{"id":1057,"date":"2012-07-05T16:08:38","date_gmt":"2012-07-05T20:08:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/?p=1057"},"modified":"2012-07-05T16:15:02","modified_gmt":"2012-07-05T20:15:02","slug":"washingon-a-life-by-ron-chernow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/2012\/07\/washingon-a-life-by-ron-chernow\/","title":{"rendered":"Washingon: A Life by Ron Chernow"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I am currently reading the Pulitzer Prize winning historical work Washington: A Life <\/em>by Ron Chernow (2010), given to me as a Father\u2019s Day present by my son Phil and his wife Leah<\/em>.\u00a0 Overall, I handily recommend it to readers interested in the details of the lives of the Founding Fathers of the United States.\u00a0 I find a lot of help in the details but at times I have some disagreements on certain points, not always minor.\u00a0 Let me list some of my observations:<\/p>\n

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  1. \u00a0I have long held that George Washington was my favorite President based upon my studies (I started years ago with Irving\u2019s work).\u00a0 Chernow\u2019s work deepens this for me.\u00a0 I appreciate the presentation of both flaws and strengths.\u00a0 Yet, Chernow has a way with words that helps the reader to picture in full bloom the way that Washington was accepted as the great man of his times.\u00a0 Beyond that he adroitly shows why Washington deserved such credit in spite of his flaws.<\/li>\n
  2. Washington\u2019s greatest contribution may not have been the tone he set for the first presidency.\u00a0 It was probably, in my opinion, his holding together of a straggly bunch of ragamuffins known as the Continental Army.\u00a0 Their survival for over eight years was nothing short of the miraculous.\u00a0\u00a0Chernow does a better job than most of delving into the details of Washington\u2019s attempts to get the States and Congress to help his army, usually with failure.\u00a0 Yet, somehow they managed to stay together and surprisingly win the Revolutionary War, albeit with French help as we all know.
    \n<\/li>\n
  3. I found it astonishing (this is my greatest criticism of the book) that Chernow does not interact with nor include in his bibliography Peter Lillback\u2019s work, George Washington\u2019s Sacred Fire<\/em> (2006).\u00a0 Lillback, President of Westminster Seminary, shows beyond doubt, in my judgment, that Washington was not a deist.\u00a0 Instead he was a thorough-going evangelical of the Anglican tradition.\u00a0 Lillback gave us over 1300 pages including massive appendices of original works for our study.\u00a0 While the opinions of Washington\u2019s religiosity and morals (especially concerning the ladies) has been debated much since the 1930s (with our increasingly secular world seeing him more and more as a rascal of sorts), Chernow does not go that far.\u00a0 He admits, although it seems reluctantly, that Washington was probably not a womanizer although he enjoyed the presence of young ladies.\u00a0 Also, while Chernow does acknowledge Washington\u2019s moral character and his Christian devotion, he overstates the worn out observations that Washington never took communion, etc., among other points \u2013 many such points easily refutable if Lillback\u2019s research were taken into account.<\/li>\n
  4. I think Chernow joins other works, and perhaps eclipses them in clarity of presentation, when it comes to Washington\u2019s greatest sin \u2013 adherence to slavery.\u00a0 Chernow correctly deals with this off and on in the life of Washington because it was an issue that did not go away.\u00a0 While Washington gradually came to a position that slaves should be freed, he fought the idea for years with an ambivalent soul because he knew that the financial status of himself and his aristocratic friends of Virginia, among others, would be dumped out into economic turmoil if slaves were suddenly freed.\u00a0 This is the greatest sin of our Founders.\u00a0 They punted on the question of slavery, hoping against hope that it would take care of itself over time or that their children and grandchildren could solve the nasty dilemma it presented.\u00a0 As a result of their most prominent sin, our country ended up in Civil War.\u00a0 Interestingly, men who were filled with courage on so many levels and in so many ways could not muster the moral courage it took to deal with slavery and implement the Founding principles of their Declaration of Independence universally as they had stated it.\u00a0 One thing that we may learn from this is that the current financial crisis of our present time is not something we should punt down the road and expect our children and grandchildren to deal with.\u00a0 We must face our debts and deal with them.\u00a0 It will take moral courage, something that seems in short supply.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I am currently reading the Pulitzer Prize winning historical work Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow (2010), given to me as a Father\u2019s Day present by my son Phil and his wife Leah.\u00a0 Overall, I handily recommend it to readers interested in the details of the lives of the Founding Fathers of the United States.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1057"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1063,"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions\/1063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}