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  • George Washington:Founding Philosopher?
  • Alan Gibson (bio)
Jeffry H. Morrison . The Political Philosophy of George Washington. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2009. xxi + 226. Appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00.

In a brief biographical sketch that he wrote of George Washington, Mark Twain asserted that Washington had shown no early signs of greatness or sagacity. "Young George," Twain quipped, "was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie." Twain continued: "It is related of him that he once chopped down his father's favorite cherry-tree, and then didn't know enough to keep dark about it."1

Although Twain sarcastically summoned this Parson Weems image of Washington for entertainment, variations of the view that Washington was simple, limpid, and obtuse have had serious defenders since the earliest days of the republic. Thomas Jefferson credited Washington with a "great and powerful" mind and concluded that, "as far as he saw," no one's judgment was sounder. Nevertheless, Washington's mind was "slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination," according to Jefferson. "When called on for a sudden opinion, he was unready, short, and embarrassed."2 John Adams was less generous. Washington, Adams concluded, was "not a scholar" and was "too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his Station and reputation."3 More recently, John C. Fitzpatrick, editor of the Library of Congress edition of the Washington Papers, maintained that it "is easy to understand George Washington. It is easy to understand any thoroughly sincere, honest, simple soul" (p. xiv).

Such assessments—strengthened by Washington's admissions that he was "conscious of a defective education," had little time for reading, and was a man of action whose designs should be judged from his deeds—have raised a persistent barrier to serious consideration of Washington's political thought.4 To be sure, scholars have acknowledged the importance of Washington's role as president of the Constitutional Convention. They have also recognized that the letter he signed that accompanied the proposed Constitution as it was submitted to Congress and then the states gave the Constitution legitimacy and helped secure its ratification. Garry Wills and Paul K. Longmore have [End Page 629] shown how Washington shrewdly shaped his own image.5 It is also increasingly fashionable to suggest that Washington was more complex than previously thought, to seek out his Machiavellian side, and to speak of Washington's political genius. Nevertheless, few scholars have suggested that anything on the order of a "political philosophy" can be reconstructed from Washington's correspondence and state papers.6

In the Political Philosophy of George Washington, Jeffry Morrison, an associate professor of government at Regent's University and the author of John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic, argues that standard characterizations of Washington as unlearned, dense, and thus intellectually dependent on others are as "mythical as Parson Weem's tale of the cherry tree" and should not stand in the way of exploring Washington's "coherent theory of American constitutionalism" and his "fully formed political philosophy" (pp. xiv, 18). The core of Washington's political philosophy, Morrison maintains, "revolved around the central principles of union, liberty, and self-government under the Constitution, administered with virtue as an example to the world, all under the superintendence of a benevolent Providence" (p. 16). This conception of political philosophy was built by combining classical republicanism, British liberalism, and Protestant Christianity—the three ideologies that, according to Morrison, were "dominant at the Founding" (p. xiv). Indeed, Washington's "syncretism," combined with his unsurpassed popularity among his contemporaries, helps to explain how he came to embody American ideals and to be viewed as the "Father of His Country" (p. 2). Speaking the three political languages that were literally "in the air" in the early republic, Washington became "uniquely the incarnation of early American political thought" (p. xv).

More specifically, Washington, according to Morrison, had by 1789 "become the most classically republican American of his generation" (p. 63). The Greeks taught Washington and other Founders that tyranny often sprang from anarchy, which, in turn, resulted from excessive democracy, and that balanced and mixed government was the necessary antidote for this problem. They also inspired Washington...

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