Leadership
In his Pulitzer Prize winning biography, His Excellency George Washington, Joseph J. Ellis presents a balanced and comprehensive portrait on the nation's first president that steers a course between hero-worship and debunking. He based his work on the latest edition of the Washington papers, which now include virtually every scrap of written information available except for his last three years as commander of the Continental Army and the second presidential term in 1793-97. For many modern readers, Washington comes across as a cold, distant, patriarchal figure, an iconic face on Mount Rushmore or the dollar bill, but not exactly a people's president like Abraham Lincoln. At the opposite extreme, Leftist and revisionist writers regard him as the creator of a nation that "was imperialistic, racist, elitist, and patriarchal," and prefer to write social history about women, slaves and common soldiers rather than the dead, white male ruling class (Ellis, p. xii). Unlike previous biographers such as Douglas Southall Freeman and James Thomas Flexner, contemporary historians have "a keen sense of the intellectual and emotional ingredients that came together to create a revolutionary ideology in colonial America" and "a more robust understanding of the social and economic forces that drove Virginia's planter class toward rebellion," such as its interest in Western lands (Ellis, p. xiii). Recent scholarship has also paid far more attention to slavery and the treatment of Native Americans, both of which preoccupied Washington throughout his life as a slaveholder, president, military commander and speculator in western lands. Indeed, for Washington, Alexander Hamilton's plans for using a strong central government to industrialize the United States seemed like the best solution for a variety of national problems, including slavery. Reviewers generally rated the Ellis biography favorably, calling it a "penetrating portrait and synthesis of Washington's lengthy and complex career" (Wesiberger...
Ellis made his main character neither a cartoon hero nor villain, and offered a more human portrait that distills "so much of the scholarship on Washington into one, eminently readable volume" (Grant 2005).
By nature, training and background, Washington was confident and aggressive, determined to take charge of events and overcome all obstacles head-on. From a very early age, he was "the epitome of the man's man: physically strong, mentally enigmatic, emotionally restrained" (Ellis, p. 12). When he took command of the Continental Army in 1775, he assumed that he was fighting a war for independence, but over time he came to realize that it was a true American Revolution, a "political movement committed to principles that were destined to topple the monarchical and aristocratic dynasties of the Old World" (Ellis, p. 73). His enemies also understood this very well, so for both sides, the future of the world would turn on which was victorious. Washington certainly made mistakes early in the war, and in the end had to adopt a strategy for winning that ran against his own personality, but he was extremely disciplined and determined, and "could not be bribed, corrupted, or compromised" (Ellis, p. 74). Once he had made up his mind to lead the cause, only death could have stopped him from seeing it through to the end. Nor did he care if the war cost him his entire fortune, or if the British destroyed his house and left his plantation in ruins.
Like most Federalists, Washington also supported Alexander Hamilton's plans for the industrialization of the United States, which agrarians like Jefferson vehemently opposed. When the latter became president, in fact, he purchased the Louisiana Territory in hopes that the U.S. would maintain its agricultural economy for centuries to come. On the other hand, Washington had always been interested in the West, going back to the 1750s when he worked with the Virginia Company and other land speculators in the Ohio River valley.…
