George Washington
a poem by James Russell Lowell

Soldier and statesman, rarest unison;
High-poised example of great duties done
Simply as breathing, a world’s honors worn
As life’s indifferent gifts to all men born;
Dumb for himself, unless it were to God,
But for his barefoot soldiers eloquent,
Tramping the snow to coral where they trod,
Held by his awe in hollow-eyed content;
Modest, yet firm as Nature’s self; unblamed
Save by the men his nobler temper shamed;
Never seduced through show of present good
By other than unsetting lights to steer
New-trimmed in Heaven, nor than his steadfast mood
More steadfast, far from rashness as from fear,
Rigid, but with himself first, grasping still
In swerveless poise the wave-beat helm of will;
Not honored then or now because he wooed
The popular voice, but that he still withstood;
Broad-minded, higher-souled, there is but one
Who was all this and ours, and all men’s – Washington

July 8, 1775

The poem is a fragment from the ode for the centenary of Washington’s taking command of the American army at Cambridge.

It says something important about George Washington that his influence on American life, politics, and culture would be so profound more than 75 years after his death. Perhaps only FDR, whose dominant personality and management of the two great crisis of the 20th century – depression and war – rivals Washington’s influence on successive generations of Americans.

Washington’s contributions to our history are almost mythic in nature. Indeed, that may be our biggest problem with coming to grips with him as a man. We ask ourselves, is it possible that someone could have refused a crown or dictatorship when it was so easily in his grasp? This is not hyperbole. There was a day – one day – when Washington could have had it all, that if he was less of a patriot and lover of liberty, America would have been changed forever.

Let me take you back to that day. The year was 1783. While formal hostilities had virtually ceased between the Crown and the American colonies, peace talks continued to drag on in London. The Congress was broke and in serious debt even though the Articles of Confederation, which required individual states to contribute funds to the Congress, had been approved two years earlier.

The Continental Army was restless. Many of its officers hadn’t been paid in months. Promises made by Congress at the time of their enlistment regarding reimbursement for food and clothing, pensions, and a pledge to give the officers half pay for life were either not being honored or were rumored to be withdrawn. Petitions by groups of officers to Congress asking them to redress these and other grievances either went unanswered or were brushed aside.

As a result of these indignities, a cabal of officers headed up by Colonel Walter Stewart and Major John Armstrong, an aide to George Washington’s chief rival Horatio Gates, were making plans to march to Philadelphia at the head of their men to force Congress to deal with their demands. The implication was clear; if Congress would not address their concerns, the men would enforce their will at the point of a bayonet.

The plotters believed that General Washington would be forced by their actions to become a reluctant participant in a military coup against the government. They believed that by presenting a united front composed of the senior officers in the army, Washington would have no choice but to back them.

To that end, they scheduled a meeting on March 10 of all general and field officers. With the invitation to the meeting, a fiery letter was circulated calling on the soldiers not to disarm in peace and, if the war were to continue, to disband and leave the country to the tender mercies of the British Army.

Washington got wind of the meeting and was deeply troubled. He issued a General Order canceling the gathering and instead, called for another meeting on March 15 ” of representatives of all the regiments to decide how to attain the just and important object in view.” The next day, another letter was circulated by the plotters that implied by issuing the General Order, Washington agreed with their position.

With the army teetering on the edge of revolt and the future of the United States as a republic in the balance, Washington stood before the assembled officers and began to speak. He started by saying he sympathized with their plight, that he had written countless letters to Congress reminding them of their responsibilities to the soldiers, and begged the officers not to take any action that would “lessen the dignity and sully the glory you have hitherto maintained.”

At that point, Washington reached into his pocket and withdrew a letter from a Congressman outlining what the government would do to address the soldiers grievances. But something was wrong. Washington started reading the letter but stopped abruptly. Then, with a sense of the moment and flair for the dramatic not equaled until Ronald Reagan became President, Washington slowly reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a pair of spectacles. There were gasps in the room as most of the officers had never seen their beloved General display such a sign of physical weakness in public. As he put the glasses on, Washington said “Gentlemen, you’ll permit me to put on my spectacles, as I have grown not only old but almost blind in the service of my country.”

Witnesses say that the officers almost to a man began to weep. This powerful reminder of the nearly eight years of service together and their shared sacrifices and hardships won the day. The revolt died then and there.

There were other days, other challenges where Washington showed a self-abnegation so profound as to allow many historians to charge that the General was more concerned about how he would look in the history books than with the kind of virtuous selflessness Washington’s contemporaries ascribed as his motives. In truth, Washington was not without a flair for the dramatic as his speech before Congress resigning his Commission attests:

Happy in the confirmation of our Independence and Sovereignty, and pleased with the oppertunity afforded the United States of becoming a respectable Nation, I resign with satisfaction the Appointment I accepted with diffidence. A diffidence in my abilities to accomplish so arduous a task, which however was superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of our Cause, the support of the supreme Power of the Union, and the patronage of Heaven.

Of course, to get the job of Commanding General in the first place, Washington paraded around the Second Continental Congress wearing his Virginia Militia uniform which sort of puts Washington’s claims to “diffidence” about serving in a different light.

And then, the peroration:

Having now finished the work assigned to me, I retire form the great theatre of Action; and bidding an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.

There is every indication in both the private correspondence with his wife Martha as well as public pronouncements like this that Washington was dead serious about retiring forever. Only the gravest of crisis could bring him back into the “theater of Action.” And as Scott Johnson points out, it was the Constitutional Convention, convening at a time when the American experiment was in dire straits and the country threatening to fly apart, that Washington once again shouldered the burden of leadership:

Take, for example, Washington’s contribution to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Washington’s mere presence lent the undertaking and its handiwork the legitimacy that resulted in success. The convention’s first order of business was the election of a presiding officer. Washington was the delegates’ unanimous choice.

Presiding over the convention during that fateful summer, Washington said virtually nothing. In his wonderful book on Washington, Richard Brookhiser notes: “The esteem in which Washington was held affected his fellow delegates first of all…Washington did not wield the power he possessed by speaking. Apart from his lecture on secrecy, Washington did not address the Convention between the first day and the last.”

One other aspect Brookhiser brings out about the Convention was the debates over the powers that would be granted to the President under the brand new Constitution. Once it became clear that there would, in fact, be an executive, delegates could only think of one man who could possibly fill the bill – and he was sitting silently in front of them. As the delegates debated the powers that would be granted the chief executive, they would glance from time to time at Washington to see his reaction. So powerful a presence was Washington that he influenced deliberations simply by being in the room.

Scott calls Washington “The Indispensable Man,” quoting James Flexner whose marvelous 4 volume biography is still considered the seminal work on Washington’s life 30 years after the last volume was published. And the man one discovers in reading Flexner, Brookhiser, Harrison Clark , Richard Norton Smith and others is not a perfect being. A slave owner, a patrician who was distrustful of “the mob” as he called the common folk.

A man who could be vain, petty, ultra sensitive to slights both real and imagined, Washington was most of all a man of his times. He was able to embrace new ideas and had the vision to see America as an independent nation because he was a keen student of the currents of thought that were running through the colonies in the 1760’s as well as pre-Enlightenment Europe. Washington may have been one of the most plugged in of our Founding Fathers. The stream of visitors to Mount Vernon never let up, to the point that poor Martha complained about the constant overnight guests. He also kept in close touch with friends in Europe, gauging the reaction to the unrest in the colonies. While publicly uncommitted to independence, some historians believe Washington recognized the inevitability of a separate nation as early as 1774 with the imposition of the Intolerable Acts.

A man of his times, yes. But also a man for all time.