Hamilton and TURN treat Washington as a person to look up too. But in the TV show SLEEPY HOLLOW & Assassins Creed 3, they say he was pretty much a coward. Do you think he was both, or people glorify him to much? (Love you work btw 😆💕)
(Thank you! I’m glad you like it!)
So the easiest answer to your question is yes, people glorify him too much. Done.
Although even that can be spun in two different directions, as in 1) he’s glorified too much allowing people to ignore that he was a poor general and slave owner, or 2) he’s glorified too much that people don’t see him as a actual person.
I do think most Americans probably don’t have a clear idea of just how many times he lost battles, or at least every single Washington historian I’ve ever read has to spend several paragraphs belaboring the point that he lost all the time, and was not really a grand strategist. Ultimately he won the war through effective image management, pragmatism, and just being willing to suffer from crippling stress for 6 years.
I mean, I think it would do him some favors if people understood that the question of George’s life is not “how did a great man become a great general and then a great president” but “how did a Virginian farmer without the colonial equivalent of a high school diploma and very little military experience win a revolution against a major world and then go on to participate in a government that somehow manages to have one of the longest peaceful transfers of power in Western history?” That kind of makes you sit up and go, “Wait, what?”
And by the way I don’t think he was in general a coward per se, in the “bravery in war” sense. And I’m assuming that was the sort of cowardice shown in AC:3 and Sleepy Hollow? Like, was he good at being a general? Nope. Not really! But there are some good examples of cowardly behavior in the AmRev and he never got anywhere close to that kind of thing. The two best are American general Charles Lee sketching out a plan to defeat the Continental Army while he was captured by the British, Horatio Gates essentially abandoning a retreat and running 170 miles away. All of the things I’ve read about the (many) retreats Washington was a part of generally indicate that he made sure they were orderly and he was usually among the last people to board a boat across a river. And I think that if Washington had ever been captured he was the kind of person to insist on having a sort of famously honorable death. If he was going to lose, he just seems like the sort that would want to lose in a way where you couldn’t say one bad thing about how he handled it.
(That said, he didn’t seem to think about getting captured very much, and his plan for if the war went South was just to retreat into the frontier and live like an outlaw. So please take a moment to consider that as an alternate universe: George Washington, Fugitive Frontiersman. Hunting bears! Punching redcoat bounty hunters! It’s gold!)
So maybe he wasn’t a coward in war, but I do think he was a coward morally in how he handled the issue of slavery. He didn’t seem to have much illusion about slavery, when you start digging in to what he actually wrote about it. He knew it slavery was arbitrary (said so in a letter), he knew it was economically unwise (bitched about it a lot), and he knew it shouldn’t last much longer (so he had to understand that it was morally repugnant). Yet he stayed mum on the subject accept in letters and conversations among friends because he didn’t know how to deal with the political fall out. And that’s not even the clearest example of his cowardice. That would be that he drafted the will which would free all the slaves that were considered to be under his ownership upon Martha’s death in secret. As in, even Martha didn’t know. And I assume he never sat her down and said, “I’m freeing the slaves upon your death” because he didn’t want to argue with her. (Martha, while nice in a lot of ways, was not at all troubled by slavery.) That’s really pretty cowardly.
I enjoy thinking about how bad Washington was at being a general in the sort of commonly understood way of winning battles, and I enjoy that in contrast to how he was actually good at being a general, which was that he showed up everyday, listened to advice, and just faked it till he somehow made it. But it’s pretty horrible at all to read about how he dropped the ball on slavery. I’m grateful for Chris Jackson’s clarity of thought on the subject, Washington’s failure there is not something to forgive or make peace with, but it doesn’t preclude him from being worthy of discussion.
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