America's First Citizen: Character Lessons from George Washington
August 12, 2026
George Washington occupies an odd place in American memory. He is everywhere, on the dollar bill, on the quarter, on the obelisk that dominates the National Mall, and yet he is strangely absent as a person. Students often arrive at college knowing two things about him: that he was the first president, and that he owned slaves. Both facts are true. Neither explains why Europeans who watched him from a distance found his conduct nearly incomprehensible, or why his contemporaries, who knew his faults intimately, trusted him with a republic that could have collapsed at any moment.
The more interesting question is not whether Washington was a great man in some abstract sense. It is what kind of man he made himself into, and what that transformation reveals about the kind of citizen a republic requires.
A Man Who Kept Learning
The young Washington was not the figure we recognize from Gilbert Stuart’s portrait. He was ambitious in a conventional, eighteenth-century way. What he wanted, more than anything, was a commission in the British regular army, the same prize his older brother had won. He wanted admission into a hierarchy he had been born just outside of, and he pursued it with the eagerness of a provincial who knows exactly how provincial he looks to the men above him.
Those men made sure he knew. British officers treated colonial officers as inferiors by definition, regardless of competence, and Washington absorbed that insult at close range during the French and Indian War. The experience appears to have shifted something fundamental in how he understood status. If rank could not be earned within the imperial system, perhaps rank meant less than the system claimed.
He also had a temper. As a young commander he acquired a reputation for disciplining his troops harshly, treating them roughly in the manner an officer of the king might treat subjects who had no standing to object. This was not an incidental flaw. It was the natural expression of a man who had internalized a hierarchical world and had not yet imagined an alternative.
What distinguishes Washington is that he treated his own character as a problem to be worked on. He read widely, but he also examined himself with unusual honesty, identified specific failings, and set about correcting them over decades. Commanding the Continental Army from 1775 to 1783 accelerated the process. He led men from Massachusetts to Georgia, farmers and tradesmen who had volunteered rather than been conscripted, and who expected to be treated as something other than property of the state. The education ran in both directions. He trained them, and they taught him what a republican army was, and by extension what a republican people might be.
By the end of the war, the Enlightenment principles he had encountered secondhand in the writings of Locke and Montesquieu had become convictions he held through experience. He never matched Jefferson’s eloquence and never tried. But he understood that all men are created equal and that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed, and he understood it in his bones rather than on paper.
The Difference Between Ambition and Republican Ambition
The old world assumed a simple rule about power: once a man has it, he keeps it, and he uses whatever means are necessary to keep it. Washington broke that rule three times, publicly, in front of an audience that could not believe what it was seeing.
The first came in the spring of 1783, when mid-level officers at Newburgh, New York, proposed marching on the Confederation Congress and demanding their long-overdue back pay at gunpoint. Their grievance was legitimate. The Congress had failed them. Washington could have placed himself at the head of that movement and become the arbiter of American politics. Instead he assembled the officers and shamed them, speaking of how he had grown old and nearly blind in the service of his country, and the insurrection dissolved.
The second came that December, after the peace treaty with Great Britain. Washington traveled to Annapolis, where the Confederation Congress was meeting, and handed over his sword to the civilian authorities who had appointed him. European observers were astonished. Victorious generals did not surrender their commissions to legislatures.
The third came in 1796, when he declined a third term as president. He had wanted to leave after one term and had been persuaded to stay by Jefferson and Hamilton, two men who agreed on almost nothing else and who both believed the widening split between their factions made his presence indispensable. By the end of the second term he was determined to go. He understood that rotation in office was one of the essential mechanisms of republican government, that public service was properly a temporary duty rather than a permanent career, and that a man who spends forty years in the capital eventually stops living under the laws he writes.
He also understood that he was setting precedents daily that would bind the country for centuries. Had he stayed and died in office, as some scholars think likely given his health, American history would have taken a different shape.
Flaws That Became Strengths
Washington was thin skinned. The attacks on him over the Jay Treaty wounded him badly enough that he drafted a farewell address lashing out at his critics, a document heavy with self-pity from a man who felt he had given everything and been repaid with abuse. He recognized what he had written, discarded it, and produced instead the address that has been read ever since as a statement of American grand strategy.
His sensitivity to reputation cut both ways. A leader who is a slave to public opinion is dangerous. But a leader acutely aware that history is watching becomes almost obsessive about acting above reproach, and that obsession served the republic well. Washington’s long presidential tours through New England and the South, months on terrible roads, were undertaken so that Americans could see their president and not fear him. Their effect was to give citizens of Virginia and Massachusetts a second identity as Americans.
The slavery question resists tidy resolution. He commanded what was arguably the most integrated American army until Vietnam, corresponded admiringly with the poet Phillis Wheatley, and also rotated enslaved people in and out of Philadelphia to defeat a Pennsylvania law that would have freed them. He believed, as many enslavers did, the comfortable falsehood that his people were well treated. Yet his will, which describes him as a citizen of the United States rather than of Virginia, freed them and funded their education for decades afterward. It was late. It was also a public admission, from the most respected man in America, that the institution contradicted the principles on which the country was founded.