Founding Brothers (19 page)

Perhaps age
alone would have been sufficient to propel Washington down the road from
Philadelphia to Mount Vernon one last time. Surely if anyone deserved to spend
his remaining years relaxing under his “vine and fig tree,” it was
Washington. Perhaps, in that eerily instinctive way in which he always grasped
the difference between the essential and the peripheral, he literally felt in
his bones that another term as president meant that he would die in office. By
retiring when he did, he avoided that fate, which would have established a
precedent that smacked of monarchical longevity by permitting biology to set
the terminus of his tenure. Our obsession with the two-term precedent obscures
the more elemental principle established by Washington’s voluntary
retirement—namely, that the office would routinely outlive the occupant,
that the American presidency was fundamentally different from a European
monarchy, that presidents, no matter how indispensable, were inherently
disposable.

But advancing age and sheer physical fatigue were only part
of the answer. Perhaps the most succinct way to put it is that Washington was
leaving office not just because he was hearing whispers of mortality, but also
because he was wounded. What no British bullet could do in the revolutionary
war, the opposition press had managed to do in the political battles during his
second term. In the wake of his Farewell Address, for example, an open letter
appeared in Benjamin Franklin Bache’s
Aurora,
in which the old
firebrand Tom Paine celebrated Washington’s departure, actually prayed
for his imminent death, then predicted that “the world will be puzzled to
decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor, whether you have abandoned
good principles, or whether you ever had any.”
¹³

Some of the
articles were utterly preposterous, like the charge, also made in the
Aurora,
that recently obtained British documents from the wartime
years revealed that Washington was secretly a traitor who had fully intended to
sell out the American cause until Benedict Arnold beat him to the punch. His
critics, it should also be noted, were a decided minority, vastly outnumbered
by his countless legions of supporters. The rebuttals to Paine’s open
letter, for example, appeared immediately, describing Paine as “that
noted sot and infidel,” whose efforts to despoil Washington’s
reputation “resembled the futile efforts of a reptile infusing its venom
into the Atlantic or ejecting its filthy saliva towards the Sun.”
Paine’s already-questionable reputation, in fact, never recovered from
this episode. Taking on Washington was the fastest way to commit political
suicide in the revolutionary era.
¹⁴

Nevertheless, the attacks had been a persistent feature of his second term,
and despite his customarily impenetrable front, Washington was deeply hurt by
them: “But these attacks, unjust and unpleasant as they are, will
occasion no change in my conduct; nor will they work any other effect in my
mind,” he postured. Although Washington was not, like Adams or Jefferson,
a prodigious reader of books, he was an obsessive reader of newspapers. (He
subscribed to ten papers at Mount Vernon.) His pose of utter disregard was just
that, a pose: “Malignity therefore may dart her shafts,” he
explained, “but no earthly power can deprive me of the consolation of
knowing that I have not … been guilty of willful error, however numerous
they may have been from other causes.” This outwardly aloof but blatantly
defensive tone seemed to acknowledge, in its backhanded way, that his critics
had struck a nerve.
¹⁵

The main
charge levied against Washington was that he had made himself into a quasi
king: “We have given him the powers and prerogatives of a King,”
claimed one New York editorial. “He holds levees like a King, receives
congratulations on his birthday like a King, employs his old enemies like a
King, shuts himself up like a King, shuts up other people like a King, takes
advice of his counsellors or follows his own opinions like a King.”
Several of these charges were patently false. The grain of truth in them, on
the other hand, involved Washington’s quite conspicuous embodiment of
authority. He had no compunction about driving around Philadelphia in an ornate
carriage drawn by six cream-colored horses; or, when on horseback, riding a
white stallion with a leopard cloth and gold-trimmed saddle; or accepting
laurel crowns at public celebrations that resembled coronations. It also did
not help that when searching for a substitute for the toppled statue of George
III in New York City, citizens chose a wooden replica of Washington,
encouraging some critics to refer to him as George IV.
¹⁶

In a sense,
it was a problem of language. Since there had never been a republican chief
executive, there was no readily available vocabulary to characterize such a
creature, except the verbal traditions that had built up around European courts
and kings. In another sense, it was a problem of personality. Washington was an
inherently stiff and formal man who cultivated aloofness and possessed
distancing mechanisms second to none. This contributed to his sense of majesty,
true enough, but pushed an increment further, the majestic man became His
Majesty.

Beyond questions of appearance or language or personal style,
the larger problem was imbedded within the political culture of
postrevolutionary America itself. The requirements of the American Revolution,
in effect, cut both ways at once. To secure the Revolution and stabilize its
legacy on a national level required a dominant leader who focused the energies
of the national government in one “singular character.” Washington
had committed himself to that cause, and in so doing, he had become the
beneficiary of its political imperatives, effectively being cast in the role of
a “republican king” who embodied national authority more potently
and more visibly than any collective body like Congress could possibly
convey.
¹⁷

At the very core of the revolutionary legacy, however, was a virulent
hatred of monarchy and an inveterate suspicion of any consolidated version of
political authority. A major tenet of the American Revolution—Jefferson
had given it lyrical expression in the Declaration of Independence—was
that all kings, and not just George III, were inherently evil. The very notion
of a republican king was a repudiation of the spirit of ’76 and a
contradiction in terms. Washington’s presidency had become trapped within
that contradiction. He was living the great paradox of the early American
republic: What was politically essential for the survival of the infant nation
was ideologically at odds with what it claimed to stand for. He fulfilled his
obligations as a “singular character” so capably that he seemed to
defy the republican tradition itself. He had come to embody national authority
so successfully that every attack on the government’s policies seemed to
be an attack on him.

This is the essential context for grasping
Washington’s motives for leaving public office in 1796. By resigning
voluntarily, he was declaring that his deepest allegiances, like those of his
critics, were thoroughly republican. He was answering them, not with words, but
with one decisive, unanswerable action. And this is also the proper starting
point for understanding the words he left as his final valedictory, the
Farewell Address. Washington was making his ultimate statement as
America’s first and last benevolent monarch. Whatever the Farewell
Address has come to mean over the subsequent two centuries of its interpretive
history, Washington intended it as advice to his countrymen about how to
sustain national unity and purpose, not just without him, but without a
king.

T
HE MAIN
themes of the
Farewell Address are just as easy to state succinctly as they are difficult to
appreciate fully. After declaring his irreversible intention to retire,
Washington devoted several paragraphs to the need for national unity. He
denounced excessive partisanship, most especially when it took the form of
political parties pursuing a vested ideological agenda or sectional interest
groups oblivious to the advantages of cooperation. The rest of the Farewell
Address was then devoted to foreign policy, calling for strict American
neutrality and diplomatic independence from the tangled affairs of Europe. He
did not use the phrase “entangling alliances” so often attributed
to him—Jefferson actually coined it in his First Inaugural Address
(1801)—but Washington’s message of diplomatic independence from
Europe preceded Jefferson’s words to the same effect. Taken together, his
overlapping themes lend themselves to easy summary: unity at home and
independence abroad. It was that simple.

The disarming simplicity of
the statement, combined with its quasi-Delphic character, has made the Farewell
Address a perennial candidate for historical commentary. Throughout the
nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, the bulk of attention focused
on the foreign policy section, advocates of American isolationism citing it as
the classic statement of their cause, others arguing that strict isolation was
never Washington’s intention, or that America’s emergence as a
world power has rendered Washington’s wisdom irrelevant. More recently,
the early section of the Farewell Address has been rediscovered, its plea for a
politics of consensus serving as a warning against single-issue political
movements, or against the separation of America into racial, ethnic, or
gender-based constituencies. Like the classic it has become, the Farewell
Address has demonstrated the capacity to assume different shapes in different
eras, to change color, if you will, in varying shades of light.
¹⁸

Although
Washington’s own eyes never changed color and were set very much on the
future, he had no way of knowing (much less influencing) the multiple meanings
that future generations would discover in his words. The beginning of all true
wisdom concerning the Farewell Address is that Washington’s core insights
were firmly grounded in the lessons he had learned as America’s premier
military and civilian leader during the revolutionary era. Unless one believes
that ideas are like migratory birds that can fly unchanged from one century to
the next, the only way to grasp the authentic meaning of his message is to
recover the context out of which it emerged. Washington was not claiming to
offer novel prescriptions based on his original reading of philosophical
treatises or books; quite the opposite, he was reminding his countrymen of the
venerable principles he had acquired from personal experience, principles so
obvious and elemental that they were at risk of being overlooked by his
contemporaries; and so thoroughly grounded in the American Revolution that they
are virtually invisible to a more distant posterity.

First, it is
crucial to recognize that Washington’s extraordinary reputation rested
less on his prudent exercise of power than on his dramatic flair at
surrendering it. He was, in fact, a veritable virtuoso of exits. Almost
everyone regarded his retirement of 1796 as a repeat performance of his
resignation as commander of the Continental Army in 1783. Back then, faced with
a restive and unpaid remnant of the victorious army quartered in Newburgh, New
York, he had suddenly appeared at a meeting of officers who were contemplating
insurrection; the murky plot involved marching on the Congress and then seizing
a tract of land for themselves in the West, all presumably with Washington as
their leader.
¹⁹

He summarily
rejected their offer to become the American Caesar and denounced the entire
scheme as treason to the cause for which they had fought. Then, in a
melodramatic gesture that immediately became famous, he pulled a pair of
glasses out of his pocket: “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my
spectacles,” he declared rhetorically, “for I have not only grown
gray but almost blind in service to my country.” Upon learning that
Washington intended to reject the mantle of emperor, no less an authority than
George III allegedly observed, “If he does that, he will be the greatest
man in the world.” True to his word, on December 22, 1783, Washington
surrendered his commission to the Congress, then meeting in Annapolis:
“Having now finished the work assigned me,” he announced, “I
now retire from the great theater of action.” In so doing, he became the
supreme example of the leader who could be trusted with power because he was so
ready to give it up.
²⁰

Second, when
Washington spoke about the need for national unity in 1796, his message
resonated with all the still-fresh memories of his conduct during the
revolutionary war. Although he actually lost more battles than he won, and
although he spent the first two years of the war making costly tactical
mistakes that nearly lost the American Revolution at its very start, by 1778 he
had reached an elemental understanding of his military strategy; namely, that
captured ground—what he termed “a war of posts”—was
virtually meaningless. The strategic key was the Continental Army. If it
remained intact as an effective fighting force, the American Revolution
remained alive. The British army could occupy Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia, and it did. The British navy could blockade and bombard American
seaports
with impunity, and it did. The Continental Congress could be
driven from one location to another like a covey of pigeons, and it was. But as
long as Washington held the Continental Army together, the British could not
win the war, which in turn meant that they would eventually lose it.
²¹

Like all of
Washington’s elemental insights, this one seems patently obvious only in
retrospect. A score of genuinely brilliant military leaders who also confronted
a superior enemy force—Hannibal, Robert E. Lee, and Napoléon come
to mind—were eventually defeated because they presumed that victory meant
winning battles. Washington realized it meant sustaining the national purpose
as embodied in the Continental Army. Space and time were on his side if he
could keep the army united until the British will collapsed. And that is
precisely what happened.