Washington [519]
An old hand at farewells, Washington, by design, rolled out of Philadelphia in his coach and headed for Mount Vernon, just as local citizens began to consume his address. He wished the words to speak for themselves, without any elaboration on his part. Washington never identified the document as his “farewell address,” a label pinned on it by others. It appeared under the rubric “To the PEOPLE of the UNITED STATES,” and began with the words “Friends and Fellow Citizens.”15 It was the perfect touch, echoing the opening of the Constitution, “We the People of the United States.” While Washington could have informed Congress of his resignation, he went instead to the source of all sovereignty, the people, just as the Constitutional Convention had bypassed state legislatures and asked the people to approve the document directly through ratifying conventions.
In the address, Washington started by mentioning the earlier farewell letter and his hope that he could have retired sooner. The “increasing weight of years” had now made withdrawal from office necessary.16 After talking of the vicissitudes of his presidency, he evoked America’s grand future, sounding the oracular strain he had patented.17 In a paean to unity, he warned that national identity must trump local attachments: “The name of AMERICAN, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.”18 This continental perspective had informed his work ever since the Revolution. Washington stressed the need to safeguard western territories from foreign encroachments, and without mentioning the Whiskey Rebellion by name, he enunciated the need for law and order: “The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.”19 Instead of flattering the people, Washington challenged them to improve their performance as citizens. Most of all he appealed to Americans to cling to the Union, with the federal government as the true guarantor of liberty and independence. As Joseph Ellis has written, “In the Farewell Address, Washington reiterated his conviction that the centralizing impulses of the American Revolution were not violations but fulfillments of its original ethos.”20
As the address proceeded, it grew increasingly evident that Washington and Hamilton directed their shafts at the Republicans in coded language. Their denunciations of “combinations and associations” that sought to counteract the constituted authorities recalled their earlier strictures against the Democratic-Republican Societies. While such groups “may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people.”21 It was still hard for Washington to conceive of parties that were not disloyal cabals against duly elected government. A party spirit exists in all types of government, Washington observed, “but in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.”22 For Washington, parties weren’t so much expressions of popular politics as their negation, denying the true will of the people as expressed through their chosen representatives.
Although he said that debt should be used sparingly and paid