Human Trustees

I would not have written this post had I not been part of a foursome virtual book club. One of these friends from my 1970s seminary days in the Boston area had been reading a book by award-winning author specialized in early American history (four awards, including being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize): Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Eye of the Hurricane: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown. So we decided to read this book and discuss it together.

An expert in the naval battles and other seafaring adventures (including his book, Why Read ‘Moby-Dick’?), Philbrick puts his knowledge to use and argues that the victory at Yorktown was the decisive breakthrough that would lead to the end the Revolutionary War. That’s because that war would never have ended without Washington’s patient bridge-building with and diplomatic pressure on the French navy’s admirals.

Though the French naval victory over the British on September 5, 1781 in the adjacent Chesapeake Bay was technically a standoff, the British suffered so much damage that they had to return to New York for several months of repairs. This prevented them from rescuing seven thousand British and German soldiers holed up in the nearby Yorktown fort. British General Cornwallis’s surrender a few days later was no surprise. Between the 20,000 French sailors in the bay and the 8,000 French soldiers fighting alongside Washington’s 3,000 American militia, Cornwallis knew from the start that the odds were not on his side.

Most history books place almost all of the emphasis of this victory on Washington’s long march south to the Chesapeake in coordination with the French general Rochambeau. As significant as that effort was, Philbrick intends to set the record straight. American historians tend to downplay the Battle of the Chesapeake because no Americans were involved. And yet . . .

Washington’s five years of war before this had taught him that his rebel army, though it had the advantage on being on its own land, Britain’s powerful fleet of warships guaranteed their control of all the coastal cities. He learned early on that without the help of the French navy (and soldiers they were transporting), the Continental Army could not win the war. A humbling thought, is it not? But Washington had become a wise military leader who could seize up the situation as a whole, without letting his own ego stand in the way.

In what follows, I present a few other lessons, focusing on the ones that seem most important to a majority of Americans in December 2025.

Washington’s incredible perseverance

The turncoat Benedict Arnold, once a decorated commander in Washington’s army, was now a British general sent from New York to establish a fortified garrison in Portsmouth, on the southern tip of the Chesapeake coast. Though the French admiral De Ternay had died suddenly, his second in command, Charles Destouches, won a brilliant victory against the British admiral Arbuthnot at Cape Henry in March 1781 but failed to follow through on it and force the British navy to leave the Chesapeake Bay area. Had Destouches done so, the soldiers he was transporting would have joined Washington’s Continental Army and crushed Arnold’s outpost in Portsmouth, and thereby eliminating much of the British threat from the Carolinas to Virginia (the Southern front).

Washington also faced bitter head winds internally. His army was dangerously exhausted, underpaid and underequipped, and Congress was so divided that it could not come up with any more money to support it. Philbrick quotes from some of Washington’s correspondence from the time:

“Not only had Destouches’s unconsummated mission against the British fleet and ultimately Arnold wasted precious resources, it had raised and then dashed the country’s expectations just when ‘we stood in need of something to keep us afloat . . . . Without a foreign loan, our present force (which is but the remnant of an army) cannot be kept together this campaign [sic].’ Washington went on to list some of the other challenges facing the country and its exhausted army such as Congress’s inability to exert ‘a controlling interests over the states’), then stopped himself. ‘But why need I run into the detail when it may be declared in a word that we are at the end of our tether and that now or never our deliverance must come’” (105-6).

This was only five months before the Battle of the Chesapeake followed by the victory at Yorktown. Washington persevered despite seemingly unsurmountable obstacles, that year, and then for two more years. But he could not have won without the French navy dealing a decisive blow against their British foes.

A man of integrity and selflessness

Sometime in 1782, “a colonel in the Continental army had made the mistake of suggesting that Washington be named king of the United States. ‘[Y]ou could not have found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable,’ Washington had thundered back in response. ‘[B]anish these thoughts from your mind, and never communicate . . . a sentiment of the like nature.’” Then Philbrick adds, “As they all knew, Washington would never challenge the sovereignty of Congress” (246).

So much more could be said of Washington’s honesty recognized by all. It was paired with his willingness to endure great hardship along with his soldiers over those years, and thereby exemplifying in his own behavior what he commanded them to do. When he was named by the Continental Congress as the commander-in-chief of the newly constituted army, he agreed to serve without pay but on the condition that Congress should pay for his expenses, which they finally did after settling all of his accounts in 1783.

Perhaps his most illustrious selfless gesture was that of stepping down after two terms of presidency at age 64. Young British architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe came visiting Mount Vernon soon after his retirement and wrote in his journal, “He is 64, but appears some years younger, and has sufficient vigor to last many years yet” (278). As it turned out, just three years later, after several hours of riding around his property in the “freezing rain,” he caught a sore throat that infected his lungs. He died a few days later. But the point to remember here is that Washington relinquished power willingly, knowing it was best for the democratic experiment to which he had so handsomely contributed, first as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, and then as its first president.

A man of vision, firmly believing in democracy and a strong central civil government

As the months went by, Washington’s “infected gums and decaying teeth” caused him almost unbearable pain. Also, like many of his contemporaries in their fifties, he suffered from poor vision, even to the point that reading became extremely challenging. He did get some help, but Washington, now with his reddish hair turning mostly white, had obviously aged a great deal with the rigors of eight years of war.

But as a crisis of monumental proportions was brewing in the capital Philadelphia, Washington stood at the ready to help solve it. He was no elected official, but a general, and yet, when he realized that in February 1783 his officers, who by now had lost patience with Congress which still couldn’t manage to pay them their dues after all the sacrifices they had made to save their fledgling nation. So they sent a delegation of three officers to Philadelphia: “Since the states refused to grant Congress the right to collect taxes required to pay the army, the officers had asked that, at the very least, the delegates determine what was owed each of them for future reimbursement. But even this request was encountering resistance” (246).

Washington, who had not been notified by his officers of the matter, grew alarmed. He was now beginning to understand the political rumblings in Philadelphia: some of the congressional delegates were seeing an opportunity to use the threat of the military to force the states to grant Congress the funds they needed to pay the government’s creditors (including the officers) and the power to spend it as they deemed necessary. Washington was well aware that the Continental army had been “terribly mistreated.” But here was the principle he could not bend on: one cannot use military might “to force the hand of civil government.”

Add to the gravity of the situation the fact that these officers had gone behind Washington’s back, thus undermining his authority. In fact, a couple of anonymous letters were circulated among the officers calling for bolder action. The first one called them to a meeting to draw up a plan to force Congress to give them their rightful due. Then it suggested that they “suspect the man who shall recommend moderate measures”—a thinly veiled reference to their leader, George Washington.

When he found out about the letter, Washington issued orders expressing “his disapprobation of such disorderly proceedings.” He then exhorted them to come together after four days, having pondered long and hard about the right course of action in the interest of their cause and in the best interest of their country. In other words, they should convene “after mature deliberation.” He ordered Horatio Gates (the hero of the Battle of Saratoga, and the man he suspected had something to do with the letter) to preside over the meeting and inform him of its proceedings.

Washington had no intention of attending that meeting, that is, until he came across a second anonymous address, which stated that their leader had given them the freedom to chart their own course, whatever that might be. That was patently wrong. But he also didn’t announce his intention to attend. Here is how Philbrick describes the scene:

“Soon after Gates began the meeting at noon, Washington arrived at the door and asked to be given the opportunity to speak. The unexpected appearance of the commander in chief at such an emotionally freighted moment had a riveting effect. According to Captain Samuel Shaw, ‘Every eye was fixed upon the illustrious man’” (248).

He began with an apology for changing his mind and for coming to the meeting unannounced with a prepared speech. He then proceeded to chasten them regarding the use of “an anonymous summons,” which is plainly “inconsistent with the rules of propriety,” “unmilitary,” and “subversive of all order and discipline.” As everyone present knew, Washington himself had struggled over the years to overcome his own “volcanic temper” but had largely succeeded at this point. In light of that, he upbraided the author of the summons for seeking to stir up their “feelings and passions” rather than appeal to “the reason and judgment of the army.” Instead of acting on the whims of the moment, they all should display “cool, deliberative thinking and that composure of mind which is so necessary to give dignity and stability to measures” (249).

More specifically, they should refuse “the appeal of a writer who would ‘overturn the liberties of our country, and . . . open the flood gates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood.” As officers of this young nation, they ought to “give one more distinguished proof of unexampled patriotism and patient virtue . . . and by the dignity of [their] conduct afford occasion for posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to mankind, ‘had this day been wanting, the world had never seen the last state of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining” (349).

Despite such an eloquent and thoughtful speech, the officers “remained sullen and unconvinced.” Yet Washington had one more item to share with them: a letter of support for them by the Virginia delegate to Congress. But as he began reading, it became painfully obvious that he had trouble making out the handwritten words. “Gentlemen,” Washington said, “you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind, in the service of my country.” Philbrick then describes how their commander in chief’s vulnerability melted the hearts of his officers:

“No one in the room had ever seen him wearing glasses—a sign of human frailty that overwhelmed them. ‘There was something so natural,’ Samuel Shaw recalled, ‘so unaffected, in this appeal, as rendered it superior to the most studied oratory; it forced its way to the heart, and you might see sensibility moisten every eye’” (250).

Washington then quickly left the room. The atmosphere was now radically transformed. Several officers “moved that a committee be elected to draft resolutions for Washington to forward to Congress. Soon Henry Knox and two others had produced a statement pledging the officers’ ‘unshaken confidence in the justice of Congress and their country’ and requesting that Washington plead their case for them. The resolutions passed unanimously” (250).

Washington had successfully quashed a mutiny that could have brought down the new nation. A year later, Thomas Jefferson quipped, “the moderation and virtue of a single character has probably prevented this revolution from being closed as most others have been by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish” (250-1).

A man of humble faith

The founding fathers of this nation had at least to some extent been raised Protestant. Many of them had since turned to the Deism, the philosophical belief at the heart of the 18^th Century Enlightenment, however (see this Britannica article). George Washington rarely spoke or wrote about religion. He generally attended the Anglican churches where he stayed or lived over the years, but always refused to receive communion. Yet, like many of his colleagues, he was also a Freemason. Not much more can be said, except that “[h]is personal letters and public speeches sometimes referred to “Providence,” a term for God used by both Christians and deists” (see this).

I only bring this up because Philbrick quotes from a letter he wrote in the spring of 1782, commenting on the “hurried rush of seemingly random events” which had led to the victory at Yorktown—from a hurricane in the Caribbean [hence, the book’s title], to a bloody battle amid the woods near North Carolina’s Guilford Courthouse, to the loan of 500,000 Spanish pesos from the citizens of Havana, Cuba” (xiv). Cognizant of these events, Washington concluded, “I am sure that there never was a people who had more reason to acknowledge a divine interpretation in their affairs than those of the United States” (xiv-xv).

Washington’s clay feet revealed 

It wasn’t until December 23, 1783 that Congress, barely managing to meet a quorum of twenty legislators, officially received Washington’s resignation. “Having now finished the work assigned to me, I retire from the great theatre of action. . . . I here offer my commission and make my leave of all employment of public life” (261). But duty called again in 1787 as he was asked to preside over the Constitutional Convention and was elected the United States’ first president the following year.

Washington, in the last four years of the war as recounted in Philbrick’s book, leans most heavily on two military leaders, Nathaniel Boone and the young French Marquis de Lafayette. But he was closest to Lafayette who considered him as a father. Washington received a letter from Lafayette in the spring of 1783 asking him to consider a “wild scheme”—buy a plantation together in which they would “try the experiment to free the Negroes and use them only as tenants. Such an example as yours might render it a general practice” (252). Washington answered him with praise for his benevolence and that he would like to join him “in so laudable a work.” But in practice, he did nothing to stop the slave catchers who were mandated to restore to their owners their “rightful property,” and he continued to make use of his own slaves at Mount Vernon. Still, in his will he stipulated that all of his 124 slaves should be freed, “becoming the only slaveholding Founding Father to do so” (280).

Furthermore, in his last years “he’d realized that the greatest threat to the country’s future came from slavery. Jefferson overheard Washington give this ominous warning, “I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union.” And, as if he anticipated the Civil War, he added that should it come to that, “he had made up his mind to remove and be of the Northern [portion]” (279).

None of this, or any other failings or weaknesses—we are all fallible human beings, after all—take away from this man’s great accomplishments. He was certainly a man of his times, but at least as his will demonstrated, he was less so than his Southern contemporaries.

My greatest takeaways from this brief look at Washington’s political leadership are 1) his unshakable conviction that only a strong federal government can preserve the Union; 2) his deep respect for the rule of law and the separation of powers; 3) and finally, his example of unwavering integrity and personal sacrifice for the common good of the people. He was a model of public service.

Sadly, these are qualities plainly lacking in our current president. May we take these qualities into account as we elect our next president in 2028.