George Washington: Becoming a Good Man Before Becoming Great General

And we’re back with our American Stories. George Washington’s service to our country can’t be overstated. He’s a man who’s been immortalized in our nation’s history books, our nation’s capital, and in the values that we still hold dear to this day. But Washington’s service as both president and general was the result of personal growth, something we’re far more familiar with than monuments. Here’s Woody Holton to tell us the story of how our nation’s founding father became the man we remember him as today. Before Washington could become a better general, he had to become a better person. So, I mean, he’s talking about some things that make us feel a little bit uncomfortable about his early years, when if there was one word that defined him, it was greed. So, you heard me saying how greedy was as a young man. Don’t give out my address, because to me, the before picture makes the after picture even more interesting. But I’m worried about people only hearing the before picture and saying, “What the heck is this guy talking about?” He married the wealthiest widow in Virginia, Martha Dandridge Custis, in January of seventeen fifty nine, and you know, you’d think that’s enough. But he was determined to go out and increase his wealth. And one way he did that was by speculating in western land. And of course that land was being taken from Native Americans. So, but Washington actually—again, only as a young man—he did worse than that, because he not only stole land from Native Americans, but his fellow soldiers who had fought with him in this war against Native Americans that we call the French and Indian War. The enlisted men had been promised bounty land, a total of two hundred thousand acres, and he and his fellow officers shouldered the enlisted men aside and took that land from them for themselves. And then, among the officers, he ensured that he got much more land than he was entitled to, specifically by going around to the officers. He had his brother do it, approached them, as he put it, in a joking way, to get them to sell their land rights to him for the eighteenth-century equivalent of pennies, and then he made a huge killing. He ended up with twenty-seven thousand acres. He once said, “The greatest the states we have in this colony”—referring to his home colony of Virginia—”the greatest the states were made by taking up the rich back lands,” and he really mastered that art, not the George Washington that we all revere today. And that’s the question: What changed him? What made Washington different? But before talking about that, let me first talk about all of the ways in which he did change. You know, he served as eight years as commander in chief of the Continental Army that won the Revolutionary War, made this a free country. He served without pay. He agreed to serve for expenses only. A lot of the most virtuous things that Washington did were acts of self-denial. You know, after the Revolutionary War, many people believe he could have used his success as commander in chief to remain commander in chief—that is, to sort of become the king of America in some fashion. But he very deliberately decided not to do. Like Julius Caesar, you know, who had all those victories in France and came back and made himself Dictator of Rome, Emperor of Rome. Washington decided not to do that, but willingly resigned from the army and went back to his farm. And he did something similar after two terms as president. This is in the early days, brought up until the middle of the twentieth century. Presidents under the Constitution were allowed to serve as many terms as they could get elected to, and people kind of assumed that he would just stay in office until he died, but he didn’t. He resigned after two terms, and sure enough he did pass away in what would have been his third term. But by resigning, not running for a third term, Washington set a pattern that was followed right up until Fractfone Roosevelt in the middle of the twentieth century, of limiting yourself. And as I say, the thing that really makes him stand out as a great person by the time he died was that he freed his slaves, and his will—Martha gets part of the credit for freeing all of those hundreds of people. He was the only major Southern founder to free all of his slaves. So he became a better person than—that raises the question: What made Washington a better person? And I think there was a personal and a public circumstance. The personal circumstance was one he mentioned, actually, I think it was a Second Inaugural Address, and that was that he never had any children. He was probably infertile because his wife, Martha, had had four kids, all of whom—I’m sorry to say—she buried; that as all of whom died before she did. Martha’s had had four kids before in her previous marriage; they had none together. So that was probably he who was infertile, possibly because he had suffered from smallpox as a young man. But it took him a while to figure out that he was infertile and that he wasn’t going to have kids. And all this time he’s making all this money, as I said, speculating in land, raffling off slaves, doing all this stuff to make; marrying a rich widow, all the stuff to build up this giant patrimony that he could pass on to George Washington, Jr., and then from then him on to George Washington III. That is, he was setting himself up to create a dynasty. But sometime in the seventeen-sixties, George Washington realized that there was no Washington dynasty, that the family tree was going to end with him. And had there been no Revolutionary War, I think his life would have been kind of a tragic life because he was programmed to make money and acquire more wealth to pass on to his kids, but then no kids. Almostly, he would be like a hunting dog. You know, that nobody ever takes hunting. He was programmed to do that, and now here there was no motivation to do that anymore. But then along came the Revolutionary War. They really wanted a Southern commander because the war had started in New England, and people wanted to make the point that it was not just New England invulged in this fight, but all thirteen colonies are involved in the common cause. And he had proved himself in the previous war, and so he was the natural choice. And we all know how much George Washington influenced the Revolutionary War, but it’s also worth stressing how much the war or influenced Washington, because here he is in seventeen seventy five, kind of a tragic figure who had hoped to build up this big patrimony to start the Washington dynasty, and he’s now not going to be able to do that. Well, in a sense, he adopted the Continental Soldiers as his children, and by seventeen seventy eight people were calling him what we still called him today, “the father of his country.” And I think that really helps explain how this greedy young man becomes a generous, patriotic, self-sacrificing old man. Is that he realized he’s not going to have children to bequeath his wealth, and so he had unofficial children—that is, the Continental Army soldiers, many of whom were young enough to be as kids—and the nation as a whole. So instead of being the founder of a dynasty, he became the father of his country. And you’re listening to Woody Holton tell the story of the man who George Washington was and the man George Washington would become. And in the beginning of his life, in the early stages of his life, dynasty was what he was thinking about. When it was no longer an option, legacy became what he cared about, and duty and so many other noble things. What a great line by Woody Holton. We all know, he said, how George Washington impacted the Revolutionary War, but we didn’t know or should know, is how the Revolutionary War impacted George Washington. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, George Washington’s story here on Our American Stories. And we’re back with Our American Stories and our final segment on George Washington’s hidden strength—that being his ability to change. Woody Holton was just telling us how the British military strategy was dominated by one word offense. Because of Washington’s long-held desire prior to the Revolution to be a British of for Sir, he was fighting a battle within himself when it came to this tactic—a battle he won internally, if not on the battlefield, during the Battle of Bunker Hill, where the British army was led by General William Howe. Let’s return to the story. So, General William Howe, who was the hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill, was very depressed afterwards because he had suffered fifty percent casualies capturing that hill, and the Americans just were treated to the next hill, meaning he was going to have to suffer fifty percent casualies to get that. And so Howe believed after this great victory at Bunker Hill that the British had no chance of winning the Revolutionary War. That basically all the Americans had to do was gig trenches and use that dirt to build walls in front of them—cells palisades, and they called them—and they could win because even if they had to give up those forts, they would be giving them up like at Bunker Hill, at the cost of fifty percent casualties on the British side. And so when Washington came in July seventeen seventy five, took over the Continental Army, his subordinates were all saying, “Okay, you can win this thing; you just have to stay on defense.” But Washington was programmed for offense, and so less than two months after taking over, he ordered this massive assault on the town of Boston. Boston in those days was almost an island, so they were gonna have to cross this very narrow neck of land, which was very well defended. Okay, they could also go over water, but an amphibious assault was the most dangerous thing you could do in those days, and so his officers talked him out of it. But then the Charles, which is the main