Don’t call it Presidents’ Day.
Don’t call it Presidents’ Day.
T oday is a federal holiday. That holiday is not “Presidents’ Day.” No such holiday exists in law. It is George Washington’s birthday.
Washington’s birthday has been celebrated since he was encamped with our first army at Valley Forge in 1778. It first became an official state holiday in Massachusetts in 1856, and a federal holiday in 1879. Since the 1968 passage of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which subordinated historical accuracy to the preferences of federal workers for three-day weekends, Washington’s birthday has been celebrated on the third Monday of February, which never falls on his actual birthday of February 22.
Commemorations used to be more Washington-centered. In 1832, on his 100th birthday, Chief Justice John Marshall was invited by a Henry Clay–led congressional delegation to give an oration on Capitol Hill. Marshall served under Washington in the Continental Army and wrote a multi-volume biography of him, but demurred due to age and ill health. In his place, the Senate began a tradition, still continued, of reading Washington’s Farewell Address. During the darkest hours of the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Washington that “North and South will hang together while they have you to hang to.”
In February 1862, with the nation sundered by war, both sides appealed to Washington: Abraham Lincoln called for Americans to gather in their churches and read the Farewell Address, while the Confederacy gathered in Richmond on Washington’s birthday to inaugurate its government. The selection of Washington’s birthday for the official inauguration of the Confederacy’s new constitution and the formal investiture of its president was deliberate. Jefferson Davis began his inaugural address: “Fellow-Citizens: On this the birthday of the man most identified with the establishment of American independence, and beneath the monument erected to commemorate his heroic virtues and those of his compatriots, we have assembled to usher into existence the Permanent Government of the Confederate States.”
In 1982, Ronald Reagan spoke at Mount Vernon on Washington’s 250th birthday: “To the students across America who are listening in today, if Washington seems much larger than life and makes you feel a little smaller, I’ll let you in on a secret — he makes us all feel that way.” George W. Bush returned there a quarter century later, in 2007.
George Washington was born a very long time ago, in 1732. In fact, he was born so long ago that the modern Gregorian calendar was not in universal use; at the time, under the Julian calendar, his birthday was denominated as February 11, 1731. Ten years from now, we will celebrate his 300th birthday. It ought to be a great American occasion.
Washington’s world is distant from ours, and it is now unfashionable to revere anyone from that place and time. His virtues were those that his society revered, and he made himself an icon of those virtues by hard work and rigorous self-discipline. Yet unlike Robert E. Lee — a Virginian who married into Washington’s family and exemplified the virtues of his own place and time — Washington is remembered today not only for virtues of bearing, decorum, and personal integrity, but also for making the right choices when they mattered most.
Washington was lucky: His wealth began with inheritance and marriage, and he was never wounded in battle despite often being in the thick of things, the biggest man in the army, resplendent on horseback in a distinctive uniform. He survived a dizzying array of illnesses in the time before modern medicine. He placed his good fortune at the service of his nation.
Washington was entrusted, throughout his life, with great offices. He was chosen, at 21, to lead an expedition into the wilderness (today, western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio), a venture that ultimately triggered a global war. He was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in his twenties, and served for 17 years. He was chosen as commander of the Continental Army, president of the Constitutional Convention, and our first president. The presidency itself was designed with Washington in mind.
Cynics note that Washington was ambitious, but that is beside the point; great men must always be ambitious. A friend and biographer of Abraham Lincoln wrote that Lincoln’s ambition was “a little engine that knew no rest.” What makes a great man in power is not lack of ambition, but restraint. Washington waited for power until he was summoned by the people, and he laid it down of his own accord. In so doing, he set the great republican precedents: Power is given by the people, and it is theirs to give and nobody’s to retain too long.
Restraint also guided Washington’s approach to the law. The people had adopted the Constitution, and it was Washington’s job to obey it. In his Farewell Address, he cautioned that “the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. . . . Resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts.”
A big man, Washington had the confidence of a big dog, and the iron discipline to control his own, often volatile emotions. In 1755, campaigning for a friend on election day in Fairfax, he was knocked down by a smaller man with a stick. When he didn’t retaliate, Virginians expected a challenge to a duel to avenge Washington’s honor. His friend Adam Stephen wrote to him later, “Such a Spirit of Revenge and Indignation prevaild here, upon hearing you were insulted at the Fairfax Election, that we all were ready and violent to run and tear Your Enemies to pieces.” But Washington knew that his honor was already beyond question; he instead apologized for provoking the man. He was, literally and figuratively, the bigger man. The man he was campaigning for won by twelve votes.
That restraint ran against Washington’s own nature. Gouverneur Morris said in a eulogy that friends knew him as a man of “tumultuous passions” and could “bear witness that his wrath was terrible.” Painter Gilbert Stuart, who captured Washington’s likeness for posterity, remarked: “Had he been born in the forests, he would have been the fiercest man among the savage tribes.” There’s a great story about Washington breaking up a snowball fight that escalated into an enormous brawl between soldiers from Massachusetts and newly arrived Virginia riflemen in Harvard Yard during the siege of Boston in 1775, possibly with racial overtones because of the presence of black soldiers in the Massachusetts regiment. A young observer recounted the scene:
Reinforced by their friends, in less than five minutes more than a thousand combatants were on the field, struggling for the mastery. At this juncture General Washington made his appearance, whether by accident or design I never knew. I only saw him and his colored servant . . . both mounted. With the spring of a deer, he leaped from his saddle, threw the reins of his bridle into the hands of his servant, and rushed into the thickest of the melee, with an iron grip seized two tall, brawny, athletic, savage-looking [Virginia] riflemen by the throat, keeping them at arm’s length, alternately shaking and talking to them. In this position the eye of the belligerents caught sight of the general. Its effect on them was instantaneous flight at the top of their speed in all directions from the scene of the conflict. Less than fifteen minutes time had elapsed from the commencement of the row before the general and his two criminals were the only occupants of the field of action.
Despite being a Virginia slave-owner, Washington was at home commanding a racially integrated army, in which a regiment of free black soldiers under the command of Alexander Hamilton played a crucial role at Yorktown.
Washington’s contemporaries understood how indispensable his character had been to the republic he left them. The Senate, upon his death, delivered a resolution to his successor, John Adams, extolling Washington’s virtuous restraint:
With patriotic pride we review the life of our Washington and compare him with those of other countries who have been preeminent in fame. Ancient and modern names are diminished before him. Greatness and guilt have too often been allied, but his fame is whiter than it is brilliant. The destroyers of nations stood abashed at the majesty of his virtue. It reproved the intemperance of their ambition and darkened the splendor of victory. . . . Let his countrymen consecrate the memory of the heroic general, the patriotic statesman, and the virtuous sage. Let them teach their children never to forget that the fruit of his labors and his example are their inheritance.
We have not always been favored with such men. Recall that on his 52nd birthday, “Franklin Roosevelt hosted a toga party in the White House. He dressed as Caesar and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt dressed as the Oracle of Delphi, with guests also donning white robes and Grecian headbands.” Dressing as Caesar was all too apt for FDR. Washington’s favorite play, by contrast, was Joseph Addison’s Cato, from 1713, which centered not on Rome’s emperors but on the tragic loss of its republic to Caesar. When George Washington crossed the Rubicon, it was alone, without his army, to go home.