Pointing to sources like the proclamation, today’s religious leaders often count Washington as one of their own. The late Tim LaHaye, whose Left Behind series sold over 11 million copies, cast Washington as a “devout believer in Jesus Christ” who had “accepted Him as His Lord and Savior.” David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, an evangelical Christian advocacy organization, and the former vice chairman of Texas’s Republican Party, pictured a reverent Washington kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge on the cover of his book, America’s Godly Heritage. And politicians look to texts like Washington’s proclamation as proof that America was founded as a Christian nation. All doubters need to do, according to Sarah Palin, is “go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant.”

But what did Washington’s talk of this “glorious Being” really mean at the time? Are these references proof that Washington would, in LaHaye’s words, “freely identify with the Bible-believing branch of evangelical Christianity?” Or do they mean something else—something that would have been clear to Washington’s audience in 1789—but which eludes us today?

To find out, research psychologist Eli Gottlieb and I conducted a study in which we asked people with varied levels of historical knowledge and religious commitment to read Washington’s proclamation and tell us what they thought. At one end of the spectrum were members of the clergy; at the other were agnostic and atheist scientists. We also questioned professional historians, religious and nonreligious alike.

Clergy and scientists agreed that Washington was deeply pious. Where they parted ways was about whether his piety should be applauded—or denounced. A Methodist minister found support in Washington for the claim that the United States was founded on a “general Christian faith” and that “religion and spirituality played a significant role” in American life, more so than people are willing to admit today.

For their part, scientists chaffed at Washington’s “violation of church and state.” A biologist compared the president to a “country preacher” who arrogantly assumed “that everybody believed the same thing.”

And the historians? They reacted so differently that it seemed as if they had read a different document entirely.

Regardless of their religious leanings, historians focused less on what was in Washington’s address than what wasn’t. One historian remarked that the proclamation would “depress Pat Robertson,” the evangelical media mogul and chairman of TV’s Christian Broadcasting Network, who would fume at the fact that the proclamation made “no mention of Jesus Christ.” In lieu of recognizable markers of Christian piety—Jesus, Son of God, the cross, the blood of salvation, the Trinity, eternal life, the Resurrection—one finds airy and nondescript abstractions like “great and glorious Being” or “the Lord and Ruler of Nations.”

Historians were not deaf to Washington’s religious references. While the clergy and the scientists saw them as evidence of Washington’s devotion, the historians stressed the president’s precision in crafting a vocabulary that would unite the dizzying array of Protestant denominations in post-revolutionary America without alienating the small but important groups of Catholics, Jews, and freethinkers dotting the American landscape. It was precisely because he understood that Americans did not believe the same thing that Washington was scrupulous in choosing words that would be acceptable to a wide spectrum of religious groups.

In his own time, Washington’s reluctance to show his doctrinal cards dismayed his Christian co-religionists. Members of the first Presbytery of the Eastward (comprised of Presbyterian churches in Massachusetts and New Hampshire) complained to the president that the Constitution failed to mention the cardinal tenets of Christian faith: “We should not have been alone in rejoicing to have seen some explicit acknowledgement of the only true God and Jesus Christ.” Washington dodged the criticism by assuring the Presbyterians that the “path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.”

Similarly, a week before his 1789 proclamation, Washington responded to a letter from Reverend Samuel Langdon, the president of Harvard College from 1774-1780. Langdon had implored Washington to “let all men know that you are not ashamed to be a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Once again, instead of affirming Christian tenets, Washington wrote back offering thanks to the generic “Author of the Universe.”

Even historians who have spent a lifetime studying Washington find his religious beliefs difficult to pin down. (John Adams once remarked that Washington possessed the “gift of silence.”) According to historian John Fea, himself an evangelical Christian, Washington’s Christianity took a back seat to his republicanism. Washington believed that personal interests and commitments of faith should be, as Fea put it, secondary to the “greater good of the nation.”

The last state to ratify the Constitution was Rhode Island. Only after they had done so did Washington agree to visit the state. Arriving in Newport on August 17, 1790, Washington listened to the town’s notables offer greetings, among them a representative from Yeshuat Israel, Newport’s Hebrew congregation. Moses Seixas thanked Washington for “generously affording” the “immunities of Citizenship” to a people “deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens.”

Moved by these words, Washington responded four days later by making clear to the members of Yeshuat Israel that citizenship in this new country was not a matter of “generosity” or the “indulgence of one class of people” by another. America was not Europe, where tolerance of religious minorities, where it occurred, was an act of noblesse oblige. In the United States, Washington explained, “all possess alike liberty of conscience and the immunities of citizenship.”

Today, George Washington has been conscripted into the culture wars over the religious underpinnings of this country. The stakes are high. As one prominent theologian put it, if Washington can be shown to be an “orthodox Trinity-affirming believer in Jesus Christ” then “Christianity today is not an interloper in the public square” but can be mobilized to counter “the secular assault against the historic values and beliefs of America.” Those who summon the first president to the contemporary battlefield must pay a price: They must scrub Washington of the ambiguity, prudence, nuance, tact, and caution that so defined his character.

In the rare moments when Washington was forthcoming about religion, he expressed fear about using faith as a wedge to separate one American from another. He understood how religious disputes tear at civic union. “Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind,” Washington wrote Sir Edward Newenham in the midst of the bloodletting between Ireland’s Protestants and Catholics, “those which are caused by a difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing.”

Washington dreamed of a nation, as he wrote to Newport’s Hebrew Congregation, that gives “bigotry no sanction … persecution no assistance.” What makes Americans American, he believed, is not the direction they turn to in prayer. Rather, it is the respect they owe fellow citizens who choose to turn in a different direction—or in no direction at all.

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Many might be surprised to learn, therefore, that at one particularly precarious point in the city’s history during the War of 1812, Congress seriously debated abandoning the site and moving the capital to another location. Rooted in the ideological and regional disputes of the time, the moment highlighted the deep symbolic value Americans placed on Washington long before it evolved into a showplace of American culture, learning, and history as well as a stage for marches, protests, and rallies.

Disputes over the physical form and development of what would become Washington, D.C. began almost immediately after President George Washington chose the site for the city in 1791, with opposing political camps hoping that the new capital might be molded to reflect their particular visions for the new nation. Two major political parties had congealed in Congress during Washington’s administration: the Federalist Party, which envisioned a strong federal government at the helm of an increasingly powerful American nation, and the Democratic-Republicans (also referred to as the Republicans or Jeffersonians, after their leader Thomas Jefferson), who believed in a smaller and weaker national government, one lacking both the power and the funds to tyrannize Americans as the British government had prior to the Revolution.

George Washington never belonged to either of these parties, but his political beliefs leaned toward those of the Federalists—and the architect he chose to plan the new capital, the French-born Revolutionary War veteran Pierre Charles L’Enfant, delivered a grand and impressive city plan that reflected a Federalist perspective on U.S. power, prestige, and government authority. L’Enfant’s design placed the President’s Mansion and the Capitol Building atop existing hills, allowing each to loom over sections of the city. It featured long, uncommonly wide avenues, emphasizing the breadth and grandeur of the cityscape. It called for individual states to erect “statues, columns, obelisks, or any other ornaments” to commemorate Revolutionary War heroes. And, in terms of sheer size, L’Enfant’s capital dwarfed the footprints of other American cities, spreading across an area more than six times the 1.5 square miles at the southern tip of Manhattan that made up New York in 1800.

Unfortunately for the Federalists, the infant republic lacked the means to build on such a grand scale. In 1800, President John Adams and Congress moved into half-finished and just barely functional versions of the White House and Capitol Building. Summing up the state of the capital, Connecticut Congressman John Cotton Smith remarked that “instead of recognizing the avenues and streets, portrayed on the plan of the city, not one was visible, unless we except a road with two buildings on each side of it, called the New Jersey Avenue. The Pennsylvania Avenue, leading, as laid down on paper, from the Capitol to the Presidential Mansion, was then nearly the whole distance a deep morass, covered with alder bushes.”

After Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans swept to power in the election of 1800, they followed through on their small-government convictions and left responsibility for further construction and development of the enormous city to the local residents. Over the next three decades, Jeffersonians confined federal government support for projects in the city almost exclusively to the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol. Calls for assistance from the locals, whose tiny tax base could not begin to support management and development of a city the size of Washington, went largely unheeded.

It was this context into which British troops marched during the War of 1812, which had started when the United States attacked British Canada in the hopes of resolving ongoing disputes with the British Empire over interference with Native Americans, and over British naval policies that affected the United States during the Napoleonic Wars. But in August 1814, after easily defeating American soldiers and militiamen at Bladensburg, Maryland, British marines captured the otherwise undefended American capital. Happily repaying the Americans for the burning of the Canadian capital of York (now Toronto) earlier in the war, British troops set fire to the public buildings in Washington. The White House, the Capitol Building, the executive office buildings, and the Navy Yard all burned.

The U.S. Capitol after it was burned by the invading British during the War of 1812. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Although their homes and private businesses had been spared by a summer storm that prevented the fires from spreading, weary Washington residents suddenly found themselves facing another—possibly even greater—threat to their livelihoods. Almost immediately, members of the House of Representatives, who had been burned out of their chambers, began debating the removal of the federal government from the District of Columbia. On September 26th, meeting in the largest building still standing in Washington, a converted hotel that housed the Patent Office and the U.S. Post Office, Congress began to debate the future of the capital. Congressman Jonathan Fisk, a Democratic-Republican from New York, first proposed the formation of a committee to “inquire into the expediency of removing the Seat of Government.”

Largely hailing from the Northern states, proponents of removal argued that Washington had been proven insufficiently defensible and that a safer location should be found for the government. They also decried the inconveniences of cramming themselves together in too small a building and the indignity of what one member referred to as “making laws among ruins.” These latter complaints might have been remedied by temporary relocation of the government while the Capitol Building was reconstructed. But supporters of Washington feared that, once out of the District, Congress might never choose to return. These fears must have been exacerbated when advocates for removal raised longstanding complaints about Washington that stemmed from both its lack of development and from its location in the South, several days’ travel beyond the Northern cities that housed most of America’s banking and financial interests. Congressman Fisk noted, for example, that Congress would benefit from being “where they could have better opportunity to call into action the resources of the nation.”

Defenders of the Potomac capital asked what message departure would send to the American people and to their British enemies. Would they double the victory already won by the British by abandoning the site of their capital altogether? Would they leave behind the local residents of the District, many of whom had invested in land and businesses there? And what precedent would be set if the capital were moved? Nathaniel Macon, a Democratic-Republican from North Carolina, warned that, “if the Seat of Government was once set on wheels, there was no saying where it would stop.” Was Congress prepared to perpetually fight over the location of the capital?

On October 15, after three weeks of debate and two successful procedural votes to continue discussion of the motion, the issue was settled when the House voted 83 to 74 against removal. While views on the proper size of the city and the government’s role in its development had long been party battles, the subject of removal proved to be more tied to regional geography. Not surprisingly, Congressional delegations from those states nearest to the District, including Southern states, voted most overwhelmingly against removal, while congressmen from the North favored it. Delegations from states west of the Appalachians largely split their votes.

For their part, local residents banded together during and after this close call in Congress to ensure that the government remained in Washington. Even as the House debated removal, District banks offered $500,000 in credit to Congress to fund reconstruction, and the following February, Congress took them up on their offer. Also, recognizing that the cramped accommodations at the former Patent Office upset Congress, local residents formed a joint stock company which eventually spent $25,000—several hundred thousand dollars in today’s terms—to construct a temporary meeting place for Congress. Over the four years that Congress met in what came to be called the Old Brick Capitol, from 1815 to 1819, the federal government paid the Company a mere $6,600 in rent.

Although the locals didn’t come close to recouping their investment, their actions helped to reaffirm the District as the permanent home for the government. With the removal bill defeated and the reconstruction of the public buildings begun, Congress closed for good the question of the location of the capital city. National politicians, local residents, and all Americans now could return to debating every other aspect of the city’s form, function, and funding. By the 1830s, Jacksonian Era politicians had begun to leave behind the Jeffersonian insistence that the District fend for itself on matters of funding and development. And over the next two centuries, the city not only grew into but also, in many ways, lived up to and even surpassed the grand plans laid down by Washington and L’Enfant.

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There are certain things about the nation’s founding era that many Americans don’t want to see messed with. The Declaration of Independence, despite its inaccurate claims that King George had already unleashed Indian warriors against the frontier, is an almost sacred text.

And George Washington, despite the barrage of criticism he attracted during his second administration, sometimes seems immune from criticism.

While I was working on a new book about Washington, someone asked me: “You’re not going to say anything negative about the General, are you?” As commander of the Continental Army during the Revolution, and as the first president of a nation that was not yet entirely sure it wanted to be, or could survive as, a nation, Washington united Americans, and Americans ever since have been united in their admiration.

One legacy of the father of this country is often overlooked.

At a time when the United States was still weak, many Indian nations were still strong and represented a significant threat to a precarious infant republic. Washington knew that he must build his nation on Indian land, and by war and diplomacy, he helped set the United States on a path of westward expansion that transformed tribal homelands into American territories and then into states.

From our time and perspective, the outcome might seem inevitable; from his time and perspective, it was anything but. His dealings with Native Americans in securing the nation’s independence, survival, and future growth could be considered as another measure of his greatness. Unfortunately, those same dealings inevitably call that greatness into question.

The primary goal of Washington’s Indian policy was to acquire Indian lands. In that, he succeeded. His second goal—and it was a distant second—was to establish just policies for dealings with Indian peoples.

“The Government of the United States are determined that their Administration of Indian Affairs shall be directed entirely by the great principles of Justice and humanity,” Washington informed treaty commissioners heading off to deal with the Southern Indians in August 1789. Washington and his Secretary of War Henry Knox agreed that the most honorable and least expensive way to get Indian land was to purchase it in treaties. Offering Indian tribes a fair price for their land, Washington hoped, would allow the United States to expand with minimal bloodshed and at the same time treat Indian peoples with justice.

But when Indians refused to sell, Washington was ready to wage war against them. “Extirpate” was the term he used. (The Merriam-Webster dictionary provides two definitions of the word: one is “to pull up by the root”; the other “to destroy completely: wipe out.”) After he dispatched armies to ravage their country during the Revolution, the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) called Washington “Town Destroyer.”

The Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, after visiting Washington in Philadelphia in 1792, warned other Indians: “General Washington is very cunning, he will try to fool us if he can. He speaks very smooth, will tell you fair stories, and at the same time want to ruin us.” Six months after meeting the president, the Cherokee chief Bloody Fellow declared, “General Washington is a Liar.”

The chief was right to be skeptical. A man who had swindled fellow officers out of the bounty lands they had been promised as payment for their services after the French and Indian War hardly could be expected to protect Indian rights against forces of expansion which he himself helped set in motion.

Yet Washington envisioned a place for Indian people in American society. He offered them the chance to remake themselves as Americans by extending them the benefits of American civilization—agriculture (to be practiced by Indian men, not, as had been the case for centuries, by Indian women), education, and Christianity.

Some tribes seized the lifeline. The Cherokees rebuilt their tribe after years of war and land loss. Looking back from the 1820s and 1830s when Andrew Jackson was leading the charge to remove eastern Indian peoples west of the Mississippi, the Cherokee chief John Ross remembered with reverence the first president who had dealt justly with Indians. Ross even named his son George Washington.

Washington’s decisions set precedents that are still with us. As the father of the country, he was also the father of America’s tortuous, conflicted, and often hypocritical Indian policies. While he aspired to a national Indian policy that might somehow reconcile taking Native land with respecting Native rights, he shared and shaped the attitudes and ambitions of his time, and employed deception and violence to attain his own and his nation’s ends.

For example, the Treaty of New York, which he signed with a delegation of Creek chiefs in August 1790, contained secret articles to secure the agreement of chief Alexander McGillivray. And in 1791 Washington dispatched an army to defeat Indian resistance to American expansion by destroying Indian villages in northwest Ohio (a tactic that backfired when the Indians destroyed the army).

In fall 2016, the museum at Mount Vernon opened an exhibit entitled “Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.” The exhibit quietly, directly, and honestly shows that Washington’s home, wealth, and daily life rested on the unfree labor and exploitation of hundreds of African slaves. Even though he worried about slavery and freed his slaves in his will, Washington’s record and legacy on slavery are deeply ambivalent.

So, too, are his record and legacy in Indian affairs. We can pretend that it wasn’t, or we can acknowledge it as we try to understand the first president and the nation he helped to build.

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He was in love with his close friend’s wife. He was called an ingrate by his commander. He was accused of being a war criminal, a murderer, an incompetent leader, and an international embarrassment.

What is truly remarkable about the 20-something Washington, however, is not that he struggled and stumbled and made some terrible mistakes. It is how profoundly he learned from them. Washington’s arc of transformation from self-centered youth to selfless leader offers an example to us all.

Washington’s father, Gus, a Virginia tobacco planter and slaveholder of middling status, died when George was 11. Gus left the bulk of his plantation lands to George’s older half-brothers, thus leaving the young Washington without a way to make a living. After his mother emphatically rejected his request to go to sea at age 14, he took up surveying. This was fortunate. Under the mentorship of the aristocratic Fairfax family, the teenage Washington was soon surveying Virginia’s frontier, making good money, and buying his own land there.

Ambitious and eager to climb in the Virginia aristocracy, Washington took a part-time officer’s post in the Virginia colonial military and volunteered to cross the wintry Appalachian Mountains into the Ohio Valley wilderness when he was 21. His mission was to carry a message from Virginia’s British governor to the commandant of a French fort deep in the forest. It said, in essence: Stay out! These lands belong to King George! This launched the young Washington on a series of harrowing adventures in the Ohio wilderness that nearly killed him. At one point he tumbled off a makeshift log raft into a half-frozen river. The real trouble began, however, after Washington delivered the French commandant’s reply to the Virginia governor. The commandant politely but firmly declined to leave.

The indignant Virginia governor dispatched Washington back into the wilds at the head of a small military party, but warned him to be cautious and avoid being the aggressor. Washington did the opposite. He ambushed a small French party while they were breakfasting at dawn. Then one of Washington’s Indian allies tomahawked open the skull of the French officer in charge. It turned out the party Washington attacked was a French diplomatic detail—or so its members claimed—trying to deliver a message to the British.

Instead of retreating and reconsidering at this point, or engaging diplomatically, Washington, eager and cocksure, pushed ahead. He bragged that he enjoyed hearing bullets whistle and that he would drive the French back to Montreal. He built a flimsy stockade named Fort Necessity and made a stand against the French and their Indian allies.

It was a disaster—his troops were slaughtered, with about 100, or one-third of them, killed or wounded. Washington was forced to surrender, but it was too late. With his mistakes in 1754, he had personally ignited the French and Indian War, which would spread to Europe and, known there as the Seven Years’ War, last until 1763.

Surprisingly, this did not end his military career. Remarkably brave in battle, he was eventually named commander of Virginia’s provincial troops in that war when he was 23. Washington was responsible for protecting Virginia’s frontier settler families from Indian and French raiding parties. Initially, he seemed largely focused on himself—his “honor,” his reputation—and driven by pride. He tried to strike up a personal correspondence with Sally Fairfax, with whom he was infatuated, the charming wife of his good friend George William Fairfax. He began to see himself as an actor on a grand stage, and Sally as a willing audience. Thin-skinned, he quit or threatened to quit at least seven times as a Virginia officer—over too little pay, jealousy toward higher-ranking officers, newspaper criticism.

Civilian friends warned him if he quit then, in the middle of the war, that he truly would sully his reputation. He deeply coveted a British Royal Army officer’s commission—a prestigious “King’s” commission instead of a colonial one—but, to his lasting bitterness, Royal Army commanders rebuffed his many requests. His emotional neediness was pitiful at times. Pouting when he didn’t receive letters from friends back home, he complained to his commander that there must be something wrong with the military mail system. In fact, his friends had not written him.

Amid the trauma of war, however, his emotional focus began to widen. He showed an evolving sense of empathy toward others, first toward the colonial troops under his command as they died, undersupplied, in mud-and-blood-filled trenches, then toward the Virginia frontier settlers he was charged with defending. Families were kidnapped and scalped and butchered in Indian raids. Settlers came begging him to save them.

He often felt powerless to protect these people. Yet Washington was dogged and fearless and calm in the face of danger. He began to listen closely to his officers, carefully weighing their advice and moderating his impetuousness. Surviving numerous close calls in battle that left bullet holes through his clothing, he felt miraculously spared. He came to believe that “Providence” had a greater role for him.

After British forces finally dislodged the French, Washington emerged from the Ohio wilderness in late 1758 at age 26. He had recently written an impassioned letter to Sally Fairfax, who did not return the sentiment. Within a few weeks of his emergence he married the wealthy widow Martha Custis, settling down to the life of a prosperous planter and family man. Besides financial security, Martha probably offered him the intimate emotional reassurance that he had lacked during those years thrashing through the Ohio wilderness, trying to make a name. (We’ll never know for sure because she burned their correspondence.)

Almost two decades later, in the spring of 1775, Washington attended the Continental Congress in Philadelphia as a delegate for Virginia. Still tall and powerfully built at age 43, he wore a resplendent blue-and-buff uniform of his own design. He projected an aura of modesty, dignity, and strength. By then he had learned how to carry himself in the world, how to engender loyalty and trust, how to seize opportunity yet also care for others. In other words, he had learned how to lead.

The Continental Congress needed a commander for its new army to march against British troops in Boston. Washington possessed far more military experience than anyone in the room due to his role—checkered though it may have been—in the French and Indian War. John Adams rose to speak favorably of him. Washington was nominated. Delegates voted. It was unanimous. George Washington would be the first commander in chief of the Continental Army of the United Colonies. In so many ways, it was a destiny of his own making.

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Standing at the threshold of that little room, 10 years ago, I wondered at the strength of Martha’s feeling. I had given little prior thought to Mrs. Washington—her big white mobcaps, her rosy face. I never conceived of her as having a romantic soul. Furthermore, I had supposed George—first commander-in-chief, then president—had little inclination or time to play the private man and husband. But as Martha’s suffering in this attic room suggested, the couple’s bond was unusually strong.

That day at Mount Vernon, I resolved to learn more about the Washingtons’ marriage. The further I got in my research, the richer I found the couple’s story, in which private life intertwines with public duty. The Washingtons’ devotion to each other sustained them through times of crisis for the army and the fledgling republic. Together, in a series of rented residences, with imagination and verve, they created the presidency as an office, and helped to establish the dignity and stability of the new country. When John Adams succeeded as president in 1797, his wife Abigail paid tribute to Martha’s faultless performance as presidential partner. In a sense, all presidents and spouses ever since have been measured against the first president and his wife.

When young George Washington married Martha Parke Custis in 1759, they were still loyal British subjects. George had recently resigned his commission as colonel of a colonial regiment fighting for the Crown against the French in Canada. Martha, though only in her mid-20s, was a wealthy widow. With her riches, the newlyweds could embellish Mount Vernon, a family home that George rented from an elder half-brother’s widow (he inherited the estate after her death). The Washingtons sent to London, with hogsheads of tobacco for sale, invoices for English bedsteads and carriages and china. The Washingtons’ home still seems eminently English, despite very American views of the Potomac from its famous piazza. The layout of the rooms, the wallpapers and the furnishings, the gardens and shrubberies—all resemble those of an 18th-century manor house in the U.K. This is only logical: London, not New York or Philadelphia, remained the “metropolis” for this Virginian couple until war broke out 15 years later.

By that time, Washington was already a vocal opponent of British taxation. “The Crisis is arrivd,” he wrote, “when we must assert our Rights, or Submit to every Imposition that can be heap’d upon us.” Martha was just as patriotic as her husband. She had a very good head for business and resented, like George, the taxes London imposed on Virginians. It gave her, she wrote during the war, “unspeakable pleasure” to hear that Gen¬eral Burgoyne and his troops were prisoners of war. And when shirts were desperately needed for Continental soldiers, she promoted among American ladies a scheme to raise the necessary funds. In a paradigm of the patriot experience, the Washingtons went from British subjects to radicalized American rebels, enduring the privations of eight years of war, to emerge into the freedom and uncertainty of a young republic. Portraits, prints and paintings scattered throughout the house attest to George’s years as commander-in-chief and president. A wealth of material, including The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, detail how the Washingtons’ union sustained them in those years when America’s union with England was dissolving.

When George was about to take command of the Continental Army in the summer of 1775, for example, he worried that Martha would be lonely without him. “I shall feel no pain from the Toil, or the danger of the Campaign,” he wrote to her. “My unhappiness will flow, from the uneasiness I know you will feel at being left alone.” But in fact, it was George, besieging the British in Boston, who missed Martha. That winter he called her to come to him at his headquarters in Cambridge. It became an established pattern. At the close of the campaigning season, every winter of the war, Martha braved bad roads and icy weather to join her husband.

The general’s aides-de-camp marked the improvement in their chief’s mood following her arrival. General Nathanael Greene wrote that George and Martha were “excessive fond.” The Marquis de Lafayette, a French volunteer, heard that Mrs. Washington was madly in love with her husband. And the commander himself, four years into the war at Epiphany 1779, told Ben Franklin’s daughter with satisfaction that he had been married to Mrs. Washington 20 years that day.

Both Washingtons hoped for more private time together after the war. That was not to be. When Washington was elected first president of the United States in 1789, he wrote to an army colleague that “my move¬ments to the chair of Government will be accompanied with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.” Martha, still at Mount Vernon, wrote to a nephew, “I think it was much too late for him to go into public life again, but it was not to be avoided.” Together, they inhabited rented presidential residences in New York and in Philadelphia. In so doing, they sacrificed all private social life, following the express orders of the Cabinet that the president must not be seen as partisan. Washington, dismayed, inquired if he might attend—“rarely”—tea parties. Martha complained privately to a niece at Mount Vernon: “I never go to any publick place,—indeed I think I am more like a state prisoner than anything else.” But at the receptions she and the president hosted, she was a charming and benevolent presence.

Every Tuesday, Washington held a levee for gentlemen, where he was a majestic figure in black velvet, with dress sword and coat. Martha hosted Friday drawing rooms, where ladies as well as gentlemen were welcome, and lemonade and ice creams were served. Additionally, every Thursday the Washingtons hosted a “Congress dinner,” to which individual members of both Houses and their wives were invited. The guests at all these events went away impressed by the benevolence of their host and hostess and the munificence of the food and wine on offer. They knew nothing of the Washingtons’ reluctance to take on the roles of president and presidential partner.

Anti-Federalists criticized the courtly levees, the “queenly” drawing rooms, and especially the keeping of Washington’s birthday in February as “monarchical prettinesses.” But Washington was resolute. Envoys and other officials from European courts must not find the new republic lacking in dignity. Letters home from English diplomats in Philadelphia show that he secured his objective.

When at last George and Martha could retire to Mount Vernon, Martha wrote to a friend, “The curtain is fall¬ing” and she looked forward to a “more tranquil theater.” Of course, when they returned, they found “everything in a deranged [condition] and all the buildings in a decaying state.” But their happiness to be home again and with each other shines out from their correspondence.

No one could have known, when this couple married in 1759, that they would pass through the crucible of war together, let alone endure the rigors of the presidency ahead. Their loyalty to each other, and their commitment to the American cause, put their marriage at the heart of the young country and established a model for future first couples: In a 1935 radio interview, Eleanor Roosevelt paid tribute to Martha as “a pioneer and maker of precedents.” “We can be grateful,” Roosevelt added, “that she took an interest in public affairs and did her duty.” For this, we can still be grateful to both Washingtons today.

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So when Washington stumbled upon a detachment of Canadian militia escorting the French emissary Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, he panicked, fearing it was a party of Indians. Jumonville had been sent to find the Virginians and to urge them to leave the region peacefully. Washington’s party killed Jumonville and 12 of his men in an ambush. The “assassination” of Jumonville caused a diplomatic furor in Europe, and most historians consider this “battle” as the informal start of the French and Indian War, or Seven Years’ War, in America.

But while we remember Washington’s part in these events, the Native Americans who worried him so much have been largely forgotten. They were the Anishinaabeg of the Great Lakes, and their history was as rich as Washington’s own story—and they had a similarly dramatic impact on world history. Indeed, the kings of France, ministers in London, and imperial and military officers in America, including George Washington, feared—and respected—the Anishinaabeg. They all spent considerable time discussing Indian politics—and worrying about their influence on European affairs.

Anishinaabeg is the term many people across the Great Lakes region—from the St. Lawrence River to the headwaters of the Mississippi—use to refer to themselves, meaning the real, or original, peoples. Europeans called them the Ottawa, Chippewa, Potawatomi, Nipissing, Algonquin, and Mississauga. But they all spoke Anishinaabemowin, and they were all, as they put it, “Allies to each other and as one People.”

One of the most powerful Anishinaabe settlements was Waganakazee, located at the Michilimackinac—a narrow strait that connected Lakes Huron and Michigan (at present day Mackinaw City, Michigan). Here, a large—and growing—group of Ottawa (or Odawa) managed to use their extensive kinship ties, mastery of the canoe, and strategic location to carve out an important role for themselves even in the midst of European imperialism. If natives or newcomers wanted to pass east and west, or north and south across the lakes, they needed the permission of the Odawa. In the era before railroads and highways, Michilimackinac was the “door” to the North American continent. And the Odawa held the key.

Historic sign marking the location of Waganakising, also known as Waganakazee.

 
I first came across the Anishinaabeg when researching the life of Charles Michel Mouet de Langlade, the son of an Odawa mother and a French father who played an important role in many different 18th-century conflicts. Langlade is often depicted as a French or British officer or agent. But I quickly realized that it was his Odawa family who wielded the most influence over his life.

They wielded an outsized influence in the region, too. The Odawa stood in the middle of a complex web of relationships with other Anishinaabemowin speakers that stretched east, west, north, and south. They also had a long history of conflict and cooperation with other Indian peoples around the Great Lakes region that shaped the way they interacted with European newcomers. Beginning in the 17th century, French imperial officials and settlers along the St. Lawrence River (which connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean) were enmeshed by the Odawa and their kin in one Indian war after another over the beaver fur trade.

And when the French tried to interfere in Indian politics, the Anishinaabeg simply played them off against other Indian nations, or the English to their south, by threatening different alliances. The collective strength of the Anishinaabeg meant they could not be ignored or cowed.

When the British defeated the French in the Seven Years’ War—a conflict the Odawa had inadvertently helped start—they inherited these uncertain and volatile relations with the Anishinaabeg. In May of 1763, Native Americans all across the Great Lakes region rose up as if on a signal to take newly occupied British posts in what became known as Pontiac’s War, or Pontiac’s Rebellion. At Michilimackinac, a group of Ojibwe playing a game of lacrosse flipped the ball into the fort and rushed after it. Once inside, they overwhelmed the garrison, killed at least 16 soldiers, and took the rest—along with their officers—prisoner.

View from Fort Michilimackinac, looking westwards toward Lake Michigan. This is a 20th-century reconstruction of the fort that was attacked by the Anishinaabe Ojibwe in 1763.

 
In local lore, Langlade reputedly strode in at the last minute and saved the remaining prisoners from almost certain death at the hands of the Ojibwe. But in reality, it was the Odawa from Waganakazee who orchestrated the denouement. They stepped in to mediate between their kin the Ojibwe, the British, and other Native groups in the region. They held on to the survivors as hostages for a time, yet ultimately returned them safely to Montreal—to great acclaim.

The Odawa were not interested in exterminating the British at Michilimackinac, which they could have done at any time. They were happy to have a British post among them, but on their own terms. These included allowing French traders to continue to operate in the area; disallowing the British garrison to grow their own corn; and twice yearly transfers of substantial amounts of trade goods and provisions. We often call these presents “hand-outs,” but we should call them “rent.”

In general, the uprising served as a costly reminder to the British of Native sovereignty and their competing claims over the land. The British tried to end Pontiac’s War in 1764 by conceding to most Indian demands and giving out about 58,000 English pounds worth of presents and provisions.

To put those concessions into perspective, that same year, Parliament passed the Stamp Act to raise revenue from the colonies to help pay for their own defense and to maintain peaceful relations with the Indians. Legislators hoped to raise some 60,000 pounds by selling the stamps, roughly the same amount the British had paid to try and end Pontiac’s War. Native Americans, then, helped ignite the fuse that would ultimately ignite the American Revolution.

We cannot understand the history of early America without comprehending Indian country on its own terms. The choices made by the Anishinaabeg mattered.

The Anishinaabeg, long a powerful presence in the Great Lakes region, remain today one of the largest indigenous ethnic groups in North America. They have shaped the history of the continent in profound and diverse and creative ways. One way or another, they will continue to shape it yet.

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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 his remaining days as a respected Virginia planter.

The fact that Washington did not deem himself indispensable to what would follow lay down a marker for this new nation of self-reliant free men—he embodied the notion that in a representative democracy, no individual is indispensable. And that, paradoxically enough, is what made Washington an indispensable protagonist at the founding of our republic.

It’s worth noting that even as the conflict began between the colonies and their mother country, Washington had not burned with desire to command the new American army. Nor did he face the assignment given him with confidence that he would succeed. His misgivings began with the estimate of himself that he offered Congress with his acceptance of the appointment: “[M]y Abilities and Military experience,” he said, “may not be equal to this extensive and important Trust.”

He also felt uneasy about leaving his wife Martha, to whom he wrote from Philadelphia: “[T]hat so far from seeking this appointment I have used every endeavor in my power to avoid it, not only from my unwillingness to part with you and the Family but from a consciousness of its being a trust too great for my Capacity and that I should enjoy more real happiness and felicity in one month with you at home.” But, he added, “as it has been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this Service, I shall hope that my undertaking of it, is designed to answer some good purpose.”

The American people do not seem to have felt any of the doubts Washington carried within himself about his abilities, and his selection by the Congress did not surprise them. He had been a leading Virginia planter concerned about British moves to curtail economic autonomy and political freedom in the colonies in the years leading up to the confrontations at Lexington and Concord, and involved in the efforts to organize opposition to these moves. Many people across the colonies knew of Washington, had learned about him from militiamen who served under his command in the French and Indian War (as the Seven Years War, 1756 to 1763, was called in America).

Washington had come to the public’s attention early in the preliminaries to the war in 1754 when he tangled violently with a small French contingent in the Ohio country, an encounter that elicited his high-spirited (and foolish) comment: “I heard bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.” The charm soon wore off as he suffered defeat in a battle a few months later. His reputation was not damaged however, and in the next four years his name became well-known throughout America as he fought with distinction—as a volunteer with General James Braddock and later as a commander of the Virginia Regiment with General John Forbes—until the Ohio country, or most of it, fell to British forces. Thus Congress’ action in making him commander of the Continental Army reflected the esteem he had earned in the conflict with the French.

Worldwide fame came to Washington during the American Revolution, despite the lack of a long succession of great victories. Washington was admired as much for how he handled adversity—and made sure his army outlasted it—as he was for his successes. His forces seemed on the edge of destruction every year after 1775. His army was defeated in major battles at Brooklyn in 1776; it suffered heavy losses in New York and New Jersey in the months after General William Howe smashed it in at Brooklyn Heights; it almost collapsed at Valley Forge where it had endured a terrible winter following defeat at Brandywine and Germantown. In the next three years, the army hardly prospered, usually nearly starving in camp. Its soldiers often proved unreliable—enlisting for short periods, and disappearing homeward bound whenever they could find a way from engagement in the war.

But this dispiriting assessment should be qualified by several facts about these men: Some fought with skill and bravery in all of their defeats, and there was a small number of superb officers at their head. Washington, in particular, stood alone in his brilliance and unwavering spirit, providing an example of steadfastness against all suggestions that the army should give up and concede victory to the British. After the battles at Trenton and Princeton, Nicholas Cresswell, a planter, recorded in his journal an opinion that was fairly widely shared: “Six weeks” before, a friend of his “was lamenting the unhappy situation of the Americans and pitying the wretched condition of their much-beloved General, supposing his want of skill and experience in military matters had brought them all to the brink of destruction. In short all was gone, all was lost. But now the scale is turned and Washington’s name is extolled to the clouds.”

The battle of Yorktown raised popular estimation of Washington even more, especially because it yielded a general conviction in America, almost matched in Britain, that the war was over (even if Washington did not necessarily agree). The toasts drunk to victory at this time always included one to Washington, the leader of the triumphal nation.

One of Washington’s finest moments came not on the battlefield or in any conventional aspect of warfare. It occurred in the army’s camp at Newburgh, New York, in early 1783. On this occasion, Washington dissuaded some disgruntled officers of his from forcing Congress—their masters and his—to provide back pay and pensions for themselves. It was healthy to petition Congress and speak up for the interests of its new army, which Washington forcefully did throughout the conflict, but in the end, he pointed out to his fellow officers, the “Civil Power” must govern, and the army must follow its direction. These officers may indeed have been considering the use of force to compel the Congress to act on their behalf; but confronted by their general, who had sacrificed so much, they gave way, and a tranquil United States made peace.

Washington reiterated his respect for civilian supremacy at the simple ceremony at which he surrendered his command, making clear that in the newly independent nation, even the greatest of generals remain servants to the republic and its representatives. The general would return to lead the “civil power” as our first president, but even then, only for a finite number of years, once again establishing the precedent of self-restraint and subservience to the law and republican norms. Thus, Washington’s great legacy was the idea that the launching of the United States was all about the people, not himself.

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Lafayette was hardly the only Frenchman of his time to view Americans in a virtuous light. The Comte de Ségur, one of Lafayette’s friends, wrote in his memoirs that a sense of admiration pervaded Paris when Silas Deane and Benjamin Franklin arrived in 1776 seeking support for the Continental Army. Ségur described “the contrast between the luxury of our capital, the elegance of our fashions, the magnificence of Versailles” and the honest, unaffected mien of the visitors from across the Atlantic. With their “almost rustic dress, simple but proud bearing, free and direct language, hair without preparation or powder,” the Americans had an “antique air” that made them seem like “wise contemporaries of Plato, or republicans from the time of Cato and Fabius.”

To Lafayette, whose rugged deportment and candid speech made him something of an outsider at the perfumed court of Versailles, the Americans in Paris seemed like men after his own heart. The Vicomte de Mauroy, a far more seasoned officer who crossed the Atlantic with Lafayette, tried to temper his enthusiasm—but his warnings fell on deaf ears. Lafayette reached Charleston, South Carolina, as optimistic as ever. Writing to his wife, Adrienne, on June 19, 1777, Lafayette described the United States as an idyllic land where “the simplicity of manners, the desire to oblige, the love of country and of liberty” were the dominant characteristics of the people, and where “sweet equality … reigns over all.” Lafayette’s first extended sojourn with an American community deepened these beliefs. After being wounded in the leg at the Battle of Brandywine on September 11, 1777, Lafayette was nursed back to health by the Moravian Brethren in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He came away touched by “the gentle religion” of his hosts, whom he saw as an “innocent family” that managed to maintain its “community of goods, education and interests” despite the devastating war around them.

Lafayette developed a more nuanced understanding of Americans in the months that followed. Living, training, and fighting alongside George Washington—a mentor he’d come to consider his adoptive father—Lafayette suffered from the deprivations that were plaguing the Continental Army. In the winter of 1777-1778, he froze at Valley Forge while political disputes and disorderly systems prevented much-needed supplies from reaching Washington’s soldiers, and he even found himself the unwitting pawn of a cabal that aimed to oust Washington from his command. The scales were falling from his eyes, and Lafayette recognized there were “open dissensions in Congress” and “parties who Hate one another as much as the Common Enemy,” as he wrote to Washington. In short, Lafayette saw that Americans, like the rest of humankind, were imperfect.

After the American victory at Yorktown in 1781, most of the French officers who fought in the War of Independence returned to the careers they had left behind, but Lafayette—who had no career to reprise—made America his life’s work. His townhouse on the rue de Bourbon in Paris became a center of American sociability: the Jeffersons, the Adamses, and the Franklins were frequent guests at Monday dinners that included Lafayette’s children—George Washington Lafayette, and his daughter, known as Virginie in honor of the American state. A gold-engraved copy of the Declaration of Independence hung on the wall of Lafayette’s study, and American plants climbed his terrace. So fully was he identified with the United States that, in 1787, the explorer John Ledyard wrote that Lafayette “has planted a tree in America, and sits under its shade at Versailles.”

Lafayette’s commitment to America was more than symbolic. Determined to serve as the new nation’s foremost advocate in France, Lafayette set out to promote friendship and trade between the two nations. He surveyed American merchants and French manufacturers, and advised ministries from both countries, eager to play matchmaker. For instance, recognizing that the finest French goods would appeal only to a select few Americans, Lafayette wrote that “the less refined manufactures will be closer to American taste,” and suggested that French producers might cut costs and gain customers “by simplifying our methods.” Knowing that Americans preferred a straightforward style not only in their goods but also in their dealings, Lafayette averred that the French way of doing business “has driven American trade away.” Articulating a sentiment that he must have heard many times over, Lafayette added that “the intricacies of our regulations are even more annoying than their cost.”

Lafayette sometimes objected to decisions made by the United States but, bound by a sense of loyalty to his second country, he voiced these disagreements only to Americans. As he put it in a 1784 letter to John Adams, “it Has Ever Been My duty and inclination to Set up in the Best light Every thing that is done By a Body of Americans. … Had I Amendments to Propose, it Should Be in America, and not in Europe.” In this case, Lafayette was writing about a comparatively minor issue—the by-laws of the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary organization founded in 1783 by the officers who had served under Washington—but he applied the same discretion in all matters.

Lafayette differed most substantively with his American friends on the question of slavery. Although he refrained from criticizing the American practice while in France, Lafayette publicly signaled his disapproval on several occasions throughout his long life. During a 1784 visit to the Virginia House of Delegates, Lafayette made a plea that the state might provide the world with “proofs of its love for the rights of all of humanity, in its entirety.” Given that the Delegates had, on that very day, received two pro-slavery petitions, the implications of Lafayette’s words could not have been mistaken.

Lafayette proudly referred to himself as a citizen of the United States (although he was not officially granted that honor until 2002), and to him being an American meant being capable of—indeed, dedicated to—constant improvement, innovation, and experimentation. As France hurtled toward its own revolution in 1789, Lafayette wrote to Thomas Jefferson explaining why, in his opinion, France should not attempt to follow in America’s republican footsteps. Americans, he wrote, enjoyed “the advantage to work a new ground, uninfluenced by all the circumstances which in Europe necessitate calculations very different.” Europeans, in contrast, had lived in a state of corruption for so many centuries that they could not easily be extracted from it; France needed a constitutional monarchy to guarantee its liberty.

This refusal to endorse a French republic infuriated Lafayette’s more radical countrymen, who saw it as incompatible with his vaunted love for the United States. But Lafayette perceived no contradiction. In his view, only Americans were in a position to create a new, more virtuous society, in an unspoiled land where all things were possible. It’s little wonder that he’d wanted in on the unique opportunity.

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