James Gould Cozzens on George Washington’s excellence

    While reading Diaries of George Washington, James Gould Cozzens wrote in his notebook:

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been getting thru these 4 volumes with great interest. I think the thing that must impress any reader most is constant evidence of a consistent and energetic good sense; and you must see that if he had made himself the richest man in the Colonies by the time of the revolution, it was through application and industry - he examined personally and knowledgeably all his western lands; he ‘rid’ every day to all his Virginia plantations, observing in detail every bit of work that was going on and carefully considered how the smallest operation might be done better - that is: more quickly, more easily, and less expensively. You must also see, reading thousands upon thousands of his own words that meanness, penny-pinching, or greed for gain weren’t remotely involved. What he aimed at was simply doing it right, eliminating irrational wastes. It’s a tribute to him that you find yourself really set-down when it develops that the diaries stop somewhat before he took command of the continental army - and all the more let-down when he resumes them (explaining that he had not before found time) in the last year of the war; because they are done with the same show of energetic good sense, sharp attention to detail, and simple businesslike perceptiveness. In some ways it’s a sort of shock to see beyond any possible doubt that the inevitably more or less mummified figure of statues, coins, postage stamps, the suspiciously stuffed-shirt-like image of conventional history must actually, as a living man, have been every bit as good as, and maybe a little better than, the man of legend. (Quoted from James Gould Cozzens, Selected Notebooks: 1960 - 1967, p. 58.)
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    For a brief biography of James Gould Cozzens, click here.

Comments

[Scarlet]

Well written article.