Washington [308]
It would have been easy for Washington to dwell on wartime accomplishments and bask in the sweet glow of victory. Instead, he pushed the agenda to the challenges ahead, offering alternate visions of glory and ruin. Americans had to choose whether they would be “respectable and prosperous or contemptible and miserable as a nation.”29 Worried that a weak confederacy would tempt European powers to play off one state against another, he called for “an indissoluble union of the states under one federal head.”30 The war had scrubbed quixotic notions from his mind. At a time when many Americans, influenced by Whig ideology, equated centralized power with tyranny, Washington argued that only a supreme central power could safeguard liberty. However tempting it might be to repudiate the enormous government debt, he asserted the need to “render complete justice to all the public creditors.”31 Instead of recommending a professional army for the country, as he might have wished, Washington, making a concession to the bête noire of a “standing army,” opted for a halfway measure: uniform standards for state militias.
In closing, Washington referred to the character of Jesus, “the Divine author of our blessed religion.”32 It was a fitting ending: despite his paean to the Enlightenment, the entire circular had the pastoral tone of a spiritual father advising his flock rather than a bluff, manly soldier making a dignified farewell. The ending rose to the fervor of a benediction: “I now make it my earnest prayer that God would have you, and the state over which you preside, in his holy protection; that he would incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to government; to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another, for their fellow citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for their brethren who have served in the field.”33
With the war drawing to a close, Henry Knox spearheaded the formation of a fraternal order of army officers called the Society of the Cincinnati. Its aims seemed laudable enough: to succor the families of needy officers, to preserve the union and liberties for which they had fought, and to maintain a social network among the officers. Its very name paid homage to George Washington: Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was a Roman consul who had rescued Rome in war, then relinquished power. Little dreaming how controversial the organization would become, Washington agreed to serve as president and was duly elected on June 19, 1783. Something of an honorary president, he was fuzzy about his actual duties and asked Knox that September to tell him “in precise terms what is expected from the President of the Cincinnati previous to the general meeting in May next. As I never was present at any of your meetings and have never seen the proceedings of the last, I may, for want of information . . . neglect some essential duty.”34 What Washington didn’t foresee was that the hereditary character of the society—eldest sons could inherit the memberships of deceased fathers—would engender fears that the society was fomenting an embryonic American aristocracy.
Perhaps nothing signaled the war’s end so dramatically as the sudden resumption of correspondence between Washington and his friend George William Fairfax, Sally’s husband, who had repeatedly sent Washington letters during the war only to have them confiscated by the British government. One letter that made it through in early July 1783 told how influential figures in England, who had once shunned Fairfax as pro-American, now pestered him for letters of introduction to the American general. On July 10 Washington sent an affectionate reply, calling upon the Fairfaxes to return to Virginia and become