Washington’s Farewell Address, Part I: Context

            While it may not be as well-known as the Declaration of Independence, George Washington’s Farewell Address, published in September, 1796, remains a very important and very relevant document. Intended to announce his retirement from professional politics after 20 years of service to the government(s) of the United States, it provides a window into some of the dangers that the first President believed his nation was due to face. Many of the issues that Washington discussed continue to be as significant now as they were at the end of the 18^th century; the dangers of excessive borrowing, partisan conflict, entangling foreign alliances, free trade, and the erosion of the separation of powers. At the same time the Address also provides insight into Washington himself, his take on public service, and his view of the role of politics and politicians in his country’s national life.

            I’d like to discuss both of these aspects of the Address; the ways in which the things it discusses continue to be relevant, and what it says about Washington as a political actor. But before I do either I want to take a moment to talk about why Washington felt compelled to put pen to paper, and perhaps more importantly why he felt the need to retire at all. 

            You see, by 1796 Washington was an extraordinarily popular man. He hadn’t always been, of course. Early in the course of the Revolutionary War, when his defeats outweighed his victories, there was talk among members of Congress and his fellow officers of replacing him with someone more experienced. And there were more experienced officers serving in the Continental Army at that time like Charles Lee and Horatio Gates (veterans of the British Army) who were perhaps also more skilled tacticians. But Washington persevered, as did his advocates in Congress, and thanks to his administrative skill, eye for talent and careful judgement he was able to hold the British to a standstill and prolong the war long enough for there to be a negotiated peace.

            It was during the years of his tenure as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army that Washington began the process of building his reputation. Unlike the members of Congress, who directed the business of the nation but were not very visible, Washington occupied a very public-facing position. In the course of his duties he travelled across the Northern and Southern states, coordinated with Governors and legislatures to ensure that the Army was well-manned and supplied, and appointed a great number of officers (who themselves came from across the United States) to see to the war effort’s day-to-day demands. In the process he became one of the few men in America that was known from one end of the Union to the other. In particular, he became very popular among the enlisted men and junior officers, many of whom looked on him as a father figure and became some of his most steadfast supporters.

            When, in March, 1783, members of the Continental Army nearly mutinied over Congress’s inability to reimburse them for their service, it was Washington’s impassioned speech that put a stop to any serious talk of rebellion. And when, in December of the same year, it came time for him to resign his commission he did so without hesitation.

            I’d like to stop for a moment and address this point. In December, 1783 there was virtually no single person in the United States who held more definite power than George Washington. He commanded a veteran fighting force whose men and officers adored him, and enjoyed the support and admiration of people from across the country. If he so desired it, I do believe, he could have marched on Congress, turned them out and declared himself King of America. But he didn’t. Feeling that his duty had been fulfilled, he turned in his commission and rode home to Virginia with the intention of living out the rest of his life in peaceful retirement. In a time when men who wielded power gave it up only along with their lives, this was a truly astonishing thing to do.  

The events of 1783 greatly enhanced Washington’s standing as a man of honesty and integrity, and when it came time to decide who should stand for election as the first president under the newly ratified constitution there was little need for debate. Though he might have preferred to retire again to his plantation at Mount Vernon, Washington bowed to the wishes of his countrymen and was unanimously elected in 1789. He did so again in 1792, once more under protest and in fact it was during the lead-up to his second election that Washington originally penned large sections of the Address. At that time in the early 1790s the United States had become increasingly divided into rival political camps, defined by their support for a strong federal government and close ties with Britain, or strong state governments and close ties with France. Never a man who lusted after power, he was convinced to serve a second term by the nearly unanimous affirmation of his colleagues and subordinates that only he was capable of uniting the factions and keeping the nation from tearing itself apart.

Over the course of his second term Washington was challenged on both the foreign and domestic fronts, and though his personal popularity was not significantly damaged, he found the public agitation that resulted exhausting. In 1794 he signed the Jay Treaty (which normalised relations with Great Britain after a period of tension), creating an uproar among the pro-French citizens of the United States. His subsequent desire to keep the United States neutral in the emerging conflict between Britain and France (whose recent revolution had left them with a republican government) ultimately angered supporters of both nations. Around the same time, in reaction to the imposition of an excise tax on whiskey, a rebellion broke out among famers and distillers in Western Pennsylvania. Aiming to settle the insurrection before it gained significant momentum, Washington rode at the head of 13,000 militia troops who arrived in the frontier region not long after the rebels disbursed. Though his government emerged victorious in its effort to quash the Whiskey Rebellion, Washington found the effort required to administer an increasingly divided nation personally draining. With another election on the horizon in 1796, and the temper of public opinion having quieted somewhat, Washington made it clear that he was not prepared to run for a third term.

The Declaration of Independence, Part IV: Fundamental Rights

All that’s left to discuss is the one part of the Declaration that most people are already familiar with. I mean, of course, this statement:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

            I would argue that few things are more central to America’s sense of self than these words and the ideas they embody. For that reason I will now proceed to pull them apart in what I’m sure will seem to some people to be a most unflattering way.

Ahem.

To begin, I think it’s important to understand what Jefferson meant by the phrase, “all men are created equal.” If you’ve been paying attention, and you remember what was said in the previous post, you’ll no doubt recognize this as a very Lockean idea. Locke (roughly) said that in a state of nature all men enjoy the same freedom, and that effectively every man is a king unto himself. It follows then that upon coming into existence, every man is, of essence, the same. This sameness is not in regard of height, weight, intellectual capacity or shoe size, but refers to a fundamental, moral quality. This, I think, Jefferson agreed with.

What he did not mean, and this is important, is that all men remain equal after they are born and until they die. Whatever Jefferson’s beliefs were, and they can be difficult to pin down, one of them was not that a peasant and a king are equal to each other in all things. One lives in a palace and the other in a hut. One has advisors and ministers, and the other has oxen and cows. One enjoys a great number of privileges, due to his wealth, and the other enjoys very little at all, due to his poverty. Jefferson, who was a wealthy landowner with hundreds of slaves at his disposal, and who over the course of his life developed a taste for fine wine and fine art, knew this as well as any man. After all, he was closer to being a king than a peasant, was aware of the advantages he enjoyed, and would have been loathe to give them up. And yet he claimed that both a king and a peasant are entitled to life, entitled to liberty, and entitled to pursue whatever it is that makes them happy.

And therein lies the other radical component of that memorable phrase, that all men have a right to live, to be free, and to pursue happiness. I don’t know that I can convey what a fundamentally earth-shaking notion that was in 1776. That isn’t to say that it had never been thought of before; Locke had written in 1689 that all men had a right to life, liberty and property. But then Locke, for all his importance as a political philosopher, never had the opportunity to build a state from the ground up. His theories would remain theories, at least in his lifetime. Jefferson and his colleagues, however, were engaged in just such an exercise. True, the state that they were creating was in many ways grounded in the English concept of rights and responsibilities, but at its core was a revolutionary take on the concept human freedom.

No state in existence in the late 18^th century, and perhaps no state in history, had ever been founded on the notion that all people have the right to live, be free, and be happy. Kingdoms, empires, even the republics of Rome and Greece, valued order, balance, stability, and discipline. In states like these different social orders were a fact of life, a consequence of divisions of wealth, ability and birth. The purpose of government was thus to maintain equilibrium. While it was preferred in most cases that the social orders look kindly on each other, in practice this was not often so. Indeed, it would have been pleasant to imagine that George III cared for the life or liberty of his subjects; in truth I’m sure he was concerned mainly with their ability to pay taxes. And as to their happiness, how could any government guarantee something so abstract? And it was not just happiness itself that all people were supposedly entitled to, but the right to determine and pursue happiness for themselves.

But Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and their cohorts believed that any government that could be considered legitimate must not only care about the life, liberty, and happiness of the people, but must actively protect them. And so they began their Declaration of Independence, their announcement to the world of the birth of a new nation, by stating unequivocally that all men are created equal, and that all men have the rights. True, it was not law. It was something else; the founding principle of one of the most unusual, contradictory, baffling and exceptional nations ever to exist.         

            

-Applause break-

Now, before I wrap up I’d like to look at the last line of the Declaration. After having laid out their case, discussed the natural rights of man and made it very clear to King George that they were quite displeased with him, the revolutionaries concluded their press release by stating that, “For the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

I think it bears remembering that the men who affixed their signatures right below this statement were as privileged a group as you’d have been likely to find living and working in the Thirteen Colonies. They counted among their number a doctor and a clergyman, lawyers, merchants, statesmen and plantation owners. They had, on the whole, a great deal to lose. And yet they were willing to give up their wealth, their honor, and even their lives for this country of theirs that they had conjured into existence. And some of them did pay; they lost their fortunes, were imprisoned, or were worn down by the stress of the war effort and wasted away. But the point is, I think, that they were all willing.

I would not go so far as to say that modern politics should be such a make or break endeavour, or that American politicians should be made to take a similar pledge to uphold their principles and those of the republic. However, I do think that it is highly unfortunate that so many of them seem so terrified of doing what they feel is right if it means losing half a percentage point from their approval rating. There is an element of self-sacrifice that is increasingly absent from American political life. Public service seems no longer to be about service at all, but functions rather as a means of gathering wealth, or advantage, or power. And time and again the Founding Fathers are invoked; what they would think, and what they intended. I believe, rather than speculating as to Jefferson’s thoughts or Washington’s ideals, one should look no further than their own words. The results may surprise you. 

See for yourself: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence

The Declaration of Independence, Part III: Radical Rights

Though I've just spent a fair bit of time attempting to demonstrate that the Declaration is in many ways a conservative document, it certainly does contain some very important radical elements. In fact it’s these elements that have arguably kept the Declaration relevant almost 250 years after it was written, and changed the way that people across the world think about government and it purpose. Having said that, I think it’s important to understand exactly what some of these radical elements are, what they mean, and where they came from.

In many ways the Declaration is predicated on the idea that all sovereign peoples have the right to overthrow any government which they feel has become destructive or abusive of their rights. Indeed, without this “right of revolution” the Declaration itself wouldn't make much sense. However, the idea that a people possess the ability to “dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them” was not, in 1776, unique. Though Jefferson’s use of it as a justification for an ongoing rebellion were certainly novel, the right of revolution was actually a staple of 18^th century Enlightenment (and particularly English) philosophy.

Specifically, the right of a people to revolt when treated unjustly by their government was first articulated by philosopher John Locke in his 1689 publication, Two Treatises on Government. Locke wrote these treatises during a period in his life when his was in exile from England because of his opposition to the Catholic, absolutist King of England, James II. They weren't published, however, until after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which deposed James and installed in his place his daughter Mary and her husband William (who also happened to be a Dutch Prince, but that’s not important). Indeed, Locke claimed in the preface that he wanted to justify William’s ascension to the throne.

In the first of his treatises Locke described something called the “social contract” which he and other Enlightenment thinkers believed was basis of all states and governments throughout human history. In nature, Locke wrote, man enjoys complete freedom, but very little security. As a result, people tend to band together and form communities, to the mutual benefit of all (in theory). The unspoken social contract between people in these communities is that the common good, or common welfare, is the highest consideration. Because people enter into a social contract voluntarily for the purpose of protecting themselves and the things they possess, Locke claimed that they all retain a basic right to life, liberty, and property. When a government violates these rights, Locke described in his second treatise, it is guilty of violating the social contract. The people therefore have a right, and at times an obligation, to overthrow any government that is acting against the interests of the majority of its citizens and replace it with one that better serves their welfare.

These were, in 1689, very radical notions indeed. And while it is almost certainly true that Locke developed them before the Glorious Revolution took place, because his Two Treatises weren't published until after all was said and done it’s doubtful that the ideas they promoted were on the minds any of the revolutionaries in 1688 (at least not in a coherent form). Therefore the relationship between Locke, his theories and the revolution they were supposed to be justifying was largely academic. Like a scientist, Locke gathered his data (in this case from the political history of Western Europe), formed a hypothesis (the social contract), and having observed a particular event (the Glorious Revolution), had his hypothesis confirmed and published the results. Locke did not take part in the revolution himself, or significantly influence it, but merely anticipated it and commented on it.

Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was very much in the thick of his revolution. And since he was a man familiar with Enlightenment philosophy, and Locke in particular, it should come as no surprise that he saw in the situation he and his fellow colonists were facing almost exactly the scenario that Locke had described. When asked, along with some of his colleagues, to draft a justification for independence he invoked Locke’s right of revolution, putting into practice something that had previously existed only in theory. Specifically he wrote, after asserting that all men possess certain rights, that, “To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

  By invoking the principles laid out by John Locke almost a century earlier, Jefferson not only provided what was to many observers a backwater colonial tax revolt with a robust philosophical grounding, but he also popularized what had been until then a relatively obscure philosophical theory. This effectively instilled in the population of the newly-formed United States of America the belief that any government that did not serve their needs or attempted to restrict their freedoms was illegitimate. While Jefferson would no doubt have applauded the people’s increased vigilance, this state of affairs became problematic during the early history of the American republic (when the Constitution was young and untested), and has arguably remained a force in the American political consciousness to the present day. 

The Declaration of Independence, Part II: Traditional Rights

While we can admire the eloquence of Thomas Jefferson’s pen, and regard with awe his sweeping vision of the natural rights of human beings, I think that it is important to remember that the Declaration of Independence was meant to serve a very specific purpose. Though it has come to be regarded as a sort of statement on the philosophical foundations of the United States of America, it is also contains a very specific list of grievances, and uses language that is not quite as revolutionary as one might assume.

One thing that becomes apparent on first reading the Declaration is its preoccupation with the notion of rights. Now I don’t suppose this comes as much of a surprise. After all, wasn't the American Revolution really a battle over rights? Over who possessed them and by what authority? Thing is, though, the rights that the Declaration discusses can arguably be fit into two different categories, radical and conservative. 

The radical rights are the ones that come to mind first, I'm sure. The right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” is, after all, fundamental to the liberal-democratic view of the world which most of us in the West (or East or wherever) share. And what could have been more radical in the 18^th century than to say that all people possessed a right to liberty? Wasn't that the age of kings and emperors? Weren't governments in that era based on tradition, and order, and discipline?  

The answer, to all of these questions, is yes. Yes, it was a radical thing that Jefferson and his colleagues did when they asserted the “unalienable rights” of all human beings. And yes, the 18^th century was dominated by governments that valued precedent and stability over freedom and liberality. But the fact is that the Declaration gives over far more space to conservative rights, based in tradition and precedent, than radical ones. And even among his radical assertions, Jefferson drew on established, though untested, principles.

But perhaps I get ahead of myself. I’ll return to the radical elements of the Declaration in short order. For now, let’s discuss these conservative rights.    

Among the accusations that the Declaration levels at the British monarch, many claim that his actions or inactions violated some right or privilege traditionally enjoyed by the colonists. By Jefferson’s estimation it seems that George III wasn't guilty of violating abstract philosophical principles, but of breaking with the laws that had governed the Thirteen Colonies for over a century. Some of the accusations are fairly explicit, claiming that the king wished his American subjects to “relinquish the Right of Representation in the Legislature,” that he had invaded “the Rights of the People,” that he had attempted to subject the colonists to “a Jurisdiction foreign to [their] Constitution, and unacknowledged by [their] laws,” and that he was guilty of “taking away [their] Charters, abolishing [their] most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of [their] Governments.” Other claims were more implicit, and seemed to refer to some unspoken precedent or covenant that the king’s actions had violated. Among these are the accusations that George III had “obstructed the Administration of Justice,” that he had kept among the colonists, “in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of [their] Legislature,” and that he was guilty of, “cutting off [their] Trade with all Parts of the World,” “imposing taxes on [the colonists] without [their] Consent,” and, “depriving [them], in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury.”

 This is heady stuff, to be sure, but it’s far from revolutionary. I say this because while Jefferson and his colleagues certainly developed a novel conception of their rights over the course of the Revolution, they undoubtedly began by first trying to reaffirm their traditional rights as Englishmen.

Allow me to clarify.

By the standards of the 18^th century, the English were a people that were peculiarly aware of their rights. This was the result of a series of incidents that had unfolded over the course of the 17^th century: three civil wars, the beheading of a king, a period of republican government, the restoration of the monarchy, and a bloodless, but extremely significant, revolution. Over the course of this long, and rather bizarre, sequence of events the people of England became very conscious of the dangers of unchecked monarchical power and of the importance of protecting what they believed were their traditional rights. In 1689, as a means of guarding against any future abuse of power by the crown, the most important of these rights were written into a bill that subsequently became an Act of Parliament.

These rights included:

1.      A prohibition against royal interference with the law or the administration of justice

2.      The right of taxation only through the consent of parliament

3.      A bar against standing armies being raised in time of peace without the consent of parliament

4.      An injunction against royal interference in the election of members of parliament

5.      A guarantee that the freedom of speech and debates of parliament shall not be questioned or impeached by any court or body outside of parliament itself

Sound familiar?

This “Bill of Rights” became the foundation of what it still referred to as the Britain’s unwritten Constitution. More to the point, however, it would also have been the foundation of what people like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin believed where their rights as Englishmen. They had, after all, been raised in a political and social climate that attached a great deal of significance to English history in general and the Bill of Rights in particular. Thus when Jefferson claimed that the colonists had a right to have their laws respected and their streets free of soldiers he was not asking for something that was particularly revolutionary or radical. Rather, he was asserting what he believed were his, and his fellow colonists, rights as British citizens.