My favorite story about GW was about his conduct at Princeton. The British were attacking and the Patriot forced was wavering. Washinton rode and on his white horse and as a junior officer might, got them to form a line. He sat there not moving as bullets whized past him, and his men, encouraged by his example, sent volley and volley back at the Red Coats and repelled their attack. As he had proved earlier at Trenton, as tactical commander, he was superb. No movie director would dare stage this fight as it occured for fear of being laughed at.
I have two stories about George Washington that paint the man for me:
In Cambridge, during the winter of the siege of Boston there is an apocryphal story that he broke up a violent riot involving hundreds of men that was started a snowball fight between bored and undisciplined men from different units from around the colonies. Taunting escalated to a snowball fight, that escalated to a full blown riot. Washington rode in on his big white horse, jumped off throwing the reins to someone and grabbed the two biggest men fighting with each other in each of his fists and screamed at them.
Apparently, everyone was so shocked, the riot stopped immediately.
The night before the crossing of the Delaware, he had done all he could do, delegated all he could delegate, and was sitting at a desk, writing something on little scraps of paper, over and over again. One fell on the floor, and when one of his aides picked it up and read it, it said “Victory or Death”. He was writing the passphrase on pieces of paper to pass the time.