The Reluctant President: Washington’s Leadership and Legacy | The American Story | Ep 10

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_3** (0:33)
It's January 21st, 1793, and the city of Paris pulsates with violence.
The Revolutionary Square is packed. Twenty thousand people press shoulder to shoulder, shouting, jeering, climbing onto the rooftops for a better view.
A gray winter sky hangs low over the city, and a wooden scaffold rises like something out of a nightmare. At its center sits a contraption that has become the defining sound of the French Revolution, the guillotine.
At the foot of the scaffold stands King Louis XVI, the same king who just a decade earlier bankrolled the American Revolution, funneling money, weapons and ships to George Washington's struggling army. It was his support that helped the United States become a nation. But here today, none of that matters. He's just another victim in the chaos that he unwittingly helped unleash. The crowd craves royal blood. Louis looks out at the sea of faces, some furious, some triumphant, some simply curious. And then he's strapped in place. The drum roll begins and the executioner pulls the lever. The blade drops and the king's head tumbles into a basket.
A war explodes across Paris, wild, primal, as if the crowd is finally tasting revenge after years of starvation and oppression. But the horror doesn't stop there. Nine months later, King Louis' wife Marie Antoinette, the queen infamous for her let them eat cake line, faces the same fate. She's dragged through the streets, her hair shorn, her spirit broken. She's made to climb the same wooden steps, her once lavish gown replaced with a plain white dress. She too will face the crowd and fall beneath the blade.
The massacre is only the beginning. The reign of terror sweeps across France like a wildfire with no windbreak. It's an environment where paranoia rules and death is a daily spectacle. In Paris alone, 3,000 men and women are marched to the guillotine. In the city of Nantes, revolutionaries heard 2,000 prisoners onto barges. They rope them together and drown them in the middle of a river. Across the country, prisons overflow with the accused, neighbors turn on neighbors and a whirlwind of suspicion. Under the radical Jacobin government, more than 17,000 people, 17,000 are executed in just 10 horrifying months. A revolution born from cries of liberty, equality, and fraternity spirals into a bloodbath that makes the old monarchy look tame. Heads on pikes paraded through the streets of Paris, it becomes a common sight. And every wave of violence sends ripples across the Atlantic directly to the desk of President George Washington. He tracks the French Revolution with growing dread. What began as a hopeful echo of liberty in common with America has transformed into chaos that threatens to swamp the young United States. Every dispatch from Paris brings new complications, new dangers, new political battles at home. And soon, the French Revolution will become the single biggest headache of Washington's presidency. It is a crisis that will expose the fractures inside his cabinet, ignite street mobs in American cities, and nearly drag the country into a war it's nowhere near prepared to fight.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:32)
This is the American Story, The Beginnings. Adapted from the book of the same title by David Barton and Tim Barton.
Episode 10, The Reluctant President, Washington's Leadership and Legacy.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:53)
Before George Washington was first elected president, he didn't anticipate finishing his first term, much less a second. He was 57 at the time of his inauguration, Pat Gray, aching from decades of war and travel and ready to settle down at Mount Vernon again.
Long before the cabinet fights, the newspaper wars, and the nonstop political trench warfare began, Washington confided to Alexander Hamilton his quiet hope.

**SPEAKER_4** (5:18)
That at a convenient and an early period, my services might be dispensed with, and that I might be permitted once more to retire.

**SPEAKER_3** (5:27)
But retirement continued to elude him.
Despite the constant demands and overall strain of the presidency, Washington still led with the same granite steady temperament and integrity that had carried him through the Revolutionary War and the Constitutional Convention. Thomas Jefferson, who spent countless hours debating Washington and Hamilton, admitted, Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence.

**SPEAKER_5** (5:51)
Never acting until every circumstance, every consideration was maturely weighed. Refraining if he saw a doubt, but when once decided, going through with his purpose whatever obstacles opposed.

**SPEAKER_3** (6:04)
To the people who served closest to him, Washington's character was not merely admirable, it bordered on myth. Tobias Lear, the 30-year-old head of Washington's five-man staff, lived in the presidential mansion as almost a member of the extended family.