I just finished Joseph Ellis’ new biography of George Washington. What an irritating book. Ellis embodies to me everything wrong with Establishment historiography of the Revolutionary era. His relentless skepticism toward the ideology of the American Revolution (and its succeeding era) leads him to make the strangest sort of arguments. He constantly refers to the “ideals for which the Revolutionaries claimed to be fighting,” rather than the ideals of the Revolution, for instance. This is not just scholarly detachment; in the concluding passages he claims that the idea of a natural political order was a great error, and throughout the book he constantly approaches Washington and his contemporaries with the attitude of “sure, they claimed to be fighting for such and such, but what were they really fighting for?” Washington, according to Ellis, fought not for liberty, or equality, or even property, but because he resented his purchasing agent in London. He freed his slaves, not because he believed in freedom and thought a slaveholding Revolutionary was a hypocrite, but because he disliked tobacco planting, and found slavery unprofitable.
Now, this approach would be fine, if it were a conscious thesis: if Ellis then at least addressed the claims by Washington and other revolutionaries that they were fighting for ideals. Charles Beard and other economic historians embraced the Marxist view that ideals are invented to cover economic interests, and presented that argument unapologetically. But Ellis just ignores the ideological claims of the Revolutionaries. For him, their ideas are practically irrelevant. In the end of the book, when he discusses Washington’s approach to slavery, he does acknowledge that Washington found the institution morally revolting—but never explains why Washington thought that, certainly not to the extent that he delves into Washington’s economic reasons for hating slavery. Ellis says Washington always combined interest with vision. But he tells us all about the interest and never tells us about the vision.
Now, the reason the book is not terrible is that of all the founders, this approach is most plausibly suited to Washington. He did seem uncomfortable with principles, like equality, for which he fought. He was not a scholar, he did not go to college, he wrote little on political theory that was not platitudinous. Ellis is obsessed with the word “elemental,” which seems to appear hundreds of times in the book. This is because Ellis’ Washington fights the British out of his own personal motives more than his political ideology. This is surely an exaggeration, but if it contains truth, it is more likely true of Washington than of Jefferson or Adams or the others. Moreover, Washington’s later life shows that he was at least sometimes led more by motives of personal loyalty and resentment than by political or philosophical considerations, as Ellis shows.
Yet at the same time that he shows this, Ellis repeatedly condemns Jefferson and Madison for believing that Washington was being manipulated by Hamilton and others during his Presidency, or being led by his heart. He ridicules them by saying that they were making themselves believe that Washington was senile, which, again, is an exaggeration. I don’t know that they ever referred to Washington as actually senile—they simply believed he was unsophisticated, and did not understand the political and philosophical issues well enough to resist Hamilton’s powerful personality and motives, in addition to the memories of the Revolution. So, which is it, Prof. Ellis? Was Washington a strong, independent political thinker who took ideology seriously and fought for the ideals of the Declaration and had serious reasons for joining with Hamilton’s schemes—or did he fight for personal motives because he was “elemental” and passionate? I don’t think you can seriously have it both ways.
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