- ASIC Gazette - Australian Securities and Investments Commission
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Commonwealth of Australia ASIC Gazette 24/01 dated 1 November
Although criticizing the founding generation has been going on for more than a century, there does seem to be something new and different about the present-day academic vilification. Instead, as has been pointed out, much of the best work on the history of the early Republic during the past several decades has concentrated on recovering the lost voices of ordinary people—a midwife in Maine or a former slave in Connecticut—or on emphasizing the popular cultural matrix of the period that transcends the leadership of the great white males.
But academic historians over the past forty years have tended to focus on issues of race, class, and gender in the early Republic and to shun issues of politics and political leadership. When the founders are not ignored but confronted directly, presentday criticism of them is much more devastating than that of the past. They are not interested, as earlier critics were, in simply stripping away myths and legends to get at the human beings hidden from view.
If anything, some of these critical historians want to dehumanize, not humanize, the founders. Because our present-day culture has lost a great deal of its former respect for absolute values and timeless truths, we have a harder time believing that the eighteenth-century founders have anything important or transcendent to say to us in the twenty-first century.
Even in constitutional jurisprudence, which has a natural bias toward discovering the intentions of the framers of the Constitution, the reputation of the founders has lost some of its former appeal, and original intent is no longer taken for granted but has become a matter of contentious debate among scholars and jurists. It appears more evident than ever before that the founders do not share our modern views about important matters, about race, the role of woman, and equality.
Hence it is easier now to dismiss them as racists, sexists, and elitists. Certainly debunking has become much more common for generations of young people raised on reading about J. As popular writer Dave Eggers points out, debunking is what he does as a magazine editor. In their scholarly opinion, the Revolution has become pretty much a failure. The founders appear even more marvelous than even those they emulated, the great legislators of classical antiquity, precisely because they are more real.
They are not mythical characters but authentic historical figures about whom there exists a remarkable amount of historical evidence. For our knowledge of the founders, unlike that of many of the classical heroes, we do not have to rely on hazy legends or poetic tales. In spite of the extent and meticulousness of this historical recovery, to most Americans the founders still seem larger than life as well as possessing political and intellectual capacities well beyond our own.
The awe that most of us feel when we look back at them is thus mingled with an acute 10 r e vo l u t i o n a r y c h a r ac t e r s sense of loss. Somehow for a brief moment ideas and power, intellectualism and politics, came together—indeed were one with each other—in a way never again duplicated in American history.
There is no doubt that the founders were men of ideas, were, in fact, the leading intellectuals of their day. But they were as well the political leaders of their day, politicians who competed for power, lost and won elections, served in their colonial and state legislatures or in the Congress, became governors, judges, and even presidents.
They were intellectuals without being alienated and political leaders without being obsessed with votes. They lived mutually in the world of ideas and the world of politics, shared equally in both in a happy combination that fills us with envy and wonder.
We know that something happened then in American history that can never happen again. But there is no point now, more than two centuries later, in continuing to wallow in nostalgia and to aggravate our deep feelings of loss and deficiency.
What we need is not more praise of the founders but more understanding of them and their circumstances. We need to find out why the revolutionary generation was able to combine ideas and politics so effectively and why subsequent generations in America could not do so.
With the proper historical perspective on the last quarter of the eighteenth century and with a keener sense of the distinctiveness of that period will come a greater appreciation of not only what we have lost by the passing of that revolutionary generation but, more important, what we have gained.
For in the end what made subsequent duplication of the remarkable intellectual and political leadership of the revolutionaries impossible in America was the growth of what we have come to value most, our egalitarian culture and our democratic society. One of the prices we had to pay for democracy was a decline in the intellectual quality of American political life and an eventual separation between ideas and power.
As the common man rose to power in the decades following the Revolution, the inevitable consequence was the displacement from power of the un- t h e f o u n de r s a n d t h e e n l i g h t e n m e n t 11 common man, the aristocratic man of ideas. Yet the revolutionary leaders were not merely victims of new circumstances; they were, in fact, the progenitors of these new circumstances. They helped create the changes that led eventually to their own undoing, to the breakup of the kind of political and intellectual coherence they represented.
Without intending to, they willingly destroyed the sources of their own greatness. Great as they were, the revolutionary leaders were certainly not demigods or superhuman individuals; they were very much the product of specific circumstances and a specific moment in time.
Nor were they immune to the allures of interest that attracted most ordinary human beings. They wanted wealth and position and often speculated heavily in order to realize their aims. They were not demigods, but they were not democrats either, certainly not democrats in any modern manner. They were never embarrassed by talk of elitism, and they never hid their sense of superiority to ordinary folk. But neither were they contemptuous of common people; in fact they always believed that the people in general were the source of their authority.
As historian Charles S. Sydnor pointed out long ago, they were the beneficiaries of a semiaristocratic political system, and their extraordinary leadership was due in large measure to processes that we today would consider undemocratic and detestable. As political leaders they constituted a peculiar sort of elite, a self-created aristocracy largely based on merit and talent that was unlike the hereditary nobility that ruled eighteenth-century English society.
It was not that there were no men of obscure origins who made it in England. But there was a difference between Britain and America. Bright Britons of humble origins could have spectacular rises, but they needed patrons and sponsors, those who were often the titled lords and hereditary aristocrats in control of British society.
Burke would never have acquired the eminence he did without the patronage of William Hamilton and the marquess of Rockingham. Members of the American revolutionary elite seem much more self-made, no doubt often achieving distinction with the help of patrons, as in Britain, but nonetheless coming to dominate their society in a way that upwardthrusting men like Strahan or Burke never dominated English society.
Eighteenth-century Britain remained under the authority of about four hundred noble families whose fabulous scale of landed wealth, political influence, and aristocratic grandeur was unmatched by anyone in North America. By English standards, American aristocrats like Washington and Jefferson, even with hundreds of slaves, remained minor gentry at best.
Moreover, by the English measure of status, lawyers like Adams and Hamilton were even less distinguished, gentlemen no doubt but nothing like the English nobility. The American revolutionary elite was thus very different from the English aristocracy.
By its very difference, however, it was ideally suited to exploit the peculiar character of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
The eighteenth-century Anglo-American Enlightenment was preoccupied with politeness, which had a much broader meaning for people then than it does for us today. It implied more than manners and decorum. It meant affability sociability, cultivation; indeed, politeness t h e f o u n de r s a n d t h e e n l i g h t e n m e n t 13 was considered the source of civility, which was soon replaced by the word civilization.
Civilization implied a social process. Societies, it was assumed, moved through successive stages of historical development, beginning in rude simplicity and progressing to refined complexity of civilization. All nations could be located along this spectrum of social development.
The various theories of social progress current in the late eighteenth century had many sources, but especially important to the Americans was the four-stage theory worked out by that remarkable group of eighteenth-century Scottish social scientists Adam Smith, John Millar, Adam Ferguson, and Lord Kames.
These thinkers posited four stages of evolutionary development based on differing modes of subsistence: hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. Courtesy books that told Americans how to behave doubled in numbers during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. From such conduct manuals people learned how to act in company, how to clean their bodies, how to refine their tastes.
Compilers of dictionaries attempted to find the correct meanings, spellings, and pronunciations of words and freeze them between the covers of their books. In these ways peculiarities of dialect and eccentricities of spelling and pronunciation could be eliminated, and standards of the language could 14 r e vo l u t i o n a r y c h a r ac t e r s be set. All sorts of new organizations and instruments sprang up to spread light and knowledge among people: learned societies, lending libraries, debating clubs, assembly rooms, reading groups, gentlemanly magazines, concerts, galleries, and museums.
Eighteenth-century English speakers saw the beginning of culture as a public commodity, as something that was valuable, that gave status, and that could be acquired. The cultural world that we are familiar with today was born in the Age of Enlightenment. And provincial Americans, anxious to display their learning and politeness, were doing all they could to be part of that cultural world.
At the center of this new civilized world was the idea of a gentleman. Defining a proper gentleman was a subject that fascinated the educated public of the eighteenth-century English-speaking world, and writers from Richard Steele to Jane Austen spent their lives struggling with what constituted the proper character of a gentleman; John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were still going at it in their correspondence at the end of their lives. For many in the eighteenth century, including the American revolutionaries, being a gentleman assumed a moral meaning that was more important than its social significance.
Pure monarchists might still define aristocrats exclusively by the pride of their families, the size of their estates, the lavishness of their display, and the arrogance of their bearings, but others increasingly downplayed or ridiculed these characteristics.
This t h e f o u n de r s a n d t h e e n l i g h t e n m e n t 15 enlightened age emphasized new man-made criteria of aristocracy and gentility—politeness, grace, taste, learning, and character—even to the point where titled peers like Lord Chesterfield liked to think their exalted social positions were due to talent and not to inheritance. To be a gentleman was to think and act like a gentleman, nothing more, an immensely radical belief with implications that few foresaw.
Being a gentleman was the prerequisite to becoming a political leader. It signified being cosmopolitan, standing on elevated ground in order to have a large view of human affairs, and being free of the prejudices, parochialism, and religious enthusiasm of the vulgar and barbaric. It meant, in short, having all those characteristics that we today sum up in the idea of a liberal arts education.
Indeed, the eighteenth century created the modern idea of a liberal arts education in the English-speaking world. Whether by birth they be descended from magistrates and officers of government, or from husbandmen, merchants, mechanics, or laborers; or whether they be rich or poor. This age-old distinction between gentlemen and commoners had a vital meaning for the revolutionary generation that we today have totally lost.
It marked a horizontal cleavage that divided the social hierarchy into two unequal parts almost as sharply as the distinction between officers and soldiers divided the army; indeed, the military division was related to the 16 r e vo l u t i o n a r y c h a r ac t e r s larger social one. Gentlemen, who constituted about 5 to 10 percent of the society, were all those at the top of the social hierarchy who were wealthy enough not to have to work, or at least not to have to work with their hands, and who thus seemed able to act in a disinterested manner in promoting a public good.
Disinterestedness was the most common term the founders used as a synonym for the classical conception of virtue or self-sacrifice; it better conveyed the threats from interests that virtue seemed increasingly to face in the rapidly commercializing eighteenth century. We today have lost most of this earlier meaning. In the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world gentlemen believed that only independent individuals, free of interested ties and paid by no masters, could practice such virtue.
It was thought that those who had occupations and had to work strenuously for a living lacked the leisure for virtuous public leadership. Such a life is not noble, and it militates against virtue. Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations thought that ordinary people in a modern complicated commercial society were too engaged in their occupations and the making of money to be able to make impartial judgments about the varied interests and occupations of their society.
The publick has this claim upon them. The revolutionary leaders were not modern men. They did not conceive of politics as a profession and of officeholding as a career as politicians do today.
Of course, there were large numbers of southern planter gentry whose leisure was based on the labor of their slaves, and these 18 r e vo l u t i o n a r y c h a r ac t e r s planters obviously came closest in America to emulating the English landed aristocracy.
But some southern planters kept taverns on the side, and many others were not as removed from the day-to-day management of their estates as were their counterparts among the English landed gentry.
Their overseers were not comparable to the stewards of the English aristocracy; thus the planters, despite their aristocratic poses, were often very busy, commercially involved men. Hancock spent lavishly, brought every imaginable luxury, and patronized everyone. He went through the fortune he had inherited from his uncle, but in the process he became the single most popular and powerful figure in Massachusetts politics during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
Laurens knew only too well the contempt in which trading was held in South Carolina, and in the s he began curtailing his merchant activities. Because the aristocracy was so weak and so vulnerable to challenge in America—the perennial problem from the beginning of the first European settlements—it was always difficult to keep upstarts from claiming gentry status.
When Washington arrived in Massachusetts in June to take up leadership of the Continental army, he was stunned to find that many of the New England officers not only had been elected by their men but had been cobblers and common farmers in civilian life.
Not having enough gentlemen to staff the officer corps became a continuing problem for Washington and the Continental army. Instead of the status of gentleman entitling a man to be an officer, too many ordinary men tried to use their military rank to prove that they were in fact gentlemen.
Artisans and tradesmen who had acquired wealth and were politi- 20 r e vo l u t i o n a r y c h a r ac t e r s cally ambitious, such as Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania and Roger Sherman of Connecticut, found that they had to retire from business in order to attain high political office.
As aspiring gentlemen the leaders of the revolutionary generation shared these assumptions about work, politeness, and civilization. They were primed to receive all these new enlightened ideas about civility and gentility. As historian Franco Venturi once observed, the Enlightenment was created not in the centers of European culture but on its peripheries. Both provincial societies lacked the presence of the great hereditary noble families that were at the ruling center of English political life.
In both North America and Scotland, unlike metropolitan England, the uppermost levels of the aristocracy tended to be dominated by minor gentry—professional men or relatively small landowners—who were anxious to have their status determined less by their ancestry or the size of their estates than by their behavior or their learning.
Both the Scots and the North Americans, moreover, were acutely aware of the contrast between civilization and the nearby barbarism of the Highland clans and the North American Indian tribes.
Both were keenly aware too of the degrees of civilization and spent much time writing and reading essays on the stages of social progress from rudeness to refinement. They knew that they lived in cruder and more simple societies than t h e f o u n de r s a n d t h e e n l i g h t e n m e n t 21 the English and that England was well along in the fourth and final stage of social development—commercial society—and had much to offer them in the ways of politeness and refinement.
England had sprawling, poverty-ridden cities, overrefined manners, gross inequalities of rank, complex divisions of labor, and widespread manufacturing of luxuries, all symptoms of overadvanced social development and social decay. Those North American colonists who came in direct contact with London were shocked at the notorious ways in which hundreds of thousands of pounds were being spent to buy elections. The English now began to regard the North American colonists less as fellow Englishmen across the Atlantic than as another set of people to be ruled.
Proud of their simple native provinces but keenly aware of the metropolitan center of civilization that was London, both Americans and Scots had the unsettling sense of living in two cultures simultaneously.
Although this experience may have been unsettling, it was at the same time very stimulating and creative. Wanting to become precisely the kind of gentlemen that their contemporaries Jane Austen and Edmund Burke idealized, they enthusiastically adopted the new enlightened eighteenthcentury ideals of gentility: grace without foppishness, refinement without ostentation, virtue without affectation, independence without arrogance.
Let us make War upon Ignorance and Barbarity of Manners. Let us invite the Arts and Sciences to reside amongst us. Let us encourage every thing which tends to exalt and embellish our Characters. And in fine, let the Love of our Country be manifested by that which is the only true Manifestation of it, a patriotic soul and a public Spirit. Once internalized, these enlightened and classically republican ideals, values, and standards came to circumscribe and control their behavior.
They talked obsessively about earning a character, which, as Dr. Theirs was not character as we today are apt to understand it, as the inner personality that contains hidden contradictions and flaws. This present-day view of character is what leads to the current bashing of the founders. Instead their idea of character was the outer life, the public person trying to show the world that he was living up to the values and duties that the best of the culture imposed on him.
The founders were integrally connected to the society and never saw themselves standing apart from the world in critical or scholarly isolation. Unlike intellectuals today, they had no sense of being in an adversarial relationship to the culture.
They were individuals undoubtedly, sometimes assuming a classic pose of heroic and noble preeminence, but they were not individualists, men worried about their social identities. They were enmeshed in the society and civic-minded by necessity; thus they hid their personal feelings for the sake of civility and sociability and their public personas.
Jefferson and Martha Washington destroyed their correspondence with their spouses because they believed that such letters were exclusively private and had no role to play in telling the world the nature of their public characters. Benjamin Franklin 24 r e vo l u t i o n a r y c h a r ac t e r s never thought that his characteristic behavior—his artful posing, his role playing, his many masks, his refusal to reveal his inner self—was anything other than what the cultivated and sociable eighteenth century admired.
The gentility and civility that these revolutionary leaders sought to achieve were public; they made sense only in society.
Knowing how to act in company, knowing how to lead and govern men meant being acutely aware of other people and their feelings and reactions. The culture of gentility and virtuous leadership thus implied audiences, spectators, and characters, a theatrical world of appearances and representations, applause and censure, something that both Washington and John Adams appreciated more than most.
Adams always thought he and his colleagues were onstage. Public leaders had to become actors or characters, masters of masquerade. Indeed, the intense self-conscious seriousness with which they made that commitment was what ultimately separates them from later generations of American leaders. But that commitment also sets them sharply apart from the older world of their fathers and grandfathers.
They sought, often unsuccessfully but always sincerely, to play a part, to be what Jefferson called natural aristocrats—aristocrats who measured their status not by birth or family that hereditary aristocrats from time immemorial had valued but by enlightened values and benevolent behavior. They had good reason for doing so, for they were men of high ambitions yet of relatively modest origins, and this combination made achieved rather than ascribed values naturally appealing to them. Almost all the revolutionary leaders, even including the second and third ranks of leadership, were first-generation gentlemen.
That is to say, almost all were the first in their families to attend college, to acquire a liberal arts education, and to display the new eighteenth-century marks of an enlightened gentleman. Of the ninety-nine men who signed the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, only eight are known to have had fathers who attended college. Those revolutionary leaders, such as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Nathanael Greene, who did not attend college usually made up for this lack by intensive self-cultivation in liberal enlightened values.
But he was not a refined and liberally educated gentleman: He did not read Latin, he did not know French, he did not play the violin, and as far as we know, he never once questioned the idea of a religious establishment or the owning of slaves. His son Thomas was very different. Indeed, all the revolutionaries knew things that their fathers had not known, and they were eager to prove themselves by what they believed and valued, by their virtue and dis- 26 r e vo l u t i o n a r y c h a r ac t e r s interestedness.
But there was one prominent revolutionary leader who did not seek to play the role that the others did. On the face of it, Aaron Burr had all the credentials for being a great founder: He was a Revolutionary War veteran, a Princeton graduate, and a charming and wealthy aristocrat. He eventually became a senator from New York and the vice president of the United States.
But something set his character apart from his colleagues. He behaved very differently from the other revolutionary leaders—especially in promoting his own selfish interests at the expense of the public good—and in the end that difference provoked his fellow statesmen into challenging him. Since he became the great exception that proves the rule, recounting his deviant experience helps us better understand the character of the founders. Yet the very high-mindedness of these mainstream founders raises fundamental questions.
If it was the intense commitment of this generation of founders to new enlightened values that separates it from other generations, why, it might be asked, and indeed, as it has been asked by recent critical historians, did these so-called enlightened and liberally educated gentlemen not do more to reform their society?
Why did they fail to enhance the status of women? Eliminate slavery entirely? Treat the Indians in a more humane manner? It is true that the founders did not accomplish all that many of them wanted. It turned out that they did not control their society and culture as much as they thought they did.
They were also no more able accurately to predict their future than we can ours. In the end many of their enlightened hopes and their kind of elitist leadership were done in by the very democratic and egalitarian forces they had unleashed with their Revolution. No doubt all the founders assumed instinctively that the western territories would eventually belong to American settlers.
The ordinary white settlers who moved west, flush with confidence that they were indeed the chosen people of God their leaders told them they were, paid no attention to the plans and policies concocted in eastern capitals.
They went ahead and rapidly and chaotically scattered westward and thus stirred up warfare with the Indians into which the federal government was inevitably drawn.
Democracy and demography did the same for the other hopes and plans of the founders. All the prominent leaders thought that the liberal principles of the Revolution would eventually destroy the institution of slavery. Far from being doomed, slavery in the United States in the s was on the verge of its greatest expansion.
Indeed, at the end of the revolutionary era there were more slaves in the nation than in But such self-deception, such mistaken optimism, by the revolutionary leaders was understandable, for they wanted to believe the best, and initially there was evidence that slavery was dying out. The northern states, where slavery was not inconsequential, were busy trying to eliminate the institution, and by all had done so. The founders thought the same thing might happen in the southern states.
Not only were there more antislave societies created in the South than in the North, but manumissions in the upper South grew rapidly in the years immediately following the end of the War for Independence. Many believed that ending the international slave trade in would eventually kill off the institution of slavery.
The reason the founders so readily took the issue of slavery off the table in the s was this mistaken faith in the future. Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country. Also, whatever the revolutionary leaders might have wished for in ending slavery was nullified by the demands of ordinary white planters for more slaves.
If we want to know why we can never again replicate the extraordinary generation of the founders, there is a simple answer: the growth of what we today presumably value most about American society and culture, egalitarian democracy. In the early nineteenth century the voices of ordinary people, at least ordinary white people, began to be heard as never before in history, and they soon overwhelmed the high-minded desires and aims of the revolutionary leaders who had brought them into being.
The founders had succeeded only too well in promoting democracy and equality among ordinary people; indeed, they succeeded in preventing any duplication of themselves. He was ranked seventh among presidents. Young people in particular did not know much about Washington. Polls of presidential greatness are probably silly things, but if they are to be taken seriously, then Washington fully deserves the first place he used to hold. He certainly deserved the accolades his contemporaries gave him.
And as long as this Republic endures, he ought to be first in the hearts of his countrymen. Washington was truly a great man and the greatest president we ever had.
But he was a great man who is not easy to understand. He became very 32 r e vo l u t i o n a r y c h a r ac t e r s quickly, as has often been pointed out, more a monument than a man. Even his contemporaries realized that he was not an ordinary accessible human being. Every passing year made him less of a real person. By the early decades of the nineteenth century he had already become statuesque and impenetrable.
Washington was about the best man this world ever set eyes on. He never slopt over! He luved his country dearly. He was a human angil in a 3 kornered hat and knee britches. There were periodic efforts to bring him down to earth, to expose his foibles, to debunk his fame, but he remained massively monumental. By our time in the early twenty-first century he seems so far removed from us as to be virtually incomprehensible.
He seems to come from another time and another place, from another world. And his countrymen knew it almost before he died in Washington was the only truly classical hero we have ever had. He was admired as a classical hero in his own lifetime. Washington was much more of a traditional hero. And he knew it. He was well aware of his reputation and his fame earned as the commander in chief of the American revolu- t h e g re at n e s s of g e or g e wa s h i n g t on 33 tionary forces.
That awareness of his heroic stature was crucial to Washington. It affected nearly everything he did for the rest of his life. Washington was a thoroughly eighteenth-century figure.
No wonder he seems to us so remote. He really is. He belonged to a world we have lost, one we were losing even while he lived. In many respects Washington was a very unlikely hero. To be sure, he had all the physical attributes of a classical hero. He was very tall by contemporary standards, six feet three or so, and was heavily built and a superb athlete.
Physically he had what men and women admired. He was both a splendid horseman at a time when that skill really counted and an extraordinarily graceful dancer, and naturally he loved both riding and dancing. He always moved with dignity and looked like a leader. Yet those who knew him well and talked with him were often disappointed. He never seemed to have very much to say. He was almost certainly not what we today would call an intellectual. We cannot imagine his expressing his views over the uses and abuses of grief in the world in the way Jefferson and John Adams did in their old age.
It was certain, said Adams, that Washington was not a scholar. Great men in the eighteenth century did not have to be scholars or intellectuals. But there is no doubt that Washington was not a learned man, especially in comparison with the other founders. He was very ill at ease in abstract discussions. Ob- 34 r e vo l u t i o n a r y c h a r ac t e r s viously he was not a great mind; he was not in the class of Bacon, Locke, Newton, or even Jefferson or Franklin.
He was not an intellectual; he was a man of affairs. He knew how to run his plantation and make it pay. He certainly ran Mount Vernon better than Jefferson ran Monticello; indeed, he was one of the most successful of planter businessmen in all of Virginia. He thought about it all the time. Even when he was president, he devoted a great amount of his energy worrying about the fence posts of his plantation, and his letters dealing with the details of running Mount Vernon were longer than those dealing with the running of the federal government.
But being a man of affairs and running his plantation or even the federal government efficiently were not what made him a worldrenowned hero. What was it that lay behind his extraordinary reputation, his greatness? His military exploits were of course crucial. Still, Washington was not really a traditional military hero. He did not resemble Alexander, Caesar, Cromwell, or Marlborough; his military achievements were nothing compared with those Napoleon would soon have.
Washington had no smashing, stunning victories. He was not a military genius, and his tactual and strategic maneuvers were not the sort that awed men. Military glory was not the source of his reputation. Something else was involved. What was it? Washington became a great man and was acclaimed as a classical hero because of the way he conducted himself during times of temptation. It was his moral character that set him off from other men. Washington epitomized everything the revolutionary generation prized in its leaders.
He had character and was truly a man of virtue. He had to work for it, to cultivate it, and everyone sensed that. Washington seemed to possess a self-cultivated nobility.
Washington was a child of the Enlightenment. He was very much a man of his age, and he took its moral standards more seriously than did most of his contemporaries. It did not involve high philosophy or abstract reasoning. He was also convinced, as he declared in his Farewell Address, that religion was an indispensable prop for both morality and republican government.
His Enlightenment involved civility. But no one was more serious in following them than Washington. He wanted desperately to know the proper rules of behavior for a liberal gentleman, and when he discovered them, he stuck by them with an earnestness that awed his contemporaries.
It is this purposefulness that gave his behavior such a copybook character. The play, very much an Enlightenment tract, helped teach him what it meant to be liberal and virtuous, what it meant to be a stoical classical hero. It was as if he were always onstage, acting a part.
Precisely because Washington had not attended college and received t h e g r e at n e s s o f g e or g e wa s h i n g t o n 37 a liberal arts education, he became punctilious and literal-minded about observing and adopting what he had formally missed. In the s he refused invitations to visit France in part because he felt it would be humiliating for someone of his standing to have to converse through an interpreter.
He said that it was his lack of a formal education that kept him from setting down on paper his recollections of the Revolution. It was even widely rumored that his aides composed his best letters as commander in chief. His lack of a college education, however, did not keep him from expressing his hard-earned gentility in other ways. He loved attending tea tables; during the months of deliberations over the new constitution in his diary entries note little more than his continual attendance at tea.
Some called his diffidence shyness, but whatever the source, this reticence was certainly not the usual characteristic of a great man. One of his most impressive acts was his freeing of his slaves in his will. Of all the well-known founders who were major slaveholders, including Jefferson, Madison, and Patrick Henry, Washington was the only one who actually ended up freeing his slaves.
He was of course no fiery abolitionist, and in his lifetime he never spoke out publicly against the insti- 38 r e vo l u t i o n a r y c h a r ac t e r s tution of slavery.
Instead he arrived at his conclusion that slavery was immoral and inconsistent with the ideals of the Revolution gradually, privately, and with difficulty. Prior to the Revolution Washington, like most eighteenth-century Americans, especially Virginians, took slavery very much for granted. Eighteenth-century society was composed of many degrees of inequality and unfreedom, and slavery seemed to be merely the most base and degraded status in a hierarchy of dependencies.
After all, slavery had existed for thousands of years without any substantial criticism, and this was still true in early-eighteenth-century America. On the eve of the Revolution all the colonies were implicated in African slavery in one way or another. Of the total American population of 1. During the first half of the eighteenth century Virginian planters, even educated and sensitive ones like William Byrd, showed no guilt or defensiveness over their holding hundreds of slaves on their plantations.
It was a cruel and brutal age, and the life of the lowly everywhere seemed cheap. The American Revolution changed all this. The revolutionaries did not need Dr. It was no accident that the first antislave society in the world was organized in Philadelphia in All the revolutionary leaders became aware of the excruciating contradiction between their revolution on behalf of liberty and American slavery.
Washington was no exception. As a civic-minded southern planter deeply immersed in his society and its culture, he held views on slavery before the Revolution that were indistinguishable from those of his fellow Virginia planters. As he sought to increase the wealth and productivity of Mount Vernon, he bought more and more slaves, selling some only on rare occasions.
By he had over a hundred slaves on his plantation. Although he was a good master, constantly concerned with the health and welfare of his slaves, he did not agonize over his holding human beings in bondage. When he criticized the institution, as he did on several occasions prior to the Revolution, he did so because he believed that slavery made his workers inefficient and lazy, not that it was immoral or inhumane.
In he endorsed the Fairfax Resolves, which included a recommendation that no more slaves should be imported into the British colonies. Many Virginians wanted to end the slave trade because they had more slaves than they knew what to do with. Washington, however, was at the time purchasing additional slaves from the West Indies.
When Washington became commander in chief of the Continental army, he was forced by military circumstances to change his original view that blacks not become soldiers. Finding African Americans among the New England troops in was an eye-opening experience for him, and he began advocating the recruitment of free blacks into the Continental army.
In he allowed Rhode Islanders to raise an all-black regiment of soldiers, and in he cautiously approved a plan to grant slaves their freedom in return for military service.
Since he understood only too well the deeply rooted fears and prejudices of his fellow southerners, he was not surprised when the plan failed. Still, through the years of the war Washington had led a racially integrated army composed of as many as five thousand African American soldiers. Although as commander in chief he did not speak out publicly against slavery, he was slowly and privately rethinking the issue of black bondage.
Reluctant as he was to confront the society and culture in which he had to live, he said nothing publicly against slavery. But privately he vowed in not to purchase any more slaves; at the time he had over two hundred, nearly half of whom were too young or too old to work. Not only did the difficulty of translating his immense landholdings into ready cash stymie his efforts to liberate his slaves, but the fact that a majority of his slaves, who now numbered close to three hundred, did not belong to him but were dower slaves who belonged to Martha and her heirs complicated matters.
In the summer of , six months before his death, he decided to deal with the problem as best he could from beyond the grave. He drew up a new will, composed secretly in his own hand, probably because what he wanted to do with his slaves was opposed by his neighbors, his family, and perhaps even Martha.
This will is one of the most important documents he ever wrote. But he did not just throw his slaves out into the world.
However the country, or at least the southern portion of it, was not yet ready for the message it contained. His legacy regarding emancipation died aborning. That was not true of another bequest that Washington had earlier left to the nation. In Washington, consummate actor that he was, made his most theatrical gesture, his most moral mark, and the results were monumental.
The greatest act of his life, the one that made him internationally famous, was his resignation as commander in chief of the American forces.
This act, together with his circular letter to the states in which he promised his retirement, was what he called his legacy to his countrymen. No American leader has ever left a more important legacy.
Following the signing of the peace treaty and British recognition of American independence, Washington stunned the world when he surrendered his sword to the Congress on December 23, , and retired to his farm at Mount Vernon. As Garry Wills has shown, this was a highly symbolic act, a very self-conscious and unconditional withdrawal from the world of politics.
His retirement from power had a profound effect everywhere in the Western world. Cromwell, William of Orange, Marlborough—all had sought political rewards commensurate with their military achievements. Though it was widely believed that Washington could have become king or dictator, he wanted nothing of the kind. It filled them with awe. Tis a Conduct so novel, so unconceivable to People, who, far from giving up powers they possess, are willing to convulse the empire to acquire more.
He was well aware of the effect his resignation would have. His reputation in the s as a great classical hero was international, and it was virtually unrivaled. Washington was a living embodiment of all the classical republican virtue the age was eagerly striving to recover. Despite his outward modesty, Washington realized he was an extraordinary man, and he was not ashamed of it.
He lived in an era when distinctions of social rank were still accepted. He took for granted the differences between him and more ordinary men. When he could not take those differences for granted, he cultivated them. He used his natural reticence to reinforce the image of a stern and forbidding classical hero. His aloofness was notorious, and he worked at it.
Stuart need never feel the need of forgetting who he is, or who General Washington is. He spent the rest of his life guarding and protecting his reputation and worrying about it. He believed Franklin made a mistake going back into public life in Pennsylvania in the s.
But his contemporaries understood. All gentlemen tried scrupulously to guard their reputations, which is what they meant by their honor. Honor was the esteem in which they were held, and they prized it. To have honor across space and time was to have fame, and fame was what the founders were after, Washington above all.
Naturally, having achieved what all his fellow revolutionaries still anxiously sought, he was reluctant to risk it.
Many of his actions after can be understood only in terms of this deep concern for his reputation as a virtuous leader. He was constantly on guard and very sensitive to any criticism. Jefferson said no one was more sensitive. Washington judged all his actions by what people might think of them. This sometimes makes him seem silly to modern minds, but not to those of the eighteenth century. The reality was not enough; he had to appear virtuous. He was obsessed that he not seem base, mean, avaricious, or unduly ambitious.
In he welcomed the formation of the Order of the Cincinnati and agreed to be its first president. Nothing was dearer to him than this fraternity of retired revolutionary army offi- 44 r e vo l u t i o n a r y c h a r ac t e r s cers, until a great popular outcry was raised against it. Washington was bewildered and shaken, and he appealed to his friends for advice. Jefferson got Washington to put pressure on the order to reform itself and eliminate its hereditary character by appealing to the one argument that Washington could not resist: that his leadership of this aristocratic society would tarnish his reputation for classical virtue.
In the winter of —85 Washington was led into temptation once again, and it was agony. The Virginia Assembly presented him with shares in the James River and Potomac canal companies in recognition of his services to the state and the cause of canal building.
What should he do? He did not believe he could accept the shares. Yet he believed passionately in what the canal companies were doing and had long dreamed of making a fortune from such canals. Would not his reputation for virtue be harmed? The story would be comic if Washington had not been so deadly earnest.
This was no ordinary display of scruples such as government officials today show over a conflict of interest; in and Washington was not even holding public office. So Washington gave them away to the college that eventually became Washington and Lee.
Washington suffered even more anguish over the decision to attend the Philadelphia Convention in Many believed that his presence was absolutely necessary for the effectiveness of the convention, but the situation was tricky.
How would his motives be viewed? If he attended, would he be thought to have violated his pledge to withdraw from public life? Should he squander his reputation on something that might not work? This would be a disagreeable circumstance for any one of them to be in; but more particularly so for a person in my situation. What finally convinced Washington to attend the convention was the fear that people might think he wanted the federal government to fail so that he could then manage a military takeover.
Nothing but the critical situation of his country would have induced him to so hazardous a conduct. Although the convention usually turned itself into a committee of the whole, meaning that Washington did not have to preside over the debates, he apparently said very little during its deliberations. Perhaps he recognized that anything he said or proposed would stymie debate since no one would dare contest him.
Only at the very end of the convention did he speak out in favor of reducing the minimum number of people for a 46 r e vo l u t i o n a r y c h a r ac t e r s representative from forty to thirty thousand. It was his way of saying to his colleagues that he favored the Constitution. His backing of the Constitution was certainly essential to its eventual ratification.
He wrote letters to friends and let his enthusiasm for the new federal government be known. Once he had identified himself publicly with the new Constitution he became very anxious to have it accepted.
Its ratification was a kind of ratification of himself. After the Constitution was established, Washington still believed he could retire to the domestic tranquillity of Mount Vernon. But everyone else assumed that he would become president of the new national government. Once again this widespread expectation aroused all his old anxieties about his reputation. He had promised the country that he would permanently retire from public life. He had so much to lose and so little to gain.
They rarely doubted that Washington was trying always to act in a disinterested way. His anxious queries about how would this or that look to the world, his hesitations about serving or not serving, his expressions of scruples and qualms—all were part of his strenuous effort to live up to the classical idea of a virtuous leader.
He had never accepted a salary as commander in chief of the Continental army, and although the Congress made him accept a salary as president, he wanted it understood that he had tried to refuse it. He seemed to epitomize public virtue. She admired his restraint and trusted him. As the first president he faced circumstances that no other president has ever faced, and he was 48 r e vo l u t i o n a r y c h a r ac t e r s the only person in the country who could have dealt with them.
The American people had been reared in monarchy and had never known a distant chief executive who had not been a king. Somehow Washington had to satisfy their deeply rooted yearnings for patriarchal leadership while creating a new elective republican president.
Since the United States had never had an elected chief executive like the one created by the Constitution of , Washington had virtually no precedents to follow. That he did all this in the midst of a revolutionary world at war and did it without sacrificing the republican character of the country is an astonishing achievement, one that the achievements of no other president, however great, can begin to match.
There is no doubt that many American leaders in thought that there had been too much democracy in the states in the s and that this excessive democracy needed to be curbed without doing violence to republican principles. That had been one of the reasons behind the making of the new Constitution. All the Federalists, as the supporters of the new Constitution called themselves, knew that if democracy were to be curbed, then what was needed in the new government was more power. And power in eighteenth-century Anglo-American political theory essentially meant monarchy.
According to the conventional conception of an eighteenth-century balanced or mixed constitution, too much democracy required the counterbalancing of some more monarchy. But by the Federalists knew only too well that they could not speak openly about the need for more monarchy in the government. In fact Hamilton and other high-toned Federalists, who in the s clung to the name of the supporters of the Constitution, wanted to create a centralized fiscal-military state that would eventually rival the great monarchical powers of Europe on their own terms.
Yet they knew that whatever aspects of monarchy they hoped to bring back into America would have to be placed within a republican framework. Perhaps, as has been suggested, the Federalists really intended to create another Augustan age, but they never openly declared this to be their aim.
If some monarchical power were to be instilled in the new system, the energetic center of that power would be the presidency. For that reason it was the office of the president that made many Americans most suspicious of the new government. The executive or chief magistracy was after all the traditional source of tyranny and, as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, the source in America from which monarchy would naturally emerge.
Although Americans were used to congresses, an independent presidency was a new office for them. A single strong national executive was bound to remind them of the king they had just cast off. The delegates knew only too well what such an office implied. Indeed, Washington was the only American in who possessed the dignity, patience, restraint, and reputation for republican virtue that the 50 r e vo l u t i o n a r y c h a r ac t e r s untried but potentially powerful office of the presidency needed at the outset.
Many people, including Jefferson, expected that Washington might be president for life, that he would be a kind of elective monarch.
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