Words Worth Remembering: Washington’s Warning of the Love of Power
George Washington was once again in the spotlight. It was nothing new. Years earlier, in late December 1783, George III, once Washington’s king, described the Virginian as the greatest man living for having resigned his military commission after the Continental Army’s victory in the Revolutionary War, rather than becoming an American Caesar.
Washington’s deepest desire was to retire to Mount Vernon, but the critical post-war period—a period of anarchy and confusion, of constitutional crisis and reform efforts culminating in the Federal Convention—brought him back into the spotlight, from which he would not return until 1797.
It was a raw morning in late September 1796. In the Northeast, the mornings were cool, the cobblestones damp, woodsmoke filled the air, and the thudding of tankards, the scraping of boots, and the conversations of ordinary citizens echoed through coffeehouses and taverns.
A literate person likely took hold of the large folio sheets that made up Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, dated September 21, 1796, reading it to interested audiences. This person would read “The Address of Gen. Washington to the People of America on His Declining the Presidency of the United States.”
The political atmosphere in 1796 was not one of sentimental nostalgia or romantic certainty, but an intense mixture of dread and optimism, of fear and hope. A new presidential election was underway, revealing stark differences between two respected founders: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. New parties—the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans—were hardening. Relations with Britain and France were volatile, with the latter steaming toward a revolution of its own.
Many citizens had assumed, indeed hoped, that Washington would serve as president the remainder of his days, as there was yet no constitutional restriction on the number of terms.
The man read, slowly and steadily, until the room seemed to narrow around the words midway through the address—“It is important… that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another.
“The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one and thus create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.”
As street carts likely rattled over stone, inside this tavern, inside homes, inside shops, inside wherever the address was read, the republic felt suddenly older, and suddenly more fragile. Washington was stepping down, not by constitutional obligation but by choice, just as he had in 1783, leaving the nation to face new, uncertain days on its own, without his steady presence.
It was at once a shock, a warning, and a civic sermon wrapped in a folio for all of America to read. As Adams and Jefferson clashed in a ferocious, near-friendship-ending political race for the presidency, with two visions of the future as different as the candidates themselves, Washington was focused on leading by example—resisting, once again, the opportunity to seize power for himself.
As had been the case for as long as anyone could remember, even before independence, it was central to Anglo-American political theory to be watchful of power, a corrupting thing always grasping at more—and at the expense of liberty. From Algernon Sidney to John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, to the Adams cousins, English (then American) liberty was the pride of the New World, the thing most cherished, the preservation of which was the first and highest duty of any government.
Washington therefore advised: “The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositories and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern, some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them.”
In closing his address, Washington hoped to enjoy civilian life yet again, “in the midst of my fellow citizens, [and] the benign influence of good laws under a free government—the ever favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.”
Today, as ever, the wisdom of George Washington has much to teach us. It is up to us whether we will listen, whether we will finally demand that the presidency return to where it ought to have always been: the seat of service and power, occupied only by the humble and the patriotic.