His Excellency: George Washington, by Joseph Ellis. Knopf, 2004, 352 pages.

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The Man Who Made Our Country

by Timothy Sandefur

To me, Joseph Ellis represents everything wrong with contemporary historiography of the American Revolution. His relentless skepticism toward the ideology of the Founding Fathers leads him to make the strangest sorts of statements. He continually refers to the ideals for which the Revolutionaries "claimed to be fighting," rather than the ideals of the Revolution: for instance, he says, "In June 1776, while Jefferson was drafting the words that declared American independence and the principles on which it claimed to be based. . . ." Such phraseology does not just indicate scholarly objectivity. Scratch the surface of such skepticism a little, and it becomes hostility, as in the concluding pages of this new biography, when Ellis attacks what he calls "the grand illusion of the age, the presumption that there was a natural order in human affairs that would generate perfect harmony once, in Diderot's phrase, the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest." Such a cynical conflation of American and French Revolutionary ideology was once reserved for paleoconservatives.

Ellis constantly approaches Washington and his contemporaries with the attitude that their acts must be explained by something less (and allegedly more fundamental) than ideology. He is obsessed with the word "elemental," which appears every time he tries to discuss Washington's convictions. The impression one gets is that Washington fought not for liberty or equality, but because he resented the high fees charged by Robert Cary, his purchasing agent in London: "The more Washington thought about it," writes Ellis, "the more he concluded that . . . the mercantile system itself was a conspiracy designed to assure his dependency on the likes of Cary. When Washington thought of that abstract thing called the 'British Empire,' he did not think politically. . . . He thought economically." Perhaps, but Ellis fails to explore how this system of exploitation would offend a Revolutionary ideologue, with a commitment to equality and economic opportunity. Instead, the Revolution was just a vulgar scramble for financial gain.

This approach would be perfectly legitimate, if it were an explicit thesis. Indeed, it would be far from original: Charles Beard, Howard Zinn, and other economic historians have long espoused the Marxist view that ideas are invented to cover interests, and they have done so unapologetically. But Ellis usually just ignores the ideological claims of the Revolutionaries. For him, their principles are more or less irrelevant — particularly today: "The entire mental universe in which Jefferson did his thinking," he writes in his Jefferson biography, "American Sphinx," "has changed so dramatically, modern science has so unmoored all the 'fixed principles' that he took for granted, that any direct connection between then and now must be regarded as a highly questionable enterprise."

This position leads Ellis to project onto Washington his own refusal to take Revolutionary ideals seriously. What makes Washington a great man, we're told, is precisely that he did not talk much about equality or "fixed principles." But this presumption leads to a deeply dissatisfying account of the Revolution and those who made it. At the end of the book, when he discusses Washington's attitudes toward slavery, Ellis acknowledges that Washington found the institution morally revolting — but never explains why, certainly not to the extent that he sifts Washington's financial reasons for hating slavery. "Economic rather than moral considerations seemed to weigh more heavily on his mind," he says, even though he admits that Washington recognized "that human bondage was a moral travesty." Why? We're not told. In freeing his slaves, Ellis writes, "conscience, his deep moral revulsion at the blatant wrongness of human bondage, surely played an important role in his decision, [yet] his motives were not purely or merely moral, as they seldom were." But should we expect — or even desire — that they be otherwise? Ellis' stated theme is that Washington always combined interest with vision. But while he meticulously excavates the interest, he rarely even describes the vision.

In Ellis' defense, an interest-based approach is more plausibly suited to Washington than many other Founders. He did seem uncomfortable with some of the principles, like equality, which other Revolutionaries defended at length. He was not a scholar; he did not go to college; he wrote little on political theory that was not platitudinous. And his later life shows that he was at least sometimes led more by motives of personal loyalty and resentment than by political or philosophical considerations. Yet an analysis of Washington, or of the Revolution, which focuses so much attention on interest rather than ideology is bound to fall apart. Ideas have consequences, at least as much as personalities or interests, especially when those ideas lead people to act against their own personal interests. And, in fact, Ellis' qui bono-style analysis cracks badly when he confesses that during the Revolution, Washington "transform[ed]" himself "into a public figure whose personal convictions must be suppressed and rendered subordinate to his higher calling as an agent of history, which in this case meant that winning the war was more important than being himself." Why would he do this? Again, we are not told. But such a transformation is not the sort of thing one would expect from a man motivated primarily by "elemental" concerns.

It cracks even more when Ellis repeatedly condemns Jefferson and Madison for their claims that during his presidency, Washington was manipulated by Hamilton. Ellis finds their allegations repugnant, and says several times that Jefferson "describ[ed] him in private correspondence as quasi-senile." This is at best an exaggeration. Jefferson never called Washington senile; rather, he believed that Washington's "mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order, his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a Newton, Bacon, or Locke, and . . . no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion. . . . His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known. . . . We knew his honesty, the wiles with which he was encompassed, and that age had already begun to relax the firmness of his purposes. . . . After I had retired from [the cabinet], great and malignant pains were taken by our federal monarchists, and not entirely without effect, to make him view me as a theorist, holding French principles of government, which would lead infallibly to licentiousness and anarchy. And to this he listened the more readily, from my known disapprobation of the [Jay] treaty."

Far from calling Washington senile, Jefferson attributes Washington's complacency to the fact that Jefferson opposed a treaty that Washington endorsed. And his general description of Washington sounds surprisingly like Ellis' own acknowledgment that the first president, though a man of great integrity, was not a political philosopher. What, then, accounts for Ellis' sarcastic dismissal of Jefferson's complaints? Was Washington a strong, independent political thinker who took ideology seriously and had thoughtful reasons for embracing Hamilton's arguments — or did he fight for personal motives because he was passionate and "elemental," and unable to see through Hamilton's manipulation?

Viewing the Revolution through the lens of interest rather than ideology causes Ellis to miss these contradictions, even while he sees contradictions that aren't really there. In one passage, Ellis asserts that "Just as the standing army he sought to create contradicted the political principles it claimed to be fighting for, Washington's king-like status contradicted the potent antimonarchical ethos in revolutionary ideology." But only a few paragraphs later, he notes that "from the very start . . . he made a point of insisting that his expansive mandate was dependent upon, and subordinate to, the will of the American citizenry. . . . Washington did not use the term 'civilian control,' but he was scrupulous about acknowledging that his own authority derived from the elected representatives of Congress." The alleged contradiction thus disappears: Washington's status was antimonarchical precisely because he was Cincinnatus, the farmer-soldier, the focus of an ethos that was at least as republican as it was antimonarchical. The Revolutionaries did not disclaim titles, they disclaimed unearned titles. The principle of equality meant government by consent, which gave legitimacy to the robes of office which they had previously lacked: the legitimacy of the "natural aristocracy of virtue and talents." Thus Washington's king-like status was consistent with the Founders' vision because the accolades were bestowed on him by the consent of the governed.

Ellis' failure to understand the Founders the way they understood themselves is a common theme in his work. In the preface to "Founding Brothers," for example, Ellis claims that "the very arguments used to justify secession from the British Empire also undermined the legitimacy of any national government capable of overseeing such a far-flung population." The "core argument" of the Revolution, he claims, "was an obsessive suspicion of any centralized political power that operated in faraway places beyond the immediate supervision or surveillance of the citizens," and "the cardinal conviction of revolutionary-era republicanism" was that "no central authority empowered to coerce or discipline the citizenry was permissible, since it merely duplicated the monarchical and aristocratic principles that the American Revolution had been fought to escape." And yet the fact is that only a few years after the Revolution, the nation ratified a Constitution that did create a central authority, and did so with the backing of the leaders of that very Revolution. They did so because their actual argument rested on "fixed principles" that are noticeably absent from Ellis' description: namely, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, to secure which government is created. Any government that respected these principles — even a centralized one — the framers saw as consistent with Revolutionary principles. The Founders were not led by an "obsessive suspicion" of all government, but by a political philosophy of equality, consent, liberty, and security. But because he omits the Declaration's most fundamental axioms from his appraisal of the Founders' "cardinal convictions," Ellis finds the Constitution a paradox — or even worse, the result of a diabolical plot of elites: "a tiny minority of prominent political leaders from several key states conspired to draft and then ratify a document designed to accommodate republican principles to a national scale," he writes.

So we are left with this: the American Revolutionaries "claimed" to fight for radical principles like equality and natural rights, which are really irrelevant today; but they were really fighting for "elemental" convictions arising from an "obsessive" hostility to "any central authority" — solely because of geographic considerations, mind you. The "tiny minority" of elites then "conspired" to foist on the United States a Constitution which was, in Ellis' word, "incompatible" with Revolutionary principles, but which nevertheless has served as a "realistic compromise" between "liberty and power."

Yet Ellis won the Pulitzer for "Founding Brothers." This isn't surprising: his views have been standard fare for generations now. Ellis' style is to announce with great fanfare the tired shibboleths of mainstream American history professors: Jefferson was an incomprehensible sphinx; the Founders were economically-driven elitists and hypocrites; Revolutionary ideology is made up of platitudes that have lost whatever meaning they might have had, and were designed to cover up the interests of the exploitative classes in the first place. Ellis' packaging of such claims is actually more mild, and far more readable, than the usual, but it's regrettable that historians of such stature continue to embrace the notion that the American Constitution somehow betrayed the Revolution, or that the "fixed principles" that Jefferson and Washington fought for are now irrelevant. They are not; they are the only hope for a safe and free world today — and the only hope of those who want to really understand our nation's past.

© Copyright 2010, Liberty Foundation

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