George Washington: He Went Home to His Farm

He won the war, he had the army, and every man in history who had done both had made himself a king. He went home to his farm instead.

This is either the most remarkable act of self-restraint in the history of the republic, or the most remarkable act of self-knowledge. Possibly both. Washington himself never explained it, because he was not a man who explained himself, and by the time people started asking the question seriously he was already dead.

George Washington was born on the twenty-second of February 1732 in Westmoreland County, Virginia, the son of a middling planter who died when George was eleven and left him ten enslaved people, a surveyor's aptitude, and the knowledge that the English education his older half-brothers received at Appleby was not coming for him. England had written him off before he understood that it had. He spent the rest of his life demonstrating the error in its reasoning, which may be the most English thing about him.

He became a surveyor, then a soldier, and the frontier did for him what Appleby would have done for his brothers — gave him a body of knowledge and stripped away illusions he could not afford. At the ambush on the Monongahela in 1755 he had four bullets pass through his coat and two horses shot out from under him and came through unwounded, which he noted in his letters with the flat factual tone of a man who had decided that Providence was not an argument but an observation, and who had no intention of testing it unnecessarily again. He went home. He married. He tried to be a farmer for seventeen years. Parliament made it impossible.

The taxes were the mechanism. The arrogance was the cause. By 1775 the question was no longer whether there would be a war but who would command the army, and the answer was sitting quietly in the Continental Congress in his old Virginia militia coat, saying nothing, which was itself a kind of audition. He told Congress on his appointment that he did not think himself equal to the command.

He was the only person in the building who might have been telling the truth, and the only one whose assessment could safely be disregarded.

He took the army, such as it was, and began the specific work of holding together something that had no reason to cohere, through eight years of disaster and occasional miracle, through Valley Forge where a quarter of his men died in huts they had built from green timber twenty miles from a British-occupied Philadelphia, through retreats that would have ended anyone else's command, through the creeping understanding that the war would not be won so much as outlasted.

Yorktown came in 1781. Cornwallis sent a subordinate to surrender because illness was the dignity the defeated allowed themselves, and Washington received the surrender through a subordinate of his own because courtesy was the dignity the victorious extended. Then the army was his. The country was his in any sense that mattered.

A colonel named Lewis Nicola wrote to him in May 1782 to suggest, with careful elaboration, that what the new republic required was a king and that Washington was the obvious choice. Washington replied the same day. He said the suggestion had given him more painful sensations than anything in the course of the war.

He told Nicola never to raise the matter again. He meant it. Julius Caesar had not meant it. Oliver Cromwell had not meant it. Napoleon, nine years later, would not mean it. Washington meant it, and the difference between a man who means it and a man who performs meaning it is the entire history of how republics survive or fail.

He resigned his commission on the twenty-third of December 1783, his voice faltering in the State House at Annapolis, and made it home to Mount Vernon on Christmas Eve. The farm was exactly as he had left it, tended by the enslaved men and women who had no commission to resign and no homecoming waiting for them.

He owned more than three hundred people. He had fought an eight-year war for the proposition that no man should be owned by another, and he understood the contradiction with the full intelligence of a man who had never permitted himself the comfort of not understanding things. He freed them in his will. Not while he lived.

The distance between those two facts is the distance between the man he was and the century required, and it is a distance he chose, every day, not to close.

The country called him back for the Constitutional Convention and then for the presidency, every Electoral College member voting for him, the only unanimous election in American history, because they trusted him with the thing they were most afraid of — which was power, and what power does to men who hold it long enough. He served two terms and stepped down in 1797, establishing by the simple act of leaving the principle that the office was larger than the man inside it.

He went back to Mount Vernon. He died there two years later of a throat infection, sixty-seven years old, and they buried him on the land he had spent his life trying to get back to.

The republic he made has spent more than two centuries arguing about what he was. The argument is still running. He is still there.