Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation. - book reviews

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 8, 1993 | by Christopher Caldwell

"Perhaps no soldier in history learned so much from his mistakes," writes Richard Norton Smith in Patriarch (Houghton Mifflin). And early in his life, George Washington made plenty of them.

The petty iconoclasts of today's history departments have had an easy time belittling Washington, ironically unaware that a central element of his greatness lay in forging a nation that did not trample on the petty - even those in history departments.

Washington's early failures did not bring on Churchillian "years in the wilderness," but they were catastrophes. On a scouting expedition to the Forks of the Ohio in 1754, he mistook a French diplomatic party for an encampment and massacred 10 Frenchmen. French troops gave chase and slaughtered most of Washington's army. Even his earliest moment of heroism, which came the following year, had calamity as its backdrop: On a second westward journey, Washington urged British Gen. Edward Braddock to use irregular marching formations to avoid attack by Indians; Braddock ignored him and was ambushed and mowed down. It was a military disaster that alarmed the court of George II, but it went down as a glowing vindication of Washington's military acumen.

By concentrating on those episodes and sneering at such apocrypha as the cherry tree story, it's possible to portray Washington as a genial, bumbling figurehead, sleepwalking through the Revolution and slacking off once in high office. Nothing could be further from the truth.

An acclaimed biographer of Thomas E. Dewey and Herbert Hoover and the director of the Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, Smith seeks to restore balance by dealing with Washington's last decade. During two presidential terms and two years of retirement before his death at Mount Vernon, Washington, through stirring force of character, defined the presidency and the nation itself.

Smith considers Washington to have been a better politician than a general, anyway, and his political successes permit one to view the earlier reversals as a necessary prelude.

Washington was an ambitious son of the very poorest of the Virginia gentry; he earned a major's commission while still in his teens and was a skilled surveyor whose daring forays into Indian country made him internationally famous by his early 20s.

He was vainglorious but not given to self-promotion; a great dancer; fond of the self-help books of the classically educated, like Seneca's Dialogues; and so riddled with insecurity that he returned to Mount Vernon after leading the Revolution to correct the grammar in his childhood letters and copy-books, lest they fall into the hands of sneering historians.

Needless to say, they did. But Smith is less interested in snickering than in rendering the fledgling republic in pulsing detail - as a loud, lively, frightening and exciting place. New York comes alive as a stinky and depraved city where rum, mimbo, "rack punch" and "pumpkin flip" were the drinks favored by the New England lobbyists whom Thomas Jefferson drank with, and where almost no one drank milk, which tasted of the garlic that the Long Island dairy herds grazed on.

In snobby, polyglot Philadelphia, novelty seekers lined up to view an African lion chained at the Rising Sun Tavern or the mastodon bones at Charles Willson Peale's Repository for Natural Curiosities. Women paid ridiculous sums to have their hair set by Hypolite Philip, who imported the latest wigs and pomades from Paris.

Smith renders the world of the 18th century sensuous and exotic, and he casts the political tumult of the day in terms easy for contemporary readers to understand. Those disturbed by the tacky pageantry of the recent inauguration will be relieved to know that during New York's tenure as the nation's capital, Washington would pose, armed, in velvet battle dress for guests at Tuesday afternoon levees. He even met tens of thousands of citizens on a Clintonesque coach trip through the South in 1791.

Washington faced controversy over the line-item veto. ("From the nature of the Constitution;' he said, "I must approve all parts of the bill or reject it in toto.") And like Ronald Reagan facing Sandinista supporters, he had to deal with foreign affairs radicals willing to tolerate anything in the name of national liberation, including many who hailed the guillotining of Louis XVI in 1793 as a triumph for the rights of man. According to Alexander Hamilton's assistant Oliver Wolcott, "By a strange kind of reasoning, our Jacobins . . . suppose the liberties of America depend on the right of cutting throats in France."

The battles of Hamilton and Jefferson over France and the nation's financial system are the jewels of the book. Smith follows the relationship from their early days as Washington's fishing buddies into their virulent personal enmity masquerading as policy dispute, which both carried out through that most modern of devices, leaking secrets to sympathetic journalists. (And even through leaking state secrets - Jefferson to France, Hamilton to Britain.)