AMERICAN PATRIARCH

The prolific historian takes on the first among equals of the Founding Fathers.

One might think that there’s not much more one can say about George Washington than has already been said in a mountain of books. Well-known historian Brands adds materially to the literature by starting on an anthropological note, painting a portrait not just of Washington, but also of the world he was born into. Washington’s ancestors, perhaps ironically, wound up in Virginia for siding with the crown in the English Civil War, and though going abroad constituted a kind of exile, they became wealthy, landed gentry, a class that “had far more land than they could work themselves. Anyway, they considered physical labor demeaning.” The solution was the purchase of enslaved people to work those lands—a matter that would gnaw at Washington for the rest of his life. “I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it,” he wrote soon after retiring from command during the Revolutionary War. But all the same, he continued to be an enslaver and, indeed, took pains that those in his servitude could not escape while he was in residence in abolitionist-inclined Philadelphia, then the capital. “The president preferred that the public see him as an enlightened slaveholder,” Brand writes, though that supposed enlightenment required subterfuge. Brands is also strong on the tangled relations of the new republic with Indigenous peoples and with the European powers, with Washington’s famous utterance that “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” For all his contradictions, Brand writes, Washington was a born soldier who came along at exactly the right moment, a timeliness by virtue of which, the author concludes, “he gained a timeless reputation.”

The one biography of Washington to read in this semiquicentennial year.