On April 30, our nation will observe the Bicentennial of the Inauguration of our first President, George Washington. A reenactment will take place at Federal Hall in New York City, where the original event took place in 1789.
George Washington’s greatest biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman, was once asked what was the most important single thing he had learned from his lifetime of historical study. He replied, “The influence of personality on history.”
Of no person in American history was that more true than of the man whom schoolchildren are (or used to be) taught is “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” The sheer power of his character and personality made him the acknowledged leader among many men of extraordinary intellect, learning, and diplomatic skills.
Mr. Freeman concluded that Washington gave the American cause what it needed most: “patience and determination, inexhaustible and inextinguishable.” Some years ago, I ran a national essay contest for junior high school students on George Washington and the winning essayist grasped that same point. “I admire George Washington,” the student wrote, “because he never gave up.”
In his first Inaugural Address, Washington acknowledged our country’s dependence on Almighty God: “It would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe – who presides in the council of nations.” After serving two terms as President, he advised us again that, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”
The famous story about not telling a lie about chopping down the cherry tree has been demoted in modem times to apocryphal status, but Washington did write: “I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs that honesty is always the best policy.” As a schoolboy, Washington had written in his copybook, “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire – conscience.”
It is frequently forgotten that Washington was the president of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 which wrote our great United States Constitution. His leadership held together that assemblage of strong-minded men with conflicting sectional interests.
One of the few times he spoke during those four hot months in Independence Hall in Philadelphia was to say: “If to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the event is in the hand of God.”
And doesn’t this sound like a modern warning against both judicial activism and an Imperial Congress? “If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.”
In his Fifth Annual Address to Congress in 1793, Washington gave us the most succinct two-part formula for peace ever devised: (a) be ready for war and (b) let it be known that we are ready. “There is a rank due to the United States among nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure the peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.”
Everything we know about 20fr century events confirms the strong warnings that President Washington gave us about keeping ourselves removed from foreign wars and factions. In his Farewell Address, he said: “History and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”
In advising us against becoming entangled with foreign problems, Washington cautioned us against giving favors to other nations in the hope of receiving favors in return. He warned that we will be “reproached with ingratitude for not giving them more,’ and we will have to “pay with a portion of our independence” for placing ourselves in such a position.
His Farewell Address summarized, it like this: “There can be no greater effort than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride out to discard.”
Freeman, who authored a monumental and definitive six-volume biography of our first President, concluded: “The more I study George Washington, the more am I convinced that the great reputation he enjoyed with his contemporaries and with men of the next generation was entirely justified. He was greater than any of us believed he was.”
