W. B. Allen, ed.: George Washington: A Collection. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988.
Originally published in the Washington Times, December 5, 1988.
In April 1789 the first President of the United States delivered the first Inaugural Address, in writing; the practice of delivering them orally in front of both houses of Congress would commence more than a century leader, when Woodrow Wilson reconceived the presidency as a platform for the nation’s ‘opinion leader.’ Washington restricted himself to more sober thoughts: “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican form of government, are justly considered as deeply, and perhaps finally, staked on the experiment trusted to the hands of the American people.” Almost two hundred years later, as another president-elect and his writers prepare another ‘inaugural,’ George Washington’s words remain true, his thoughts on the preservation of liberty and republicanism worth heeding.
Washington understood the need for republican government, and its hazards, as clearly as any among that most lucid generation of American statesmen. Political liberty means government by consent of the governed, a principle denied by the British to the Americans. “What is it we are contending against?” Washington wrote in the aftermath of disturbances in Boston in 1774. “Is it against paying the duty of three pence per pound on tea because burthensome? No, it is the right only, we have all along disputed.” Consent to taxation matters more than taxation. “We must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”
Washington considered a peaceful boycott of English goods, but judged it likely to be ineffective, requiring infeasible unanimity of American opinion. The right to liberty guarantees disagreement, making absolute unity in action impossible. Yet without a degree of union, men will never enact their right to liberty. Only warfare might unify Americans sufficiently to defend their right to thoughtful and moderate individual liberty. Washington therefore saw “no alternative but civil war or base submission,” and began the difficult, almost paradoxical act of fighting a civil war for political union, and maintaining a united effort for the rights of individual liberty and national independence.
A nation of individualists may organize itself to fight, but how well? For how long? Sunshine soldiers and summer patriots abound in this climate, and Washington had to devise a way to sustain a war with the people he had. In public, to his soldiers, he encouraged manly elevation of spirit. In the face of Congressional failure to pay them, he asked, “Is the paltry consideration of a little pelf to individuals to be placed in competition with the essential rights and liberties of the present generation, and of millions yet unborn?” He appealed to shame not to humble ordinary souls but to fortify them.
To his private correspondents and in his confidential memoranda to Congress he took an icier view. “Nothwithstanding all the public virtue which is ascribed to these people, there is no nation under the sun (that I ever came across) who pay greater adoration to money than they do.” Americans are human, only more so, and in every nation “the few who act on principles of disinterestedness, are, comparatively speaking, no more than a drop in the ocean.” Statesmen “must take the passions of men as nature has given them,” regulating and rechanneling them to defend natural, human rights. Though unalienable, those rights are always vulnerable.
To supplement appeals to principle, Washington insisted on discipline of, and pay for, his troops. Discipline rechannels the passion of fear, overwhelming the fear of death in battle with the “fear of punishment”; this latter fear “most obviously distinguishes” the trained from the “untutored” soldier. Pay rechannels the passion for gain; without it, soldiers will look elsewhere to support themselves and their families—often back to farm and hearth, where musket balls seldom fly.
Discipline and regular pay for troops require a Congress willing to back up its military officers, and able to raise money. This gives political union its practical urgency. Washington had advocated colonial union as early as 1756, during the war against the French. He intensified his call during the War of Independence. Disunion from England and union among the American states complemented one another, as both served the cause of peace; union with England and American disunion would prolong war. Union with England would mean “a peace on the principles of dependence.” This “would be to the last degree dishonorable and ruinous”—”if I may be allowed the expression, a peace of war.” Here Washington follows John Locke’s insight; tyranny is a form of war, and to fail to resist tyranny with arms actually perpetuates a peculiarly inconvenient war in which only one side has firepower.
American disunion frustrated Washington during the war and, in his view, would make Americans “instruments in the hands of our enemies” even after victory. To forge a political union, the bulwark of national liberty, independence, while protecting individual liberty and other unalienable rights, Washington participated in the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The delegates there sought to frame the world’s first sustainable republic. Washington regarded their successful Constitution-making as America’s real revolution, not the war. Changing a regime is one thing, sustaining the change another.
He considered a just government as consisting of three elements: a foundation supporting “pillars,” and a “fabric” supporting by them. Liberty—in political terms, consent—is the foundation of republican government. Its four pillars are union, a “sacred regard to public justice” (especially the willingness to pay debts), a “peace establishment” (that is, a reformed militia), and a “pacific and friendly disposition” among the people for each other. The materials of these pillars are enlightened minds and manners—”above all” the religious spirit that teaches us of “human depravity” and its malign effects on government, thereby adjuring citizens to restrain themselves and maintain a spirited vigilance toward their governors.
The fabric upheld by these pillars consists of independence and national character. Washington balances the ends of foreign and domestic policy, denigrating neither at the expense of the other. He can do this because he conceives of America’s revolution as the first practical, political step toward achieving not only the purpose of Americans but the purpose of mankind. He expresses two hopes for the future: First, he hopes that “that period is not very remote, when the benefits of a liberal, and free commerce will, pretty generally, succeed to the devastations and horrors of war.” But commerce alone will not suffice. He also hopes that human beings “will not continue slaves in one part of the glove, when they can become freemen in another.” Commerce or consent-based economics, and republicanism or the content-based politics of representative government, together can bring genuine peace to the human race.
There are dangers. Washington imagines no inevitable progress; the project can derail. Commerce and industry generate more wealth than all the gold and silver mines of Spain, he writes, and “in modern wars the longest purse must chiefly determine the event.” Yet commerce can also bring greed, and the destruction of that modest degree of military spirit needed to defend its very wealth; greed can also bring union-threatening faction.
On the problem of faction, Washington deferred to the brilliantly-conceived remedies described by his friend and collaborator, James Madison, in the tenth Federalist. On the military spirit, he spoke for himself. “If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.” He thus connects military strength, which requires financial sacrifices, with the prosperity that only peace can secure. That this is a verbal not an institutional solution, that it depends for its success on enlightened statesmen to enunciate it and enlightened citizens to heed it, suggests is perpetual precariousness. Were it not precarious, spiritedness and statesmanship could be rendered obsolete, and men something like Washington could retire forever behind the neatly clipped hedges of administration.
Washington saw no prospect of such retirement. “It is to be regretted, I confess, that Democratical States must always feel before they can see: it is this that makes their governments slow, but the people will be right in the last.” Republican government, taking human beings as it finds them, rechanneling their passions into juster courses without crushing human liberty, defending itself against tyrants without and would-be tyrants within, by means provided by this modestly improved human nature, sets humanity on a race between its demons and the better angels of our nature. By doing what it can to make the people feel so that they can see, republican statesmanship appeals to those better angels without forgetting the demons. Having succeeded in this statesmanship, Washington earned the right to view America’s prospects with measured optimism.
Recent Comments