The First Inauguration:
George Washington at the Frontier of Presidential Power
Every four years, sometimes more often in the case of untimely death or assassination, the President of the United States, after being sworn into office on the twentieth of January in the year after the election, gives an inaugural address. The speech is not Constitutionally mandated, it is a custom that has been strictly adhered to since George Washington decided to give the first one in 1789. Although written in a language that sounds distant and disconnected from our present day, taking the time to read it closely, and to understand the context it was written in, provides some perspective from which to view our own political moment. Washington’s speech echoed the concerns that the Constitution’s architects had for the role that custom and precedent would play in defining extents of Presidential power. Reading it today highlights the importance the Founders placed in electing leaders worthy of the public’s respect and trust, and the critical role that precedent, custom and social norms play in our Constitutional system. Washington’s speech is a lens through which we can both understand how the role of President was conceptualized at the time and what similarities and differences exist in our own time. In the midst of our daily discussions and debates about the ways in which character, trust, demeanor and precedent shape the immense powers of the Presidency, it is well worth taking the time to understand how we got here.
Washington began his speech by recounting his personal doubts about the wisdom of assuming office after receiving the news of his election. He was hesitant to assume office and in the speech spoke of his physical infirmities, his age, and his concerns that he was ill-suited for the position. After explaining that despite his reservations he felt duty bound to assume office, he pivoted to his plans for the new office. Yet rather than outline his proposals for the coming years, the new President focused on what he would not do in office. Tellingly, Washington rejected an earlier draft of the speech which was so laden with details that it ran to some seventy pages. The version he used, no more than a few pages and devoid of policy pronouncements, likely took less than ten minutes to read. In focusing on his personal struggles, his doubts, and in his intention to defer much of the decision making in the ensuing years to Congress, Washington signaled his intention to thoughtfully and carefully wield power — to be a humble caretaker of the new government.
To our ears, Washington’s Inaugural Address may seem much less relevant than his more famous Farewell Address, delivered eight years later. That speech’s pointed observations about the country, politics, and America’s future is often cited as his admonitions resonate in our own time. In his next to last speech, Washington announced one of the most significant and long-lived contributions that he made as President: the at first customary, and then Constitutionally mandated, two-term limit on holding office. Throughout his Presidency, Washington was keenly aware of the important role that precedent played in establishing the office’s legitimacy and authority, and the impact that his first Presidency, and the precedents established, would have on future office holders. Nearing the end of his second term in office, Washington surprised the country by announcing he would decline to run for a third term, which he would likely have won easily, and instead opted for retirement. In addition to his decision to leave office, the speech is often cited for Washington’s warning about the destabilizing effects that political parties and allegiances have within our system of government. He also voiced his concerns about the potential dangers of involvement in diplomatic relationships that might “entangle our peace and prosperity” with those of other countries. While the specifics were different in his day than ours, the same concerns about the divisiveness of party politics, as well as our confusion and difficulty in attaining the right balance for our diplomatic and military engagement with the rest of the world, remain apt today.
Washington and his generation of revolutionaries were extremely sensitive to the role that precedent played in creating and channeling political power. Critics of the modern presidency have noted the vast accumulation of power in the office of the President, most clearly exemplified in the creation of the “Nuclear Football,” the briefing books and codes that were created in John F. Kennedy’s White House after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The unlegislated power of a president to conjure nuclear war, without any consultation or oversight, is regulated only by two things, both of which are front and center in Washington’s first speech: precedent, and the importance that ethics and morality play in governance. Washington and the authors of the Constitution were well aware that power existed outside of, and in spite of, any law they might inscribe. The Constitution was conceived by people who knew that the powers of the office, and the limits on that power, would be a function of custom, established through precedent as importantly as law enacted through legislation, as well as by the restraint of the person holding office. In 2021, awaiting the inauguration of a new President, much focus has been placed on the idea that we live in two different Americas. We worry that we have ignored Washington’s admonitions about the corrosive role that political parties play in our political life, and are careening into a new reality. We worry that our politics is all about winning and losing, not the idealistic creation of the conditions for human flourishing that Washington and the Constitution’s framers believed in, and wrote the Constitution to enable. In reading Washington’s inaugural speech another dimension for consideration is revealed, the importance that common values must play in any system of democratic governance.
During the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and 1788, more time was spent debating the formal structure of the Presidency — the laws that would enable and circumscribe its power, than any other single issue. Even late in the Philadelphia debates, a discussion of a tripartite presidency, three executives instead of one, was actively considered. Yet after their lengthy debates, rather than settle on a carefully crafted legal definition of Presidential power, the Framers emerged with only the barest outlines of the structure of the office and its powers. In fact, like the Constitution itself, the Presidency was understood as experimental. It was conceived as being imperfect, and likely to require amending. When enacted, the Constitution’s definition of a president’s powers, duties, and constraints were few, with details left to the future to decide. The assembled were willing to move ahead despite their misgivings and disagreements, not because there was broad agreement about the written details, but because they all trusted the man they planned to put in office, George Washington. There was consensus that the revered Revolutionary War general would comport himself in keeping with his life-long reputation for virtuous behavior, and continue to act in the public’s interest. Had another man been elected president, or Washington had acted differently, the office, and likely our entire history, would have unfolded differently.
Washington was keenly aware that broad expanses of potential Presidential power were left undefined by the Constitution. He knew that his actions, as well as his inaction, would set important precedents. Historians have long recognized the singular role that the President and the officeholders’ real or imagined power plays in the American psyche. There is an amorphous and ill-defined relationship between the office’s institutional power and that of a given officeholder. This hazy relationship between office and personality is likely the reason that the term mystical is often applied to the odd blending of person and office. It is as if the inauguration of a new president is a moment of alchemy through which the individual and office are melded into something that is neither. John Adams, who would succeed Washington, noted that people maintained a deep seated natural desire for a singular leader, a champion, a king, or a president. Adams understood the importance and mythical allure of governmental power embodied in a single individual: a hero who, through their presence and nature, would establish the order and safety that people sought in a chaotic world. He wrote that “there never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state — a doge, an avoyer, and archon, a president, a consul, a syndic.” The historian Forrest McDonald explained that “the king, the executive, whatever else he may be is the symbolic embodiment of the community over which he holds sway, and much of what he does is ritualistic and ceremonial. This part of the executive function is different from, yet quite as important as the actual business of running government, for it fulfills a powerful human need.”¹
Washington entered office determined to be a careful architect and custodian of the new office. He recognized that as the first embodied president, his behavior would have far reaching consequences. He wrote that “many things which appear of little importance in themselves and at the beginning, may have great and durable consequences from their having been established at the commencement of a new general government.” Adding later that he walked “on untrodden ground.” and that “there is scarcely any action, whose motives may not be subject to a double interpretation. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.” Washington’s generation was steeped in the understanding that power and position were not just a function of legislation and election, but also custom and opinion. The license to wield power was granted to leaders who conformed to well understood and carefully enforced social expectations. In creating new precedents, Washington was doing far more than molding the ceremonial aspects of the position, he was defining the limits of raw power. Sir William Temple, a seventeenth century political essayist who influenced political thinking in the subsequent century, argued that the role that public opinion played in governance was fundamental to it. He wrote that the “force of custom or opinion [is] the true ground and foundation of all government.” Temple explained that while power ultimately resided “in those that are governed” nevertheless “opinion” along with “custom,” created the authority which in turn controlled power. More recently the political scientist Malcolm L. Cross addressed the relationship between public opinion and the formation of political institutions. Cross quoted the eighteenth century English essayist Walter Bagehot, whose thinking the Framers were familiar with. Bagehot wrote that adherence to custom created the “dignified institutions… those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population.” Cross explained that “by inspiring the population’s loyalty to the government” this reverence and loyalty provides the governance its “motive force.” The presidency itself, as well as a particular president, gains the “reverence” of the population through the adherence to custom and meeting society’s expectations. Each successive office-holder is held to the standards set by those before them, and creates new standards for those who come afterwards, this chain both sets expectations for behavior as well as establishes authority for the use of power.²
The relationship between law and the social system within which they are constructed is fundamental. The historian Stanley N. Katz points out that the very concept of a constitution as understood in America in the eighteenth century was an ancient English one. It was understood to encompass an “arrangement of governmental institutions, laws, and customs together with the principles and goals that animated them.” Katz quotes John Adams writing about constitutionality ten years before the Revolution. Adams described a complex, amorphous, almost mystical construction — “a frame, a scheme, a system, a combination of powers, for a certain end”; where the “end” is “the good of the whole community.” Adams relied on analogies to communicate his meaning, explaining that
life and health are the ends of the constitution of the human body, as much as the [measuring] of time is the end of the constitution of a watch, as much as grinding corn is the end of a grist mill, or the transportation of burdens the end of a ship.³
In our own day we see the complex and confusing interrelation between social norms and expectations, law and custom played out in concerns about widespread abuses of police power. At one level proponents and critics of the police both see the problem as a social one. On one side arguing that what is needed is what they would characterize as a restoration of traditional respect and deference to the police. On the other side an essentially social argument is made that the entire institution is delegitimize and needs replacing, not reform. Somewhere in the middle are calls for additional rules and laws to constrain power.
Central to this “frame, scheme or system” that the Constitution’s authors believed in was the role that the authority of those chosen to govern would command. Authority is the right to rule, shaped by the laws, customs and opinions, that channel power. The framers understood that whomever was elevated into office would be granted power over liberty itself. They understood any governance as a restriction on liberty. Sir William Temple explained that “all government is a restraint upon liberty.” Temple argued that conceptions of absolute liberty were at odds with any form of government. Government, whether monarchical, aristocratic, despotic or democratic, depended on, by definition, the limiting of liberty. The Framers understood that maintaining democracy and the liberty that the Revolutionary generation fought for, depended on custom as well as law. Modern Americans tend to think of the governmental framework as being primarily legal and when confronted with abuses of trust and custom, often look to legal remedies. Yet despite our society’s focus and reverence for the written law, our system was architected by people whose very conception of a constitution was much less stable and concrete than we have previously imagined. For the people of the revolutionary era authority was constituted within socially constructed frameworks of power.⁴
Washington subscribed to his generation’s belief in the importance of behaving virtuously in public life, a cornerstone of our own Constitution. Socially acceptable individual behavior would allow the transmogrification of social standing into political power. Those who comported themselves as virtuous individuals were eligible for authority and the right to wield political power. Washington’s America existed within a framework of classical values that dated back to ancient Greece. Their system of governance was filtered and interpreted through the Renaissance’s civic humanism and further influenced by Enlightenment thinking. The Founders were American classicists who believed in Aristotle’s teaching that personal happiness was tightly bound to the pursuit of the communal good. The Greeks believed that a good life was one that was led virtuously; one in which the individual put aside personal gain and desire in the interests of the public good. Aristotle explained that the objective of government was to create the conditions that would make an individual’s pursuit of happiness possible. He believed that true happiness was not found solely through the attainment of material pleasure, but in a fuller happiness that depended on the overall well-being of the community. It was this melding of the personal and the communal that Washington and his generation believed in, and that formulated the social framework that surrounded and enabled the written laws of the Constitution to operate with any clarity and authority. Understanding the centrality of this belief system allows for a fuller reading of Washington’s speech. With this understanding, what we might think of as a certain high-minded yet superficial appeal to social norms and ceremony in the Inaugural Address, becomes a pledge to uphold fundamental communal values.
Placed in context we can understand Washington’s first speech as one meant to reassure an anxious country that he understood what was expected of him and intended to govern in the interests of the public first and foremost. He began his speech by explaining that his ill-health, age, and meagre abilities made his decision to accept the office a difficult decision. He explained that he had reluctantly left his Virginia “retreat” where he had found an “asylum” in his “declining years” and a salve for the “frequent interruptions in my health [resulting from the] gradual waste committed on it by time.” Beyond reservations having to do with his health and his age, he complained that he was ill-qualified and ill-equipped for the position, possessing only “inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration.” Yet despite all of these impediments he explained that he had nevertheless decided to heed the “voice of my country,” journey to New York where the government was convened, and take office as the first President. In light of the heavy demands of the office, and his concern that he would not live up to others’ expectations, he asked his countrymen’s forbearance and hoped that their judgement of any errors he might commit be “palliated by the [virtuous] motives which misled me.” Washington then turned away from his personal situation and onto official matters. However, rather than a listing of the policies he might pursue, he dwelt on the powers he would not exercise. He detailed his intent to allow Congress to take the lead in both governance and legislation. He explained that despite the Constitution’s direction to the President “to recommend to your consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient,” that he would instead defer to, and pay to Congress the “tribute that is due to the talents, the rectitude and the patriotism” of the legislative branch.⁵
From 1787, when the Constitutional Convention convened, through Washington’s installation in office in 1789, vocal critics of the new Constitution worried that there was a secret plot to install Washington as a new monarch. In his speech, Washington sought to allay these fears by beginning his presidency with gestures of deference to Congress. One of the few specific policy pronouncements was his assurance to Congress that one of the most powerful powers of the Constitution, Article Five which describes the process of amending the Constitution itself, would “remain with your judgement.” Washington promised to in general defer to the Congress and would “give way to my entire confidence in your discernment and pursuit of the public good.” Overall, the effect of his speech was to assure his audience that he took office reluctantly and humbly. Towards the end of the speech he further informed his audience that his sense of service dictated that, as he had during his stint as General of the Revolutionary army, he would decline “the personal emoluments” that might accrue from the position and take no salary for his service as president.⁶
Washington took pains to assure his audience that he assumed office without any intent other than to serve his country. The Framers saw themselves as heirs to a great Western European tradition of civic humanism that developed during the Renaissance and was rooted in Greek and Roman ideas of man’s nature and through those, governance. The historian Lance Banning wrote that Washington’s peers lived in “a structured universe of classical thought” which served “as the intellectual medium through which Americans perceived the political world.” Banning argued that this framework of understanding “is necessary if we are to understand the limits within which Americans went about the creation of a new kind of state and the ways in which they debated its virtues and defects.” The classical concept of virtue lands on our modern ears as antiquated and obscure, while these influences are still an important part of our culture, the language we use has morphed. For example we commonly use the words ethics or morality in roughly the same way that virtue was used then. Washington’s generation understood Aristotle’s virtue as an essential ingredient necessary for good governance. The Greek philosopher opined that a citizen “intentionally chooses being ruled and ruling with a view to the life in accordance with virtue.” He explained that the purpose of politics was to create the conditions through which citizens could achieve true happiness. Further, he believed that governance should be reserved only for those who strove for virtue and placed the good of the community above their individual, material, pursuits. Washington assured the country that virtue was at the center of his governing philosophy when he declared in his Inaugural Speech that “the foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality,” explaining that
there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage; between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.⁷
While Washington only used the word virtue once in his speech, the theme of personal virtue and its relationship to governance is suffused throughout. For the Greeks, virtue was a shield that defended good citizens from the problems that life presented as represented by Tyche. Tyche, the goddess of chance, later called Fortuna by the Romans, was the deliverer of unexpected, sometimes good, but often bad, luck. To ward off Fortuna’s upsetting surprises, people looked to virtuous behavior. Later, Christians would similarly promote virtuous behavior, as a way of avoiding life’s bad fortune by pleasing God. In the classical world people acted virtuously to forestall the unwanted attention of Fortuna and it is possible to read the first paragraphs of Washington’s speech as describing a struggle between Fortuna and virtue. He began the speech writing that “among the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order.” The order was an operation of fortune. Washington was disturbed from his personal enjoyment by the call to service, and responded by consulting the expectations of his society and the dictates of his virtue. Washington’s return to Virginia after the Revolution was meant to be permanent. It was a “retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection… as the asylum of my declining years.” Yet Washington, a virtuous man, concludes that he must put aside his personal happiness in favor of the public good.⁸
When Washington stated in his speech that “no local prejudices or attachments, no separate views nor party animosities” would cloud his actions, he was referring the role that what he and his generation referred to as disinterest, the state of not having any personal stake in the outcome of a public decision. Where we would use the term to describe a lack of interest or attention to a particular subject, in Washington’s day it denoted that a person had no personal, usually financial, interest in a particular issue. To be disinterested was a requirement of service, Washington and his generation would have considered it impossible to act virtuously without being disinterested in the matter at hand. Yet while Washington’s colleagues believed that authority to rule should be predicated on their disinterest and virtue, another group strongly objected. Critics of the Constitutional Convention and the Constitution saw the Framer’s centralization of virtue, and their attempts to build a constitution on its foundation, elitist posturing. They saw appeals to virtue as a disingenuous façade, they believed that the Framers were attempting to accrue power, establish an aristocracy, and even install a new king; many thought that Washington, after taking office, would manipulate his position to seize power.
While it is commonly understood that the Constitutional Convention was convened to establish a more centralized and rational governmental structure, this more basic struggle, over the nature of democracy and who was morally equipped to govern, was at the heart of the debates of the day. The explanations given for the convening of the Constitutional Convention are commonly that a consensus arose, in a time of political, economic and military crisis, for a more thoroughly integrating constitution. While that understanding is not incorrect, neither is it complete, in addition to the material concerns over trade, war and insurrection, there was an important metaphysical concern as well. At the time there were widespread concerns that the Articles of Confederation, drafted in 1777 and ratified in 1781, provided an insufficient basis under which to conduct the operations of a new nation. These practical problems were real and pressing. The regulation of both inter-state commerce and foreign trade had been left to each state to determine. The result was a highly competitive situation where states routinely enacted tariffs and trade restrictions meant to enhance the position of an individual state at the expense of the other states. There were also concerns about the difficulty of conducting a consistent and rational foreign policy. In addition to economic and diplomatic issues were concerns about the potential for war. America was a young, weak country in a hostile world dominated by powerful French, Spanish and English empires. Beyond these external threats were even more immediate threats of domestic strife as evidenced by Shays’ Rebellion. These economic, political, diplomatic and military concerns are the commonly identified issues that historians point to when explaining the rationale behind the drafting of the Constitution. Less acknowledged, but underpinning all these, was what the framers understood as the underlying disease at the root of these problems.
That disease was the waning of the virtuous, community minded revolutionary spirit, and the waxing of a competitive, materialistic culture. The lack of economic and diplomatic coordination, and the worrisome security situation were pressing matters. However, the deeper concern was the belief that the society was in rapid decline. In May of 1786 Washington wrote to John Jay worrying about “the errors in our national government which call for correction.” He was clear that he thought the faults were those of the nation’s emerging character:
I think often of our situation, and view it with concern. From the high ground on which we stood — from the plain path which invited our footsteps, to be so fallen, so lost is really mortifying! But virtue I fear has, in a great degree, taken its departure from us and the want of disposition to do justice is the source of the national embarrassments… this I apprehend is the origin of the evils we now feel.
A month later Jay seconded Washington’s concerns and, voicing deep concerns for the less than virtuous way he thought that state legislators were behaving, observed that the
private rage for property suppresses public considerations & personal rather than national interests have become the great objects of attention…. The mass of men are neither wise nor good.
In November of that year, Washington wrote to James Madison about the need for change and argued to combat the societies “prejudices, unreasonable jealousies, and local interest[s]” to be countered by “reason and liberality.” The authors of the Constitution sought to put in place the mechanisms of governance that would address the concrete, immediate problems the country faced, but they also sought to rekindle the revolutionary spirit that they thought was fast dissolving.⁹
However, despite the worrying of Washington, Adams, Jay, Madison others, their concerns were not universally shared, others had doubts, both in the methods being employed and the intentions of those pursuing them. The historian Gordon Wood described the that the world view that Washington and his generation ascribed to was that of
a classical world that was rapidly dying…. They believed in democracy, to be sure, but not our modern democracy; rather, they believed in a patrician-led classical democracy in which ’virtue exemplified in government will diffuse its salutary influence through the society.’ For them government was not an arena for furthering the interests of groups and individuals, but a means of moral betterment.
Yet America was quickly transforming itself away from the traditional social, political and economic foundations in which adherence to classical values was so foundational. The social fabric was being rapidly altered by new commercial interests. The perceived value of virtue and disinterest in public life was quickly receding. The Revolution had “unleashed acquisitive and commercial forces that no one had quite realized existed.” A chasm was opening with proponents of a dying civic humanism on one side, and on the other those who found political expression as Anti-Federalists. These critics questioned both the motives and methods of men they saw as elitists and the Constitution they proposed which they felt would create a new American aristocracy.¹⁰
Part and parcel to high-minded appeals to virtue was an ancient tradition of elitism that the Framers fully embraced. The design of the Constitution was a victory for those who, like Aristotle and countless thinkers afterwards, felt that government service should be reserved for a select group of superior men. The Framers’ generation justified their elitism on two grounds. The first was that they acted in the public interest, to the detriment of their own, and in their view this self-sacrifice was a qualification for their elevation. Alexander Hamilton explained that “there must be some public fools who sacrifice private to public interest at the certainty of ingratitude and [condemnation].” Hamilton understood himself to be one of these “fools.” Beyond virtuous self-sacrifice the Founders believed that their elitism was special in that it was available to all and therefore egalitarian and justifiable in the new democratic society. Unlike the ancient virtue that for so long had only been available to the select few, who through their wealth and birth were considered capable of virtue, this new American virtue could be earned by anyone so inclined and willing to sacrifice. Enlightenment thinking had informed an opinion that education and rational thought could transform anyone (at least any white male) into an individual worthy of the public trust. John Adams explained that the division of men was no longer by “the rich or the poor, the high-born or the low-born, the industrious or the idle: but all those who have received a liberal education, an ordinary degree of erudition in liberal arts and sciences.” However, despite the claims of this classical cum Enlightenment idealism, a significant portion of the new American electorate was deeply skeptical.11
The world that these debates took place in was one of rapid economic and social change ushered in by the incipient Industrial Revolution. The emergence of a large, ambitious middle class, enabled by a fundamental shift in the relationships between land, wealth and status was already underway. The democrats who opposed the elitism of Washington and his generation of civic humanists, saw interest not as a human flaw, but as its condition. The classical values that constituted the world and thinking of the Framers were rapidly fading. Rather than reach for a metaphysical solution dependent on an Aristotelian denial of materialism, and a class of elites who would judge their compatriot’s worthiness to govern, these new democrats were motivated by the potential for every citizen of this new world to get their due through the expenditure of sweat and blood. The vast expanses of Western land available for settlement (after dealing with the indiginous people who lived on them) didn’t need doling out by a self-proclaimed class of social betters, it was ripe for the taking by common men through strength, ability and initiative. This new class of men saw the Framers’ appeals to virtue as an expression of a rejected aristocratic world incompatible with truly democratic ideals. These men saw that the status claimed by the new Constitution’s authors as simply a thin veneer behind which landed and moneyed men would conspire to control the resources of the new democracy. They feared that the new system being debated in Philadelphia would ensure, in the words of one Anti-Federalist, that “none but the great will be chosen” to rule. In place of the complex system of checks and balances designed by these new elitists, the Anti-Federalists proposed a simpler, more direct and more democratic method of addressing the issues of the day: competition.¹²
Earlier in the eighteenth century the Scottish philosopher and social commentator David Hume had described the battle lines which formed in America at this time. Hume agreed that the issues of personal interests in politics was a real concern; he roughly outlined the two ways it might be addressed. One was by creating “a partition of power among several members,” more or less the path the Federalists trod with their checks and balances. However, Hume described another path as well. He was skeptical of the individual selflessness necessary to construct an ideal solution and proposed an alternative. Rather than counter selflessness he sought to harness it and suggested simply that “every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, [than] private interest.” Hume thought that a balance of sorts could be achieved by pitting one man’s interests against another’s. This is essentially the approach that the Anti-Federalists favored. Like Hume they believed that all men were “knaves,” incapable of the sustained virtuous behavior necessitated for the Federalists schemes to work — there was no way to filter out self-interest. Rather, they believed that the only democratic solution was to permit these interests to be placed in competition. They would engage in a world where success and failure would occur in a kind of pre-Darwinian battle of abilities and desires. Their solution to human nature’s foibles was a marketplace of competing interests, where everyone was focused on their individual needs, and the social good would be worked out in the ensuing struggle.
In 1788 the Anti-Federalists lost the argument. At the time they were too disorganized and the Federalists, benefiting from the prominence and respect earned during the Revolution were too unified. While many Americans were uneasy with the prospects of the kind of singular power that the new Constitution called for, the alternative was too ill-defined. While the Anti-Federalist argued against a new elitism it was unclear how a different system might work. The system promoted by the Framers may have been complex and exclusionary, but for these costs it promised to produce a clearly defined, idealistic outcome — a rational system of good and fair governance that would benefit all. The Anti-Federalist critique of the Federalist elitism had traction, but the balancing and harmonizing of interests that the Federalists promised was more easily digested at that moment. The Federalists proposals also leveraged custom. They based their rhetoric on a seemingly stable tradition. They claimed their innovation was carefully considered within a long history of gradual improvement; their proposals were the product of an ever perfecting knowledge and logic, pursued by great men. The kind of market-of-ideas and competition of interests that the Anti-Federalist world gravitated to was, as yet, unfamiliar and infant.¹³
Having won their battle at the end of the eighteenth century, the Federalists would lose the war at the beginning of the next. The tensions inherent in the need for efficient and fair governance in a world populated by Hume’s knaves would be addressed by a free-wheeling political competition in which every man was an equal, and the weapon of choice was the vote. The kind of contradictory egalitarian-elitism that Washington and his generation promoted proved unpopular and politically unsustainable. Twenty-four years after the Constitution was ratified the War of 1812 would prove a demarcation in national philosophy and priority. The country became transfixed with its Westward expansion, which defined the geography of an emerging American national character. The carefully drawn, European derived, values and sensibilities of the men who wrote the Constitution were overcome by a surging new energy. The future was not something that would be constructed by men of virtue and learning, but by those willing to seize the opportunity that fortune placed in their path.
John O’Sullivan, who would later coin the term Manifest Destiny, captured his generation’s zeitgeist, its sense of America’s bold futurity. O’Sullivan sought to break the new country away from the ancient past that the Framers had relied upon for their designs and authority. He wrote that the Revolution had freed Americans from European “scenes of horrid carnage where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another, [and were] dupes and victims to emperors, kings, nobles [and] demons in the human form called heroes.” He declared an American year zero in which the Declaration of Independence was “the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only.” O’Sullivan called on Americans to abandon the old and embrace the new, writing
we have no interest in the scenes of antiquity, only as lessons of avoidance of nearly all their examples. The expansive future is our arena, and for our history. We are entering on its untrodden space…. We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march?¹⁴
What does this rich history, viewed from Washington’s first public act, a speech that at first reading seems unremarkable to our modern ears, say to our current generation? Historians would counsel us to avoid attempting to draw explicit parallels, claiming history’s authority as justification for our present decisions. However, they would also encourage us not to travel the path that O’Sullivan suggested, believing that we can separate ourselves from history and create a brand new world through force of will. If we use Washington’s Inaugural Address as a point of reference, a patch of ground to stand upon as we contemplate our own moment, we can see similarities, and differences, in our own moment. It is difficult to think of the Federalist’s claims on propriety, custom and order, and the Anti-Federalists concerns about manipulation and elitism, without thinking about the surge of nationalism and populism, and critiques of power distribution and elitism that are at the center of our current debates. In our own time, as in Washington’s, each side of the political spectrum is deeply suspicious of the motives and methods of the other. It is possible to argue further that ideas around virtue are as much in play today as they were then. While Washington and his generation may have been, as is held by modern scholars of political philosophy, to be the last civic humanists, that is not to say that the values and ideas they held onto died with them. The idea of virtue and public behavior is alive today in our concerns about racism and sexism in public life. The Me Too movement is nothing if not an attempt to establish a baseline of socially constructed acceptable behavior. Virtue is also alive in our thinking about our national history and the men who are on the one hand feted for their intelligence and self-sacrifice in founding the nation, but who are also appropriately scrutinized for their inability to work out the fundamental moral problem that slavery represented for both their public and private lives. And critics of Me Too and Black Lives Matter activists point to their moralizing, elitism and alleged hypocrisy to make their arguments.
While words like virtue and disinterest sound antiquated to our ears, we would be mistaken to think that their underlying ideas have changed much. The esteem that many hold for firefighters, the police and soldiers is grounded in an understanding that people in these professions are called to put their health, and sometimes their lives, on the line in the service of the public good. When they authentically act in this manner they are widely heralded as heroes for acting in a virtuous manner. When Donald Trump announced that he would refuse a salary for his public service he was bending his knee to the same disinterest that George Washington did centuries earlier, and the criticism many expressed when he refused to disclose his tax returns was met with the same suspicion that Washington’s peers had for interest.
Our individual and political predilections lead us to cherry-pick historical analogies and to create stories that fit our ideological preferences. The myth of a singular and ideal Constitution, written by giants, is a powerful narrative central to our national identity, used over and over to rationalize and justify our current choices. In approaching this history one of the most striking, and perhaps most important realities to grapple with is that its story is an ongoing and fluid process that has no firm beginning and continues today. The history of our country’s founding was not one of a blinding moment of genius and a sudden unveiling of universal truth. Rather, the history of the first President, taking office and delivering a speech to reassure the country, is part of a long, complex and ongoing process that we play a role in and can influence. As we debate the role of partisanship, social status, rule of law, Constitutionality, self-sacrifice, and competition in our current moment, we can look behind us and see the roots of our disagreements in an ever receding past. This history implies that there are no simple answers found in our past, despite our attempts to mythologize it. However, while there are not simple answers to be exhumed and restored, understanding our past helps us determine what questions we might ask today.
NOTES:
1. John Adams quoted in McDonald, The American Presidency: An Intellectual History, 38. from A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America; McDonald, 37.
2. “Many things,” “From George Washington to John Adams, 10 May 1789.”; “I walk,” “From George Washington to Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham, 9 January 1790.”; Temple, The Works of Sir William Temple, 97.; Cross, “Washington, Hamilton, and the Establishment of the Dignified and Efficient Presidency.”
3. Katz, “The American Constitution: A Revolutionary Interpretation,” 68.; “Diary of John Adams, January 1766.”
4. Temple, The Works of Sir William Temple, 97.
5. “George Washinton’s Farewell Address.”
6. Washington, “Inaugural Address.”
7. Banning, “Republican Ideology and the Triumph of the Constitution, 1789 to 1793,” 173.; For the role that disinterest played in this period see Wood, “Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution.”
8. “George Washinton’s Farewell Address.”
9. “To John Jay from George Washington, 18 May 1786.”; “From John Jay to George Washington, 27 June 1786.”; “To James Madison from George Washington, 5 November 1786.”; For a discussion of George Washington’s concerns during this period see Chernow, Washington, A Life, 513–519.
10. “A classical world…,” Wood, “Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution,” 83.; “unleashed acquisitive…,” Wood, 77.
11. “From Alexander Hamilton to Robert Troup, 13 April 1795.”; Adams quoted in Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, 24.
12. For this view of the Anti-Federalists see Wood, “Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution,” 93–103.; “None but the great…,” Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, 35. quoting Melanconton Smith.
13. “A partition…,” McDonald, The American Presidency: An Intellectual History, 59., quoting Hume, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” in Essays 3:480; “every man…,” McDonald, 59., quoting Hume, “Of the Origin of Government, 3:116, 117–118, emphasis in the original.
14. O’Sullivan, “The Great Nation of Futurity.”
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— — — . “Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution.” In Beyond Confederation : Origins of the Constitution, edited by Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, 69–110. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.