Questions to Ask George Washington if He Was Still Alive

The questions

Open any question to see why it works.

1. 1

   You are the only president chosen twice with no vote against you. Did you want the job either time?

   He said publicly that he did not, which is exactly what someone who wanted it would also say. The test is the second term: he had drafted a farewell in 1792 and stayed anyway, so any answer has to explain what changed his mind, and the honest version involves Hamilton and Jefferson both begging him.

2. 2

   At twenty two you commanded a small force in the Ohio country, and it ended in a surrender and a war across four continents. What did you learn at Fort Necessity?

   He signed capitulation terms in French that he could not read, which reportedly included an admission about the death of a French officer. Whether he understood what he signed is still argued. The useful answer is about how a young officer handled being out of his depth, since he was never in that position again without knowing it.

3. 3

   The British army refused you a regular commission. How much of the revolutionary started there?

   Colonial officers ranked below regulars of lower grade, and he took it personally enough to travel to press the case. Watch whether he treats this as a private grievance or as evidence about the structure of the empire, because the two answers describe two different men.

4. 4

   You lost more battles than you won. What actually held the army together?

   The interesting answer is administrative rather than heroic: enlistment terms, supply, keeping the force in existence rather than risking it. He understood earlier than most that he did not need to win, only to avoid being destroyed, and that is a strategic idea he can be asked to state plainly.

5. 5

   The night after Christmas in 1776 you crossed the Delaware in weather that had already cancelled two of the three crossings. Was it as desperate as it looks?

   Enlistments were expiring within days and the campaign year had been a string of defeats. Ask what he would have done on the first of January if the attack had failed, because the answer reveals whether the risk was calculated or forced.

6. 6

   At Newburgh your officers were close to marching on Congress over unpaid wages, and you stopped it by putting on your spectacles. Was that planned?

   The line about growing grey and going blind in the service of his country is the most theatrical moment of his life, and witnesses said the room broke down. Ask whether he had rehearsed it. Either answer is interesting, and the refusal to answer is interesting too.

7. 7

   You handed your commission back to Congress and went home. Whose idea was that?

   It was the least likely outcome available to a victorious general with a loyal army and an unpaid one at that. Press on whether he understood it as precedent setting at the time or simply wanted to go back to farming, because the whole American arrangement rests on the answer.

8. 8

   You presided over the Constitutional Convention for four months and barely spoke. Why the silence?

   His presence was the reason many delegates showed up and many states ratified, and he seems to have known his value depended on not taking sides. Ask which clause he privately disliked, since a man who says he had no view on any of it is not describing a person who sat through those debates.

9. 9

   Everything you did in the first term became precedent. Which one do you now think you got wrong?

   The title question, the cabinet, the two term limit, executive privilege in the Jay Treaty fight, the decision to declare neutrality without Congress. Any specific answer is more valuable than a general one, and pushing him to name a single mistake is the point of the question.

10. 10

    You rode out at the head of an army against your own citizens in western Pennsylvania. Where was the line for you?

    The Whiskey Rebellion is the only time a sitting president has personally led troops in the field, and the tax that caused it fell hardest on farmers who had supported the revolution. Ask what distinguished them from the men he had commanded fifteen years earlier, because they had made much the same argument about taxation.

11. 11

    The Jay Treaty made you unpopular for the first time in your life, with your name burned in the street. What did that do to you?

    He was thin skinned about criticism in a way his public manner concealed, and the press attacks of the second term wounded him. This is the closest thing to a personal question that the record clearly supports, and it explains a good deal about the tone of the farewell address.

12. 12

    You ordered the expedition that burned the Iroquois towns and fields in 1779, and the Haudenosaunee remember your name for it. What did you intend?

    The instructions were explicit about destruction of settlements and crops rather than only engaging warriors, so this cannot be answered as an accident of war. It also sets up his later policy toward Native nations as president, which he described in the language of civilization and treaties while land kept moving one direction.

13. 13

    You held people in slavery for your entire adult life and freed them only by a will that took effect after your death and your wife's. Why not sooner?

    He wrote privately that he wished to see a plan for abolition and never proposed one publicly. The practical answer involves debt, the dower slaves he did not legally own, and the political cost of acting. Ask him to rank those three, because the ranking is the actual confession.

14. 14

    Ona Judge escaped from your household and you spent years trying to get her back, including through a federal officer. What did you tell yourself about that?

    She lived long enough to give interviews and said she wanted to be free, which gives you a second witness against him in his own lifetime. This is the hardest question in the set because the pursuit was personal, sustained and undertaken while he was president.

15. 15

    You rotated enslaved people in and out of Pennsylvania so they would not qualify for freedom under state law. Whose arrangement was that?

    The state's gradual abolition act freed adult slaves after six months of continuous residence, and the household moved people before that clock ran out. The correspondence about it survives, including the instruction to keep the reason quiet, which makes the deliberateness the point rather than the practice.

16. 16

    Hamilton and Jefferson spent your presidency fighting each other through you. How much of that did you see at the time?

    Both wrote to him about the other, and he asked both to stop and kept both. Ask whether he thought he was balancing them or being used by them, and whether the party system he later condemned was something he had helped to incubate inside his own cabinet.

17. 17

    The farewell address warns against permanent alliances and against parties. Both arrived almost immediately. Was the warning ever realistic?

    Hamilton drafted much of the text, which is worth raising with him directly. The substantive question is whether he thought factions could be avoided by character, and whether he had noticed that the two men in his own cabinet were already organizing what he was warning about.

18. 18

    You had no children of your own. Did that change how you thought about what you were leaving behind?

    Contemporaries noticed it and some thought it made him safer to trust with power, since there was no son to inherit anything. Whether he saw it that way is a genuine open question, and it connects to how he handled Martha's grandchildren and his estate.

19. 19

    You died in an afternoon with three physicians bleeding you repeatedly. Did you understand what they were doing?

    He asked for the bleeding early and one of the doctors objected to how much was taken. This is not a morbid question but a practical one about how much authority a patient had over his own treatment, and he was a man used to giving instructions.

20. 20

    If you woke up now, what would you want to look at first, and what would you want to check before you believed anything you were told?

    The one question the framing earns, and it should come last. A person who has been handed two centuries of summary would need to know who is doing the summarising, which is the same instinct that made him ask for written reports from more than one officer. Anything else is you putting words in his mouth.