Episode 863: Founding Fathers – George Washington

of America. And now the life of George Washington. I wanted to start the entire podcast series with George Washington because literally we all stand on his shoulders to the degree that this is a country that has a remarkable ability for freedom, that is open to everyone, and that creates a framework within which normal people can lead usual and extraordinary lives. All of that started and was based

in Washington. One of the best biographies of Washington describes him as literally irreplaceable, that he is the man that was the essential person for the entire creation of America. And I think that's true. Every time clost and I go down to Mount Vernon and we look at that house he lived in with Martha and we look out on the Potomac, we realize that he had this sense. He loved being a farmer, he loved the land. He had a sense of solidness, partly because he was so

big physically. I always tell people that if you played Washington in the modern era, you should be basically an nfl authensive blindman. He was physically so large for a time when the average man was about five six. He was also considered the best horseman in the colonies, which is, if you're that big physically and you're that good a horseman, he's astonishing. And Washington had this strength, both physical and moral. Part of his physical strength just came, I think biologically.

He was just that big. And he worked as a farmer, he worked as a frontiersman, and he used his body his whole life. When he was serving in the legislature, people often forget this. Washington was a professional politician. He ran for office. In fact, there was a very funny story. He'd been out on the West and thought of himself as a hero and ran for office the first time. And in that era, he had a one day election campaign.

Everybody gathered at the polls and the candidates bought alcohol and got free beer, free wine, free whiskey, and Washington said, no, I am a military hero. I don't need to buy anything primally, and he came in last. The following election, he bought the largest quantity of alcohol ever bought in a Virginia election, and he won. People said, I you'd be going to learn the trade here, which also fed

Washington's general pattern. Many experts have studied his campaigns and said, he made many mistakes once, but you never finally making the same mistake twice. So he's down and at the House of Burgesses. And I always recommend to people to go to Williamsburg because it is such a remarkable recreation of that era. And you can go to the taverns, and Washington went to in the evenings. They didn't have TV, they didn't have computer games. So they'd sit around playing

cards and drinking and talking with each other. And it was a very famous squire named Governor Bird. And Governor Bird would find some stranger and he said, I'll bet you a shilling that George Washington can break a walnut between his thumb and his first finger. Now, I urge you sometime to try this, because it takes extraordinary strength. And so he'd go over Washington be playing cards or

telling stories, and he said, Colonel Washington. At this stage he had become an honorary colonel in the Virginia militia, would you mind breaking a walnut? And Washington would break

the walnut. He'd collected the shilling that presumably bought Washington a drink for the favor, But it was again a sign of in an age when people value being strong physically, Washington was the strongest, but it was our show morally strong in the sense, first of all, you can get from Mount Vernon the rules he wrote at fourteen years of age, which he had copied out of several books, and which were rules for being a gentleman. And he

wanted very much to have respect. He wanted what the Romans had called vertu in the sense that you are a virtuous person, not in our modern sense of sin, but in the sense that you have served the community. You are bigger the normal history. You're going to live on in history as a person who's done his job. And so Washington wanted to project this sense of authority, the sense of I am and it says, in fact, I'm noble in a in a world where her there's

no nobility in the new world. At that point, it's a famous story of Washington in Philadelphia, and I think at the Constitutional Convention and Governor Morris takes a five pound bet that he can walk over and slap Washington on the shoulder, and he goes over. He gets close, he gets closer, Washington turns and looks down on him.

Because Washington looks down, and everybody except Jefferson and Morris stands and looks at him and says, good evening in general Washington, he walks back over the eyes says, it's your five pounds. It is physically impossible to touch Washington because he is projects this almost force field of dignity

that you can't penetrate. And he used that to enormous effect. Now, ironically, when he was a general, for example, serving the places that were pretty desperately valley forged in the winter, he would go out and throw medicine balls with the troops. He was physically very engaged. So it's not that he was incapable of being close. He loved to dance. He was capable of being close. But when he decided that he was aloof, he was a loof beyond anyone normally

being able to deal with them. And that was very important that he didn't start that way, but he grew into that person. He started as a relatively poor kid, went to the Caribbean, got a slight case of smallpox, which turned out to be really valuable because it meant that he was vaccinated. He also was in a position where he watched life in the Caribbean and realized he didn't particularly like that life. Came back home. Was not wealthy personally, he's adequately, but he knew he'd have to

earn a living, so became a surveyor. By the time he is nineteen years of age, he is surveying. In fact, if he had a little Washington, which is a town that has a remarkable in called the End of Washington, which is a Michelan the first place to get a Micheline star in America. Washington laid out the entire town at nineteen years of age. Now to give you a sense of how the world's different. Look at a map little Virginia and it is about seventy miles west of

Washington and about fifty miles south. That was the frontier, not Kentucky, not Texas. I mean western Virginia was the frontier. And Washington spent a large part of his youth in the frontier, first as a surveyor. Where we aren't fairly good money. He also learned something people tend to forget.

Surveyors can look at topography, so as when he's a general officer later he looks at a battlefield with a level of technical knowledge that no other general officer has because he knows how to he knows the distances because he's surveyed, he knows the rolling hills, he knows how

to look for gullies. He knows how in an age when he didn't have helicopters, and he didn't have tanks, and he didn't have cars, even a small rise is a big deal if the other guy's got to come up in because it wears them out and slows them down. And so he's very good at looking at terrain. And he learned all this by the time he was nineteen to twenty years of age. He's given an assignment. He's

very precocious. He's very close to the Fairfax family and they're among the largest landowners in the colony of Virginia. He gets an assignment to go west. This is supposed to be a peaceful assignment. The French have come down from Canada. They have occupied the place where the Ohio River is formed by two rivers coming together and where Three River Stadium is nowadays. He's given a letter to take to them that says you got to get out of here, and the French basically think you're a nice

young goy. What we're not getting out of here? Washington picks a fight. He's not he was not as signed to pick a fight. He's just very pugnaciously, very young. And he then ends up at a place called Fort Necessity, where they stop and I've been out visiting Fort Necessity, which still exists as a national historical monument, and this is clearly a sign that he's not applying his survey or skills, because the fort is in the bottom of a valley where the other guys up above are shooting

down at you. Furthermore, they have huge reign. The place gets totally wet, their powder gets wet. They have no choice except to surrender. Very fortunate for America he wasn't killed. I mean, at that point, the French and Indians who are their allies, are really pissed off at Washington and here's this young guy out here picking a fight. And you can literally argue that the Seven Years' War, which we call the French Indian War, the Seven Years War,

which is a global war in India. He goes in Europe, it's in North America, it's in the Caribbean. It started by George Washingington who just picks this fight, and the fight starts going down to the Washington comes back home. Imagine this the early twenties, your first big assignment. It's a total mess. So what does he do? He writes a pamphlet. He says, I was really right. I did exactly the right thing, the only thing you could have done, and none of it was my fault. And I'm really

proud of to do it well. I played well. The average person doesn't know anything about what's going on. There's no television, there's no live coverage from Fort Necessity, and so the only explanation of what happened is Washington's and copies of it get to London, and he's now a persona He's a real person. So along comes the British. Finally said okay, this is going to be real war. You got to get engaged. They send an army and Washington gets some of his first basic lessons, and this

is selling people often forget. Washington learned a lot about war by being at war. He didn't learn about war by reading theoretical works, and so they need a colonial advisor. British aristocracy was totally contemptuous to the colonials, and I thought they were basically stupid and lazy and cowardly. And furthermore, they want British aristocrats. They were also contemptuous of British soldiers, and they're contemptious of Heshman mercenaries because they're British aristocrats.

So Washington has assigned and he has some advice for him. He says, it is not helpful to march down the middle of the road in red outfits because the other side will cheat and they will fire from behind trees and you're going to get killed. And General Braddock explains to them, you obviously don't understand European warfare, but just relax. They actually leave. If you go to the Army War College at Carlisle, you can see the post from which

they left, and they might again remember the Carlile. Pennsylvania, which is next to Harrisburg, is the beginning of the frontier. So they're now marching through the Pennsylvania forest and surprise, surprise, they get attacked by people who are cheating there. They're wearing outfits that blend into the forest, and the French are not wearing the normal white French uniforms, which they do when they're informal warfare, but when they're fighting in

the woods, they're wearing stuff that fits the woods. The Indians, of course, have no uniforms anyway, and so the combined French and Indian force attacks. Braddock is killed almost immediately. The British force is disintegrating. I mean, they're confused, they're scared, they've lost their commander. And the one guy who's on the tallest horse is Washington, and so Washington starts to rally them, get them reorganized, get them the hell out of the way, because they're in real danger of being

a massacred. The Washington in that fight has four bullet holes in his coat and has two horses shot out from He reached his brother the next day. God must have really been protecting him, because at some point one of those bulls should have hit him and it was lucky. And then he began insists on being up on these horses, which is important for his men's morale because they can see they at least have a leader, even if he's a colonial. But at the same time it sort of

makes shift target. Decade later, he runs into an Indian chieftain of a tribal council, and the chieftain says, God must have some big role for you, because I personally shot at you thirteen times. He said, all of us are trying to kill you because you were so obvious, and we just couldn't itch you. That's important later because Washington, after that fight in his own mind as a man of destiny. So he goes back home, marries a very wealthy widow who brings him Mount Vernon, and I think

a genuine love match. She has two children. They never have children on their own. Washington raises the children as his own, and he and Martha entertainment. And this is one of the things to remember Colonial Virginia. If you were reasonably in Washington in Land was the wealthiest columnist,

not as wealthy as the Fairfaxes. But the Fairfaxes eventually leave during the Revolution, at which point he becomes the wealthiest person in America in Land, not in money, but you always entertain if you look at the Fuda Mount Vernon and you look at the register of who comes by.

There are always people coming to visit. I mean, at one point later in his life, James Madison comes over and spends I think six weeks living with Washington, writing, arguing and writing about the Constitution and the just used

to this. This is this is their life. Washington regularly will ride up to Alexandria, and if you want to, you can go to Gatsby's Tavern, which still exists, which was the site of Washington's birthday parties, and he would they'd all ride up together and have a great party and have a few drinks. Intended to party during the daytime so they could get home around dark. But it was this was It's all real. It was a social life.

It was a nice life. And Washington's faced with the same problem as every other American, which is, you are trying to have a cash based economy with no cash and you're dealing with British merchants who are constantly cheating you, cheating you in the sense that they want to pay you less for what you sell and charge you more

for what they sell. So you're always juggling us very tight financial burden and you're not particularly happy with the British, and Washington is serving in public life as a legislator, but mostly he's a farmer and a gentleman who is nice to people who come wandering through. And then the British decide that they're going to pay for the debt coming out of the Seven Years' War by raising taxes

on the Americans, and their rationale is not crazy. The rationale is, look, we saved you from the French, we saved you from the Indians. Things are relatively safe. You ought to pay your fair share. Now the American attitude is very different. The American attitude is, you know, it's not our fault that you're a profigate government in London and that you waste all your money and that you're surrounded by corruption, and no, we're not going to pay anything.

You know, we're happy to have you around, but frankly, since we no longer have any threat from the French, why do we need you? And so you have this weird moment where the British think the generosity is going to leave the Americans out of gratitude don't want to pay taxes, and the Americans are saying, no, the very fact that you one means we don't need you. And Washington's in the faction. That's fine. You know, I don't think I want to pay any taxes. I mean, I

don't like those guys anyway. They'll always trying to cheat me. He's not a fire Brown, He's not out there saying let's rebel, let's do something, but he's clearly in the group around Patrick Henry and others who want to stand up to the English. And then, of course you end up with a series of events. Again, thinking yourself as a planter sitting on the Potomac River having a nice life. You're not connected by cable TV, you're not connected by internet.

You know, you don't get any text messages. You occasionally read things, and so one day you read or you hear from somebody who's riding through spending the night that there was the massacre in Boston and the British troops had shot Americans who were protesting. Well, you sort of start thinking about that, did that happen here? Could it happen at Williamsburg? Do I feel a little pissed off

that the British are shooting Americans? And the alienation starts to build, and the call goes out to come to Philadelphia, and let's talk about how bad this is getting. When the British decide to impose taxes that the Americans really get mad about, particularly tacks on tea, which leads to the Bostonians dressing up as Indians and having a tea party throwing all the Indian East Indian Company tea into

the river. And ironically, the British thought they were being clever because they actually had organized it so that the price he would be less under the new rules, even though you paid taxes and the Americans got none. No, it's the principle, we don't care that it's cheaper. We care that part of the money goes to you, and we're not going to pay your money. And so they're cheerfully throwing all of these bales of tea, which are very valuable, into the Boston harbor, which really makes the

British pretty bad. And so the British decided that they're going to close down on Boston and ultimately isolate the city of Boston to punish it, in the theory that that will then scare the rest of the Americans into being obedient. But what it really does is just makes them angry. So the call goes out, they meet and then what is called the Continental Congress, which is a huge breakthrough. I mean, these people hadn't thought of themselves

as Americans. They were Virginians, they were Georgians, they were Massachusetts. They spoke very different dialects in the sense of the tone of their language, the patterns they ate differently, and they hadn't really begun to identify them they were Americans. And now they have this problem, and Washington's one of the people who's drifting towards being more and more alienated and more and more angry, and he's ultimately affected, I think in part by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin is a world

class scientist recognized all over the world. He is a very successful businessman who makes enough money by forty to sell his businesses and devote himself to public life. He writes for Richard's Almanac every year and is very widely known as the first postmaster General of the colonies, and therefore has connections at all of the colonies because he

handles the mail. And he is sent by the Colony of Pennsylvania to London to plead with the British and to basically say, look, there's some things we need solved, and we can be nice. He spends about seven or eight years in London, and he ends up suddenly realizing they'll never accept it. They're aristocrats. He's not an aristocrat, even though he's a world famous scientist, even though he's wealthier than some of the aristocrats. There'll never be anything

in British society. And it just totally infuriates And somebody once wrote that he left America as an Englishman and he returned as an American, and so his spirit made he's very widely respected. People like Washington look to him and say, you know, you've been there, you've lived there, what do you think And he's basically saying, I don't think we have any choice. These people are never going to treat us fairly now they think they were servants.

And so the spirit begins to build, and the British begins sending troops to Boston because they're determined to crush the spirit of resistance and they think that if they can break Boston that that will symbolically shift the whole country. Now, one of the myths about Washington is that he's sort of self effacing He's this guy who really wasn't ambitious. But I've always saw one of them telling things. In the Commonal Congress, there is only one person wearing a

military uniform. He's also the one of the two biggest people of Jefferson and the other Jefferson Stein, but tall, very tall. The Washington is big. I see this huge guy walking around in the uniform of a Virginia militia and saying to everybody, of course, I wouldn't want to go to Boston. I don't want you to think I'm a military man just because I'm standing here in my uniform. But it just seemed to me it was the appropriate thing to wear. And gradually they all look around each

andy go aha, because they have a problem politically. They need a Southerner to go to Boston because they need to unify the columns. They can't appoint a Bostonian or a New Hampshire Rite to be commander of the army because they'll have no linkage to New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Virginia is the biggest colony in wealth and population

at that point, so they could turn to Washington. He says, with great reluctance, I will accept this burden, although I fear that I will be inadequate and I probably will fail. But as long as you recognize that I'm only doing this because he wanted me to, I will go to Boston. And I think it's hard for us to realize. You're this guy who's in many ways an aristocrat. He's very wealthy. You know, he rides a horse very well in the style of the wrist. If you're a farmer, you don't

ride a horse the way George Washington does. He rode to the Foxes and he shows up, and you have to think about this. You have a new England Army and this weird guy shows up from Virginia, speaking in a slightly strange English and with an attitude of being sort of a little lustere and a little you know, And he's got to really think about this because he realizes he's got to find a way to get all these new wonders to follow him, or he's got a problem. And so he works at it, and he spends a

lot of time with the troops. And again, I think there's an advantage that we underestimate. If you imagine this as a movie scene, you'd have this, as I said, a guy in the modern era who's the size of an NFL offensive lineman and you're walking around the camp. Well, it's pretty obvious when he walks around the camp because he towers over everybody. He's also the strongest guy in the army. Well, it gives them a certain sense of

immediate acceptance that he should be the leader. And he designs a very intelligent strategy and they move from the cannon in a position where the British have to flee. And so Washington, in a matter of a couple months has driven the British out of Boston, which is an enormous achievement. And at that point, you can imagine everybody's excited, everybody's positive, and there's a problem because of the British have a navy and they're not leaving. They just left Boston.

They went to Canada group and they're probably going to come back to New York, which is in many ways the key town for the whole war is it's a big port. It leaks that if you can break New York, then you cut off New England from the rest of the country. So Washington takes his army and marches to New York, and they feel him pretty good about themselves. And in his first grade outing he's been very successful.

And he has the dequition independance read to everybody, and they're all pumped up, and they have a real problem. It's not a very good army. They're not trained very well, they don't have very good equipment, and they're up against the best starting in the world and the British land and just knock them all over the place, capture a bunch of them, kill a bunch of them, and they're

in real danger of being annihilated. And one of those miracles of Washington refers to and when he has said later in life that anybody who thinks that God wasn't watching over us, he used the word providence misunderstands how it happened. Because what happens is the Gloucester fishermen common say, look, we can we can get the army across and get you out of Brooklyn before you're annihilated if we go at night and the Royal Navy probably won't see us,

and we'll get certainly a large part of you across. Well, the night they decide to do this, a huge fog grows in and the British can't see anything. And so Washington's getting these troops and he goes last. He's getting all these troops in these boats. They're rowing across to Manhattan. But they've been beaten. You know, there's no question they just they just ran head out into the British and lost.

They get into Manhattan, well, they're this huge problem. One British man of war has more artillery than the entire American army has at any point in the governess. These are big ships, the equivalent of modern naval aircraft. Payers they're powerful, and if you're close to the water, they're going to just knock you about with arty. And so they're driven out of Manhattan where they losing him. And at one point General Green of Rhode Island has probably

his best general, has this clever idea. We're going to name this fort Fort Washington, and the moral effect of defending Fort Washington, three thousand men will stand firm well for Washington falls because in fact they're not capable of fighting Verige. So Washington suggests agree that in the future they should probably not try gimmicks, and he flees across to White Plains and then he flees across into New Jersey,

and a week by week he gets smaller, tirer, more defeated. Washington, who's a very smart guy about people in a way that you wouldn't expect, and his austerity. Washington knows that Thomas Pain has written tremendously important pamphlet on the revolution and probably the best selling pamphlet describing the revolution, and so he goes to him and he says, look, you

wrote that when everything was great in the summer. Now we had a problem because all of us thought we were going to win easily, and now we're getting beat and I need a new pamphlet. And so he said, I don't need you to be a rifleman. Pain's actually in the army and he says, you've written common Sense. It's the most widely read explanation of the revolution. And he says, go to Philadelphia and write, explain to us what we're living through. And so Pain writes the crisis which begins.

These are the times the trimensuls and people read it and they said, they go, oh, yeah, this is what I'm living through. And Pain basically says, look, you know, hell is going to grab onto you as long as it can, and it's not going to be easy to beat, and you've got to be and he compares basically fighting the British to trying to fight your way out of hell, and people read it and they go, look, okay, it's not going to be easy. It's not going to be

this week. So Washington ends up at Christmas Day, and the week before Christmas he's dropped from thirty thousand men to five thousand. Of the five thousand twenty five hundred or sick, so he's actually got twenty five hundred defectives. Of the twenty five hundred effectives, one third do not have boots and are actually marching in burlet bags, leaving a trail of blood. So Washington is sitting here, twenty five hundred men left. Cross the river in New Jersey,

Washington in Pennsylvania. Cross the river in New Jersey. Is the British army, and Washington brings all of his generalism and says, we have a really big problem. We don't win a victory. Most of our men actually expire in their enlistment sometime in January. If they don't have some reason to stay, we will have no army left. So

we have to win something. So I propose, let's cross the Delaware at night during a snowstorm in the ice march eleven miles to treaden surprise the British Army, actually Hessian who were there, who were paid mercenaries, which is an honorable job back then, and then we'll have won a great victory and then people will be excited and'll be okay. Every one of his generals looks at him

like he's insane, and they go, we've been losing. Now since September, we've shrunk down from thirty to twenty five. And Washington has a plan which has three units that are going to cross the river at three different places in the coordinator attack, which even a first class professional army would have had a hard time doing. And they're

just staring at it. And it's really important to this point to go back and think about Washington in the ambush, because he's sitting there as a guy who's had two horses shot off under him and four bullet holes, and he's thinking, you got to take risks. You know, there are all guys who hadn't had that experience, and they're going, I don't want to take are you crazy? I don't want to take this risk, and then he has the winning argument. He says, look, this army disappears. The revolution's over.

The revolution's over. We're all going to be hung, so you don't have anything to risk, so we might as well try to wound, because at least that way we have a shot. So they cross over, and interestingly he has the officers who can read, reading pains the crisis to the troops as they get in the boat. Again, this is a very subtle man he has. He's got

to get the morale up. The instry line. Mausei Dungwan said all power comes out of the end of a rifle, and somebody corrected it and said, no, all power comes from the person who's willing to shoot the road. And it's exactly right. You've got to keep morale up. So he takes his twenty five hundred men and then, in a situation which can only be described as a miracle, they cross over. There's this huge snowstorm coming from the north, which means it's coming to their back, but it's coming

to the face of the Hessian troops. The Hessians run into a small Virginia unit which is off on its own without any authority, which arouses them about two or three in the morning. They jump up with the stand arms. They're all getting cold and wet, and this small unit takes off. Washington runs into this unit and thinks they've ruined the chance of success. The Hessians are going to be awake, probably going to get slaughtered about what the

hell with no choice. Well, just the opposite happened. The Hessians stand outside for about an hour. They get totally soaked. They realized that this was just a griller unit that was wandering through. They all go to bed. It's not that Theassians were drunk. The Hessians were in the middle of a snowstorm. Now here's the key thing to remember. In Europe, there are no real battles fought in winter. From I think seventeen sixty seven to nineteen forty four,

the German Army never launches a winter of place. Fredericks Cred launches the last one I think it's in seventy sixty seven, and then the Battle of Balgim forty four. Because winter is hard, I mean it's cold and it's miserable. Americans deer hunt in the winter. Americans are all in the woods, in the winter. So the Americans are gone. Oh we had a snowstone. Okay, the Hessians are gone. We got a snowstone. Let's stay in the house because no rational European army would be out in the snowstop

so they're safe. Well, they wake up in the morning and Trenton back then is a very small town and has just two streets, and so if you put cannon at the end of the two streets, you control the town. And the Hashians are all in these little houses and they can't get out of them, and they finally get a semi organized Washington captures eight hundred first class professional soldiers for the loss of one American, and then does

a very intelligent thing. They run like him because the British army's coming, and they get across the river before the British can get there. Now victory really matters. They go from twenty five hundred effectives within two weeks to fifteen thousand because people are this is cool, we're winning. Same the fact happens a football, you know, people like

to hear the game where they win. So they show up and Washington now has enough troops to go back across the river and one of those important examples of Washington's system. They get to Trenton this time Cornwallis and the British are ready. They are charging down the road from Princeton. Washington calls a council of War. And in the Council of War there are two farmers. And I always said, I'm teaching military courses. I always say the officers,

why do you think there are two farmers? Because they are the only two people who knew the territory. So the British would never have done this because as an aristocrat, you don't listen to farmers. They haven't had military training. They only have one great advantage. They actually know the neighborhood. Well, it turns out that there is a sunken road on

the south side of Trenton. He goes from Trenton to Princeton that you cannot see if you're on the northern road from Princeton to trent So Washington takes his entire army runs down the road and the British are running

towards Trenton. He's running towards Princeton. And my favorite war Washington paigning is Washington and Princeton with the cannon sitting there and the British captured British flags behind it, and Washington, at this point is about forty four years old, is standing jauntily leaning on a British cannon, looking like the Fox center who's called the Fox. I mean it's the best picture because we tend to see Washington backwards. We see the guy who's president late in his life. This

is still a young, energetic, aggressive guy. So the revolutionists survived, and Washington's now in a position to continue to develop the army. But it's important remember this is not everybody worships Washington. I mean, if you're not in the army with Washington, you're thinking, this guy's not had a very good run here. I mean, okay, did okay in Boston, got cleaned out in New York, cleaned out in New Jersey?

I mean, can we do better? Of course, during this period, when the Americans win at Saratoga with the British army collapses, you suddenly have an interest in somebody other than Washington. So this' about a third of the continent of Congress would like to fare Washington and is actively plotting. And one of the reasons when Washington ends up the next year going into Valley Forge, where he'd been promised to be food, there'd be equipment to build houses, et cetera,

and they had nothing. People in Congress are deliberately setting him up to fail because they want to get rid of it. And again you get a sense of Washington settled it. Washington, who had no children himself, had basically opted the Marquis de Lafayette, who's in his early twenties, as kind of like a steps. He loved Lafayette, Lafayette loved him, and so Lafayette happens to write a letter

to the Congress. It says, you know, French King thinks so highly of General Washington that if something were to happen to him and he was no longer in command, I really fear that all French money, French ammunition, French uniforms, French assistants would disappear. And I, certainly, because of my deep belief in the Revolution, wouldn't want that to happen. Well, that's it. Washington has reasserted that he's in charge. He also understands that he still doesn't have a very good army.

And a guy shows up named Astoivan, who is a character in his own writer, I mean almost somebody could do an entire novel about He's a German officer, claims more credit than he really deserves, claims higher rank than he really deserves, shows up and says, you know, I can train your army. And this is one of those miracles, A little bit like Washington listening to Farmers. Is when Stryman looks around for a little while and realizes, if I try to apply European systems, they will all rebuild

because they're Americans. So I can't just go and enforce the being in Europe, I can force obedience because the peasants expect me to force able. In the US, they all, you know, does just throw me out. And so he figures out, you have to tell Americans why you're doing it. But if you'll tell them why you're doing it, they actually learn faster than the Europeans. And so he begins to train this army. And when they're in Valley Forge, Washington again is very careful about a number of things.

They have a huge bakehouse which makes all the bread for the army, and they turn it into a theater, and so they bake bread good morning in the evening they have plays. Washington's favorite play is Cato, which is a remarkable study. In eighteenth century Britain, you could not

directly attack the king, because that'll be treason. So they tended to write about the Romans, because you could write about tyranny and corruption in Rome, and that's not really attacking the king, although everybody who sees the play knows

you're talking about the king. So Cato is about the Roman senator who, at the time of Caesar, refuses to accept Caesar as the head of the government, and Caesar ultimately chases him across the Mediterranean and ends up face to face and says, look, I want you to live. You're my friend, I really believe in you. All you have to do is swear loyalty and you'll be rich and happy to us joy and Cato basically says, you know,

my son's already been killed. Freedom is worth everything, and would rather die as a free person than live swearing loyally. View This is Warshington's favorite play. He cried every time he saw it, and it was the center in the way of Washington's own belief that he is in rebellion because he is a Freeman and he is not going to give him, and so they would. I think they showed it three times that winter, and then they showed other things. He was very concerned about morale, I mean,

how do you keep morale up? And they began to build a real army. They collide with the British shortly after Valley Forge and they beat him head to head, and the British suddenly realized that they have a real problem. They can no longer count on the Americans breaking them. Washington then chases them across New Jersey. At the British ended up going back into New York City, where the

Royal Navy can sustain them. Now by this stage you've also got a French army showing up, have the French Navy occasionally showing up, your French money showing up, which is really important. But Washington can't win. He cannot break into New York. You can't drive the British out of

New York. And what the British have done is they've got Washington sucked into basically laying siege to New York, while the British army is moving troops into South Carolina and Georgia and trying to reconquer the colonies from the South coming north, which turns out also to fail because Washington, since Green, was his best general, and they organized guerrilla warfare and altimately organized regular warfare and gradually start chewing

up the British in the South. But the Southern War is a really miserable, nasty war, and it was good that Washington couldn't go there because he would not have liked it. It isn't who he wanted. He believed deeply you had to have a regular army that had discipline, because it was the base civilization. And he did not want to be involved in World War. He knew how to me. He had thought he'd fought the Indians. He

understood a lot about how to fight at Glewar. He thought in the end it would be so bitter and so bloody that it would shatter the society. And so he really worked hard at keeping on together. And one of the great gambles, if you, if you ever get a chance, is look at him out Washington sitting in New York. The French army is actually sitting in Rhode Island, and all of a sudden, cornwallis who has a large British army finds himself cooped up at York Town in Virginia.

I remember this is people are marching with no trains, no airplanes, no cars, and Washington has to make a decision. If I leave New York there's people are really getting terrible matter for seven years, I leave New York. I marched down through Philadelphia and get to York Town. Will Cornwell still be there? Will the French navies show up? And will the French army walk with me? Go with me? And can I raise the money to pay the troops?

And if it works, I might be able to win the battle that will lead the victory in the war. If it fails, we may well collapse because we've been at this so long and we're so tired. This is one of the great strategic game. I'll takes some normal if you imagine the courage to sit there and think this through and go. You know what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move. I'm going to decoy the British with just in our forces left behind that they think I'm still in New York and We're going to march

as fast as we can. And when I get to Philadelphia. I'm going to see governor, want some big him to bring together all the rich people in the city to steve Is enough money to pay the army to keep moving. And hopefully by the time I get to Yorktown, if you're marching, this is a long march, hopefully by then the French navy will have shown up so we can cut Cornwallis off. So he can't the British navy can't

take him off Yorktown. Well, it is said that when Washington crossed the last ridge and could see Yorktown and beyond Yorktown could see the French fleet, that he physically jumped off his horse and did a jig. The only people said it's the only time in the entire war that he saw him just lose control. He was so excited because he had him, so the French and the British,

I mean the French of the Americans lay siege. Cornwallis is a good professional British officer and later on goes on to become a very successful governor General of India. Recognizes after a couple of days that you know, he can't win, so he sends the word that he's prepared to surrender to the French, and the French send the way back now to Washington, and then Cornwella says, I

am not swinning to Washington. I'm sending a junior officer, at which point Washington says, fine, I'm sending a junior officer. So General Lincoln has I think a brigadier general at the time, accept the surrender of the British and supposedly the band plays the world turned up. Said that now Washington at that point does the monster like that which people really undervalue. They go back north because the war's not over. I mean, the fighting's over now. The diplomats

are negotiating. You've got to work out all the time, so you have to keep an army in being, and his officers get really angry because you're not getting paid. The Congress in that period was setting a standard to the current Congress's match. It was often irresponsible, often tailed to do what it should do, often had to really done policies, and in this period they weren't paying the army. So a group of the officers get together and decide

that Washington should become a dictator. And there was a precedent for this because one hundred years earlier, in the English Civil War, Cromwell had emerged and established a dictation, And in fact, a lot of people had worried about Washington it need to be too powerful and too popular,

precisely because he would become Cromwell. There's a great scene where the officers have met in the schoolroom, and Washington was in and as he recounted, he took out his glasses in order to remind him that he'd grown old in the service of his country. And he pulls out this letter, and he fees the letter, the essence of which is, do you really think that we rebelled against George the Third to create George the first? This would destroy everything that we fought for for eight years. The

officers all go, okay, yeah, don't be dictator. I guess we'll continue. He then does something that is remarkable, and George the third says, if Washington gives up power, it'll be the greatest man of the century. So Washington on the way home, having been I always tell people when they get frustrated, they get tired of trying to do something. Washington spends eight years in the field. He's in Mount Vernon for two weeks in the entire war, and he

loves mont. So now he's on the way home. So he goes to Annapolis with the Condinal Congress's meeting, and you can actually go to the State House. They still have the room and they have it set up with statues. The Congress is sitting, Washington is standing in the Congress is sitting to show that he is obedient to them, but that they are his superior to collective, and he gives them his sword. He literally says, I've now done my job. I'm returning to you the sword that I

was given back in Philadelphia. And he then goes home. He's at home, he's happy, he's being a farmer. Martha's happy. And things don't work pretty well. And it turns out people forget this. Virtually every state, as they've now become ceased to be colomists, has to rewrite his constitution. They

all fail. And so yet people getting pretty good practice of writing constitutions, and people got involved in a variety of fairly dumb ideas, repudiating the debt, inflating the currency, and people begin to write Washington and say, you know, we're going to have to do something to fix this, and this is not working, and it's creating a vacuum where the British and the French and the Spanish can come in and exploit it. Washington writes several of his

friend and says, no, people aren't tired enough yet. They've got to finish celebrate and we've got to finish getting over this. And I'm not going to go now because if I go now, it'll be too soon. And so he's very patient. Now again, everybody in their brother is coming to Mount Vernon to spend the night, to have dinner, to chat with him. He's receiving letters from all over the country. Finally a group gets together on Annapolis and

they get him to come to the meeting. And I say, we've got to fix the articles of Confederation because they're not working. We need to have a meeting to fix the current system. So he's the center of this. If he's willing to sign the letter, people will show up. If he doesn't sign the letter, it would never happen. So he agrees he's the lead signer. It basically says, I'm going to go to Philadelphi and try to fix this.

Why don't you come run? So every state sends a delegation to Philadelphia in seventeen eighty seven, and again it's very different than people think. First of all, when they meet for fifty five days, it's in secret. There's no press corps, there's no press secretary, don't tell anybody anything. Second,

at several points it almost breaks down. At one point, the oldest man there, Benjamin Franklin, says we need to stop, have a day of fast and prayer and get our head on straight, because right now we're just strown up. They do that, They get a sermon, they pray, they fast. There together, they talk, and people who study carefully make the point that I think is often very misunderstood about Washington.

Washington is presiding inevitably, and so he's sitting up here and you actually go and look at the room, and occurs in in Philadelphia. But at lunch, at breakfast, at dinner, he's constantly political. What if we did this, what if we fixed that, what if we pulled this together. Maybe if you work with so and so, you can work something out. So his underlying influence is enormous, but it's all private. It's not public speeches, it's not you know,

speaking from the chair. He represents the whole convention, and they do something which is really quite remarkable. They're sent there to fix the articles of Confederation, and by the time they all get there, they go, this is stupid. They are not going to work. Let's just write a constitution. So what you technically have a coup datam I mean you a group of people who decide they're going to fix the whole thing. They have no authority to do it.

They just assert it. They then publish it. And again Washington when this thing started, and Madison in particular, was all over Washington, You've got to go do this, you got to go do this. The reason Madison ends up living in Mount Vernon for while was Washington, fine, you come here, you do the reading, you put the other writing, you do all the work, and when you get that done, I'll think, good going. But I'm not gonna do all that junk. You're the intellectual. I'm not going to run

my farm. So Washington's happily entertaining at night and walk going around running his farm. Poor Madison's trapped, who loves it, is trapped in a room with Mount Vernon thinking through the whole thing. They then do something that's quite remarkable. They go to the thirteen states and they say, basically, you have to vote. We will not be legitimate unless you vote. And the greatest political brochure in history is the Federalist Papers, because that's what it is. It's a campaign.

Doctor and Jay and Hamilton and Madison write it. And you get Washington sending a letter out to the whole country saying basically, this is what we've done. We need you to vote yes, this is important. Not an overwhelming margin. The country says yes, and they adopt a constitution, on which point, of course, they turn a meeting and go, gosh, we're going to need a first president now, Washington saying, wait a second, I'm a noun vernon. I've done you know,

I've done my share. No, no, no, no, you got to come up. So he agrees. He and Martha go to New York by the end of the first term, and he's very conscious he is setting the precedents which we still live by, and he knows that and he operates that way. He convinces Jefferson and Hamilton to serve in the cabinet. They hate each other. They each subsidize the newspaper to attack the other. And he doesn't care. He says, you guys are invaluable. You got to stay here, and if I got to be here, you got to

be here. Late in the first term, New York newspapers are attacking Martha for holding high tea, which they regard as the first step towards a monarchy. Washington is so angry that he says, I'm going home. I've served a term. It's over. I am not going to subject my wife

Martha to this kind of vicious behavior. The threat of Washington leaving is so central to the survival of the United States as a concept that Jefferson and Hamilton, who have become bitter opponents, put aside their hostility, get together jointly go to see him, and they say, you can't go home. The country's not stable enough without your leadership, without your prestige, the country won't last. You have to

stay for one more term. He very grudgingly agrees. He really is so angry about the news media treatment of his wife, but they convince him that for the country he has to stay, and as a patriot in the end, he's going to do what the country needs. And it's a very important, very difficult period Britain and France are engaged in a deep war which will last until eighteen fifteen. He's trying to make sure the United States doesn't get drawn in on either side, because he understands they will

just tear the country apart. So he's being very careful about not getting into European politics and not getting into conflict. At the same time, on our western frontier, particularly in Pennsylvania, farmers have gotten really angry about a tax break which was designed to help big distillers in the East and actually hurts the small farmers in the West who are producing corn whiskey in small batches, and so they're refusing to pay their taxes, and there's what became known as

the Whiskey Rebellion. And it takes the prestige of Washington to insist that the law be enforced, and he literally organizes an army which they're about to send into western Pennsylvania in order to force people to pay their taxes. Confronted by Washington's prestige and by Washington's seriousness and by the size of the army he's raising, the farmers ultimately caved. The laws are changed a little bit so that they have a face saving way out. The Whiskey rebellion disappears.

But that's the kind of thing going on that indicates how shaky this new country is, and how little people understand the concept of a central government and that it has power which can reach all the way to the boundaries of the country. Without Washington's prestige, that might not have been survivable. He does stay, and then he really has done. And one of the greatest things he does

is he goes home. And that's really important because it sends a signal that power is loan to you, you don't own it, and that you have a duty to limit yourself, to be disciplined. And with the exception of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War Two, no president has violated the Washington principle of a maximum of two terms. And in fact, after Roosevelt, we passed a constitutional amendment

to block anybody from serving more than two terms. So Washington set the principle that he served the people, they didn't serve him, that power was deliberately limited. He goes home, finally, to Mount Vernon, a place he loves. He relaxes, He goes back to being a gentleman, farmer. He's just drowning in visitors because everybody wants to drop by and see the great man. He's out riding on a wet, cold,

rainy day. He comes down with a fever. In that generation, the doctors thought they would help you by bleeding you. They put leeches on him, probably hurting him by some of his blood, although there are some modern studies that indicate the leitch has actually had for some kind of diseases. They were actually very helpful because they had certain things that they actually put in your body. But in the case of Washington, they probably further weakened him. His throat

seized up, and he finally died. Marca was left alone. She promptly did something which every historian ever since has regretted. She burned all of their personal letters because she felt it was private. She didn't want people to see what Washington had written to her, or she'd written to Washington, and so she literally shortly after his death, eliminates all of the personal records, which had grown up over a

long lifetime and would have been fascinating. The country warns him, the country realizes that he heally had been the father of the country, that he really was first in their hearts, and that he was the symbol of what a free society was supposed to be, which is why our national capital is named for him, and why the Washington Monument stands there as a memorial to a man who had literally created the modern system of freedom under the rule

of law that we've come to take for granted. So when you look around the world and you see countries failing, you see people who are in desperate trouble, you see places where the rule of law doesn't exist, you look at kleptocracy, corruption, dictatorship, it's really important to remember that the United States could have been that kind of country. It still cos them to be that kind of country,

but that people can make an enormal difference. The founding fathers collectively and by their commitment to the rule of law, to the Constitution, made that difference. And the person who was indispensable, who really surmounted all of the others, they all looked up to him, they all followed his judgment. Who was President Washington, first as a general, then as president, but above all as a human being. Washington personified the kind of dignified patriotism that was at the heart of

the rule of law. Each of us can learn from Washington. Each of us can learn about freedom, about discipline, about persistence. Each of us can come to understand why he loved America so much and why he loved freedom so much. And then we can teach others that anybody anywhere on the planet can learn to be free, can learn to live under the rule of law, can learn to pursue happiness. And Washington, in that sense, is a person for all of humanity, not just America, and a person for all time,

not just the eighteenth century. I want to thank my longtime writing partner and fellow George Washington historian Bill Fortune. I also want to thank the Fred W. Smith National Library for the study of George Washington at Mount Vernon, and frankly, the person who did more than anybody else to create that library, Gay Gaines. Thank you for listening to founding Father's Week on Newtsworld. You can learn more about George Washington on our show page at newtsworld dot com.

Newtsworld is produced by Gingwish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan and our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks the team at Gingwish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others come learn what it's all about.

Right now, listeners, A New World consigner for my three free weekly columns at Ginrish three sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm new Gingrich. This is news World.