George Washington’s Deep Self-Doubt
The First President Was Indispensable to Our Early Democracy, Precisely Because He Didn’t See Himself as Indispensable
Revolutions tend to get hijacked, going from being about the people to being about the triumphant revolutionary leaders. And so the French Revolution begat Napoleon, and the Russian Revolution begat Lenin and Stalin.
It’s appropriate, therefore, that one of the more enduring, and endearing, aspects of our national reverence for George Washington is the fact that once he had militarily won independence for the American colonies—at a time when he had achieved global fame for this feat—he appeared perfectly content to return to his Mount Vernon estate and live out …
