Q&A: Ron Chernow, Part 2

this week on Q&A part two of our look at the new biography of George Washington by Ron chernell Ron turn now as we begin our second part discussion of your new book on George Wasington I want to ask you about some of the relationships you have with people first up Tom Payne Tom Payne at first was a great admirer of Washington actually traveled with the Continental Army uh later became very scathing critic of Washington he ended up saying Washington is treacherous and private friendship and hypocrite and his public uh life ended up publishing this very uh vitriolic open letter to Washington what happened was that Tom Payne during the French Revolution was imprisoned and he felt that Washington did not make sufficient efforts to free him Payne was an non American citizen and so he thought that Washington should have done more Washington was really in a political bind in terms of trying to apply pressure on the French government to release him so pain goes from one extreme to the other how important was he to the founding I think that he was extraordinarily important um I think that at the time that he published Common Sense uh there were a lot of people uh who had not yet been converted to the idea of independence from Great Britain and I think that at Key moments for instance after the um very long and demoralizing Retreat across New Jersey uh in um late 1776 uh pay publishes his stirring essays the crisis these are the times the tri men Souls the what is it the summer Soldier and the Sunshine Patriot will in this time of Crisis um uh not serve was it was I'm forgetting it um want serve their country uh these were very very inspirational words at a time when the cause needed it and Washington certainly thought that uh Common Sense had had a profound uh impact on people in terms of convincing them of the need for total independence from England you know when you read about the founders you see so many of them that ended up broke at the end and a guy like Tom Payne comes back to the United States and they have a little Monument to him up here in new relle New York and then they you know they dug up the bones and they supposedly all over the world what what happened to all these Founders they well Washington actually at the end of the Revolution uh he meets uh Tom Payne and Payne already um was full of Grievances and felt that he had not been properly rewarded for his role and Washington does help to Lobby on his behalf and says that Congress should should help pay out yeah there were a lot of people who were uh forgotten Benedict Arnold Benedict Dar this is one of the fascinating relationships because um Washington is completely blindsided by the treachery and you ask how could that be well um bendi darnold had shown extraordinary bravery and Daring Do first at Quebec and then at Saratoga Ben darnold had been wounded twice in the leg he was limping around he become a from his War wounds and so he's not somebody that you would have expected to turn traitor and Washington was probably more shocked by the exposure of Benedict Arnold's treachery than anything that happened during the Revolutionary War what's the story what's the story well um Arnold had a lot of different grievances he felt that other people had been promoted in preference to him uh when he was a military commandant of Philadelphia at one point during the war he' been accused of uh corruption and he was found guilty on a couple of minor accounts so he's feeling more and more bitter uh he marries a woman named Peggy shien who was sympathetic to the Tories and really the two of them begin to uh collaborate and um Arnold Maneuvers to become the uh head of West Point um and then he actually sells the secrets of West Point to the British in exchange for I think it was 6,000 Sterling and a high Commission in the British Army and as far as I know the British made good on their end of the deal so what happened at the end where did he end up he goes down to um uh Virginia he ends up fighting against um Lafayette and other American generals in the uh in the South the Revolutionary War started when and ended when well the war really starts in April 1775 at Lexington and Conor shot fired around the the world um and then uh on November 20 5 th 1783 evacuation day in New York actually it used to be celebrated throughout the 19th century George Washington and Governor George Clinton uh at the head of 800 men uh ride into Manhattan and as they're riding South into the city the British are uh leaving uh on board ships and Washington is greeted by these Delirious uh crowds I guess that in terms of what was happening on the ground uh that was the official end of the revolution of course Washington uh submits his resignation to the Congress in Annapolis in December uh 1783 a moment uh immortalized by John Trumble in a great painting and actually at the time that was in many ways considered the most important act that Washington ever took a famous story Benjamin West The Expatriate um artist uh told um George III that General Washington was planning on resigning signing his commission and going back to Mount Vernon and George III says if he does that he will be the greatest man in the world this was considered unheard of for somebody not to try to Parlay that kind of military success into post-war political power leading up to the Revolutionary War what did people in this country think of George III how visible was he no you know the interesting thing is in the early stages of the Revolution people keep blaming the ministry of Lord North I still feel that the king is their father and protector and this was a certain sentiment that even Washington uh shared you know that the the King was a benevolent figure but that he was being betrayed by his uh ministers but of course there was not nobody whom they had ever set eyes on so at the beginning where was George Washington when when at Lexington and Concord time Lexing Concord well uh he's already at the Second Continental Congress he attended both the first and Second Continental Congress and uh Washington I think one of the reasons that he was such a successful General and and president he'd had long political experience he'd been serving in the House of Burgesses since 1758 he'd been very involved in the protest to the Stamp Act in 1765 the towns and duties in 1767 opposing the Intolerable uh acts later on and so that this was a man who's very well um versed in parliamentary government by the time that he is in a position of responsibility why do people want to follow him why do people want to follow him I think that Washington inspired a lot of confidence in part uh you want to give power to people who don't seem to be grasping at Power and this was a lesson that Washington had uh learned very well also when he's chosen his commander-in-chief people are very impressed as by someone of his wealth is willing to risk all of it for the sake uh of of the cause Washington was a very uh good listener he wasn't an egomaniac there was a tremendous uh fear that whoever became commander and chief would then become the so-called man on Horseback would become very you know puffed up with his own power and that there was there was a modesty and a humility about Washington's demeanor but combined with a large degree of self-confidence as well so how many Americans at the height of the Revolutionary War we fighting no I don't know the exact figure of that Brian because it it it varies so much um Washington said that the bane of his life uh was that never in history had there been an army that was disbanded at the end of every year and then had to be uh reconstituted you know so that at various times he had two or 3,000 uh men under his command I guess at the time of Yorktown maybe went up to 15 or 16 uh thousand there are all together 25,000 um Americans die in the Revolutionary War which sounds small compared to let's say the Civil War was 5 or 600,000 but the population was only 3 million so that was a very significant uh number of uh fatalities given the population at the time back in those days how did they record the different events in other words how are you able to go back and check what happened during the Revolutionary War well it was partly um you know Washington took tremendous care of his own correspondence and we were talking in the first interview about his personal guard and how strange it was that he did that in the middle of the Revolution no less strange as as he's complaining about a shortage of Manpower and money he gets the Congress to uh give him a special appropriation to create a secretarial staff that did nothing for two years but to create Fair copies in other words clean copies of his correspondence in these 28 large uh ledgers and so Washington's papers which are voluminous are a fantastic source of information about the different battles and then of course as with any War uh you get uh letters and Diaries to a certain extent newspaper um uh accounts but there were a lot of people did he know in those early days the British the generals on the other side yes interestingly enough if you go back to the French and Indian War uh we find George Washington not only uh fighting alongside Horatio Gates of course would become his great rival in the Continental Army but you also find for instance Thomas Gage who then becomes the uh the first U you know British commander uh in North America at the very beginning of the time of Lexington and Concord so yes Washington had known for many years some of the personalities he would not have met for instance the the how brothers or Sir Henry Clinton before so there were quite a number of personalities who were new him or or Quin Wallace would not have met before who decided that he should be the commander-in-chief uh Washington was um the Second Continental Congress um appointed him by a unanimous vote it was the first of four significant unanimous votes okay Washington is unanimously appointed commander-in-chief he unanimously appointed president of the of the Constitutional Convention and then both times that he ran for president uh he was unanimously elected by the Electoral College so that's a record that I think we can safely say no one will ever duplicate how obvious was it when you were doing your research that he was the the choice for all this you know I don't think in a certain way that uh he had a lot of competition as I was saying during the the first part they needed a southerner because the uh continental army at that point was all the uh New England militia men gathered in Cambridge Massachusetts uh Washington had been very um involved in the House of Burgesses um in protesting the St act and all of these other things uh Washington had been a very active member of the second uh first and second continental congress he was one of the few people who had military experience at the time you know we all know the story that he wore his uh uniform to the Second Continental Congress from the the Fairfax militia and so even though it had been many years because Washington had been in his uh 20s uh that he'd fought in the French and Indian war that counted quite heavily at the time when there was a severe shortage of people with experience the only other two people um who had comparable experience would have been htio Gates or Charles Lee Charles Lee was a very vain eccentric and difficult uh personality um ditto for Horatio gates in certain ways and so in a certain sense Washington wins the contest by uh default and um as I've kept stressing Washington there was a CL ity of vision about this man there was a tenacity of purpose his whole life if you gave him a job to do if you fixed a goal he was relentless in pursuing it and he certainly did that during eight and a half years as commander-in-chief what were the relationships among the colonies then and is there any residual after all these years the way Virginians feel about Massachusetts people and vice versa well um I remember John Adams we were talking about how envious he was of Washington uh John Adams said that in Virginia well geese are swans and also John Adams you know wrote a hilarious letter years later in terms of why Washington was appointed and uh some of the things that he pointed out Washington was tall he looked the part of a commander Washington had the gift of Silence he didn't make mistakes by alienated people and saying the right thing you know and he went on and on in that semi satirical vein but some of the stuff was true that Washington looked the port um the colonies were very fractur and very fractured uh throughout the the the contest I mean Washington's greatness is a general most generals their greatness is what they do on the battlefield I try to show in the book arguably Washington's greatness was as much what he did between battles simply holding the the Continental Army together um we tend to think of uh you know Valley Forge as the nater of uh the continental army when they're they're shivering and they're suffering and they're they're starving rally Forge in many ways was was more the uh the rule than the exception this was an Army that was constantly short of men money blankets shoes clothing gunpowder uh Etc and George Washington not only had to uh hold this often disgruntled and disaffected army together but he had to be a brilliant politician uh in dealing not only with the the Congress but in dealing with 13 uh separate states and um you know Washington's story is a heroic story and ditto for the Continental Army um but he got precious little cooperation from a lot of the the states I mean his correspondence is is one long Jeremiah of of complaint and and grievance that nobody is helping him out what about pay for the soldiers during that time you know the the Congress was constantly in a rears on uh uh paying people I mean to the point where at the end of the Revolution there's actually a mutiny among the officers that they owed so much back pay they're not convinced that they're going to get promised pensions in the uh in the future and there was such a shortage of money major problem that Washington had was that in order to get people to serve they would pay them bounties um they would give them money they would promise them land uh and then the states begin to compete with each other and so what people people do is they would get a bounty from one state then they would disappear then they would come back having taken a bounty from another state I mean money permeates the whole thing there's a constant shortage of money why though well um this is important in terms of the development of Washington's political philosophy the um the Continental Congress had no independent source of Revenue there was no executive branch at the time there were later on there were certain executive departments there was really just the the legislature the Congress uh Congress could um uh requisition that is Congress could request that the states give them money Congress could not demand that the states uh give them money so the states competed to see who could give the least uh money but uh Congress did not have its own independent Revenue source so Washington Hamilton the other officers this is really the beginning of their nationalistic philosophy they realize that um you need a powerful Federal govern government with a strong executive um that it have taxing powers and independent sources of revenues and Washington's um policies as president are a direct outgrowth of his frustrations during the Revolutionary War you know we hear a lot of these names today and you you know almost nothing about them uh the John Hancock building in Boston right clearly he meant more than being named uh building after what did he do well John Hancock was the the president of Congress at the time of the Declaration of Independence and signed first as we all know uh the large signature at the top so that George III could could see it uh John Hancock was actually uh very competitive with Washington in fact John Adams told the story that when John Adams Rose at the second continental congress in order to um nominate Washington as commander-in-chief that Hancock thought that Adams was going to nominate him and Adam said he looked over at at Hancock who had this big smile on his face up at the days and then Adam said and you know I nominate George Washington and he said that the smile suddenly disappeared from John Hancock's phe so you know it's interesting very often people will ask me ran what what would the founders have thought of this and I always say the founders were not monolithic the founders fought like cats and dogs with each other the founders were very competitive uh with each other the founders had very different political philosophies but to sort of lump them all together in this one mask called the founders as if they all uh thought the same completely misrepresents uh what happened during that period so when George Washington was leading the troops during the Revolutionary War what was his philosophy what did he want to accomplish when it was all said and done and did most people agree with him well uh you know what he wanted was um independence from from England exactly what form the government would would would take was a subject that was postponed as I said that he is gradually developing his nationalistic philosophy really through his critique of the uh of the Congress in terms of his military uh strategy Washington realizes early on that uh he lacks what the British have in Spades which is C power you know he's up against arguably the greatest uh Navy in the world because the British have this very powerful navy they can rapidly move troops up and down the Eastern Seaboard and Washington doesn't sea way nor to his generals that he can actually defeat uh the British and so it becomes a war of attrition an opportunistic War where Washington tries to um uh evade the British and where opportunity uh presents attack so that when you're writing about the Revolutionary War it's actually one of the difficulties of writing a a biography of George Washington is that there were long stretches in the Revolutionary War where in terms of battles nothing is happening sometimes many months go by and there's no major uh battle and then what happens lateer in the war is that the war shifts to the South but Washington stays in the north and so it's really um Nathaniel Green and the Marquee de lafad and others who were the main Generals in the South and George Washington the hero of the revolution is pretty much a distant spectator uh in the north so it's only uh when the French alliances started in 1778 culminating in the Yorktown Victory three years later that um you know American land power combined with French sea power and also French army finally uh they bottle up corn Wallace at Yorktown and that becomes the climactic battle why did the French come in the French came in um to harass the British pure and and and simple the uh the enemy of your enemy's friend uh John Adams had a wonderful image that the French were kind of keeping the Americans head um above uh water they would put their finger under their their chin you know would would keep the head um uh out of the water enough so that the person wouldn't drown but not so much that he could really survive and that was really the French attitude it was not in the interest of an absolutist monarchy like France to promote something like the French Revolution and in fact I guess you could say that they live to regret it because so many of the French officers who came to fight in the Revolutionary War you know who were imbued with the ideals of the American Revolution most notably Lafayette uh then went back to to France and uh became leading figures in the French Revolution if you live in Washington I we're York uh recording this but you live in Washington you cross from Virginia to DC the Rambo Bridge yeah you also have a bradic road in a Fairfax County and a fort belir and all these names uh and lafayette's portrait is in the House of Representatives uh the the French I mean Rambo is also throughout your book uh yeah he he he was the French General he he was rather crusty and difficult uh character to a certain extent he humored Washington and gave him a good time while kind of pursuing his own uh strategy the French for political reason reasons made it seem as if Washington was really the commander of both the American and French army but uh in fact that was something of a PL fiction and you could see at the time of uh Yorktown that roshambo was the head of the French army deas is the head of the French navy that they're pretty much carrying out their own strategy that Washington then kind of belatedly comes along with and marches his men down to Virginia uh but the um the French were absolutely uh indispens ible not only in terms of having that Navy that uh traps and surrounds cornales but the Battle of Yorktown was an old-fashioned European Siege where you're building uh uh trenches and these parallels keep getting closer and closer to the enemy and that was really the work of French Engineers so we needed not only french navy to certain extent French army but also French military noow 900 pages right we talked in our first uh interview about how you broke down the different sections right uh how long did it take you before you began writing the book I do all my research before I start writing it and so I spent uh six years and so uh I didn't write a word until I had uh spent at least four years researching the the book I like to know what I have to say before I sit down and start writing and about the different sections do you follow it chronologically I follow it chronologically one thing because I knew that this was going to be a long book one thing that I did to try to make the narrative uh move quickly and make it more manageable is that I break it down into 67 chapters so it's really a lot of small chapters which I think gives the reader a sense of forward motion that you're making progress in the book and then each of the 67 chapters is broken down to three or four uh different scenes so it it proceeds more or less uh chronologically and I hope has a kind of kaleidoscopic uh quality that it keeps kind of you know flitting from one scene uh to the other and I tried to give it a fast pacing because even though it's a long book um because I felt that Washington is a man of action this story is really among other things it's not only the creation of the country it's w too Adventure it's it's it's high adventure and I felt that the book should have some of the um excitement and the headlong pace of Washington's own life which was kind of running from you know one battle or one crisis to another there's not I hope a dull moment in the story years ago when we talked about another one of your books Titan on John D Rockefeller uh you said that you had a normal day you began writing at 9:00 in the morning and might write till 4:00 in the afternoon has anything about that changed no um you know I usually don't work more than about five or six hours I find that um if I work fewer hours I work with more uh concentration um I um I live in Brooklyn Heights I I don't have lunch in in in Manhattan um I don't spend a lot of time schmoozing on the telephone when I'm working and so this was very intensive and very uh rigorous but no I think particularly if you're doing such a long project and then you're writing such a long book I think that you have to pace yourself in order to to do it and one of the secrets of pacing yourself is not to write yourself out at the end of the day what's your relationship during this project with your editor how's that work my editor um well an godov who has just been such a Wonder um in in my career an and I would meet periodically for uh lunch she was always full of kind of enthusiasm and good ideas and the right questions and what I love about Ann is she's not only a wonderful editor she's wonderful publisher so that for instance an had said to me we have to have a cover that shows Washington on a white horse I said Bo she said well you make much of How Majestic he looked on a white horse and this sense of stay craft political theater that uh he had and so I found this uh painting that rembrand Peele did at Washington on a white horse um that RR peel did it in 1824 it's called Washington before Yorktown and and was absolutely right about it because I think that what we wanted you know when people think of George Washington they think of Gilbert Stewart's George Washington they think of an old craggy stiff character um that wasn't the Washington that excited his contemporaries the Washington that excited his contemporaries was a youthful Dynamic you know charismatic man and I think that that was really captured in that rembrand Peele painting where you could see how athletic he was and just how magnificent now there there's a scene in your book where you have five peels around him at one time explain that yeah well what happened was that Washington was good friends with Charles Wilson uh peel who was a great Portrait Painter and also operated a natural history museum in Philadelphia what um Charles Wilson Peele had a teenage son rembrand Peele who asked to paint Washington uh during Washington second term when he was 17 when he was 17 rbrand Peele said that he woke up that morning and his hands were trembling he was so nervous he couldn't even mix his pains and he felt that he was going to waste the time of the president of the United States so he contacted his father and said would you mind doing a portrait of President Washington at the same time that way if I bungle it which he thought he would at least we'll have your uh picture of him uh then what happened was that Charles Wilson Port Peele agreed he got his brother James Peele to to to join and then um there were all these Peele children who were painters who were named after Old Masters one was tishan Peele uh there was um uh rembrand Peele and then there was Ruben's Peele anyway the other brothers came as well so that there were five peels who were simultaneously painting Washington and Gilbert Stewart happened to walked by the the studio and he was shocked to see five people uh painting George Washington so uh he ran into Martha Washington and he said Madam the general is under assault from five peels one is attacking his ear and the other is attacking his nose and the third is attacking his chin it was quite funny because Washington had always expressed a lot of discomfort um about sitting for portraits clearly uh he had learned to not only tolerate it but love it that he had five peels doing him at the same time go back to an God off U who was random house before you before she went to penguin that's right I did I did the warberg at random house with an um and uh so at the moment though when you decided it was going to be George Washington and did you did you know it was going to be a 900 page book at that point no by you know on the other hand um I did Alexander Hamilton who died in 49 and that was an 800 page book Washington dies at the age of 67 and it's a much larger life than than Hamilton's so this is only maybe most 80 or 100 Pages more so I was actually relieved that it was only another 100 Pages no so we all knew that um it was going to be a long book and again um we all felt that the problem was that um in years past there had been these great multiv volume biographies that were kind of out of print and largely unread and the most difficult thing with Washington is to do the kind of one volume authoritative Cradle to grave biography and so what I wanted to do there were various places in the book where I thought to myself you know I could cut this scene this would shorten the book but I thought if was going to be an authoritative book on Washington I don't use the word definitive you know because there's always another book that will come along and um add things to it but if it was going to be an authoritative book I wanted um that every significant event in his life that you could go to the index and look it up and not only enjoy it as a good read but just use it as a standard reference work so that there are various episodes in there that I might have cut for the sake of space but I said no this was an important moment and I think that it should be there couple more questions on the process when you write a book like this do you submit chapters before you're finished with the whole book to uh penguin and they look at them no my deal with with with with an is that she sees the uh entire uh manuscript um you know I don't think that you can paraphrase Dr Johnson uh show someone a few bricks and expect them to get a picture of the uh of the house and also I felt here I not only wanted um an to see the pacing I wanted an to see the proportions which we were talking about earlier because this is one of the tricks of doing a book on George Washington there's so much ground to to cover uh how are you going to allocate the space the penguin people put out promotion on this and I'm going to go down some of the things they say and just see how you feel about it uh what we're going to learn in that in the book is he had a troubled Boyhood I think it was a difficult Boyhood remember uh his father dies uh when George is 11 uh we just have maybe one or two sentences where he talks about his father and uh but he seems to have gotten along better with his father than his mother and then he's left uh at The Tender Mercies of his mother who something of a holy Terror and there was a lot of financial stringency uh at the time which I think stayed with Washington is always very tense about the subject of of money and I think that that came from his his Boyhood so it was but also he starts surveying it's also a period of great accomplishment promotion says it's a going to focus on the precocious Feats in the French and Indian War well um Washington was a prodigy um by the time he is 23 years old he's the head of the Virginia regiment at the age of 23 he's the head of all the armed forces in Virginia it's really quite uh astounding you know which was the biggest Colony at the time yeah it was the was the biggest most populous richest Colony at the at the time you know we so associate Washington with the Revolutionary War he had a whole other life as a young man in the French and Indian War his heroic exploits with the Continental Army well we have eight and a half years of very heroic exploits with the continent I can't exactly Short change that so we're doing okay so far uh his uh presiding over the Constitutional Convention which we have not talked about yeah now that's very very important uh he's somewhat reluctantly drawn to the uh con Constitutional Convention but his um position there is absolutely vital for a couple of reasons number one constitutional convention uh is conducted behind closed doors and so in order to convince the public outside of those doors that some nefarious plot is not being concocted inside those doors the public is reassured by the presence of George Washington because they know that no evil cabal is going to form if Washington is the president of the um Constitutional Convention the other thing that's very important in terms of the writing of the Constitution is that uh given the fact that we had just fored a revolution against abuses of executive power article two which details the powers of the the presidency was far in away the most difficult part for these delegates to write because they kept um fearing abuses of executive power everyone knew that if he wanted it George Washington would be the first president and so I think that the delegates were emboldened to create but turned out to be a very strong uh presidency because they imagined George Washington or someone like George Washington holding the the office and actually they were um you know well advised uh in that because I think that Washington was quite a brilliant president one of the last points in the pr pitch is that talks about his magnificent performance as America's first president yes um Washington really forges the Office of the presidency let me give you some examples Brian um there's no mention in the constitution of uh cabinet there's a reference to reports from departmental uh heads uh Washington creates the first cabinet he chooses Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of Treasury Thomas Jefferson Secretary of State Henry Knox is Secretary of War so he establishes a very very high Benchmark uh for talent and intelligence and uh Integrity um also you know the founders um FRA the framers of the Constitution U devoted article one to the Congress because that was the people's house and they expected that to be the most important branch of government Washington early on discovers that Congress is really too large and unwieldy a body to shape policy so Washington decides that it is the president who is going to initiate policy that the Congress then reacts to very important we take this for granted but in fact um it was not really the intention of the people who met in Philadelphia in 1787 to have that powerful and uh an executive and so Washington really creates the office of the presidency that we have today and he goes a long way to uh defining the relationship of the executive branch both to the legislative branch and the Judiciary which we haven't talked about where again uh brilliant Choice John Jay becomes the first uh chief justice um George Washington appoints 11 Supreme Court Justices um more than any other president 11 total in his years 11 total yeah he starts out um in the Constitution mentions the Supreme Court of course but doesn't specify the number of justices so that the first court has uh six justices uh Washington sends all six names to Congress at the same time they all Breeze through in 48 hours which seems comical now we to get one through is a process of many weeks and and many months but he really Washington said that he um devoted more painstaking effort to the choice of Judges than to anything else he did he said that he felt that the independent Judiciary was the Cornerstone of the whole constitutional structure did this is uh maybe for a question did he appoint John Marshall no no John Marshall was appointed by uh by John Adams but Marshall was a friend of of Washington's in fact um it was uh Washington in his final years who urged John Marshall uh to run for Congress and then uh when Marshall becomes chief justice um that's right it was obviously um Adams because Jefferson hated uh Marshall and that Jefferson felt there was this entrench you know Federalist uh Court uh when John Marshall was chief justice Marshall um is very good friends with bushrod Washington who's an associate Justice uh bushrod was George Washington's uh nephew bushrod had control of Washington's papers and John Marshall not only writes the first authorized biography of George Washington there was five uh volumes he writes it Brian while he's chief justice it's an immense piece of work slavery complex Behavior as a slave master is part of the promotion on this and you know at Mount Vernon they've changed the language uh and where the slaves are buried um all that how many slaves that did the he and his wife have at the height at the height about 300 slaves of of those 300 slaves about 125 were legally under the direct control of George Washington that being important not on a day-to-day basis but important because in his will Washington does something that no other founder does he frees those 125 slaves the other 175 slaves were known as D slaves brought to the marriage by Martha and pledge to the custus heir so that Washington legally could not emancipate those slaves but in the book though you see quotes where he calls Negroes Riff Raff or the slaves Riff Raff you know Washington was always frustrated as a um as a slave holder uh as illogical as it sounds he always talked about them as if they were salaried employees and he's paying them room and he's paying them board and why can't he get a full day's work in return he can't understand that slaves have no rational reason for performing uh well and so he's constantly frustrated because he's a very efficient man and he's always trying to introduce um new science scientific production Methods at um at Mount Vernon and he feels that the slaves Bon cooperate of course the slaves had no reason to uh cooperate I mean if you're a slave the best um response is to be passive aggressive you do kind of enough to get by but there's nothing in it for you by you know performing with maximum intensity did all the founders have money land uh certainly well the Virginia uh Planters had a lot of uh often had more land than money they were uh all land rich and cash poor they were all in debt in fact particularly before the Revolution they were all in debt to their British factors in London and this is no small source of resentment against the uh the British that they felt that they were in Hawk to their London agents how much of the laws that they made in those early days were in their favor as land owners and white males oh everything I mean you know the uh suffrage is restricted to a very very small you know group of you know white uh uh property uh owners this was not an egalitarian world at all why did we then keep talking about our Founders as such great people well I think that they established um you know the principles of um a more Equitable society and over time we've been nourished by those principles you know all men were not created equal in the 18th century but that has always been an ideal that we subcribed and so that um a lot of the principles they they enunciated um even if not carried into effect have had a very inspirational effect in later American history so that Jefferson was a large slaveholder um and did not always practice what he preached but um you know what he preached he preached so well that those doctrines have had an ongoing life now if you put a copy of this book of yours uh in the hands of all 535 members of Congress and the Senate uh and they sat down and read it all what would they what do you want them to take from this that might change the way we're doing things today because I mean a lot of what I read in here seems like it's happening today yeah well I would hope that there were certain things that they would learn about leadership one of the things that I loved about George Washington is Washington always challenged people to to match up to his high standards he didn't stoop he didn't Pander fact it's very interesting Brian if you read Washington's Farewell Address he's not flattering the American people he's challenging the American people I hope that people will see that George Washington was somebody um who always as um a general and as a president he always stuck to his principles he never confused leadership with a popularity contest he always thought the important thing was not to be loved but to be respected of course as I try to show in the book If people respect you in the long run they will not only respect you but love you uh as as as well but he was really an exemplary leader who had um a vision of American greatness um but not simply a vision of America being strong and Rich and Powerful he had that and that has come to to fruition but he also saw the country as an honorable uh country a respectable member of the community of of Nations and so Washington from the time that he's commander-in-chief he's trying to mold the character of the country as well as the strength of the character you know I spent a lot of time uh when I'm talking about the Revolutionary War that Washington and his general orders is always telling them uh don't don't don't swear Don't drink don't you know pillage crops from the the farmers I respect human rights respect uh uh property you know he had such a respect uh for um property rights for instance that even at Valley Forge if you were caught stealing uh you would be tied to a tree and you would be whipped for for doing it he's very concerned during the war with Humane treatment of prisoners on and on you see his ethical uh concerns just permeated and I think that Washington felt that um if things are grounded in sound morality and ethics you know the politics will take care of itself but you don't see him uh cutting uh Corners you don't see him you know pandering to different people uh you see him uh following the dictates of his own conscience what do you think you would not like about him if you knew him well he was um in two sides of his life in terms of the less attractive side of George Washington anytime he was dealing with money in business situations Washington could be quite testy quite a seric he was a very difficult and times nasty person to deal with in a business situation I also try to give a very long and searching look uh here at what it meant to be as Washington was always described a benevolent slave master and there were good sides to Washington um as a slave master if one could say that uh that um he honored slave marriages he honored slave uh families um that he made sure they got adequate medical treatment etc etc but I also try to show that um he was intent on extracting a profit from these slaves and I have one passage in the book where discovered um After the Revolutionary War he goes back to man it's the coldest winter on record in Virginia it's so cold that he writes in his diary was too cold for him to go out riding and he was a very Hardy specimen yet he also is checking with his overseers to make sure that all of the slaves are out in the fields draining swamps pulling up tree stumps this is really quite brutal work and you want to say to him George if you can't go outside is it really um fair to expect the slaves to be doing this very heavy uh manual labor so I love Washington but it's not to say that I love him on every page of the book or every you know phase of his life these are always uh difficult questions or difficult answers if he were here today and looked at what's happened in this country based on what he wanted to happen What would he like what would he not like well I think he would not be surprised that things were as partisan as they have uh become because uh he was subjected to that uh him himself uh that things could be very nasty and partisan back in the founding era so that would not uh surprise him I think that um back in the um founding era even though the pmics were often quite vidic there was a Brilliance to the level of discussion and that even though people expressed themselves very vehemently this was coming out of their own passions and their own political views I think that uh he would see a lot of mediocrity today not everywhere I mean we have no lot of fine public servants but I think the general caliber is lower than it it it was um I think it would disturb him to see people pandering to party uh it would disturb him to see people pandering to to lobbyists because he expected you know that politics derived from your um personal principles and um and and passions and I think one important thing to stress Brian is that back in the uh 18th century um public service was honorable and as a result we had our best Minds went into public service I feel that there are so many disincentives to public service now lack of privacy um tabloid press non-stop fundraising and also people keep integrating government that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if you keep telling you know people that government is is is is terrible and that Congress is a bunch of morons you know the course of time you're not going to get the best people going into politics and I think that as a result you'll get the best Minds going to work on Wall Street or Silicon Valley or biotech what what whatever and so um it would be wonderful it maybe uh for laoren Hope to try to revive that sense of public service that we had in the early days of the country but how much of that uh back in the Revolutionary War period was these men wanting to keep their property and if you read your just your chapter on Valley Forge you had those poor people those poor soldiers out there with no blankets no shoes uh in the middle of the winter no food no money no anything while the generals are back in the you know in the The Shack somewhere with the fire going I mean what's how do you explain that yeah although you know Washington um believed strongly in in in leadership by example you know he made a point in every battle that he fought in he was right smack in the thick of the battle he was often the most conspicuous uh Target also when they got to to Valley Forge precisely to avoid that situation where you know the general seemed to be back in the warm house uh Washington uh lived in a tent he lived in temporary quarters and then there was this great uh they they started building all of these Huts but he kind of wanted to show the men that he was sharing their uh suffering and said that Washington uh lived in a series of houses During the Revolution where he certainly was living more uh comfortably than his men but if you go to to see them who's really living very very uh you know uh modestly for for a general the book publishes says that um George Washington this is in the pr statement remains a lifeless wax work for many Americans what have you done here that might take a little B of that away well you know what I've tried to to to do is to um recreate that very charismatic and dynamic you know figure uh from Washington's early days um I've tried to use every device that I know as a writer to bring him to to to life and so that um he I want him to be Vivid and immediate so that throughout the book every time Washington is painted by somebody I describe the painting so that you can actually see him you know feel it kind of taste the uh the period um and also I have um hundreds and hundreds of um anecdotes and quotes in the book of people who met George Washington who left their impressions of Washington because I feel that he really comes Al comes to life in a lot of these you know letters and and and Diaries and newspaper accounts so that uh description is very very important I wanted people not only to hear Washington's voice I actually wanted them to see Washington throughout you've already won the $50,000 Washington award for your book on Alexander Hamilton the first one that was awarded what are you going to do now I don't know it was funny when I got that award Brian um I had um already published Hamilton and it was known that I was doing Washington next so I kind of chuckled when I got the award I know that there were few people out there who probably felt the fix was in that I got the George Washington award I don't know you know the the difficulty of completing a long biography of George Washington like this is that uh right about Washington is to scale Mount Everest and then you look around and you say are there any Peaks as high as as this it's such an extraordinary uh life I'll I guess I'll find out if there's life after Washington uh last couple questions about your own life where were you born I was born in uh in in Brooklyn New York Bay Ridge coincidentally next to 4 Hamilton and then when I was three my family moved to far's Queens uh so I'm a child of the outer Burrows of New York and we talked in the first uh discussion about your book on JP Morgan and the war Bergs and uh Rockefeller Rockefeller and Hamilton are you thinking about the next one I know this is just the beginning of this tour yeah I I I am um I'm feeling like having uh you know toiled in the vineyard of the 18th century for um more than a decade now but I think I might like to uh return to the not the early 21st C 20th century like what I don't have any idea as I said Washington is such a tough act to to to follow because I feel that I should look for some figure of you know Washington's uh you know stature and their few and far between um a personal what do you think of the country our country today I have a feeling that we're uh very much um a drift I feel like we're stalled at the uh at the moment what I loved about um writing about Washington was that here was somebody who had a real vision of the country and as I was saying before not just a vision of American um Power and uh uh riches but a real vision of American morality you know kind of what we stood for what but the character of the the country was um you know Washington also like all great presidents uh he was one of those rare leaders he had this Mystic faith in the uh in the public he had this Mystic connect connection uh with the country um he felt interestingly enough although he was always optimistic about the country in the long run he was Al frequently very pessimistic about the country in the short run and I keep reminding myself of that because Washington felt that the American public you know would often be you know misled for brief periods of time but kind of in the long run that things would come out right and so I hope that his faith is born out how how much of a tour are you going to do with this book probably about 10 or 15 cities do you like that part of this I like going out and and and meeting people because I know that as I'm out on the road um uh people will be asking me questions and that not only will I learn all sorts of things from their reaction in terms of the way that Washington is perceived or even the things that people know about Washington that maybe that I don't uh know but that also it kind of pulls a lot of different things out of me that I wish I had thought of when I was writing the the book and very often people's you know questions or back and forth with audiences will elicit uh different things from me that I hadn't realized uh before so it's it's very very exhausting that part I don't like but it also can be very very uh educational after all I've sat in a room for six years writing this uh book and we were just talking about the state of the country I think that if you want to um eases drop on the American mind and psyche at the moment there's no better way of doing it than to go out and speak to people about George Washington so in the end what's the hardest part of doing a book like this I think just mastering the sheer amount of material the amount of material written by Washington written about out uh uh Washington um just mastering the basic facts and of course then once you master the basic facts you have to synthesize it into a portrait that's compelling you have to craft it into a narrative that is engrossing it's a very very hard subject to do and um uh did you have somebody check all your facts um I actually had four different Scholars who reviewed portions of the manuscript and I'm very grateful uh for that I just felt with the with with Washington this book had to be impeccable and I did an extraordinary amount of factchecking on my own multiple times Ron Chau author of Washington Al life we thank you very much it's has been a pleasure Brian thank you for a DVD copy of this program call 877662 7726 for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program visit us at q&a. org Q&A programs are also available as C-SPAN podcasts

Channel: C-SPAN

Views: 17,006

Keywords: qa, C-SPAN, cspan, chernow, lamb, washington, history

Id: 8KLybZDahzQ

Length: 56min 56sec (3416 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2010