Two traits essential to George Washington’s success

George Washington is often considered our greatest president. Certainly he was the model for every president that followed. But what made him so successful as our first commander in chief? The answer lies in two essential qualities of his character.

George Washington’s character was defined by both great strength and great restraint. It is for this reason our Founding Fathers chose him as our first president. He wielded vast power, and yet he demonstrated his willingness to surrender it back to the people who empowered him. It is just this sort of limited power that the founders intended to institutionalize in the executive office. Hillsdale College’s new class, “The President and the Constitution” explains the role of the president as it was in Washington’s era, and as it ought to be today.

The college’s latest free online course examines the office of the president as it was established in the Constitution by our Founding Fathers. What can Washington’s example show us about the executive branch? What principles guide the structure and function of the executive office? Are those principles still in operation in the presidency today? In this free 10-lecture series, “The Presidency and the Constitution,” Hillsdale’s politics faculty answer these questions, bringing a much needed constitutional focus to a conversation dominated by a modern progressive administrative state.

In signing up for this free class, you will join the ranks of over 600,000 Americans who have learned from Hillsdale College about the principles of liberty at the heart of our founding documents. Hillsdale’s online courses teach how these principles of liberty allow free enterprise and the entrepreneurial spirit to flourish, which helped America quickly become the freest and most prosperous country on earth.

John Adams wrote of the Constitutional Convention in 1787: “The deliberate union of so great and various a people in such a place, is without all partiality or prejudice, if not the greatest exertion of human understanding, the greatest single effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen.” Become a part of the current national deliberation over the Constitution today.

Click here to enroll in Hillsdale’s latest free course “The Presidency and the Constitution.”