President George Washington’s birthday was last Saturday, February 22. Although he was born 288 years ago, Washington's life and legacy continues to shape the nation and to be a source of fresh debate today.
Historians Lindsay Chervinsky and Craig Bruce Smith reflected holistically on the first president’s legacy in conversation with host Jeffrey Rosen on last week’s episode of We the People.
One of Washington’s best qualities, they agreed, was the value he placed on honor. Smith, the author of American Honor: The Creation of the Nation's Ideals During the Revolutionary Era, said Washington’s conception of honor represented a crucial departure from the British conception of that value.
“Honor traditionally was related to reputation, birth status, and even things such as valor on the battlefield,” he said.
“For Washington, it was acting in the best interest of the nation that was deemed honorable, not necessarily your birth, not necessarily your position, but rather, how you acted for the greater good. Now, it doesn't mean that that social hierarchy vanishes, but it opens up a degree of social mobility or democratization that did not exist prior to the American revolution," he explained.
Chervinsky added that Washington’s honor was revered by the troops he led as general in the Revolutionary War.
“For many of the soldiers, they believed that Washington was essentially equivalent to the army. Without Washington, there was no army. And without the army, there was no war. And so Washington, in a lot of ways, was the embodiment of the nation. … He had a sense of duty and honor that was really forged by hardship and by the burdens of that position, and that really crafted who he was. He was under no false illusions that this was a tremendous challenge and one that he, perhaps and only he, could bear.”
In addition to leading the war, perhaps Washington’s biggest contribution, as Smith and Chervinsky explained, was his shaping of the office of the presidency and the executive branch. Following the ratification of the Constitution in 1787, Washington became the nation’s first president in 1789. But Article II had described the powers of the president in broad terms, and the Constitution had not laid out solutions to every problem the new government would face; it was largely up to Washington to fill in the necessary powers and positions to make the presidency effective.
One way he did so was by forming the cabinet, as Chervinsky explained. She shared some of her findings from her new book The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution:
“[Washington] started initially with individual meetings, and then about two and a half years into his administration — and that’s really important because most people sort of assume the cabinet just sprouted up from the very beginning and it was an inevitable, but it was two and a half years into the administration before Washington actually convened his first cabinet meeting with the secretaries that you mentioned. The point was really that there were these complex issues. It was usually about diplomacy or constitutional question or a domestic rebellion, you know, big, big, chunky matters. State that he needed advice and he needed support, and one of Washington's great strengths was his ability to know his limitations and his ability to find advisors that he could surround himself with that had experience and expertise that was different than his own.”
Smith said that Washington’s formation of the cabinet helped quell divides in the early republic as well.
“The example he set, and the fact that he does have this bipartisan cabinet, and he is taking views from multiple sides — I think that's what kept [political parties] at bay,” he said.
Smith added that Washington also warned against the formation of political parties in his farewell address. Washington published a public letter that would come to be known as his farewell address after he decided not to seek re-election in 1796, setting the precedent of a two-term limit on the presidency that endures today.
Smith and Chervinsky also spoke candidly on the negative aspects of Washington’s legacy — echoing a debate recently raised by a new biography of Washington, You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington by Alexis Coe. Coe’s work sheds new light on the conditions experienced by the enslaved people that the Washington family owned, and Smith cited Washington’s behavior as a slaveowner as perhaps the worst aspect of his legacy.
Chervinsky also reflected on some other negative aspects of Washington’s legacy, including the bad temper that he sometimes released on his army subordinates, and his incessant concern about his political image. She said, however, it’s important not to focus only on the either the positive or the negative aspects of Washington’s life.
“I think focusing on Washington as a holistic person, the good and the bad, is actually far more productive. And it's more productive for our nation because no one is ever fully good or fully bad. By ignoring his flaws, we set up a completely impossible standard to try and meet again. And by only focusing on the negative, we risk really forgetting the very important contributions that he did make to the founding of the nation. “
Smith echoed the need to acknowledge the full breadth of Washington’s contributions.
“He's flawed, no one’s going to deny this — but at the same time, there are these moments of perfection,” Smith said. “He is not a paper saint. He very much was the indispensable man in the revolution, in the constitutional era.”
