The still unseen father of our country

Over at Powerline, an article is quoted that praises George Washington for the manner in which he resigned his office as commander-in-chief of the Continental army, on December 23, 1783. While Washington indeed deserves the highest admiration for this, I remind readers of the odd fact that when contemporary American patriots, particularly conservatives, praise Washington they invariably do so only for Washington’s negative virtues—for his rejection of kingship, for his renunciation of power, for his stoic self-control. For some reason, today’s conservatives seem unable or unwilling to see Washington as he really was, as an active agent who did things—who, with unexampled energy, thoroughness, and devotion, led, envisioned, planned, and built this nation. It’s as though they want Washington to be a statue, a static, empty symbol for people to rally around, rather than an actual man and leader, just as they want America itself to be an abstract idea rather than an actual country and people.

They are, in other words, followers of Richard Brookhiser, of whose George Washington biography and tv documentary I once remarked that, while every previous Washington biography of the last 50 years has promised to reveal the man behind the monument, Brookhiser shows you the monument behind the man.

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To illustrate what I mean by the difference between praising Washington for his negative virtues, and appreciating him for what was positive in him, here are two ways of describing the same scene. First, here is the passage by novelist and historian Thomas Fleming (not the Chronicles editor) quoted at Powerline about Washington’s resignation of his commission to the Continental Congress in December 1783:

The man who could have dispersed this feckless Congress and obtained for himself and his soldiers rewards worthy of their courage was renouncing absolute power. By this visible, incontrovertible act, Washington did more to affirm America’s government of the people than a thousand declarations by legislatures and treatises by philosophers.

And this is from my discussion about James Thomas Flexner’s multi-volume biography of Washington, posted at VFR in February 2003. To provide the context from the original article, I’ll lead into the resignation before Congress:

In Volume Three, covering the years after the war and Washington’s first term as President, I was deeply moved by Flexner’s rendering of the real sacrifice Washington made when he returned to public life in the late 1780s. Especially poignant is the scene when, a few months before the 1787 Constitutional Convention, as Washington realizes that a new government will be formed and that he will very likely be the head of it, Flexner describes how, during his daily rounds of his farms, his beloved Mount Vernon and all his interesting plans for his future life there seem to fade from before his eyes.

As in the scene just mentioned, Flexner at rare, key moments in the narrative shifts from his usual objective tone to a depiction of the world as he imagines Washington is seeing it through his own eyes. He does this to great effect in the opening and closing scenes of Volume Two … Washington at the conclusion of the War of Independence in 1783 entering the Congress chamber in Annapolis to resign his commission, seeing with his physical eyes a handful of mediocre politicians who had so often let down the cause (the quality of the members the Congress had declined drastically from the heroic days of 1775 and 1776), but seeing with his mind’s eye the great nation that is to come from them.

Thus, while Fleming emphasizes the mere renunciation, the negative act of refusing power, Flexner emphasizes Washington’s positive, animating vision—transcending the unsatisfactory present—of what America would one day be.

Here’s I’ll say something heretical. I think it trivializes Washington to make such a big deal over the fact that he resigned his military command rather than take over the country. For Washington to get so much credit for that assumes that he was tempted to do it and resisted the temptation. But of course he wasn’t tempted in the slightest. The dearest wish of his heart was to retire from public life and take up his life at Mount Vernon that he had abandoned 8 1/2 years before. America had become free and self-governing, the achievement of all those years of war and stress. For Washington to take over as dictator would have been absurd, it would have destroyed everything he believed in, everything he had sacrificed for, and would have turned his life into a mockery.

I’m not at all diminishing the importance of Washington’s resignation. I’m just saying that to make the mere fact that he gave up power the greatest thing about him, rather than the actual things he did (including the way he carefully orchestrated every detail of his resignation to make the maximum impression on the country), is to have a distorted and reduced picture of the man and his role in history.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 26, 2007 10:55 AM | Send