But to Sandra Moats, the nation's first president is a scholarly research challenge.
Moats, an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside in Kenosha, is among a handful of scholars recently named to the inaugural class of fellows at the new Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon. That's Washington's picturesque Virginia plantation on the banks of the Potomac River 16 miles south of Washington, D.C.
Not only will Moats have access to everything in the new presidential library, which celebrates its grand opening in September, but she will live on the estate for five months as a guest in the DeVos House, a scholars residence 150 feet west of the library entrance.
Washington's original personal papers haven't been as easily accessible to scholars as the papers of third president Thomas Jefferson, whose Monticello home in Charlottesville, Va., houses the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies.
Washington's new library - the only presidential library built and maintained without government funding - will change that.
"I think this is all going to be pretty heady - the intense immersion in his world," said Moats, who grew up in suburban Maryland and thinks it's a shame Washington is cast in Jefferson's shadow for tourists who visit the nation's capital and historic environs.
"We sort of take Washington for granted," Moats said. "A lot of his leadership was about restraint and being cautious. It's a very positive thing, because he didn't get us in a lot of messes and he was very careful about how he conducted himself. It would have been easier to be bold, but he was very careful and calculated."
Had Washington been bold, Moats said, the United States after the American Revolution could have ended up like France after the French Revolution.
"We lucked out. The French end up with a dictatorship; we end up with a republican government, and a lot of that is due to Washington being very thoughtful and careful in his role as the first president. . . . He chose not to act as a monarch."
Therefore, Moats said, "He deserves credit for what he didn't do, as much as what he did do."
Americans still enjoy the benefits of Washington's leadership, even though they have trouble thinking of him as having been a living, breathing human being, Moats said.
"They think of him as the marble man - a monument or a statute. But there was a reason he was cautious and controlled."
Moats will take a leave of absence in January and spend five months at Mount Vernon. She plans to write a book about Washington's role in American neutrality post-Revolutionary War, as the country was establishing its identity.
The timing of the fellowship couldn't be better, Moats said. She was planning to take a sabbatical in the fall anyway. So now she can use that time to focus her research questions.
She's especially looking forward to having total access to Washington's voluminous correspondence and records - not the widely published sets of papers, or papers available online. But the original papers at Mount Vernon in Washington's handwriting.
"He has an enormous set of papers, basically from the time he was a revolutionary officer up until his death in 1799," Moats said. "So, I'll be tracing the evolution of (neutrality) through Washington's papers and the papers of people like John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison - all of the people who would have been involved in this whole process."
In announcing the selection of the inaugural class of fellows, the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association said scholars will generate new research on the life, leadership, and legacy of Washington.
Fellows range from doctoral candidates to seasoned scholars. They were selected from a worldwide pool of candidates by an independent jury of prominent scholars.
Among the other Washington scholars and their research topics: Lydia Brandt of the University of South Carolina, studying "Making Mount Vernon Anew"; James Kirby Martin of the University of Houston, researching "George Washington: The Greatest Character of the Age"; and Edward Larson of Pepperdine University, writing on "George Washington's Role in Shaping the Constitution."
Washington's papers have always been at Mount Vernon, but before the library was built, the plantation wasn't set up for scholars to do research there, Moats said.
Moats first became interested in Washington while writing her dissertation at the University of California, Los Angeles on presidential ceremony in the early republic.
Washington set the precedent for how a president should behave in an inauguration to avoid cheapening the office, Moats said.
"He famously said, 'I walk on untrodden ground.' "
Now Moats will trace his footsteps on the plantation he maintained much of his life.
"I'm excited about the opportunity to immerse myself in George Washington's world," she said.
"I think I'll come back with a powdered wig or something."
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