Washington’s Power Went Beyond President or General – He Was a Full-Fledged Patriarch

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Washington was the perfect man for an impossible moment — aristocratic enough to command the respect of erudite founders like Hamilton and Jefferson, yet only a mid-level Virginia planter who understood ordinary life and could relate to common soldiers because his ancestors had fled the English Civil War with nothing and spent generations clawing their way back into respectability. That family history gave him something neither Hamilton's brilliance nor Jefferson's philosophy could manufacture: a bone-deep understanding of what it felt like to have status, lose it, and rebuild it through sheer force of will. This goes alone with his earliest military experiences in the French-Indian…