After being the central figure of American independence and leading the formation of the new country,
George Washington decided not to seek a third term as president. Read how this decision affected the young
country and answer the questions that follow. | |
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The Farewell
from Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis
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THROUGHOUT the first half of the 1790s, the closest approximation to a self-evident truth in
American politics was George Washington. A legend in his own time, Americans had been describing
Washington as “the Father of the Country” since 1776—which is to say, before there was even a
country. By the time he assumed the presidency in 1789—no other candidate was even thinkable—the
mythology surrounding Washington’s reputation had grown like ivy over a statue, effectively covering
the man with an aura of omnipotence, rendering the distinction between his human qualities and his
heroic achievements impossible to delineate. |
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Some of the most incredible stories also happened to be true. During Gen. Edward Braddock’s ill-
fated expedition against the French outside Pittsburgh in 1755, a young Washington had joined with
Daniel Boone to rally the survivors, despite having two horses shot out from under him and multiple
bullet holes piercing his coat and creasing his pants. At Yorktown in 1781, he had insisted on standing
atop a parapet for a full fifteen minutes during an artillery attack, bullets and shrapnel flying all about
him, defying aides who tried to pull him down before he had properly surveyed the field of action.
When Washington spoke of destiny, people listened. |
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If there was a Mount Olympus in the new American republic, all the lesser gods were gathered
farther down the slope. The only serious contender for primacy was Benjamin Franklin, but just before
his death in 1790, Franklin himself acknowledged Washington’s supremacy. In a characteristically
Franklinesque gesture, he bequeathed to Washington his crab-tree walking stick, presumably to assist
the general in his stroll toward immortality. “If it were a sceptre,” Franklin remarked, “he has merited it
and would become it.” |
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In the America of the 1790s, Washington’s image was everywhere, in paintings, prints, lockets; on
coins, silverware, plates, and household bric-a-brac. And his familiarity seemed forever. His commanding
presence had been the central feature in every major event of the revolutionary era: the linchpin of the
Continental Army throughout eight long years of desperate fighting from 1775 to 1783; the presiding
officer at the Constitutional Convention in 1787; the first and only chief executive of the fledgling federal
government since 1789. He was the palpable reality that clothed the revolutionary rhapsodies in flesh
and blood, America’s one and only indispensable character. Washington was the core of gravity that
prevented the American Revolution from flying off into random orbits, the stable center around which
the revolutionary energies formed. As one popular toast of the day put it, he was “the man who unites all
hearts.” He was the American Zeus, Moses, and Cincinnatus all rolled into one. |
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Then, all of a sudden, on September 19, 1796, an article addressed to “the PEOPLE of the United
States” appeared on the inside pages of the American Daily Advertiser, Philadelphia’s major newspaper.
The conspicuous austerity1 of the announcement was matched by its calculated simplicity. It began:
“Friends, and Fellow Citizens: The period for a new election of a Citizen, to Administer the Executive
government of the United States, being not far distant . . . it appears to me proper, especially as it
may conduce2 to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the
resolutions I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those, out of whom a
choice is to be made.” It ended, again in a gesture of ostentatious moderation, with the unadorned
signature: “G. Washington, United States.” |
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Every major newspaper in the country reprinted the article over the ensuing weeks, though only
one, the Courier of New Hampshire, gave it the title that would echo through the ages—“Washington’s
Farewell Address.” Contemporaries began to debate its contents almost immediately, and a lively (and
ultimately silly) argument soon ensued about whether Washington or Hamilton actually wrote it. Over
a longer stretch of time, the Farewell Address achieved transcendental status, ranking alongside the
Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address as a seminal statement of America’s abiding
principles. Its Olympian tone made it a perennial touchstone at those political occasions requiring
platitudinous wisdom. And in the late nineteenth century the Congress made its reading a mandatory
ritual on Washington’s birthday. Meanwhile, several generations of historians, led by students of
American diplomacy, have made the interpretation of the Farewell Address into a cottage industry of
its own, building up a veritable mountain of commentary around its implications for an isolationist
foreign policy and a bipartisan brand of American statecraft. |
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But in the crucible of the moment, none of these subsequent affectations or interpretations mattered
much, if at all. What did matter, indeed struck most readers as the only thing that truly mattered, was
that George Washington was retiring. The constitutional significance of the decision, of course, struck
home immediately, signaling as it did Washington’s voluntary surrender of the presidency after two
terms, thereby setting the precedent that held firm until 1940, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke
it. (It was reaffirmed in 1951 with passage of the Twenty-second Amendment.) But even that landmark
precedent, so crucial in establishing the republican3 principle of rotation in office, paled in comparison
to an even more elemental political and psychological realization. |
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For twenty years, over the entire life span of the revolutionary war and the experiment with
republican government, Washington had stood at the helm of the ship of state. Now he was sailing off
into the sunset. The precedent he was setting may have seemed uplifting in retrospect, but at the time
the glaring and painful reality was that the United States without Washington was itself unprecedented.
The Farewell Address, as several commentators have noted, was an oddity in that it was not really an
address; it was never delivered as a speech. It should, by all rights, be called the Farewell Letter, for it
was in form and tone an open letter to the American people, telling them they were now on their own. |
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1austerity — the quality of being plain and unadorned
2conduce — contribute
3republican — relating to a form of government where citizens vote for their representatives |
From FOUNDING BROTHERS by Joseph J.
Ellis, copyright © 2000 by Joseph J. Ellis. Used by permission of Alfred
A. Knopf, a division
of Random House, Inc. |
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