Epilogue: Moral Leadership: The Mixed Legacy

If a New York or Philadelphia newsman had accosted Washington as he stepped out of his gilded carriage—an unlikely happening—and asked him, “What is the single most crucial quality of a great leader?” and if Washington had deigned to reply—even more unlikely—his answer probably would have been “Character!” What would he have meant by this compelling but vague word?

As a young man he had been most explicit—character consisted of polite and virtuous social behavior. Some of the virtues he absorbed from the Rules of Civility—“Eat not in the Streets”; “In your Apparel be Modest”—come through to us today as etiquette book niceties or as advice to a young man on the make. But other maxims taught the importance of empathy and responsibility. “When you see a Crime punished, you may be inwardly Pleased, but always shew Pity to the Suffering Offender”; “Let your Conversation be without Malice or Envy”; “Undertake not what you cannot Perform.” On the level of these virtues, the young Washington acted well.

But Washington the acquisitive planter, entrepreneur, and president would later be put to the more exigent test of ethics and integrity, and here he did not always pass with flying colors. Coldly interested in his own profits, canny and competitive in his financial dealings, he appropriated for himself the best land from the acreage set aside for veterans of the army of 1754 and, through his brother, convinced some of the men to sell their shares to him, as historian John Ferling remarked, “for a pittance.” When one veteran complained, the hot-tempered Washington exploded, berating the man for his “stupidity and sottishness.” As president, he would push for the new federal city to be located on the Potomac, in which he had business interests, and near Alexandria, where he owned real estate. So sterling was Washington’s public reputation that one is tempted to welcome such signs of human fallibility—perhaps even to hope that John Adams was justified in complaining that when the retiring president was selling off possessions, he tried to fob off on him, for $2,000, two old nags.1

If Washington had remained a plantation owner or simply a private citizen, he would have been judged by the ethical standards of his community. But as the most illustrious public man of his time, he would be measured by higher and broader criteria than either virtues or business ethics. He would be judged by the reigning moral principles of his time, by the values that buttressed the entire republican project of his young nation. From the start, American leaders would be evaluated not only for their private conduct and personal honesty but also for their commitment to values of national security, individual liberty, equality, and the welfare of the people, unforgettably summarized in the Declaration of Independence as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. How to define these values, how to prioritize them, how to apply them would be at the heart of debates over presidential leadership beginning with Washington and lasting at least two centuries.

These were Enlightenment values, examined in depth by Hutcheson and Ferguson in Scotland and by Rousseau and Voltaire in France, in turn distilled into noble utterances by Jefferson and Madison and Washington himself. Washington had read little of the philosophers, but he had absorbed much from thinkers he admired and from the great debates of the era. And he had a strong sense of priorities among the Enlightenment’s ideals.

For him, security, stability, order—the nation’s ability to survive, that is, its very life—constituted the supreme value, because the other high principles could not be established and expanded except in an environment free from fear and tumult. He had come too close to disunity and defeat in the Valley Forge winter to doubt the importance of the sheer survival of his country. How could liberty, for example, be protected amid the kind of internecine conflict he witnessed from afar in the French Revolution? How could order survive if rebels and dissidents were allowed to run riot?

Like any good student of the Enlightenment, he believed in liberty, but only to a limited degree. Certainly he supported freedom of religious belief and expression; he made conciliatory statements about faiths other than his own, those of Catholics, Jews, even “Mohametans.” But the supreme test of Enlightenment values in this era—dominated by absolutist regimes—was political liberty, which he formally extolled as indispensable in a republic but which he deserted in the political crucible. The test came after his presidency—when he had the good fortune to deal with it at a distance—in his support for the Federalists’ Alien and Sedition Acts. The fact that, as an ex-president, he was not under any political pressure offers a good test of his real feelings—his willingness to subordinate the supreme Enlightenment belief in individual liberty to what he saw as the overwhelming need for national security. Washington’s personal and political security in 1798, along with his learning experiences as revolutionary leader and president, might have moderated his apprehension of subversion, opposition, and dissension. They did not.

The issue was not only freedom from excessive government restriction but a broader and more expansive value—the right to happiness. For a man who rejected sentimentalism, it was remarkable how often Washington used the word “happiness.” His adherence to the Enlightenment definition of happiness as public happiness, founded in reason, as a human responsibility rather than mere personal enjoyment, ultimately as fulfillment of a moral responsibility to the nation as well as to others—all this strikes the virtuous citizen of today as a fine recipe for good leadership and followership. Washington’s derogation of happiness as sheer self-gratification and pleasure seeking sharpens our concern that too many Americans in the twenty-first century see happiness as only that.

Yet Washington’s idea of happiness was so elevated that he seemed to overlook the fact that to millions of his fellow Americans it appeared esoteric and even elitist, for they found happiness in the comfort of a decent habitation, in the pleasures of material satisfactions, in the pursuit of everyday enjoyments, and in a good income—forms of happiness that he recognized but placed second to public happiness. Ultimately Washington’s “Federalist” conception of happiness would play politically into the hands of Jeffersonian Republicans, who would offer people what they wanted—a more earthy, material kind of happiness—and who would hence benefit at the polls.

Nothing could have more bluntly challenged Washington’s view of happiness than slavery. To move from his public world of civility and decorum, statesmanship and diplomacy, revolutionary leadership and constitution making to his private world at Mount Vernon is to descend into a southern plantation of several thousand acres, two hundred slaves managed by hard-driving overseers, directed from near or afar by entrepreneurs busy computing profit and loss, sales and expenses, the buying and selling of slaves as chattel property. Washington was the unchallenged master of these slaves, yet utterly dependent on them, in a hierarchical community. The slaves, adults and children, as historian Fritz Hirschfeld noted, “plowed the fields, tended the crops, harvested the wheat and corn, dried the tobacco, cured the hams, picked the apples, built the barns, mended the fences, milked the cows, collected the eggs, operated the distillery, fished the Potomac, drained the swamps, herded the cattle, sheared the sheep, loaded the cargoes, and carried out the other menial tasks associated with the upkeep and operation of a large and mainly self-sufficient plantation—and it was the profit from their toil that resulted in the creation of the luxury and great beauty … that made Washington’s ancestral home a magnificent showplace during much of his lifetime.” These were precisely the menial tasks of millions of Washington’s fellow white citizens—but they enjoyed, to an increasing degree, the blessings of liberty.

One could fantasize that Washington and his slaves might have been bound together as leader and followers. But in reality he was their ruler, not their leader; he would not have dreamed of mobilizing them politically, as leaders may do, and his slaves would not have dared to burst out of bondage and lead him, as followers may do. His plantation was not a little democracy.

And yet in private Washington increasingly opposed slavery. His disapproval intensified as he accepted blacks as soldiers in the revolutionary army, as he met antislavery Britishers and corresponded with other enlightened men such as his friend Lafayette who wanted to see an end to slavery, and as he read the Philadelphia press. And he was most eloquent and revealing about his true beliefs in his private correspondence. As early as 1786 he expressed to a business acquaintance his hope that “slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees.”2

But in public Washington was silent about slavery. Why was this courageous and comprehending man so timid to speak out in public about his changing views? He possessed the benevolence—and concern for his eternal reputation—to free his slaves upon his death, or upon Martha’s death, should she outlive him; but during his lifetime he made no public pronouncements against slavery. Not because he was any kind of racist or Negrophobe, as some critics claimed. Rather because he believed that a public stand in favor of abolition would endanger the value he prized above all: unity grounded in order, the stability and survival of the nation. When the House of Representatives voted in 1790 that the federal government had no jurisdiction over ending the slave trade or emancipation, Washington voiced approval that the issue had “at length been put to sleep.” Discussions of slavery, he judged, had been “mal-apropos.” More important to the survival of the young republic, he felt, was “a spirit of accommodation.” Doubtless he had an intuition, perhaps more, of the terrifying potential for conflict that slavery portended, indeed, conflict that one day would rupture the union. But liberty and happiness, buttressed by justice and equality, were not only lesser values than order for Washington but were dependent upon order.3

Yet Washington could hardly imagine that the reverse was true, that ultimately order and stability are dependent on those “lesser” values, because, without them, order deteriorates into despotism and tyranny. It would take more historical imagination than even Washington possessed to understand that a proper balance among the three values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness could have produced steady compromises that might have achieved emancipation before the bloody conflict of the 1860s. But such an outcome would have required a combination of transforming and transactional leadership that the fragmented constitutional system could not support. Washington wanted all three of the great American values, but he did not work out the interrelationship among them. It would remain for other leaders to do this—most notably Franklin D. Roosevelt in his “Four Freedoms.”

Ultimately, then, what was the legacy of Washington’s leadership and especially of his presidency? It was an array of great initiatives in establishing a strong executive and in formulating innovative economic policies of lasting import. It was a successful experiment in collective leadership composed of the brilliant cabinet members Washington chose and whom he empowered to try to overcome the fragmented government. It was a politics of mobilizing people behind his Federalist policies and his Federalist allies but also a politics of failing to anticipate the vital need for an opposition party pledged to offer an alternative route to the people’s liberty and happiness.

Transcending all this was the legacy for all Americans of Washington the man—the revolutionary hero, the founding president, the First Citizen of the young republic.