Washington's Day Address, February 23, 2009
Adam Goodheart visits the Maryland House of Delegates
Adam Goodheart,
the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of the C. V. Starr Center
for the Study of the American Experience, spoke before the Maryland House of Delegates, delivering
a birthday tribute to College patron George Washington.
Adam Goodheart addresses the Maryland House of Delegates
Adam Goodheart:
Thank you, Mr. Speaker, members of the House of Delegates,
and distinguished guests - it is an honor to be here tonight.
I'd like to begin by telling you a story - a story about Washington's crossing. I'm
not talking about his famous crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas Eve,
1776, but rather one that happened much closer to here - and instead of ending
with a military victory and undying glory, this one ended in epic bungling and
near disaster.
In fact, my story involves the same crossing I just made myself a little while ago: from Kent County, Maryland to Annapolis. It was March of 1791, when the journey that I just made in 45 minutes used to take an entire day. Two years into his first presidential term, Washington was on his way from Philadelphia down on a tour through the Southern states. He thought he'd save himself a slog through the muddy roads around Baltimore by boarding a boat on the Eastern Shore and sailing into the port of Annapolis in grand presidential style. What he didn't foresee was that the ferrymen he hired in Rock Hall would turn out to be the least competent sailors in Maryland history. (And any of you who have been out on the Bay on a summer weekend know that that's really saying something.) After an interminable crossing,
a squall blew in and they managed to run the boat aground not once but twice. The President of the United States spent the entire night stranded on a sandbar at the mouth of the Severn, in imminent danger of drowning.
What was Washington thinking as he huddled all night in his overcoat and boots against a driving thunderstorm? "Man, won't they just build that dang Bay Bridge already?" Or, in those long hours of darkness, did his thoughts take a more ironic
and philosophical turn? The metaphor of the "ship of state" was already a common expression in American politics by 1791. Just two years earlier, Washington had been carried to his inauguration aboard a symbolic presidential barge rowed by
13 oarsmen dressed in white. Did he worry at all that the grounding of this humbler "ship of state" might be an ominous portent for the future?
***
If George Washington could return among us today, he would no doubt hardly recognize what the presidency has become - or, for that matter, the country. Our modern-day ship of state has become less and less like a Chesapeake Bay schooner and more and more like an aircraft carrier: immense, heavily armored, and very slow to turn. And when it runs aground on a sandbar, it is much, much harder to push it off - as we're all discovering right now, in fact.
Just a few weeks ago, I was privileged to sit on the steps of the U.S. Capitol during the inauguration of our new president. As I watched the chief executive address
the nation from behind a wall of bulletproof glass in a locked-down capital city, it was hard even to conceive of a time when the President of the United States could
be
left to fend for himself on a sandbar in the middle of the Chesapeake. The crowd watching from the Mall on January 20th was about half the size of the entire population of the United States when George Washington took office. The federal government's entire budget in 1791 was just over $4 million, which is as much as
the federal government today spends about every 4o seconds.
In fact with George Washington, one of the most difficult crossings of all is the vast gulf that seems to separate him and his time from us and ours. While Abraham Lincoln's flesh-and-blood humanity still seems alive to us today - thanks in no small part to the fact that he lived during the era of photography - Washington's is locked away behind a marble mask, irrecoverably. The human being - the man who did and felt the same kinds of things we ordinary mortals do - lies entombed inside the effigy, the symbol.
Make no mistake - George Washington the symbol is very important, and was so even during his own lifetime, even prior to his presidency. My own institution, Washington College, was established while he was still out in the field commanding the revolutionary army, chartered by legislators within this very building, your direct forebearers. To these founders, General Washington represented a civic
ideal, a role model for future generations of young Americans to emulate. And I
can tell you that each and every one of Washington College's students lives up to
this today...
well, ah, mostly.
Yet treating George Washington only as a symbol or an idol also renders him oddly static and passive, isolated from the fractions and the rambunctous times in which he actually lived. It also suggests something very dangerous, which is that he was perfect - or at least somehow inherently better than America's leaders can ever be today. The reason I call that idea dangerous is that it lets us off the hook. The suggestion you'll find in so many of the recent bestselling books about the founding generation - that it was somehow a miraculous assemblage of perfect statesmen - would have seemed ridiculous to those men themselves. Washington was a mediocre battlefield commander, an awkward public speaker, and a tedious conversationalist - and that's according to no less an authority than Thomas jefferson. As a general, he was the target of a would-be coup by his own officers;
and as president, he was lashed by the hostile press as a spendthrift, a tyrant, a monarchist, or worse. When he made a treaty with great Britain in 1795, the response from his critics was about what it would be today if President Obama suddenly flew over Afganistan and shook hands with all the leaders of the Taliban. We also know that it took Washington until the very last years of his life before he came fully to terms with his own hypocrisy and cruelty in owning other Americans as slaves.
***
orge Washington's greatest innate quality, I believe, is that he was an expert politician. That might come as a surprise to many Americans today, who -
although I hesitate to say it in front of this crowd - have been taught to think the word politician as basically synonymous with lawyer, except without the moral backbone. However, by considering George Washington as a politician, I think we can start to reclaim the dignity of the word, and perhaps even of the art of politics itself. Although many people now think that Washington detested politics - and he certainly railed publicly against partisan factionalsim - he was in fact a master of compromise, of persuasion, and of gentle or even not-so-gentle manipulation. As Dr. Edward Papenfuse has written, Washington's cabinet was the original "team of rivals," where the oversized intellects - and oversized egos - of Jefferson and Hamilton famously jostled and sparked against each other, an arena in which governance could often be a blood sport. Indeed, like our current president, Washington began his career as a state legislator - actually a provincial legislator,
as a member of Virginia's famously unruly House of Burgesses, where he and other lawmakers strained to hold together the precarious alliance of landed gentry, poorer planters, governor, and crown. (Until one day they decided not to, that is.)
The root of the word politician is the word polis, which comes from the same culture that gave us the first democracies - ancient Greece - and means city or community. What Washington and the best of his contemporaries realized is that the art of politics is the art of organizing, leading, and holding together communities, whether of citizens or, indeed, of lawmakers. The very idea of a nation as an entity that could hold itself together entirely through the free practice of politics was a radical one in the 18th century. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer has written, it involves nothing less than "the discovery that people could organize a society based on liberty and freedom, and could actually make it work. The ideas themselves were not new in the world, but for the first time, entire social and political systems were constructed primarily on that foundation."
Indeed, when Washington walked into this building in the winter of 1783 and submitted his resignation as commander-in-chief to Congress, he was yielding up the clarity and precision of military leadership for the messy stew of politics - just
as all the founders of our nation, when the threw off the authority of the British Crown, were giving up old rock-solid certainties for something shaky and improvisational, subject always to renegotiation and change. They didn't do so without a great deal of fearfulness, hesitation - and quite a bit of backsliding. Even today, of course, we still see in our own generation of Americans a tension between the yearning for liberty and the desire for authority and order. The genius of Washington's generation was their faith that these values are not irreconcilable - that in a sense, every crewmember was a captain on the ship of state. This leap of faith was Washington's bravest crossing of them all.
***
Speaking of which, you may be asking - what ever happened to good old George
after we left him stranded in the rainy darkness on that sandbar at the mouth of the Severn? Well, at first light, the sailors managed to hail a passing sailboat and ask its astonished crew if they wouldn't mind giving President Washington and his luggage
a lift the rest of the way to Annapolis. He entered the harbor in about as fine a style as he could manage under the circumstances, to a 15-gun salute from the no doubt equally astonished cannoneers. After freshening up a bit, and before dinner, he strolled over here to the State House to revisit the site of his resignation speech eight years earlier.
But that was the last time, as far as history records, that Washington ever crossed the Chesapeake.
