Washington

On his real birth day

— WAIT A minute, didn’t we just celebrate Washington’s Birthday yesterday? Yes, but that was his birthday on the legal calendar, even though he tends to be thrown in with all the other presidents who are honored on what’s now loosely called Presidents’ Day-presumably in honor of them all. Between presidential proclamations, Acts of Congress, and ads for white sales, there’s no sure telling just what the third Monday in February is any more. Actually, the Father of His Country was born 279 years ago today, on February 22, 1732.

Well, not actually. Because when he was born, the date was February 11th, and would become February 22nd only in 1752, when the English-speaking world finally switched from the old Julian to the current Gregorian calendar, skipping 11 days.

Nowadays our atomic clock has to be adjusted by one second from time to carefully calculated time, and even then the chronometricians, if that’s the right title, squabble about every less-than minute adjustment. The annual seasonal change in the nation’s biorhythms called Daylight Savings Time still evokes resistance here and there. So you can imagine the uproar in 1752 occasioned by losing 11 whole days. It sparked not just confusion but resentment and talk of a conspiracy in high places to steal time. (“Give us our 11 days back!”)

Much like the calendar in his time, Washington’s image would be a product of artifice, too. We don’t want to shock anybody, but George Washington wasn’t actually born in powdered wig and dress sword. He wasn’t always the man whose picture used to hang in every American classroom, or the paragon of virtue in Parson Weems’ tales. All of us make ourselves to an extent, but in George Washington’s case, the process was more conscious than most.

Early on, the young Washington decided to become the landed aristocrat in the portraits. The younger son of a land-poor family in the Virginia colony, his education was sketchy. (His spelling is still an eccentric puzzle to historians.) But he was determined to improve himself, even laboriously copying out the rules by which gentlemen conducted themselves-perhaps as an exercise in penmanship.

Much attracted to the ladies, married and unmarried, the lumbering young frontier surveyor would marry the richest widow in Virginia. It may not have been a love match, but it was a most successful union, much like the one he would one day forge between the northern and southern colonies, then states.

AGAIN and again, the contemporaries who recorded their impressions of the man, whether as promising military commander or senior statesman, tend to note the same characteristics-his grave dignity, his semi-royal presence, his cultivated distance from others. All learned traits.

Washington’s legendary gravity was an acquired characteristic, too. If he was a man with a man’s impulses, those impulses would have to be controlled. There was never anything impromptu about his leadership; his governance of the nation would become a reflection of his own self-governance. He came to understand that he had not only his own honor to uphold but that of the infant republic.

Washington worked long and hard to develop a commanding presence, and was able to lend his own dignity first to a fledgling army and then to the still new American presidency. He understood that every decision he would make as the first president of these United States would become an historical precedent, and he was determined to make it the proper one.

Just as he molded himself into a colonial gentleman, a man of both action and judgment, he would mold his country into what he envisioned America should be-a land of both liberty and order. Even today, the ideal America is a projection of the virtues Washington labored to acquire for himself, then to engender in the young republic.

The general could swear like a sergeant (better than most sergeants, according to his confidential secretary) but he issued many a formal remonstrance against that bad habit in the ranks of the new continental army. And he was a model of decorum and deference when it came to holding together those two brilliant but feisty intellects he came to depend on for counsel, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Each was determined to go his own way, as certain of his own judgment as he was suspicious of the other’s-and respectful of Washington’s. Only a George Washington could have kept those two brilliances in the same Cabinet as long as he did.

A man fully capable of rage, outwardly Washington exerted a glacial calm. Gilbert Stuart, the painter of the public Washington, wrote that “all his features were indicative of the most ungovernable passions, and had he been born in the forests, it is my opinion that he would have been the fiercest man among the savage tribes.” FOR SOMEONE so much a part and product of his time, Washington could also look far ahead.Not just politically but morally. It was one thing for a lawyer and financier in New York like Alexander Hamilton to be an early abolitionist. He had been born into a slave society in the West Indies (“the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler,” old John Adams once called him in a heated moment), and he’d seen slavery in operation, early on, close-up and unadorned, complete with all its barbarities. Washington was a Virginia planter who actually had something to lose by embracing emancipation. And yet he, unlike Jefferson, that paragon of hypocrisy, would in the end arrange to free his slaves, despite the disapproval of family and friends.

Looking back at the end of a long life marked by the greatest accomplishments and honors to match, the Father of His Country would express but one remorse: “The unfortunate condition of the persons whose lab our in part I employed, has been the only unavoidable subject of regret. To make the Adults among them as easy & as comfortable in their circumstances as their actual state of ignorance & improvidence would admit; & to lay a foundation to prepare the rising generation for a destiny different from that in which they were born; afforded some satisfaction to my mind, & could not I hoped be displeasing to the justice of the Creator.” Amen.

In his will, Washington would not only provide that Mount Vernon’s slaves be freed on Martha’s death but made provision for them-education for the young, and maintenance for those too old to work. But he understood what a curse slavery was, and what a blot it would remain on his and his country’s honor. One day the struggle over it would even rend the Union that was his life’s work and love. No wonder it was his “only unavoidable subject of regret.”

Washington’s famous portrait would remain unfinished, like his country’s struggles over the Peculiar Institution. In his Farewell Address, the old general foresaw how ruinous the spirit of faction-of partisan passion-could prove to the American Union, especially if those factions formed along geographical lines. As they would when free and slave states could no longer compromise their differences.

Washington’s warning against the forces that would tear the Union apart proved all too accurate. As a general and statesman, he is much celebrated, and deserves to be. Sadly, he also proved a prophet.

Even now “the baneful effects of the spirit of party” that Washington inveighed against in his Farewell Address tear at the fabric of national unity as separate but equally fanciful conspiracy theories circulate with the speed of the Internet.

As the heirs of Washington weigh the opposite but equally fierce messages being sent by today’s political factions, We the People would do well to ask which ones appeal to our best selves and which to our worst-which ones raise the level of political discourse, as Washington did, and which ones only debase it.

Editorial, Pages 12 on 02/22/2011

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