Letter to the editor: Washington was not disparaged

In his letter to the Addison Independent (March 12) Tom Hughes accuses me of writing disparagingly of George Washington. This was not my intention. Indeed, I meant just opposite. Therefore, either I miswrote or Mr. Hughes mistook my point. Probably both are true. In any case, I take it that Mr. Hughes and I agree about Washington’s greatness. We seem to disagree about where in his character and personality the source of that greatness lay. I locate it in Washington’s moral character and not in his intellect … (read more)

In his essay published in the Jan. 28 edition of the Addison Independent, on his way to making a point about George Washington’s example of moral excellence, Victor Nuovo made a misleading and disparaging comment about the Father of our Country. The first … (read more)

Eleventh in a series. George Washington (1732–99) was not an intellectual. He did not attend college. He did not read books; he was not a great orator, and wrote nothing that might become a classic. As Joseph Ellis has written in his excellent biography, … (read more)