The officers, made ashamed, and some fighting back tears, raised a clamor of support for him, and the conspiracy was finished. And although the words were not his – they were from his favorite play, Joseph Addison’s Cato: A Tragedy, which also supplied Nathan’s Hale’s “Give me liberty or give me death” – their effect could only have come through him.

It was said that whenever he entered a room a hush fell over it. This persona, so unnatural to an age prurient in its desire to make the private public, seemed fitting to Washington himself for several reasons. It was foremost a tool of leadership, whereby a cool or even marble exterior instantly inspired confidence in Washington the general. Also, it was a mask for his profound sympathy for the sufferings of his troops. And finally, it even seems the reward of his virtue, the willing tribute of a public who did not find it feigned or pompous or unnatural in the least. As Abigail Adams put it:

And a French officer found his face

This character was not forged by his experience as the commander of the new republic’s armies. Indeed, although he was a natural leader, he was not a great general, and had a conspicuous dislike of war, whose destructive scope he always tried to limit. As Congressman Charles Carroll, a leader of the “bring it on” variety, complained

Another great character trait, one that allowed him to succeed as a general was, let us call it, his implacable modesty. It allowed him to learn the two decisive advantages of the Continental Army: its superior mobility, and its possession of the popular will, which he recognized as more important than battalions. Regarding the latter, Washington wrote

His faith
Washington does not come any closer to anyone by being called a fellow Christian. It is true that his habit was to rise before 5 a.m. to read and meditate upon Scripture – with the Bible open on a chair and Washington before it on his knees. Yet the word “Jesus” was almost never on his lips. He most often referred to god, even in letters to his wife, as Providence – a being inspiring awe and mystically aiding the steadfastly virtuous, a god far from the chipper business partner of Norman Vincent Peale and farther still from the personal improvement counselor of the televangelists. His was not a god of happy talk, but the “Governor of the Universe” brooding over the future happiness of the virtuous.

His flaws
Biographers of the modern stripe reach almost reflexively for a presentation of human shortcomings. They suppose that by finding the dirty secrets of a man that they have his clockspring. These failings, they suppose, will drive his decisions (to compensate for them, to hide them, etc.). For these little men, character is destiny, and a wart is predestination.

It can be easily said that Washington had failings. He liked to play cards; he liked to drink; and he liked, we may put it, the pleasure of women other than his betrothed. But even in the latter, he is nothing like us. He didn’t have “affairs” in the modern sense of an attempt “find oneself” or to expand a miserably lonely consciousness. He just enjoyed sex, in an almost casual or Latin way. May as well let the very modern Erica Jong say it: it was “zipless” sex. But this was the commonplace in an age before ours, when now sex is really much less fun – and almost never “zipless” – because it is freighted with psychological needs that just weren’t felt in the past.

The most notable of his personal failings was his volcanic temper, which he managed to control. Indeed, his recognition of the fact that it was his responsibility alone to control it gives us an insight into the man and his age. He wrote:

An entire book could be written in unpacking that one sentence! The modern says exactly the opposite on both points: that our actions are often outside our control, and that our thoughts are always our unique property. But for Washington, the first clause implies the rejection of all predetermining agents: no nature or nurture, no Freud or society relieves us from responsibility for any of our actions. The second clause provides a unique defense for freedom of speech and thought: that we not only may think of anything, but that we are not necessarily responsible for what we think, that we are at least sometimes passive hosts for ideas – and that this is a good thing. This one clause is the complete antithesis of modernity, for the modern view insists on uniqueness or novelty as the very definition of personality. According to this modern view, it is what we have invented, our unique thoughts, our personal way of expressing something, yes, our so very important cleverness, our style, that define us. And if we have no ideas, cleverness, or style, then it is our own peculiar bundle of tastes, whims, and personal tics that define us. The modern treads the earth as the First Man: he has nothing in common with those who preceded him; they were the slave owners, the bigots, the chauvinists while he is the pinnacle of all human progress. But note how very opposite is Washington’s view. The very act of thinking is not personal – it is a communion with causes higher than ourselves. This has nothing to do with abstraction as such. Washington implies that thinking is a communion with powers that lift us out of the petty confines of our selves, away from the little box of our own cleverness, and toward something universal and permanent.

Stepping outside one’s own age is very difficult, but understanding this one sentence brings us into Washington’s world, and indeed into the entire world prior to the modern “mind set.”

His mental landscape
Of course the true way to understanding a historical figure’s “mental landscape” – the commonly shared assumptions of an age – lies in extensive reading from that age. By this reading we can sensibly declare that this person or that person possessed the “mind of eighteenth century America.” But there is another sense in which we can say that this or that is the expression, not of the mind of an age, but of a particular mind. This latter sense is revealed by style of expression. For example, everyone can identify the particular expressive style of Mencken, Voltaire, G.K. Chesterton, or Laurence Sterne (whose Tristram Shandy provided the introduction for Thomas Jefferson and his wife).

In Washington’s writing we see a mind that revolves each idea slowly, ponderously some would say. It wants to consider multiple aspects; it is very fond of contrast by antithesis – not in the dramatic sunlight-and-shadows way of, say, Victor Hugo, but in the way of someone who is striving above all for completeness. His first inaugural address as well as his famous Farewell Address offer conspicuous examples of this style. Some may argue that these are not representative of him, since the first is present only in fragments and the latter was edited by the Federalist Papers trio (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay), but Washington was responsible for the final version of the Address, and it is so like his other writings, that I think it speaks with his particular voice. Parts of the Address are frankly tiresome, but it reveals a mind that, once seizing a principle, is forceful and without a quibble:

As we should remember him
In some way everyone, from a five-year-old to a TV personality, can be said to know Washington.

Helen, my precocious five-year-old, found my laptop open and contributed the following, which I really don’t want to erase:

But Jefferson, a close friend of over 30 years, provides the best succinct image: