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Home – Political News – ‘American Patriarch’ Tells George Washington’s Tale

‘American Patriarch’ Tells George Washington’s Tale

As the United States marks its semiquincentennial, a new biography reminds us why George Washington was eulogized by “Light Horse Harry” Lee in 1799 as having been “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

In “American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington,” prolific historian H.W. Brands delivers an in-depth look at the man who was driving events years before there was a United States.

As far back as 1754, the young Washington, then a lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia, helped trigger the French and Indian War on the western frontier. That war, like so many of Washington’s endeavors, worked out well for his countrymen. When it was over, France had lost its foothold in North America, and the colonists were able to dream of pushing westward to build an empire.

Before long, Washington was also taking the lead on independence from the British crown. “At a time when our lordly masters in Great Britain will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprivation of American freedom, it seems highly necessary that something should be done to avert the stroke and maintain the liberty which we have derived from our ancestors,” Washington wrote to fellow Virginian George Mason after Parliament imposed the Townshend Act in 1767. He was prepared to do something about it.

“Colonel Washington appears at Congress in his uniform,” John Adams wrote from Philadelphia in 1775. Washington attended the Second Continental Congress and was unanimously appointed commander in chief of the Continental Army on June 15. Through trials and travails, he would lead that army to victory more than six years later.

However, it was never easy, as Brands makes clear.

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