[Amezarak]

The letters I linked in this thread are an interesting place to get started: Benjamin Rush to John Adams: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-5755

Thomas Paine to George Washington: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-20-02-...

Another good source would be the newspapers from the time: the Philadelphia Aurora had a good for the circulation of the time, was a "respected" paper (as far as that went then), and has lots of very nasty things to say about Washington during his presidency. It (and a selection of other papers) will give you a vastly better idea of the political climate than just about anything else you can get.

You can see a wide swath of people who knew Washington thought very poorly of him, especially militarily.

> I've read the biographies of most of the founding fathers, and in none of them does anyone strike out against the great man himself.

Reading biographies is better than nothing, but they usually have an agenda. Not that say, Paine or Rush didn't, but we're talking about how Washington was view among his contemporaries and how the speech was received and understood at the time. Later works are going to be clouded with different agendas, particularly the mythologization I mentioned.

[jaybrendansmith]

I've read most of Paine and as much as I like him, he was an iconoclast, un-pragmatic to the core. He's not going to have a good opinion of anybody. Rush did not like Washington's military style, because he did not understand the necessity for fiat decision-making in an army ... again he was unrealistic and later grew to respect the man. So yes you can cherry-pick (npi) people who at one point or another did not like him. Politics is a blood-sport and anyone who has been in a leadership position understands you cannot make everybody happy ... that does not change in basic fact that Washington was at all times trying to make the right decisions for all 13 of the colonies. At core he was a pragmatist who believed in federal strength and yes Hamilton did much of his thinking for him. He did not love the English or the French too much and while Jefferson and Madison benefited from their friendship with France, they also got the Capitol burned. It would have been great to see what a President Hamilton would have done instead of Madison, but the Federalists pushed too far and Adams screwed that up nicely and ultimately destroyed his party.

[Amezarak]

The Rush letter is from 1812, not early on, and also cites many of Washington's "friends" saying the same things.

It was actually fairly widely held among his contemporaries that he was a poor military leader.