The Books: “His Excellency: George Washington” (Joseph Ellis)

Daily Excerpt continues:

Next book in my American history section is His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph Ellis

Hard to believe but this is the last book on this particular bookshelf (at least the last one I’ve READ. I hav a biography of Lincoln I haven’t read yet, Henry Adams’ book, as well as McCullough’s Trumna bio – but I haven’t read those). So this will be the last excerpt from the particular bookshelf. The “play” bookshelf felt like it went on forever – I guess because play scripts are so small, you can fit more of them on the shelves.

Anyhoo – this is Ellis’ latest book, a superb biography of George Washington. But it’s a biography in the Ellis style – it’s more of a character analysis, an assessment of who this man was in Ellis’ eyes. Ellis is open about the fact that this is his own personal interpretation (based on research, of course). He’s not like many other biographers who basically say: “This is the way this person was, and I am right about it.” Ellis can back up his interpretation with facts – but that’s one of the reasons why I love Ellis’ books sooo much and I am DYING for him to write another one.

I thought I’d post an excerpt from the end of the book, where Ellis takes the long view. To me, the way he writes about those guys (in his Adams biography, in Founding Brothers, in his Jefferson bio) – it just makes them come alive, fully human, flawed, mysterious, interesting.

His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph Ellis

In effect, there were two distinct creative moments in the American founding, the winning of independence and the invention of nationhood, and Washington was the central figure in both creations. No one else in the founding generation could match these revolutionary credentials, so no one else could plausibly challenge his place atop the American version of Mount Olympus. Whatever minor missteps he made along the way, his judgment on all the major political and military questions had invariably proved prescient, as if he had known where history was headed; or, perhaps, as if the future had felt compelled to align itself with his choices. He was that rarest of men: a supremely realistic visionary, a prudent prophet whose final position on slavery served as the capstone to a career devoted to getting the big things right. His genius was his judgment.

But where did that come from? Clearly, it did not emanate from books or formal education, places where it is customary and often correct to look for the wellspring that filled the minds of such eminent colleagues as Adams, Jefferson, and Madison with their guiding ideas. Though it might seem sacrilegious to suggest Washington’s powers of judgment derived in part from the fact that his mind was uncluttered with sophisticated intellectual preconceptions. As much a self-made man as Franklin, the self he made was less protean and more primal because his education was more elemental. From his youthful experience on the Virginia frontier as an adventurer and soldier he had internalized a visceral understanding of the arbitrary and capricious ways of the world. Without ever reading Thucydides, Hobbes, or Calvin, he had concluded that men and nations were driven by interests rather than ideals, and that surrendering control to another was invariably harmful, often fatal.

Armed with these basic convictions, he was capable of remarkably unblinkered and unburdened response to the increasingly consequential decisions that history placed before him. He no more expected George III and his ministers to respond to conciliatory pleas from the American colonists than he expected Indians to surrender their tribal lands without a fight. He took it for granted that the slaves at Mount Vernon would not work unless closely supervised. He presumed that the Articles of Confederation would collapse in failure or be replaced by a more energetic and empowered federal government, for the same reasons that militia volunteers could never defeat the British army. It also was quite predictable that the purportedly self-enacting ideals of the French Revolution would lead to tragedy and tyranny. With the exception of his Potomac dream, a huge geographic miscalculation, he was incapable of illusion, fully attuned to the specter of evil in the world. All of which inoculated him against the grand illusion of the age, the presumption that there was a natural order in human affairs that would generate perfect harmony once, in Diderot’s phrase, the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest. For Washington, the American Revolution was not about destroying political power, as it was for Jefferson, but rather seizing it and using it wisely. Ultimately, his life was all about power: facing it, taming it, channeling it, projecting it. His remarkably reliable judgment derived from his elemental understanding of how power worked in the world.