His Excellency, George Washington

By Michael Ellis | Wednesday, January 12, 2005

His Excellency: George Washington
Joseph J. Ellis
Knopf, 2004

Over the past few years, two trends have emerged in popular history writing: a resurgent interest in biographies of the Founding Fathers and a slew of plagiarism scandals involving best-selling authors. David McCullough, Gordon Wood, Walter Issacson, and Ron Chernow represent the first, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Steven Ambrose, and Michael Bellesiles represent the second. But only Joseph Ellis stands at the intersection of both trends&mash;his Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers and his biography of Thomas Jefferson, American Sphinx, have made him one of the most widely-read scholars of the Revolutionary era, and he was suspended from his teaching position at Mount Holyoke in 2001 after it was revealed that he had not served, as he claimed, as a platoon combat leader in Vietnam.

Ellis used his time away from teaching to write His Excellency: George Washington, and like his previous books, it is an excellently-researched and well-written work. As a serious yet accessible biography of Washington, probably the most important figure of the 18th-century and in all of American history, His Excellency is in Ellis' words "a fresh portrait focused tightly on Washington's character." While Ellis' approach will not sit well with more �politically correct' academics who view Washington as "complicitous in creating a nation that was imperialist, racist, elitist, and patriarchal," it excels at highlighting Washington's exceptional leadership in forming and holding together the fragile American nation.

Ellis also pays particular attention to Washington's willingness to follow the example of Cincinnatus and give up power at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War. Unlike other successful generals who took up the mantle of revolution before him (Caeser, Cromwell) and after him (Napoleon, Lenin, Mao), Washington had a firm belief in civilian control of the military and the knowledge that his historical legacy would be enhanced by his decision to renounce power.

One of His Excellency's greatest virtues is its brevity. Ellis does an admirable job of refusing to become bogged down in the details and covering Washington's life in 260 pages. Martha Washington makes only a brief appearance, providing the financial means for George to establish himself among the landed gentry of colonial Virginia and set up his estate at Mount Vernon. Ellis' treatment of slavery is also balanced and mature. He believes that Washington had a more "progressive" view of slavery than many of his contemporaries. He notes that Washington insured that the younger slaves were taught to read and write, that the older ones were "comfortably clothed and fed," and included in his will that all of the slaves were to be freed upon his death, the only politically prominent Virginian to do so.

In Ellis' attempt to focus in on Washington's "psychological chemistry," he becomes the latest in a long line of historians attempting to unravel Washington's personality. While he certainly sees Washington as a man of honesty, virtue, and extraordinary character, he also paints the inner Washington as a man of "tumultuous passions," "personal avarice," and "a truly monumental ego with a massive personal agenda." To Ellis, Washington's choice to join the Revolution was not born of any lofty idealism, but rather was a psychological response to his personal financial problems with British merchants. While he may be right that Washington felt bilked by the London trading houses to whom he sold his plantations' tobacco crops, Ellis perhaps goes too far in dismissing Washington's revolutionary ideals.

Likewise, Ellis is certainly correct that Washington "lost more battles than he won; indeed he lost more battles than any victorious general in modern history." But Ellis is perhaps too quick to attribute Washington's defeats to his "overconfident and aggressive personality," and too reluctant to give him credit for keeping the Continental army in the field against a foe that constantly outnumbered him and serving as commander in chief of an extremely fractious coalition of states.

However, even if Ellis is overly quick to judge some of Washington's character traits, His Excellency remains an excellent piece of scholarship and a lively read. In his later chapters on Washington as President, Ellis aptly shows how Washington laid the foundations for transforming America from a loose confederation to a united nation.

However, it is impossible to fully evaluate His Excellency without taking the scandals of Ellis's personal life into consideration. In both a 1994 interview and in his classes at Mount Holyoke, Ellis claimed that he parachuted into Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division and served on Gen. Westmoreland's staff while in reality he was an Army instructor at West Point. He further claimed that he protested for civil rights in Mississippi, against the Vietnam War at Yale, and was a high school football hero, though none of these is true. While there has been no evidence that he ever plagiarized others' work or exaggerated facts in his professional life, as a historian his personal reputation for truthfulness cannot be separated from his professional reputation. Institutions of higher education that place a premium on the pursuit of truth must not allow their professors to cut corners, even if the fabrications are of a solely personal nature and do not extend to academic work. Having apologized profusely for his fibs, Ellis has since resumed teaching at Holyoke, but he remains tainted by his suspension.

Ironically enough, Ellis, one of the "Historians in Defense of the Constitution" who signed a petition urging Americans not to support the impeachment of President Clinton, fell in to the same trap himself. While his personal indiscretions did not impact his work nor diminish its quality, they did cast a shadow of doubt over his character, and by extension, his record as a historian. His Excellency may be the definitive modern biography of George Washington, but it unfortunately rests under a cloud of suspicion due to its author's less-than-stellar reputation of truthfulness.

His Excellency, George Washington

Article Tools

Related Articles