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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

‘Excellency’ looks at Washington’s orchestrated life

Marc Schogol The Philadelphia Inquirer

Joseph J. Ellis and George Washington have something in common: Neither was a complete stickler for the truth.

What, you say? George “I cannot tell a lie” Washington?

Yes, says Ellis, who won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2001 for his book “Founding Brothers” – and then was suspended from his position as history professor at Mount Holyoke College when it was discovered he had lied about his military service in the Vietnam War.

With the unexpected free time, Ellis got to thinking about how Washington became such a mythical figure and how the real George Washington has been buried under impenetrable marble.

Able to study newly compiled collections of Washington’s papers, Ellis concluded that Washington very consciously and painstakingly created his own image for posterity.

Washington intuited that commanding the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, becoming the first president of these United States – and then, having had almost absolute power, voluntarily surrendering it – would elevate him to God-like status for all times.

He thought out the consequences of everything he did beforehand, then by almost inhuman self-control, he stuffed all those feelings and impulses.

So where does the not being a stickler for the truth come in?

As a Virginia militia officer, he desperately craved advancement in the regular British army.

In the French and Indian War, for example, Washington led forces that in one battle committed a massacre and in another were ignobly defeated. Ellis says Washington’s accounts played down what actually happened.

When Washington became commander of the Continental Army, he proved a poor battlefield commander. Reluctantly, he was forced to adopt a strategy of avoiding major battles in order to keep an army in the field and thus keep the Revolution alive.

This, too, he was able to reconstruct so that in posterity, he would be remembered as “first in war” and hence “first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

The one blotch on his reputation that worried him was that, like Jefferson and all the Virginia-planter patriots who talked up equality, Washington owned slaves.

Washington knew he should free them but found – or invented – reasons why he couldn’t. In his will, however, he did so.

It was a very carefully orchestrated life. Before he died, Washington gave his papers a good cleaning – what Ellis calls Washington’s “posterity project.”

“Most of the prominent leaders of the revolutionary generation recognized that they were making history and took care to preserve their correspondence and edit their memoirs with an eye on posterity’s judgment,” Ellis writes. “But none … were as earnest in courting posterity as Washington.”

And none did it so excellently.