Episode 863: Founding Fathers – George Washington

The lives of these men are essential to understanding the American form of government and our ideals of liberty. The Founding Fathers all played key roles in the securing of American independence from Great Britain and in the creation of the government of the United States of America. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
On this episode of This World. The lives of these
men are essential to understand the American form of government
and our ideals of liberty. The founding fathers all played
key roles in securing American independence from Great Britain and
in the creation of the government of the United States
of America. And now the life of George Washington. I

(00:50):
wanted to start the entire podcast series with George Washington
because literally we all stand on his shoulders to the
degree that this is a country that has a remarkable
ability for freedom, that is open to everyone, and that
creates a framework within which normal people can lead usual

(01:14):
and extraordinary lives. All of that started and was based
in Washington. One of the best biographies of Washington describes
him as literally irreplaceable, that he is the man that
was the essential person for the entire creation of America.
And I think that's true. Every time clost and I
go down to Mount Vernon and we look at that

(01:36):
house he lived in with Martha and we look out
on the Potomac, we realize that he had this sense.
He loved being a farmer, he loved the land. He
had a sense of solidness, partly because he was so
big physically. I always tell people that if you played
Washington in the modern era, you should be basically an

(01:57):
nfl authensive blindman. He was physically so large for a
time when the average man was about five six. He
was also considered the best horseman in the colonies, which is,
if you're that big physically and you're that good a horseman,
he's astonishing. And Washington had this strength, both physical and moral.
Part of his physical strength just came, I think biologically.

(02:20):
He was just that big. And he worked as a farmer,
he worked as a frontiersman, and he used his body
his whole life. When he was serving in the legislature,
people often forget this. Washington was a professional politician. He
ran for office. In fact, there was a very funny story.
He'd been out on the West and thought of himself
as a hero and ran for office the first time.

(02:41):
And in that era, he had a one day election campaign.
Everybody gathered at the polls and the candidates bought alcohol
and got free beer, free wine, free whiskey, and Washington said, no,
I am a military hero. I don't need to buy
anything primally, and he came in last. The following election,

(03:02):
he bought the largest quantity of alcohol ever bought in
a Virginia election, and he won. People said, I you'd
be going to learn the trade here, which also fed
Washington's general pattern. Many experts have studied his campaigns and said,
he made many mistakes once, but you never finally making
the same mistake twice. So he's down and at the
House of Burgesses. And I always recommend to people to

(03:23):
go to Williamsburg because it is such a remarkable recreation
of that era. And you can go to the taverns,
and Washington went to in the evenings. They didn't have TV,
they didn't have computer games. So they'd sit around playing
cards and drinking and talking with each other. And it
was a very famous squire named Governor Bird. And Governor

(03:44):
Bird would find some stranger and he said, I'll bet
you a shilling that George Washington can break a walnut
between his thumb and his first finger. Now, I urge
you sometime to try this, because it takes extraordinary strength.
And so he'd go over Washington be playing cards or
telling stories, and he said, Colonel Washington. At this stage

(04:08):
he had become an honorary colonel in the Virginia militia,
would you mind breaking a walnut? And Washington would break
the walnut. He'd collected the shilling that presumably bought Washington
a drink for the favor, But it was again a
sign of in an age when people value being strong physically,

(04:28):
Washington was the strongest, but it was our show morally
strong in the sense, first of all, you can get
from Mount Vernon the rules he wrote at fourteen years
of age, which he had copied out of several books,
and which were rules for being a gentleman. And he
wanted very much to have respect. He wanted what the

(04:50):
Romans had called vertu in the sense that you are
a virtuous person, not in our modern sense of sin,
but in the sense that you have served the community.
You are bigger the normal history. You're going to live
on in history as a person who's done his job.
And so Washington wanted to project this sense of authority,
the sense of I am and it says, in fact,

(05:12):
I'm noble in a in a world where her there's
no nobility in the new world. At that point, it's
a famous story of Washington in Philadelphia, and I think
at the Constitutional Convention and Governor Morris takes a five
pound bet that he can walk over and slap Washington
on the shoulder, and he goes over. He gets close,

(05:36):
he gets closer, Washington turns and looks down on him.
Because Washington looks down, and everybody except Jefferson and Morris
stands and looks at him and says, good evening in
general Washington, he walks back over the eyes says, it's
your five pounds. It is physically impossible to touch Washington
because he is projects this almost force field of dignity

(06:00):
that you can't penetrate. And he used that to enormous effect. Now, ironically,
when he was a general, for example, serving the places
that were pretty desperately valley forged in the winter, he
would go out and throw medicine balls with the troops.
He was physically very engaged. So it's not that he
was incapable of being close. He loved to dance. He

(06:22):
was capable of being close. But when he decided that
he was aloof, he was a loof beyond anyone normally
being able to deal with them. And that was very
important that he didn't start that way, but he grew
into that person. He started as a relatively poor kid,
went to the Caribbean, got a slight case of smallpox,

(06:42):
which turned out to be really valuable because it meant
that he was vaccinated. He also was in a position
where he watched life in the Caribbean and realized he
didn't particularly like that life. Came back home. Was not
wealthy personally, he's adequately, but he knew he'd have to
earn a living, so became a surveyor. By the time

(07:03):
he is nineteen years of age, he is surveying. In fact,
if he had a little Washington, which is a town
that has a remarkable in called the End of Washington,
which is a Michelan the first place to get a
Micheline star in America. Washington laid out the entire town
at nineteen years of age. Now to give you a
sense of how the world's different. Look at a map

(07:24):
little Virginia and it is about seventy miles west of
Washington and about fifty miles south. That was the frontier,
not Kentucky, not Texas. I mean western Virginia was the frontier.
And Washington spent a large part of his youth in
the frontier, first as a surveyor. Where we aren't fairly
good money. He also learned something people tend to forget.

(07:47):
Surveyors can look at topography, so as when he's a
general officer later he looks at a battlefield with a
level of technical knowledge that no other general officer has
because he knows how to he knows the distances because
he's surveyed, he knows the rolling hills, he knows how
to look for gullies. He knows how in an age

(08:09):
when he didn't have helicopters, and he didn't have tanks,
and he didn't have cars, even a small rise is
a big deal if the other guy's got to come
up in because it wears them out and slows them down.
And so he's very good at looking at terrain. And
he learned all this by the time he was nineteen
to twenty years of age. He's given an assignment. He's
very precocious. He's very close to the Fairfax family and

(08:30):
they're among the largest landowners in the colony of Virginia.
He gets an assignment to go west. This is supposed
to be a peaceful assignment. The French have come down
from Canada. They have occupied the place where the Ohio
River is formed by two rivers coming together and where
Three River Stadium is nowadays. He's given a letter to

(08:51):
take to them that says you got to get out
of here, and the French basically think you're a nice
young goy. What we're not getting out of here? Washington
picks a fight. He's not he was not as signed
to pick a fight. He's just very pugnaciously, very young.
And he then ends up at a place called Fort Necessity,
where they stop and I've been out visiting Fort Necessity,

(09:13):
which still exists as a national historical monument, and this
is clearly a sign that he's not applying his survey
or skills, because the fort is in the bottom of
a valley where the other guys up above are shooting
down at you. Furthermore, they have huge reign. The place
gets totally wet, their powder gets wet. They have no

(09:34):
choice except to surrender. Very fortunate for America he wasn't killed.
I mean, at that point, the French and Indians who
are their allies, are really pissed off at Washington and
here's this young guy out here picking a fight. And
you can literally argue that the Seven Years' War, which
we call the French Indian War, the Seven Years War,
which is a global war in India. He goes in Europe,

(09:56):
it's in North America, it's in the Caribbean. It started
by George Washingington who just picks this fight, and the
fight starts going down to the Washington comes back home.
Imagine this the early twenties, your first big assignment. It's
a total mess. So what does he do? He writes
a pamphlet. He says, I was really right. I did
exactly the right thing, the only thing you could have done,
and none of it was my fault. And I'm really

(10:18):
proud of to do it well. I played well. The
average person doesn't know anything about what's going on. There's
no television, there's no live coverage from Fort Necessity, and
so the only explanation of what happened is Washington's and
copies of it get to London, and he's now a
persona He's a real person. So along comes the British.
Finally said okay, this is going to be real war.

(10:39):
You got to get engaged. They send an army and
Washington gets some of his first basic lessons, and this
is selling people often forget. Washington learned a lot about
war by being at war. He didn't learn about war
by reading theoretical works, and so they need a colonial advisor.

(11:00):
British aristocracy was totally contemptuous to the colonials, and I
thought they were basically stupid and lazy and cowardly. And furthermore,
they want British aristocrats. They were also contemptuous of British soldiers,
and they're contemptious of Heshman mercenaries because they're British aristocrats.
So Washington has assigned and he has some advice for him.
He says, it is not helpful to march down the

(11:22):
middle of the road in red outfits because the other
side will cheat and they will fire from behind trees
and you're going to get killed. And General Braddock explains
to them, you obviously don't understand European warfare, but just relax.
They actually leave. If you go to the Army War
College at Carlisle, you can see the post from which
they left, and they might again remember the Carlile. Pennsylvania,

(11:45):
which is next to Harrisburg, is the beginning of the frontier.
So they're now marching through the Pennsylvania forest and surprise, surprise,
they get attacked by people who are cheating there. They're
wearing outfits that blend into the forest, and the French
are not wearing the normal white French uniforms, which they
do when they're informal warfare, but when they're fighting in

(12:07):
the woods, they're wearing stuff that fits the woods. The Indians,
of course, have no uniforms anyway, and so the combined
French and Indian force attacks. Braddock is killed almost immediately.
The British force is disintegrating. I mean, they're confused, they're scared,
they've lost their commander. And the one guy who's on
the tallest horse is Washington, and so Washington starts to

(12:29):
rally them, get them reorganized, get them the hell out
of the way, because they're in real danger of being
a massacred. The Washington in that fight has four bullet
holes in his coat and has two horses shot out
from He reached his brother the next day. God must
have really been protecting him, because at some point one
of those bulls should have hit him and it was lucky.
And then he began insists on being up on these horses,

(12:51):
which is important for his men's morale because they can
see they at least have a leader, even if he's
a colonial. But at the same time it sort of
makes shift target. Decade later, he runs into an Indian
chieftain of a tribal council, and the chieftain says, God
must have some big role for you, because I personally
shot at you thirteen times. He said, all of us
are trying to kill you because you were so obvious,

(13:12):
and we just couldn't itch you. That's important later because Washington,
after that fight in his own mind as a man
of destiny. So he goes back home, marries a very

(13:40):
wealthy widow who brings him Mount Vernon, and I think
a genuine love match. She has two children. They never
have children on their own. Washington raises the children as
his own, and he and Martha entertainment. And this is
one of the things to remember Colonial Virginia. If you
were reasonably in Washington in Land was the wealthiest columnist,

(14:04):
not as wealthy as the Fairfaxes. But the Fairfaxes eventually
leave during the Revolution, at which point he becomes the
wealthiest person in America in Land, not in money, but
you always entertain if you look at the Fuda Mount
Vernon and you look at the register of who comes by.
There are always people coming to visit. I mean, at
one point later in his life, James Madison comes over

(14:28):
and spends I think six weeks living with Washington, writing,
arguing and writing about the Constitution and the just used
to this. This is this is their life. Washington regularly
will ride up to Alexandria, and if you want to,
you can go to Gatsby's Tavern, which still exists, which
was the site of Washington's birthday parties, and he would

(14:49):
they'd all ride up together and have a great party
and have a few drinks. Intended to party during the
daytime so they could get home around dark. But it
was this was It's all real. It was a social life.
It was a nice life. And Washington's faced with the
same problem as every other American, which is, you are
trying to have a cash based economy with no cash

(15:13):
and you're dealing with British merchants who are constantly cheating you,
cheating you in the sense that they want to pay
you less for what you sell and charge you more
for what they sell. So you're always juggling us very
tight financial burden and you're not particularly happy with the British,
and Washington is serving in public life as a legislator,
but mostly he's a farmer and a gentleman who is

(15:36):
nice to people who come wandering through. And then the
British decide that they're going to pay for the debt
coming out of the Seven Years' War by raising taxes
on the Americans, and their rationale is not crazy. The
rationale is, look, we saved you from the French, we
saved you from the Indians. Things are relatively safe. You
ought to pay your fair share. Now the American attitude

(15:58):
is very different. The American attitude is, you know, it's
not our fault that you're a profigate government in London
and that you waste all your money and that you're
surrounded by corruption, and no, we're not going to pay anything.
You know, we're happy to have you around, but frankly,
since we no longer have any threat from the French,
why do we need you? And so you have this
weird moment where the British think the generosity is going

(16:19):
to leave the Americans out of gratitude don't want to
pay taxes, and the Americans are saying, no, the very
fact that you one means we don't need you. And
Washington's in the faction. That's fine. You know, I don't
think I want to pay any taxes. I mean, I
don't like those guys anyway. They'll always trying to cheat me.
He's not a fire Brown, He's not out there saying
let's rebel, let's do something, but he's clearly in the

(16:39):
group around Patrick Henry and others who want to stand
up to the English. And then, of course you end
up with a series of events. Again, thinking yourself as
a planter sitting on the Potomac River having a nice life.
You're not connected by cable TV, you're not connected by internet.

(17:00):
You know, you don't get any text messages. You occasionally
read things, and so one day you read or you
hear from somebody who's riding through spending the night that
there was the massacre in Boston and the British troops
had shot Americans who were protesting. Well, you sort of
start thinking about that, did that happen here? Could it

(17:21):
happen at Williamsburg? Do I feel a little pissed off
that the British are shooting Americans? And the alienation starts
to build, and the call goes out to come to Philadelphia,
and let's talk about how bad this is getting. When
the British decide to impose taxes that the Americans really
get mad about, particularly tacks on tea, which leads to

(17:44):
the Bostonians dressing up as Indians and having a tea
party throwing all the Indian East Indian Company tea into
the river. And ironically, the British thought they were being
clever because they actually had organized it so that the
price he would be less under the new rules, even
though you paid taxes and the Americans got none. No,

(18:07):
it's the principle, we don't care that it's cheaper. We
care that part of the money goes to you, and
we're not going to pay your money. And so they're
cheerfully throwing all of these bales of tea, which are
very valuable, into the Boston harbor, which really makes the
British pretty bad. And so the British decided that they're
going to close down on Boston and ultimately isolate the

(18:28):
city of Boston to punish it, in the theory that
that will then scare the rest of the Americans into
being obedient. But what it really does is just makes
them angry. So the call goes out, they meet and
then what is called the Continental Congress, which is a
huge breakthrough. I mean, these people hadn't thought of themselves
as Americans. They were Virginians, they were Georgians, they were Massachusetts.

(18:51):
They spoke very different dialects in the sense of the
tone of their language, the patterns they ate differently, and
they hadn't really begun to identify them they were Americans.
And now they have this problem, and Washington's one of
the people who's drifting towards being more and more alienated
and more and more angry, and he's ultimately affected, I
think in part by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin is a world

(19:14):
class scientist recognized all over the world. He is a
very successful businessman who makes enough money by forty to
sell his businesses and devote himself to public life. He
writes for Richard's Almanac every year and is very widely
known as the first postmaster General of the colonies, and
therefore has connections at all of the colonies because he

(19:37):
handles the mail. And he is sent by the Colony
of Pennsylvania to London to plead with the British and
to basically say, look, there's some things we need solved,
and we can be nice. He spends about seven or
eight years in London, and he ends up suddenly realizing
they'll never accept it. They're aristocrats. He's not an aristocrat,

(20:00):
even though he's a world famous scientist, even though he's
wealthier than some of the aristocrats. There'll never be anything
in British society. And it just totally infuriates And somebody
once wrote that he left America as an Englishman and
he returned as an American, and so his spirit made
he's very widely respected. People like Washington look to him

(20:23):
and say, you know, you've been there, you've lived there,
what do you think And he's basically saying, I don't
think we have any choice. These people are never going
to treat us fairly now they think they were servants.
And so the spirit begins to build, and the British
begins sending troops to Boston because they're determined to crush
the spirit of resistance and they think that if they

(20:45):
can break Boston that that will symbolically shift the whole country. Now,
one of the myths about Washington is that he's sort
of self effacing He's this guy who really wasn't ambitious.
But I've always saw one of them telling things. In
the Commonal Congress, there is only one person wearing a
military uniform. He's also the one of the two biggest

(21:08):
people of Jefferson and the other Jefferson Stein, but tall,
very tall. The Washington is big. I see this huge
guy walking around in the uniform of a Virginia militia
and saying to everybody, of course, I wouldn't want to
go to Boston. I don't want you to think I'm
a military man just because I'm standing here in my uniform.

(21:29):
But it just seemed to me it was the appropriate
thing to wear. And gradually they all look around each
andy go aha, because they have a problem politically. They
need a Southerner to go to Boston because they need
to unify the columns. They can't appoint a Bostonian or
a New Hampshire Rite to be commander of the army
because they'll have no linkage to New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia,

(21:53):
and Virginia is the biggest colony in wealth and population
at that point, so they could turn to Washington. He says,
with great reluctance, I will accept this burden, although I
fear that I will be inadequate and I probably will fail.
But as long as you recognize that I'm only doing
this because he wanted me to, I will go to Boston.

(22:17):
And I think it's hard for us to realize. You're
this guy who's in many ways an aristocrat. He's very wealthy.
You know, he rides a horse very well in the
style of the wrist. If you're a farmer, you don't
ride a horse the way George Washington does. He rode
to the Foxes and he shows up, and you have
to think about this. You have a new England Army

(22:39):
and this weird guy shows up from Virginia, speaking in
a slightly strange English and with an attitude of being
sort of a little lustere and a little you know,
And he's got to really think about this because he
realizes he's got to find a way to get all
these new wonders to follow him, or he's got a problem.
And so he works at it, and he spends a

(23:01):
lot of time with the troops. And again, I think
there's an advantage that we underestimate. If you imagine this
as a movie scene, you'd have this, as I said,
a guy in the modern era who's the size of
an NFL offensive lineman and you're walking around the camp. Well,
it's pretty obvious when he walks around the camp because

(23:22):
he towers over everybody. He's also the strongest guy in
the army. Well, it gives them a certain sense of
immediate acceptance that he should be the leader. And he
designs a very intelligent strategy and they move from the
cannon in a position where the British have to flee.
And so Washington, in a matter of a couple months
has driven the British out of Boston, which is an

(23:45):
enormous achievement. And at that point, you can imagine everybody's excited,
everybody's positive, and there's a problem because of the British
have a navy and they're not leaving. They just left Boston.
They went to Canada group and they're probably going to
come back to New York, which is in many ways
the key town for the whole war is it's a

(24:07):
big port. It leaks that if you can break New York,
then you cut off New England from the rest of
the country. So Washington takes his army and marches to
New York, and they feel him pretty good about themselves.
And in his first grade outing he's been very successful.
And he has the dequition independance read to everybody, and

(24:31):
they're all pumped up, and they have a real problem.
It's not a very good army. They're not trained very well,
they don't have very good equipment, and they're up against
the best starting in the world and the British land
and just knock them all over the place, capture a
bunch of them, kill a bunch of them, and they're

(24:53):
in real danger of being annihilated. And one of those
miracles of Washington refers to and when he has said
later in life that anybody who thinks that God wasn't
watching over us, he used the word providence misunderstands how
it happened. Because what happens is the Gloucester fishermen common say, look,

(25:15):
we can we can get the army across and get
you out of Brooklyn before you're annihilated if we go
at night and the Royal Navy probably won't see us,
and we'll get certainly a large part of you across. Well,
the night they decide to do this, a huge fog
grows in and the British can't see anything. And so

(25:38):
Washington's getting these troops and he goes last. He's getting
all these troops in these boats. They're rowing across to Manhattan.
But they've been beaten. You know, there's no question they
just they just ran head out into the British and lost.
They get into Manhattan, well, they're this huge problem. One
British man of war has more artillery than the entire

(26:00):
American army has at any point in the governess. These
are big ships, the equivalent of modern naval aircraft. Payers
they're powerful, and if you're close to the water, they're
going to just knock you about with arty. And so
they're driven out of Manhattan where they losing him. And
at one point General Green of Rhode Island has probably

(26:23):
his best general, has this clever idea. We're going to
name this fort Fort Washington, and the moral effect of
defending Fort Washington, three thousand men will stand firm well
for Washington falls because in fact they're not capable of
fighting Verige. So Washington suggests agree that in the future
they should probably not try gimmicks, and he flees across

(26:46):
to White Plains and then he flees across into New Jersey,
and a week by week he gets smaller, tirer, more defeated. Washington,
who's a very smart guy about people in a way
that you wouldn't expect, and his austerity. Washington knows that
Thomas Pain has written tremendously important pamphlet on the revolution

(27:07):
and probably the best selling pamphlet describing the revolution, and
so he goes to him and he says, look, you
wrote that when everything was great in the summer. Now
we had a problem because all of us thought we were
going to win easily, and now we're getting beat and
I need a new pamphlet. And so he said, I

(27:27):
don't need you to be a rifleman. Pain's actually in
the army and he says, you've written common Sense. It's
the most widely read explanation of the revolution. And he says,
go to Philadelphia and write, explain to us what we're
living through. And so Pain writes the crisis which begins.
These are the times the trimensuls and people read it

(27:51):
and they said, they go, oh, yeah, this is what
I'm living through. And Pain basically says, look, you know,
hell is going to grab onto you as long as
it can, and it's not going to be easy to beat,
and you've got to be and he compares basically fighting
the British to trying to fight your way out of hell,
and people read it and they go, look, okay, it's

(28:12):
not going to be easy. It's not going to be
this week. So Washington ends up at Christmas Day, and
the week before Christmas he's dropped from thirty thousand men
to five thousand. Of the five thousand twenty five hundred
or sick, so he's actually got twenty five hundred defectives.

(28:33):
Of the twenty five hundred effectives, one third do not
have boots and are actually marching in burlet bags, leaving
a trail of blood. So Washington is sitting here, twenty
five hundred men left. Cross the river in New Jersey,
Washington in Pennsylvania. Cross the river in New Jersey. Is
the British army, and Washington brings all of his generalism

(28:56):
and says, we have a really big problem. We don't
win a victory. Most of our men actually expire in
their enlistment sometime in January. If they don't have some
reason to stay, we will have no army left. So
we have to win something. So I propose, let's cross

(29:19):
the Delaware at night during a snowstorm in the ice
march eleven miles to treaden surprise the British Army, actually
Hessian who were there, who were paid mercenaries, which is
an honorable job back then, and then we'll have won
a great victory and then people will be excited and'll

(29:41):
be okay. Every one of his generals looks at him
like he's insane, and they go, we've been losing. Now
since September, we've shrunk down from thirty to twenty five.
And Washington has a plan which has three units that
are going to cross the river at three different places
in the coordinator attack, which even a first class professional

(30:03):
army would have had a hard time doing. And they're
just staring at it. And it's really important to this
point to go back and think about Washington in the ambush,
because he's sitting there as a guy who's had two
horses shot off under him and four bullet holes, and
he's thinking, you got to take risks. You know, there

(30:24):
are all guys who hadn't had that experience, and they're going,
I don't want to take are you crazy? I don't
want to take this risk, and then he has the
winning argument. He says, look, this army disappears. The revolution's over.
The revolution's over. We're all going to be hung, so
you don't have anything to risk, so we might as

(30:46):
well try to wound, because at least that way we
have a shot. So they cross over, and interestingly he
has the officers who can read, reading pains the crisis
to the troops as they get in the boat. Again,
this is a very subtle man he has. He's got
to get the morale up. The instry line. Mausei Dungwan

(31:09):
said all power comes out of the end of a rifle,
and somebody corrected it and said, no, all power comes
from the person who's willing to shoot the road. And
it's exactly right. You've got to keep morale up. So
he takes his twenty five hundred men and then, in
a situation which can only be described as a miracle,

(31:31):
they cross over. There's this huge snowstorm coming from the north,
which means it's coming to their back, but it's coming
to the face of the Hessian troops. The Hessians run
into a small Virginia unit which is off on its
own without any authority, which arouses them about two or

(31:51):
three in the morning. They jump up with the stand arms.
They're all getting cold and wet, and this small unit
takes off. Washington runs into this unit and thinks they've
ruined the chance of success. The Hessians are going to
be awake, probably going to get slaughtered about what the
hell with no choice. Well, just the opposite happened. The
Hessians stand outside for about an hour. They get totally soaked.

(32:13):
They realized that this was just a griller unit that
was wandering through. They all go to bed. It's not
that Theassians were drunk. The Hessians were in the middle
of a snowstorm. Now here's the key thing to remember.
In Europe, there are no real battles fought in winter.
From I think seventeen sixty seven to nineteen forty four,
the German Army never launches a winter of place. Fredericks

(32:36):
Cred launches the last one I think it's in seventy
sixty seven, and then the Battle of Balgim forty four.
Because winter is hard, I mean it's cold and it's miserable.
Americans deer hunt in the winter. Americans are all in
the woods, in the winter. So the Americans are gone.
Oh we had a snowstone. Okay, the Hessians are gone.

(32:56):
We got a snowstone. Let's stay in the house because
no rational European army would be out in the snowstop
so they're safe. Well, they wake up in the morning
and Trenton back then is a very small town and
has just two streets, and so if you put cannon
at the end of the two streets, you control the town.

(33:17):
And the Hashians are all in these little houses and
they can't get out of them, and they finally get
a semi organized Washington captures eight hundred first class professional
soldiers for the loss of one American, and then does
a very intelligent thing. They run like him because the
British army's coming, and they get across the river before

(33:40):
the British can get there. Now victory really matters. They
go from twenty five hundred effectives within two weeks to
fifteen thousand because people are this is cool, we're winning.
Same the fact happens a football, you know, people like
to hear the game where they win. So they show
up and Washington now has enough troops to go back
across the river and one of those important examples of

(34:01):
Washington's system. They get to Trenton this time Cornwallis and
the British are ready. They are charging down the road
from Princeton. Washington calls a council of War. And in
the Council of War there are two farmers. And I
always said, I'm teaching military courses. I always say the officers,

(34:24):
why do you think there are two farmers? Because they
are the only two people who knew the territory. So
the British would never have done this because as an aristocrat,
you don't listen to farmers. They haven't had military training.
They only have one great advantage. They actually know the neighborhood. Well,
it turns out that there is a sunken road on
the south side of Trenton. He goes from Trenton to

(34:47):
Princeton that you cannot see if you're on the northern
road from Princeton to trent So Washington takes his entire
army runs down the road and the British are running
towards Trenton. He's running towards Princeton. And my favorite war
Washington paigning is Washington and Princeton with the cannon sitting
there and the British captured British flags behind it, and Washington,

(35:10):
at this point is about forty four years old, is
standing jauntily leaning on a British cannon, looking like the
Fox center who's called the Fox. I mean it's the
best picture because we tend to see Washington backwards. We
see the guy who's president late in his life. This
is still a young, energetic, aggressive guy. So the revolutionists survived,

(35:36):
and Washington's now in a position to continue to develop
the army. But it's important remember this is not everybody
worships Washington. I mean, if you're not in the army
with Washington, you're thinking, this guy's not had a very
good run here. I mean, okay, did okay in Boston,
got cleaned out in New York, cleaned out in New Jersey?

(35:57):
I mean, can we do better? Of course, during this period,
when the Americans win at Saratoga with the British army collapses,
you suddenly have an interest in somebody other than Washington.
So this' about a third of the continent of Congress
would like to fare Washington and is actively plotting. And

(36:18):
one of the reasons when Washington ends up the next
year going into Valley Forge, where he'd been promised to
be food, there'd be equipment to build houses, et cetera,
and they had nothing. People in Congress are deliberately setting

(36:48):
him up to fail because they want to get rid
of it. And again you get a sense of Washington
settled it. Washington, who had no children himself, had basically
opted the Marquis de Lafayette, who's in his early twenties,
as kind of like a steps. He loved Lafayette, Lafayette
loved him, and so Lafayette happens to write a letter

(37:10):
to the Congress. It says, you know, French King thinks
so highly of General Washington that if something were to
happen to him and he was no longer in command,
I really fear that all French money, French ammunition, French uniforms,
French assistants would disappear. And I, certainly, because of my

(37:33):
deep belief in the Revolution, wouldn't want that to happen. Well,
that's it. Washington has reasserted that he's in charge. He
also understands that he still doesn't have a very good army.
And a guy shows up named Astoivan, who is a
character in his own writer, I mean almost somebody could

(37:53):
do an entire novel about He's a German officer, claims
more credit than he really deserves, claims higher rank than
he really deserves, shows up and says, you know, I
can train your army. And this is one of those miracles,
A little bit like Washington listening to Farmers. Is when
Stryman looks around for a little while and realizes, if

(38:16):
I try to apply European systems, they will all rebuild
because they're Americans. So I can't just go and enforce
the being in Europe, I can force obedience because the
peasants expect me to force able. In the US, they all,
you know, does just throw me out. And so he
figures out, you have to tell Americans why you're doing it.

(38:39):
But if you'll tell them why you're doing it, they
actually learn faster than the Europeans. And so he begins
to train this army. And when they're in Valley Forge,
Washington again is very careful about a number of things.
They have a huge bakehouse which makes all the bread
for the army, and they turn it into a theater,

(39:00):
and so they bake bread good morning in the evening
they have plays. Washington's favorite play is Cato, which is
a remarkable study. In eighteenth century Britain, you could not
directly attack the king, because that'll be treason. So they
tended to write about the Romans, because you could write
about tyranny and corruption in Rome, and that's not really

(39:22):
attacking the king, although everybody who sees the play knows
you're talking about the king. So Cato is about the
Roman senator who, at the time of Caesar, refuses to
accept Caesar as the head of the government, and Caesar

(39:42):
ultimately chases him across the Mediterranean and ends up face
to face and says, look, I want you to live.
You're my friend, I really believe in you. All you
have to do is swear loyalty and you'll be rich
and happy to us joy and Cato basically says, you know,
my son's already been killed. Freedom is worth everything, and

(40:04):
would rather die as a free person than live swearing loyally.
View This is Warshington's favorite play. He cried every time
he saw it, and it was the center in the
way of Washington's own belief that he is in rebellion
because he is a Freeman and he is not going
to give him, and so they would. I think they

(40:25):
showed it three times that winter, and then they showed
other things. He was very concerned about morale, I mean,
how do you keep morale up? And they began to
build a real army. They collide with the British shortly
after Valley Forge and they beat him head to head,
and the British suddenly realized that they have a real problem.
They can no longer count on the Americans breaking them.

(40:47):
Washington then chases them across New Jersey. At the British
ended up going back into New York City, where the
Royal Navy can sustain them. Now by this stage you've
also got a French army showing up, have the French
Navy occasionally showing up, your French money showing up, which
is really important. But Washington can't win. He cannot break

(41:09):
into New York. You can't drive the British out of
New York. And what the British have done is they've
got Washington sucked into basically laying siege to New York,
while the British army is moving troops into South Carolina
and Georgia and trying to reconquer the colonies from the
South coming north, which turns out also to fail because Washington,

(41:32):
since Green, was his best general, and they organized guerrilla
warfare and altimately organized regular warfare and gradually start chewing
up the British in the South. But the Southern War
is a really miserable, nasty war, and it was good
that Washington couldn't go there because he would not have
liked it. It isn't who he wanted. He believed deeply

(41:55):
you had to have a regular army that had discipline,
because it was the base civilization. And he did not
want to be involved in World War. He knew how
to me. He had thought he'd fought the Indians. He
understood a lot about how to fight at Glewar. He
thought in the end it would be so bitter and
so bloody that it would shatter the society. And so
he really worked hard at keeping on together. And one

(42:18):
of the great gambles, if you, if you ever get
a chance, is look at him out Washington sitting in
New York. The French army is actually sitting in Rhode Island,
and all of a sudden, cornwallis who has a large
British army finds himself cooped up at York Town in Virginia.

(42:38):
I remember this is people are marching with no trains,
no airplanes, no cars, and Washington has to make a decision.
If I leave New York there's people are really getting
terrible matter for seven years, I leave New York. I
marched down through Philadelphia and get to York Town. Will

(43:05):
Cornwell still be there? Will the French navies show up?
And will the French army walk with me? Go with me?
And can I raise the money to pay the troops?
And if it works, I might be able to win
the battle that will lead the victory in the war.

(43:25):
If it fails, we may well collapse because we've been
at this so long and we're so tired. This is
one of the great strategic game. I'll takes some normal
if you imagine the courage to sit there and think
this through and go. You know what I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna move. I'm going to decoy the British

(43:47):
with just in our forces left behind that they think
I'm still in New York and We're going to march
as fast as we can. And when I get to Philadelphia.
I'm going to see governor, want some big him to
bring together all the rich people in the city to
steve Is enough money to pay the army to keep moving.
And hopefully by the time I get to Yorktown, if

(44:09):
you're marching, this is a long march, hopefully by then
the French navy will have shown up so we can
cut Cornwallis off. So he can't the British navy can't
take him off Yorktown. Well, it is said that when
Washington crossed the last ridge and could see Yorktown and

(44:34):
beyond Yorktown could see the French fleet, that he physically
jumped off his horse and did a jig. The only
people said it's the only time in the entire war
that he saw him just lose control. He was so
excited because he had him, so the French and the British,
I mean the French of the Americans lay siege. Cornwallis

(44:56):
is a good professional British officer and later on goes
on to become a very successful governor General of India.
Recognizes after a couple of days that you know, he
can't win, so he sends the word that he's prepared
to surrender to the French, and the French send the
way back now to Washington, and then Cornwella says, I

(45:20):
am not swinning to Washington. I'm sending a junior officer,
at which point Washington says, fine, I'm sending a junior officer.
So General Lincoln has I think a brigadier general at
the time, accept the surrender of the British and supposedly
the band plays the world turned up. Said that now

(45:45):
Washington at that point does the monster like that which
people really undervalue. They go back north because the war's
not over. I mean, the fighting's over now. The diplomats
are negotiating. You've got to work out all the time,
so you have to keep an army in being, and
his officers get really angry because you're not getting paid.
The Congress in that period was setting a standard to

(46:08):
the current Congress's match. It was often irresponsible, often tailed
to do what it should do, often had to really
done policies, and in this period they weren't paying the army.
So a group of the officers get together and decide
that Washington should become a dictator. And there was a
precedent for this because one hundred years earlier, in the
English Civil War, Cromwell had emerged and established a dictation,

(46:32):
And in fact, a lot of people had worried about
Washington it need to be too powerful and too popular,
precisely because he would become Cromwell. There's a great scene
where the officers have met in the schoolroom, and Washington
was in and as he recounted, he took out his
glasses in order to remind him that he'd grown old

(46:55):
in the service of his country. And he pulls out
this letter, and he fees the letter, the essence of
which is, do you really think that we rebelled against
George the Third to create George the first? This would
destroy everything that we fought for for eight years. The
officers all go, okay, yeah, don't be dictator. I guess

(47:18):
we'll continue. He then does something that is remarkable, and
George the third says, if Washington gives up power, it'll
be the greatest man of the century. So Washington on
the way home, having been I always tell people when
they get frustrated, they get tired of trying to do something.
Washington spends eight years in the field. He's in Mount

(47:39):
Vernon for two weeks in the entire war, and he
loves mont. So now he's on the way home. So
he goes to Annapolis with the Condinal Congress's meeting, and
you can actually go to the State House. They still
have the room and they have it set up with statues.
The Congress is sitting, Washington is standing in the Congress

(47:59):
is sitting to show that he is obedient to them,
but that they are his superior to collective, and he
gives them his sword. He literally says, I've now done
my job. I'm returning to you the sword that I
was given back in Philadelphia. And he then goes home.
He's at home, he's happy, he's being a farmer. Martha's happy.

(48:25):
And things don't work pretty well. And it turns out
people forget this. Virtually every state, as they've now become
ceased to be colomists, has to rewrite his constitution. They
all fail. And so yet people getting pretty good practice
of writing constitutions, and people got involved in a variety

(48:47):
of fairly dumb ideas, repudiating the debt, inflating the currency,
and people begin to write Washington and say, you know,
we're going to have to do something to fix this,
and this is not working, and it's creating a vacuum
where the British and the French and the Spanish can
come in and exploit it. Washington writes several of his

(49:08):
friend and says, no, people aren't tired enough yet. They've
got to finish celebrate and we've got to finish getting
over this. And I'm not going to go now because
if I go now, it'll be too soon. And so
he's very patient. Now again, everybody in their brother is
coming to Mount Vernon to spend the night, to have dinner,

(49:28):
to chat with him. He's receiving letters from all over
the country. Finally a group gets together on Annapolis and
they get him to come to the meeting. And I say,
we've got to fix the articles of Confederation because they're
not working. We need to have a meeting to fix
the current system. So he's the center of this. If
he's willing to sign the letter, people will show up.

(49:51):
If he doesn't sign the letter, it would never happen.
So he agrees he's the lead signer. It basically says,
I'm going to go to Philadelphi and try to fix this.
Why don't you come run? So every state sends a
delegation to Philadelphia in seventeen eighty seven, and again it's
very different than people think. First of all, when they

(50:14):
meet for fifty five days, it's in secret. There's no
press corps, there's no press secretary, don't tell anybody anything. Second,
at several points it almost breaks down. At one point,
the oldest man there, Benjamin Franklin, says we need to stop,
have a day of fast and prayer and get our

(50:35):
head on straight, because right now we're just strown up.
They do that, They get a sermon, they pray, they fast.
There together, they talk, and people who study carefully make
the point that I think is often very misunderstood about Washington.
Washington is presiding inevitably, and so he's sitting up here

(50:58):
and you actually go and look at the room, and
occurs in in Philadelphia. But at lunch, at breakfast, at dinner,
he's constantly political. What if we did this, what if
we fixed that, what if we pulled this together. Maybe
if you work with so and so, you can work

(51:18):
something out. So his underlying influence is enormous, but it's
all private. It's not public speeches, it's not you know,
speaking from the chair. He represents the whole convention, and
they do something which is really quite remarkable. They're sent
there to fix the articles of Confederation, and by the

(51:41):
time they all get there, they go, this is stupid.
They are not going to work. Let's just write a constitution.
So what you technically have a coup datam I mean
you a group of people who decide they're going to
fix the whole thing. They have no authority to do it.
They just assert it. They then publish it. And again
Washington when this thing started, and Madison in particular, was

(52:03):
all over Washington, You've got to go do this, you
got to go do this. The reason Madison ends up
living in Mount Vernon for while was Washington, fine, you
come here, you do the reading, you put the other writing,
you do all the work, and when you get that done,
I'll think, good going. But I'm not gonna do all
that junk. You're the intellectual. I'm not going to run
my farm. So Washington's happily entertaining at night and walk

(52:25):
going around running his farm. Poor Madison's trapped, who loves it,
is trapped in a room with Mount Vernon thinking through
the whole thing. They then do something that's quite remarkable.
They go to the thirteen states and they say, basically,
you have to vote. We will not be legitimate unless
you vote. And the greatest political brochure in history is

(52:49):
the Federalist Papers, because that's what it is. It's a campaign.
Doctor and Jay and Hamilton and Madison write it. And
you get Washington sending a letter out to the whole
country saying basically, this is what we've done. We need
you to vote yes, this is important. Not an overwhelming margin.

(53:10):
The country says yes, and they adopt a constitution, on
which point, of course, they turn a meeting and go, gosh,
we're going to need a first president now, Washington saying,
wait a second, I'm a noun vernon. I've done you know,
I've done my share. No, no, no, no, you got
to come up. So he agrees. He and Martha go
to New York by the end of the first term,

(53:31):
and he's very conscious he is setting the precedents which
we still live by, and he knows that and he
operates that way. He convinces Jefferson and Hamilton to serve
in the cabinet. They hate each other. They each subsidize
the newspaper to attack the other. And he doesn't care.
He says, you guys are invaluable. You got to stay here,
and if I got to be here, you got to

(53:52):
be here. Late in the first term, New York newspapers
are attacking Martha for holding high tea, which they regard

(54:14):
as the first step towards a monarchy. Washington is so
angry that he says, I'm going home. I've served a term.
It's over. I am not going to subject my wife
Martha to this kind of vicious behavior. The threat of
Washington leaving is so central to the survival of the
United States as a concept that Jefferson and Hamilton, who

(54:38):
have become bitter opponents, put aside their hostility, get together
jointly go to see him, and they say, you can't
go home. The country's not stable enough without your leadership,
without your prestige, the country won't last. You have to
stay for one more term. He very grudgingly agrees. He

(55:01):
really is so angry about the news media treatment of
his wife, but they convince him that for the country
he has to stay, and as a patriot in the end,
he's going to do what the country needs. And it's
a very important, very difficult period Britain and France are
engaged in a deep war which will last until eighteen fifteen.

(55:23):
He's trying to make sure the United States doesn't get
drawn in on either side, because he understands they will
just tear the country apart. So he's being very careful
about not getting into European politics and not getting into conflict.
At the same time, on our western frontier, particularly in Pennsylvania,
farmers have gotten really angry about a tax break which

(55:46):
was designed to help big distillers in the East and
actually hurts the small farmers in the West who are
producing corn whiskey in small batches, and so they're refusing
to pay their taxes, and there's what became known as
the Whiskey Rebellion. And it takes the prestige of Washington
to insist that the law be enforced, and he literally

(56:07):
organizes an army which they're about to send into western
Pennsylvania in order to force people to pay their taxes.
Confronted by Washington's prestige and by Washington's seriousness and by
the size of the army he's raising, the farmers ultimately caved.
The laws are changed a little bit so that they
have a face saving way out. The Whiskey rebellion disappears.

(56:30):
But that's the kind of thing going on that indicates
how shaky this new country is, and how little people
understand the concept of a central government and that it
has power which can reach all the way to the
boundaries of the country. Without Washington's prestige, that might not
have been survivable. He does stay, and then he really

(56:51):
has done. And one of the greatest things he does
is he goes home. And that's really important because it
sends a signal that power is loan to you, you
don't own it, and that you have a duty to
limit yourself, to be disciplined. And with the exception of
President Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War Two, no president

(57:13):
has violated the Washington principle of a maximum of two terms.
And in fact, after Roosevelt, we passed a constitutional amendment
to block anybody from serving more than two terms. So
Washington set the principle that he served the people, they
didn't serve him, that power was deliberately limited. He goes home, finally,

(57:34):
to Mount Vernon, a place he loves. He relaxes, He
goes back to being a gentleman, farmer. He's just drowning
in visitors because everybody wants to drop by and see
the great man. He's out riding on a wet, cold,
rainy day. He comes down with a fever. In that generation,
the doctors thought they would help you by bleeding you.

(57:56):
They put leeches on him, probably hurting him by some
of his blood, although there are some modern studies that
indicate the leitch has actually had for some kind of diseases.
They were actually very helpful because they had certain things
that they actually put in your body. But in the
case of Washington, they probably further weakened him. His throat
seized up, and he finally died. Marca was left alone.

(58:39):
She promptly did something which every historian ever since has regretted.
She burned all of their personal letters because she felt
it was private. She didn't want people to see what
Washington had written to her, or she'd written to Washington,
and so she literally shortly after his death, eliminates all
of the personal records, which had grown up over a

(59:00):
long lifetime and would have been fascinating. The country warns him,
the country realizes that he heally had been the father
of the country, that he really was first in their hearts,
and that he was the symbol of what a free
society was supposed to be, which is why our national
capital is named for him, and why the Washington Monument

(59:22):
stands there as a memorial to a man who had
literally created the modern system of freedom under the rule
of law that we've come to take for granted. So
when you look around the world and you see countries failing,
you see people who are in desperate trouble, you see
places where the rule of law doesn't exist, you look

(59:45):
at kleptocracy, corruption, dictatorship, it's really important to remember that
the United States could have been that kind of country.
It still cos them to be that kind of country,
but that people can make an enormal difference. The founding
fathers collectively and by their commitment to the rule of law,

(01:00:05):
to the Constitution, made that difference. And the person who
was indispensable, who really surmounted all of the others, they
all looked up to him, they all followed his judgment.
Who was President Washington, first as a general, then as president,
but above all as a human being. Washington personified the

(01:00:26):
kind of dignified patriotism that was at the heart of
the rule of law. Each of us can learn from Washington.
Each of us can learn about freedom, about discipline, about persistence.
Each of us can come to understand why he loved
America so much and why he loved freedom so much.

(01:00:48):
And then we can teach others that anybody anywhere on
the planet can learn to be free, can learn to
live under the rule of law, can learn to pursue happiness.
And Washington, in that sense, is a person for all
of humanity, not just America, and a person for all time,
not just the eighteenth century. I want to thank my

(01:01:15):
longtime writing partner and fellow George Washington historian Bill Fortune.
I also want to thank the Fred W. Smith National
Library for the study of George Washington at Mount Vernon,
and frankly, the person who did more than anybody else
to create that library, Gay Gaines. Thank you for listening
to founding Father's Week on Newtsworld. You can learn more

(01:01:36):
about George Washington on our show page at newtsworld dot com.
Newtsworld is produced by Gingwish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our
executive producer is Guernsey Sloan and our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.
Special thanks the team at Gingwish three sixty. If you've

(01:01:58):
been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast
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Right now, listeners, A New World consigner for my three
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I'm new Gingrich. This is news World.