The Read on George Washington

George Washington—surveyor, planter, commanding general of the Continental Army for eight and a half years, president of the Constitutional Convention, first President of the United States for two terms, and the man who gave the office back twice: the 1783 resignation of his commission and the refusal of a third term. Famously reticent in deliberative bodies—he presided over the Convention for four months and is recorded speaking on substance a handful of times. His published Farewell Address warned against permanent alliances and party spirit. No formal education past his mid-teens, a fact he remained sensitive about his whole life; as a boy he hand-copied one hundred ten Rules of Civility and kept the habits. His self-presentation was managed and deliberate: the uniform worn to the Second Continental Congress, the reserve maintained in public, the correspondence carefully filed and preserved.

Mount Vernon—five farms run as one enterprise on detailed weekly reports; he switched the estate from tobacco to wheat after concluding from his own ledgers that tobacco enriched the London factors and exhausted the soil, and he ran a fishery, a mill, and later a distillery off the same accounts.

Surveying from sixteen—licensed, paid work on the frontier, his first trade and first capital. Militia colonel at twenty-two with no military schooling; the rest was learned in the field, mostly from losses. Hand-copied the Rules of Civility as a boy; managed his education by reading agriculture, accounts, and law as needed. No college, no Europe, no languages—the gaps he managed around all his life by preparation and by silence.

The record, role by role, losses stated first because they taught the method. At twenty-two, the Jumonville affair and the surrender of Fort Necessity—he signed capitulation terms written in French he could not read, confessing an assassination, and the frontier war that followed became a world war. Aide to Braddock in the ambush that destroyed the column. As commander from 1775: lost New York in a chain of defeats, saved the army by the Delaware crossings and Trenton-Princeton; thereafter his generalship was preservation—keep the army alive, avoid the decisive battle, outlast. Valley Forge and Morristown: the army held together through two starvation winters by logistics, inoculation against smallpox ordered for the whole force, and his daily presence. Yorktown: the one great set-piece, executed with the French. Resigned his commission to Congress in 1783—the relinquishment that made his reputation in Europe. Presided over the Constitutional Convention. As President: built the executive branch from nothing—the cabinet, the departments, the precedents, nearly all of which held; managed Hamilton and Jefferson in open war at his own table for three years; put down the Whiskey Rebellion by leading militia in person, then pardoned the convicted; signed the unpopular Jay Treaty and absorbed the storm; declined a third term and published the Farewell. The slavery record runs the whole arc and is stated plainly: he enslaved over three hundred people at Mount Vernon, pursued the escaped Ona Judge across state lines while President, and freed his enslaved people only by will, effective at his wife's death—both halves are his.

Served on his headquarters staff for three years and dined at Mount Vernon after the war. The working method never varied: written reports demanded on schedule, councils of war where he asked every officer's opinion in order of rank and spoke last, decisions issued in writing the next day. He rode the same daily circuit of the five farms at Mount Vernon that he rode of the camps at Valley Forge, and the inspection was the management. His temper is real and famous among those who have seen it—twice in my service—and the control of it is the more famous fact; it goes back into the box within the minute. At Newburgh, facing officers on the edge of mutiny over back pay, he did not argue the case; he fumbled for his new spectacles and said he had grown gray and nearly blind in the service—and the room broke. He said almost nothing at the Convention for four months and was the man every faction assumed would execute whatever was decided. What I never saw him do: improvise in public, speak beyond his information, or leave an account unsettled. The ledgers at Mount Vernon record the weather, the work, and every shilling, in his own hand, for forty years.

I chair a board that has just hired a founder-CEO's successor into a company held together by the founder's personality. I want to understand how he built institutions that ran without him, and how to approach a man famous for reserve.