Washington

On his real birth day

Saturday, February 22, 2014

WAIT A minute, didn’t we just celebrate Washington’s Birthday back on the 17th? 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 called Presidents’ Day in the ads-presumably in honor of them all. Between presidential proclamations, Acts of Congress, and plugs 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 282 years ago today, on February 22, 1732.

Well, not actually. That’s not quite right, either. 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.

Much like the calendar in his time, and the clock in ours, Washington’s image would be a product of artifice, too. Not 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’ fairy tales that became folk tales. All of us make ourselves to an extent, but in George Washington’s case, the process was much 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 soldier and 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, which he would see become the northern and southern 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 self-imposed restraint on a passionate temper, his deliberately 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 so was able to lend his own dignity first to a fledgling army and then to the still new American presidency.

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.

He also proved 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, those two suns in the same solar system, 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, complete with all its barbarities, and despised it all his life. Washington was a Virginia planter who actually had something to lose by embracing emancipation. But unlike Jefferson, that paragon of hypocrisy, Washington in the end would arrange to free the slaves he had inherited despite the disapproval of family, friends and Virginia society.

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 labour 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. 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, as it was tactfully called in his time. In his Farewell Address, the old general foresaw how ruinous the spirit of faction would prove. And how dangerous partisan passions 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 fanciful conspiracy theories circulate with the speed of the Internet. And aggravate our differences, dividing us into red and blue states, and a whole torn patchwork of different social, economic and political interests.

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. Which ones appeal to only the crassest of party and class interests, and which, in the phrase of the Constitution whose creation Washington oversaw, truly seek to promote the general welfare.

Editorial, Pages 16 on 02/22/2014