle couldn't but it also opened up the possibility of a career

00:12:43.840 in the army here in the military because that was something outdoors and this of course is

00:12:49.100 something that washington went into and excelled at all right so his childhood gave him that sense

00:12:54.700 of honor to do admirable things so he could be admired his place in the social standing

00:13:00.320 upper class gentry but still kind of the bottom rung of that it gave him some ambition like if

00:13:05.760 I'm going to make something to myself.

00:13:07.360 I'm going to have to do it on my own.

00:13:08.900 I have to be ambitious.

00:13:11.340 And he developed a love of the outdoors and became quite a horseman.

00:13:16.380 So by the time he was 20, I mean, he had a successful career.

00:13:19.980 And not only was he surveying, but he kind of became a real estate mogul.

00:13:22.920 I think by his 20s, he owned something like 2,000 acres in the Shenandoah Valley.

00:13:28.280 And so he could have stuck with that, but he decided to pursue a career in the military.

00:13:32.600 And it seemed kind of out of the blue.

00:13:34.460 What was going on with that decision?

00:13:36.620 The thing that pointed him in the direction of the military was when after his various trips out to the West,

00:13:41.900 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.

00:13:51.560 The Ohio country in those days referred to everything across the mountains.

00:13:54.860 It's now Western Pennsylvania, the state of Ohio, West Virginia, and beyond.

00:13:59.060 because the French were thought to be, as in fact they were,

00:14:03.380 descending from Canada and ascending from Louisiana

00:14:06.840 to invade, as the English saw it, to invade Ohio.

00:14:10.720 The English thought, the British thought that Ohio was theirs.

00:14:14.100 And so the governor sends Washington out there with this letter

00:14:17.840 from the governor to the commandant saying,

00:14:20.100 basically, get out of here.

00:14:21.560 You have no right to be here, be gone.

00:14:23.260 But he sends Washington out, and Washington, nor the governor,

00:14:26.580 nor anybody at that point knows who the French commandant is, where the French commandant is

00:14:30.540 located. He's just going to go out there and he's got to find it. And this young guy, he's given

00:14:34.500 enough of a budget that he can hire a scout and he's given some presents that he can use to make

00:14:40.220 his way through the Indian tribes. But this young guy chose this remarkable facility, first of all,

00:14:45.820 to handle the rigors of the journey. Because again, it's through bad weather and it's cold

00:14:51.140 and everything else. He's got to deal with that. He can camp out under doors. He can hunt for his

00:14:54.840 food he has to. To distinguish friendly Indians from hostile Indians, because it was often hard

00:15:00.760 to tell who was which. To keep the hostile ones away and the friendly ones close. To try to 0.94

00:15:07.780 maneuver his way through the French and deal with the French officers that he encountered.

00:15:12.620 To put up with disappointments and the frustrations of people not willing to go along with all of this

00:15:18.180 stuff. And to get the message there and to get the message back. Now, I don't know to this day,

00:15:23.560 I don't know what Washington was thinking in keeping a journal of this.

00:15:28.020 Now, it was a habit with Washington.

00:15:29.800 He had kept a journal on his earlier trips to the West.

00:15:32.280 So I think it was just a daily habit.

00:15:34.500 But it turned out that this was a big deal for Washington's career because the journal

00:15:39.980 of his expedition out to Ohio, out and back and all this group and everything is a great

00:15:45.940 narrative of what amounts to a wonderful adventure tale.

00:15:49.480 And the Virginia governor recognized this because when Washington came back and Washington was relating what had happened and shoved him the journal, the governor says, we got to publish this.

00:15:59.020 And so they published it right away.

00:16:00.160 And so Washington now in his early 20s has a name that is suddenly known all over the American colonies.

00:16:06.560 In fact, some of the pamphlets made it to England.

00:16:09.360 So here's this guy who becomes famous as a result of this single expedition.

00:16:13.900 That was a wonderful expedition.

00:16:15.140 It's just one deal.

00:16:17.200 Okay, so he does this first mission for the Virginia governor.

00:16:21.480 After this point, is this like when his military career officially started?

00:16:24.860 And when it started, was he put into leadership positions right away?

00:16:28.860 Not quite yet.

00:16:30.300 The next go around, so he goes out there, delivers the message, brings the message back. 0.79

00:16:35.500 And the French come and basically says, forget it. 0.91

00:16:38.580 We're not getting out of here. 0.96

00:16:39.480 We have as much right to this place as you do.

00:16:41.280 At which point, and all this takes months and then adding up to a few years.

00:16:44.440 The Virginia governor, and having consulted the British government, said, okay, well, we're going to go stake the British claim to the Ohio country.

00:16:54.260 And the key, the strategic point in the Ohio country was what's now the city of Pittsburgh called the Forks of the Ohio because two rivers, the Allegheny and the Monongahela, come together to form the Ohio River proper.

00:17:06.360 And we're going to go out there.

00:17:07.720 And so Washington is given command of a Virginia militia unit.

00:17:11.840 It's the Virginia Army.

00:17:13.500 These are part-time soldiers, but they're Virginians.

00:17:16.540 And Washington's a young guy leading them, and off they go.

00:17:20.200 Now, unbeknownst to Washington, until he gets fairly close,

00:17:23.940 there's a French small group doing the same thing, coming south,

00:17:27.440 who's trying to get to the forks of the Ohio and warn away any of the British.

00:17:32.060 And so going out, Washington acquired some Indian allies and scouts,

00:17:36.640 and the French have their Indian allies and scouts.

00:17:38.940 And by the way, this is going to give rise to what becomes called the French and Indian War.

00:17:44.080 And it's not because the French are fighting the Indians,

00:17:46.220 because the French and their Indian allies are fighting the British and their Indian allies.

00:17:50.360 But anyway, this French continued and Washington's continued.

00:17:54.140 They kind of circle around each other looking for each other, and then they get in a firefight.

00:17:58.420 And in the firefight, Washington's side comes out ahead.

00:18:01.660 They kill a dozen of the French soldiers, including the commander of them.

00:18:05.960 and just a couple of casualties on the Virginia, on the British side.

00:18:11.560 Now, for Washington, at first, this is a very exciting moment

00:18:16.320 because it's his first action under fire.

00:18:19.260 And he has a response that is going to characterize his approach

00:18:23.540 to being in battle for the rest of his life.

00:18:26.540 He writes to his brother, Jack, after all this, and he says,

00:18:30.840 I have heard the bullets whistle, and believe me,

00:18:34.620 there is something charming in the sound. Now, when I read that, I thought, my gosh,

00:18:41.320 anybody who could find the prospect of a narrow escape with your life, you could have been killed

00:18:47.820 if the bullet had been three inches in and under direction. And think it charming. This guy has a

00:18:53.700 military career ahead of him. And one of the reasons I say that is, I did an earlier book

00:18:57.580 on Ulysses Grant, and his reaction to his first battle was essentially the same thing. And in both

00:19:02.280 cases, these individuals discovered that under circumstances that cause other people to get

00:19:08.140 really confused and afraid and want to run, they become focused. They're better under fire almost

00:19:14.620 than they are anywhere else. This was definitely true with Grant, but it was true to some degree

00:19:19.760 with Washington. So he discovers that under fire, he makes better decisions. He does better things

00:19:25.500 than other people do. And he begins to realize, yeah, I could do this. Military command is

00:19:30.880 something I could do. And in fact, he's rewarded with promotion, except in the moment, his moment

00:19:37.580 of pride, his moment of epiphany doesn't last very long because there's a larger French group

00:19:41.840 behind the French group that he tangles up in. And this larger French group comes in and thrashes 0.94

00:19:46.720 Washington and he is captured and he is persuaded to sign what is basically, he thinks is a statement

00:19:55.020 regarding what happened in this first skirmish, the one in which the French man who was killed.

00:19:59.980 So Washington claimed afterwards that because of the circumstances of the negotiation, it was in the middle of night, in the dark, it was pouring rain.

00:20:10.680 It was in French, which he didn't read.

00:20:12.960 He, well, the French interpret it, is that he confessed to assassinating, and that's the term of the French version of the term of assassination, of the French commander.

00:20:24.480 And so Washington basically says, I murder the guy.

00:20:27.680 And Washington, when he learns about this, at least so he says, when he learns about

00:20:30.760 this, that's not what I thought I was saying.

00:20:33.100 I didn't assassinate anybody.

00:20:34.600 It was a fair fight.

00:20:35.880 He just happened to get killed and I didn't.

00:20:37.500 But it made Washington notorious, certainly among the French, but it also made Washington,

00:20:44.540 what shall I say, celebrated, maybe in a notorious way, a little bit among the British, because

00:20:50.100 this turns out to be the first action in the French and Indian War, which is actually going

00:20:56.360 to grow into the Seven Years' War, which in some ways is the first world war of the

00:21:02.780 Western European North Atlantic.

00:21:05.040 And Washington was there firing the first shot.

00:21:07.740 Yeah, he started as a 22-year-old kid.

00:21:10.040 Yeah.

00:21:10.540 And so to have this sort of weight of world history on his soldiers.

00:21:14.320 Now, when people raise this question with me, I point out that if Washington hadn't

00:21:20.180 been the first one, somebody else would have been.

00:21:22.440 The French and the British were going to tangle over Ohio.

00:21:25.560 It was going to happen because they both claimed it and neither one was going to give it up without a fight.

00:21:29.880 So the fight would have occurred.

00:21:31.800 Washington happened to be there as the first.

00:21:33.720 But if those bullets, that first bullet hadn't been so charming and in fact had killed Washington,

00:21:38.420 of course we wouldn't be talking about Washington,

00:21:40.360 but we still would be talking about the equivalent of French and Indian War.

00:21:44.580 What did his military career look like after that?

00:21:47.820 What was he doing?

00:21:49.140 So he ascended through the ranks of the Virginia militia until he became the commander of the militia.

00:21:55.180 So Virginia's army, and Virginia was the most populous of the British colonies in North America, he was their top soldier.

00:22:02.220 And as time went on, his Virginians became attached to British regulars.

00:22:08.760 So once it became a regular war, the British government in London sent British regulars, that is full-time British soldiers with British officers, to Pennsylvania.

00:22:18.360 And Washington joined them, and they marched off again to try to seize control of the forks of the Ohio.

00:22:25.180 And Washington doesn't have a formal commission with this group,

00:22:28.480 but he wants to ride along kind of as an attaché.

00:22:31.320 The commander of the British Army is a guy named Edward Braddock.

00:22:35.320 And Braddock is a fairly well-meaning guy,

00:22:37.960 but like so many British officers who was trained and experienced in warfare in Europe,

00:22:44.580 where typically the fighting took place on some broad open field,

00:22:48.440 and the British tactic of lining up in their bright red coats

00:22:53.000 and lying up and marching across a field

00:22:55.920 and marching, marching, marching,

00:22:57.880 even though the other side fires at them.

00:22:59.620 And if the fire kills somebody in the British line,

00:23:02.260 that person falls down,

00:23:03.260 but somebody else steps right in.

00:23:04.700 And they just march unstoppably across the field

00:23:07.720 until the other side breaks and runs.

00:23:10.000 And that's their way of thinking.

00:23:12.000 Something else regarding officers in the British Army.

00:23:15.560 The officers typically had to buy their commissions.

00:23:19.560 So these were a valuable kind of thing.

00:23:21.260 It was a little bit like the system of taxi cab medallions in New York City.

00:23:25.960 Not anybody can be a cabbie.

00:23:27.300 You've got to buy the medallion, basically get it from somebody else.

00:23:30.000 Well, that was the way it was with commissions and the British Army.

00:23:34.020 And it ruled out provincials like Washington.

00:23:37.040 So he goes off to battle.

00:23:38.620 And in this key battle, the Battle of the Monongahela, the British side is routed by

00:23:44.060 the French.

00:23:44.520 And it's routed primarily because the British commander, Braddock, doesn't listen to Washington.

00:23:51.840 The officers, the British officers, don't listen to Washington or the Virginians.

00:23:56.420 They treat the Virginians as they don't know anything.

00:23:59.080 But in fact, the Virginians know how to fight in the forest, how to deal with the Indians, what to do about all this stuff. 0.80

00:24:04.920 And so while the British regulars, they break and run, Washington and his fellow Virginians, 0.90

00:24:10.340 they have to step in and keep the battle from becoming an utter rout. They sort of hold the

00:24:15.920 army together. The army retreats, but it doesn't fall apart entirely. And at that moment, Washington

00:24:21.500 has a revelation. He realizes that I'm pretty good at being a soldier. And not only am I pretty good,

00:24:28.380 I'm better than most of the British officers. And the British were like, sort of like the New York 0.59

00:24:33.740 Yankees of the day for somebody in the military field. Britain had this great empire and this

00:24:38.880 powerful army. These soldiers had been places and won lots of battles. And he had stood up in battle

00:24:44.560 beside them and done better than they had. So for Washington, this says two things. It makes him

00:24:50.800 realize, hey, I could be a good soldier. That's one. But it also makes him realize at a deeper

00:24:56.600 sense that's going to be more significant as the thought spreads that these British are not all we

00:25:03.520 thought they were. Because the American colonials, they had tended to think the folks in Britain know

00:25:09.620 more, they're better, you know, and we're just the rustics. But now it turns out that Washington

00:25:14.100 says, no, we're just as good as they, in fact, we're better. And we're better at the stuff that

00:25:18.280 matters most to us. So from this particular battle, you can see the seeds of Washington's

00:25:24.140 conviction that America needs to govern itself, that America needs to be independent. You can

00:25:29.080 see them planted at this point could you also see maybe a bit of the resentment that could go along

00:25:34.400 with that that you know oh look hey i'm better than these guys but because i was born in the

00:25:38.360 colonies and i you know i don't have the connections to london and the aristocracy that it takes to

00:25:43.240 become an officer i'll probably never become an officer of the british army well in fact that

00:25:47.680 becomes explicit because during the course of the french and indian war the virginia governor who's

00:25:54.060 appointed by the British government back in London, realizes that it would be a good thing

00:26:00.400 if Washington actually had a commission in the British army because, as I suggested earlier,

00:26:07.700 the British soldiers didn't respect and they certainly didn't obey a Virginia officer. They

00:26:13.140 would obey their own officers. But even though Washington had a higher rank than some of the

00:26:18.420 British officers, they would just ignore his orders. And when he was given the assignment

00:26:23.200 to secure the Virginia frontier as the war developed and the British officers wouldn't

00:26:28.060 listen to him, then the governor says, you know what, you need to go and see the British

00:26:32.360 commander in chief who was in Boston at the time. You need to go see him. And I'll give you a letter

00:26:36.860 of recommendation saying that you should be given a commission in the British army. And that way it

00:26:41.940 would clear up this confusion and it would make the Virginia border safer. So Washington goes off

00:26:47.560 and he makes his case.

00:26:48.880 And the British commander, for reasons of his own,

00:26:53.160 said, nah, I don't think so.

00:26:54.640 He did write a letter directly to the British officers

00:26:58.080 who were giving Washington trouble,

00:26:59.800 saying, you obey Washington.

00:27:01.360 They didn't give him the commission.

00:27:02.620 Now, some of this may have had to do the fact

00:27:04.200 that Washington didn't have the money

00:27:06.280 or the connections that were expected

00:27:08.600 to become an officer.

00:27:10.400 I don't think it was because the British

00:27:12.280 thought that Washington wasn't any good as a soldier.

00:27:14.840 No, politics was at play here.

00:27:16.440 Yeah. Now, when Washington came back from this, I can't say that Washington was resentful exactly

00:27:23.320 because he wasn't somebody who tended to resent insults. But what it did do was it continued.

00:27:31.300 It added to that belief that the British really don't know what they're doing. And as he applied

00:27:35.740 it to himself, if they did know what they were doing, they would give me this commission. But

00:27:40.700 they didn't and so we're stuck in virginia with these inferior officers who take precedence over

00:27:47.300 the people who know what they're doing and so washington again begins begin again begins to

00:27:51.540 think this simply isn't good for the future of virginia if we're going to be stuck with this

00:27:56.500 second class government system and so that's going to lead into concluding we're going to have to 0.94

00:28:01.720 govern ourselves yeah all right so he distinguished himself as a soldier early on in his 20s after his

00:28:07.940 active service in the french and indian war he married a woman named martha custis and she was

00:28:14.300 a widow but she was a wealthy widow i think the wealthiest in virginia i believe did washington

00:28:21.260 just marry her for the money or did he have genuine affection for her you think he was

00:28:26.780 affectionate toward her did he fall head over heels in love i don't know about that that wasn't

00:28:33.060 a common thing in those days and even if you did that didn't determine who you would marry so

00:28:37.820 marriage for love, there's a later thing. I mean, he realized that he and Martha could get along.

00:28:44.360 She was looking for a solid guy to be a husband. She was married to an older guy, a very wealthy

00:28:51.000 guy named Daniel Custis, and he died. And so she's a widow who's two years older than Washington.

00:28:57.900 So they're still pretty knowing in their mid-twenties. She has two kids that she's going

00:29:01.980 to have to raise. In those days, it was very difficult to be an unmarried woman because 0.90

00:29:06.880 English law hardly recognized property owning in women. And there was a whole, it was a cultural

00:29:12.440 thing. It was a political thing. It was an economic thing. It was hard for a woman as a woman to

00:29:17.160 manage a plantation that in her case included hundreds of slaves and thousands of acres. That 1.00

00:29:22.580 was, women didn't do it. So she was looking for a husband. He was looking for a wife. He had had 1.00

00:29:29.260 some romantic notions. It's hard to document that he had had any kind of really romantic

00:29:36.680 relationship, in part because he was busy off on the frontier and spent most of his time out there,

00:29:41.480 but he just was awaiting the right moment. And the right moment came along. And from the

00:29:47.600 perspective of both of them, this was a really good match in the sense that she got a husband

00:29:52.580 who was an up-and-coming military officer in Virginia. And this was a big deal. She certainly

00:30:00.660 didn't need a husband who brought a lot of wealth to the marriage. She had all she needed. But for

00:30:05.860 somebody who could bring respect, that she could go out in public with. Washington's great. It

00:30:11.940 helped a lot. He was a handsome guy, a big strapping guy. This is worth remembering that

00:30:17.220 Washington was a big guy, physically big for his time. He was 6'2", 6'3". He was a strapping guy.

00:30:25.320 He was muscular, well-built. He wasn't skinny by any means. People who know this stuff a lot better

00:30:31.000 than I do, thought that he had a physique that was designed to be on horseback. You know, he had

00:30:36.740 long legs and, you know, he could really grip the horse well. He was generally considered to be the

00:30:43.260 best horseman in Virginia at a time when being good on a horse was a big deal. It got you around,

00:30:49.960 but it also, it was something that engendered respect. It was a talent and it was an important

00:30:55.600 talent, but also you could make a good impression if you were good on horseback. Washington was

00:31:00.760 big guy, he could ride a big horse, and he could ride it well. And so that by itself made a strong

00:31:07.000 impression on people. And it's one of the reasons that he was given these military commands,

00:31:12.520 because when you're the commander, you're on horseback, you're above the other soldiers,

00:31:17.440 you're a very visible figure when you go into battle, because even generals in those days,

00:31:21.940 they were often riding around the front, so they were easy targets for the people to see.

00:31:25.260 So if you made that impression, it went a long way toward getting people to decide this is somebody we're going to follow.

00:31:32.420 So she was a good match because she brought wealth and she seemed to be a very nice person.

00:31:37.840 And he was quite willing to be the stepfather.

00:31:41.880 I mean, technically, he's the guardian of her kids.

00:31:46.480 And it gets a little bit complicated legally because she brings to the marriage all this property.

00:31:52.400 he becomes the manager of that property, but not the owner of the property. So he can't sell

00:31:58.440 Martha's land. He can't sell or free Martha's slaves if he had chosen to. Indeed, in a complicated

00:32:04.900 way, not even Martha could have done that because the property was held in dower, D-O-W-E-R as the

00:32:12.400 term in law was, basically in trust for her children. And so if Martha had said, you know

00:32:17.340 what, let's sell off that plantation. Let's free those slaves. Legally, she couldn't do that either. 1.00

00:32:22.400 So English law in those days was set up to hold together large properties and large fortunes.

00:32:29.360 So that's always behind the mirror, but it seems to have been a fact, and I have to say it seems

00:32:35.340 to have been because the correspondence that George and Martha Washington shared was burned

00:32:41.920 at her order upon his death. She decided to burn the letters. Now, I did not begrudge her the right

00:32:50.100 to burn the letters. He wrote letters to her, not to the nosy biographer coming along 200 years

00:32:56.180 later. But I wish I'd seen the letters because that would reveal a side of Washington that's

00:33:01.680 really hard to pin down. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

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00:37:31.280 And now back to the show.

00:37:32.760 How did that, the wealth of Martha, how did that set up Washington to become the public figure that he would become?

00:37:41.860 It's a little bit difficult to answer specifically because he became a very large landowner.

00:37:49.060 But land was cheap. Everybody had land.

00:37:53.420 And sometimes the cash flow from the land could, well, sometimes it could go up, sometimes it can go down.

00:38:01.260 And although Washington was, in effect, about the largest landowner in Virginia, as I say,

00:38:06.660 he didn't really own it, but he had control of the property.

00:38:09.900 Sometimes he was so cash poor that eventually, back after his presidency, he had to borrow

00:38:15.100 money from people to pay his creditors.

00:38:17.960 So it's an odd thing.

00:38:19.400 He was very well respected because if you owned a lot of land, that connoted a certain

00:38:24.400 kind of gravity in this Virginia gentry group. 0.98

00:38:28.240 And it gave him, well, it gave him command of the lives of the hundreds of people, mostly slaves, some hired workers on his property. 0.96

00:38:36.500 So there's that.

00:38:37.580 Here I'll point out that because he had management, he had responsibility for management of this very large set of properties at a young age.

00:38:46.440 He marries when he's in his mid-20s.

00:38:48.520 Washington had more executive experience.

00:38:52.200 That is experience making executive decisions about stuff.

00:38:55.520 You're going to do this.

00:38:56.420 You're going to do that.

00:38:57.000 We're going to hire this. 0.79

00:38:57.600 We're going to plant that.

00:38:58.160 we're going to do this, that, than almost anybody else in America. And it's not an accident that

00:39:03.360 several of the first presidents of the United States were Virginia planters who found themselves

00:39:09.560 in pretty much the same position as Washington. If you run Mount Vernon, as with Jefferson,

00:39:15.720 if you run Monticello, you're running the equivalent of a larger operation by far than

00:39:22.260 the federal government was when Washington and Jefferson was president. Wow. Yeah. So land rich,

00:39:27.840 cash poor and another thing you point out about washington when he did become general of the

00:39:33.160 army we'll talk about that in a bit and even when he served as president he didn't take a salary

00:39:37.900 because i think it was like the honorable thing well that's just i'm doing this as a service

00:39:42.040 all i want is my expenses and that often got into trouble because sometimes you know the continental

00:39:48.860 congress they were pretty slow in paying expenses so like washington was just taking on personal

00:39:53.880 debt fighting this war. Yeah, there's no question about it. And in fact, it was not an unusual thing

00:40:00.040 for Washington to do when he, as you say, when he accepted the commission, giving him command

00:40:04.280 of the government alarming to say, don't pay me a salary, just cover my expenses. And it seemed like

00:40:08.940 a generous offer to make. Now, Washington almost wouldn't have known what to do with a salary. He'd

00:40:13.940 never had a salary before. He'd lived off the produce from the farms, the plantation, I think.

00:40:19.960 But also, it's hard to know how far Washington saw into the future.

00:40:24.820 It's certain that he did not see how long the Revolutionary War was going to last.

00:40:29.740 In fact, one of the few, if not the only letter from Washington to Martha that survives

00:40:35.560 is a letter that Washington wrote shortly after he received the commission,

00:40:40.600 giving him command of the Continental Army.

00:40:42.440 He had gone from Mount Vernon, where he lived, to Philadelphia,

00:40:45.680 where the Continental Congress was meeting.

00:40:47.220 and this was in response to news that they had been fighting at Lexington Concord in the spring

00:40:52.380 of 1775. So Washington shows up and he showed up in his military uniform from his Virginia regiment

00:40:59.420 as a way of saying, if you need me, I'm ready. And in fact, he got the appointment as command

00:41:04.560 general. And upon that, he wrote home to Martha. When he had left Mount Vernon, apparently he had

00:41:11.140 told Martha, I'll be gone a couple of weeks maybe. So now he writes a letter home saying,

00:41:16.840 dear Martha, I'm not going to be home in a couple of weeks. I've been given this command. I probably

00:41:21.140 won't be home before. This is in June when he's writing. I probably won't be home before September.

00:41:25.660 Now, Washington's thinking, okay, this fight against the British started in April. It'll be

00:41:31.440 over by September and then he'll go home. Washington didn't get home in September of 1775.

00:41:38.060 he didn't get home until 1783. He had no idea how long the war was going to last. Neither did

00:41:44.760 anybody on the other side. And this is very typical of wars. If people knew how long the

00:41:50.060 wars were going to last, they'd think a lot more seriously about, should we even start this thing?

00:41:53.940 But that's the way it goes. But there was a weird thing about it for Washington, and that is

00:41:58.120 Heveling's given command of this army now, go fight the British. But he wasn't told, what are

00:42:01.780 you fighting for? Because nobody knew what he was fighting for. They were fighting because the

00:42:07.540 British had tried to disarm the Massachusetts militia. And the militia said, forget it,

00:42:12.340 we're holding on to our arms. And I could point out, this is why we have a Second Amendment in

00:42:17.160 the Constitution of the United States. Don't take away our arms. Anyhow, so Washington goes and

00:42:23.340 takes command of originally a militia force. Now, there is supposed to be this Continental Army

00:42:28.300 that's in the making, but it's going to take months for it to come together. But he's there

00:42:32.240 and he takes a position. The British are now inside Boston. He's on the outside. He's trying 0.97

00:42:36.960 figure what to do. Do I attack Boston? Do I try to destroy their army? Do I try to get them to

00:42:41.640 surrender? Do I try to drive them off and they get on the ships and sail away? And what's the end of

00:42:46.720 all of this? He doesn't know because the Continental Congress hasn't decided. Americans don't know what

00:42:52.060 they're fighting for. They know what they're fighting against. They're fighting against what

00:42:55.900 they perceive as British oppression. But if the parliament had said at this point, okay, reset the

00:43:02.060 clock to before the Stamp Act, let's say, of 1765, one of the first actions by Parliament that

00:43:08.580 triggered this resentment and protest in America. Wind it back and we'll guarantee you the rights

00:43:13.060 you've had for the 150 years that there have been colonies in America. If the British had said that

00:43:17.960 at that point, there probably wouldn't have been a revolution, a revolutionary war. You know,

00:43:22.780 and Martian would have said, okay, we win, everybody goes home and that's that. But they

00:43:25.960 didn't, Parliament in fact doubled down on his authority and Parliament didn't know exactly what

00:43:29.920 it was fighting for either. It's just that, well, you guys broke the law, our law, so we're going to

00:43:34.720 enforce the law. So Washington spends the period from June of 1775 to July 1776 in this limbo about

00:43:43.740 what in the world are we fighting for? Only when the Continental Congress on July 4th, 1776, adopts

00:43:50.560 the Declaration of Independence, which Washington then reads to his soldiers, is it clear, ah, we're

00:43:57.380 fighting for American independence. This clears things up and it makes it a lot easier for

00:44:02.280 Washington to make the case to his soldiers. This is why we're fighting. Before then it was, well,

00:44:07.760 we have to fight to resist the British and plenty of the soldiers in his army would say, well,

00:44:11.620 British haven't oppressed me. What am I fighting for? Because they had families, they had homes,

00:44:16.180 they had hungry kids, they had to do something. But now we're fighting for independent, we're

00:44:21.000 fighting for a country of our own. And in Washington, he sincerely believed that.

00:44:25.360 Oh, yeah. Yeah. And this is really a striking thing about Washington. And it's a challenge

00:44:30.200 to the biographer of Washington. How does he reach this conclusion? Because Washington becomes

00:44:36.260 a rebel. He becomes a traitor to the British government. He becomes an avowed foe of the

00:44:43.180 British crown. How does he come to these positions? It's unusual in that typically rebels,

00:44:50.580 revolutionaries are people who are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo.

00:44:55.360 The status quo is not working for them, and so they say, we've got to fix it.

00:44:59.280 And if you just looked naively at Washington from the outside, you'd say, oh, he's doing pretty well under the status quo.

00:45:04.780 He's this rich guy, and he can do whatever he wants.

00:45:08.120 So what's his big beef?

00:45:10.560 But Washington remembers some of the things we were talking about, the fact that the British didn't govern as well as they thought or claimed to,

00:45:18.100 that they looked down on the colonials, that they were more intent on what they could get out of the

00:45:26.080 colonies and what the colonies could get out of the relationship between the colonies and the

00:45:31.100 mother country. In all of this, Washington thought that there was a pattern. And the conclusion that

00:45:37.200 he drew was that if we Americans do not stand up for our rights, we will be no better than slaves.

00:45:45.640 Now, I remember the moment when I read that passage in one of Washington's letters,

00:45:50.200 and I thought, George, this is awfully rich, coming from somebody who has hundreds of slaves,

00:45:55.040 real slaves, under his control.

00:45:57.180 Are you just using this metaphorically?

00:45:59.240 And if so, don't you realize the incongruity of this metaphor?

00:46:03.460 But the more I read, and the more he became aware of Washington's thinking,

00:46:07.300 he meant it precisely, precisely in the following way.

00:46:11.700 The essence of being a slave is not being poor or maybe sometimes being beaten or not doing what you want.

00:46:20.740 It is being unfree.

00:46:23.000 You are subject to the will of somebody else.

00:46:25.740 And Washington didn't want to be subject to the will of somebody else, speaking for Americans generally.

00:46:31.200 Americans and their ancestors had come out from England in the early 17th century and established these colonies,

00:46:37.820 many of them precisely because they didn't like the way they were being treated in England.

00:46:42.040 Lots of, when the Puritans go out to America, they want to get out from under that. And for 0.67

00:46:47.200 the first roughly 150 years, the British let Americans handle their own stuff. The Americans 0.64

00:46:53.580 essentially have home rule, self-government in matters that relate directly to them. Yeah,

00:46:59.780 in matters of trade with the empire and wars, there is a connection there. But most of the

00:47:04.120 Americans can do stuff on their own. And Washington grew up in a world where that was the case.

00:47:08.420 But things changed in the 1760s and 1770s after the end of the French and Indian War,

00:47:14.740 when the British began to intrude more into the daily lives. We had talked, you mentioned that

00:47:20.860 Washington was a speculator and land in the Ohio country. And he had big plans along with some of

00:47:27.240 his brothers, Benjamin Franklin, William Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's son, other distinguished

00:47:32.520 figures in virginia they would go out they would gain legal title to this land they would survey

00:47:38.420 it and then they would sell it to the next wave of settlers and they would make money and washington

00:47:42.760 spent a lot of time and energy in this project the ohio project was part of something that was

00:47:49.180 called the ohio company there's a land speculation company and then at the end of the french and

00:47:53.820 indian war the british government says nope nobody gets to acquire land titles in the ohio country

00:47:59.100 in the western region. Nobody got settled there. Your whole plan, Washington, and all you other

00:48:03.600 people, poof, it's gone up in smoke. Why? Because it's too expensive for us to administer that.

00:48:09.640 And Washington again thinks, wait a minute, they're making laws based on the convenience

00:48:15.180 and profits of people living in England rather than the interests of us. So we're going to have

00:48:20.580 to figure out a way to gain control of our own affairs or we will be no better than slaves.

00:48:25.940 All right, so he takes command of the army.

00:48:28.060 What was his strategy?

00:48:29.660 I mean, this is, he's going against you,

00:48:31.100 like you said, he was like the New York Yankees of the time,

00:48:34.080 the most powerful military in the world,

00:48:35.820 the British military.

00:48:37.180 And here he was this sort of leader

00:48:39.080 of this ragtag colonial army

00:48:41.160 made up of militias from different colonies.

00:48:43.860 What was his strategy for taking on this Goliath?

00:48:46.840 Okay, so this is the big question that I had.

00:48:49.080 And it's one of the reasons

00:48:49.720 I didn't write about Washington for a long time.

00:48:51.940 I've written about other people

00:48:53.080 and I've written about history and moments of history,

00:48:55.580 but I stayed away from Washington in large part

00:48:58.320 because I couldn't figure out the answer to the question you pose.

00:49:01.920 So what made him a good general?

00:49:03.900 And later on, we're getting there, but what makes him a good president?

00:49:06.860 Because he's ranked as the best general in American history

00:49:10.640 and one of the three best presidents in American history.

00:49:14.000 And naively looking upon Washington, I didn't get it.

00:49:18.620 He didn't do stuff that was so obvious, so dramatic.

00:49:23.080 as other generals did. So he didn't capture Vicksburg the way Ulysses Grant did. And he

00:49:29.920 didn't head the D-Day invasion the way Dwight Eisenhower did. His battles were the merest

00:49:36.900 skirmishes by the standards of the American Civil War, certainly of World War II. And furthermore,

00:49:42.960 as a general, Washington lost far more battles than he won. If you just count up his victories,

00:49:50.580 Well, he won this surprising attack against a small group of drunken Hessian soldiers at Trenton, and he won a follow-up a little bit. It's kind of almost a toss-up who won at Princeton several days later. And then he won at Yorktown, and that's about it.

00:50:08.820 So, meanwhile, he lost at dozens of places.

00:50:13.200 He lost the American capital.

00:50:15.340 The government of the United States was driven from Philadelphia,

00:50:18.140 and the British army moved in and spent a nice cozy winter there.

00:50:23.020 It was 1777, 1778 in Washington,

00:50:25.920 and his army was stuck on the hillside out in the open at Valley Forge.

00:50:31.300 So, how does he do it?

00:50:33.400 You know, he turns out to win the war, but he couldn't win any battles.

00:50:36.740 And this because though Washington was mediocre, not even mediocre, at tactics, at running a single battle, here's your army, here's the other army, how do you maneuver you guys and take advantage of the other guys?

00:50:50.980 Washington lost battles that he could have won. He lost individual battles that, well, Brandywine,

00:50:58.700 for example, a critical battle ahead of the loss of Philadelphia that many other generals would

00:51:04.540 have won, that Ulysses Grant would have won, that Robert E. Lee would have won. He lost them. So how

00:51:10.680 does he get this reputation? And the answer is very simple. If you are the commanding general,

00:51:15.680 you're not just a theater general, you're not just a general of a particular unit, but if you're

00:51:20.720 commanding general, you got to keep in mind the big picture. And the big picture is to win the

00:51:26.600 war. So because I've written about Ulysses Grant, I often find myself in debates, well, was Grant

00:51:32.560 a better general than Lee? And the answer, my answer is always simply yes, because he won the

00:51:38.540 war. And so with Washington, yes, he won the war. Why did he win the war? Because as undistinguished

00:51:44.460 as he was as a tactical commander. He was brilliant as a strategic thinker. He understood

00:51:51.760 what this war was all about, and he understood the fundamental asymmetry between the American

00:51:57.360 position and the British position. He understood that he did not have to win a single battle

00:52:02.340 except for the last one. He could lose every battle, and he nearly did, as long as he wins

00:52:06.980 the last one. He did win the last one at Yorktown because Washington understood something that's

00:52:11.440 profound about politics, but is often forgotten. And that is wars, including the American

00:52:16.500 Revolutionary War, begin in politics and they end in politics. And Washington understood that

00:52:22.120 the war in America was, for the British, a decision made by parliament, go enforce the law

00:52:28.420 against these American colonials. And Washington understood that the war would end when parliament

00:52:33.920 essentially reversed that decision. When they said, okay, we spent too much, we spent too much

00:52:39.020 time. Let's just call the army home and get on to other things. So Washington was aiming for that

00:52:44.180 final result. And this contributed to the fact, I've really overstated Washington's mediocrity

00:52:49.380 in tactics. One of the reasons Washington lost all those battles that he did was that he never

00:52:55.500 was willing to put his army in a position where it might lose the battle. Now, other commanders

00:53:01.560 would have taken that chance, but not Washington. For Washington, the big deal was preserving the

00:53:06.640 army. As long as there is an army, then the British will have to keep fighting us, and the

00:53:11.960 British public and the British parliament will have to keep sending money and resources to America.

00:53:17.740 This is an odd war of attrition that Washington is fighting, not attrition in the sense of killing

00:53:22.900 more British soldiers than they killed Washington. That's the typical definition of attrition. No,

00:53:27.960 attrition of British political morale and support for the war. So it's really as much a matter of

00:53:35.400 keeping the war going as it is of winning anything. And so it's not an accident. The war lasted as

00:53:42.100 long as it did. If Washington had been bolder, if Washington had had the temperament, say,

00:53:47.200 of the Ulysses Grant, he probably would have had it out earlier with the British. But he didn't

00:53:53.180 because he didn't think he had the capacity to defeat them decisively only after the alliance

00:53:58.700 with France, when French soldiers joined Washington's army, when French ships bottled up

00:54:03.220 the british army in this case at yorktown could he go there and stand for the fight and deliver

00:54:08.960 the final blow so washington's strategy is exactly the way the war played out we just keep fighting

00:54:14.220 we keep fighting keep fighting eventually the british weary and they call it off and we win

00:54:18.340 yeah and part of what he did as a general to keep the war going for as long as it did

00:54:24.040 he had you talk about this a lot in the book manage his own troops there's a lot of turmoil

00:54:28.800 and conflict within his own troops mutinies or you know people wanting to mutiny because they

00:54:34.200 weren't getting paid they weren't getting supplies and washington had this knack this skill to quell

00:54:41.200 those those up people yeah so this is absolutely crucial and indeed the epitome of washington's

00:54:47.600 challenge in holding the army together is at valley forge so in fact it's often thought that

00:54:53.580 washington's great victory was the victory at york 10 which is big deal no question about it

00:54:57.860 But in a deeper way, his greatest victory was at Valley Forge, which was not a battle.

00:55:04.240 It was an ordeal.

00:55:05.740 But the fact that he came out of that ordeal with the army intact, and in fact, in better

00:55:10.900 shape and better training than when it had gone into the camp at Valley Forge, meant

00:55:15.520 everything. 0.78

00:55:16.100 It meant that the war would continue. 0.94

00:55:18.260 The American side would get back its capital because the British would have to come out

00:55:22.000 of Philadelphia to fight.

00:55:23.020 And when I was trying to assess, okay, how did Washington do that?

00:55:27.860 This gets back to Washington's character.

00:55:30.360 This gets back to the impression Washington made.

00:55:33.880 Now, Washington, by this time, is in his 40s.

00:55:37.980 So he's sort of the prime of mid-adulthood for a male.

00:55:42.700 And he's still a big, strong, impressive guy.

00:55:45.480 He's galloping all around the battlefield.

00:55:47.420 His soldiers are seeing everywhere.

00:55:49.000 It's crucial that in the time at Valley Forge, when he could have gone back to Mount Vernon,

00:55:55.080 spent the winter there, he stayed with his troops.

00:55:57.360 He stayed with his troops the whole war.

00:56:00.680 They saw that he was there, this rich guy who could have been elsewhere.

00:56:04.220 He was living as they were living.

00:56:05.940 Not quite.

00:56:06.520 He had better rations than they did.

00:56:08.120 He commandeered a real house and they had to build their own cabins.

00:56:11.200 But still, he really put himself out there.

00:56:13.760 They understood that he put a lot more on the line than they did.

00:56:17.200 If the American side lost this war, they would probably just go home and go back to what they were doing.

00:56:22.840 He might very well be hanged as a traitor or drawn and quartered or whatever they were going to do to traitors in those days.

00:56:28.700 But he was there.

00:56:29.880 And because he was older than they were, he became a father figure to many of them.

00:56:34.140 And it helped in this regard that he did not have any children of his own.

00:56:38.840 So some people became almost explicitly surrogate sons.

00:56:43.080 Alexander Hamilton was one.

00:56:44.480 The Marquis de Lafayette was another.

00:56:45.940 These people who are a generation younger than Washington, who sort of, they were looking

00:56:50.160 for this fatherly figure, this fatherly advice and model.

00:56:54.180 But Washington in some ways became a model for the soldiers in general.

00:56:58.420 It's a commonplace of military history and affairs that while soldiers might be drawn

00:57:05.220 to join the ranks for a cause, for the cause of freedom or independence or later freeing

00:57:11.220 sledge or whatever it is. Once the campaigns get going, they fight for each other. They fight for

00:57:16.780 their commanders. And in the case of Washington, that was really a big deal because what kept the

00:57:23.220 soldiers at Valley Forge, many of whom were sorely tempted to leave, and some in fact did,

00:57:28.500 they were sorely tempted to leave because they weren't getting paid. Very often Congress wasn't

00:57:33.300 paying them what Congress had said it was going to pay them. And so they couldn't send money to

00:57:37.120 their wives and children. They got pletters instead from home saying, we're hungry. The kids don't have

00:57:41.860 clothes. You know, what are you going to do? How can we hold ourselves together? And some of them

00:57:45.920 said, well, you know, I'm going to just go take leave and go spend the winter with my family.

00:57:50.160 Maybe I'll come back in the spring. But most didn't. Washington held them together. And the

00:57:54.400 reason they stayed was they believed with Washington in the cause. But what they really

00:57:58.760 believed in was their commander. And they didn't leave in part because they didn't want to be

00:58:04.540 untrue to the cause, but mostly because they didn't want to disappoint Washington. And this

00:58:10.800 emotional attachment of Washington's men for him, and vice versa, became clear at the end of the

00:58:17.220 war, when finally the American side has won. News of the peace treaty in Paris has arrived at

00:58:22.500 Washington's camp, which is in Newburgh, New York, above New York City. And so, okay, now it's time

00:58:28.080 for a bit to go home. So they go down and they reoccupy New York City, which had been controlled

00:58:32.320 by the british the whole war they reoccupied new york city in the new it's okay time for the army

00:58:37.740 to break up and washington takes leave of the army and his officers hold a going away party

00:58:43.660 for a tavern in one of the francis tavern in new york city and at this party at this reception

00:58:50.220 washington one by one brings up his junior officers and they come up and they shake hands

00:58:55.620 and in every case they embrace each other and eyewitnesses there they they commented on the

00:59:00.640 fact that Washington was weeping as the other officers were. And they realized they probably

00:59:06.260 never see each other again. They've been through all this and now they're taking leave. And they've

00:59:11.440 done this thing that banded them together. So they've been through hardship. They've been

00:59:16.260 through war and peace. They've suffered. They've seen comrades die, the whole thing. But in addition

00:59:21.420 to that, they have done this thing that is of world historic importance. They have created

00:59:26.720 this new country. And they didn't realize it, they didn't think of it in these terms exactly,

00:59:32.120 but they did this thing that people 250 years later would still be talking about,

00:59:36.180 as indeed we are. And so it was that, it was this connection between Washington and his soldiers,

00:59:41.180 and especially his officer corps, that was key to his leadership and his success in leading the

00:59:47.120 army forward. All right. So the Americans win. Washington resigns his commission. He gives it

00:59:51.820 back to the continental Congress. And I, you know, King George even said like, I mean, if he did that,

00:59:57.000 he's the greatest guy in the world because he has so much power, no one would give away power.

01:00:02.120 And he just wanted to go back to Mount Vernon and be a planter, work on it. So he's like,

01:00:07.180 I got all this debt. I just want to retire from public life. I'm done. But he gets called back

01:00:11.540 into public service because they're developing the constitution. He takes part in the constitutional

01:00:16.440 convention. And then they say, okay, we need a president. Washington, you're the guy. You're

01:00:21.320 the only one who could be president. Why did people think like, I mean, were there any other

01:00:24.880 contenders to be president or everyone agreed like, you know, Washington's the guy is going to be the

01:00:28.820 first president of the United States? There were a few people who imagined that they'd make a good

01:00:33.280 president, but the consensus was that Washington was the guy because Washington was by far the most

01:00:38.360 admired figure in the United States, the most famous figure in the United States. Benjamin Franklin

01:00:43.480 maybe, but Franklin quite clearly was declining. He was a generation older than Washington and he

01:00:50.120 was essentially dying. So he wasn't going to be president of the United States. But if not Franklin,

01:00:55.740 it had to be Washington because Washington was this big name. And this new government had no

01:01:01.100 guarantee that it was going to do better than the government that it replaced. The Articles of

01:01:04.960 Confederation were adopted by the American states in 1781. They were overthrown by the Constitution

01:01:12.420 in 1787. So it lasted six years. Will this new Constitution do any better? Nobody knew. But it

01:01:19.880 would have the best chance possible if it had Washington at its head, because Americans trusted

01:01:26.180 Washington. They knew about Washington. They trusted Washington. They had seen that Washington,

01:01:32.260 after the end of the war, had given up military power voluntarily. He didn't have to be pried out

01:01:38.440 of his position. He handed it off. And as you said, when George III, King of Britain, heard about

01:01:43.660 this, he says, greatest man in the world for doing it. So Americans, including the people at

01:01:49.120 the Constitutional Convention, and the people who all went to Washington said, you got to be

01:01:53.300 president. They were quite comfortable with Washington taking charge of this new government.

01:01:57.940 They had a stronger executive than the previous government. And a really ambitious, a power-hungry

01:02:04.040 new executive, that is a president, might cause problems. But they didn't worry about that,

01:02:08.800 because Washington, at another moment when he could have retained power, when he had control

01:02:13.440 of an army, had not. So he wouldn't overstay his walk. And they also understood that here was

01:02:18.380 somebody who made good judgments, made good decisions. This is really crucial. If there's a

01:02:22.760 single key to Washington's success, it's this. And it's a really nebulous thing. It's an elusive

01:02:28.600 thing to figure out. But time and again, Washington makes good decisions. And that's what you're

01:02:35.320 looking for in any executive. That's what we're always looking for when we choose presidents from

01:02:40.440 Washington today until now. Will this person make good decisions? You don't know ahead of time

01:02:45.820 because you don't know what the decisions are going to be.

01:02:48.400 And in many cases, there are going to be decisions

01:02:49.960 unlike any that candidates for office have had.

01:02:52.880 But people figured if a decision is going to be made,

01:02:55.540 then we want to have Washington making them.

01:02:58.120 So stepping into the presidency,

01:02:59.400 there was no instruction manual on how to be president

01:03:01.940 except for some vague guidelines

01:03:03.660 in Article 2 of the Constitution.

01:03:06.160 Was Washington aware that every single action of his

01:03:09.640 was going to set a precedent for subsequent presidents?

01:03:12.540 And then if so, like, how do you navigate that pressure?

01:03:14.720 He understood the potential of that.

01:03:16.340 And he was at the Constitutional Convention.

01:03:18.460 He was the presiding officer.

01:03:20.260 He was called the president of the convention.

01:03:21.980 He didn't take part in the debates, partly because he wasn't a debater,

01:03:25.160 partly because he interpreted his office as being more like the speaker of the House of Parliament,

01:03:30.040 where you just bang the gavel and you don't actually join the debate.

01:03:32.360 But the presidency, the executive branch, is described in Article 2 of the Constitution,

01:03:36.240 which is far shorter than Article 1.

01:03:38.820 Article 1 is what the convention spent all their time arguing about.

01:03:42.200 Article 2, is this how we're going to choose?

01:03:43.980 him. That was kind of complicated. But in terms of what it'll do, he's going to take this oath of

01:03:47.680 office, and then he's going to see that the will of Congress is carried out, and he's going to

01:03:51.480 faithfully preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States. That's it. And one of the

01:03:55.000 reasons that they're so sketchy about this is, one, is that the convention was running out of

01:03:59.180 time. They'd been in Philadelphia for about four months, and they wanted to get home. But also

01:04:03.680 because they looked across the room to where Washington was sitting. And they said, well,

01:04:07.980 he's going to be the first president. We'll let George figure it out. And they, both they and

01:04:12.460 washington himself and answer your question they understood that the first president was going to go

01:04:16.920 a long way toward shaping this particular office and it was really interesting you talked about

01:04:22.720 i mean they even thought about things like what should i call what should we call the president

01:04:26.100 his excellency your majesty like no that reeks too much of british aristocracy and they just like

01:04:30.900 mr president we're going to settle with mr president at the very beginning the congress

01:04:35.280 demonstrated its ability to spend a lot of time blowing a lot of hot air about trivial things

01:04:40.860 Excellency, magnificence.

01:04:42.600 What are we going to call him?

01:04:43.820 Well, it's a Washington citizen.

01:04:45.160 Mr. President.

01:04:45.860 We'll leave it at that.

01:04:46.960 We're still calling the president, Mr. President.

01:04:49.620 So he steps into being president.

01:04:52.460 Being a president is kind of like being a commander of an army.

01:04:55.600 You're an executive, but it's different in a lot of ways.

01:04:59.840 What were the biggest problems he faced during his presidency?

01:05:02.900 And what was his approach to managing them?

01:05:05.680 Well, the fundamental problem with being president after you've been general

01:05:08.840 is that like being a general,

01:05:11.340 you have all sorts of responsibility,

01:05:13.320 but unlike being a general,

01:05:14.540 you don't have any authority.

01:05:16.020 So you can't order people around.

01:05:18.220 The executive branch in those days

01:05:20.440 consisted of about a dozen people.

01:05:22.540 So his four cabinet secretaries

01:05:24.360 and their personal secretaries,

01:05:26.420 and that's about it.

01:05:27.260 It's not like the huge executive branch

01:05:29.040 we have today.

01:05:30.740 And so Washington,

01:05:32.180 he responded to what Congress did.

01:05:34.100 He left the proposal of programs

01:05:36.740 up to, well, primarily Alexander Hamilton, who proposed things like a bank in the United States

01:05:41.440 and the decision of the federal government to assume the debts of the states and so on.

01:05:46.960 And so Washington was kind of this referee. Is this measure, is it unconstitutional or not?

01:05:51.860 Should I veto it or should I not? So there's that part of it. He did have to deal with differences,

01:05:57.600 debates, disagreements among members of his cabinet. It soon became clear that Hamilton

01:06:01.800 and Jefferson, Hamilton is secretary of the treasury, Jefferson is secretary of state.

01:06:05.580 They had a philosophical difference about what a government is supposed to do.

01:06:10.740 And Hamilton was in favor of a stronger president.

01:06:15.140 Stronger, stronger, bigger, stronger, more powerful.

01:06:18.000 Jefferson was very suspicious of power.

01:06:20.400 The president ought to be kept under control.

01:06:22.220 Congress ought to be kept under the control in deciding whether power ought to be exercised by the feds or by the states.

01:06:28.460 Leave it to the states.

01:06:29.120 So he's got this fundamental difference, by the way, it's a difference that has separated people in America from then until now. For a long time, the people who advocated bigger government, well, it's kind of hard to call them conservatives, although they were Hamilton and his side, the Federalist Party.

01:06:46.300 They were the big government conservatives of the day.

01:06:49.560 And Jefferson and his, the original Republican Party, they were the small government.

01:06:54.940 Well, does that make them liberal or conservatives for the day?

01:06:57.000 That part would change.

01:06:57.740 What you call them would change.

01:06:59.280 But at any given time, there are some people who have confidence in government, so want

01:07:03.100 government to act, and other people who are skeptical of government, say government ought

01:07:06.240 to stay out.

01:07:07.120 And that division was there.

01:07:08.520 What Washington had not anticipated, what really nobody had anticipated, was that these

01:07:12.640 differences of opinions would give rise to effectively permanent parties. They weren't

01:07:18.340 surprised that on any given issues, people would line up on one side or the other. If you're having

01:07:23.200 a yes or no vote on something, then you line up and people bring a bunch of different views to

01:07:28.660 the yes side and other people bring different views to the no side, but you have this binary

01:07:33.320 split one or the other. But what Washington didn't see and what he really didn't like when he began

01:07:38.480 to see it was that the difference of opinions would give rise to political parties. Originally,

01:07:43.280 they called them factions and they thought that factions were this blight on the body politic and

01:07:48.660 it would be bad. That the country needed to be guided by virtue where individuals would put the

01:07:54.500 interests of the nation as a whole ahead of their own or their own group's interest. Whereas if you

01:08:00.380 are a partisan, if you believe in party government, you think that you must put ahead the interests of

01:08:05.940 the party because the party then will serve the national interests. And Washington grew very

01:08:11.080 impatient with what he saw as this emerging partisanship. When he agreed to become president,

01:08:17.060 he sort of thought that he would just preside over at a high level over everything. And

01:08:22.580 occasionally he would just sign this bill or maybe veto that bill, but that he wouldn't have

01:08:27.620 to really descend very far into the realm of politics. He didn't like politics. He knew he

01:08:32.800 was not good at politics. He didn't have the patience for politics. He didn't have the speaking

01:08:38.180 skills necessary for politics. But in the course of his presence, he found himself drawn into

01:08:43.440 politics. He found himself caught in the firefight, the crossfire between Jefferson and Hamilton. He

01:08:48.520 found himself criticized, slandered even, in this new partisan press that emerged as the political

01:08:55.660 party swarmed. And he got more and more fed up with it. Yeah, I mean, so Washington tried to

01:09:00.880 stay above the fray, never aligned with any of the parties. But people would say, well, look,

01:09:05.820 Washington kind of went along with this Federalist idea. He must be a Federalist,

01:09:10.320 even though he doesn't publicly say so. So we're just going to like go after the guy

01:09:13.500 and sling mud at him for being a Federalist. Yeah. And so in fact, in the early days,

01:09:18.800 sometimes the parties or the factions were denoted as the administration faction,

01:09:23.960 the anti-administration faction. But even that is a little bit vague because Jefferson was part of

01:09:29.160 the administration, but he was opposed to most of the legislation, the policy that was put out by

01:09:35.160 the administration. In effect, in philosophy, Washington was a federalist. He wouldn't have

01:09:40.560 admitted to being a federalist. He wouldn't have said ahead of time, I will always agree with

01:09:45.200 Hamilton. But in effect, he did. And so naturally, those people who disagreed with Hamilton,

01:09:50.540 including Jefferson, they thought that Washington was a partisan. And so they came out and attacked

01:09:55.000 washington yeah i mean for the most part it seems like he managed it pretty well during those two

01:10:00.180 terms as president and then he finally he's like ready to retire he's like i'm done with this i did

01:10:05.640 my part and he gives his farewell address and i mean what do you think his mindset was when he

01:10:11.520 was giving this farewell address do you think he was optimistic about the republic he helped build

01:10:16.660 or was he kind of thinking this thing could probably fall apart because of the partisanship

01:10:21.380 Well, the first thing that I will say is that he was glad to get out of office.

01:10:24.600 In fact, John Adams, who was his successor, and had to fight his way to the top of this

01:10:28.580 and defeat Thomas Jefferson at contested election.

01:10:31.540 On the inauguration day, Washington, as the outgoing president, was there.

01:10:35.840 And Adams caught Washington's eye.

01:10:38.880 And as Adams wrote home to his wife, Abigail, that night, he said the general was there.

01:10:43.880 And I think I saw a gleam in his eye, a twinkle in his eye.

01:10:47.960 Now, this is unusual.

01:10:49.000 Washington's eye did not twinkle.

01:10:50.520 but this was Adams inference because Adams went on to say and I thought I heard him thinking I am

01:10:59.020 fairly out and you are fairly in now let's see which of us will be the happier so Washington was

01:11:06.380 thrilled to be out of office what did he think about the future of America I think that he

01:11:12.520 realized that he was coming to the end of his life he didn't have any degenerative disease he

01:11:17.980 He couldn't say, I will be dead within six months.

01:11:20.040 In fact, the affliction that carried him off came on within 24 hours.

01:11:23.820 It was a sudden infection of his throat that basically choked him.

01:11:28.240 But he realized that his public life was over.

01:11:31.640 Looking back on what he had accomplished, he thought, well, I and we of my generation

01:11:36.040 have accomplished some great stuff.

01:11:38.000 We made this independent country.

01:11:39.800 We embarked for America, for the states of the United States, on this audacious experiment

01:11:46.500 to determine whether ordinary people can govern themselves.

01:11:50.420 Is self-government even a possibility?

01:11:53.460 There were no self-governments of any size or distinction in the world in that day.

01:11:58.560 Maybe Switzerland and there had been some Italian city-states.

01:12:02.520 And if you go way back to Athens, but everybody else, everywhere else,

01:12:06.020 people had been governed by somebody else.

01:12:08.040 It was the age of kings and emperors and czars and the like.

01:12:12.300 But for people to govern themselves, they created a republic

01:12:14.920 where authority wells up from the people.

01:12:17.920 Will this even work?

01:12:19.420 A lot of people around the world said no.

01:12:21.480 In fact, a lot of people in Europe

01:12:22.560 were rooting for the American Republic to fail

01:12:25.140 because they're trying this radical new thing

01:12:27.680 that's gonna challenge everything that we believe in.

01:12:30.060 So we hope it fails,

01:12:31.160 otherwise we're gonna have to change our stuff.

01:12:33.440 But so Washington looked back.

01:12:34.640 We won independence and he was very proud of his role

01:12:38.040 and that of his army in winning the war.

01:12:40.980 He always thought of himself primarily as a general,

01:12:43.780 as a military commander, as a soldier. He was secondarily a politician as our president.

01:12:49.560 And looking back on his presidency, he was proud that the country had survived eight years under

01:12:55.720 this new constitution. Already it had gone farther than the country had under the Arctic

01:12:59.800 Confederation. That was a good thing. Americans were settling into this new rhythm. They had 1.00

01:13:05.400 created this government that had more authority at the center. And he thought that was necessary.

01:13:10.660 And so he thought that was a good thing.

01:13:12.540 But he wouldn't have presumed to promise that the republic was going to persist for a long period of time.

01:13:19.860 I often get asked as a teacher and a writer, so what would the founding generation have thought if they came back today?

01:13:26.040 And I generally answer that I think they would have been of two minds.

01:13:29.240 One is they would have been gratified that this experiment in self-government that they started is still going on because it's always kind of on a knife's edge.

01:13:40.040 in that the experiment can never succeed definitively

01:13:44.200 because if we've succeeded in governing ourselves for 250 years,

01:13:47.940 we might fail in the 251st year.

01:13:50.720 But it can fail definitively.

01:13:52.900 If we lose it, we lose it and it's gone.

01:13:55.120 So they would have been happy

01:13:56.300 that this thing that they had started is still going on.

01:14:00.100 I think he would have been surprised

01:14:02.520 that we're operating still under the constitution

01:14:04.720 that was written then.

01:14:06.500 As I say, their first constitution,

01:14:08.080 Articles of Federation lasted less than a decade. We're on 25 decades and counting. That's pretty

01:14:14.660 amazing, a little bit less, but over 22 decades and counting. But I think they might have,

01:14:21.060 and maybe not Washington so much, he was a very practical guy, but somebody like Jefferson,

01:14:24.200 for example, Madison, I think they would have been surprised. They would be surprised that we're

01:14:28.000 still using that constitution, that we haven't had the imagination or the gumption to write

01:14:33.600 something more appropriate for our times. They believed in self-government. That means you

01:14:38.320 govern yourselves. You're not governed by a generation that lived 250 years ago. So I think 0.97

01:14:42.560 they would have been both gratified that we're still a republic, but I think they would have

01:14:46.800 been puzzled that we haven't devised a government more to the likings and the needs of our own

01:14:53.180 specific time. So what do you think Washington can teach us about being an American citizen

01:14:58.500 250 years after America's founding?

01:15:01.160 Like what specific qualities of his

01:15:02.780 do you think are still worth emulating today?

01:15:05.300 Well, I answered the question in two ways.

01:15:06.580 One, that's kind of the obvious thing

01:15:08.620 you might expect to somebody in Washington,

01:15:10.360 but then one that maybe is not so expected.

01:15:12.340 The first thing I would say is that

01:15:13.760 a person of character,

01:15:16.420 a person with good judgment,

01:15:17.520 a person who engenders respect

01:15:20.360 of him in this case on the part of other people

01:15:23.520 is really a blessing to any group that he's with.

01:15:28.500 definitely a blessing to our republic. If you're going to have public servants, and you do in any

01:15:33.680 kind of government, to have public servants, whether they're in the military like Washington

01:15:37.640 first or in politics as Washington was subsequently, if they're able to put the

01:15:42.020 interests of the country ahead of themselves and give it their best thought, their deepest

01:15:46.200 consideration, and make their decisions without calculating what it's going to mean for them

01:15:51.040 individually, then that's great. Looking back on Washington when he was young, saying, I want to be

01:15:55.840 I want to be an honorable man. I want to be a man of principle. I want to be a man that people will

01:16:00.260 look up to. Well, a young person today can take that kind of model and apply it to himself or

01:16:06.220 herself today, and it would be just as valuable. So developing character, living up to character

01:16:14.080 and principle, that is as good a goal today as it ever was. But the other side of it is that

01:16:21.620 it doesn't really work out in politics today the way it did for Washington. Washington in the 1790s

01:16:29.760 became president because he had been this victorious general, and everybody looked up to

01:16:35.580 Washington, and he was coming out of an age of deference, where people were willing to look up

01:16:42.380 to their betters, as they often would call them. Within 30 years after Washington left office,

01:16:49.300 America went from being a republic to being a democracy, and a democracy is a version of a

01:16:55.860 republic, but it's one where equality is the guiding principle. And by the time Andrew Jackson

01:17:02.140 became president in the 1820s, Americans insisted that their presidents be no better than them,

01:17:08.020 and that they'd be able to look the presidents right in the eye. Moreover, and this is natural

01:17:13.640 in a free country with a First Amendment, where people get to speak their minds,

01:17:18.700 where people had strong minds and want to put their ideas into politics, there's going to be

01:17:23.600 competition. Washington was handed the presidency. So Plato wrote about a philosopher king.

01:17:30.860 Washington was, in effect, America's philosopher king. And the reason Plato was drawn to it is

01:17:36.340 that the king doesn't have to seek the approval of the people. He can be a king. He can rule them.

01:17:41.500 But he also has the best interest of the people. Washington was, in effect, the closest thing

01:17:45.880 America had to a philosopher king because he didn't have to run for office. He was the first

01:17:50.220 president. If he hadn't been first president, he ever would have been the second president or the

01:17:54.000 third or any subsequent president because he wouldn't put up with the kind of stuff that

01:17:58.220 people who seek office have to put up with. The closest analogies to Washington as president

01:18:04.000 were the other generals who became president. Jackson, Grant, Eisenhower, they became president

01:18:09.840 because they had been famous generals.

01:18:12.560 So the rules of competitive politics

01:18:14.640 don't apply to that group.

01:18:16.960 But even there, for somebody like Eisenhower,

01:18:19.040 Eisenhower had to run for office.

01:18:20.760 He had to run for the Republican nomination.

01:18:22.620 He had to defeat a Democratic opponent.

01:18:25.700 Washington had none of that stuff.

01:18:27.420 So Washington, the man of character,

01:18:29.600 that's a good role model for today as it was back then.

01:18:32.300 But you're not going to find somebody

01:18:34.280 who has that sense of self,

01:18:36.780 somebody who has those values,

01:18:38.620 that person's not going to be effective in the politics that we have our system has changed so

01:18:43.360 other skills are selected for not the skills that washington had yes we work with what we got i

01:18:49.020 guess yeah well hw this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn

01:18:52.520 more about the book and your work about the book they can go to penguinrandomhouse.com

01:18:58.180 and for my work generally they can find me at hwbrands.substack.com i got a substack column

01:19:05.080 Fantastic.

01:19:05.540 Well, H.W. Brands,

01:19:06.200 it's been a pleasure.

01:19:07.540 Great to talk to you.

01:19:09.380 My guest today was H.W. Brands.

01:19:10.860 He's the author of the book

01:19:11.720 American Patriarch.

01:19:12.740 It's available on Amazon.com

01:19:13.940 and bookstores everywhere.

01:19:15.200 You can learn more information

01:19:15.980 about his work at his sub stack,

01:19:17.500 hwbrands.substack.com.

01:19:19.860 Also check out our show notes

01:19:20.760 at awim.is slash Washington

01:19:22.340 where you can find links to resources

01:19:23.540 when we delve deeper into this topic.

01:19:32.600 Well, that wraps up another edition

01:19:34.220 of the AOM Podcast.

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01:19:46.100 As always,

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The Art of Manliness - June 30, 2026

George Washington — The Man Behind the Monument

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