In Hill School talk, historian Gordon Wood highlights importance of Washington’s character

POTTSTOWN – In the eyes of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood, among all the things George Washington was known for doing, perhaps the thing which made him truly great was to stop doing – twice.

During a 90-minute talk in The Hill School’s Alumni Chapel Monday night, Wood talked about the importance of Washington’s character in the early days of the nation and how it was demonstrated best by his willingness to walk away from power – twice.

There was no talk of chopped cherry trees, wooden teeth or tossing coins across the Potomac.

Wood, whom Hill history teacher Jim Reifsnyder described as ‘a scholar of the first order’ while also being ‘engaging and accessible and no ivory tower intellectual,’ is the author of many prize-winning histories, including ‘The Radicalism of the American Revolution,’ which won him the 1993 Pulitzer.

In 2001, Wood was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2011 by President Obama.

He is also the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University and he was in Pottstown Monday night to speak about our first president as this year’s David R. Dougherty Senior Teaching Fellowship of American History speaker at The Hill.

His talk, given, appropriately on President’s Day, focused on how Washington’s character shaped the decisions that shaped the modern world’s first Democracy.

In Washington’s day, one’s character, one’s honor, was best if described as by being ‘disinterested,’ said Wood; not in the way we use the word today, to mean indifferent or uncaring, but in its 18th century context as a synonym for being unbiased or objective.

That Washington serve in the country in a way he believed was best for the country, and ignore opportunities to take actions or make appointments that would benefit him personally, was of the utmost importance to the man who had taught himself how to be a gentleman without the benefit of a college education.

Which was why resigning as commander of the Continental forces at the end of the Revolutionary War, and again after his second term as president, marked him as a truly great man, said Wood.

‘How will this be viewed by the world (and by history)?’ is the question Washington seemed to ask himself most when confronted with a choice that might be misinterpreted, according to Wood.

Whether it was whether to accept shares in a canal company offered by an appreciative Virginia Assembly; or whether to return to public life and preside over the Constitutional Convention or, subsequently, to stand for president, Washington wrestled always with what was the virtuous thing to do and how that choice might reflect on his hard-won reputation for virtue.

‘He was fastidious in his appearance’ and always had an awareness of how any action might be interpreted by those around him. ‘Whenever he was in public, it was as if he was always on stage,’ Wood said of the man whose favorite play was Joseph Addison’s ‘Cato.’

But in many ways, Washington’s true role in our history has been lost, Wood said.

‘These days, we tend to think of the founders as equals but even they knew he was superior to them,’ Wood said during his lecture. ‘He is the only truly classical hero in our history. He was a great man, and he knew it.’

While his fellow founders did not consider him an intellectual, and people who spoke with him ‘were often disappointed’ at the quality of the conversation, Washington had a unique awareness of the role he was playing, of the precedents he was setting on a regular basis and the importance his character being unimpeachable was to the country, said Wood, who, with a slight smile, quoted a French diplomat of the time as remarking that Washington’s ‘modesty is astounding, especially to a Frenchman.’

His vice president John Adams, who was both contemptuous of Washington’s intellect and jealous of the nation’s admiration of him, said Washington had mastered ‘the gift of silence.’

‘He lived his life by the book,’ Wood said, ‘the book of gentility.’

Aspiring to be a gentleman at the time meant you lived by the rules of ‘civility, gentility and virtue; that you be a man of reason and avoided enthusiasms and fanaticism, especially religion,’ Wood said.

In fact on the subject of religion, Wood said that although Washington ‘went to church regularly, he was not an emotionally religious person. In all his letters and correspondence, we find only one mention of Jesus. Certainly, he believed in God, but he tended to call him ‘the great decider of events,” said Wood.

This cleaving to the character of the ideal gentleman is what made Washington the father of the country, said Wood.

After all, he was not a ‘traditional military hero. Yorktown was really a French victory and he wasn’t even at Saratoga. No, it was his behavior beyond the battlefield’ that distinguished him for history, as well as for his peers.

Wood told the tale of a pending military coup, hatched in the Hudson Valley town of Newburgh, N.Y. in which many of Washington’s officers planned to march on Congress and demand better pay and pensions.

‘He single-handedly stopped it by simply appearing before them and speaking to them as kind of a ‘band of brothers,” said Wood.

‘He reminded them that he had been in the field with them, suffered their hardships, and then produced a letter from a Congressmen saying they would get much of what they wanted,’ Wood said.

‘And he was such a good actor, he pulled out his spectacles to read the letter and there was a gasp because most of his officers did not know he needed glasses to read, and he just looked at them and said ‘yes gentlemen, I have not only grown gray, but nearly blind in the service of my country.’ And that was it, it was over.’

When he resigned for the first time, in December of 1783, surrendering his sword to Congress, ‘it sent a shockwave on both sides of the Atlantic,’ Wood said. ‘He was a modern Cincinnatus. That was what set his reputation as a hero, and he did not want to lose it. He judged all his actions by what people might think of him. He had achieved this amazing reputation and he was reluctant to risk it.’

So perhaps Washington’s greatness, Wood argued, was that he was willing to risk it, repeatedly.

After all, how could he preside over the Constitutional Convention when he had already made his grand exit? ‘Should he squander his reputation on something that might not work?’ Wood asked.

Or, as artillery officer and future Secretary of War Henry Knox put it, ‘secure as he was in his future, he again committed it to the mercy of events.’

To some historians, this ‘coyness’ was not well regarded.

Washington biographer Douglass Southall Freeman criticized it as ‘too much the self-concious hero and not enough the daring patriot,’ Wood said.

‘It was certainly for the sake of his reputation that he freed his slaves,’ said Wood; something that no other founder did and something which, we must remember in the events of the times, ‘he did in the teeth of opposition from everyone.’

Nevertheless, if it was the risk to his reputation which made Washington hesitate, it was almost always appeals to how that reputation might be affected if he did not act, which brought him back into his nation’s service.

Both James Madison and Alexander Hamilton used this argument to convince Washington, in the case of the first, to run for president a second time ‘because the new government was not yet secure;’ and, in the unfortunate case of the second, the embarrassing decision to return to command an army formed to fend off a French invasion that never came.

By 1796 ‘no one could dissuade him’ from what Wood described as ‘his most important act,’ stepping down after a second term as president.

And it was that precedent, among so many others we still follow today, which stood unregulated until Franklin Roosevelt won a fourth term in office and the 22nd Amendment limiting presidents to two terms was adopted in 1951.

‘Remember that at the time, this experiment of Republicanism was very much in doubt. France was falling apart and would soon be under a dictatorship,’ said Wood.

But Washington did not step down with a calm mind.

Already, the politics of the nation was moving beyond that dictated by character and ‘party politics’ was taking hold.

Rebuffing an attempt to draft him for another term, Washington responded, with some bitterness, that ‘political parties, not great men, would seen be the objects of contention’ and that either party of the time, his own Federalists, or Jefferson’s Republicans, could put ‘a broomstick’ up for election and it would garner the votes of loyal party members.

In many ways, we have been trying to replicate Washington ever since, said Wood.

‘Think of the number of generals who have been president or candidates for president,’ he said, noting that he believes Eisenhower came the closest to replicating the Washington ideal.

But in truth, Wood concluded, ‘we shall not see Washington’s like again.’

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