Attitudes toward power
There are still widely differing views among historians about whether Washington accepted power reluctantly and with great trepidation, as he claimed, or sought it avidly. It is part of the complexity of his character that both views are somewhat true. On one level, he always found almost irresistibly appealing the English country parties' regard for a pastoral life, independent of corrupting influences from outside. The concept, told primarily by Harrison Virgil, of the peaceful and leisurely world of a Roman farm held great appeal for Virginians who idealized their own plantation life.

But there were elements of fiction in country party ideals as practiced in Virginia, even in Washington's youth. He was deeply immersed in the attitudes of the Virginia gentry, who felt it was the responsibility of their class to provide political leadership. This commitment gave him a powerful incentive to accept the command of the army and election to the presidency.

The acceptance of responsibility was indeed part of his view of a national character. As he wrote in 1775, when he assumed command of the army "it was utterly out of my power to refuse this appointment, without exposing my character to such censures as would have reflected dishonor upon myself, and given pain to my friends." But he was also reported to have said to Patrick Henry that "from the day that I enter upon the command of the American armies I date my fall and the ruin of my reputation." In 1788 and 1789, when he was pressed to accept the presidency, Washington was torn between his desire to remain in the pastoral peace of his plantation, under "my vine and fig tree," as he put it, and the demands and attractions of public service.

He greatly feared that if he accepted the office the enormous reputation he hoped to leave to succeeding generations would not survive the difficulties facing the new nation. "I walk on untrodden ground," he wrote Katherine McCauley Graham. Perhaps, even more, he feared that accepting the office would be viewed as a violation of his role as Cincinnatus.

Because so many of his peers subscribed to classical and English country party values, Washington feared being suspected of lusting after power, or even of being particularly concerned with the rewards and emoluments for public service.

Indeed, disavowal of a desire for power was a convention among American elite in the eighteenth century. No doubt it contributed to Washington's reluctance to accept the offer for public service extended to him. He felt he should prefer his vine and fig tree above the tumult and strife of public office. And he was generally apprehensive that his own natural abilities were not equal to the demands of office.

Expectations and disappointments

	Washington: The great unifier
	Don Higginbotham, professor of American history at the University of North Carolina, believes the establishment of a united America can possibly be attributed to Washington's actions as president. Washington wanted people to identify with the nation. That was paramount in his thinking as president. That is why he saw value in presidential proclamations: Thanksgiving messages, State of the Union speeches, statements of neutrality and so on. Full text This sidebar was adapted from a lecture given by Don Higginbotham at Columbia University on December 13, 1999.

During his second administration (1792-6), Washington met serious challenges to the role he had conceived for himself and his country. His second term succeeded on many fronts--in maintaining neutrality in the war between France and Britain, in establishing peace on the frontiers and in the negotiation of the Jay Treaty.

But for these successes, Washington believed that he had paid a heavy price in what he conceived as necessary for both himself and the new government: the esteem and support of the citizens of the republic. The events of 1793, beginning with the outbreak of war between Britain and France in January, provided a concrete issue for divisions among Federals and Republicans.

Washington, who identified more with the habits, lifestyle and role models of Britain's eighteenth-century elite than with the brave new world of the French Revolution, was appalled at the excesses of the radicals in France. But his concern was for the impact that the French Revolution had on the United States. Washington felt that the kind of party spirit found in governments of the popular form--like the new government of France--could become a government's worst enemy.

Washington found personal criticism devastating. Press invective aimed at him grew virulent, and, as he said, "it was couched in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a serious defaulter, or even to a common pickpocket." For so able a politician, Washington was always excessively thin-skinned. To him, partisanship was what the new republic had most to fear. The neutrality crisis, the fight over the Jay Treaty, and Washington's own quick and stringent actions to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion resulted in a storm of public criticism, to which he was quite unaccustomed and which appeared to him to threaten the principles on which he had constructed his public life.

If his reaction to the disorder of the 1790s seems exaggerated, it must be viewed in the light of the classical conceptions of public virtue, acquired in his youth, and in the light of his obsession with his reputation. Even on a private level, deviations from what he considered "due demands" had always troubled him. He had a very long memory for unpleasant incidents, especially when they reflected on his reputation or on the respect that he felt was due to him in the public positions that he occupied. He very often forgave, but he rarely forgot, either public or private criticism.

If Washington expressed appreciation and satisfaction to friends and subordinates who were involved in his public and private affairs, it does not emerge in his correspondence. A perfectionist, he found few people who were able to measure up to his high expectations. Washington's colonial correspondence abounds with complaints about the services and shipments of his London agents. After the Revolution, squatters who had the temerity to settle on his Pennsylvania lands were summarily ejected. Subordinates who managed his western lands were the subjects of constant harping. His overseers and workers rarely pleased him.

Relatives did not escape. The feckless financial maneuverings of his stepson, John Clark Custis, of whom he was very fond, filled him with consternation. And the behavior of other members of the family often appalled him. "In God's name," he wrote John Augustine Washington in 1783, "how did my brother, Samuel, contrive to get himself so enormously in debt? Was it by purchases, by misfortune, or sheer indolence and inattention to business?" Many of these people were, indeed, incompetent or worse.

But it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Washington often set the same impossibly high standards for his subordinates as he set for himself. And that he failed to appreciate their difficulties; he felt betrayed when their achievements were less than his expectations.

Washington's approach to dealing with his political and social inferiors, and often even his peers, was essentially paternalistic. But he expected that on their parts they should do what was required of them, from showing up as militiamen when needed to paying their rent when they were his tenants. This attitude, acquired during his early days on the frontier, was one he carried with him into the political arena. And in that field he applied many of the same standards in his view of public behavior. With his almost obsessive fear of factions--the death knell of the republic--Washington had little conception of a loyal opposition.

Whatever the cause or justification, he viewed disorder as a threat to the stability of the new nation, as diabolical attempts to destroy the best fabric of human government and happiness that has ever been presented for the acceptance of mankind. During Shay's rebellion, in the late 1780s, he wrote Benjamin Lincoln, "Are your people getting mad, Sir? Are we to have the goodly fabric we were nine years rising pulled over on our heads? What is the cause of all this? When and where is it to end?"

CORBIS

George Washington speaking at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, circa 1787. An enthusiastic proponent of national unity, Washington was chosen by the other delegates of the convention to preside over the conference.

Creating a "national character"
For a time, after the ratification of the Constitution, and perhaps continuing through the success of his first administration, Washington seems briefly to have held a hope, foreign to many of his Federalist contemporaries, not only of the boundless possibilities open to the new republic but of the perfectibility of its citizens, the development of a responsible citizenry, replete with Republican virtues, free of party faction and dedicated to his own classical ideals.

By the middle of his second term, he feared that in its place was a nation with different aspirations, with a taste for political struggle and for the pursuit of luxury. He had devoted his life to the service of the people, and he believed, very firmly, that he had governed for and in their name. But he had never, from his days on the frontier, been convinced of their political wisdom. He had very little faith that they could govern for themselves. His own tendency toward political pessimism inevitably colored his perception of the state of the nation. Throughout much of his public life, he judged his own achievements in light of his contributions to the creation of what he referred to as a "national character." The kind of republic that Washington visualized was essentially an eighteenth-century utopia, much of it based on the political educations of his early years. Much of it had very little to do with the democratization of politics in the United States and the private aspirations of its citizens in the last decade of the eighteenth century.

He was mistaken in thinking that he had lost the regard of his fellow citizens. His place in the forefront of the American pantheon was still secure. If Americans have found his expectations for the development of their national character difficult to achieve, sometimes irrelevant to their agenda, and often easy to ignore, Washington's ambitions for the new nation nevertheless provided his political heirs with a blueprint for what has been referred to as "universal virtues" and for an ideal republic yet to be achieved.