This attitude toward Washington as a man was due largely to the misrepresentations of the early literature.  Three distinct eras in our regard for him as a public character have been pointed out by Bradley T. Johnson:[4]

The generation which fought the Revolution, framed and adopted the Constitution, and established the United States were impressed with the most profound veneration, the most devoted affection, the most absolute idolatry for the hero, sage, statesman.  In the reaction that came in the next generation against “the old soldiers,” who for thirty years had assumed all the honors and enjoyed all the fruits of the victory that they had won, accelerated by the division in American sentiment for or against the French Revolution, it came to be felt, as the younger generation always will feel, that the achievements of the veterans had been greatly overrated and their demigod enormously exaggerated.  They thought, as English Harry did at Agincourt, that “Old men forget:  yet all shall be forgot, but they’ll remember with advantages what feats they did that day.”

The fierce attacks of the Jeffersonian Democracy on Washington, his principles, his life, and his habits, exercised a potent influence in diminishing the general respect for his abilities felt by the preceding generation; and Washington came to be regarded as a worthy, honest, well-meaning gentleman, but with no capacity for military and only mediocre ability in civil affairs.  This estimate continued from the beginning of Jefferson’s administration to the first of Grant’s.  Neither Marshall nor Irving did much during that period to place him in a proper historical light....

But in the last twenty-five years there has been a steady drift toward giving Washington his proper place in history and his appropriate appreciation as soldier and statesman.  The general who never won a battle is now understood to have been the Revolution itself, and one of the great generals of history.  The statesman who never made a motion, nor devised a measure, nor constructed a proposition in the convention of which he was president, is appreciated as the spirit, the energy, the force, the wisdom which initiated, organized, and directed the formation of the Constitution of the United States and the Union by, through, and under it; and therefore it seems now possible to present him as the Virginian soldier, gentleman, and planter, as a man, the evolution of the society of which he formed a part, representative of his epoch, and his surroundings, developed by circumstances into the greatest character of all time—­the first and most illustrious of Americans.

Henry Cabot Lodge,[5] writing in 1899, was one of the first to discover “the new Washington.”  “The real man,” he wrote, “has been so overlaid with myths and traditions, and so distorted by misleading criticisms, that ... he has been wellnigh lost.  We have the religious and statuesque myth,