> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.centerlinedaily.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Apparently George Washington Isn’t Tall Enough - URL: https://www.centerlinedaily.com/apparently-george-washington-isnt-tall-enough/ - Published: 2026-09-12T17:37:04.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-12T17:37:04.000Z - Description: A 30-foot statue has Washington back in the conversation. But the more interesting story isn’t how tall we make him. It’s what happened when one of the most powerful men in America decided he’d had enough power. - Author: Mark Earl - Tags: Main Story I was doing some reading this morning and discovered that apparently George Washington isn’t tall enough. President Trump would like to fix that. He wants a 30-foot statue of Washington outside the National Museum of American History in Washington, replacing the big abstract sculpture that’s been sitting there since the 1960s. He’d also like an 11-foot Washington inside the museum and a new exhibit about the man leading up to the 300th anniversary of Washington’s birth. Thirty feet. I’m six-foot-two, so I did the math. I’d come up somewhere around George’s kneecap. I’m not sure exactly how large we have to make Washington before everybody agrees we have adequately honored him, but thirty feet ought to get the conversation started. And, of course, because this is America in 2026, we’re already arguing about it. One side says we’ve spent too much time lately tearing apart the people who built this country and not enough time remembering what they accomplished. The other side says putting Washington on an enormous pedestal while brushing past the uglier parts of his life isn’t history either. Here at CENTERLINE, this seems like a good place to commit the increasingly radical act of looking at the whole man. Because George Washington was complicated. He owned slaves. That isn’t somebody’s opinion of George Washington. He did. There were 317 enslaved people living at Mount Vernon when he died, although Washington himself legally owned 123 of them. The others mostly belonged to the estate of Martha’s first husband, which becomes important later. Washington had grown up in Virginia when slavery was simply part of the world around him. He inherited enslaved people when he was eleven years old and spent most of his life participating in a system that, from where we sit today, is obviously indefensible. But something happened to George Washington as he got older. He changed. Not completely, and certainly not quickly enough for the people whose freedom depended upon it. But sometime around the Revolution, the man who had spent his life accepting slavery began wrestling with it. By the time he wrote his will, Washington ordered that every enslaved person he personally had the legal authority to free would be freed. He couldn’t legally free the people belonging to the Custis estate, so he didn’t pretend otherwise. The 123 people who belonged to him were eventually freed, and he even made provisions for the elderly, the sick and the education of children who would need to make their own way. Does that make the slavery part disappear? Of course not. But neither should the slavery part make everything else disappear. And this is where George Washington gets considerably more interesting than the fellow staring back at us from a dollar bill. In 1783, Washington had just done something nobody had been very successful at doing. He had helped beat the British Empire. He commanded the Continental Army, his country adored him, and if George Washington had decided he enjoyed having that much power, there wasn’t exactly a well-established American HR department where somebody could file a complaint. History was full of generals who won wars and then discovered they rather liked being in charge. Washington did something strange. He quit. On December 23, 1783, he walked into the Maryland State House at Annapolis, stood before Congress and handed back his military commission. The war was over. He had done his job. He was going home. King George III supposedly heard that Washington intended to surrender his command and said that if he actually did it, he would be the greatest man in the world. Whether the king said those exact words has been debated ever since, because apparently historians also need something to do on rainy afternoons. But the remarkable part isn’t in dispute. Washington had power. And he gave it back. Then America came calling again. The Constitution was written, the new country needed its first president, and Washington was about the only choice everybody could agree on. So he left Mount Vernon again, served eight years, and then did something that was almost as important as anything he did while president. He quit again. Nobody threw him out. He hadn’t lost an election. There was no constitutional two-term limit yet. If Washington had wanted to hang around, he probably could have made a pretty good run at it. Instead, he went home. And while I was reading about all this, I stumbled across something about Washington I had never really paid much attention to before. The man loved a particular line from The Book. He used some version of it again and again in his letters, dozens of times over the years. It comes from Micah, and it paints a wonderfully simple picture: a man sitting under his own vine and his own fig tree, with nobody making him afraid. That was George Washington’s picture of peace. Not a giant statue. Not a capital city with his name on it. Not his face on money. A farm. His own land. His own vine and fig tree. Nobody telling him what to do and no army waiting for him in the morning. After he surrendered command of the army and finally returned to Mount Vernon, that’s how Washington described his life. He was home again under his own vine and fig tree, away from camps and courts and the business of running everybody else’s world. I find that fascinating because The Book is full of stories about what power does to people. Give a man enough of it and pretty soon he starts thinking God probably put him there personally and would be terribly disappointed if he ever left. Kings have been doing that for a few thousand years. Politicians have occasionally experimented with the idea themselves. Washington wasn’t immune to ego. He wasn’t perfect. He certainly wasn’t a saint, and I don’t think he’d survive five minutes if we required him to pass every moral test of 2026 before allowing him back onto the dollar bill. But maybe that’s exactly why his story is worth telling. We’ve developed a strange habit of demanding that the people who came before us be either heroes or villains. Pick a box. Washington owned slaves, so everything else about him must be discarded. Washington founded the country, so we’d rather not talk about the slaves. Neither one is history. The whole story is. George Washington was a man born into one world who helped create another. He carried some of the sins of the world he came from. He also began questioning some of them. He fought for liberty while owning people who didn’t have it, an enormous contradiction that America itself would eventually have to settle at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. And yet when Washington was handed something men have murdered brothers, fathers and entire countries to possess, he did something extraordinarily rare. He let go of power. Twice. So should we build the 30-foot statue? I don’t know. Thirty feet of George seems like a lot of George. I suppose if we’re going to do it, somebody ought to make sure the pigeons understand the historical significance of what they’re sitting on. But I think there’s a better way to remember him. Tell the whole story. Tell people about the slaveholder. Tell them about the general. Tell them about the president. Tell them about the man who changed some of his thinking and failed to change enough of it. Tell them about the enormous contradictions because human beings are full of those, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make history more honest. And then tell them about an old soldier who had become one of the most powerful men in the new country, handed the power back, climbed on his horse and headed home. Back to his own vine and fig tree. Maybe George Washington doesn’t need to be 30 feet tall after all.