George Washington and the Character of Leadership
The Leadership Briefing
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
April 27, 2018
I want to admit a bit of hesitation in addressing this issue. The title of my address today is George Washington and the Character of Leadership. In this series I’ve been honored to speak about examples of historical leadership, including Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt. I have long wanted to apply the same kind of grid and ask the same kind of questions about lessons in leadership from George Washington. I had some young people in my library the other day, and one of the teenagers asked me, he said, “Why do you have all these ships and planes in your library?” And I said, “It is because, here’s good news for you, young man, we never have to actually grow up. We get to continue all of our obsessions into adulthood. I still like planes, I still like ships, they’re just more sophisticated than they were when I was 12.”
And heroes that I had when I was a boy continue with me, obsessions that I have had for virtually all my conscious life. Learning from figures of history from whom I have learned so much, this has been a lifelong project. So what’s dangerous about speaking to this issue in 2018? What’s dangerous is that when you speak of character in presidential leadership, people immediately jump to contemporary politics and assume we’re talking about that. No, that’s not avoidable in the context, but I dare say that if we are at the point where we cannot talk about such an issue as character in leadership without fear, then all is lost and what George Washington called this experiment in Republican self-government is over. But I’m not looking to speak about the last several months or even the last several years, but rather to go back to the founding era of the United States and ask some basic questions about lessons that should be learned from the singular example of George Washington.
But even as we understand that lessons grow stronger over time and some figures loom larger over time and some smaller, we also understand that the issue of character has always been at the center of conversation about leadership, even amongst the ancients. The ancients in classical leadership, whether in Athens or in Rome, understood that one could not conceive of leadership without character. The moderns have also generally affirmed this, but between the ancients and the moderns is a redefinition of character we ought not to miss. In the ancient world, character was a set of virtues, which were to be publicly embodied, but not necessarily privately embraced. It was a model of public leadership over against the private self. In the contemporary age, character is far more about the interior than about the exterior. And so if you come up with the shortest definition of character in our age, it would likely be something like congruence between the inner and the outer self.
The inner self is largely missing from ancient conceptions of character. It was all external and it was public. It was about the man, and yes they were all men, in public leadership and the kind of virtues that should be embodied. And so what we have in the ancient age is this entirely public understanding of virtue and character and what we have in the modern age, and now in an increasingly post-Christian age is an understanding of character as authenticity. And so we speak to people having character, whether or not they possess any virtues, just so long as the inner and the outer self are in congruence. We’ve gone from to thine own self be true to merely you be you. It’s a vast cultural chasm and different understanding of character itself. And as we think about the American presidency and in thinking about leadership and character, we have to understand that there was a constant throughout most of American history that was disrupted somewhere in the last couple of generations.
So just thinking through the men who have been elected president of the United States, there was a fairly common conception of character as related to public leadership all the way from Washington, I would argue, to Eisenhower. There’s a continuity between Washington all the way to Eisenhower that was broken after president Dwight David Eisenhower. Eisenhower much like the classic leaders of old understood that leadership required public virtues, very important non-negotiable public virtues, and those virtues were bipartisan.
They would have been accepted as necessary by any party or by any major candidate. And voters generally understood a very substantial consensus about what kind of character should be expected of the nation’s chief executive, but you just mention some names after Eisenhower, immediately after Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy. And by the time we reached John F. Kennedy, American idealism on character has begun to crack. The press continues to protect a president from revelations about his lack of virtue, but it is becoming a celebrity role when it came to John F. Kennedy, who in his public life deported himself with remarkable statesmanship. But as we know in his private life, lived a very different life indeed. And what we now know, and this is the scariest part, what we now know is how widely it was known. That, for example, as a sexually promiscuous young man, long before he entered public life, but was already the son of the United States ambassador to the court of St. James in London, John F. Kennedy was conducting a well-documented affair with a Nazi spy. Later, as president of the United States, he would conduct an affair sharing a woman with a mafia don. Now you would say, that would be impossible, except not only was it real, it was fairly well known amongst the elites and the press at the time.
And this is a bipartisan problem, you go from Kennedy to Nixon. What’s of interest concerning Nixon is not his sex life, but what appears to be a paranoid self that was so determined to hold onto power at any cost that he nearly brought the Republic to the moment of its greatest crisis. And then of course you have Clinton, and then there are other names during this same period, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. I’m just ending there because I particularly am staying away from more modern presidencies, but just arbitrarily ending with George H. W. Bush, the last president of the greatest generation as it’s been called.
You understand, there was an understanding of character there. So after every experience of a crisis and character, especially after the resignation of Richard Nixon and the ascension of the unelected president, Gerald Ford, who was well understood. When he was the first vice president by action of the nomination of the president, Concurrence of Congress after the 22nd amendment, when Gerald Ford was approved by Congress, in order to be the vice president of the United States, everyone understood he was going to become president. He is the first congressionally chosen president of the United States. And the reason he was chosen, he was then minority leader of the US house, was because he was a man of impeccable character. And both parties knew that they could trust him. And even though he was never elected as had been his hope after he’d assumed office, looking back, there was a very clear consistency of character with Gerald Ford.
Jimmy Carter, a very interesting figure, a figure who has intersected with my life at many points. In high school debate in 1976, I led the debating team with statewide involvement against Jimmy Carter. My political instincts were quite different. Although as a Southern Baptist, I was very proud of Jimmy Carter. As a Southern Baptist deacon, nominated to be president of the United States, Jimmy Carter was elected president. And by the way, Jimmy Carter has not been pleased with the conservative redirection of the Southern Baptist theological seminary. President Carter spoke at the graduation for this institution just before I was elected, when commencement was held down at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts and president Carter was the speaker. President Carter does not like the conservative direction of the Southern Baptist convention, rather flamboyantly and artificially, he has resigned from the Southern Baptist convention I think four times. By the way, individuals are not members. You cannot resign that from which you did not join, but nonetheless, the press has called me several times saying, how do you respond to the fact that your denomination has taken a decision that has led president Carter to resign? I said, “You can’t resign,” but he’s already done it twice, maybe three times.
But you have to respect much about president Carter, a man of integrity, never a whiff of accusation of infidelity or immorality and a man whose politics one may or may not share, but whose commitment to humanitarian causes and furthermore evangelicals need to remember that this is a man who was so evangelistic that as president of the United States he shared the gospel with chairman Mao. I dare say that’s something that ought not to go without notice. He stared down Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary of the communist party of the Soviet Union and led to the release of many of those who had been imprisoned because of their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Figures such as Georgi Vins, some of you will remember, released as Soviet dissonance by his personal intervention. So you see his consistency of character there.
Ronald Reagan, who knew how to act the part of a president. And I mean that with absolutely no condescension, he understood the public role of the president better than any modern president, perhaps better than any president in the 20th century, other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who understood that the American people are looking for not just a political philosophy, which he had honed and made eloquent over years of presentation, but they were looking for someone who knew how to fulfill the role of the president of the United States, not only on a national, but on an international stage. And then again, George H. W. Bush, Bush 41, as he is now known, who himself embodied a lifetime of service, going back to the fact that he was the youngest combat pilot to be shot down as a naval aviator and famously rescued by a submarine or otherwise history would be very different.
So you look at that and you recognize, we really can’t talk about leadership without character. We really can’t talk about judgments. You can’t talk about leadership without making judgments of character. It’s impossible. It’s implausible. For me, it has been a lifelong project and we haven’t even turned really to George Washington. Major general Henry Lee III, he was known as Light-Horse Harry. Some of you will know in the revolutionary war. He described Washington in famous words as “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” It was quite a statement, but it well summarized the beliefs of the vast majority of Americans when Washington was not yet president, when he was president, and when he was an ex-president. He’s often described as the father of the nation. And we understand that historically the American nation cannot be explained without the towering figure of George Washington.
But why, why is George Washington so central to the American story? The historian Joseph J. Ellis puts it this way, I think better than any other. He said, “In effect, there were two distinct creative moments in the American founding, the winning of independence and the invention of nationhood and Washington was the central figure in both creations. He was the single figure, most instrumental to winning independence and after he had retired from public life or so he thought, he became the central figure in America’s new constitutional government as the first elected chief executive.” Now, why would this be the case? It certainly was not because George Washington was the most educated of those we refer to as the founders. He was not the most educated. If you look at those who were in the constitutional convention, it’s amazing how many of them were graduates of university, such as William and Mary, it would be Thomas Jefferson, who was not so much present in the convention as a looming figure over it, but William and Mary was represented. Princeton, Columbia known as Kings College, Alexander Hamilton, and of course institutions like Yale and Harvard, Harvard most famously by John Adams.
Almost all of the founders who were college graduates were first generation college graduates. In most cases, their fathers had not attended college. George Washington’s father had died when Washington was only 11 years old and Washington had entered into professional life at age 17 as a surveyor. He was ambitious, but he was not well-educated. He was a self-taught man, who sought to learn from every other man he knew. He wasn’t the most educated. He wasn’t the most advantaged. You would say that perhaps the most advantaged would be either the Adams’s or someone like Aaron Burr, who had inherited a greater claim to nobility than just about any of the other, the founding generation, who had inherited more wealth and prestige and other advantages than Washington ever knew. His grandfather of course was Jonathan Edwards. But Washington was not that advantaged. He wasn’t absolutely poor, but he was not personally wealthy.
He wasn’t the most eloquent. He was aware of the fact that his lack of formal education did not give him the kind of eloquence that others seemed to be capable of. When you think back to the founders, it’s clear that when some of them spoke, someone like Patrick Henry, it was evidently impossible for an audience not to listen to him because of his eloquence, his rhetoric, his oratory, not so with Washington. Washington, well, folks listened to him because of his character and because of the importance of what he would say, not how he would say it. Washington was not the most ambitious, that becomes an interesting question about his character. Others of the founders were far more ambitious, which is why they didn’t become president, and certainly did not become the first president. So Washington was not the best educated. He wasn’t the most advantaged. He wasn’t the most eloquent. He wasn’t the most ambitious. He was just the most necessary. He turned out to be the most important.
George Washington understood the role of the new American aristocracy, and he did intend for the nation to be led by a new aristocracy. It would not be an inherited aristocracy of wealth and country estates, it would be an aristocracy of ideas, principles, morals, manners, reputation and virtue. Key to Washington’s understanding of this is the fact that an experiment in political self-government would require personal self-government. There would be no way that a government that would be self-government, on behalf of and by and for the people. There’s no way you can be successful if the people themselves did not self-govern. And, most importantly, if their leaders did not demonstrate self-government. He was born on February the 22nd of 1732. Again, his father died when he was 11, but by the time he was 16, it’s clear that George Washington is already thinking about his character in a very determined way. Famously he copied down 110 maxims, which he defined as rules of civility and decent behavior. It would be probably a different world if every 16 year old boy sat down and wrote 110 maxims about rules of civility and decent behavior.
George Washington was not entirely original in this list. The list goes back several centuries to Jesuits and then his knowledge of it came down to the fact that a 12 year old boy had translated the document as his own list of 110 maxims of rules of civility and decent behavior. They’re pretty interesting to read. And again, you could wish that just about every American would read such rules and conduct himself or herself by them. He says, “Don’t jostle a table when someone is writing. Do not turn your back when someone is speaking. Do not pick your teeth with a knife when at the table nor appear too perplexed if someone else does.” It’s good advice. He ended with number 110, which says, “Labor to keep alive in your breasts, that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.” That little spark of celestial fire called conscience. He began working at 17 as a surveyor. His first military expedition was undertaken as he was a major. Now, this would be in a unit under the command of the British army, the King’s army, that is in 1753, he’s only aged 21 and he’s a major.
During the French and Indian war between 1756 and 1763, he rose to be Lieutenant Colonel and then Colonel. Now, one of the reasons why Washington stood out from other men was the fact that he stood above them. He was given the gift of unusual height, during the age, he was about 6’3. And if you look at the American history museums, especially as you’re at the Smithsonian and the museum of American History, and you look at the soldier uniforms, you will notice that most soldiers were not that big and they were not that tall. Nutrition being rare and genes being as they were, most men were somewhere near 5 and a half feet tall, the taller of them approaching 6’0. A young man who at age 16 or 17 was 6’3″ towered over most other men. And George Washington knew how to use his physical frame. And he was also possessed of some basic instincts towards leadership. To emerge from the French and Indian war as a Colonel, it was a remarkable achievement.
But thereafter, he turned to what he believed a new national aristocracy should represent. Now, this is a new national, this is not at this point independent from Britain, but rather a new understanding, a new order of aristocracy, landed gentlemen, planter farmers, who would represent this kind of civility and decent behavior. And so he inherited a bit of wealth, but he also received as his due promised for his military service, attractive land, to which he added much, which became now what we know is Mount Vernon. In 1767, Washington had taken his place amongst other later identified as revolutionary figures in standing against the crown and arguing, even in 1767, that the British King, King George III was ruling improperly and tyrannically over his American subjects. By the time the declaration of independence had been signed in 1776, by the time the continental army was formed, it was clear that one man and one man alone could be commander in chief. And thus, the man who had been the Colonel in the British army in one of its colonial regimens, became the commander in chief of the continental army and full general.
As you know, the American revolution was won and once the revolution was won, the most astounding action was taken by the commanding general. George Washington resigned his commission. Now in so doing, he understood exactly what he was symbolizing and why he was taking the action. He resigned his commission as commander in chief and full general of the continental army, at the very time when the continental army had turned the world upside down. King George III, hearing that Washington intended to resign his commission said, “If so, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
There were classical antecedents. Most importantly, Cincinnatus that is Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus who lived between 519 and 430 BC. He became the model of the military leader who resigns and forfeits power, power that would be at his disposal and in his grasp in order to return power to the people and then to return to non-public life. Now, it’s clear that George Washington intended to do that. It wasn’t just a symbolic act, it appears that he was ready to resign his commission. He feared what might happen in this new experiment in self-government. He feared that someone who would be a military ruler, who had become the political leader could be downright dangerous. The temptations of using military means to bring about what would be claimed to be democratic ends would just be too close. And so he retired to Mount Vernon resigning his commission on December the 23rd, 1783.
But later when the constitutional convention met with the failure of the Articles of Confederation, it became very, very clear that only one man could serve as the nation’s chief executive. But it’s more than that. The framers of the US constitution came to understand that even the nation committed to self-government required a strong leader, a strengthened executive. There’s all kinds of speculation amongst the founders and the framers as to what this might look like. The basic idea was that the American presidency, as it came to be known should be a strong executive who would be something of a democratic Monarch, effectively, an elected King. There was no other intellectual apparatus for anything other than a kingly kind of role. The question was, how exactly do you have a democratically elected King? One of my favorite aspects of this is all the controversy over what the president would be called. The most monarchial of the leading founders was John Adams. He proposed that the president should be known as his Highness, or if you will, his most benign Highness, probably there’s a lot of his Highness’s turned out not to be so benign. The Senate committee deciding on how the president would be addressed, actually came up with this formula, his Highness, the president of the United States of America and protector of their liberties. So as you hear in the background, hail to the chief, just imagine the president of the United States being addressed as his Highness, the president of the United States of America and protector of their liberties.
This led to a great deal of controversy and awkwardness until the house of representatives simply voted. And by voting resolved the question saying that they, that is the house of representatives, would refer to the president simply as Mr. President and thus it has been ever since. But the background, even in terms of that language indicates that there was a struggle to understand just what kind of president Americans must have. There was an instinct by the time that the awkwardness before the constitution, by the time the constitution and its convention had come to be, it was clear that there would have to be a strong chief executive, but there was tremendous fear about how this experiment in democratic self-government as a Republic could continue if there were to be such an elected Monarch. The bottom line in all of this is that the presidency in the US constitution was not defined in the end by ideas or principles, but rather by a person. The US constitution’s definition of the president and the role of the presidency was defined around the person of George Washington.
It becomes clear that those who framed the constitution were looking to Washington and they were projecting, perhaps, they were both reflecting and projecting their hopes of what a democratic Monarch would look like. Now that raises all kinds of questions. For example, how would Washington turn out to be the father of the nation? Well, here’s a reason many people don’t think about, George Washington in one very clear historical sense became the father of the nation because he was the father of no one else. Washington noticed this. He said, and I quote, “It will be recollected that the divine Providence has not seen fit that my blood should be transmitted, or my name perpetuated by the endearing, though sometimes seducing channel of immediate offspring. I have no children for whom I could wish to make a provision, no family to build in greatness upon my country’s ruins.” One of the reasons why George Washington became president and the presidency was defined around him was that there was not a George junior, or another George III, that would bring the risk of a hereditary democratic monarchy. Washington had no sons.
He stood alone and thus the father of none could become the father of the nation. But back to Washington and character in this new aristocracy of virtue, Gordon Wood put it this way, “Washington’s genius, Washington’s greatness, lay in his character. He was as Chateaubriand said, a hero of the unprecedented kind. There never been a man quite like Washington before and after Napoleon emerged in 1800 as a Caesar like world shattering imperialistic hero, it seemed like there may never be another like him again. Washington became a great man and was acclaimed as a classical hero because of the way he conducted himself during times of temptation. It was his moral character that set him off from other men.” He went on to say, “Washington epitomized everything the revolutionary generation prized in it’s leaders, he had character and was truly a man of virtue. This virtue was not given to him by nature, he had to work for it to cultivate it and everyone sensed that. Washington was a self-made hero and this impressed an 18th century enlightened world that put great stock in men’s controlling both their passions and their destinies. Washington seemed to possess a self cultivated nobility.” So a new aristocracy, an aristocracy not of heredity, but of virtue. A new nobility of self-made virtue. That’s very important.
This means that someone who did not have a father, who had demonstrated this kind of character or played a role in the world scene could emerge as president of the United States. Most classically in the 19th century, a rail splitter from Illinois could become president of the United States. And in the end, one of the most important and indispensable presidents. Richard Brookhiser points out that from his earliest years, George Washington cultivated this sense of nobility. He had never had any diplomatic experience and until he was elected president, he really didn’t experience any kind of diplomatic reality, and yet he had the manners of someone who had lived all his life at court. Why? It’s because even as a teenager, he cultivated certain manners and even certain formal means of life and conversation. He understood how to watch a public role and even though his own father died when he was 11, and even though he was the father to none, to become the father of the nation, he adopted many fathers along the way from whom he learned nobility and he was a keen student.
Now, how do we understand Washington’s conception of character? Well, again, I go back to Gordon Wood, I think he summarizes this better than anyone else. He wrote this, “Preoccupied with their honor or their reputation, or in other words, the way they were represented and viewed by others, these revolutionary leaders inevitably became characters, self fashioned performers in the theater of life. There’s was not character as we today are apt to understand it as the inner personality that contains hidden contradictions and flaws.” He says that, “(This present day view of character is what leads to the current bashing of the founders.) Instead,” said Wood, “Their idea of character was the outer life, the public person trying to show the world that he was living up to the values and duties that the best of the culture imposed upon them. The founders were integrally connected to the society. They never saw themselves as standing apart from the world in critical or in scholarly isolation. Unlike intellectuals today, they had no sense of being in an adversarial relationship to the culture. They were individually singular. They were undoubtedly individuals, sometimes assuming a classic pose of heroic and noble preeminence, but they were not individualists, men worried about their social identities. They were enmeshed in the society and civic minded by necessity, thus, they hid their personal feelings for the sake of civility and sociability and their public personas.”
My favorite story of this, the most famous portrait of George Washington is by Gilbert Stuart and Gilbert Stuart was trying to paint George Washington, as Washington was sitting for him and speaking in the formality that was always necessary around Washington, Gilbert Stuart said something to the effect of, “General Washington,” he liked to be called General Washington, Mr. President, General Washington. He said, “General Washington, it would be very helpful if you would forget for a moment that you are General Washington.” And Washington looked at Gilbert Stuart and said, “There shall never be need leave that Mr. Stuart should ever think of himself as other than Mr. Stuart, for Mr. Washington will never think of himself as anything other than Mr. Washington.” That’s the formality on the dollar bill. That makes perfect sense and thus the painting. He understood that he would never allow himself to be anything other than George Washington. He was never going to forget himself. He spent his entire life not forgetting himself, believing that he had a role to play.
Now as a part of that, he understood himself as an actor. Now, again, people say about Ronald Reagan, well, there’s an actor became president and he never ceased to be an actor. Well, all of the founding fathers thought of themselves as actors on a world stage. They would use that kind of language. Washington, by the way, liked to attend plays, the play of which he was most fun was Cato by Joseph J. Addison, which again was an upholding of civic virtue in the role of Cato, the younger of classical Rome. By the way, why did they emulate figures in classical Rome rather than classical Greece? Well, it’s because the American founders thought that the Greeks were incompetent political leaders. The men of lofty ideals who couldn’t run a neighborhood, much less a city state. The Romans, they believed at least knew how to run a country or an empire, and to translate their political principles into a successful political rule. Well, Washington understood himself to be an actor on the world scene. He understood that in terms of character and morality.
How did that get translated into action? Well, his resignation as commander in chief of the continental army, but later his decision not to run for a third term as president of the United States. He was the indispensable man as James Thomas Flexner has argued, but the indispensable man decided that he was not indispensable, that the nation could never actually have a successful experiment in self-government if the person supposedly serving as this democratic chief executive stayed until his death. Though Washington could clearly have remained president of the United States until his death, part only because no one would have dared to run against him. But Washington decided after eight years as president, that he would retire to Mount Vernon and it stuck. And when he went back to Mount Vernon, he stayed. In 1800, there were tremendous pleas for him to reenter public life and to run for president of the United States. But by that time, political parties had gained ascendancy over persons and Washington refused to run as the representative of a political party against which of course he had argued in his farewell address to the nation.
As an actor, Washington understood that every play has a beginning, a middle and an end. And the end was reflected in the fact that on his last day in office, he said to governor Jonathan Trumbull, “The curtain drops on my political life this evening, I expect forever,” and thus it did. And he did retire to Mount Vernon. He died December 14, 1799, buried at Mount Vernon with no funeral oration as had been his request.
What about George Washington and religion? How do we speak as Christians of character without reference to Christianity? What do we say about George Washington? Well, he was an Anglican all of his life. And in one sense, probably summarizes a rather traditional Anglican, which is to say he did not speak often of his own personal convictions, but rather he participated in the life of the church as an Anglican. He participated in worship ruled by the Book of Common Prayer, the question of an Anglican, and you could translate this into other contexts, including Catholic context. The question would be, does he take of the Eucharist? And this is a debated issue. There is no absolutely clear historical reference to George Washington taking of the Eucharist, but there are words, mostly second hand recollections that he did. We don’t know.
We do know that in the modern age, many people have suggested that along with several others of the founders, that Washington was a Deist, but that can’t be true. It can’t be true. Now, why not? Because the Deist believes perhaps as represented by someone like Abraham Lincoln’s expression, arguing Lincoln was a Deist, but a deistic expression would be something like what Abraham Lincoln affirmed in his second inaugural address when he speaks about divine judgment over time. It’s clear that Abraham Lincoln in his second inaugural address does not imply that God’s providence is ruling in the individual events, individual battles and individual lives of whom he speaks, but rather against the great tableau of history, his judgment will be revealed.
George Washington had far more particular understanding of divine providence. He believed that certain battles could only be explained by divine intervention. He credited divine providence, not in a general sense, working against the canvas of history, but rather in the specific sense of God ruling in the affairs of human beings, he affirmed that understanding of providence. He quoted scripture. His favorite text to quote was Micah 4:4. He wrote to the Rhode Island, Jewish Americans that they should be assured that religious liberty included the Jewish people. He quoted the prophet Micah again, chapter 4:4, saying that his vision of America was one in which, “Everyone shall sit in safety under his own fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.” Now, in thinking about George Washington and religion, we should claim neither too much nor too little. Nor leave out the fact that another of his commitments was to Freemasonry, which he appears not to have been merely kind of a conventional member, but actually someone who played a role defined by Freemasonry in his public life.
We’re talking about character. We’re talking about character on a public stage. We’re talking about Washington and others seeing themselves as actors on a world stage. They also saw the United States as a young nation, as an actor on the world stage. They thought the new nation was actually living before the world. And in such way, that Washington said this, and I quote, “We are a young nation and have a character to establish, it behooves us therefore, to set out right for first impressions will be lasting.” Now I’ll just say that we would all be better off and we’d sleep better in our beds at night if we understood that at all times under all administrations throughout all the decades, since George Washington, that the president and other political leaders understood that the United States is an actor on a world stage with the world watching. That’s very, very important and that they themselves are playing out a role. It’s more than that, but it’s certainly not less than that and that the world is watching.
But George Washington’s understanding of character lived out on the world stage from a Christian perspective is really important, but it’s not adequate. A character defined by classical virtues as learned from Greece and Rome and from meditations upon the Greeks and the Romans and classical virtues and the English speaking world, even in the English enlightenment, it turns out that for Christians, that’s not enough either, because George Washington’s ultimate concern in his own leadership appeared to be what others would think of him. That was that entire conception of character, what others should think of him. And again, we can understand the disaster if you have such a leader who isn’t concerned with what others should think of him. But that’s not enough, not from a Christian perspective, not from a biblical worldview, because that means that the morality and the virtues we seek would simply be established by the conventional wisdom of the age.
And the greatest example of that for George Washington is not that later he was caught with accusations of some kind of sexual scandals. As a matter of fact, there is no sticking scandal to George Washington. Modern historians have tried to come up with something. If you’re looking for that, you have to turn to Thomas Jefferson about whom is very well-documented. George Washington, there is no dirt to stick. He appears to have been absolutely scrupulous in his private life, in his business dealings, as well as in his sexual life, in his marriage. No, the great stain against George Washington is not financial or sexual, it’s the issue of slavery. And if George Washington were somehow to know that we were saying this in 2018, it’s important to recognize he would not be surprised. He would not be surprised because even as slavery is the great stain on George Washington, he understood it was also the great stain on the nation.
By the time Washington died, he owned over 100 slaves, 317 slaves were working the plantation at Mount Vernon. Some of them were dour slaves that were received from his wife, the former Martha Custis, about another several dozen were rented slaves in order to make Mount Vernon work. Famously, ironically, Washington freed his own personal slaves in his will. In 1794, speaking of his will and thinking of the issue, this is 1794. He would die in 1799. He spoke of, “A certain species of property, which I possess very repugnantly to my own feelings.” The word species here by the way, has nothing to do with any kind of biological designation, because money itself was called species. Currency was called species. This refers to property. A certain kind of property says, which I possess very repugnantly to my own feelings. By 1794 he had also said that slavery must be eradicated, but he said, “By slow, sure and imperceptible degrees.” And you look at this and you come to understand how could someone like George Washington, how could the founders and framers of the US constitution who so prized liberty and claimed that all human beings possess inherent natural rights, God given rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
How could they then deny those very natural rights to an entire class and race of human beings whom they would not only exploit, but would treat as chattel slaves. Washington at least understood that this could not long be perpetuated, but he did not have the moral fortitude to speak openly about what he believed to be repugnant, that tells us something. It wasn’t just that he had a moral judgment about slavery, he said that he believed it would be repugnant, but there’s no public statement. Now, if you’re trying to make excuses for Washington, you would say, well, there is no mechanism even for dealing with this. And of course there wasn’t, but that was the point. That’s not an excuse. This would lead just in a matter of decades and in just two or three generations to civil war. And of course it has led to a stain on the nation’s character until the very present. Washington knew that it was immoral, but all of his self made virtue, all of it was not enough for him to know what to do with the greatest moral challenge of his age.
Some interesting sidebars to this, one of our own colleagues and a good friend, Curtis Woods, whose associate executive director of the Kentucky Baptist Convention this week just defended his dissertation on Phillis Wheatley. A young girl taken from West Africa as a slave when she was seven years old, brought to Boston where she was adopted. No, that’s not even the right word. She was owned by the Wheatley family, bought by them. And she was given the name Phillis as a slave name. She became one of the most famous poets of revolutionary colonial and then early national America. In 1771, Phillis Wheatley, a young African American girl who’s a slave, who had learned to read and became a classical poet, she had gained recognition again, in 1771 when she wrote an elegy for George Whitefield. But in 1775, now remember the date, that’d be 1775, she wrote an ode to George Washington, the December of 1775. With the revolution looming and with the knowledge that George Washington will be indispensable to winning American independence, Phillis Wheatley wrote in her elegy, in this case, it’s an ode to George Washington, “Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side. By every action, let the goddess guide. A crown, a mansion and a throne that shine with gold unfading, Washington! Be thine.” We can look back with irony, with sentiment and frankly, with a sense of heartbreak at the fact that Washington was so touched by this ode by someone he knew to be a slave girl. It was sent to George Washington and he was very touched by it, he wrote back to her addressing Phillis Wheatley as Miss. Phillis, and ironically, he signed the letter, your obedient humble servant, G. Washington. Now you can understand as you look at that such a missed opportunity. Historians might not see the missed opportunity, but we must.
And the lesson we must learn as Christians thinking about leadership is this, it turns out that as important and indispensable as classical virtue is to public leadership, it’s not enough. The moral frame by which we must be guided and to which we must be committed, and by which we’ll be judged is not just a set of classical virtues, which by common grace, often embody biblical virtues. It’s rather the understanding of righteousness, truth, beauty and justice, as revealed in Scripture. We can trace and we can note with tragedy, the loss of public character is a central American preoccupation. Again, whatever’s happened in the United States, the American people decided decades ago that character was expendable. The founders would say, you can’t have national self government without personal self government and the loss of those classical virtues will be disastrous. But we also come to understand that those classical virtues are not enough and that’s what distinguishes even great political leadership from lasting Christian leadership. Because for us, it’s not just the verdict of history, it’s ultimately the verdict of God. God bless you, and thank you.