American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington, by H.W. Brands (Doubleday, 640 pp., $40.00)
No founder has loomed larger, or stranger, over American culture than George Washington. “The Father of the Nation” has turned up everywhere from the 1995 debut of George magazine, which posed Cindy Crawford as a sexed-up first president, to the German American Bund’s 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden, where his portrait hung between swastikas. And for a generation that met the Founders through Disney+’s Hamilton, Washington’s face may simply be Christopher Jackson’s. Add the countless films, shows, monuments, and musicals, and it seems Washington can be made to mean almost anything.
But what he does mean and what he should mean are two different questions, and both are still being argued over by historians and ordinary citizens alike. For some, like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he remains a pillar of American greatness, a man worth being inspired by. For others, his legacy is permanently stained by his ownership of enslaved people. This reckoning against Washington is visible in the toppled statues and removed memorials of recent years.
H. W. Brands’s new biography, American Patriarch, does not try to resolve those tensions. What it offers instead is an accessible route into both Washington’s greatness and his failings.
Apart from Abraham Lincoln, few presidents have inspired as many biographies as Washington, and one can always ask what purpose there is in adding to the pile. Brands’s answer is scale. At roughly 600 pages, American Patriarch is trim beside Ron Chernow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington: A Life, which runs to some 900, and exactly double the length of Joseph J. Ellis’s more compact His Excellency: George Washington. As someone who has read a good many Washington biographies, I’d say Brands may have found the Goldilocks length for many readers: substantial enough to do justice to the events and complexities of the life, but not so exhaustive that only the devoted will finish it. Readers already familiar with Washington’s life and times will not find much here that is new, but for the uninitiated, one could do far worse than making American Patriarch a first biography of George Washington.
As in almost all his biographies, Brands is less keen on psychoanalyzing his subject than on capturing the broad strokes of his personality. Readers will not get an intimate portrait of the Washington marriage, a sustained assessment of his religiosity, or much at all about his difficult mother. Writing for laypeople, Brands is selective, and his eye is on the Washington people already know in passing: the soldier of the French and Indian War (even more so now thanks to Angel Studio’s Young Washington), the general of the Continental Army, the first president of the United States, and the patriarch of Mount Vernon. Likewise, he does not belabor every factor that helped spark the Revolution or every layer of the political machinery that shaped the earliest days of the new government. On the more complicated matters Brands is, as usual, masterfully concise. He has the popular historian’s uncanny ability to give readers both what they want and what they need, and those who want fuller treatment of what he passes over can find it elsewhere.
Where other biographies center on Washington’s political development and evolving character, the defining element of Brands’s approach is his sense of place. Nearly every part of the book is named for somewhere that shaped him: his upbringing in Virginia; his apprenticeship as a green commander in the Ohio country in the 1750s; the siege of Boston; the hard winter at Valley Forge in 1777–78; his triumph over Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781; his years at the center of American political life in New York and Philadelphia through the 1790s; and his last years at Mount Vernon, ending with his death in 1799. Brands draws these settings from contemporary sources (mostly Washington’s own diary entries, correspondence, and field reports) and his characteristic blend of documentary detail and narrative craft pays off. Washington’s 1751 bout with smallpox in Barbados, his surveying of the rich Shenandoah country in the rain, his riding the farms to watch a wheat harvest brought in by enslaved cradlers—all of it feels lived-in and real. Brands paints America as Washington experienced it, and it works to great effect.
The War of Independence takes the largest single share of the book (a little over 30 percent) and readers unfamiliar with the campaigns that defined the Revolution will get the basics. But American Patriarch is by no means a military history. Where it delivers is in conveying what “the Cause,” as the patriots called it, actually cost. Alongside Washington’s own letters, Brands brings in Albigence Waldo, a doctor with a Connecticut regiment at Valley Forge; Joseph Martin, a private who joined the Connecticut militia at sixteen; and Friedrich von Muenchhausen, a Hessian officer serving as aide to General William Howe. Even Washington’s British opponents get their say. Given this intimate focus, it is not surprising that Valley Forge gets more room than any single battle in the book, Yorktown included. Yet readers still come away with a clear sense of Washington’s style as a general, why the Continental Congress chose him, and how his endurance and pragmatism finally won the war.
The same selectivity governs the Constitutional Convention, which Brands moves through in a couple of dozen pages. Washington’s usefulness there, he writes, was “chiefly ornamental.” As presiding officer, he rarely presided and never joined the debates, and his silence let the delegates assume he knew more than he did.
Washington’s presidency fills most of the book’s remaining chapters, and here Brands is less conventional than many of his predecessors. Most biographers organize these years around the drama of the cabinet—above all the Hamilton–Jefferson quarrel and the party system it spawned. Brands gives that narrative its due. But he also turns to the frontier, devoting unusual space to the southwestern negotiations, to Alexander McGillivray—principal chief of the Creeks (Muscogee)—and to the Treaty of New York. Even those well versed in Washington biographies should find this refreshing, and it will be largely new to anyone whose sense of the era comes only from Hamilton and HBO’s John Adams.
But students hoping the work will account for—or contest—Washington’s standing near the top of nearly every scholarly ranking will not find that argument here. As in the war chapters, Brands withholds the report card on policy decisions and outcomes. He is more interested in supplying grounds for admiration—like Washington’s awareness of the precedents he was setting, his refusal to head a party, and his unwillingness to turn his popularity into a political battering ram. And yet, as Brands details, the very qualities that made Washington indispensable (e.g., the reserve, the distrust of party, the readiness to go home) were already becoming liabilities in a democratizing country before he died. Rewriting Henry Lee’s eulogy, Brands suggests Washington was “first in war, first in peace, and last of his kind in America”—a judgment that only sharpens the longer one looks at the leaders we have now.
Washington’s admirable character runs throughout the book, but so does slavery. Brands establishes this from the opening chapters, where Virginia gradually constructs a legal system for hereditary slavery before following Washington through a lifetime shaped by the institution. He goes to war from a colony whose leaders denounce British “chains and slavery,” even as Lord Dunmore offers freedom to enslaved people who join the British. In one particularly gripping section, Brands follows one of Washington’s own enslaved men who escaped to British lines, took the name Harry Washington, and ultimately settled in Nova Scotia.
The most shocking episode comes during Washington’s presidency. Because Pennsylvania law prevented nonresidents from holding enslaved people in the state for more than six months, Washington repeatedly rotated members of his household out of Philadelphia to avoid their claiming freedom. Tobias Lear organized the transfers, which Washington instructed be carried out “under pretext that may deceive both them and the public.” Complicating matters, many of the enslaved people involved were Martha Washington’s dower slaves, making emancipation legally and financially difficult. As Brands describes it, Washington wanted to be seen as “an enlightened slaveholder” though determined to decide the timing of emancipation himself rather than allow Pennsylvania law to do it for him. He ultimately provided for the freedom of his own slaves only in his will, but not before others, most famously Ona Judge, fled Mount Vernon despite his determined efforts to recapture them.
Brands’s biography captures the ambivalence many Americans now feel about the founders: they are genuinely moved by their character, resolve, and sacrifice, but also genuinely pained by their moral failures. Earlier generations grappled with the contradiction too. But it has grown harder to hold the halves together, to admire the man and reckon with the master in the same breath.
Which brings us back to what Washington should mean. Brands declines to say, and readers who find that unsatisfying might look to the laws of history he has set out elsewhere—on his Substack rather than in these pages. His third law holds that great leaders have limited vision, that the people who move history are people of their place and time, and reformers who get more than a half-step ahead of their contemporaries lose the ability to influence anyone. In short, the flaw and the influence cannot be cleanly separated. His first law is blunter still: there are no laws of history. At the end of the day, history is not physics, but neither is it pinball. It yields patterns rather than rules, and no historian can say in advance which pattern applies in a given situation. That is this biography in miniature. Brands explains Washington without excusing him and admires him without canonizing him.
For better and worse this is the father of the country, and in the republic’s 250th year Brands leaves us to decide what to do with George Washington.
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