Joseph J. Ellis (22 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

Third, when Washington talked about independence from foreign nations, his understanding of what American independence entailed cut much deeper than the patriotic veneer customarily suggested by the term. Once again, the war years shaped and hardened his convictions on this score, though the basic attitudes on which they rested were in place long before he assumed command of the Continental Army. Simply put, Washington had developed a view of both personal and national independence that was completely immune to sentimental attachments or fleeting ideological enthusiasms. He was a rock-ribbed realist, who instinctively mistrusted all visionary schemes dependent on seductive ideals that floated dreamily in men’s minds, unmoored to the more prosaic but palpable realities that invariably spelled the difference between victory and defeat. At its psychological nub, Washington’s inveterate realism was rooted in his commitment to control, over himself and over any and all events with the power to determine his fate. At its intellectual core, it meant he was the mirror image of Jefferson, for whom ideals were the supreme reality and whose inspirational prowess derived from his confidence that the world would eventually come around to fit the pictures he had in his head. Washington, however, regarded all such pictures as dangerous dreams.