A leader, not a ruler

George Washington looms large over this nation’s creation story, an impossibly remote and fabulous figure. He is the American Moses delivering a chosen people from the tyranny of the Imperial British. Washington is the father of his country, the cardinal personification of the United States, the First Hero. We carry his portrait in our wallets. Our capital city, a state, and at least 33 counties and seven mountains are named for him.

And every February his image is trotted out by marketers to sell used cars and washing machines. But Washington is also the least human-seeming of American saints. What do we know about him beyond the starter kit of facts presented to us in grammar school? Washington was the reluctant president, the general who resisted installing himself as dictator. He was physically imposing, between 6 feet 3 inches and 6 feet 5 inches tall who weighed more than 200 pounds, with auburn hair that went gray during the Revolution. (Contrary to popular misconception, Washington never wore a wig.)

Perhaps we believe he had wooden teeth (in fact his various dentures were made of ivory, cow teeth, hippopotamus tusk and human teeth) and that he could not bring himself to mislead or prevaricate. He had a troubled relationship with his mother, became a surveyor, suffered some ignominious defeats in the French and Indian War. We know a little about what Washington did (and what he is supposed to have done) but there is a kind of paternal mystique about Washington that causes us to regard him more with awe than affection. He is a figure apart, a stranded Olympian, entangled in myth and shrouded by time.

It seems Washington was born to be venerated; he exists most naturally as a marble bust, familiar yet impenetrable. He has none of Jefferson’s intellectual magnetism or intellectual confidence, though he shared many of the same interests and was no less the architect of Mount Vernon than Jefferson of Monticello. He has none of Hamilton’s romantic dynamism, none of Lincoln’s preternatural sadness. In his martial gravitas, with his great leonine head (John Adams referred to him as “Old Muttonhead”), Washington has always seemed more marble monument than man—the essence of his personality has always been elusive.

Reading his extensive diaries and letters is hardly a revelatory experience. Washington was a prolific but prosaic writer whose letters are direct, blunt and generally concise. He did not like windy preachers or profligate speculators. He worried his servants might be drinking his Madeira. He treasured his dignity and accepted the adoration of the freshly liberated Americans with weary noblesse oblige.

Yet he had a sense of humor and a degree of tolerance for human foibles. In a 1787 employment contract he drew up for his gardener, Philip Bater, he allowed that while Bater should “conduct himself soberly, diligently and honestly, that he will faithfully and industriously perform all and every part of his duty as a gardener, to the best of his knowledge and abilities, and that he will not, at any time, suffer himself to be disguised with liquor except on Christmas with which he may be drunk four days and four nights.”

This glimpse of humanity is rare. There is far less evidence of Washington’s humanity than there is of his greatness.

America’s beginnings as a world agricultural power can be traced to Washington. As the most successful American farmer of his day he developed and popularized new strains of wheat and invented threshing machines. He also operated a profitable fishing fleet in the Potomac and harvested lumber in the Great Dismal Swamp.

Washington was more than a general, more than a leader of soldiers or guerrilla genius. He was a self-constructed Ur-American, a rugged stoic with his well-documented lust for land and social standing. Washington might never have agreed to lead the Continental Army had he ever secured the royal commission he sought again and again during the French and Indian War. But then again, he could have installed himself as emperor and did not. Who knows why? Who knows Washington?

Even during his lifetime, he was an enigma who seemed to understand his prestige could only be undermined by familiarity. So he purposefully held himself apart. But Washington’s famous aloofness can at least partially be attributed to health problems: His hearing, eyesight and memory were failing. By the time he assumed the presidency, the hero of Valley Forge was long past his physical peak.

During his presidency some thought Washington enjoyed too well the royalist trappings of his office; he kept a sumptuous executive residence in New York and though he had offered to serve as president without pay, when Congress insisted on paying him a salary, he accepted and spent seven percent of it on booze.

Those around him said the many portraits of him did not do him justice. Gilbert Stuart, who painted the most famous portrait of Washington, claimed he was an impossible subject—that his personality could not be reduced to canvas.

For his part, Washington did not particularly like Stuart or any other portraitist. He sat for portraits reluctantly, understanding the value his image had for the country. The Stuart painting portrays the president’s mouth as an ichthyoid slit, an unflattering feature to be sure, the result of stuffing Washington’s mouth with cotton in place of his ill-fitting dentures. (Washington’s teeth gave him almost constant trouble; his dentures were “both uneasy in the mouth and bulge my lips out in such a manner as to make them appear considerably swelled.”)

That’s the human side of Washington: a childless husband who reared Martha’s grandchildren, a slave owner who freed some of his chattel at his death, a man of this time but also a transcendent figure, the strong leader of a weak country who somehow was able to imagine a new kind of greatness. Washington walked away from power after his second term, which established a convention that was followed until FDR and subsequently made into law.

Before Washington, to be great was to be triumphant, to be the conqueror. A great man was ruthless, a sponge for power. In an age when the prevailing political ideology held that the right to rule was vested in special men selected by God, Washington resisted the kingdom they laid at his feet: The American president was a leader, not a ruler.