On the personal virtues of George Washington and our New American Moment.
In a work first published in 1974, historian James Flexner called George Washington America’s “Indispensable Man.” Fifty years later, the teaching of American colonial history, not to mention diplomatic and military history, has largely been excised from secondary and college curricula, and a cynicism about the founding era has become almost de rigueur in many circles. The question, therefore, emerges of whether any can still call Washington indispensable—at least, to any commendable degree. Indeed, many now find Washington eminently dispensable as a figure in our civic life owing to a litany of real and perceived sins, from slaveholding, to ambitious careerism, to land-speculating profit-seeking, to Eurocentric misunderstanding of indigenous people—sins that many now see as marring the goodness of the nation as a whole. From this perspective, better to be done with the once hallowed hero. Yet, properly understood, Washington’s contributions to the United States remain indispensable in incontrovertibly positive ways. A high valuation of Washington appears to be reemerging nationwide, doubtless thanks to what we might call our New American Moment—a time of renewed respect for religion and a desire for shared civic understanding.
Despite recognizing, as we must, that indispensability in any literal sense is a metaphysical construct that assumes a vantagepoint proper only to divinity—whether any other individual might have arisen to match Washington’s contributions had he not been with us is a counterfactual question we can never know—what we can know is that, in every practical and effectual sense, Washington was indeed indispensable to the American Revolution, to the Constitutional Convention, and to the establishment of the powers of the president.
As to the Revolution, we must I believe follow historian Mark Edward Lender, who notes that “The success of the Revolution depended on the success—or at least the effectiveness—of the Continental Army, and the army depended on Washington. Thus without Washington we can reasonably speculate that the revolutionary cause would have been in very deep trouble.” In fact, Washington’s unshakeable leadership—leadership, in the words of one historian, that at times seemed to have “powers bordering on the mystical”—helped to calm not only thousands of potential mutineers in the Continental Army, but also the distressed millions in our newly independent nation, allowing a fledging sovereign people to stay the course, as arduous and nearly insurmountable as doing so often would appear.
Washington’s contributions to the Constitutional Convention were also essential. We tend to forget just how deeply troubling to so many was the call for a stronger federal government, with men such as the venerable patriot Patrick Henry repudiating any participation in the Constitutional Convention because he “smelled a rat.” Had Washington not been in Philadelphia as the presiding officer of the convention it would have been vastly more difficult—perhaps even impossible—for the document which ensued to gain the support of the American people. Indeed, the sage Benjamin Franklin noted just as much in early 1787, when he wrote to Washington that he was "persuaded that your Presence will be of the greatest Importance to the Success of the Measure.” And so it was.
As to the office of the president, historian Harlow Unger in his important work, Mr. President: George Washington and the Making of the Nation’s Highest Office, demonstrates that Washington’s two terms in office made this position what we know it to be. An independent, energetic, yet not imperious presidency was not the inevitable outcome of the text of our Constitution. As one historian remarks, “the Constitution did very little to define those powers.” Instead, it was Washington and the precedents established by his administration that instantiated the “pillars of power” of the office of federal chief executive and embedded the principle of executive energy without executive tyranny.
Washington was, in sum, indispensable to the war for Independence, the basic charter of our national government, and the structure of the federal presidency.
We should now ask: what personal virtues were themselves the indispensable elements of so indispensable a man? Here I believe we must focus on four: Washington’s personal integrity; his conspicuous public probity; his courage—including the personal attributes that flowed from this courage and the attributes that fortified and sustained this courage; and his wisdom as demonstrated in his political, legal, and social ideals.
First, personal integrity People, both in and out of public life, could trust Washington’s word.
Second, conspicuous public probity. Washington believed it was vitally important for public officials to demonstrate virtue in the discharge of public functions. Leaders should always witness to the people a moral demeanor. By doing so, they would help to bring into existence what one commemorative coin celebrating Washington’s life held was the pride of the new republic: “non vi, virtute vici”—here, not by might, but by virtue do we prosper.
Third, one of Washington’s most striking personal and private virtues was his dauntless courage. But here we should also reflect on what additional features of Washington’s character this courage made possible. His courage no doubt increased his capacity to fight against long odds. It also gave to Washington the self-confident openness to seek the thoughtful counsel of others and to cultivate among those around him a collaborative ethos. As David and Jeanne Heidlerin note in their important book, Washington’s Circle, “Washington wanted the opinions of as many people as he could reach, and he preferred to have them in writing so he could think through each methodically, systematically, deliberately, and slowly. Wide-ranging discussions between men posturing at a table vaguely irritated him . . . certainly because he disliked the ephemeral nature of talk when confronting thorny problems. A written opinion made advisers think, and the result was a depth to their ideas that avoided impromptu thought and foolish musings” and forced them to bring to collective discussions their very best arguments—ideas Washington was unintimidated to consider or adopt.
Washington’s courage also facilitated an entrepreneurial spirit. As Edward Lengel maintains in his superb work First Entrepreneur: How George Washington Built His—and the Nation’s--Prosperity, “Washington’s steadfast commitment to the core principles of probity, transparency, careful management, and calculated boldness” set an ennobling example of responsible entrepreneurism to a new nation. Note the “calculated boldness” essential to the entrepreneurial ethos.
As a fourth consideration, we should also emphasize the character traits that themselves helped to forge and fortify Washington’s remarkable courage. The traits which made his own courage possible include, first, a love of family. As Flora Fraser documents in her prize-winning book The Washingtons: George and Martha, “Join’d by Friendship, Crown’d by Love,” Washington’s love for Martha was an anchor in his life. As one continental officer close to Washington remarked, “Mrs. Washington is excessive fond of the General and he of her.” This marital love, in Fraser’s words, “imbued George Washington with a confidence he had lacked earlier.” Such are the fruits of a lasting and loving marriage.
An additional trait which forged Washington’s courage was his personal Christian faith. Here I commend especially the works of Mary Thompson and Peter Lillback. As the latter argues in his copiously detailed book, George Washington’s Sacred Fire: “There are numerous accounts from family and military associates—too numerous to be dismissed—of people coming across Washington in earnest, private prayer.” Sincerity must be assumed. Moreover, Washington’s very frequent references to providence as a benevolent superintending personal force active in the world bespeaks the language and belief of traditional Christian orthodoxy. Indeed, for Lillback, what “enflamed Washington’s passion and stirred his heart was his utter dependence on the Hand of Divine Providence,” and his “holy flame of faith.”
What is more, in her aptly titled book In the Hands of a Good Providence, historian Mary Thompson, formerly of Mount Vernon, concludes that “Washington was a devout eighteenth-century Anglican,” who was “low church”—that is, devout but unceremonious in personal declarations or expressions of his faith. To say Washington was not a Christian, Thompson maintains, is to assume that in addition to consistent church attendance and articulations of theistic belief—which Washington provides to us in spades--one must “have had an emotional conversion experience and to talk about it publicly.” Yet, she asks: “Why can’t someone be seen as Christian who is daily doing their duty to God and their fellow man (as Washington and other eighteenth-century Anglicans were taught was the chief responsibility of a good Christian) and who is quietly making the choice to live uprightly, to attend and support the church, to see that there is religious structure set up to meet the needs of the community, as Washington did, and to see that the next generation is raised in the church?” To say he is not Christian is to assume as definitive only one expression of Christian faith. Yet, Thompson shows how entirely common public reserve was for individuals of undoubtedly sincere Christian faith during Washington’s time. She draws an especially powerful parallel with one well known Episcopal bishop in the early 1800s, William White, who “at no point in his life had been disposed to speak of the influences of religion upon himself. That his heart and conduct were controlled and regulated by Christianity’s principles was undoubted. But the inclinations and feelings which were the result were always of that retired and unobtrusive kind which fill and satisfy the soul.”
But ah, didn’t Washington refuse communion after he took command of the Continental Army? See, the skeptics will say, Washington must have been one of our own. However, as another Episcopal bishop in the nineteenth century would write, “ in the former days of Washington’s time, there was . . .a notion . . . prevalent in both England and the United States, that it was not so necessary in the professors of religion to communicate at all times, but that it might be regulated” by the individual in light of circumstances. No skeptic, therefore, must infrequent communion create.
Oh, but still, he must have really believed, as Joseph Ellis alleges, that Christianity is only a this-worldly moral supplement to a life lived without belief in such core tenets as personal immortality. On the contrary, we can glimpse Washington’s firm belief in the life beyond in numerous personal letters, including one to his family members after the death of his beloved stepdaughter Patsy. Washington writes, “She now is no more; but she must be happy, because her virtue has a claim to it.” God’s mercy and justice will prevail against the grave. They must. Does Paul’s celebrated phrase in First Corinthians 15:55—o death where is thy victory?—state this pillar of Christian faith any more strongly?
In sum, as Thompson establishes, “Given statements such as these, and the positive evidence for Washington’s religious practices and his statements about the deity, it seems that those who doubt Washington’s Christianity must come up with stronger” arguments—something they still have failed to do. In turn, this deep personal faith fortified Washington’s courage to hold fast to what his conscience and reasoned reflection made known to him to be true.
Lastly, Washington had wisdom, as demonstrated in his political and legal ideals. Indeed, Washington’s insights are becoming clearer as we enter what we might call Our New American movement—a time permitting us to reconfirm, in a way our nation was seemingly unable to do over the past few decades, the wisdom of George Washington. We are able today to reconfirm Washington’s sagacious insights in part because of a residual civic piety arising from the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. The scales from cynical eyes might fall just a bit amidst the wonders of magnificent civic pageantry. However, the marking of two hundred and fifty years from the Declaration of Independence is at root a merely physical fact. In addition to calendrical coincidence, 2026 presents us with new insights that allow us to confirm anew Washington’s remarkable wisdom.
First, Washington had the wisdom to know that faith is not just a private but also a public good; a faithful citizenry is a constitutive element of a free and honorable people. It should be encouraged by government, Washington believed, through government’s non-coercive but powerful symbolic influence. Throughout his time in public office, Washington “continued to encourage his countrymen to thank God for God’s many blessings to them,” Thompson writes. One way Faith was encouraged by Washington was through his presidentially declared days of Thanksgiving to God, as seen, for example, in his proclamation of January 1, 1795, of a “National Day of Public Thanksgiving and Prayer.” Earlier, during the late days of the American Revolution, Washington had welcomed a plan, led by Revered John Ridgers, to give each member of the Continental army a Bible. Throughout the long Revolution, Washington publicly endorsed efforts by various local and national legislative bodies to proclaim their own days of fasting and thanksgiving. Washington knew that public statements and actions of honorable public servants matter.
The wisdom of religion as a public good is resurfacing in the United States. Not only is this evidenced by the first signs of a renewed religiosity among a rising percentage of Americans, especially young men, but it is reconfirmed by scholars at the forefront of social science. Jonathan Rauch, a prominent public intellectual at the Brookings Institution and no religious believer himself, has reconfirmed Washington’s insight in his important new work Cross Purposes, in which he argues that Christianity is a fundamental foundation of America’s system of liberal democracy. Further, research continues to highlight the prosocial effects of sincere religious belief and consistent religious attendance. Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff, for example, have demonstrated that those who act with a firm sense that a moral God is watching and judging what they do are more likely to act morally than those without this belief. We appear open to relearning Washington’s lesson.
Washington also had the wisdom to counsel national unity despite centrifugal forces and to see national unity as possible of being furthered through a concerted focus on a national civics curriculum. Washington hoped to create a national university that would bring together citizens from across the country for a common framework of civics instruction, and he encouraged proposals that would have civics instruction proliferate throughout the nation. As he argued in his First Annual Address to Congress on January 8, 1790: “Whether this desirable object” of a common civics framework “will be best promoted by affording aids to seminaries of learning already established, by the institution of a national university, or by any other expedients will be well worthy of a place in the deliberations of the legislature.”
Here, again, Washington’s wisdom meets the New American Moment. Washington counseled just what is emerging in the new civic centers at colleges and universities throughout the country. Enlightened statesmen, from Ohio, to Texas, to Florida, to Arizona, are following Washington’s lead by empowering serious educators to forge the general outlines of a robust curriculum on the distinctive features and positive aspects of the American system of government. In these civic centers we see Washington’s wisdom confirmed anew.
Finally, let me note what, in a sense, is Washington’s last great contribution: the gift of his authentic humanity. He was not perfect, as no mere man ever has been. He was slow to question the institution of slavery, and he, in ways common for his time, was a rather cruel master as shown in his stout demand for the return of his runaway slaves. These failures deserve our serious rebuke. However, it is in our recognition of Washington’s humanity that he leaves us his final gift. Washington as an imperfect human can have an even greater influence on us. Not as enmarbled but as flesh and blood; not as an impassable stoic but as a man of passion and personal ambition; not as an infallible seer but as a human fraught with the weaknesses of all mortal men. The real Washington is much more accessible to us than he could ever be if treated like a fabled Lycurgus or Quinctius Cincinnatus. It is, therefore, in how Washington lived —if, to be sure, imperfectly—and the values he proclaimed that his vision and person become for us not aspirations fit only for an Olympian few, but the basis for each fallible one of us to be inspired to advance those republican institutions and that culture of decency, public service, and responsible citizenship that he tirelessly defended.
Let us, therefore, take the opportunity the revolutions of our planet mark as the 250th anniversary of our political revolution to have George Washington’s imperfect but still noble example, and his reconfirmed political and legal insights, elevated in our public life. And let us make this New American Moment a season to rebuild on the foundations Washington wisely provided.