Was America’s greatest general and first president also a political philosopher? Regent University professor Jeffry H. Morrison says yes, in his just-published book, The Political Philosophy of George Washington. He recently took questions from NRO’s John J. Miller.

JOHN J. MILLER: George Washington was a lot of things — a general, a president, a symbol of hope and inspiration for people with wooden teeth — but was he also an intellectual? Did he actually develop a political philosophy? JEFFRY H. MORRISON: He was and he did, though it sounds a little highfalutin to put it that way. Washington developed a simple but coherent and consistent political philosophy — for example, nonpartisanship and cooperation of church and state at home, neutrality abroad — during his half-century public career. He wasn’t in the same class as Jefferson or John Adams in terms of education or intellectual horsepower. But even Jefferson ranked Washington’s Farewell Address with The Federalist Papers as one of the best texts of American political principle — texts he wanted taught in law classes at his University of Virginia, by the way.

MILLER: Didn’t James Madison and Alexander Hamilton have a hand in writing the Farewell Address? MORRISON: They did, and so did John Jay — coincidentally the three authors of The Federalist Papers. But Washington was clearly the superintending intelligence behind the address. He owned every idea in it, and he made plenty of changes to the various drafts, deleting and adding language of his own.

MILLER: Have scholars downplayed the philosophical side of Washington? Why? MORRISON: They did for many years, though in the last generation scholars have shown an increasing appreciation of Washington’s mind. Washington was very self-deprecating, and that didn’t help his reputation. He was always embarrassed by his lack of formal education — he never went to college. But, of course, you can have an excellent mind without a lot of schooling. Washington actually had a keen practical intelligence, it was just untutored.

MILLER: What books influenced Washington’s thinking? MORRISON: Seneca’s Morals, Joseph Addison’s Cato and Spectator essays, and to a surprising degree, the Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Washington didn’t have time to become a bookish person, but he was a self-educator, and he read when he could. Judging from the way he wrote, those are some of the things he did read and internalize.

MILLER: Sophisticated people laughed at George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign when he cited Jesus as his favorite philosopher. Would Washington have cackled, too? MORRISON: No, he would not have cackled. But I think he would have been puzzled. George Bush is a 21st-century Evangelical; Washington was an 18th-century nominal Anglican (and Stoic), and those cultures are very different. Contemporary Evangelicals have an intensely personal relationship with Jesus and they verbalize it. Anglicans of Washington’s day were more restrained. And besides, Jesus himself said, “my kingdom is not of this world” — not the sort of thing one might expect a political philosopher to say. So our first “George W.” probably would not have cited Jesus that way.

MILLER: And what’s the deal with Cato? This play was very important to Washington. How come nobody ever stages it nowadays? MORRISON: It’s a tragedy, and Americans prefer happy Hollywood endings. Also, Cato’s virtues are of the self-denying sort — he kills himself rather than submit to Caesar’s tyranny — and they don’t fit our consumer culture. And, though it has violence, there’s no sex in it.

MILLER: Does Cato the play have anything to do with Cato the think tank? MORRISON: A little. The libertarian Cato Institute is named for Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters, British liberal pamphlets from the early 1700s that Americans used to justify their Revolution. Those pamphlets were named after the Roman Cato the Younger, so that’s the connection. Washington had Cato’s Letters in his library, incidentally.

MILLER: In addition to Christianity and Cato, what are the other sources of Washington’s political thought? MORRISON: The classical republicanism of ancient Greece and especially Rome, British Enlightenment liberalism (featuring John Locke), and Protestant Christianity were the three main ideologies that helped form not only Washington but also his peers during the Founding. Of course experience was a great teacher too: You see him change his mind on slavery, for example, based partly on his experience in the North. American colonial development and history also influenced him.

MILLER: What specifically made him change his mind on slavery? Why didn’t he free his slaves until after his death? MORRISON: He commanded free black troops and spent most of the Revolution above the Mason-Dixon Line, and acquired abolitionist tracts like Granville Sharp’s Just Limitation of Slavery in the Laws of God. His will freed his slaves at Martha’s death, presumably so she would have people to help her run the farms after he was gone. (By law, he couldn’t free her slaves, because they belonged to her first husband’s estate.) But he was insistent that his slaves be freed immediately upon Martha’s death “without evasion,” and he set up a trust fund to educate and provide for them and their descendants. It was still paying out in the 1830s.

MILLER: Would Washington have been uncomfortable with his secular deification — naming the capital city and a whole state after him, building a towering monument to him, and so on? MORRISON: Perhaps, though a desire for lasting fame earned through public service was not a vice to the Founders. When he was young, especially during the French and Indian War, Washington hankered after glory and fame. But the pressures of public life chastened him, and by the time he retired from the presidency, he was content to lead a private life. He didn’t want a “parade” or even a eulogy spoken at his funeral.

MILLER: At the end of your book, in an appendix, you publish “a selected inventory of Washington’s library.” What is this list supposed to show us? And where is the library now? MORRISON: Most of the library is in the Boston Athenaeum, and Mount Vernon has a few of the books in its archives. The list is designed to correct a common error, one made by otherwise excellent historians, that Washington didn’t have a good library. In fact, he had an outstanding library, both broad and deep, which he intentionally built up over the years. It contained more books on political theory than on agriculture. The question is, how much of that library did he read? That is hard to answer definitively, for a variety of reasons.

MILLER: I was pleased to see Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations on the list. But do we know for certain that he read Smith or any of the other books? MORRISON: We do know he read Smith because it was one of very few books he wrote in. Unlike so many of the educated Founders, Washington didn’t ordinarily take notes in his books, or keep a literary diary. But a clean book doesn’t prove he didn’t read it. For example, several times he quoted or alluded to Cervantes’s Don Quixote, although as I recall his copy is pristine.

MILLER: Speaking of personal libraries, what’s the very best book on George Washington — i.e., if somebody wants to read a single book on the guy, which one would you recommend and why? MORRISON: Richard Brookhiser’s Founding Father is insightful, well-written, brief, and that rare thing — a moral biography that isn’t moralistic.