George Washington

"It was a cycle of violence, a brutalizing back-and-forth. In 1794, a third general, Anthony Wayne, launched a third offensive and defeated the confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The next year, both sides signed a treaty at Fort Greenville. The Americans offered annual payments for the territory that would become much of Ohio, a swap that proved disastrous for the Shawnee. Even that treaty wasn’t enough for the settlers. As Natives were also learning in Georgia and New York, American treaties did not hold. George Washington was learning the same thing. In private, the president complained that “scarcely anything short of a Chinese wall, or a line of troops, will restrain land jobbers and the encroachment of the settlers upon the Indian territory.”"

"America’s first president, of course, was George Washington, and once he took office, in 1789, he created all sorts of precedents. A crucial one was the federal stance toward Natives. Washington and his secretary of war, Henry Knox, worried about America’s global reputation and its greedy settlers. “It is a melancholy reflection,” Knox wrote, “that our modes of population have been more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru.”"

"Once upon a time, America, too, had the musculature of an engineering state, building mighty works throughout the country: lengthy train tracks, gorgeous bridges, beautiful cities, weapons of war with terrible power, and missions to the moon. George Washington was a general, the first of many national security types who appreciated the value of building. As a young army officer, Dwight Eisenhower spent two months driving, or, more precisely, juddering, from coast to coast on unpaved roads. As president, he built the Interstate Highway System. When the United States had surging population and economic growth through the nineteenth century, political elites agreed that its vast territories needed canals, rails, and highways. Some of the leading figures in the Progressive Era embraced social engineering—and they conducted enough eugenics experiments to prove it."

"Soon after his arrival at the Tuileries, Napoleon collected twenty-two statues of his heroes for the grand gallery, starting, inevitably, with Alexander and Julius Caesar but also featuring Hannibal, Scipio, Cicero, Cato, Frederick the Great, George Washington, Mirabeau and the revolutionary general the Marquis de Dampierre. The Duke of Marlborough, renowned for his victory at the battle of Bleinheim, was included, as was General Dugommier, whose presence alongside such genuine military giants as Gustavus Adolphus and Marshal Saxe must have been based on his perspicacity in spotting Napoleon’s worth at Toulon. Joubert was there too, since he was now safely dead."