To become an American Cato, Washington would need to become a man of recognized great virtue. Despite his lack of education, he understood that for someone of his time and place, attainment of public virtue was the highest goal one could have in life.28 He also may have sensed that eighteenth-century “virtue” was essentially male—the root of the word is vir, the Latin word for man.29 To be virtuous was to be a public man with a reputation for selflessness.
