Disastrously Unhelpful: Anti-Trump Historians' Disputes over George Washington

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Shortly before the recent election, the scholar Tom Nichols published a long piece in The Atlantic reviewing in great detail a topic that I'd be understating wildly to call familiar: the virtues of the Commander of the Continental Army and first President of the United States, George Washington. The context, of course, is comparison with Donald Trump. Nichols sets Washington up as the shining model of an approach to serving the presidency that Trump recklessly and dangerously trashes. The stuff is so trite—so many pieces exactly like it, though briefer, have been published so often during the past eight years—and I’ve written so often in opposition to the whole thrust that I can’t review the Atlantic piece at the length it calls for.

But that’s not my main point today anyway. In Time, the scholar Karin Wulf published a critical response to Nichols’s piece, and it’s the basis of Wulf’s and Nichols’s disagreement that I find really disheartening.

Their bone of contention has to do with the nature and meaning of tyranny. Nichols presents, in the usual glowing terms, the Washington we all know so well that you can probably recite the main ideas right along with me: as commander, he gave up command; as president, he gave up the presidency; as a man with opportunities to become a tyrant—override civic authority, demolish rule of law, assume dictatorial power—he chose not to.

That, to Nichols, was Washington’s vision for the presidency. And until Trump came along, it held up, thanks in large part, he says, to precedents set by Washington.

Wulf, acquiescing in the notion that “no one is more appealing than George Washington” as “a precedent that represents an alternative to Donald Trump's crude notion of presidential power” and that “Washington’s model of taking and then relinquishing power inspires us still, as it should,” nevertheless dissents from the idea that Washington renounced tyranny, asserting that he “was, in fact, a tyrant. As an enslaver of over 600 people, he actively, aggressively, and persistently sought wealth through tyrannizing others.” Reviewing facts that should by now be as familiar as Nichols’s, given historians’ frequent emphasis—and I recognize that they’re probably not as familiar as they should be—Wulf reminds readers that Washington utterly depended on the relentless exploitation of enslaved people, from the hundreds who labored to make his properties pay to his body man William Lee to Oona Judge, whom he bent every effort to re-capture.

I lean toward one of Wulf’s overarching ideas, that while “in times of crisis, drawing the contrast between heroes and villains seems necessary . . . We should know better,” and as those of you who know my work on Washington won’t be surprised to hear, I lean away—so far away that “lean” might not be the right word—from the kind of fulsome praise for the first president that Nichols indulges in, as so many have before him, including the many who have been using Washington, ever since 2016, as a foil for Trump.

And yet the contrast Wulf strikes—the man often held up as an antidote to tyranny in fact tyrannized people—seems to me to involve a kind of category error, enabling a framing of the American founding that I find just as useless, in the end, as Nichols’s hero-worship.

Useless, I mean, for any hope of realistically confronting Trumpism’s threat to republican institutions, and for understanding the national founding.

Nichols does concede, in what amounts to a side-paragraph, before resuming the praise, that the first president’s “personal code had one severe omission. Like other southern Founders, Washington did not let his commitment to freedom interfere with his ownership of other human beings.” Kind of a dodgy way to put it. The pursuit of slavery wasn’t a sin of omission, something unfortunately left out of a code otherwise spotlessly noble; to Wulf’s point, it was an active pursuit, bound up in everything Washington did. The pursuit wasn’t limited to southern founders, either. (I also don't get why The Atlantic capitalizes “founders,” but whatever.) This phenomenon pervading Washington’s life makes him no different, as both Wulf and Nichols are of course aware, from most men of that type in that day, and some not of that type.

So where Nichols seems to be expressing regret that Washington's supposed exceptionality in other areas didn’t make him exceptional in this one, Wulf, shifting the frame, makes Washington, on this issue, an unexceptional representative of his type, and thus makes the founders, as a whole and in this one overwhelming sense, tyrants. She does note the better behavior of some Virginians, who freed their slaves, but none of the famous founders was an abolitionist, and all of them, including non-slaveowners, benefited in one way or another from the workings of slavery in the economics of the country. In this frame, Washington doesn’t stand out.

Tyranny also prevailed in other areas of life during the founding period. Men laid down the law for wives, mothers, and daughters, and while few would claim that the near-absolute authority of men over women made women the equivalent of chattel slaves, few who engage seriously in these discussions would view that authority as anything but arbitrary, which is the kind of power Nichols is talking about in his essay. Exercising arbitrary power over others—tyranny—pervaded life in the founding generation.

Hence what I see as the category error. Nichols is talking about an approach to the presidency taken by a founder who, he concedes, sort of, was imperfect on slavery. Wulf is taking Nichols’s praise of Washington as a pretext for foregrounding what is really the whole founding elite’s involvement in a crime against humanity, while conceding Washington’s greatness in establishing anti-tyrannical precedents in the presidency. They’re talking past each other, in a well-worn circle that allows them to assent in avoiding certain realities that routinely go unacknowledged in these discussions, and I think what they’re leaving out is what's really most salient in Washington’s relationship to the presidency, especially if we’re talking about confronting the significant threat posed by Trumpism.

It's what the historians agree on that I dissent from.

No, I don’t take Washington to be a tyrant in the dictatorial sense that Nichols, Wulf, and the rest of us have good reason to fear the craziest and most dangerous Trumpists want to create. But I don’t think George III was that kind of tyrant either, and I don’t think anybody else does, at least anybody serious about these things. The notion that the American presidency, and Washington’s way of serving that office, represent a historically innovative exercise in placing limitations on executive power doesn’t play for me. That development occurred on a spectrum. It began in British culture as far back as, say, Magna Carta, and it’s never given us good bulwarks against the usurpations and overturnings of existing republican institutions that the rise of modern dictators has so often involved. Whenever the founders raised the specter of demagogues overturning republican institutions, they were arguing not against extreme assertions of executive power (often they were arguing in favor!) but against what they saw as democratic excess. For them, democratic excess included certain elements seen today as benchmarks of legitimacy in government: broad representation, universal suffrage, national protections for individual rights, innovations they claimed would lead to tyranny. Their ideas about such matters are irresolvably at odds with ours.

As to everybody’s favorite story, Washington’s giving up power. I mean, come on. Give me a break.

As commander of the Continental Army, the story sentimentally goes, the general had an opportunity to do what Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell had done before him and Napoleon Bonaparte would do after him: lead that army in taking over the country and becoming a ruler. I don’t know how many of the historians who push this idea have gotten a good look at the Continental Army, but I bet Nichols, who teaches at West Point has, and I know Washington did. If the old question “yeah? with whose army?” comes to my mind, I imagine the general, if the issue had come up, would have had a similar thought. He might have pulled it off, but sustaining that particular outfit in a state of consistent vigilance would have been quite the headache.

And to what conceivable end? Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon: those guys had something to take over, something big, some ancient concentrations of great force. Coffers of gold. Existing bureaucracies. Multiple palaces. Huge armies populated by a professional warrior class, imperial expansion, mass extraction of resources and labor, mighty revenue streams. People take over for reasons.

Washington may not have been the deepest thinker in the founding generation, but few were cannier at appraising value, and I don't think this takeover proposition would have crossed his mind. The temptation Washington supposedly resisted was no temptation.

Nichols, in his discussion of what’s known as the Newburgh Crisis—when Washington subverted what he believed was an attempt by some of his officers to mutiny and bring about a coup—cites the adoring Washington biographer Stephen Knott to the effect that the general could have, at that moment, “with a nod of his head, gained a throne.” Thrones are for something other than sitting on. If I were Washington, I think I’d be wondering not only where this imagined throne would be set up but also why it would be set up there and what setting it up would get me. To a bad angel whispering “Hey, Georgie, all this could be yours,” the general might reasonably have asked “all what?” If there was one thing our first real-estate developer president knew, it was how to get ahead. 100 years ago or so, it was taken as given by many historians that pursuit of commercial gain is what drew him to the resistance to Britain in the first place. Certainly he knew without having to think about it that he would get a lot farther by “going home,” as the sentimentalists have it—more realistically it was “going back to the relentless pursuit of wealth that had drawn him into this thing”—than by trying to become the Glorious Emperor of Nothing Special.

The other big career highlight hymned by the fanbase, Washington’s decision to not seek a third presidential term, has also been drastically overplayed.

Washington is on the record opposing presidential term limits, and he had no intention of setting a precedent for a two-term tradition. (If Nichols and Wulf disagree with B.G. Peabody’s scholarship on that issue, OK, but then maybe they should clarify why, not just ignore it.) In 1799, the Federalist Party toyed with bringing Washington back for a non-consecutive third term (he died). Later presidents considered third terms too. When FDR broke through and actually did it, some called it tyranny, or at least a flirtation with tyranny, and you might think Nichols, given his view of the meaning of Washington’s deciding to give up power, would see FDR’s third and fourth runs as just such a flirtation. Yet he mentions FDR only admiringly: a president who emulated Washington’s wartime leadership. None of it adds up.

The real problem for me—the disheartening thing, when it comes to eminent scholars’ discussing U.S. history in the context of the real and present dangers presented by Trumpism—is that neither Nichols nor Wulf has any interest in certain aspects of Washington’s presidency that were critically important to Washington himself and, far from a bulwark against the kind of tyranny that Nichols is talking about, prefigured it. To begin with, just the office, as designed. Washington fully supported its conception as a solo position with broad powers to be exercised independently of the legislative branch. There were in fact less monarchical alternatives.

But also the maniacal cult of personality around Washington himself. Nichols does discuss that, but he can see it only a healthy sign of high public regard, nothing like an 18th-century version of a fanatical Trump rally, which is how I see it.

Then there’s the 1794 deployment of an overwhelming, occupying military force, led by the first president against the entire citizenry of western Pennsylvania, with door-kicking, warrantless mass arrests and indefinite detentions without charge, in response to events that the administration had gone out of its way to incite.

Also consider Washington’s desire to have opposition organizations shut down as seditious and people arrested for attending meetings.

And really, what are you going to do with the stark fact that as former president, he didn't just support the tyrannical Alien and Sedition Acts but thought they erred in not going far enough?

One might hope, amid our legitimate fears of fascist activity emerging from the incoming executive branch, that important historians of the American past would be examining the traditions and tendencies in our early history that have tended to encourage just such dangerous outcomes. Well, no, at this point one can’t hope that—but one can still regret the liberal history establishment’s seeming commitment to refusing to face potentially disastrous aspects of our founders’ systems and attitudes in this exact regard. It’s a refusal that, if you believe the liberal academy has an important role to play in shoring up a liberal society, might in itself be disastrous.

Wulf concludes her essay by reiterating the point iterated so often by the Americanist history establishment in the past near-decade. “… we don’t need heroes,” she says, “—even Washington—as much as we need to know and confront [our] fullest history.”

It’s not as clear to me as it is to the professional historians that if the American public is to fend off fascism, it must learn what professional historians claim to know. But if our current politics really might in fact benefit from confronting our history, then I think we’d do better to confront the most relevant parts of it.

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Further Reading

Nichols’s essay

Wulf’s essay

Scholarship on Washington and term limits by B. G. Peabody (paywalled, sorry)

I track Washington’s tendencies toward authoritarianism, as well as his activities during the Newburgh Crisis, in The Hamilton Scheme and his progress from commercial activity to involvement in the Revolution in Autumn of the Black Snake.