Reconsidering How George Washington Came To Symbolize the American Revolution

‘American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington’ By H.W. BrandsDoubleday, 640 pagesA biography of George Washington is likely to be well received if it offers a new slant and certain nuances that have been elided by earlier biographers. By this standard, H. W. Brands has succeeded, providing a shrewd reading of Washington’s character formed in the clash of civilizations, war, and political intrigue.Barely into his twenties, Washington was given by royal governor Dinwiddie the perilous assignment of delivering to the French a warning: stay out of the western territories claimed by by the British. Not only did Washington have to travel through uncharted land in foul weather, he had to deal with Indians used to playing the British and the French off one another.The hardy, if inexperienced Washington, insisted the Indians had to fight French encroachment on their land. He had to be commanding and diplomatic, and from the Indian point of view (well told by Mr. Brands) he seemed arrogant, and yet he knew how to give way to Indian demands for more time to muster their forces against the French. He fulfilled his assignment, though at the cost of a bloody encounter with a French force that resulted in the death of their leader.The French called Washington an assassin, relying on the document he signed in the dead of night in poor light and without a command of the French language. Washington thought he was negotiating an honorable agreement that allowed his forces, overwhelmed by a French counterattack, to withdraw without prejudice to his mission. This early episode, Mr. Brands rightly implies, formed Washington’s early concern about his reputation and the importance of cultivating the loyalty of the men he led into battle and the trust of his superiors.During the French and Indian War, Washington realized that as a provincial colonial he could never rise in the British Army while at the same time the British, victors in the war, no longer felt much inclination to accede to American demands for more autonomy, which included the exclusive right to tax themselves, since they were not represented in Parliament.Having been disabused of the idea that the British were invincible — especially after the disastrous defeat and death of General Braddock, attacked by an inferior force of the French and Indians, Washington was well on his way to conceiving of an American nation that could defend and promulgate its own democratic values.The patriarchal planter and Virginia gentleman drew Americans to him because he stood so staunchly for a national identity, which meant the colonies organized as states of a union, would have to relinquish some of their sovereignty. John Adams touted Washington as the only commander in chief with the experience and character that would hold the army and the colonies together during a long arduous war.Washington as President, Mr. Brands explains, tried to be impartial during the conflicts between small government Jefferson and big government Hamilton, but, in the main, he inclined toward the latter, alienating Jefferson and inadvertently contributing to the formation of political parties that Washington abhorred.Mr. Brands suggests that Washington was naive in supposing the new nation could do without political parties, that somehow politicians could rise above partisanship. He appealed to Jefferson and Hamilton to cease the attacks on one another, but each man said, essentially: “You first!”Mr. Brands shows that Washington really did think of himself as impartial and selfless, and both Jefferson and Hamilton, for all their differences, saw it as in their interest to promote the idea of Washington as above politics. In short, the fiction of Washington as American patriarch became a reality, one that the Federalists and Republicans could not do without.By the end of his presidency Washington was a Federalist, Mr. Brands argues, no matter how much the President said he was not. Mostly Federalists, not Republicans, dined at his table during the President’s retirement. Would he have been surprised, if he had lived to see Jefferson elected in 1800 sounding like Washington, declaring “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists”?Fiction depends, as Coleridge observed, on the willing suspension of disbelief. So it has been since Washington in presidencies that have remained patriarchal.Mr. Rollyson’s book, “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History” will be published on Presidents’ Day in 2027.

Reconsidering How George Washington Came To Symbolize the American Revolution

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