The times didn’t “call forth” the great men who shaped our history. Far from being unwitting agents of vast impersonal forces, men like Martin Luther or Abraham Lincoln molded events according to an individual vision we can revere but not entirely account for. George Washington is a preeminent case in point. He was, in biographer James Flexner’s perfect phrase, the indispensable man, without whom the miracle of the American republic, the flower of the Western Enlightenment, might never have bloomed.

As nothing is so intriguing as the miraculous, it’s no wonder that biographies of Washington appear with the regularity of daffodils, seeking, if not to explain his magical gift, at least to describe how it developed and what it accomplished. This year’s crop offers two fine examples, very different in their approaches. by Gary L. Gregg II, director of the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center, aims to introduce the general reader to the subject with a fast-paced,  conversational narrative of the facts. By contrast, eminent biographer H. W. Brands, chair of history at the University of Texas at Austin, addresses his hefty  to an informed audience. He enriches the well-known outlines with a cornucopia of context—the perspectives of contemporary first-hand observers, the predicaments of Washington’s adversaries, the related events that affected the general’s choices—to produce an absorbing scholarly resource.

At the heart of both books is an account of how Washington’s actions, choices, and character determined the course of American history not once but thrice over. In the first place, his generalship defeated the world’s most powerful empire and won the War of Independence, a feat that in the waning days of 1776 seemed highly improbable. Yes, he had driven the British out of Boston in March, but then nothing went right for the 44-year-old commander. He escaped utter defeat by a hairsbreadth at the Battle of Brooklyn, nearly got checkmated in Manhattan by vacillation that lost him close to a third of his army, and fled before the Redcoats all down the length of wintry New Jersey to temporary safety in Pennsylvania, where his troops, now ragged, hungry, and depleted, shivered round campfires in the December snow.

There he brooded over intercepted correspondence between two of his officers, blaming the losses—over which the British commanders were snickering, they said—on his supposed weakness and indecision. When asked his opinion, adjutant general Joseph Reed stressed the future, not the past. Without an immediate, decisive stroke, he replied, troops would melt away, volunteers would dry up, the fast-depreciating paper money would be worth nothing, and civilians wavering between allegiance to Congress or the crown would take the British offer of amnesty. Radical journalist Thomas Paine, marching with the retreating troops, underscored the message in his just-published pamphlet, The Crisis, which the soldiers read by firelight. “The present winter is worth an age, if rightly employed,” he wrote; “but if lost or neglected, the whole continent will partake of the evil.”

Washington recognized how desperate matters were, and he responded by crossing the ice-choked Delaware River on Christmas Day and marching through a stinging snowstorm to attack and defeat the surprised Hessian mercenaries holding Trenton. After taking 900 prisoners back to Pennsylvania, he recrossed the river into New Jersey, where on New Year’s Eve he formed up his men. He knew their enlistments expired at midnight; he told them that if they’d sign up for one more month, they could save their country. By then, they knew him well enough to be inspired by his brave and protective leadership, and almost all re-enlisted, a testament to his charisma as well as to their patriotism. With some of them barefoot and leaving bloody tracks in the snow, they marched toward Princeton, fending off the British regulars intercepting them, and defeated the Redcoats garrisoned there.

These victories electrified Americans, startled the British into recognizing this as a real war, and prompted the French foreign minister to think that an alliance with these New World rebels might sorely wound Britain, his nation’s rival since 1066. Legendary general Frederick the Great understood at once how world-changing these victories were. “The achievements of Washington and his little band of compatriots between the 25th of December and the 4th of January, a space of 10 days,” the Prussian king pronounced, “were the most brilliant of any recorded in the annals of military achievements.”

But there were seven hard years to go before the war was won, years of grinding endurance rather than battle, as Washington realized he was commanding an insurgency, whose goal had to be to keep his army intact, even if he lost cities, so that he could harass, demoralize, and outlast an enemy fighting in a vast and unfamiliar territory far from home. Even after the final battle at Yorktown, Virginia, won in 1781 with essential help from French troops and ships, Washington had to keep his officers and men under control as they restlessly awaited the final peace treaty that came at the end of 1783, all the while fretting that Congress wasn’t disbursing the back pay owed to them, sorely needed by their families back home. In our own bureaucratic age, it’s hard to appreciate the strength of will and character that inspired men to accomplish such feats of action and fortitude. It’s worth pondering.

In the second place, Washington was a prime mover of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, and as its president, he was key in getting its extraordinary blueprint of the new government drafted and ratified. Because he spoke so little during the proceedings, it’s easy to think of him largely as a passive observer with little to add beyond the seriousness of purpose his grave demeanor in the chair encouraged. Not so. For three decades, ever since his frustrating stint trying to protect settlers from Indian violence on the vast frontier as the young commander of Virginia’s colonial regiment in the mid-1750s, he had argued for a union of the colonies under a central government strong enough to supply sufficient troops and also to raise the taxes to support them. At this early date, he was farsighted but not alone in this vision.

As Benjamin Franklin ruefully remarked in his Autobiography, had the crown and the colonial legislatures not rejected the union of the colonies under a central head responsible for defense, taxation, and Indian relations that he proposed at the Albany Congress of 1754, the crown’s need to tax the colonies to defray its French and Indian War expenses, and the Revolution those taxes ignited, might never have occurred. But, sighed Franklin of this fatal choice, “history is full of the errors of states and princes.” The times called, but even the visionary Franklin couldn’t make the era’s leaders give the right answer.

Washington’s supply problem in the 1750s was bad, but it was as nothing compared to what he faced in the Revolution, especially in those starving winters between 1778 and 1780 at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and at Morristown, New Jersey. There his men would “sometimes be five or Six days together without Bread, then as many without Meat, and once or twice two or three without either,” the general lamented. Many “had scarcely clothes enough to cover their nakedness” or even “the shadow of a blanket, severe as the Winter was.” It’s not as if this were happening in a desert but rather in a fertile land, where war profiteers could throw lavish dinner parties in Philadelphia. The Articles of Confederation, which held the new states in an association of separate sovereignties rather than a single nation-state, were to blame. That pact did not establish an energetic executive able to mobilize the resources of the whole community.

Washington emerged from the war so determined to remedy that defect that, just before returning to civilian life, he sent a letter to all the state governors stressing that the success of the newly independent nation depended on creating an “indissoluble union of the states under one federal head.” His correspondence during the next three years, especially with his old aide Alexander Hamilton and his fellow Virginian James Madison, echoes the same preoccupation. Thus, his agreement to head the Constitutional Convention was not the beginning of a new theme in his life but rather the culmination of one that had preoccupied him since his mid-twenties.

Congresses there had been since 1774 but never yet a President of the United States. So, third, George Washington would have to invent the role of the energetic executive he had envisioned, as the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, working under the spell of his charisma, took for granted when they rather sketchily framed the office with him in mind. A lover of theater, especially Joseph Addison’s bombastically republican Cato, he was a connoisseur of role-playing, and indeed, over a lifetime, he had self-consciously created the role of himself, which evolved into His Excellency the General and then into his star turn as Mister President from 1789 until 1797.

He began studying for the part in his teens, copying out a sixteenth-century French etiquette book and memorizing its maxims of gentlemanly behavior, such as cultivate a “Grave Settled” manner, hide your feelings, and “associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation.” He did indeed esteem his reputation—highly—not out of mere vanity but as a measure of virtue, according to the widespread eighteenth-century belief that a love of respect and praise and fame is what drives men to behave respectably and even nobly, in ways that benefit the community. In quintessentially American fashion, Washington sprang from his Platonic conception of himself and, with his upright bearing and punctilious tailoring, he became a persona of such self-command and nobility of purpose that it won the respect and deference of others.

Beyond the matters of protocol he constantly had to invent as president—what his title should be, whom he should visit, and what kind of parties and speeches he should give—there were far weightier matters of policy to determine. The first concerned the shape of the new nation’s economy. Should he sign the bill, drafted by Treasury Secretary Hamilton in 1790, establishing a national bank? Did the limited and enumerated powers the Constitution granted to Congress include that prerogative? After carefully weighing the objections of Congressman Madison, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph, Virginians who not only argued that the Constitution’s “necessary and proper” clause did not extend to this matter but who also envisioned an agricultural economy for the new nation, rather than the one of trade and finance foreshadowed by this measure, the president signed. Though a Virginia planter himself, Washington had an entrepreneurial heart and, in due course, established a sawmill, a gristmill, a salt-fish export business, and a huge distillery alongside the five farms on his vast Mount Vernon estate. As a speculator in frontier land on a heroic scale, he envisioned an expansive future for the new nation, with an exploding population enriched by trade, industry, and the accompanying finance as well as by farming.

In foreign affairs, he was particularly determined to keep the country at peace in an era when the wars of the French Revolution were roiling the globe. This was no easy achievement, given the Democratic-Republican Party’s almost fanatical support for the French Revolutionaries, a stance that sprang into existence under the leadership of Jefferson and Madison. It didn’t help that the youthful French ambassador was fanning American war fever and even commissioning American privateers, or that both the French and the British navies, each suspecting the new nation of aiding its enemy, were intercepting and seizing American merchant ships.

Washington took matters into his own hands, declaring in his April 1793 Neutrality Proclamation that America would remain “friendly and impartial toward the belligerent powers.” Wars, he thought, were not matters of passion or partisanship but of cool national interest, and it was the infant nation’s interest to grow in wealth and population in tranquility. But as London observed the pro-French clamor rage unabated in America, the proclamation didn’t convince London of U.S. nonalignment, and the Royal Navy continued to harass American shipping and dragoon American sailors into its service. In February 1794, Britain upped the pressure, threatening renewed hostilities from the forts in the Northwest Territory that British troops had promised to evacuate at the end of the Revolutionary War but still held. Now it wasn’t only pro-French Americans who favored renewed war with the mother country.

That month, Washington sent Chief Justice John Jay to London to try to head off hostilities. It took until November for the skilled diplomat to forge a treaty. Its terms seemed so disappointing to many Americans that Jay joked, on his return home, that he could light his way across the country by burning effigies of himself. But despite the treaty’s shortcomings, Washington got what he wanted—continued peace and, in short order, the economic boom he had predicted.

The treaty allowed him to set another policy precedent he thought important. Some of its provisions required funding to carry out, and the House of Representatives wouldn’t appropriate the money without reviewing the correspondence between Jay and the executive. Absolutely not, Washington replied. The Constitution requires Senate ratification of treaties but assigns no role to the House. In fact the Constitutional Convention, as he well knew from having presided over it, considered and rejected the idea that treaties must be ratified by law before taking effect. The separation of powers is a key constitutional principle, and he intended to draw an inflexible line of demarcation between executive and legislative branch prerogatives.

While Jay was negotiating peace abroad, however, unrest broke out at home. Farmers in western Pennsylvania, who distilled some of their corn into spirits for preservation and ease of transport, viewed the newly assessed excise on whiskey as no different from Britain’s Stamp Tax or Tea Tax, and they took up arms to oppose it. In Washington’s eyes, this was precisely the anarchic refusal to support the nation’s common purposes that an energetic executive had been called into existence to correct, by force if necessary, and he led troops to compel compliance. As Brands recounts, the area’s congressman, serving as mediator, explained to the rebels that the president saw this conflict as the very first test of whether the new republican government could enforce its laws and vindicate its sovereignty, and not only the American citizenry but the whole world would be watching. In the face of such presidential determination, the rebels folded, and Washington, his precedent firmly established, ultimately pardoned the two rebels convicted of treason.

What are the virtues of the two biographies under review here? The great strength of Mr. Brands’s absorbing account, as noted, is the wealth of primary material he so aptly brings to bear. For instance, who imagined we could still hear, after some 270 years, the grumbling of Washington’s Indian guides, who said that if he’d taken their advice he would have avoided his youthful military debacle at Fort Necessity? Or, like a John Ford Western, Brands treats us to a gruesomely detailed eyewitness account of a representative slaughter, complete with scalping, inflicted by Indians on the frontier settlers Washington struggled to defend in the 1750s. Later, a letter from his subordinate officers begging him not to resign the command of the Virginia Regiment vibrates with the deep loyalty the young colonel inspired: “Your presence only will cause a steady firmness and vigor to actuate in every breast, despising the greatest dangers and thinking light of toils and hardships while led on by the man we know and love.” That’s charisma.

We get a you-are-there sense of actuality from an anonymous sergeant’s wide-eyed description of the Battle of Princeton and from the vivid, wry account of Dr. Albigence Waldo of the Valley Forge winter, in which his “eyes are started out from their orbits like a rabbit’s eyes” from the smoke and cold of his tent, and, as cries of “No meat! No meat!” echo through the camp, he joins his fellow soldiers for their two daily meals of “Nothing but fire cake and water, sir”—flour paste baked in campfire ashes. And meanwhile, with scanty wages still unpaid, his fellow officers receive letters from their wives, begging each to remember that “charity begins at home, and not suffer his family to perish with want in the midst of plenty.”

A tour de force of this method is Brands’s section on the end of the French and Indian War, under the brilliant premiership of William Pitt the Elder, who pretended to hesitate about accepting the post due to poor health with “all the studied apparatus of a theatric valetudinarian,” as Brands quotes Horace Walpole’s sparkling description. Though it was hot, Pitt appeared before the king in

an old coat and waistcoat of beaver laced with gold: over that a red surtout, the right arm lined with fur, and appendant with many black ribands, to indicate his inability of drawing it over his right arm, which hung in a crape sling, but which, in the warmth of his speaking, he drew out with unlucky activity, and brandished as usual. . . . [N]o aspiring Cardinal ever coughed for the Tiara with more specious debility.

Under his skilled leadership, British forces defeated the French at Louisbourg, Fort Duquesne (where Washington fought with distinction), and finally at Quebec, a victory Brands recounts in dramatic detail, painting an unforgettable portrait of General James Wolfe, the heroic 32-year-old British commander who lost his life there. These victories ended French power in North America and also ended the American colonists’ need for British protection, paving the way to the Revolution.

Brands lets us hear from Washington’s own lips the essential conservatism of his revolutionary sentiments, his backward-looking determination to “maintain the liberty which we have derived from our ancestors,” as he wrote to his neighbor George Mason in 1769. The same invocation of ancient British liberties pervaded the Fairfax Resolves passed in 1774 at a meeting Washington chaired, which went on to remind Parliament that “our ancestors, when they left their native land and settled in America, brought with them, even if the same had not been confirmed by charters, the civil constitution and form of government of the country they came from.” Three months later, the future president had moved from the historical to the universal Lockean “rights and privileges which are essential to the happiness of every free state and without which, life, liberty, and property are rendered totally insecure.” With this buildup, Brands’s dramatic presentation of almost the whole of Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech to his fellow Virginians gives readers as intense goosebumps as the original audience.

By contrast with Brands’s originality, Gregg’s account is more traditional, though it is distinguished by an energetic narrative that propels the story effortlessly along. Gregg spiritedly recounts the saga of the 21-year-old Washington’s perilous 500-mile winter trek through the wilderness to deliver royal Governor Dinwiddie’s ultimatum to quit the Ohio Country to the commander of the French forces there, for instance. His summary of the Washington presidency is as judicious as it is crisp. I confess to missing Washington’s own vivid journals, which, when Dinwiddie had them published, made the young major famous throughout the colonies and even in London. So distinctive is that voice that if you heard it behind you, you’d know who was speaking without looking around.

Gregg has real insight into Washington’s unique and uniquely American character, and he sensitively captures its two outstanding aspects. There is, of course, the self-made, theatrical persona—reserved, rigidly controlled, formed on the model of his British-educated half-brother, an officer with a royal commission, and of his aristocratic Fairfax neighbors, a family of landowning magnates. This is the Washington who loved showy, well-tailored uniforms, recognizing, as Gregg explains, that looking the part has power over both the actor and his audience. It’s the Washington who thirsted for fame and who radiated such “martial dignity,” said his friend Benjamin Rush, that “there is not a king in Europe that would not look like a valet de chambre by his side” (though Gregg stretches his six foot height to six-three, one of the book’s distracting errors of fact).

But then there is a different kind of self-made—the boy who found his dead father’s old surveying instruments, taught himself the craft from books, got ample practical experience in the wilderness, and became the official county surveyor at 17, all the while learning what land was best for crops, mentally laying out tracts for future purchase, and forming the ambition to become a landed magnate himself in a territory he foresaw would someday be settled, cultivated, and richly productive. For all his tinge of British aristocracy, this is the Washington who also spent three years as a frontier Indian fighter. He was, as Gregg quotes Flexner as observing, as much formed by the wilderness as Andrew Jackson, quick to have his soldiers dress and fight Indian-style when necessary, and at least as clear-sighted about the savagery and power hunger of which human nature is capable as Federalist 51.

But as a colonial officer, Gregg notes, Washington chafed at the condescension of regular British army officers, who treated him as second class because he lacked a royal commission, even while in battle the royal troops they had trained “broke and ran as sheep before the hounds,” while his colonials “behaved like men and died like soldiers.” His experience fighting alongside those regulars made him an even more confirmed republican meritocrat. “Remember that it is the actions, and not the commission, that make the officer,” Washington told his subordinates, assuring them that “I shall make it the most agreeable part of my duty to study and reward the brave and deserving.” As president, Gregg reminds us, he chose a stellar cabinet, and in staffing the minor offices he passed over his own nephew in favor of a more qualified candidate.

When his father died, the 11-year-old Washington inherited ten slaves. As an eighteenth-century Virginian and a history-shaping hero, he took years to consider the justice of owning such property. During those years, Gregg notes, he unreflectingly bought and sold many more slaves, pursued and punished runaways, and chafed that people without freedom also lacked a work ethic. But as he thought his way toward revolution, contemplating how Britain threatened to take away his God-given Lockean right to liberty and turn him into a slave, he began to draw the obvious conclusion about his own household.

It’s today’s fashion to condemn him for the early part of the story, but Gregg rightly recognizes the moral imagination that led him first to refuse to buy another slave, next to decline to sell any if it meant breaking up a family, then to try, unsuccessfully, to lease Mount Vernon’s five farms with his slaves working as ordinary paid laborers, and finally to free them in his will. Emancipation would happen at his wife’s death, because many of the 123 slaves he owned were married to the 153 owned by the estate of Martha’s first husband, and he wanted at least to postpone the issue of splitting up families. In the meantime, his will established a trust to care for the ill and the old, to teach the children to read and write, and train them in a marketable skill. And he did “most solemnly enjoin” his executors to make sure that every one of these provisions for his slaves “be religiously fulfilled.”

Was this too little, too late? I like the answer Gregg quotes from Bishop Richard Allen’s sermon to his African Methodist Episcopal congregation in Philadelphia just after Washington died at 67 in 1799. “He has watched over us, and viewed our degraded state with compassion and pity,” said the former slave. He “thought we had a right to liberty. Unbiased by the popular opinion of the state in which is the memorable Mount Vernon, he dared to do his duty, and wipe off the only stain with which man could ever reproach him.”

Certainly, as these two books reaffirm, his memory is a blessing to every American.

Myron Magnet, a National Humanities Medalist, is the author of The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817, among other works.