Father Superior

...His childlessness, possibly owing to sterility caused by his smallpox attack, leads Ellis to conclude: "There could be no Washington monarchy because there could be no Washington dynasty...

...A giant figure from the Virginia community, he arrived in Philadelphia wearing the colonel's blue and buff uniform...

...Service as the first President of the nation, and the first in the history of the world, showed the characteristics of Washington's personality and mind-set as they had developed...

...In 1753, barely out of adolescence, he was appointed by His Majesty's Virginia Governor Robert Dinwiddie to pursue the French...

...So his marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis was very important to him, for her large dowry of acreage and slaves catapulted him into the ranks of the richest plantation holders in Virginia...

...After Washington became famous "women would swoon at his appearance," Ellis observes, but in his youth "he struck them as awkward, even oafish, and paralyzingly shy...

...His consequent immunity, unknown to the larger public, enabled him to seem divinely in command during the Revolution when the awful ailment took many of his soldiers'lives...

...Leadership was his chief attribute and he loved it...

...Washington's relations with the other giants of his day, who are well-known by the author, are also carefully recalled here...

...A major source for Ellis is the recently produced multivolume collection of Washington's papers edited by WW...

...Washington was a self-made man whose possessions were fewer than those of the majority of his fellow planters, whom he clearly envied...

...After the Revolution ended he was "destiny's child," the only truly national figure—and a hero in the bargain...

...But it led to his "posing for posterity" almost immediately thereafter...

...So he maneuvered behind the scenes...

...and how he gradually learned to exercise selfcontrol in order to shape not an affectionate but an effective personality...

...That he was not going to be a king impressed the public sotto voce...

...He was, Ellis shows, a superior "Excellency...

...She reported (in words not quoted by Ellis): "The gentleman and the soldier look agreeably blended in him...

...His portrait hangs in countless schoolhouse auditoriums and entranceways across the land...

...They seemed to be poaching on the forks of the Ohio River deemed to be British, where he engaged them in a bloody clash that would remain in his mind for the rest of his life...

...I admire and learned from Richard Brookhiser's Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (1996), and George Washington: Man and Monument (1958) by the English historian Marcus Cunliffe...

...Though Washington was addressed as "His Excellency" by those who met him, he had no expectation or intention of taking ultimate political control...

...In making a plea for neutrality in his famous Farewell Address, he was not seduced by the experiences of the Revolutionary Era...

...do not therefore [labor] under a belief that, as a friendship has long subsisted between us, many things may be overlooked in you...

...Washington never gave up his zeal to expand his land holdings...

...When he hired an old friend to manage his Western properties, his instructions, unlike any that other planters might issue, were severe: "As you are now receiving my Money, your time is not your own...

...Still, Ellis shows that beyond question Washington had "semiroyal status" that fitted his personality as well as the needs of a public just now growing accustomed to its lack of a monarch to bow down to...

...The general, always thinking nationally, played an indispensable part in emphasizing the importance of this outlook...

...The interests of the United States, his life had taught him, "did not lie across the Atlantic but across the Alleghenies...

...As Ellis puts it, "He was determined to prevent his personal affection for Lafayette or his warm memories of Rochambeau's soldiers and de Grasse's ships at Yorktown from influencing his judgment about the long-term interests of the United States...

...Not incidentally, one has to assume that Ellis, working on a fallible man of uncommon gifts, was helped to comprehend his subject through his own suspension from teaching at Mount Holyoke College for having bizarrely told students he was a Vietnam War veteran...

...His life has been admirably examined by biographers, especially those who did multivolume studies, like Chief Justice John Marshall and, more recently, James T. Flexner...

...And when "His Excellency" ordered "superfine broadcloth from a Hartford manufacturer for his inaugural suit it suggested that he wanted to make a sartorial statement of republican simplicity that countered the royal image...

...how he earnestly observed punctuality and military rules and expected others, especially inferiors, to do the same...

...He was stern, but courteous and kind...

...He did not mention the subject in the Farewell Address, leaving the institution and the agony of its existence for another generation—although he arranged for the freeing of his own slaves upon his death...

...It supersedes the extensive edition that appeared in the 1930s, when the bicentennial of Washington's birth was a national event, and provides fresh material for every chapter of Ellis' book...

...Although most young men of his class and place in society went to college, he went into military service and learned the art of war...

...editor, "The Presidents: A Reference History" George Washington belongs to every American, but they do not really know him...

...My wife and I attended George Washington High School in Manhattan and so did Henry Kissinger, yet none of us ever heard a salute to the honored name...

...The Father of His Country was a realist...

...Since the Civil War, Lincoln has succeeded him as the godlike hero of heroes...

...Troubled by its existence, Washington was nevertheless thoroughly dependent on slave labor for his constantly expanding land holdings...

...And readers will find here a seductive appreciation of why Washington has never been surpassed by subsequent Presidents of the United States...

...While quite young he accompanied his brother Lawrence, with whom he was very close, to Barbados and contracted smallpox...

...He attended to the details of his Administration, but the public saw him as "not directing the government so much as floating above the infant republic as a sagacious and beloved guardian...

...He learned from the conflicts he saw and experienced in the West how to wage guerrilla war—which would later help him outlast the British in the Revolutionary War and bring the well-trained Redcoats to defeat...

...He could not make speeches or take sides in the controversies...

...Ellis, whose Founding Brothers (2000) magnificently evoked the Revolutionary War generation, and was acknowledged with a Pulitzer Prize, previously wrote American Sphinx (1997), a stunning biography of Jefferson, and Passionate Sage (1993) about John Adams...

...Abigail Adams, better than her husband who was intimidated by Washington, saw the man for what he was...

...At the first meeting of the Constitutional Convention, he was elected chairman...

...and another rising (though less splendid) was a novelty...

...No one, however, has more persuasively portrayed Washington as a man, or better understood the way his mind worked, than Joseph J. Ellis in this new book...

...The issue of slavery comes up several times in these tight pages...

...More intimately than ever we see how Washington was a deeply emotional man who could be overwhelmed by his temper and impatience...

...Upon Lawrence's death, he acquired his beloved home at Mount Vernon...

...The country knew Washington was the inescapable choice to be the first President...

...Splendid smaller works have anticipated the present one...

...As Adams wrote, "The sight of the sun setting...

...Fully comfortable with the principal men of the early national period, he was ready to take on the Father of His Country...

...That title simply "fit him better than any of his old suits, and he was determined to protect it from tearing and shredding...

...Until the 1860s, though, Washington's name was everywhere as the best and worthiest, eventually ornamenting not only the country's capital city but a state, 121 towns and villages, 33 counties, many colleges, and a bevy of lakes and mountains...

...The silence imposed on him was not a handicap because the making of a new government, the work of the gathering, was not one of his skills...

...Abbot (to whom His Excellency is dedicated) and Dorothy Twohig...

...national in outlook, but devoted to the existence of states...

...John Adams feared that a victorious commanding general would be aching to become a king...

...When the Continental Congress was taking steps to choose a general to wage war against the Mother Country, Washington was ready...

...When he left office in 1797 for Vice President Adams to succeed him, the republic saw a remarkable and glorious fact...

...Washington mastered all of them...

...Moreover, he keenly watched the performance of his suppliers and vendors, ready to believe they were cheating or shortchanging him...

...principled, but able to negotiate...