National Review Online
Monday,
February 19, 2024
The federal
holiday we celebrate today is not Presidents’ Day: It is George Washington’s
birthday. It has been celebrated as such since 1778 and has been an official
federal holiday since 1879. In order to give three-day weekends to federal
workers, it is often not celebrated on Washington’s actual birthday of February
22. That is no excuse for downgrading his preeminence.
Washington
may or may not have been the greatest American; he surely was the most
indispensable American. We should remain grateful for what he bequeathed us and
be guided by his example.
George
Washington was born into a very different world 292 years ago. Indeed, his
birthday was denominated as February 11, 1731, under the Julian calendar in use
at the time. It was just five years into the reign of George II, who was king
until Washington was 28. About 630,000 of the king’s subjects then lived in the
twelve English colonies along the eastern seaboard — the 13th, Georgia, was
first settled in 1733 — and half of those lived in either Massachusetts,
Virginia, or Maryland. Fewer than 50,000 lived in New York.
Washington
never received a college education (only four colleges existed in the colonies
at the time), but the rigorous rules he imposed for his own development of
virtue and manners as a teenager included a reminder to “labor to keep alive in
your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.” It never
went out. He made his way in the world beginning at age 18 as a surveyor,
literally mapping the growth of his country. Virginia’s population doubled by
the time Washington turned 20 and doubled again by the time he turned 40. He
was an early believer in America’s continental destiny, which lent its name to
its Congress and army.
Washington
was a model of many virtues. A natural leader and a man of great physical
vigor, he embodied the active virtues: courage, industry, endurance,
perseverance, resiliency, and a powerful sense of honor. A man of fundamentally
conservative outlook and temperament, he nonetheless risked everything for a
revolution that changed his country and the world. He was visionary for his day
in inoculating his army against smallpox.
Yet
he also imposed upon his great natural passions, ambition, and aggressiveness
the virtues of restraint. He walked repeatedly away from power and declined
entreaties to crown himself king. He declined a salary for eight years as
commander of the Continental Army. He bore personal slights in silence and
would not be goaded into fights for honor alone. He adopted a Fabian military
strategy against his own nature and allowed his advisers to talk him out of his
own plans when they were too ambitious. As president, he steered America away
from European entanglements it was unready to undertake, and he counseled his
successors to do the same.
Washington
was fantastically successful in business, not just as a planter but as a serial
entrepreneur. He lived to become one of the wealthiest men in the United States
and (adjusted for the era) perhaps our richest president. And yet, from the
time he accepted a commission to lead an expedition into the Ohio country in
1753, most of his next 43 years were spent in public service. He knew when to
walk away, retiring from the presidency at age 64.
Just
as Washington put his skills in the field at his country’s service in war, he
brought his formidable talent and understanding of business to the task
of laying the foundations (along with Alexander Hamilton)
for the economic revolution that created the world’s economic superpower. The
Constitution and the policies of the Washington administration left America by
1796 with a national marketplace larger than any in Europe, freedom from
oversight by an imperial capital across the sea, a fiscally sound government, a
reasonably stable and liquid currency, protection of patents and copyrights,
and an evenhanded national court system, as well as setting us on the path to
the easy creation of limited-liability enterprises, the abolition of debtors’
prisons, and the building of interstate infrastructure. None of this was true
in 1775.
As
chairman of the constitutional convention, Washington lent his great prestige
to the formation and ratification of our founding charter, yet rather than act
as a Napoleonic domineering spirit, he mostly let the other delegates make the
arguments that developed its particular provisions — a humble deference to
their many and varied talents. As president, he was punctilious about ensuring
that his acts were within the Constitution and accepted the correction of
others when they convinced him at times that he had overstepped the line — such
as when he asked the Supreme Court for an advisory opinion.
In
his Farewell Address, Washington warned posterity against undoing our
constitutional system from without or from within: We should “steadily
discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority,” “resist
with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles,” and reject
modifications and interpretations that would “undermine what cannot be directly
overthrown.” Because it was the right of the people to make their constitution,
Washington argued, “the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by
an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon
all.”
The
great morally vexing matter in Washington’s life is slavery. Washington never
openly acted against the institution in Virginia or in national office. He
owned slaves his whole adult life. That included a valet, Billy Lee, who was
with him throughout the Revolutionary War, often faced the hazards of battle at
his master’s side, and (with Washington’s blessing) married a free black woman.
Slavery
was largely unquestioned in America until Washington was nearly 40. It was
growing rapidly in Virginia in his youth, at the peak of the transatlantic
trade; slaves surged from less than a third of Virginia’s population in 1730 to
nearly 44 percent in 1750. By 1786, after the process of abolition had begun in
northern states, and not long after a proposal to pursue the same had been
debated and voted down in Virginia, Washington wrote privately that “I never
mean (unless some particular circumstance should compel me to it) to possess
another slave by purchase: it being among my first wishes to see some plan
adopted by the legislature by which slavery in the Country may be abolished by
slow, sure, & imperceptible degrees.”
Washington
then set about making arrangements to emancipate his slaves but encountered
legal complexities because most of them were the property of his wife. The law
required him to hold her property in trust for her and her grandchildren, one
of whom lived long enough that Robert E. Lee was still unwinding the estate in
1862. Washington’s last act in his will of emancipating the aged and disabled
Billy Lee upon Washington’s death in 1799 and directing that the other slaves
he owned be freed at Martha’s was a very public blow against slavery that
reflected his morally serious effort to grapple with this issue. But the long
time frame doubtless made that cold comfort to the people enslaved at Mount
Vernon. It would take generations for their descendants to reap the benefits of
the nation George Washington made for all of us. It was the largest matter he
left unfinished for his successors.
But
he left the nation and the world far better than he found it. That Washington
did not solve all of the nation’s flaws from the start, and that he was
doubtlessly self-interested in his hesitance in addressing slavery, should not
overshadow the colossal scale of his accomplishments, the vast debt we owe to
him, and the towering nature of his virtues. Those virtues left his
contemporaries in awe and exercised a compelling and positive moral influence
on everyone around him and all who followed him. The day that we stop honoring
Washington, we will no longer be America, and no longer deserve to be America.
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