Dan Snow's History Hit - George Washington: The First President

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

George. Where did it all go wrong? George Washington could have had a comfortable career as a loyal member of His Majesty's Virginia militia and colonial grandee. But no, he had to go and roll the dice. In this episode, Dan speaks to historian Alexis Coe about her biography of Washington. She has a fresh take on the first President, but no less scholarly for that. Young George Washington was raised by a struggling single mother, demanded military promotions, caused an international incident, and never backed down - even when his dysentery got so bad he had to ride with a cushion on his saddle. But after he married Martha, everything changed. Washington became the kind of man who named his dog Sweetlips and hated to leave home. He took up arms against the British only when there was no other way, though he lost more battles than he won.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hey everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about George Washington today everybody. It's a great pleasure to repeat one of the classic episodes of the past. It is one of the episodes that most people have listened to, so we thought we'd give another airing. Where did it all go wrong? George Washington, he could have had a comfortable career. He was doing so well. He was an important figure in the colony of Virginia. He was a little member of His Majesty's Militia. He could have been a big deal. But no, no, he had to go and roll the dice. He had to go and join the revolution. And look where that got him. This is an episode all about George Washington, the first president. I talked to Alexis

Coe. She's a brilliant historian in the US, and she's got a pretty fresh take on the first president. His life was completely extraordinary. He was raised by a struggling single mother. He basically started the Seven Years' War, an international global conflict, kind of by mistake, in the early 1750s. He was defeated constantly. He suffered personal illness. He knew setbacks and disasters. He called his dog Sweet Lips. And he had an extraordinary relationship with his wife, Martha. He was also a slave owner. What should we make of George Washington? I'm very excited. Alexis Coe is on the podcast to tell me all about the first president.

If you like US history, we've got plenty of US history available at History at TV. We've got all the back episodes of this podcast available exclusively there. We've gone into quite a lot of the old presidents now. A lot of US history has been discussed on that podcast, particularly over the last four years, and I suspect for the next few years as well. It doesn't look like it's going to get boring anytime soon. So please get a History at TV.

It works anywhere in the world. It's like Netflix for history. It's a great documentary channel full of wonderful history docs for history fans. Off to Antarctica to make a documentary about Shackleton. We've got more stuff this year coming up. Stalingrad, big anniversary. We're digging up. Well, we're conducting some very interesting archaeology on Anglo-Saxon King, the potential burial place of an Anglo-Saxon King. It's all coming up this year. So check it out. Follow the link in the description of this podcast. Just click that link. You get two

weeks free. You can check it out. In the meantime, here's alexis co talking about george washington enjoy alexis thank you very much for coming on the podcast thank you for having me i'm a big fan well listen i'm a big fan both of you and of the first president a lot of a lot of brits in fact everyone the brits the royal navy lowered their entrance to half-mast when George Washington died, so much respect did they have for their great nemesis. But tell me why everyone is losing their mind about your book. Did you set out to consciously write a very different kind of presidential biography? I did. I'm a political historian in America, and I love presidential biographies, and I usually read three in conversation. But when I read Washington

biographies at the end, I couldn't get anywhere. Thousands and thousands of pages. I understood they thought he was great. They commented a lot about his manliness, which I feel like, as you've just pointed out, is sort of a foregone conclusion. Everyone respects him. He can take it. He can take a different kind of view. And so I wanted to present it differently. I wanted to proceed differently. And I also, when I checked their primary sources in the archives, I found that they either had just been quoting each other for hundreds of years or, you know, the story just completely didn't check out.

It was really different. The context was more interesting. And that's the story I wanted. I also, presidential history is written in America. It's known as dad history. It's sold on Father's Day, on President's Day. It's a size matters crowd. It's usually like a thousand pages. And I wanted to take this opportunity to reach out to other readers who I fully believe, and I think this is a part of the reception, are desperate for good presidential history that isn't just about masculinity and destiny and

American greatness. They just want to hear the story and they want to feel like they know the person. There's a lot of hagiography around you guys, those giant founding fathers. I mean, I have to say I'm a big sucker for them because I just love them. But they are just giant tomes, right? And there's a hushed reverence to that, which I think is, we Brits find that a bit weird because we think of you guys as the, you know, like Americans. You're not reverential about anyone. And yet you are about that generation. Absolutely. And I find that so strange. So as praise, one of the things that's been said about the book, about my book, is that it's irreverent. And this is a good word. They use it in the 20 books to read in 2020 sort of thing. And first I thought, oh, that's very nice. And then I thought, how odd,

how odd that we think irreverence is something to comment on. And we're so accepting of reverence. It's strange because it implies a bias. so you can't trust the biographer. And also, who do you know who's perfect? I mean, I have not lived through a single president that I can say was a perfect human. I've never met a perfect human. And it gives us the skewed understanding of the founding era that these guys were sort of destined for greatness and our country was always going to be what it was. And none of that is true. None of it was a foregone conclusion. It denies Washington the real work and agency he had in his own story and the American story. It misrepresents our founding as if it was a monolith. And if we as

a whole country wanted to rebel against the crown, that's also not true. There were plenty of loyalists. That's a part of the reason the war took so long. And it doesn't allow us to really reconsider Washington in his own world and his own time. So, you know, this is a pretty big loss for you guys, right? But the thing is, he could have been yours. The whole trajectory of America and of the British Empire could have been different had you just given the guy the promotion he wanted. Tell me about it, dude. Tell me about it. But I mean, you know, that's something we've been beating ourselves up about for a long time, let me tell you. But his military career was, as you point out, it's kind of hapless military career, like obviously great successes like at Trenton and across in Delaware, but a list of errors. Like he's all too human, I think,

if you look at his military accomplishments and failures. Yeah, I mean, let's be realistic here. Because if we treat him like a god who could do no wrong, we're never going to understand what happened. One thing is, you know, he started a world war, the French and Indian War, that didn't go so well. And we think of him as being like a great, promising young military man. And then, you know, during the war, he lost more battles than he won. He made all kinds of mistakes. And he wasn't fighting on the front lines. He was in a tent most of the time. We were completely outmanned and outgunned, as Lin-Manuel Miranda, you know, famously

has put in hip hop form. So how did we do it? Washington was a spymaster. Washington understood propaganda. He understood that the court of public opinion, not only in America, you know, that British Army wouldn't recognize America as a sovereign nation and therefore didn't have to follow the rules of war. So every incidence he found of British cruelty, of rapes, of burning down of houses, of forceful

taking of animals to eat, he made sure that everyone knew about that. And he also made sure that the world knew that, you know, you weren't following the rules of war. And that was important. And to deny him that sort of work is to also sort of degrade his legacy. He should get credit for that. And instead, we sort of focus on he was only good at the military, and he was otherwise very self-conscious about his lack of education. Sure, but he made up for it in real time. Okay, so let's go through the things that we've given him a pass for that we should remember. I guess we've got to talk about slavery as an owner of enslaved human beings. Is that something that

you think is important that we put back into this story? Yeah. So there are two things Americans love. One is a man who overcomes a shrewish woman in order to achieve great things. So Washington's mother is presented as this terrible thwarting influence when in fact, she was a struggling single mother who worked really hard to give him all advantages and made sure that he found an occupation, his first one surveyor, that served him well, and kept encouraging him actually to quit military service for the British because, you know, he wasn't getting paid equally equally and it wasn't a good investment in his future. And the other thing we love is the redemption story. And so Washington, as the story goes, emancipated his slaves in his will, and he was the only

founding father to do so. That's a lovely story. That's not totally true. He emancipated one man outright, Billy Lee, who he had always thought of as exceptional. He was, you know, by his side during the war. And then when he was crippled in his service, he retired him and replaced him. The other 100, you know, 213 people, he did pave the road to emancipation, which, by the way, Ben Franklin also found or emancipated his slaves during his lifetime. So we can have that conversation another time. But he paved the road. And what he did was, you know, this was a good thing. Ultimately,

it meant something to them. But it also, you know, meant that, that they had to wait it out, because it was up to Martha. She either had to die or decide to emancipate them. Martha was not of this mind. She would not have done so if she didn't need to. But according to Abigail Adams and a lot of other primary sources, she feared for her life because Washington's will, this was a little bit about legacy, was published. So even if they couldn't read, you know, these rumors spread very quickly. And in order to keep herself alive, to protect herself, she emancipates his slaves who have married hers, who have had children with hers. So when she dies two years after him and her heirs split her enslaved people among themselves,

families are broken up. You know, his slaves can try to live nearby. They can hope that they're allowed access, but that doesn't happen a lot. And it's a really devastating story. So to understand the full arc of it is to understand what he set out to do, what he really did, and how we remember it. He didn't make these claims. His biographers have since made that claim. They've tried to sanitize him. And as you pointed out, it just doesn't, it doesn't teach us anything about the founding of our country and why we're, you know, we're a mess. We were always a mess. I find that comforting. I find that a lot more reassuring than some fairy tale about these perfect men.

And one with wooden teeth, for God's sakes. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about the first president, George Washington. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research.

From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. It makes me feel a lot better knowing that my that napoleon and caesar and george rossington were just losers like me chronically insecure and always waiting for someone tap them on the shoulder and tell them they've been checking them out and they're useless at their job what else do we give them a pass for do you think what how has his reputation been inflated we think of him as the great unifier and that that's certainly why he was elected. This was not a

country that was born of one mind. There were still plenty of loyalists, and people who thought that we should maintain a relationship with the British Empire. And then there were plenty of people who during the French Revolution thought we've got to get in there, we've got to help this country, we would have never beaten, you know, we would have never won it in Yorktown, we would have never been at Yorktown if it weren't for the French. We didn't, we barely had rowboats. You know, you had a pretty good navy. It was sort of famous. And so what we have here is someone who is a symbol and who thinks, okay, if I just keep being the symbol of unity, then the country will fall in place around me because he's also got the mindset of a military man. He thinks, okay, listen to people, but I'm the general. I hand down my pronouncement and everyone's going to follow what I say.

That didn't happen. He said, I don't want partisanship. And what he did was he ended up ushering partisanship into existence. He had people, you know, famous founders like Hamilton and Jefferson, argue their opinions in his cabinet meetings, which he invented this cabinet. But, you know, he did it in a way that made them feel, as Jefferson would later describe, like they were in a cockfight. And that's an incredible, you know, analogy to use. Like, my God, that Hamilton and Jefferson, their razor beak, their drawing blood. Washington is either sort of like sitting silently watching this and not intervening, or he's almost like, you know, ironically waving around dollar bills, like, you know, go, go, go. And that fight spilled out into the street. And the country ended up

taking sides. And he left an absolute mess, an absolute partisan mess in America that we are still living through today. That's fascinating because of course that's not at all his reputation. Before we come into the things he was great that you do think he deserves praise for, is there anything else that actually where his reputation is undeserved? Oh, sure. So it's funny, Washington, when he died, he was one of the greatest whiskey distillers in America, had one of the biggest operations. He was a businessman, which is a part of the reason he rebelled. He wasn't, you know, he wasn't a Thomas Payne. He wasn't just like revolution hopping. He wanted to succeed as a businessman. He didn't feel

like the British Empire was allowing him to do so. And so he took matters into his own hands after he had tried everything possible, you know, to his mind. He made a lot of mistakes. And one of the biggest ones, to my mind, is something he's often celebrated for, which was a bloodless rebellion. Well, the rebellion didn't happen. What happened was it was the greatest instance of executive overreach in our history. You know, he needed to pay off these debts that we were born with from the war. And so part of it was he agreed to Hamilton's whole financial scheme, a central bank ironically modeled after the British system, and a tax on whiskey distributors and distillers in rural Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Now, this is pretty funny because these men didn't vote. So they were being taxed without representation and they didn't vote because they didn't own land.

And they also were a relatively cashless society they paid their rent in agricultural goods or in whiskey so even if they wanted to pay these taxes which they didn't because they didn't feel like they had a say in it they couldn't they really didn't have the cash for it so instead of sort of like listening to them to any of their many protests and letters which was funny because that's of course what the Virginia Assembly sent to Parliament so many times, it was just like almost textbook, you know, the swap out the names, the situation is pretty similar. Instead of just sort of like trying to deal with it, he has just a huge overreaction. He listens to Hamilton who says anytime the government shows force, it has to come out like Hercules. And he has a military uniform tailored

for him for his, you know, older body that he has now. And he rides out, he's in a carriage, but he's still riding out with the military, who, by the way, he sidesteps the Constitution, our sacred document, gets a judicial writ and draws arms on his own people. The irony is, you know, right before he gets there, he turns around and the meeting place for this big rebellion that's supposedly happening is Braddock's Field, which is when, of course, you know, one of your generals was felled on the field and Washington, this young man, takes over. He very dramatically grabs this red sash and he fights for the British. Well, they get to Braddocks Field and there's

nobody there. These like supposedly 6,000 rebels who are ready to take on the government, who Washington has taken so personally, they're not there because they didn't actually want to fight the government. They just wanted a fair shake of things. They have to work really hard to round up anyone. He ends up, you know, sentencing two to death and then he pardons them. So I don't understand why that's presented as a bloodless end, you know, a real triumph of his presidency. It was a crazy overreaction. Things could have been wild. And it also, he won't let it go. He keeps talking about it for a really long time. And he ends up talking about it like, oh, I'm sure the French had something to do with it. This is all about partisanship. It's a terrible look for him. Okay, so ignoring his leadership during the war, which at times was clumsy and at times very, very deft indeed. And you've mentioned the spy masters,

some of the greatest achievements, some of the greatest praise for Washington. Am I right? It comes around him declining the opportunity to become a military dictator at the very end of the war when the army's refusing to demobil mobilize. And then also his willingness to give up ultimate power, to step away from the presidency, ensuring the tradition of peaceful transition. Does he deserve praise for those two particular foundational acts? Absolutely. But then in context, it wasn't that hard for him. You know, Washington had everything to prove. He wanted to be the center of his nation's story when he was a young man. It didn't really matter what nation that was. He would have been happy being, you know, the most famous colonist in the British

Empire. That didn't happen. By the end of the revolution, he's pretty satisfied. He's done the unthinkable. He's got a plantation back home, a forced labor camp. He wants to get back to you. He's a businessman. He wants to make a lot of money. He's got his Martha does not like to travel. There's just a lot calling him. And so when he gives up power, he's eager to do so. You know, he he writes to, you know, the powers that be. And he's like, how do you want to do this?

I really want to be home for Christmas. Everything about it is just like, OK, yeah, ceremony, ceremony. I just want to get home. I want to get home. And he indeed makes it home just in time for Christmas. The second time, again, he was desperate to get out of that situation when he was the president. Partisanship had erupted. He wasn't talking to half the people, half the founders.

You know, I call them frenemies. But, you know, by the end, he was estranged from Jefferson. Thomas Paine wrote a scathing letter about him. His worst nightmare had been realized. Partisanship was rampant. He was getting older. He wasn't just getting this blind respect he got as a general. He wanted to go home.

And so that's absolutely true. He should receive credit for it. But, you know, it was also sort of innate. He was, by that time, really secure. So, you know, the concern with Trump is that, you know, would he give up power? We don't know. He's not secure and he's so power hungry that, you know, we don't know this, but yes, it is an amazing thing that he did. If you know him, you know, it was never an option, but look at the context he lived in. You had a King.

Most countries had a King. We are a few years off from Napoleon. Napoleon will say, everyone expected me to be George Washington. I couldn't be. There was only one George Washington. And that's absolutely true. Well, thanks for bringing in the current occupant of the office. I did it. I made the mistake. Well, you know what? It's hard not to in these days. But I mean, what was it interesting? Last question, was it interesting writing this big work of presidential history? How did you feel about the current occupant? Did it make you think that this is an outrage? This is a sort of radical discontinuity?

Or do you think, you know what? It's always been there. I've gone through all the emotions. I've gone through all the emotions during this time. You know, writing a book takes a long time, a well-researched book. You know, writing a book takes a long time, a well-researched book. When I started in 2016, there were certain patterns to the American electorate and to our presidential history. And so I knew it's really uncommon after eight years that the same party wins again.

At the same time, Trump was so at odds with someone like Washington. I was actually at Mount Vernon at his home the weekend before the election. And everyone seemed to agree it would definitely be Hillary. And I, in fact, was taking notes in a notebook that said first female president. And I thought, okay, I'm going to be writing this book while living through this time. How very lovely. And then, despite, you know, getting 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, Trump assumes the presidency. And for a while I play along as a presidential historian. I do my job and I show up on television and I give all the radio interviews.

But I felt a little bit like a hack. And it also was such a dramatic experience to be living through that I didn't want to do it. to be living through that I didn't want to do it. And I'm really glad that I saved myself up after the first hundred days, which is significant to us because FDR sort of threw everything at the wall for the first hundred days and since has been regarded as some really significant time when it's really just trying anything that works to write course. After that last interview, I was like, I'm out. And it's good because I'm asked about it constantly now.

You know, it's like opposites day every single day. Everything that I wrote, everything that I studied is just the exact opposite plays out in the media. It plays out on Twitter. He could not be more different than Washington. And even as threatened by Washington, he, you know, Trump visited Mount Vernon and said, you got to put your name on things or else nobody remembers you. Your job is in a city called washington uh no one's forgotten washington and and i think a part of it is that you know he wasn't quite so insecure so it's been excuse my language it's been batshit crazy well thank you uh that's

good to know that you think so as well because it looks like that from over here so thank you for i was in mount vernon the weekend of the presidential inauguration so we only just missed each other by a couple months oh my goodness next time yes so thank you very much good luck with the book it is called you never forget your first a biography of george washington and it's out now go and get it everybody thank you It was a pleasure. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks, you've made it to the end of another episode. Congratulations, well done you.

I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do here at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give it a rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Thank you very much indeed. That really does make a huge difference. It's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account. So please don't ever do that. It can seem like a small thing, but actually it's kind of a big deal for us. I really appreciate it. See you next time.