His excellence in all things is so much a matter of record that, in the American imagination, he has lost much of his humanity. George Washington was the general who led the Continental Army to a seemingly impossible victory over British forces, at a time when Great Britain was the world’s sole superpower. Years later, he presided over the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in 1787, and oversaw the drafting of the Constitution that made the United States of America a more perfect union. By universal consensus, he became the first President of the United States; and during his two terms in office, he guided the young nation with wisdom and restraint, and set many of the precedents that we take for granted today as hallmarks of American democracy.

Did he make it all look too easy? Is that why so many of us see him as a stiff, unsmiling figure – a re-animated Gilbert Stuart portrait, strutting robotically across the American stage?

In His Excellency: George Washington, Joseph Ellis restores George Washington’s humanity. In contrast with the hagiographic, cherry-tree nonsense foisted upon the American and international public by so many prior biographers, Ellis works to provide “a more potent, less iconic, portrait” (p. 275). Knowing that the man who did all these extraordinary things was not the Zeus-like figure on the 25-cent piece or the one-dollar bill, but was rather a tall Virginian who constantly fought to control his temper and often doubted his fitness for the positions of importance constantly entrusted to him, makes George Washington’s heroism more human and more real.

Biographer Ellis, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, seeks constantly to give the reader the inner Washington, the man behind that gravely courteous, aristocratic façade. When, for example, Ellis considers young Washington’s often-expressed feelings of distrust toward Robert Cary, the London mercantilist who received the tobacco from Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation and shipped consumer goods to Mount Vernon in return, Ellis sees Washington’s negative feelings toward Cary as “a stark statement of Washington’s dependence on invisible men in faraway places for virtually his entire way of life. If the core economic problem was tobacco, the core psychological problem was control, the highest emotional priority for Washington, which, once threatened, set off internal alarms that never stopped ringing” (p. 51).

As a military officer, Washington was far from perfect; any visitor to Fort Necessity in Pennsylvania will see at once that Washington placed that French & Indian War fort “in a hopelessly vulnerable position” (p. 17). During the American Revolution, however, Washington showed a strong ability to learn from his mistakes, as Ellis discusses perceptively what Washington realized during a winter encampment at Morristown, New Jersey, in 1777. As Ellis tells it, Washington disliked the “Fabian tactics” of preserving one’s army by avoiding pitched battles because he considered it a tactic of the weak: “Washington did not believe that he was weak, and he thought of the Continental army as a projection of himself. He regarded battle as a summons to display one’s strength and courage; avoiding battle was akin to dishonorable behavior, like refusing to move forward in the face of musket and cannon fire” (p. 101).

Yet Washington was able to change his thinking, and his tactics, in order to achieve the broader strategic goal of wearing down British willingness to continue the war in North America. Many American generals from the 240-plus years since Lord Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, Virginia, might have benefited from emulating Washington’s example of being able to think anew and act anew.

Ellis’s Washington impresses by his authentic humility; when he surrendered command of the Continental Army and returned to his home at Mount Vernon, Ellis argues, “Washington himself experienced these years as an epilogue rather than an interlude….His public career, he firmly believed, was over, his life nearly so” (p. 150). When what we now know to have been an interlude ended, and Washington answered his country’s call to become the first American President, he wielded power with comparable restraint, choosing, in the realm of domestic policy, “to delegate nearly complete control to his ‘co-adjutors’” because of “his recognition that executive power still lived under a monarchical cloud of suspicion and could only be exercised selectively. Much like his Fabian role during the war, choosing when to avoid conflict struck him as the essence of effective leadership” (p. 200). Good judgment on Washington’s part, especially considering that the “co-adjutors” mentioned by Ellis included James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Henry Knox, John Jay, and Edmund Randolph. What president wouldn’t want a Cabinet like that?

And Washington’s example of dignity and restraint served the country well one last time, when war hysteria against the French swept the young United States during the administration of Washington’s successor as president, John Adams. While Washington, as American political parties began to form, certainly sympathized with Adams and the Federalists, as opposed to Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans, nonetheless his “initial response to the hysteria was characteristically measured. He thought the prospects of a French invasion were remote in the extreme” (p. 250), and his voice of moderation once again made a positive difference.

Ellis does not shy from considering Washington’s relationship with slavery; indeed, as Washington was one of the wealthiest slaveholders in Virginia, the issue demands consideration. Ellis’s verdict regarding Washington and slavery is characteristically fair-minded: while “there was a clear long-term evolution in his thinking toward the recognition that human bondage was a moral travesty”, Washington seems to have tried to balance that moral judgment with “a relentlessly realistic insistence that ideals per se must never define his agenda” (p. 259). We may feel that Washington fell short in not pushing more forcefully for emancipation toward the end of his life, after the example of his fellow luminary Benjamin Franklin; but Ellis sees Washington’s restraint in this regard as “an integral part of the same rock-ribbed realism that had proved invaluable, indeed his trademark quality, as commander in chief and president” (p. 259).

His Excellency: George Washington shows us why a thoroughly human and imperfect George Washington can still be considered “primus inter pares, the Foundingest Father of them all” (p. xiv). As historian Ellis grew up in Alexandria, Virginia – where Washington is honored by a Masonic National Memorial that replicates the classical Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria, Egypt; where one can walk into Christ Church and sit down in the Washington pew where Washington worshipped -- perhaps this is the book that Ellis was born to write. It is a great work of biography.

Pretty good biography if youre interested in his life

Joseph J. Ellis' stated goal in writing this biography was to produce a book that people could actually read, and I think he really succeeds. His Excellency George Washington comes in under 300 pages, which is about a third of the length of David McCullough's fine John Adams. It really is hard to get to know the personality and character of someone so mythical as George Washington, but Ellis does a good job at displaying his virtues (which are many) along with his weaknesses. There is a popular notion that George Washington was the only man that could have won the War for Independence and successfully overseen the founding a new democratic nation. After reading the book, I am convinced that it is true. This book is surprisingly accessible, moving along briskly through Washington's eventful life, and I would recommend it to anyone.

“Washington was more omnipresent for me than Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, but also more distant…Jefferson, it seemed, was like Jesus, who had come to earth and spoken directly to us. Washington was like God Himself, levitating above it all…Washington was aloof and silent, like the man in the moon.” So relates Ellis about his own impressions of George Washington, as Ellis himself is an eminent historical scholar and writer. The imagery of George Washington as the secular equivalent of God the Father, in the form of Father of the United States is a heavily prevalent theme in this work. While Washington is the most recognizable name and figure in American history, few know a great deal about the man as an individual, or his personal character, which is the primary focus of Ellis’ writing in this work.

Until recently, Washington has been revered like a demigod for his contributions to the emergence of the United States and its development into the modern world’s superpower nation. Modern historical reassessment has coincided with cultural shifts in thinking on race to tarnish the once unimpeachable character of “the Foundingest Father of them all”(Ellis playfully labels Washington). The inescapable issue of slavery seems so incompatible with the ideas of liberty Washington spent his life in service to, that on a cursory glance, he seems a great hypocrite. Yet, as he always does, Ellis performs admirable work in attempting to contextualize how those two ideas could exist simultaneously in the same person. Ellis demonstrates the gradual shift in Washington’s internal thoughts on human bondage. Refreshingly, he doesn’t attempt to canonize as a saint or sanitize the reality, but shows the greater complexities of Washington’s understanding of the incompatibility of slavery with the principles of liberty secured by the American Revolution.

Beyond that issue, Ellis expertly interprets the massive collection of the George Washington manuscript collection to resurrect the flesh and blood man that actually lived and breathed during the birth of a new nation, indelibly imprinted onto the fabric of its existence, like a maker’s mark on an article of clothing. Highly recommended to anyone wishing to better know and understand the inimitable George Washington, “His Excellency”.

A decent Washington biography with a heavy focus on pre-revolutionary times through the end of the Revolutionary War. Relatively scant attention is placed on his presidency or post-presidency, which reflects the author’s primary research source: the letters of George Washington. One almost gets the impression that Washington, presidency and post, is but a passive historical figure.

Each topic area is gone over relatively briefly and intertwined within a larger narrative that flows relatively seamless.

Loved reading this history of George Washington by Joseph Ellis. Covered very well the many positions his was put in and his great leadership.

"Benjamin Franklin was wiser than Washington; Alexander Hamilton was more brilliant; John Adams was better read; Thomas Jefferson was more intellectually sophisticated; James Madison was more politically astute. Yet each and all of these prominent figures acknowledged that Washington was their unquestioned superior." (pg xiv) And in this "modest-sized book about a massive historical subject," Joseph Ellis looks at why Washington was so highly regarded, both by his contemporaries and by history.

Ellis astutely points out that many others (such as Cromwell, Napoleon, Lenin, Mao, and Castro) were pivotal in orchestrating successful revolutions but only Washington declined to assume power in a military dictatorship (pg 139). And perhaps Washington's greatest trait was understanding that stepping aside would enhance the way he was viewed by posterity far greater than simply assuming power. He was always ambitious, looking for ways to integrate himself into Virginia society as a younger man, but he also knew when to exercise restraint and keep himself above the fray.

As the key figure of the American Revolution he kept up the struggle even when all odds were against him - flagging support among the populace, poor condition of the Continental Army, lack of support from Congress, the supremacy of British strategy and control of the seas, French reluctance to provide assistance. And yet such experience taught him the importance of a strong federal government and guided his role as President of the new nation. There were no prior examples to draw from or precedent to follow, and although his own lack of a formal education was a constant embarrassment to him, he intuitively knew how to utilize the strengths of others and manage the competing ambitions of those around him in setting the nation on a path to stability.

Ellis hasn't exactly written a biography in the classic sense, although he does chronicle Washington's life, but it's enhanced by a deep character study of this important man. And few are as adept at bringing history's characters to life in such an insightful way and putting the reader into their shoes. It was in strong contrast to John Ferling's The Ascent of George Washington. Where Ferling looks at a events with a critical eye enhanced with 200 years of historical hindsight, Ellis sees beyond the failings to the motivations and greater social customs of the day and makes the history personal in a way no one else does. Although the book was a little slow starting it was so packed with valuable insight that it merits a close reading. I highly recommend it.

A great single-volume biography of the Father of Our Country (in the U.S.A., that is) that seeks to tell the honest truth about the man and the legends around him, showing his flaws and extolling his virtues, Joseph J. Ellis states that while there are multi-volume biographies that are more comprehensive, his purpose was to try to condense the available information into one book, sifting information and filtering it while revealing more recent discoveries.

And, for the most part, Ellis succeeds. He paints Washington as a great man but not a man without flaws and weaknesses, but that helps us respect the great man even more – knowing that he accomplished all that he did with his flaws.

Part of the reason for that is that, although he had deeply held beliefs, he was adaptable. A case that Ellis talks about is Washington’s military strategy, where Washington always wanted to fight a decisive battle similar to the battle of Breed’s Hill where he forces the British to confront his forces in a frontal assault. However, at various times, he had to adopt both a “posting” strategy – letting the British own most of the territory while strategically attacking in small skirmishes – and a guerilla strategy (as employed in the campaigns in the South, although Washington did not lead those) because circumstances required changes to the grand strategy.

His recognition of this change was tested after Saratoga and the fall of Philadelphia in 1777. At this time, he was being urged to be more aggressive like Gates had been against Burgoyne, but circumstances would have made this a poor choice. Washington patiently bade his time, even in the face of talk (called the Conway Cabal) that Washington should be replaced.

He set many precedents during his presidency, defining the office with restraint while resisting (in most cases) the urges of his Federalist advisors and cabinet secretaries to a more monarchical role while defending the role from the Republican influences of Madison and Jefferson (whose French Revolution-inspired sympathies were to a more anarchical philosophy), and he stepped down after two terms despite enjoying good health and popularity (notwithstanding the criticisms of Republican newspapers editors of the time, such as Benjamin Franklin Bache, in addition to Jefferson and Madison). The schism in his cabinet between the two factions led to the creation of political parties in American politics.

Topical at the time I finished this book, the focus of his post-presidency years was on a complex financial scheme that involved selling off parcels of his property that would enable him to free all of the slaves under his control. (It is doubtful that the slaves that were part of Martha’s dowry could be released, and she may not have felt the benevolence that Washington did). Viewed in the microscope of history, it doesn’t seem significant that he released the slaves he controlled at his death (with stipends and housing to provide for their basic needs, as well as education to help them be gainfully employed), but consider that he was the only one of the vaunted Virginia framers to actually live up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence by doing so.

Political intrigues with Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and others as the Republicans and Federalists began to split into parties drove him from politics, and he had hoped to live into the 1800s (he missed the end of 1799 by just a few weeks). Yet he was able to be the leading figure in both the fight for independence and the struggle for nationhood – the Father of Our Country, indeed.

In all, a comprehensive biography - as Ellis intended - and fair in its assessments. I probably would go with 4.5 stars, (or 9 out of 10) but have rounded up for Goodreads.

I really enjoyed this biography of George Washington. Joseph J. Ellis does a great job of creating an interesting book that is short and easy to read, and that allowed me to get an understanding and image of the person of Washington. He did an amazing job of providing the essence of Washington’s character and motivations.

He kept returning to themes in Washington’s life, calling out those things about Washington that persisted and affected him throughout his whole life, such as his always valuing practical realism over moral idealism, and the formation of his leadership style and decision making via experience and “elemental education,” versus formal education. He also points out parts of Washington that form and change over the years, such as his ever-evolving view of slavery and his growing self-control and desire to be judged well by posterity.

For better or worse, it is not very detailed in its description of events and background information. It also isn’t a specifically chronological history of the time period. I enjoyed that rather than discuss and detail events of which Washington was a part, he framed Washington around those events.

Here is a quote I think really captures the essence of Washington’s thinking: “The second long-term pattern in his thinking about slavery was a relentlessly realistic insistence that ideals per se must never define his agenda; indeed, he associated an idealistic agenda with sentimental illusions, like the belief that American virtue was sufficient to defeat Great Britain in the war, or that the French Revolution would succeed because it was a noble cause. His earliest apprehensions about slavery, after all, were more economic than moral; namely, that it was an inefficient labor system ill-suited for the kind of diversified farming he had begun to practice at Mount Vernon in the 1760s… Ideals were not irrelevant to Washington, but he was deeply suspicious of any idealistic agenda that floated above the realities of power on the ground.” (Pg 259)

I guess after reading Chernow’s Washington masterpiece and Alexis Coe’s excellent alternate look at Washington (while having a crack at “The Thigh Men”), Ellis was on a hiding to nothing.

That said, it never gripped me and I found myself thankful it is a relatively brief affair. And Ellis is a card carrying Thigh Man (so called because he and other all male authors rave about Washington’s amazing thighs, among other things).

Clearly I should have read this before the other two, but never mind. It was OK without hitting any standard I would expect from someone so well renowned.

I made a goal at the beginning of 2024 to read more biographies, especially those featuring people I admire. His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis is a perfect example of why I wanted to do this. Despite my education, I found that my actual knowledge of Mr. Washington was very limited and narrow. After reading this book, I not only feel like I know significantly more than I did previously, but I admire and respect our first president so much more. One of the most impactful points made in the book was that there may be more exciting historical figures or those whose words inspire us more today, but the one person the Founding Fathers respected most and held in the highest esteem was George Washington. It was obvious why by the time I finished.

Just a quick note on the author's writing style. I thought Mr. Ellis did a great job being balanced and fair in this biography. I appreciated that when he inserted his opinion or judgement he was clear that it was just that and not a fact or documented event. When he did this, he also presented other points of view and why he doesn't necessarily agree with them. I liked this because it allowed me to think critically about what he was saying and why he felt that way.

His Excellency George Washington frees Washington from the frozen icon/monument status that has gathered around his name. Instead, it presents him to the reader as an approachable, flesh and blood portrait. Ellis steers cleanly between Charybdis and Scylla, avoiding the twin errors of portraying his subject as a saint, or its opposite, which he describes in his prefaces as:
”the deadest, whitest male in American history."
He accomplishes this in a modest 275 pages, making this book an ideal introduction for those beginning to study the life of Washington.

The central thesis of this work is that Washington's career was driven by an enlightened self-interest, tempered by a hard-earned practical wisdom. Always sticking closely to the available evidence, Ellis shows us a young Washington full of ambition for wealth and social status that he learned to control and temper, but never eliminate. Ellis writes that:
”ambition this gargantuan were only glorious if harnessed to a cause larger than oneself, which they most assuredly were after 1775."

He shows us Washington as a self-educated man, not from books like his illustrious contemporary Ben Franklin, but from practical, visceral experiences of a youth spent fighting the French and Indians in the back country of Pennsylvania. He views Washington's defeat at the Great Meadows and his survival of the carnage of Braddock's massacre as critical events that freed him of illusions, and left him a man who viewed the world through practical realities rather than shimmering ideals. This practical education, working on his natural ambition, created the control mechanisms that allowed Washington to serve his nation long and well.

Ellis writes mainly of the public Washington. He begins the book not with Washington's birth, but at the point in his youth when he first appeared on the world stage. While the short length of the book limits the depth of its inquiry, it does manage to touch on most every important aspect of Washington's public life, including his positions on dealings with the American Indians, and his evolving ideas about the injustice of slavery. Many other books exist that can provide greater in depth, comprehensive accounts of Washington. This book serves as an outstanding, balanced introduction to the man called the father of our country, and is an excellent place to begin.