Product Description

To this landmark biography of our first president, Joseph J. Ellis brings the exacting scholarship, shrewd analysis, and lyric prose that have made him one of the premier historians of the Revolutionary era. Training his lens on a figure who sometimes seems as remote as his effigy on Mount Rushmore, Ellis assesses George Washington as a military and political leader and a man whose “statue-like solidity” concealed volcanic energies and emotions.

Here is the impetuous young officer whose miraculous survival in combat half-convinced him that he could not be killed. Here is the free-spending landowner whose debts to English merchants instilled him with a prickly resentment of imperial power. We see the general who lost more battles than he won and the reluctant president who tried to float above the partisan feuding of his cabinet. His Excellency is a magnificent work, indispensable to an understanding not only of its subject but also of the nation he brought into being.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8309 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-08
• Released on: 2005-11-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400032532
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
As commander of the Continental army, George Washington united the American colonies, defeated the British army, and became the world's most famous man. But how much do Americans really know about their first president? Today, as Pulitzer Prize-winner Joseph J. Ellis says in this crackling biography, Americans see their first president on dollar bills, quarters, and Mount Rushmore, but only as "an icon--distant, cold, intimidating." In truth, Washington was a deeply emotional man, but one who prized and practiced self-control (an attribute reinforced during his years on the battlefield).

Washington first gained recognition as a 21-year-old emissary for the governor of Virginia, braving savage conditions to confront encroaching French forces. As the de facto leader of the American Revolution, he not only won the country's independence, but helped shape its political personality and "topple the monarchical and aristocratic dynasties of the Old World." When the Congress unanimously elected him president, Washington accepted reluctantly, driven by his belief that the union's very viability depended on a powerful central government. In fact, keeping the country together in the face of regional allegiances and the rise of political parties may be his greatest presidential achievement.

Based on Washington's personal letters and papers, His Excellency is smart and accessible--not to mention relatively brief, in comparison to other encyclopedic presidential tomes. Ellis's short, succinct sentences speak volumes, allowing readers to glimpse the man behind the myth. --Andy Boynton

Amazon.com Exclusive Content
Curious about George?
Amazon.com reveals a few facts about the legendary first president of the United States.

Washington bust by Jean Antoine Houdon. Courtesy of the Mt. Vernon Ladies' Assoc.

1. The famous tale about Washington chopping down the cherry tree ("Father, I cannot tell a lie") is a complete fabrication.

2. George Washington never threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River--in fact, to do so from the shore of his Mount Vernon home would have been physically impossible.

3. George Washington did not wear wooden teeth. His poorly fitting false teeth were in fact made of cow's teeth, human teeth, and elephant ivory set in a lead base.

4. Early in his life, Washington was himself a slave owner. His opinions changed after he commanded a multiracial army in the Revolutionary War. He eventually came to recognize slavery as "a massive American anomaly."

5. In 1759, having resigned as Virginia's military commander to become a planter, Washington married Martha Dandridge Custis. Washington’s marriage to the colony's wealthiest widow dramatically changed his life, catapulting him into Virginia aristocracy.

6. Scholars have discredited suggestions that Washington's marriage to Martha lacked passion, as well as the provocative implications of the well-worn phrase "George Washington slept here."

7. Washington held his first public office when he was 17 years old, as surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia.

8. At age 20, despite no prior military experience, Washington was appointed an adjutant in the Virginia militia, in which he oversaw several militia companies, and was assigned the rank of major.

9. As a Virginia aristocrat, Washington ordered all his coats, shirts, pants, and shoes from London. However, most likely due to the misleading instructions he gave his tailor, the suits almost never fit. Perhaps this is why he appears in an old military uniform in his 1772 portrait.

10. In 1751, during a trip to Barbados with his half-brother Lawrence, Washington was stricken with smallpox and permanently scarred. Fortunately, this early exposure made him immune to the disease that would wipe out colonial troops during the Revolutionary War.

Timeline
Important dates in George Washington's life.

Engraving of Mount Vernon, 1804. Courtesy of the Mt. Vernon Ladies' Assoc.

1732: George Washington is born at his father's estate in Westmoreland County, Virginia.

1743: George’s father, Augustine Washington, dies.

1752: At age 20, despite the fact that he has never served in the military, Washington is appointed adjutant in the Virginia militia, with the rank of major.

1753: As an emissary to Virginia Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie, he travels to the Ohio River Valley to confront French forces--the first of a series of encounters that would lead to the French and Indian War.

1755: Washington is appointed commander-in-chief of Virginia's militia.

1759: He marries wealthy widow Martha Dandridge Custis.

1774: Washington is elected to the First Continental Congress.

1775: He is unanimously elected by the Continental Congress as its army's commander-in-chief. Start of the American Revolution.

1776: On Christmas Day, Washington leads his army across the Delaware River and launches a successful attack against Hessian troops in Trenton, New Jersey.

1781: With the French, he defeats British troops in Yorktown, Virginia, precipitating the end of the war.

1783: The Revolutionary War officially ends.

1788: The Constitution is ratified.

1789: Washington is elected president.

1797: He fulfills his last term as president.

1799: Washington dies on December 14, sparking a period of national mourning.

From Publishers Weekly
In this follow-up to his bestselling Founding Brothers, Ellis offers a magisterial account of the life and times of George Washington, celebrating the heroic image of the president whom peers like Jefferson and Madison recognized as "their unquestioned superior" while acknowledging his all-too-human qualities. Ellis recreates the cultural and political context into which Washington strode to provide leadership to the incipient American republic. But more importantly, the letters and other documents Ellis draws on bring the aloof legend alive—as a young soldier who sought to rise through the ranks of the British army during the French and Indian War, convinced he knew the wilderness terrain better than his commanding officers; as a Virginia plantation owner (thanks to his marriage) who watched over his accounts with a ruthless eye; as the commander of an outmatched rebel army who, after losing many of his major battles, still managed to catch the British in an indefensible position. Following Washington from the battlefield to the presidency, Ellis elegantly points out how he steered a group of bickering states toward national unity; Ellis also elaborates on Washington's complex stances on issues like slavery and expansion into Native American territory. The Washington who emerges from these pages is similar to the one portrayed in a biographical study by James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn published earlier this year, but Ellis's richer version leaves readers with a deeper sense of the man's humanity. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–As Ellis indicates in his well-documented acknowledgments and endnotes, this book relies heavily on the "Papers of George Washington" series, which provides access to the president's correspondence. Since no new documentary evidence is available, the attraction is Ellis's assessment of Washington's character and impeccable judgment. He keeps Washington on his pedestal while pointing out just a few flaws in the president's personality: ambition from an early age (yet how American!), slaveholding (although he came to regret this, and ordered in his will that upon Martha's death the slaves were to be freed), and no great military talent. These defects were vastly outweighed by his character and practical wisdom. Ellis notes that, even among that group of brilliant men known as our Founding Fathers, Washington was recognized by every one of them as "the Foundingest Father of them all." This book does offer new insights regarding Washington's disposition of his wealth and property in his will. Ellis does an excellent job of infusing a sometimes remote national icon with breath and life, so that readers are able to see the human Washington operating in his tumultuous period of history while towering above it–no mean authorial feat.–Edward Redmond, Library of Congress, Washington, DC

Customer Reviews

A Balanced Introduction
His Excellency George Washington attempts to free Washington from the frozen icon/monument status that has gathered around his name, and presents him to the reader as an approachable, flesh and blood portrait. Joseph Ellis accomplishes this goal admirably. Most notably, he manages to steer 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, which makes this book an ideal introduction for someone beginning to study the life of Washington.
The central thesis of this work is that Washington's amazing 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 unbounded 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 his youth fighting the French and Indians in the backcountry of Pennsylvania. He views Washington's inglorious defeat at the Great Meadows and his miraculous 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 so long and so 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. There are many other books that can provide more in depth and comprehensive accounts of Washington. This book serves as an outstanding, balanced introduction to the man we call the father of our country, and is an excellent place to begin.

Theo Logos

Excellent Introduction to the Life of George Washington
Mr. Ellis has written a succinct and fresh biography of our first President. A previous recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his American Revolutionary histories, he has expanded upon a brief essay of Washington included in his "Founding Brothers."

This is not an in-depth day-by-day account of Washington's life. For that pleasure, I refer the reader to the definitive four volume set (and 1,800+ pages) published over 30 years ago by James Thomas Flexner. Even Mr. Flexner's one volume abridgement is more detailed (at 400 + pages) than Mr. Ellis' new biography (only 275 pages of narrative).

The difference lies in Mr. Ellis' big picture approach and his interpretation of key events during Washington's lifetime. So Washington's love of Sally Fairfax is restricted to a mere two pages and his estate at Mount Vernon gathers more ink than his tranquil marriage to Martha. Instead "His Excellency" focuses upon the impact that Washington's decisions had upon the course of American history. Overall this is a well-written and thoughtful introduction to the life of George Washington.

A passable primer on the life of a great man
When it is seen that popular historian Joseph J. Ellis has written another book about a personality from the Revolutionary War era, excitement fills the publishing world. When it is seen, though, that the subject of his book is George Washington, the question comes quickly to mind, "Do we need another book about George Washington?"

After having read Ellis's book, the answer would seem to be a less ambiguous than you would think, "Well, no." There is no "new" information about Washington here and very little noteworthy insight.

From the introduction, we learn that there have been many biographies of Washington. Some of them, like the tales of an early nineteenth century parson, were pretty fanciful (the "cherry tree incident", the dollar across the Potomac), while others were quite factual and scholarly. The only thing that could be said against this second group seems to have been that they were exceedingly long and, possibly, dry of read.

Such cannot be said of Ellis's work. Ellis is an excellent and engaging writer who could write a book on the local city council's discussion of noise abatement and leave you hoping there's a second volume. He writes with warmth and humor and all those other buzzwords so frequently misapplied to writers and I can truly say I enjoyed reading the book.

With so many other works on Washington already out there, it was left to Ellis to try to find some new angle with which to chronicle the Father of Our Country. With all the facts recorded (almost ad nauseum), what angle could he use? Ellis has chosen to explore the "character" of George Washington.

It takes Ellis 274 pages (plus some end notes) to determine that Washington was aloof. Or, at least, his personal correspondence (of which there are apparently reams and reams) is rarely ever personal. From this is drawn the assumption that Washington was a distant fellow. Added to this impression are those things written about him by his contemporaries, who still seem to keep him (or allow him to keep himself) at arm's length.

George apparently wrote many letters to his beloved wife Martha but she, as was deemed appropriate for the time, burned all those letters after his death. Is it possible that other letters, those deemed more personal than public, were treated similarly by other people George wrote to? Martha's fire makes the news because a] she was his wife and b] there was so much fuel for the conflagration; but perhaps there were many other such personal letters that met the same fate but have not made the news because they were scattered singly among many friends. (This may be a completely unwarranted and unfounded guess on my part.) Only Lafayette seems to have kept anything like personal letters from Washington, so we need to ask whether he was the only one to receive them or just the only one to preserve them (if Ellis asked this question and received an answer, it's not in the book.)

This is just one illustration of what I see as the overall problem with this book (and, indeed, with almost all works about people dead more than a century): judging a person's life back then by today's standards. Perhaps Washington was aloof and distant, or maybe that was just the public persona and in more intimate settings he was quite different (he was known, after all, as an excellent dancer and frequent attendee of balls). The mores of the time, however, would have precluded anyone he didn't volunteer the information to from asking.

Early or even contemporary, biographers may not have had the sheer volume of material to peruse that the modern historian has, but they also had-for good or bad-a sense of the times that the modern historian can only guess at. Washington's treatment of slaves, makes a good for instance. We look at slavery from our modern perspective as an unquestioned evil and can't imagine how anyone-a Christian especially-could put up with it. I admit I find the subject so horrible as to be unfathomable-rather like permissive murder (oh, wait, we have that in our society). So it becomes easy to look at things from our perspective and see Washington's possession of slaves as barbaric when, by the standards of his times, he was way out in left field because he treated his slaves so much better than what was common among Virginia's landed gentry. Maybe Washington-who was an extremely astute businessman who died wealthy (unlike Jefferson and some of the others)-just took care of his slaves because it was good business to keep one's business assets in fine working order (as Ellis suggests), or maybe he was beginning to see the Negro as a person but had not yet made the leap past his times to set them free (until his death). From our perch two centuries later, it's hard to say with anything like certainty what the man truly thought about slavery and the worth of people with different colored skin and it may be folly to try. Still, his actions, even Ellis seems to grudgingly admit, were progressive for the times, if not progressive enough for our times.

Ellis also assumes from the fact that Washington eschews the name "God" in favor of terms like "Providence" that Washington was not a particularly reverent person and maybe not even a Christian (owing that he didn't often go to church). This is at odds with other biographers who see, in Washington's hand-written prayer book especially, a deep and abiding reverence for God and his word. Again, it is possible we are trying to look backward from our century in which worship of God is mentioned by every candidate and determine whether a man in an age when even the ministers hesitated to invoke God's name in a sermon for fear of accidentally violating Exodus 20:7 were agnostic or extremely reverent.

If you are looking for a detailed biography, go to your local library and pick up one of the probably two dozen offerings they have. If you are looking for a primer on the life of George Washington that can be read (and enjoyed) in a couple sittings, "His Excellency" by Joseph J. Ellis is a good place to start. Just don't stop there.