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It is not surprising,
therefore, as civil war loomed on the horizon, that both North and South would
claim Washington as their patron of democracy. After all, no one then stood
higher in the public's estimation. Historian Joseph J. Ellis wrote, "If
there was a Mount Olympus in the new American republic, all the lesser gods
were gathered farther down the slope" from Washington. As historian Anne
Sarah Rubin noted: "Far and away the most often invoked icon of the
Revolutionary War period was George Washington. Throughout the antebellum
period he was beloved by Northerners and Southerners alike and by 1861 had
come to symbolize all that was virtuous and heroic about the American
Revolution."
Abraham Lincoln invoked the
first president as the storm clouds of war gathered. In his Cooper Union
speech in New York City on February 27, 1860, Lincoln rejected Southern
charges that the young Republican Party was merely a sectional party,
something that Washington had warned against in his 1796 Farewell Address.
Lincoln said: "Could Washington himself speak, would he cast the blame of
sectionalism upon us, who sustain his policy, or upon you who repudiate it? We
respect the warning of Washington, and we commend it to you, together with his
example pointing to the right application of it." Noting Washington's
strong commitment to the Union, Lincoln criticized those who made
"invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said,
and undo what Washington did." Upon leaving Springfield, Ill., for the
last time on February 11, 1861, the president-elect said, "I now leave,
not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater
than that which rested upon Washington."
Southerners, too, claimed
Washington as their guiding spirit. A member of the Georgia delegation to the
1861 Confederate constitutional convention in Montgomery, Ala., even proposed
that the new Southern nation be named the "Republic of Washington,"
and many other Southern leaders invoked Washington's name for political
advantage.
Jefferson Davis was sworn in
as the permanent president of the Confederate States of America on
Washington's birthday in 1861. In his inaugural address, Davis said, "On
this the birthday of the man most identified with the establishment of
American independence, and beneath the monument erected to commemorate his
heroic virtues and those of his compatriots, we have assembled to usher into
existence the permanent government of the Confederate States." The
Confederacy, he vowed, would "perpetuate the principles of our
Revolutionary fathers. The day, the memory, and the purpose seem fitly
associated....We are in arms to renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to
the holy cause of constitutional liberty." Although neither Davis nor
Confederate General Robert E. Lee ever claimed the title for themselves, they
were often called "second Washingtons."
At first glance, it appears
obvious that the Confederate States of America would seize upon the figure of
Washington as a patriotic symbol, putting him on its great seal and holding
him up as an icon of secession. He was a Virginian, after all, beloved
throughout the country. He had owned slaves. He had led armies in rebellion
against a remote, tyrannical power. Many Southerners believed that they were
fighting a second American Revolution; some said that had Washington been
alive in 1861, he would have supported the Confederacy.
A closer look, however, casts
a dark shadow over that assertion.
Washington was firmly, indeed
unshakably, for the Union. On June 8, 1783, just two years after his triumph
at Yorktown, Washington sent a message to all the state governors, urging them
to downplay local jealousies in order to strengthen the Union. He wrote:
[I]t is indispensable to
the happiness of the individual states, that there should be lodged
somewhere, a supreme power to regulate and govern the general concerns of
the...republic, without which the Union cannot be of long duration. That
there must be a faithful and pointed compliance on the part of every state,
with the...proposals and demands of Congress, or the most fatal consequences
will ensue; that whatever measures have a tendency to dissolve the Union, or
contribute to violate or lessen the sovereign authority, ought to be
considered as hostile to the liberty and independency of America, and the
authors of them treated accordingly....[W]ithout an entire conformity to the
spirit of the Union, we cannot exist as an independent power.
Three years later, with the
need for a stronger federal government even more apparent, Washington wrote to
future Chief Justice of the United States John Jay in August 1786, "I do
not conceive we can exist long as a nation without having lodged somewhere a
power, which will pervade the whole Union in as energetic a manner, as the
authority of the state governments extends over the several states."
In late 1786, the inhabitants
of western Massachusetts took up arms against monetary policies imposed by
their own elected government. Historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote that Washington
"was outraged by the very idea of rebellion against a republican
government...in the years that followed the winning of independence, as the
power of Congress continued to wane, his great worry had been that the failure
of the states to support the union would `destroy our national character, and
render us as contemptible in the eyes of Europe as we have it in our power to
be respectable.'" The difficulties the state and national governments
faced in putting down Shays' Rebellion highlighted the weaknesses of the
Articles of Confederation and eventually led to the convening of the
Constitutional Convention and the strengthening of the federal government.
After the Constitutional
Convention had done its work and adjourned, Washington wrote in November 1787,
"[T]here are characters who prefer disunion, or separate confederacies to
the general government which is offered to them...but as nothing in my
conception is more to be deprecated than disunion, or these separate
confederacies, my voice, as far as it will extend, shall be offered in favor
of [the Union]." Morgan wrote that once Washington was president, he
"identified the national interest so closely and so personally with the
new national government that he could scarcely recognize the validity of any
kind of dissent...[He] had borne the brunt of a war that was needlessly
prolonged because of the supineness of the central government. He had watched
the nation approach the point of dissolution in the 1780s, a development that
threatened everything he had fought for." Washington wrote to the Irish
patriot Sir Edward Newenham in 1788 that, under the new Constitution, the
United States would be "nearer to perfection than any government hitherto
instituted among men." He agreed with Jefferson, who confided to him in
1794, "I can scarcely contemplate a more incalculable evil than the
breaking of the union into two or more parts."
As president, Washington was
true to his principles. To put down the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 -- the first
major insurrection against the authority of the United States -- he used
military force, demanding that federal law be obeyed. The dissolution of the
Union, he wrote at the time, would be "the most dreadful of all
calamities." He warned, "If the laws are to be trampled upon with
impunity, and a minority (a small one too) is to dictate to the majority,
there is an end put, at one stroke, to republican government." Calling on
the militias of Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania to stop the
armed rebellion against a federal excise tax on distilled spirits, the
president announced that the military's first duty is "to combat and
subdue all who may be found in arms in opposition to the national will and
authority."
Once the rebellion was almost
bloodlessly suppressed, he wrote to his friend and Revolutionary leader Edmund
Pendleton: "I hope, and believe, that the spirit of anarchy in the
western counties of [Pennsylvania], to quell which the force of the Union was
called for, is entirely subdued...the spirit with which the militia turned
out, in support of the Constitution, and the laws of our country...does them
immortal honor. [R]epublicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination:
on the contrary...under no form of government will laws be better supported,
liberty and property better secured, nor happiness be more effectually
dispensed to mankind." He also wrote in May 1797 to Revolutionary War
general William Heath that Americans should be "indignant at every
attempt [of those who] should presume to sow the seeds of distrust or disunion
among ourselves."
Washington would have
denounced the view of many Confederate leaders that the Union was merely a
temporary, convenient alliance between the states. He was never in any doubt
that the Union was intended to be permanent, despite the Constitution's
silence on the point. In 1783 Washington wrote that the first thing
"essential to the well being, I may even venture to say, to the existence
of the United States as an independent power [is] an indissoluble Union of the
states under one Federal head." After the Whiskey Rebellion, he wrote of
his satisfaction that "my fellow citizens understand the true principles
of government and liberty [and appreciate] their inseparable union." As
new states and their citizens joined the Union, Washington said the nation
should bind "those people to us by a chain which never can be
broken."
In his Farewell Address of
September 1796, Washington wrote: "To the efficacy and permanency of your
Union, a government for the whole is indispensable. No alliances however
strict between the parts can be an adequate substitute. They must inevitably
experience the infractions and interruptions which all alliances in all times
have experienced...[the federal government] has a just claim to your
confidence and your support. Respect for its authority, compliance with its
laws, acquiescence in its measures, are duties enjoined by the fundamental
maxims of true liberty...the Constitution which at any time exists, 'till
changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly
obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to
establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the
established government." In the address, his last major statement to the
nation, Washington expressed his hope that "Union and brotherly affection
may be sacredly maintained."
Given his strong support for
the Union, it follows that George Washington was no zealot in defense of
states' rights; far from it. In 1777, during the Revolution, he was criticized
by some members of the Continental Congress for permitting New Jersey citizens
who had been forced to swear allegiance to the British Crown to expunge this
by swearing allegiance, not to their state, but to the United States. After
the Revolution he saw, under the weak Articles of Confederation that then
guided the relationship between the states, the dangers of states' preeminence
over the federal government -- as when New York, with impunity, negotiated a
private treaty with the Indians to its own advantage.
In a July 1783 letter to
historian and educator the Rev. William Gordon, Washington wrote:
It now rests with
[Congress]...to make this country great, happy, and respectable; or to sink
it into littleness; worse perhaps, into anarchy and confusion; for certain I
am, that unless adequate powers are given to Congress for the general
purposes of the Federal Union that we shall soon moulder into dust and
become contemptible....We are known by no other character among nations than
as the United States; Massachusetts or Virginia is no better defined, nor
any more thought of by foreign powers than the County of Worcester in
Massachusetts...or Glouster County in Virginia...yet these counties, with as
much propriety might oppose themselves to the laws of the state in [which]
they are, as an individual state can oppose itself to the Federal
Government, by which it is, or ought to be bound. [When counties] come in
contact with the general interests of the state, when superior
considerations preponderate in favor of the whole, their voices should be
heard no more; so it should be with individual states when compared to the
Union....I think the blood and treasure which has been spent [in building
the nation] has been lavished to little purpose, unless we can be better
cemented; and that is not to be effected while so little attention is paid
to the recommendations of the sovereign power.
Washington concluded, "[W]hen
the band of Union gets once broken, every thing ruinous to our future
prospects is to be apprehended; the best that can come of it, in my humble
opinion, is that we shall sink into obscurity, unless our civil broils should
keep us in remembrance and fill the page of history with the direful
consequences of them."
Following the Revolution and
to the end of his days, in fact, Washington was concerned that disunion would
make America the plaything of European powers. Given the diplomatic
flirtations of Great Britain and France with the Confederacy, this was quite
prescient. Washington wrote in 1783, "[T]he United States came into
existence as a nation, and if their citizens should not be completely free and
happy, the fault will be entirely their own...it is in their choice, and
depends upon their conduct, whether they will be respectable and prosperous,
or contemptible and miserable as a nation...[it would be an] ill-fated moment
for relaxing the powers of the Union, annihilating the cement of the
confederation, and exposing us to become the sport of European politics, which
may play one state against another to prevent their growing importance, and to
serve their own interested purposes." He insisted, "It is only in
our united character...that our independence is acknowledged, that our power
can be regarded, and our credit supported among foreign nations."
George Washington did not
share the view of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Thomas J.
"Stonewall" Jackson and other leading Southerners that he was a
citizen of his state first, and of the United States second. It was Henry
"Light-Horse Harry" Lee, Robert E. Lee's own father, who most
famously eulogized Washington as "a citizen, first in war, first in
peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." This was part of a
memorial resolution that Lee introduced not in the Virginia legislature, but
in the U.S. House of Representatives. Virginia was not Washington's
"country." He believed that love of country meant "giving every
possible support and cement to the Union," and wrote in 1796:
"Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a
right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to
you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism
more than any appellation derived from local discriminations."
Washington's last will and
testament began with what historian Richard Norton Smith called "an
unmistakable political statement." Washington described himself as
"a citizen of the United States, and lately President of the same."
Smith observed, "Not [as] `a citizen of Virginia,' not as a Southerner or
a Tidewater aristocrat, but as an American, Washington chose to round out his
life with the creed to which he had devoted himself for forty years."
Pulitzer Prize--winning historian Joseph J. Ellis wrote that the "core of
Washington's vision" was the Union, and suggested that "[a]
reincarnated Washington...would have gone with Lincoln and the Union in
1861." Another Pulitzer Prize--winning historian, Garry Wills, agreed,
"He was as ardent a proponent of union as President Lincoln would be, and
he had in some measure foreseen that this would be the great trial of the
republic."
One states' rights issue in
particular bothered Washington. Even though he and his wife, Martha, owned and
oversaw the work of more than 250 slaves at Mount Vernon, he was not an
enthusiastic supporter of the "peculiar institution." Historian
Roger Bruns noted: "As he grew older, he became increasingly aware that
it was immoral and unjust. Long before the Revolution, Washington had taken
the unusual position of refusing to sell any of his slaves or to allow slave
families to be separated." Although at the beginning of the Revolution he
opposed using black soldiers, he eventually worked with Congress to allow
"free Negroes" to join the Continental Army and even introduced
measures to permit enslaved blacks to serve in return for their freedom.
After the Revolution,
Washington told an English friend, "I clearly foresee that nothing but
the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union by
consolidating it in a common bond of principle." He said soberly that if
the South were ever to try to divide the nation over the issue of slavery, he
would "move and be of the northern" part. He wrote to his friend
John Francis Mercer on September 9, 1786, "I never mean...to possess
another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan
adopted, by which slavery in this country may be abolished by slow, sure,
& imperceptible degrees." Ten years later, he wrote to Robert Morris,
a major financier of the Revolution, "There is not a man living who
wishes more sincerely than I do to see some plan adopted for the gradual
abolition" of slavery. As president, Washington signed legislation
enforcing the prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern Territory, and wrote
to the Marquis de Lafayette that he considered it a wise measure.
Throughout his life, he was
known as a benign slaveholder (although admittedly, to 21st-century eyes,
that's virtually an oxymoron). Washington, alone among the slaveholding
framers of the Constitution, included provisions in his will for the freeing
of his personal slaves, adding that, prior to their emancipation, Mount Vernon
slaves should "be taught to read and write, and brought up to some useful
occupation." At the time, Virginia law prohibited teaching slaves to
read.
"Deo Vindice" was
the motto that appeared below the mounted figure of Washington on the Great
Seal of the Confederacy: "God Vindicates." Whether or not God
vindicates the Confederacy is a question probably best left to theologians and
other thinkers and philosophers. It is very clear, however, that had he lived
to see it, Washington would not have supported the Confederacy. His principles
were timeless, his commitment to the Union was absolute, his opposition to
slavery had grown strong and his personality was such that he surely would
never have been swayed by the secessionist hysteria of the early 1860s. No one
worked harder or did more than George Washington to see that the United States
would become -- and remain -- one nation, indivisible.
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Abraham Lincoln at the
time of his 1860 Cooper Union address in New York City where he
claimed Washington for the Union side.
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At his 1861 inauguration, held symbolically on Washington's
birthday, Jefferson
Davis likewise claimed Washington for the Confederate cause.
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George Washington is rightly
called the "Father of our Country." Born on February 22, 1732, near
Wakefield, Virginia, he was a planter, surveyor, soldier in the French and
Indian War, a politician in Virginia's House of Burgesses and member of the
first and second Continental Congresses. A natural leader with extensive
military training, he served as commander in chief of the Continental Army
through eight hard years of war, sometimes holding his army together by sheer
force of will. He rejected a crown, which many of his officers would gladly
have given him. He presided over the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and, of
course, was the first president of the United States, from 1789 to 1797. He
died in peaceful retirement at Mount Vernon on December 14, 1799. More than
any other individual, Washington was responsible for securing the independence
of the United States, and for establishing a government that would ensure its
survival and success. Its capital rightly bears his name.