George Washington On Leadership by Richard Brookhiser

Author:Richard Brookhiser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

ENEMIES

ENEMIES HAVE to be beaten—killed or impoverished in war, defeated in politics, outsold in business. Everyone understands this, from the earliest childhood game with winners and losers. But as we grow older, we learn there are other things we have to do with enemies, during and after the contest.

LIVING WITH ENEMIES

Washington played to win. He went to the Constitutional Convention only when he was sure that most of the delegates were as serious about change as he was; once the Constitution was written, he did everything in his power to ensure that his state ratified it. “Be assured,” wrote James Monroe, a Virginian who opposed the Constitution, “his influence carried this government.”

When, as a private citizen, assigned to survey land claims for French and Indian War veterans, he was accused of shortchanging a fellow veteran (and benefiting himself), he reacted with wrath, telling the complainant in a letter that he was impertinent, drunk, rude, stupid, and sottish. He stepped so far outside the bounds of normal discourse between gentlemen because his honesty and honor had been questioned: that demanded a nuclear response. In real war, he could show a stern face, hanging Benedict Arnold’s spymaster.

He went to great lengths to secure specific goals, or to respond to particular offenses. Yet his behavior toward enemies was usually modified by his awareness of time. He looked beyond the moment he was in to the time that was to come. Some enemies would survive the struggle; perhaps the struggle was over, and they had already survived it. They might be fellow citizens; even if they lived on different continents, they would still be sharing the same world. That thought influenced how he treated them as he was beating them.

The Revolution had some of the characteristics of civil war, and the internecine strife of city-states. As rival armies came and went, many ordinary people sat on the sidelines, while others, more zealous in the cause, recommended harsh measures for timeservers. When the British left Philadelphia in 1778, after an exceedingly pleasant occupation, Gouverneur Morris suggested that the city be fined for collaborating. At their worst, grudges morphed into vendettas. In 1780 Nathanael Greene reported that patriot and loyalist guerrillas in the Deep South “pursue[d] each other” like “beasts of prey.” After the war, survivors longed to settle accounts; New York, which had suffered a long occupation, encouraged patriots to sue loyalists for doing business under British rule. Washington set his face against reprisals, monetary or violent. Morris’s plan to punish Philadelphia, he wrote, “widely differs from mine.” Like Greene, whom he had sent to run the southern theater, he wanted a war conducted by disciplined troops, not partisans settling scores. When New York’s courts interpreted the state’s punitive laws in a humane spirit, Washington, observing from out of state, gave his “hearty assent.”

Washington dealt coolly with enemy nations. Many of his colleagues, including three future presidents—Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe—were frozen by the Revolutionary War, becoming diehard Anglophobes and Francophiles, especially after France’s revolution made her a sister republic.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.