George Washington's Farewell Address

The Constitution of the United States was ratified in 1787 and came into effect two years later, replacing the Articles of Confederation. Because the Articles had granted nearly all power to the individual states, those states were required to work together to achieve any common purpose, making it nearly impossible to regulate trade, collect taxes, or conduct foreign policy; a convention met in 1787 in Philadelphia to draft a new Constitution. Many delegates worried that an overly powerful central government would be no less oppressive than the British monarchy, and so the key question became how to make a government strong enough to perform essential functions and yet not so strong as to trample individual rights. The answer was a “federal” system, which delegated certain essential functions like trade and diplomacy to the central government, while leaving everything else to the states.

The Founders did not refer to the United States as a “democracy,” as is common today. They understood democracy as the direct involvement of all (adult male) citizens in every question of policy, like Athenian democracy; such a direct democracy was both impracticable for a large country and highly precarious in terms of factious power struggles and the will of the masses. (Indeed, in formulating the Constitution, the Founders viewed ancient Athens’s “pure” democracy—and its role in the fall of Athens—as a cautionary tale.) They instead used the term “republic,” from the Latin res publica, meaning “a concern of the people”; the people were the ultimate source of political legitimacy, but they exercised that power through elected representatives while they managed their own private lives. The Jeffersonians adopted for themselves the term “Democratic-Republican” to signify their form of republicanism was more concerned with the common person, unlike the Federalists, whom they accused of being elitist and even monarchical.

Part of Washington’s advice on dampening factionalism was to “cherish public credit” (Paragraph 28). As treasury secretary, Hamilton drew up his signature policy, the creation of a national bank that borrowed money, including money from foreign governments, to raise money beyond its fairly meager tax revenue. Many objected to the plan on the grounds that the Constitution did not authorize the creation of a national bank, and that accumulating debt would leave the country at the mercy of foreign creditors (which echoes in criticisms of the national debt today). Washington’s “Farewell Address” tries to straddle the line between the two positions, acknowledging the necessity for such finances, especially in cases of emergency, while counseling against relying on those finances too heavily.