George Washington’s Providential Progress

American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington, by H.W. Brands (Doubleday, 623 pp., $40)

In 1778, when the City of London decided to erect a monument to Lord Chatham after his death, it chose an inscription from Edmund Burke: “The means by which Providence raises a nation to greatness are the virtues infused into great men,” which evokes not only the statesman who counseled against Britain going to war with America but the general who won the war. Throughout his life, George Washington acquired many virtues as the result of Providence looking after both his own fortunes and those of what he would call “the glorious cause”—patience and steadfastness above all else. In his excellent American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington, H. W. Brands confirms that “Washington sensed that heaven watched out for him.” He certainly felt as much after the in French and Indian War debacle of Monongahela (1755), where the British lost 900 and the French 23 men. “I now exist and appear in the land of the living by the miraculous care of Providence,” he told his brother. “I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, although death was levelling my companions on every side of me!” He felt similarly in 1775 upon being named commander-in-chief of America’s fledgling army, when he told his wife Martha, “I shall rely . . . confidently on that Providence which has heretofore preserved and been bountiful to me.” If we consider his surviving the Battle of Long Island (1776), after Willliam Howe, the British commander, chose not to follow up his victory with what might have proven a war-winning rout, not to mention the providential blessing, for the Continental Army, of Saratoga (1777) and Yorktown (1781), when first Burgoyne and then Cornwallis capitulated, we can see why Washington was so thankful to Providence.

The life of America’s first president was, largely, a soldier’s life. Born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, George Washington (1732–99) was never given the education he craved, though he knew enough mathematics to learn surveying, which guided all his future soldiering. Losing his father at age 11 and never having children of his own made him an odd candidate for the patriarchy with which his legacy is still associated. Yet, for his contemporaries, having no heir was advantageous: he would never pose any danger of a hereditary succession. As a planter, he raised tobacco and then wheat, the trading of which required no London agent. From 1753 to 1758, his years of service in the French and Indian War, he showed the courage, strategic smarts, and solicitude for his troops that would become hallmarks of his tenure as commander-in-chief. His personal life centered around his wife, Martha Custis, whom he married in 1759, her two children, whom he adopted, his lucrative rye whiskey distillery, which produced 11,000 gallons annually, and his farm, Mount Vernon, over which he presided with exacting devotion.

The distaste for party so characteristic of his presidency (1789–97) grew out of the intrigues that plagued his conduct of the war. Despite such machinations, Brands claims that Washington’s military detractors—Horatio Gates, Thomas Conway, and Thomas Mifflin—were fair critics, not conspirators. Washington experienced similar troubles with his cabinet ministers, especially with Thomas Jefferson, his anti-Federalist Secretary of State, who was convinced that Washington, together with Alexander Hamilton, his Treasury Secretary, and John Jay, his Supreme Court Chief Justice, were monarchists intent on subverting the fledgling American republic. Jefferson’s aspersions against Washington were no fairer than those he lodged against George III. Martha abominated the man from Monticello.

As for the country’s foreign policy, Washington was in favor of extending commercial relations with European countries but not political ones. Long before Lord Palmerston, he realized that while countries might have permanent interests, they should not have permanent allies. Moreover, in prioritizing domestic policy, he avoided, at once, both foreign misadventures and the folly of isolationism. “Why,” Washington asked, “by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?” Diplomatists would ask the same question repeatedly throughout American history. In all events, Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality (1793) sensibly distanced the new country from the Jacobins. Another noteworthy aspect of the country’s first president was his ardent support of religious liberty. Writing the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, he was categorical: the United States government “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

The virtues Washington acquired in war shaped his many accomplishments. As Brands writes, “At the head of the Continental army, he manifested a devotion to duty and an ability to inspire that held the army together when everything else seemed bent on pulling it apart.” Though often praised for resigning power after both his victory in the war and his second presidential term—Lord Byron favorably contrasted him with Napoleon by calling him “the Cincinnatus of the West”—Washington would never have acted otherwise, knowing how much his legacy depended upon the constitutional transfer of power. Another of his attributes was his patrician aloofness. “The personal style Washington cultivated from youth,” Brands writes, “marked by polite reserve . . . suited the country he was born in much better than the one he died in.” Jefferson’s egalitarianism rendered obsolete Washington’s more aristocratic style.

There are numerous excellent biographies of Washington, including those of James Thomas Flexner (a multivolume opus), John Ferling, Joseph Ellis, Ron Chernow, and John Rhodehamel. What sets Brands apart is his lavish quoting of primary sources, together with his terse, insightful, witty commentary. Though known as a popularizing historian, here Brands has written an unabashedly scholarly narrative, which nevertheless retains his usual readability. Disdaining paraphrase, he replicates the texture and tone of Washington’s eighteenth-century world by letting his subjects speak for themselves. One instance of this is Brands’s depiction of the olive branch Howe extended to John Adams and Benjamin Franklin after the Battle of Brooklyn (1776). When the Americans refused Westminster’s offer, Howe admitted to being aggrieved, especially since he was grateful to Massachusetts for paying for a statue in Westminster Abbey for his brother, who had fallen in the war against France. If America were to lose the war, Howe confessed, he would feel as though he had lost a brother. Whereupon Brands quotes Adams, who wrote of the meeting’s dénouement:

Dr. Franklin, with an easy air and a collected countenance, a bow, a smile and all that naivety which sometimes appeared in his conversation and is often observed in his writings, replied, “My Lord, we will do our utmost endeavours to save your lordship that mortification.”

Brands’s summation regarding Howe’s embassy is characteristically apt. “Had Britain made a credible offer before July 1776, the moderates in Congress might have deprived the radicals of a majority for independence. But the offer wasn’t made then. And when it came, it came too late.” Like Chatham and Burke, Brands recognizes that only timely conciliation had any chance of regaining the colonists for the empire, though Burke’s dictum that “a great empire and little minds go ill together” was unlikely to persuade the men who carried out the outrages Franklin found so inexcusable. “It is impossible we should think of submission to a government,” he wrote to Howe, “that has with the most wanton barbarity and cruelty, burnt our defenceless towns in the midst of winter, excited the savages to massacre our farmers, and our slaves to murder their masters, and is even now bringing foreign mercenaries to deluge our settlements with blood. These atrocious injuries have extinguished every remaining spark of affection for that parent country we once held so dear.”

That Franklin should have referred to the empire as “that fine and noble China vase,” which, once broken, could never be put back together again, only accentuated the genuine loyalty Westminster had squandered in trying to pay down its debts. Washington, too, began his days a loyal subject, but seeing how inept the British army was at fighting the French and how disinclined to allow stakeholders like himself to reap the benefits of western investment, he became a sworn rebel. Interest, not ideals alone, drove his republicanism.

Brands’ primary sources resonate when he considers Valley Forge, to which Washington retreated in 1777 to rebuild his battered army after his Brandywine and Germantown defeats. When Congress ignored his continual pleas for proper provisions, the results were predictably woeful. “Poor food, hard lodging, cold weather, fatigue, nasty clothes, nasty cookery,” Albigence Waldo, a doctor with the Connecticut regiment, wrote in his diary. To beguile his wretchedness, Waldo, like all soldiers, thought of home. “What sweet felicities have I left at home: a charming wife, pretty children, good beds, good food, good cookery, all agreeable, all harmonious.” That Martha shared her husband’s deprivations in this and other army camps proved the solidity of their bond. If historians credit the Prussian mercenary, Baron von Stueben, for getting the Continental Army through the trials of Valley Forge, Washington credited Providence, which, after all, had given him, among so many other gifts, his goodhearted wife.

As for Washington’s belief in Providence, some have suggested that because he did not call for a clergyman at his deathbed, he died, as he had lived, in Ellis’s words, a “Roman stoic” rather than a Christian. This is false. When he told his troops in 1776 that “The General hopes and trusts that every officer and man, will endeavor so to live, and act, as becomes a Christian soldier, defending the dearest rights and liberties of his country,” none of them would have confused him with a “Roman stoic.” Brands accurately refers to Washington as a “conventional Anglican, steady rather than enthusiastic.”

Nevertheless, throughout this well-written, well-researched, well-judged biography, Brands turns his mastery of his sources to account by showing how beneath his subject’s reserved exterior there lay great, passionate conviction. One example of this was his gathering realization of the iniquity of slavery. As Washington told an English visitor toward the end of his life: “I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union.” Yes, Providence looked after the new republic, but, for Washington, and, indeed, for Lincoln, Americans would have to cooperate with it if they wished to sustain their “glorious cause.”

To give readers a sense of where Washington might have first acquired his notions of Providence, Brands quotes lengthy passages from the sermons of the popular Great Awakening preacher, George Whitefield (1714–70), who told the colonists that there might be a providential reckoning for their mistreatment of their slaves:

Considering what usage they commonly meet with, I have wondered that we have not more instances of self-murder among the negroes, or that they have not more frequently rose up in arms against their owners. And though I heartily pray they may never be permitted to get the upper hand, yet should such a thing be permitted by Providence, all good men must acknowledge the judgment would be just.

Here was an understanding of Providence that recalls what Washington had said to a friend in a letter of 1774: “The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us; till custom and use, will make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.” It might also have led to the relatively humane treatment Washington showed his slaves, especially with regard to keeping slave families intact. At the same time, Whitefield’s warning was certainly not at odds with Washington’s stipulation in his will that his slaves be not just emancipated but educated. Jefferson might regard enslaved blacks as so intellectually inferior as to merit only expatriation; Washington believed otherwise.

If emancipating his slaves was one of Washington’s greatest accomplishments, at a time when the very idea of emancipation was anathema to most Southern planters, his humility was another virtue bred of his gratitude to Providence. He made this clear in a letter to the mayor of Philadelphia in 1789:

When I contemplate the interposition of Providence, as it was visibly manifested, in guiding us through the Revolution, in preparing us for the reception of a general government, and in conciliating the good will of the People of America towards one another after its adoption, I feel myself oppressed and almost overwhelmed with a sense of divine munificence. I feel that nothing is due to my personal agency in all these complicated and wonderful events, except what can simply be attributed to an honest zeal for the good of my country.

Abigail Adams corroborated these sentiments when she said after the great man’s death: “Simple Truth is his best, his greatest eulogy—She alone can render his Fame immortal.” American Patriarch gives brilliant new life to this “simple truth.”