The Farewell - George Washington

I've been away from this blog a considerable time. An election has come and gone (though it seemed to most an agonizingly long and expensive election); a president has been re-elected for a second term. Barack Obama grew tearful at the thought of those who had worked so hard for him in his "last" campaign.

The fact that an American president only has two terms was a precedent set by George Washington. In this section of Joseph Ellis's historical sketches, he focuses on Washington's famous Farewell Address, the letter to the American people in which Washington declared he was retiring and would not run for a third term. 

Ellis declares that Washington's "Farewell Address achieved transcendental status, ranking alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address as a seminal statement of America's abiding principles."  (That may have been true twenty or thirty years ago, but in the American Literature anthology I taught from it no longer puts in an appearance.) 

What were the "abiding principles" expressed in Washington's "letter"?  (It was never really an address, never spoken publicly; instead it was, by design, a letter published in newspapers.)  According to Ellis: 

Washington devoted several paragraphs to the need for national unity. He denounced excessive partisanship, most especially when it took the form of political parties pursuing a vested ideological agenda or sectional interest groups oblivious to the advantages of cooperation.  The rest of the address was devoted to foreign policy, calling for strict American neutrality and diplomatic independence from the tangled affairs of Europe.

His admonishment against "excessive partisanship" has obviously not been heeded, though everyone still pays lip service to it.  And his call for "strict American neutrality" seems woefully outdated, though there are still those who call for it.

What was important about the Farewell Address was not just its admonitions but the simple fact that it announced Washington's retirement.  "By resigning voluntarily," Ellis states, "he was declaring that his deepest allegiances, like those of his critics, were thoroughly republican."  In other words, "Washington was making his ultimate statement as America's first and last benevolent monarch."