Ellis, Joseph J., His Excellency George Washington, 2004

July 20, 2011

Ellis, Joseph J., His Excellency George Washington, 2004

Spoilers in this review: None.

It’s amazingly coincidental that I’m immediately reading the biography of another long-lived, tall, skinny, white-skinned man, George Washington. I bet Dick Van Dyke could make that frosty visage break into a smile. It would take a master.

I bought this book on a recent visit to George Washington’s home, Mt. Vernon, just outside of Washington, D.C. (Yes, Washington placed the capital right outside his own front door.) The docents were excellent and one of them recommended this book. His Excellency is well researched and well written, intended to be accessible rather than dense. It traces the hints of Washington’s true personality as revealed by an exhaustive study of his letters. This book is about Washington the man, not Washington the god/king that nearly was. But, don’t worry, it’s not some kind of tell-all or bubble-puncturer. In fact, Ellis explains that knowing what was going on behind the stoic façade of this great leader actually enhances our understanding of his key decisions. And, his key decisions for himself became key decisions for the new nation—and the nation we are today.

His Excellency has chapters on the key events of Washington’s life—his service with the British in the French & Indian War, his establishment of himself as landed gentry (he married well), the War for Independence, and his presidency. I was especially intrigued with the chapter on the French & Indian War. Ellis’s descriptions had my heart racing a couple of times. And Washington seemed protected by an invisible shield. He was the tallest and fairest soldier in the battle and yet remained unscathed. These were the Ohio lands—my home.

I find endlessly fascinating the individual threads that wove together to become this experiment of representative government that is the United States. Washington would not be surprised to see the sticky messes Congress gets into and he was certainly familiar with various smear tactics and propaganda campaigns. People are so “now”-centric—it must be worse now than it ever was. His Excellency is an antidote to that thinking. The maneuverings of Jefferson and Hamilton were as cut-throat as they could get and included buying off the press.

I recommend this book. It is a bit dry, but in the same way that a good white wine is dry. The writing is clear and crisp as Ellis shares his explorations with us. His Excellency refreshed and deepened my high-school-history knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the birth of my nation—as an idea and a reality. I am more committed than ever to exercising my freedoms and celebrating the courage of the Founders. Visiting Mt. Vernon was a welcome confirmation. I look forward to trying some of Ellis’s other books after another foray into my endless children’s literature list.

Best bits: “Instead of going to college, Washington went to war. And the kind of education he received, like the smallpox he had contracted in Barbados, left scars that never went away, as well as immunities against any and all forms of youthful idealism” (Chapter 1).

“…the meaning of the American Revolution, at least as [Washington] understood it, had been transformed during the course of the war into a shape that neither he nor anyone else had foreseen at the start. It was a war not just for independence, but also for nationhood” (Chapter 4).

“…he saw himself as a mere steward for a historical experiment in representative government larger than any single person, larger than himself; an experiment in which all leaders, no matter how indispensable, were disposable, which was what a government of laws and not of men ultimately meant” (Chapter 4).

Main complaint: As a non-scholar, I could have used a bit more background discussion. I was really pulling stuff out of the archives. Maps and a timeline would have been helpful to me and a kindness to any reader.

Hidden gifts: I appreciated the way Ellis tied together the private and public Washington; Ellis’s discussions of Washington’s evolving view of slave-holding were fascinating; I feel like I’ve been walking among the fields of Mt. Vernon, sitting to the side of the Constitutional Convention, watching the signing of Jay’s treaty. All good books should be so transportive.

Physical description: Book-shaped (traditional proportions); published by Vintage Books/Random House; 8 pages of trivial front matter, 12 pages of serious front matter (including dedication to W.W. Abbot, table of contents, and an actually interesting and stage-setting preface), and a half-title page to mark the beginning of the actual text; 2 pages of acknowledgments; 30 or so pages of notes; and index; 275 pages long (text), 320 over all

Typo: None that I found.