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 đđ)
(Thank you! Iâm glad you like it!)Â
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) heâs glorified too much allowing people to ignore that he was a poor general and slave owner, or 2) heâs glorified too much that people donât see him as a actual person.Â
I do think most Americans probably donât have a clear idea of just how many times he lost battles, or at least every single Washington historian Iâve 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.Â
I mean, I think it would do him some favors if people understood that the question of Georgeâs life is not âhow did a great man become a great general and then a great presidentâ but âhow 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?â That kind of makes you sit up and go, âWait, what?â
And by the way I donât think he was in general a coward per se, in the âbravery in warâ sense. And Iâm 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 Iâve 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 couldnât say one bad thing about how he handled it.Â
(That said, he didnât 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! Itâs gold!)
So maybe he wasnât a coward in war, but I do think he was a coward morally in how he handled the issue of slavery. He didnât 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 shouldnât 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 didnât know how to deal with the political fall out. And thatâs 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 Marthaâs death in secret. As in, even Martha didnât know. And I assume he never sat her down and said, âIâm freeing the slaves upon your deathâ because he didnât want to argue with her. (Martha, while nice in a lot of ways, was not at all troubled by slavery.) Thatâs really pretty cowardly.Â
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 itâs pretty horrible at all to read about how he dropped the ball on slavery. Iâm grateful for Chris Jacksonâs clarity of thought on the subject, Washingtonâs failure there is not something to forgive or make peace with, but it doesnât preclude him from being worthy of discussion.
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