Washington was an inveterate theatergoer, and his favorite play - he had it performed for his troops despite a Congressional resolution against theater - was Joseph Addison's "Cato." A character in that play, the Numidian Juba (with whom the young Washington identified), says that he would rather have Cato's respect than have the world's admiration. One was what in the 1950's would have been called other-directedness: Washington was ever concerned with what others thought of him or expected of him.
To oversimplify, Ellis detects two main internal qualities that drove Washington to behave as he did. To demysticize this larger-than-life, quasi-divine personage, to make him understandable as a human being, is the formidable task Ellis has set for himself. that no one needed to talk about." He is "always an icon - distant, cold, intimidating." like one of those Jeffersonian truths, self-evident and simply there. Called out of retirement, he presided over the Constitutional Convention of 1787, reluctantly accepted the presidency in 1789 and served for two terms, thus assuring the success of the American experiment in self-government.īut as Ellis puts it, though Washington is "an inescapable presence that hovered all around," he "remained a mysterious abstraction. He was born into a minor family in Virginia's plantation gentry, worked as a surveyor in the West as a young man, was a hero of sorts during the French and Indian War, became an extremely wealthy planter (after marrying a rich widow), served as commander in chief of the Continental Army throughout the Revolutionary War (including the terrible winter at Valley Forge), defeated the British at the Battle of Yorktown, suppressed a threatened mutiny by his officers at Newburgh, N.Y., then astonished the world and won its applause by laying down his sword in 1783. To describe George Washington as enigmatic may strike some as strange, for every young student knows about him (or did when students could be counted on to know anything).
Now he has taken on the greatest and most enigmatic founder. He concentrates mainly upon the founders of the American republic, and while those who have particular favorites among the founders may cavil at his interpretations, Ellis has a gift for getting inside the skins of his subjects and showing what made them tick. Ellis has emerged as an eloquent champion and brilliant practitioner of the old-fashioned art of biography.
IN a historical profession that is scornful of what it calls dead white males, Joseph J.
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