He was a small Virginian squire named George Washington, a planter with a house on a bluff, overlooking the Potomac, who spent his youth managing his father’s estate. Here he raised cattle; he was out in the field surveying, growing tobacco. He shot wild turkey and chewed it on the bone. In the French and Indian Wars, he’d had horsy shout-out from under him. And he came back here to Virginia with a purely local reputation for a blank refusal to panic. Suddenly his health failed him, he resigned his commission and at the age of 27 married a very rich widow and settled here at Mount Vernon. His wife brought him the pleasant dowry of, by today’s exchange, about a quarter of a million dollars, 15,000 acres near Williamsburg, more profitable real estate and 150 slaves whose condition, Washington admitted, embarrassed him. But he was an 18th century man to whom emancipation was a strange remote doctrine. And he decided that for the rest of his days, he would be a rich Virginian planter.

And then at the age of 43, he left all this. He received a call. If he could be resurrected, I am sure that he would shock most Americans by his air of a prosperous landowner and real estate operator in the guise of a rather superior British soldier. Even his most idolatrous biographers have been unable to find much evidence of charm or even jollity in him. He was imperious, massively self-sufficient. And he had very decided ideas about the relations of rank and rank, class and class. He didn’t, for instance, like to be touched. And when he became the first president he laid it down that people coming to see him should stay standing in his presence. He certainly doesn’t sound like the All-American Boy. He arrived for his inauguration in full dress uniform and a flourish of outriders and that the actual ceremony took the oath with such a lofty air that a bystander whispered to his neighbor, "I fear we may have exchanged George III for George I".