Muse

This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's Business and Commercial Banking. One of the great things about finance is that it may result in you having to pay tax. And this was a constant grumble in Anglo-Saxon England, which was the most heavily taxed country in the whole of Christendom. And just when the Anglo-Saxons thought it couldn't get any worse, they got conquered by King Canute and Canute imposed a tax rate that was effectively 100%. Yeah, well, that was one very big change, Tom, but another tax change is upon us. And this is the advent of making tax digital for income tax. And if you're at all concerned about it, this is where Lloyd's come in because they're here to help make that change much simpler for you with a useful HMRC recognised accounting tool that will help you stay in line with all the making tax digital requirements. And the brilliant thing about this is that it is free for Lloyd's business account customers. So when it is time to digitize your income tax, you can bank on Lloyd's. Search Lloyd's business accounts to find out more. This episode is brought to you by TikTok. Believe it or not, history isn't just in textbooks. It comes to life every day on TikTok. Millions of people are exploring the history of music, fashion, food, and art, and discovering new facts about the things they love. One scroll could take you from the roots of jazz to the flavors of ancient kitchens. And the next might reveal a quirky fact about how modern traditions came to be. Discover the past in new ways on TikTok, where curiosity never gets old.

with low prices guaranteed at The Home Depot. Prices may vary by store. Exclusions apply. See homedepo.com slash price match for details.

Oh, history is a journey. And as we continue our journey, we think of those who traveled before us. And we see and hear again the echoes of our past A general falls to his knees in the hard snow of Valley Forge A lonely president paces the darkened halls And ponders his struggle to preserve the Union The men of the Alamo call out encouragement to each other a settler pushes west and sings a song and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air it is the american sound it is oh hopeful big-hearted idealistic daring decent and fair That's our heritage That's our song We sing it still We raise our voices to the God Who is the author of this most tender music And may he continue to hold us close As we fill the world with our sound in unity affection and love one people under god dedicated to the dream of freedom god bless you and god bless america so that absolute mush was obviously Ronald Reagan, unmistakable tones there, delivering his second inaugural address on the 21st of January 1985. And Dominic, Ronald Reagan loved American history, didn't he? He loved the idea of American exceptionalism. He loved the idea of his country as a shining city on a hill. And clearly, there is no better way to kick off our new series. which is marking the 250th anniversary of the colonial tax rebellion than with that great Hollywood actor turned two times president. Yeah, you're right, Tom. Reagan absolutely

believed in America's special place in the world, didn't he? I don't think any president has ever really topped it. Yeah, has drunk so deeply of the Kool-Aid than Ronald Reagan. And so what

better way to kick off? I mean, I said that was mush. I had to say that to reassure myself that I wasn't buying into the whole thing because obviously we are a patriotic British podcast.

We are.

Yeah. So we have to keep our distance from some of the flag of liberty and all of that stuff. Yeah. All of that. So we are going to be looking at four of the founding fathers. And in due course, we are going to be looking at Benjamin Franklin and his extraordinary transatlantic career. So the sense in which he's British as well as American. We're going to be looking at the infamous duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, as in the eponymous musical. And we're going to be looking at the moral and intellectual contradictions of Thomas Jefferson.

That's a kind way of putting it.

In all kinds of ways, I think the most extraordinary of the founding fathers, but also perhaps the most compromised. um but today there can be only one candidate can't there for um our opening episode and this is the most famous tax or tax defaulter independence fighter of them all right so

george washington the man who gave his name to the capital the city where reagan gave that speech the man who led the continental army through the war of independence and the man who of course became the first president of the united states and washington had i mean a really really extraordinary life you know not quite apart from his military career this obviously his time as president so i thought it would be fun to focus on just one particular episode and one episode really stands out and it's the one that reagan alluded to in that speech so he mentioned the moment when a general falls to his knees in the hard snow of valley forge you know tears glistening in his eyes did that happen did it happen well we will be finding out yeah we did a series before about ronald reagan in which reagan tells a series of absolutely tremendous anecdotes about things that never happened yeah he commentated on an entire baseball match didn't he that never happened exactly exactly so that that sets the tone for what will follow anyway this moment when george washington does or does not fall to the snow in valley forge many of our american listeners will immediately recognize this i would say not one in a hundred of our british listeners will ever have heard of this moment. So we should explain just a bit of context. This moment at Valley Forge happens in the winter of 1777, 1778, and things are actually looking bleak for the American cause. So they have been fighting their tax rebellion for almost two years, but it's not going well. Their capital, Philadelphia, their provisional capital, has been occupied by British troops. They have been looking to the French to come in and bail them out, but so far the French have not yet officially entered the war and it looks quite possible they might not enter at all

although dominic benjamin franklin is on the scene to help out so we'll be doing that in our next

episode that's right and george washington and his continental army are holed up in a place called valley forge pennsylvania they've holed up there for the winter they are desperately short of food and supplies and clothing they're at the mercy of the weather they are ravaged by disease and they are hoping for a miracle so this is one of the mythic moments in american um sort of patriotic history it is the episode that turns washington into a national father figure and before we get into the story of valley forge itself we should pull back a bit and look at who washington is and what on earth is going on with this story so there's a recent biography of uh washington with loads of prizes, great acclaim, by Ron Chernow. And Chernow calls Washington the most elusive figure in American history, more revered than truly loved, an impossibly stiff and inflexible figure composed of too much marble to be quite human. And one of the things that Chernow does is to show that actually he was human. He was a flesh and blood character behind the kind of marble facade. And Tom, I think you've got a tremendous anecdote, haven't you, that will

illustrate this i do have an amusing anecdote so it happens at the uh the constitutional convention in 1787 and um the guy who writes the preamble to the constitution is a guy called governor morris he sets the template for mad american names right from the very beginning suspiciously french and he's the guy who goes on to he's kind of involved in um establishing the grid system in new york in Manhattan. But he's a massive japester. So he's the funster.

of the Constitutional Convention, and he is approached by Alexander Hamilton, as in the musical. Hamilton says that if Morris will go up to Washington and slap him on the shoulder and say, my dear general, how happy I am to see you look so well, then Hamilton will buy him a dinner. Morris does this, but the icy quality of Washington's stare as he greets this slap on the shoulder was so terrifying that he would not do it again for a thousand dinners wow and surely

ruined the dinner the memory of that would have ruined the dinner it must have been a chilly occasion i imagine yeah he felt he just let himself down he was ashamed of himself surely

well he had to go off and design grid systems to work it out of his system

that's quite a good anecdote isn't it it's a brilliant anecdote that's the best one of the best anecdotes actually i think i've ever heard thank you that's tremendous certainly the best don't ever heard about George Washington. So Washington was born in 1732. He's born into a kind of gentry family in the colony of Virginia. That's the oldest of all the British colonies in North America, named by one friend of the show, Saul to rally for another, Elizabeth I. So the Washingtons are originally, I believe, from Tring in Hertfordshire. John Washington, Washington's great-grandfather, had started off in Tring and he had moved to Virginia. he establishes a tobacco plantation with african slave labor in the late 1650s so this is a theme that will run through this series there's a lot of slave labor in this series anyway george grows up in the 1730s and 1740s his great ambition is to be an english country gentleman and he is he he does stand out he means he's an outstanding man because he's so big so he's six feet tall which of course in the 1740s is very tall he's very powerful huge shoulders everyone talks about has massive hands so he has to have gloves made specially he's a great horseman and he likes riding he likes drinking tea and he likes reading the novels of henry fielding which is nice i'm

just wondering about the um the cherry tree yeah because that's the other famous story that's told about him is that he chopped down a cherry tree and then whatever said i cannot tell a lie yeah

his father said did you chop down a cherry tree and he said i did i can't tell a lie this story is itself a lie it was invented it was invented by a man called of course inevitably an american writer called parson weems oh yes and parson weems will be reappearing in this story oh brilliant parson weems just basically goes around making stuff up today he'd have a history podcast absolutely about the costa rican civil war right anyway um so george washington he's this massive bloke with his huge hands but disappointingly he's got a very weak voice he's got a very thin sort of breath he described something a breathy voice because he had pleurisy so he speaks he speaks like marilyn monroe happy birthday mr president exactly to himself as he looks in the

mirror i can be just on the topic of accents yeah does he have a west country accent undoubtedly how do they talk about in virginia in virginia happy birthday happy birthday happy birthday

mr president if you can basically imagine a dorset yokel doing marilyn monroe with massive hands with kenny everett's hands in the 1983 general election rally that's a that's a niche reference didn't expect we get that in okay so the thing is you said that governor morris was a great funster george washington is a total fun he's a massive fun sponge he it's often said of him people would say they never saw him laugh one of his officers said of him you would seldom see a frown or smile on his countenance his air was serious and reflecting And part of the reason he's not keen on smiling is that he's got these terrible dental issues. So from an early age, his teeth are decaying. As early as 1760, so long before he's involved in the tax business, one of his friends said of him, his mouth is large and generally firmly closed, but which from time to time discloses some defective teeth. Is that because of all the sugar from the plantations? Yeah, possibly. Is it a Virginia thing? I don't know. tobacco is virginia really yeah virginia is tobacco does that that's that damage your teeth surely it does anyway he's just got terrible teeth again a theme that will run through this episode the key to him says ron churnow in his biography is washington's intense self-discipline and his sense of control so washington is not actually as boring as you would think he is a man of fierce passions and a hot temper but he keeps these under sort of rigid inflexible control thomas Jefferson said of him his temper was naturally high-toned but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendancy over it John Adams he had great self-command but to preserve so much equanimity as he did required a great capacity John Adams also called him a muttonhead he did actually John Adams would have said he had a great self-command but to reserve so much equanimity as he did required a great capacity because that's how john adams spoke as we discussed in our previous american revolution series anyway the crucial moment in washington's life comes when he's in his early 20s britain and france were fighting for control of north america this is what we call the seven years war and what americans call the french and indian war washington became a commander of the virginian militia and he established reputation as the preeminent colonial officer from north america from the colonies everyone said he's very brave he's very he's a good leader he's very disciplined he's great but at the end of the war he was denied a royal commission by his british superiors they said no you know he's not quite good enough or whatever and he felt a deep sense of resentment he thought basically they look down on me because i'm a mere colonial and they're from the metropolis i'm the imperial metropole and they have made me grovel to them and i've got nothing out of it and so he definitely has a sort of you know for him this is personal there's a chip on his shoulder the seven years war has been a great

triumph for britain but unfortunately tom it creates huge problems which is sad because the victory in the seven years war leaves britain with this massive debt 140 million pounds so basically our debt has gone up 10 times to win the war and paying interest on the debt that alone takes up half Britain's national budget. This sounds quite familiar. Yeah, it does. Except we're not winning triumphant wars against the French. No, no. Anyway, the question is, how do you pay for this debt? Now that you've conquered all this territory in North America, how are you going to fund troops to look after it and to keep the peace? Not least because there are increasing conflicts with native tribes as the settlers push west. In England, the gentry who shoulder the tax burden are already paying more tax than they've ever paid before so what three percent yeah exactly half a percent or something so so parliament decides it will raise revenue from the colonies themselves to pay for their own defense i mean that sounds entirely reasonable quite right and parliament also says well this is the time basically the british empire britain's overseas possessions have now swollen to dimensions that we never dreamed of and the system for dealing with all this it's very ramshackle and corrupt there's all sorts of smuggling and whatnot basically let's sort let's use this opportunity to sort this out to streamline and modernize it for the age of the enlightenment sensible policies for a happy america basically exactly we'll have new courts we'll have nice new customs duties uh on all legal documents in america there'll be a stamp tax as there is already in britain we'll just basically streamline the whole thing this sounds great i mean who could possibly object to that it is great because basically if you if you just follow this you'll turn into Canada which is brilliant or Australia and everyone loves those countries however at the time the American colonists don't like this at all and very very simply I mean obviously this is a massive issue that we could spend hours discussing going into all the nuances but very simply the issue is that until the 1760s the North American colonists had basically been left alone but what's happened now is that obviously Parliament is trying to legislate for them parliament says look it's time to sort all this out and the more militant colonists don't like it they don't want to be sorted out they don't want to be interfered with and the militants say well we had traditional liberties um you know from the 17th century which are english liberties english liberties and you're interfering with them you don't have any right to make laws for us without our consent and the french have been beaten so actually frankly we don't really need you anyway because we can probably deal with the natives ourselves right

Right. So that's the thing, isn't it? That they don't actually want the British to come in and be woke about the Native Americans. They just want to go out and grab their land.

Yes, absolutely right. This is such a great patriotic podcast. Brilliant. But it's true, isn't it? It is true. I mean, that is the state of play. Yeah. And to just point out what the British and the loyalists take on, because don't forget, at least one in five Americans probably is a loyalist and stays loyal to King and Parliament. they say well here's the reasons for doing this don't go moaning about that you're not represented in parliament most people in britain don't vote in elections for parliament most towns in britain lots of them don't have an mp the way that parliament works is parliament is chosen on ancient organic principles that have evolved over time parliament as a body represents our entire british global family and parliament's laws bind not just british subjects in britain but british subjects all over the world so parliament does speak for you as it speaks for everybody at home now that doesn't cut any ice with the militants or indeed with george washington washington stands very much on the more extreme wing of this issue he has money problems like a lot of landowners do after the seven years war

Thank you.

The tobacco price had fallen considerably in the 1760s, so he's struggling to maintain his gentry lifestyle. He's run up big debts, and obviously he hates the thought of paying new taxes. He doesn't want to pay a stamp tax. He doesn't want to pay a tax on glass or paper or tea brought in by a parliament in London, where he's never been. Washington is also involved, you mentioned land, so important. Washington is involved in land speculation in the West. And when in 1763, Britain forbids American settlement west of the Appalachian so Parliament says stop expanding west we don't want to get into conflict with the native tribes Washington is gutted Washington and his mates want to get stuck in yeah of course so at every point during the breakdown of relations Washington is very much with the militants so he goes to the first continental congress in Philadelphia in 1774 and he doesn't really say much because of course he's worried about showing people his teeth but he's very much on the hawkish wing then in 1775 after fighting is already broken out with british troops at lexington concord there's a second continental congress this time washington turns up in his militia uniform and it's at this second continental congress that the militants vote to set up a secessionist proto-state called the united colonies of north america which will have its own continental army to fight off their imperial overlords can i ask

is this why washington turns up in his militia uniform of course that he suspects this is going to happen he therefore thinks there's going to need to be a commander and if i turn up in my militia uniform it will serve as a nudge to everybody that i'm i'm the guy yeah fighting

has broken out and washington wants to proclaim that he is you know tanned rested and ready yeah to take on the British. So the Continental Army has been set up. Someone's got to command it. There are various people, but Washington is by far the most obvious. He's got military experience from the Seven Years' War. He's from the most populous colony, which is Virginia, the oldest. And the other important thing about Washington, which will run through his career, he is a unifier. He is a bit vanilla. Because he's a bit boring and he doesn't say anything, no one's offended by him. So a delegate from Massachusetts said of him, he's a complete gentleman. He's sensible, amiable virtuous modest and brave a bloke from connecticut he seems discreet and virtuous no harem scare and ranting swearing fellow but sober steady and calm i mean you know these could be washington's epitaph so now what he has to do is he has to weld the militias from these 13 rebel colonies into a continental army and he has to lead the resistance to the british you know arguably at

this point the greatest imperial power on earth and a power that washington knows well because

of his experience with them knows very well now in american kind of patriotic legend this is a great underdog victory and you can see why they would say that britain has the royal navy britain has a bigger population britain has a trained professional army with up to 50 000 men and britain also brings over about 30 000 german mercenaries the so-called hessians but if you read distinguished American historians, academic historians of this period, like Gordon Wood, who died a week ago. You see his obituaries in the papers in Britain as well as America. Gordon Wood points out actually the rebels have an awful lot of things going for them. First of all, they're fighting on home soil. The British have to send troops 3,000 miles away, you know, in an age when there are massive communications and logistics problems. and actually no country in the 18th century has ever fought and won a war like this 3,000 miles

from home. God, I suppose that's true, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, it's not been done before. The British are trying to do something that's never really been done. I suppose the closest analogy would be the conquest of America by the conquistadors, but they're nothing on the scale that's required to defeat the colonial rebels in America. Yeah. I mean, there's a big difference

between basically toppling a kind of bronze age state a widely disliked regime that doesn't even understand what you are and dealing with an insurgency on a massive scale i mean that's a really important point second point you could send 80 000 troops or whatever but you can't conquer north america it's huge and it's perfect for a guerrilla war i mean it's covered with woods and forests and lakes and all of these things even if you captured the the towns and cities which of course are very small by european standards so what the guerrillas can just go off into the countryside so there is a kind of vietnam quality to it totally there is so i think that's the other issue i think vietnam is absolutely the right comparison because basically what the americans can do first of all they they care much more than the british do the americans basically know i think even from the start that if they just keep going they will probably win

the british will eventually give up i mean and in britain there are lots of people who have sympathy with them it's not like everyone in britain is opposed to this no no there's lots of

people who sympathize with the colonists but also even if you don't sympathize with the colonists you're much more interested in india or the caribbean the rich sugar islands of the caribbean than you are in you know georgia or vermont or something i mean no one in britain cares that much about these places so basically washington's job i mean rather like if you're a member of the vietcong or something his job is don't get caught into a massive pitch battle just keep going melt into the shadows keep up a long guerrilla campaign and eventually the british will come to terms surely they will and so this is the story of the next two years washington does a pretty good job of building this into an army although he's often complaining that they're very licentious and disorderly his men because washington is very straight-laced he loses far more battles than he wins but these are very small battles by european standards kind of little skirmishes if they were fought in in europe we would call it a skirmish we wouldn't even think of them as a battle of course they're battles by north american standards but the thing is every time he loses he just melts away into the into the woods a good example is one of his biggest defeats he's driven out of new york in 1776 he escaped south from new york into pennsylvania and then he pulls off this tremendous pr coup by crossing the river delaware at christmas and then he wins two little battles at trenton and princeton and everybody in europe says oh washington you know he's he's got one over on the british again washington crossing the delaware that one wasn't

that nice yeah uh lydia the tattooed lady do you want to explain that reference to people tom it's a song called lydia the tattooed lady and she has all kinds of tattoos and one of them is

washington crossing the delaware there you go so people can um google it maybe you should sing the entire thing as a bonus special bonus treat for our rest of history club members do you know maybe so let's get to 1777 it's a very mixed picture the war that year on the one hand the americans get a massive result they um captured general john burgoyne's army at saratoga and they capture lots of prisoners and that's a great propaganda coup for them especially in the capitals of europe paris madrid and so on but for washington personally 1777 is a nightmare he's outwitted by the british general william howe in rural pennsylvania he loses a crucial battle and the result of that is that the British at the end of September are able to march into the rebel capital of Philadelphia unopposed and the Continental Congress this is the kind of political wing of the tax protest they have fled and basically Philadelphia has been only the women and children remain Washington's army is outside Philadelphia kind of lurking around in the woods and the morale that autumn is very very low so that's the pouring with rain they haven't got any food the discipline is breaking down even ron churnow who's definitely a patriotic american historian describes them as marauding through the countryside terrorizing the inhabitants so they're basically sort of looting and stuff and they're very miserable so let's pick up the story a few weeks after that winter has come and washington has a dilemma what's he going to do with his army so his army there's about 12 000 of them and about 400 women and servants and general hangers-on and among those 12 000 men are men from all 13 breakaway colonies and we'll talk about them more after the break they can't just go home washington himself only went home once between 1775 and 1781 what they need to do he needs to keep the army together and he needs to find winter quarters for them he doesn't want to retreat too far from philadelphia because he doesn't want to abandon the capital's kind of rural hinterland to the british but he also wants to stay in touch with the continental congress which is in york pennsylvania and the pennsylvania legislature which is in lancaster pennsylvania oh it's just very wars of the roses very wars of the roses yeah i don't think that was by design i think that's by actor yeah it would be possibly pushing things too far to imagine that was by design it would so the place he chooses is valley forge which is 18 miles northwest of philadelphia and valley forge is somewhere that becomes one of the most sacred sites in american history washington said it was dreary which was a bit unfair i think it's a sort of plateau it's high ground surrounded by woods and fields because you're on high ground you can see if the british are coming because there's woods you've got timber for your camp there are streams for water and you can basically sort of keep an eye and make sure the british don't go out from philadelphia to raid the countryside and because there's farmland

around washington is hopeful that the locals who are welsh quakers so ticking two very familiar rest is history boxes in one go that the welsh quakers will keep them supplied with crops and livestock unfortunately tom one of the only lessons of history that really endures is that you can never truly rely on a Welsh Quaker. So Washington will learn that lesson.

in the second half of the episode so they're on their way to valley forge washington knows even as they're marching there that this is going to be pretty grim his men have run out of supplies many of them don't have a blanket between them about 4 000 of them don't have any boots or shoes and washington said later that even the march through the sleet to valley forge was a pretty grim ordeal he remembered seeing men without clothes to cover their nakedness without blankets to lay on without shoes by which their marches might be traced by the blood from their feet marching through frost and snow without a murmur but i think you can argue that i mean we've been quite down on washington but this is the moment when he really emerges as a national leader because basically washington says and he has it known has it widely known that he will share the hardships of his men he's not going to bunk off to mount vernon he will be there with them every step of the way and his artillery commander Henry Knox said to him the people of America look to you as their father and into your hands they entrust their all confident of every exertion on your part for their security and happiness so basically this is on you now like you're gonna you're we're looking to you to get us through this anyway six days before Christmas the 19th of December they arrive at Valley Forge there is absolutely nothing there no shelter but this is the sort of challenge at which washington excels so he divides his men up into construction teams he says i want you to cut down the trees and build these cabins american historians love these cabins wood cabins log cabins because they love like they love summer camps in america don't they this must be the ancestor of that winter camp washington says we'll have a race so you can build their cabins most quickly and the winner gets twelve dollars and washington says i'll give a hundred dollars to the team that comes up with the best way of making a waterproof roof using the least wood so very exciting scenes i mean you called him a fun sponge but that could be more fun than that it's great fun winter fun the washington way and actually they do a really good job they put up 2 000 log cabins within a few days they dig trenches they dig redoubts oh we love our redoubt don't we we haven't had a redoubt on the show since the battle of poltava yeah great to have the redoubts back and actually i mean this gives you a sign of how small north america is in terms of demography by the time they finish they've built the fourth biggest city in north america with these 2 000 cabins that's an amazing stat anyway i compared this momentarily to a summer camp it is not like a summer camp it's pouring with rain there are dead horses everywhere they just throw discarded wood everywhere it's very muddy it's very sludgy as we will discover in the second half the toilet facilities are extremely poor can i ask why they don't bury the horses that baffled me i mean isn't it kind of basic know-how yeah there's just rotting horse

corpses everywhere yeah a british would have buried their horses i think anyway um a lot of them haven't got any clothes because of that they've ripped up some tents and they're wearing them as shirts and as shoes weirdly one european volunteer said afterwards the unfortunate soldiers were in want of everything they had neither coats hats shirts nor shoes their feet and legs froze until they become almost black and it was often necessary to amputate them now on top of all this they don't have enough food because the war has destroyed the continental army's supply chain so to washington's horror the days go by some supplies come but they've all rotted so they live on something which they call fire cakes which is basically they make this disgusting mixture of flour and water and they cook it on kind of heated stones oh my god sounds horrible yeah they're eating flour basically i mean americans do love a big breakfast don't they they do and we would before we started recording we were discussing the quality of american food so you know again a theme that will run through american history so after a few days they're basically like a camp of ghosts or beggars and there's an excellent diary entry by another splendidly named american i've just looked at the name he's a he's a regimental surgeon this can't be true he's called dr alba gents waldo that's just a star wars name isn't it that's just one of those star wars names or an nfl name alba gents waldo says he's describing the scene he says poor food hard lodging cold weather fatigue nasty clothes nasty cookery vomit half my time i'm getting i'm going west more west country the more i do it smoke out of my senses the devil's in it i can't endure it there comes a bowl of beef soup full of burnt leaves and dirt sickish enough to make a hector spew and he on and on he goes on it goes poor food hard lodging cold weather nasty clothes nasty cookery tom it's like my days living in minnesota oh bang Bye.

Bang. Great banter. So anyway, they're all really sick. They've got scabies, they've got scurvy, they've got typhus, they've got typhoid, they've got dysentery.

I mean, we emphasize dysentery, the role of dysentery in history, don't we?

Yeah. And they've got loads of it.

Very rarely discussed by historians, but a key, key factor, the massive killer.

Now, you know, I had that fact for you about this being the fourth biggest city in North America. Yeah. I actually have a better fact that I hope people will take away from this podcast, apart from the teeth more americans died at valley forge than at any battle of the entire

war well i mean that is illustrative of the impact of dysentery on the patterns of history isn't it

i have to say i was i was really struck by that and that's partly because the battles are basically glorified punch-ups in fields but you know 2 000 people died at valley forge which was the sixth of washington's army and more would probably have died if washington hadn't been an enthusiastic proto-vaxxer so it's inoculations isn't it at this point inoculations it's not vaccination it's inoculation so basically what they do is they they scratch your skin and they give you a very mild dose of smallpox from which you'll probably recover because if you get it through the skin you're more likely to recover and the army had been plagued by smallpox had washington not organized this program of inoculation probably more men would have died

so it's one of the more memorable scenes in john adams the tv series yeah where they scrape a bit of pass out of one of a someone with smallpox franklin was very keen on this was he because he'd lost one of his sons when he was four years old to smallpox and he hadn't inoculated him and So he became a great proselytizer. And of course, he's the great scientist of America. So everyone listens to him.

Yeah. I have to tell you that we gave up on John Adams as a family because Mrs. Sandbrook said she found it interminably boring and refused to watch anymore.

There were similar sentiments from Mrs. Holland. And she didn't actually complain. She just fell asleep.

She voted with her eyelids. Voted with her. I love it. So anyway, the inoculation campaign. this is testament to washington's great strengths as a commander so actually on the battlefield washington is not a brilliant tactician at all i mean he loses most of his battles but he is brilliant i take my hat off to him he is brilliant at managing his men and this doesn't matter if the battles are just glorified skirmishes correct exactly so he's got he's basically he's got his headquarters in this little stone cottage at inevitably valley forge creek hold on how come he's got a stone cottage yeah the sharing the hardships was kind of nominal for the first few days he was in a tent for the first few days and now he's got a stone cottage luxury but yeah his entire reputation is a lie we dare to tell it as it is yeah it's a podcast that tells you the truth finally about top hypocrite george washington so here he is in his lovely stone cottage his holiday home with zaga although it's not terribly good fun because he doesn't believe in fun so dice and card games are banned and all of his aides are sleeping in the downstairs rooms and stuff. And actually, the general sense of discipline was very impressive to European visitors. So one French officer said he was struck by the air of calm dignity through which you could trace the strong feelings of the patriot and discern the father as well as the commander of his soldiers. And this emphasis on Washington as a father figure, you know, runs right through accounts of Valley Forge, even at the time. And I think, again, that's one of his distinguishing characteristics now it's precisely because of washington's insistence on his own dignity that ronald reagan's story about kneeling to pray in the snow must be false we know it must be false and historians have you know spent a lot of ink talking about did washington believe in god or not was he a christian because it's a slightly confusing picture he did go to church but he didn't go regularly when he everyone else knelt to pray washington would stay standing washington never took communion washington very rarely mentioned jesus christ he would talk about providence so we talk about the author of our being so some historians have painted him as a deist so you know god is a clockmaker but some of washington's mates like james madison said oh no no he was a very devout anglican and it's probably i think the consensus actually is that in the 18th century if you were part of the virginia gentry your anglicanism was very austere and sort of restrained i like that in anglicanism yeah you like that sort of small p puritanical well literally upstanding exactly they you want to say standing kneeling is flummery you don't want to do that it's performative and it's precisely because of that that it's utterly implausible that washington would have knelt in the snow especially if where his men could have seen him i mean reagan

would have done that yeah but washington wouldn't he definitely would oh my lord it would have been a lapse of the dignity bill clinton would have lain down in the snow or something oh god yes tears streaming down his cheeks trump would have stayed in his stone cottage yeah and his gold cottage surely made out of gold ingots well anyway this story about him kneeling in the snow is absolutely fake it was invented in 1800 after washington's death this is parson weems again this is parson weems he's an absolute villain he's a terrible man making up stuff randomly but actually do you know what washington should have knelt in the snow maybe he should have done because things are looking very bleak for him as they approach christmas two days before christmas 23rd of december he writes to the continental congress he says our situation here at valley forge is absolutely desperate yesterday i asked the troops to be in readiness to scour the countryside for food he said but they were too weak and hungry to obey only the efforts of my officers he says prevented a dangerous mutiny i am now convinced beyond a doubt that unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place this army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things starve dissolve or disperse in order to obtain subsistence and just three or four days of bad weather would prove our destruction so tom is the game up for george washington the american cause are they going to abandon the rebellion pay their taxes obey the laws and peacefully evolve into a warmer canada well there's only one way to find out

and spoiler alert I'm afraid the answer to that is pretty disappointing but come back after the

break and find out the worst. Hi this is Gary Lineker from Goalhangers the rest is football this episode is brought to you by Wise it's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate the fee and what might be hidden away in the small print whether you're living abroad paying someone overseas or just trying to manage your money across borders you want a fair exchange rate an easy transfer and no surprises along the way wise keeps things simple wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe it works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies most transfers arrive instantly wise uses the mid-market exchange rate like the one you see on google with no markups or hidden fees. So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee, and get on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the Wise app today. Be smart, get wise, T's and C's apply.

three months of premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month. $45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for

details. This episode is brought to you by TikTok. Now, discovering something new,

nothing could be more thrilling than that. That's so true, Tom. So the most exciting intellectual adventure that I've been on in the last couple of years was finding out all about the siege of Szyrmyśl in eastern Poland. So that's during the First World War. And I went online, I read lots of books about it. But what particularly thrilled me was discovering that there's a phenomenon called Shemishla Tok. So people on TikTok exchanging facts about the siege of Shemishla, talking about its history, its people. And for me, that was one of the most invigorating intellectual journeys that I've ever been on. Well, of course, studying the history of

obscure First World War battles, that's the kind of thing we're all into. But there are less mainstream areas that you can discover on TikTok, like history or maths or literature or cooking or music or sport or anything like that. Creators on TikTok make it easy to discover something new every day. TikTok is where discovery turns into conversation. Visit

tiktok.com forward slash explore more to learn more. Hello everyone and welcome back to The Rest

its history. It is the 23rd of December 1777 and in Ballyforge it's not looking like it's going to be the best Christmas ever. So a very cold, miserable George Washington even though he's got lovely stone cottage um he's still not having a fun time he sent a desperate message to the continental congress basically saying you've got to help me out here or the entire army is going

to implode and with it the the war effort exactly so exactly so two days later they have christmas and washington and his aides they have a dinner a christmas dinner of mutton cabbage and crusts of bread with water to drink because he'd lost all his baggage in the campaign outside philadelphia he's only got a single spoon to eat it with so his aspirations of becoming an english country gentleman are very very far from being realized at this moment well you could say i mean this is

the kind of training you get at an elite english public school don't you it's true actually it's true kind of awful food and kind of shivering in the cold to toughen you up yeah if he saw it in

those terms perhaps it would have cheered him up maybe exactly well actually do you know what you say it's terribly cold and reagan talked about the snow and parson weems talked about all the snow but it's not actually that cold so it's not a particularly cold winter it doesn't snow that much it's basically rain and wind that they have to worry about now before the break i mentioned that he was hoping for aid from welsh quakers this was foolish because basically the locals are not that interested in helping him and this may you know surprise american listeners who have been brought up you know to in the sort of hurrah hurrah view of the american revolution historians disagree about the exact numbers but let's say a quarter a third maybe even of the colonial population support actually support the british in this war the quakerism i think means they're probably not desperately keen on piling into a war but by and large they just want to keep out they just want to get on with their lives and they do have food but the british troops in philadelphia paying them more for their food so they just think well i'd rather sell it to the british troops in philadelphia than i would to these blokes well that's the american way isn't it yeah capitalism is the american way washington is very disappointed by this interestingly Washington does not think that selling to the highest bidder is the American way so Washington at various points talks about making trading with the British punishable by death he sends thousand men out to basically requisition all the livestock from the local fields to basically steal it to steal it exactly and he says in letters this business about selling to the highest bidder is a sign of the debasement of our national character he says our spirit of American independence is imperiled by our own abominable lust of gain goodness what would he make of elon musk yes exactly very good question and actually the interesting thing is that washington at this point is not quite as popular with even his fellow officers or with congress as he would later become so that winter while he was a valley forge there was a movement to sack him as commander-in-chief and bring in the bloke who'd won the battle of saratoga six months earlier general horatio gates and this movement fizzled out but it's a reminder that washington is not as secure as he looks and actually at the end of january 1778 you know he's been writing these letters to congress a congressional delegation at the end of january visits the camp and washington has to be on his very best behavior he's very polite he's very respectful and he basically begs them to improve recruitment to sort out their supply chains but the visitor that he's really looking forward to getting comes a few days after that and this is his wife Martha so Martha hasn't seen him for months she arrives in early February by carriage over the kind of icy roads she's joined by some of

their slaves they she gets to Valley Forge she's really shocked by his condition she writes to a friend he is well but much worn with fatigue and anxiety I never knew him to be so anxious as now now if George is a little bit elusive I have to say Martha is positively opaque so I had a look in my files and in 2015 I reviewed a biography of Martha Washington for the Sunday Times and the final line of my review read as follows I don't think I've ever read a biography of a more boring woman really anyway she she arrives at the camp she rolls up her sleeve she gets stuck in she manages the staff she organizes the meals everyone says oh she's brilliant you know i never in my life knew a woman so busy from early morning till late at night as was lady washington interesting they call her lady washington actually yeah very now she's not the only woman at the camp and and modern historians perhaps unsurprisingly are very very keen to play up the general diversity of valley forge so there's other generals wives um this one with the with the I just, again, just saw that and thought, did I read?

that right it leaps off the page isn't it so this is lucy flucker nox so which prompts me to ask so we clear flucker is not a nickname nor is nox no um so you've put down that there are wives of the various generals that there are nurses and there are lawn dresses but are there prostitutes because i mean they generally follow armies don't they do you know

what i haven't seen any mention which i did find odd and i wondered whether that was either because american historians don't really want to mention it or because washington forbade it it's perfectly possible that washington because he is very puritanical whether he basically tried to stamp it out even so 12 000 men is it really plausible there's nobody there well he's shown that he's

alert to the danger of disease i suppose that might be possible yes and washington generally

was very down on women being at the camp he said the multitude of women in particular especially those who are pregnant or have children are a clog upon every movement but he can't stop them now the other thing is the kind of the racial diversity or the ethnic diversity so as we said before there are men from all 13 rebel colonies there are catholics and jews there are lots of people from scotland and ireland there are french there are prussians there are austrians poles dutch italian spanish or even hungarians now the most celebrated foreigner at the camp somebody you admire tom or you always make excuses for the hapless and ineffective marquis de lafayette is he uh is he dazing off right a man who fell asleep at the crucial moment of the french revolution and thereby lost completely lost the initiative so lafayette had arrived in the summer of 1777 as a volunteer when he was only 19 years old he was incredibly idealistic he'd gone and made his case personally to congress about being involved washington at first was suspicious of him but basically fell in love with him at valley forge really impressed by lafayette's energy and his enthusiasm so he's not falling asleep at this point no no not at all actually maybe he burnt himself out at valley forge and that meant he was um underpowered when it came to the crisis in his own country but washington adopted him as a protege kind of son almost wasn't it yeah exactly as a surrogate son yeah really exactly so now there are also some people of color at what valley forge so most native tribes sided with the british for understandable reasons because they think the north american colonists just want to steal all our lands and they're not wrong yeah they're not wrong and the british have you know although they probably would have taken them the british have made a feeble attempt to stop this happening. But there were about 50 scouts from the Orneda tribe. And Washington was a great fan of these fellows. He said they were brilliant. But the really striking story is the presence of African-American soldiers. And if you look at sort of online accounts of this and very recent history books, in the last decade, the estimates have kind of got bigger and bigger and bigger. I think probably because historians are trying to see what they want to see to get into the sort of the details of this in january 1778 the smallest colony which was rhode island was struggling to fulfill its its quota that it had to send basically its kind of recruitment quota and one of washington's officers who was a guy called james mitchell varnham said well why don't you just why don't you sign up slaves put them in the army and for washington that's a big ask because washington was born into a slave-owning family and washington did own slaves himself he was conflicted about it by the standards of slave owners washington was pretty humane even so he bought dozens of slaves during his lifetime

by the time the crisis you know with britain breaks out in the 1770s he's he owns for getting on a hundred slaves something like 87 slaves ron churnow who loves washington says in his biography slavery was woven into every aspect of mount vernon life even for visitors even though washington has slaves even though washington knows that southerners will be appalled by this he agrees to this proposal and said the colony of rhode island bought the freedom of 117 slaves and sent them as soldiers to valley forge and two other states then followed suit massachusetts and connecticut and the deal there in connecticut for example was if you're a slave owner you could duck military service if you sent slaves in your place but they're not slaves

they're not like the mamalooks or something they've been freed by this point you get freed

exactly you're freed and you're sent into the army and then afterwards you will be free so by august 1778 so this is the point after which they've lost valley forge the total of black men in the

army is about 755 soldiers and the really interesting thing that the top man on this top historian on this is a guy called Henry Weincheck and he says there are remarkably few reports of any trouble at all there's no record of people complaining there's no record of fights or interdisciplinary problems caused by racial integration and both Weincheck and Chernow think that the war had a big impact on washington personally on his attitude to slavery so it's at this point 1778 that he tells his steward back home at mount vernon we should stop selling slaves against their will we should stop breaking up slave families and then at the end of the year he's writing to his steward he mentions his slaves in passing and he says my slaves of whom i every day long more and more to get clear of in other words set free i'd like to set them all free he never actually does set more free though i thought he did in his will well not in his lifetime exactly

he doesn't set them free in his life there's a complication because it's what actually martha owns most of them exactly but he kind of makes provisions for when she dies that he will they

will be set free exactly so it's a complicated story in washington but there's any doubt that washington thinks slavery is wrong and he feels bad about it as we will see with jefferson that

doesn't necessarily mean that you set your slaves free though no exactly so back to the story we're

in february 1778 they're still very uh short of food they're still suffering from disease washington writes the governor of new york george clinton he says you know we're pretty close to a famine in the camp uh there are more rumors of a mutiny nothing but the most active efforts can avoid so shocking a catastrophe but a week later it's his birthday his 47th birthday and i thought you'd like this detail tom his junior officers organized an entertainment for him and this was a british play by joseph addison about the life of cato the younger so do you want to tell everyone

who cato the younger is cato the younger is a model of republican virtue who uh prefers to commit suicide rather than submit to caesar there you go so basically he's the kind of model of inflexible humorless opposition to monarchy that washington is all about exactly he's seen this

play several times uh he actually could quote bits of it at length without the text so some of his favorite lines though a steady temper can look on guilt rebellion and fraud in the calm lights of mild philosophy tis not in mortals to command success but we'll do more we'll deserve it so all this sort of stuff about duty steadfastness deserving success yeah this is absolute washington bingo so that's his birthday brilliant watch his play about kato the younger and the next day an excellent man arrives in the camp and this is a man who actually is going to transform the fortunes of the continental army completely and this is a man called friedrich wilhelm ludolf gerhard augustin luis freiherr von steuben dominic would this gentleman by any chance be a german he is german he's top absolutely top tip top prussian and this bloke von Steuben he came from a military family in Prussia he'd served in the seven years war he'd been a captain he'd been a great pal of Frederick the Great but then he'd been discharged from the Prussian army in murky circumstances and there are some clues to those circumstances perhaps that will emerge in the next few moments he became the court chamberlain for the prince of hohenzollern heckingen but he found it a bit boring so he made contact with your great pal benjamin franklin and in the summer of 1777 this bloke von steuben sailed to america with his greyhound who was called azor he went with him everywhere his secretary the excellently named pierre etienne du ponceau and du ponceau was certainly 17 years old he's a very good looking young lad good looking young man and his uh suspiciously handsome young aide louis de pontier okay so they land in boston they're wearing these very tight red uniforms and they've got loads of medals and steuben says to the americans i've come here to fight for you i don't want pay i just pay my expenses so what's his beef with british because you know britain and

and prussia were allies same side yeah sad he's just there for fun he wants to hang out and have

some you know with the lads and their tight uniforms i think it's a big element of the appeal so he arrives at valley forge and he makes a great impression straight away he's an unusual looking man he's very jowly he's got a gigantic red nose and he speaks comically bad english and one american private said later the trappings of his horse the enormous holsters of his pistols his large size and his strikingly martial aspect made him a perfect personification of mars the ancient fables.

god of war now when steuben arrives remember he's a german he is appalled by the litter and the filth of the camp the dead horses i mean we've flagged that up haven't we we have already so we too are appalled by it um he says he remembers the officers wearing and i quote a sort of dressing gown made of an old blanket or woolen bed cover and most of all the issue about the lack of proper toilet facilities and he says to washington look mate and he says in his broken english in prussia we would not stand for this you're literally preparing the food feet away from the bodies of rotting horses you have your toilets next to the kitchens and next to people's cabins dig your latrines on the other side of the camp sort yourself out if they are so short of food and they're reduced to eating kind of water and flour why are they not eating the horses i'm not an american i don't know god's sake i mean i i just think i do a better job than washington absolute shambles from washington yeah so anyway washington is delighted this bloke's turned up basically because he's lost loads of officers some of his officers have gone home they're they're sick of things and of course two thousand of his men have died of disease so this bloke who's a pal afraid of the great he's like manna from heaven and steuben says i'll train your army for him washington gives him 120 men as guinea pigs and steuben basically turns them into prussians what he does is he writes out the drill every day in french and he gets some of washington's young officers to translate it into english for him and do you know one of those officers who does it for him alexander hamilton yeah of musical fame yeah because um he hangs out with washington in the musical doesn't he he does yeah so stroibin drills them he teaches them to march in formation he teaches them to use a bayonet they're not you they don't have me using their bayonets property He said afterwards, the American soldier had no faith in it and never used it but to roast his beefsteak. And the men love him. They think he's brilliant. They think he's very eccentric. He's funny. He's an absolutely textbook example of the hired football manager of a Premier League team who speaks only in sort of mumbled English obscenities. F this, F that. He's basically Claudio Ranieri when he was the manager of Leicester. And he's going to pull off a similarly startling feat of promotion, isn't he? He is, exactly. So Stoyman's drills actually became the instruction manual for the U.S. Army until for decades, still influencing American military strategy right up to the Civil War. So Custer might have experienced it. Exactly. So the result of this is the Continental Army will leave Valley Forge, a much more modern and professional unit than they came. and afterwards Strobin was made an American citizen he was given a big estate in New York and he was made a member of the American Philosophical Society alongside loads of other founding fathers he clearly had a brilliant time because he became very close to two other handsome young men from Washington's army in their early 20s

called Benjamin Walker and William North he adopted them he made them his heirs which was actually very common for gay men to do in the late 18th century this was a way for you to establish a kind of formal relationship and when he died in 1794 he left them his estate so it worked out well for him worked out well for him and for them actually so that's one european contribution to the insurgent effort but obviously the americans need more help than just this one prussian the war is now almost three years old and although the british you know are not really anywhere near victory it's not clear how the americans will ever force the british out they have pinned their hopes all this time on French intervention but the French although they've sent arms kind of surreptitiously they haven't formally joined the war and basically the Americans are praying that the French will one day join the war to challenge Britain's command of the seas the months have passed and there's been no breakthrough but then in the dying days of April 1778 the news reaches the insurgent camp at valley forge there has been a diplomatic bombshell because at versailles two months earlier your mate benjamin franklin he has secured french recognition of the american republic and a military alliance and a month later war was formally declared between britain and france and when the news reaches valley forge washington and his officers recognize this as a total game changer lafayette is said to have kissed washington on the cheeks with joy which washington probably didn't really approve of and a week later after they got the news washington and his troops they have a day of thanksgiving they fire their guns in the air uh they read copies of the treatise aloud they all shout long live the king of france and not a brilliant shout this god save the friendly powers of europe that didn't become an anthem no that didn't become an anthem and there's Those.

Water drinking. Everyone said that actually this time, this is the one time that Washington's lost his sort of imperturbable glacial exterior. He had accountants of uncommon delight. And the most shocking thing is that at the end of the day, he agreed to throw aside his dignity and

to play cricket with the junior officers. Well, that is the traditional American way of celebrating, isn't it? Exactly. He was very, very good at throwing things because there are all these kind of mad stories of him throwing bricks over rivers and things right so i think he'd be quite good at cricket as a bowler as a fielder well the bowling wouldn't he because the at this point the ball was thrown rolled along the ground rather than yeah kind of it wasn't kind of airborne but you know you hit the ball you have to throw it back in so is this the ancestor of american enthusiasm for tempin bowling i think it well yeah it's cool kind of part of it also he had very big hands and that's very useful if you're a bowler in cricket of course of course so french entry into the war

has changed everything. Because from this point onwards, the odds really are against Britain. And from this point onwards, London thinks, okay, well, the North American colonists, southern North American colonists, what really matters is the Caribbean and the Sugar Islands. So within weeks of this, London sends a message to the new British commander in North America, Sir Henry Clinton, send a third of your army to the Caribbean. When Clinton gets this message, he says, well, our position in Philadelphia is now untenable. We should evacuate east to New York city on the 16th of june washington at valley forge gets word that the british british in philadelphia have asked for the return of their clothes from the local laundries which is a sign that they are moving out because obviously a british army would never take to the to the uh to the roads in unlaundered uniforms that would be appalling so a couple of days after this the first american brigades move out of valley forge in hot pursuit by the 22nd of june the whole Continental Army has crossed the Delaware into New Jersey. And on the 28th of June, at a place called Monmouth Courthouse, New Jersey, Washington's men have their first military test since they've been at Valley Forge. So they have caught up with the British. The heat is overpowering. It's almost 40 degrees Celsius, so 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So hot that some soldiers actually drop dead from sunstroke and the result of this battle i mean i say battle it's basically another skirmish is a draw really there's about 350 casualties on either side the british continued their evacuation to new york but having lost so many battles even a draw to washington seems like a victory and actually afterwards even the british commented they said gosh you know the americans have changed their tune they're pretty professional and obviously this is the result of this top prussian this bloke von steuben so where does all this leave the war they've got out of valley forge they're back on the road again you know things are looking up they've got the french on their side the war's not over but the balance has fundamentally shifted because 10 days after this battle a french fleet sails into delaware bay with 10 ships of the line four frigates and 4 000 french soldiers so from this point the war is a global war britain will be on the defensive and although american independence is not inevitable at this point in 1778 it is probably much more likely than not washington himself never gets the hollywood ending that you might have thought he would have liked because actually monmouth courthouse is the last major battle in

the northern theater do you think that's why he hasn't been the hero of a kind of classic hollywood film and that's also maybe why the war of independence actually there aren't that many

Hollywood films about it there's The Patriot with Mel Gibson but I can't actually think of any others I mean certainly none others that are well known in in Britain or in Europe and part of that

is because it ends in a very kind of um desultory manner it kind of splutters out doesn't it it

splutters out the British end up sort of trapping themselves at Yorktown Washington is there but even Ron Chernow in his biography says this is really a victory for French siege craft and French naval supremacy and washington is really a supporting actor a york town and it's a sort of slightly confusing ending the war then it nominally goes on for another two years before the the treaty is at paris is signed anyway back to washington himself did washington matter i think the answer is undoubtedly yes and actually this is why the story of valley forge is so important because at that moment in 1777 1778 almost any other commander probably would have seen his army fall apart they're hungry they don't have supplies the weather is terrible you know congress is losing confidence in them the men are tempted to mutiny it's easy to imagine the different colonial units turning on one another and if the army had broken up the Continental Army I think it would have been pretty hard to rebuild it I think the momentum would have been lost even with French backing I mean probably the French would not have joined the war you know in february and valley forge could have been you know the end of the war there could have been some sort of compromise who knows now instead of course it becomes one of the most mythologized moments of the entire campaign and washington because of his dignity because of his leadership because of his glacial self-control all of which are a bit performative but of course that's not to criticize them it's precisely because they're so public that they're so powerful washington has set the tone you know he's played the roman commander he has played his hero cato and it has absolutely worked he does the same trick again in december at 1783 so that's when the treaty was signed he famously walks into the confederation congress and he resigns his command and he returns to private life back to his plow back to his plow Well, again, he's self-consciously playing a Roman. He's playing Cincinnatus, isn't he? And people loved it. And George III said, oh, if he did that, he must be the greatest man in the world. You know, because people love the Romans at this point in the late 18th century. They're obsessed by this idea of honor and duty and stuff.

And Republican virtue, that this is what you do in a republic, is that you don't monopolize monarchical power, even if you're given it briefly. Exactly so. And so this will also be important for his role as the first president, that he ends up laying down his power.

this is why they choose him they don't just choose him as president in 1789 because he was the victorious commander-in-chief they choose him i think because he's the only one of the founding fathers who has the dignity and the self-control and the kind of paternalistic vibe that allows him to transcend all the factional and regional differences the other founding fathers may be more interesting more spiky more distinctive in their different ways but that means that they are they have enemies they have people who don't like them everybody likes and respects washington but

you said that he's he's got a very memorial quality that he's like a statue hewn out of marble and that is an enormous advantage if you have um an unstable republic and you need a kind i'm literally heavyweight, someone who's hewn out of marble, who will provide the kind of dignity that you need in a head of state in the early years of your infant republic, but who will also serve as a kind of monument to that republic after his death. And they must all be kind of thinking of

this. Yeah, I think exactly right. So we've got a bonus episode coming up for Arrested History Club members, where I talk to Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker, and he's made this massive series a billion episodes about the american revolution and he says in this washington is the kind of indispensable he's the one indispensable man without which it could not have succeeded a rare example of a great man of history who lives up to his reputation however just in case people are thinking they've gone mad they've gone native they're sucking up to the colonials i should stress this even american heroes have feet of clay or in washington's case teeth of clay tom because by the time the war ends george washington's teeth which should end with this crucial point are in an absolutely shocking state by 1781 he was wearing dentures that were held together with this crude wire mesh in 1784 so a year after the war ended he bought nine teeth from unknown african americans and these teeth were then transplanted into his gums and by the time he became president in 1789 for all that george iii said he was the greatest man in the world he had just one working tooth left which is why as president i think he went on to save almost nothing memorable or interesting whatsoever and tom that i think is why since the dawn of their republic 250 years ago americans terrible teeth have been the cause of so much innocent amusement all over the world and nowhere more so of course than in our own beloved country in britain and so the ultimate lesson of this story is that if you want to have proper teeth teeth like the british british teeth then you should pay your taxes thank you dominic um and

we have more to come. So Benjamin Franklin is next, the great scientist and diplomat in France. Then we have Alexander Hamilton and his duel with Aaron Burr, and then Thomas Jefferson. We also have an amazing couple of American Revolution bonuses. So as Dominic mentioned, the world's greatest historical documentary maker, the legendary Ken Burns. And then we will be talking to very much friend of the show, Conan O'Brien, for his views on the founding fathers. And on top of that, of course, there's a massive array of supplementary benefits, including our brilliant newsletter.

Get all this, therestishistory.com. You know what to do. Sign up there. And one other thing we should mention, actually. So we are doing our Restless History Festival at Hampton Court this weekend. It's got tons of exciting events. The Saturday, I'm sorry to say, is sold out. That's disappointing for people who want to get tickets. But the good news is that there are still one or two tickets available, I think, for Sunday. There'll be all kinds of treats, but among them will be the appearance of friends of the show, Helen Castor, William Dalrymple Adam Smith, Katya Hoyer and very excitingly Ian Hislop the editor of Private Eye magazine and if you'd like to get a ticket go to therestishistory.com

We will be back in our next episode with Benjamin Franklin but for now, thank you Dominic thank you everyone for listening, bye bye Bye bye

This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18+.

As a Massey Services technician, we have earned the trust of our customers. So much so, we're often called upon for a second opinion.

Could I interest you in the steak or lobster?

Hmm, what would my Massey technician do?

That's a lot to chew on, but I do know that Massey's Pest Prevention is the right choice for preventing pests from getting inside your home. Plus, our service is guaranteed or your money back. Massey Services, offering expert advice and much more. Expect more and get it.

Take this as your sign to go. Just get out there and go. This summer at Best Western, get 1,000 bonus points and a chance to win 250,000 bonus points. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at bestwestern.com. No additional purchase necessary for sweeps. See bonus point T's and C's and sweeps rules for details.