itself, and one of the great generals of history. The statesman who
never made a motion, nor devised a measure, nor constructed a
proposition in the convention of which he was president, is
appreciated as the spirit, the energy, the force, the wisdom which
initiated, organized, and directed the formation of the
Constitution of the United States and the Union by, through, and
under it; and therefore it seems now possible to present him as the
Virginian soldier, gentleman, and planter, as a man, the evolution
of the society of which he formed a part, representative of his
epoch, and his surroundings, developed by circumstances into the
greatest character of all time--the first and most illustrious of
Americans.

Henry Cabot Lodge,[5] writing in 1899, was one of the first to discover
"the new Washington." "The real man," he wrote, "has been so overlaid
with myths and traditions, and so distorted by misleading criticisms,
that ... he has been wellnigh lost. We have the religious and statuesque
myth, we have the Weems myth (which turns Washington into a faultless
prig), and the ludicrous myth of the writer of paragraphs. We have the
stately hero of Sparks, and Everett, and Marshall, and Irving, with all
his great deeds as general and President duly recorded and set down in
polished and eloquent sentences; and we know him to be very great and
wise and pure, and, be it said with bated breath, very dry and cold....
In death as in life, there is something about Washington, call it
greatness, dignity, majesty, what you will, which seems to hold men
aloof and keep them from knowing him. In truth he was a difficult man to
know....

"Behind the popular myths, behind the statuesque figure of the orator
and the preacher, behind the general and the President of the historian,