George Washington Gave Up Power Twice and Changed What Leaders Could Be

Name a general who won a revolution and then went home to farm. Take your time. Most of the answers you reach for, from Caesar to Cromwell to the long list of men who came after them, point the other way. The usual price of a successful revolution is the man who led it, who tends to stay on as a permanent guest of honor with a large staff.

America got the exception, and it got him twice. George Washington surrendered power at the moment he could have kept it, once as a soldier and once as a President. Those two acts did as much to shape the republic as any battle he won. I want to tell the story in order, then ask what it means for a country that has lately forgotten how rare it is.

The Setting: An Army With a Grievance

By the spring of 1783 the fighting was over. The surrender at Yorktown had come in October 1781, and a peace was being negotiated in Paris. The Continental Army was camped at Newburgh, New York, waiting for the treaty. As I describe in Yorktown in October 1781 and How a French Fleet Helped Trap Cornwallis, the war was won, but the army had not been paid.

That was no small complaint. Officers had been promised half-pay for life, and Congress, which had no power to tax and depended on the states for money, could not make good on any of it. The states were slow to pay. Months of back pay were owed. Officers who had risked everything watched the legislature that had commissioned them argue about whether it could afford to keep its word. The same weakness that had starved the troops at Valley Forge, which I explain in Valley Forge Was a Winter of Hunger That Turned Farmers Into an Army, was now insulting the men who survived it.

In that atmosphere a few officers began to talk about forcing the issue. In early March 1783 an anonymous address, attributed to a young officer on the staff of General Horatio Gates, began to circulate through the camp. It urged the army to take its grievances to Congress in a way that hinted at a threat: if Congress would not pay, the army might refuse to disband, or might move on its own. It was the beginning of a mutiny, and the country had no force to stop it except the army itself.

Newburgh: The Spectacles

Washington learned of the anonymous address and moved quickly. He did not suppress the officers' meeting, which showed more tact than most of Washington's successors have shown a press office. Instead he called his own, for March 15, at a large building in the camp known as the Temple. He then walked in, uninvited, on a gathering of officers who had expected to plan a confrontation without him.

He addressed them. He told them that he understood their grievances and shared them. He argued that to threaten Congress or to disband the army in anger would dishonor the cause they had served and would hand the British their victory in peace. He appealed to them to trust the country's honor and to stand by their government. And then he did something that is remembered because of how small it was.

He took out a letter from a member of Congress and began to read it. He stumbled over the words, paused, and took from his pocket a pair of spectacles that most of the officers had never seen him wear. Then, by the account of those present, he said he had grown not only gray but almost blind in the service of his country. I give you the sense and not the exact phrasing, because the reported words come from the recollections of those who were in the room, and I would rather be careful about quoting what no stenographer took down.

What is not in doubt is the effect. Hardened officers who had been ready to take a hard line were moved to tears. When he finished and left the room, the officers passed a resolution reaffirming their confidence in Congress. The mutiny was over.

Think about what Washington was in that room. He was the commander of an armed force that adored him, in a country with no standing government strong enough to oppose him. If he had stood silent, or had hinted that he understood the officers' impatience, the history of the republic could have turned. Instead he used his authority to disarm the crisis. Two years earlier, in May 1782, a colonel had written to him suggesting that he become king, and he had answered with an immediate, unmistakable rebuke. At Newburgh he showed again what that answer meant.

Annapolis: The Resignation

The peace treaty was signed in September 1783, and the British evacuated New York in November. Washington said farewell to his officers at Fraunces Tavern in New York on December 4 and then traveled south to Annapolis, Maryland, where the Congress was sitting in the State House.

On December 23, 1783, he appeared before Congress, whose president was Thomas Mifflin, and resigned his commission as commander in chief. The ceremony was short and formal. He had asked how it should be done, and he followed the protocol: the members remained seated and covered while he bowed to them, a sign that sovereignty rested in the legislature and not in the general. Then he read his speech. The most famous sentence closes it:

...bidding an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.

Note the phrase "under whose orders I have so long acted." That is the principle of civilian control of the military, spoken by the man who could have broken it. He did not say he was returning power. He said he had been under orders all along.

Then he went home to Mount Vernon in time for Christmas. He wanted to be a farmer, and he meant it.

The Reaction of a King

There is a famous story about how this was received overseas. According to a tradition told in several versions, King George III, learning from the American-born painter Benjamin West that Washington planned to give up his command and go home, said that if he did so it would place him among the greatest men of the age. I give this as attributed, not quoted, because it comes down to us secondhand and the wording varies from one telling to the next. But the story has lasted because it captures a truth. For a monarch, a man who could hold power and gave it back was almost beyond understanding.

The Presidency and the Second Refusal

Washington's retirement did not last. The government under the Articles of Confederation was too weak, and a convention was called in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to fix it. Washington was persuaded to attend, and the delegates chose him to preside. He spoke rarely, but his presence was a kind of guarantee. The story is in Washington Spoke Once at the Convention and Still Made the Constitution Possible. The Constitution created a presidency, and it was widely understood that the first occupant would be Washington. He was elected unanimously by the electors in 1789 and again in 1792. He took the oath on April 30, 1789, in New York.

Here comes the second refusal. The Constitution as written in 1787 did not limit the number of terms a President could serve. Nothing stopped Washington from running again in 1796. Many thought he would, and a good many thought he should, since the new government was fragile and the political parties were already at each other's throats. He chose to retire at the end of his second term. In September 1796, he published a Farewell Address, addressed to his fellow citizens, announcing that he would not be a candidate.

Understand how unusual that was. No law required it. No rival forced it. There was no precedent for a head of government who voluntarily left office when he could have stayed. By choosing to go, Washington set a custom that held for a century and a half, until Franklin Roosevelt broke it by winning a third term in 1940 and a fourth in 1944. The Twenty-Second Amendment, ratified in 1951, wrote Washington's custom into the Constitution: no one may be elected President more than twice.

For the debate on term limits as a principle, see Term Limits Work for Presidents, So Why Not for Members of Congress. The argument for them rests on Washington's example, that a republic cannot become dependent on one man, however good.

The Farewell Address

The Farewell Address was not a victory lap. It is a set of warnings, and three of them are worth knowing.

On faction. Washington warned against what he called the spirit of party, the habit of putting a faction's interest above the common good. He had watched the parties form during his presidency, and he feared that they would use the government as a prize. The warning is a hard one to read in an election year, and an easier one to read in the year after, when everyone has forgotten it.

On religion and morality. He wrote: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports." That is the sentence conservatives quote most, and it is the heart of the argument that self-government depends on self-government of the soul. Laws cannot do all the work. A people who cannot restrain themselves will need a master. For a fuller treatment, see Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable.

On foreign entanglements. He advised that the great rule of conduct for America toward foreign nations was, in extending commercial relations, to have as little political connection with them as possible. Trade freely, he said, but avoid binding the country's fate to other people's quarrels.

None of these warnings was a policy program. They were the advice of a man who had held the highest power in the land and knew its temptations from the inside.

The Strongest Objection

Let me put the best objections plainly, because Washington does not need protection from them.

The first is that his greatness is exaggerated by the fact that he held slaves. That is a serious charge and a true fact: Washington owned human beings. A fair account has to say so, and also to say that in his will he directed that the enslaved people he owned outright be freed after the death of his wife. Martha Washington arranged for their freedom in early 1801. That does not erase the wrong, and it was less than the cause of liberty demanded. The honest approach is the one set out in How to Judge the Founders Fairly Without Excusing Slavery or Erasing Them: judge him by the standards he claimed, and give him credit for the real things he did.

The second is that his resignations were shrewd politics, not virtue. On this view, Washington understood that giving up power would make him more admired, and he acted accordingly. Answer it in three steps.

1. Suppose it was shrewd. Many virtuous acts are also wise. The question is whether the act was costly and whether it did good.
2. It was costly. He gave up the command of an army and later the first office in the republic, and both times he accepted that his authority would end and the country would carry on without him. A power-seeker does not do that.
3. The results were real. The principle of civilian control and the custom of two terms did not exist until he made them. Whatever his motives, the precedents he created have protected the country ever since.

What the Example Asks of Us

I draw four points from the career, and they go beyond Washington.

Power is a loan. In a republic, authority is held on behalf of the people and returned to them. Washington's two resignations were the clearest picture of that idea any American has given.

Institutions need examples. The Constitution is a text, but a text does not enforce itself. It takes people who will behave as if the rules bind them even when no one can make them. That is the argument of The Rule of Law Is Older Than the Constitution, From Magna Carta to Marbury.

No man is indispensable. The best compliment to a leader is that the country can go on without him. Washington's willingness to go home proved the country could.

Citizens must make the same choice in miniature. You will probably never command an army. But you may chair a committee, run a business or hold a seat on a board, and you will face a smaller version of the same question: will you hold on to a post because it is useful to you, or hand it over because the work is done? The country is made of such choices.

The Case in Brief

1. At Newburgh on March 15, 1783, Washington defused an officers' revolt over unpaid wages, and in doing so reaffirmed that the army served Congress.
2. At Annapolis on December 23, 1783, he resigned his commission before Congress, saying he had long acted under its orders.
3. After two terms as President, he declined a third and announced it in his Farewell Address of 1796, setting a custom that the Twenty-Second Amendment later made law.
4. The Farewell Address warns against the spirit of party, praises religion and morality as supports of political prosperity and counsels few political ties to foreign nations.
5. His flaws, including slaveholding, are part of the record, but the precedents he set remain among the great gifts of the republic.

What you can do: read the Farewell Address in full at the Library of Congress or the National Archives, then ask your own state legislator or a local official how long they intend to serve and what they will hand over when they leave.