No matter what the official calendar says, today is not some generic “Presidents Day,” but the ritual observance of tomorrow’s George Washington’s birthday. Washington was a great man not just of his age alone but of all the epochs of mankind.
Woke attempts to erase history cannot succeed in besmirching Washington’s character and significance. Such singular virtue and historical achievement cannot forever be obscured.
Not just the United States but the whole free world owes a debt to Washington for his courage, his sacrifices, his vision, his sense of duty, and his dedication to liberty. Entering the Revolutionary War as one of two continentally renowned men in the American colonies (Ben Franklin was the other), Washington arguably had more to lose, and less personally to gain, than almost any of his cohorts. He could have gone about his business as a leading citizen of one of the two leading states in the colonies, a prosperous farmer and commercial leader, one who could afford to wait out British crackdowns aimed largely at Virginia’s northern neighbors.
A SMALL BUT SIGNIFICANT WIN FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
Instead, Washington volunteered for and led what seemed like the most daunting of military efforts, against the mightiest armed force in the world, holding together an untrained and badly provisioned army by sheer force of personal leadership and character. Then, having won, he carefully marshaled his renown and moral authority to give legitimacy to the creation of a new Constitution for a new, federated government, to serve a new nation self-styled (in Thomas Jefferson’s words) as an empire of liberty.
All along, Washington knew he was playing not just for 13 colonies at one time, but instead for the whole world for posterity. Washington’s inaugural address as the first U.S. president is justly famous, but consider the unused excerpts from his notes for the speech, words of his own before the draft was considerably shortened and polished by James Madison.
“Can it be imagined,” he asked, “that this continent was not created and reserved so long undiscovered as a theatre, for those glorious displays of divine munificence, the salutary consequence of which shall flow to another hemisphere and extend through the interminable series of ages?”
Furthermore, he later continued: “Though I shall not survive to perceive with these bodily senses, but a small portion of the blessed effects which our revolution will occasion in the rest of the world, yet I enjoy the progress of human society and human happiness in anticipation. I rejoice in the belief that intellectual light will spring up in the dark corners of the earth; that freedom of enquiry will produce liberality of conduct.”
Only a willful ignorance or, worse, an outright maliciousness, could fail to recognize how new and how noble was Washington’s civilizational enterprise. As always, the proper gauge of historical worth is not the comparison of a leader’s achievements to today’s standards, but rather the measure of how far he advanced human liberty and human flourishing from where he found it. By that wise way of reckoning, that generation and a half of American founders – Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Mason, Sherman, and the rest – did more than perhaps any other in history to secure dignity and manifold blessings for all mankind.
Yet even amid that “assembly of demigods” (to borrow a phrase the absent Jefferson used to describe the Constitutional Convention), Washington was recognized, without reserve, as the first among equals. That is why we should celebrate Washington’s Birthday: in order (to quote Washington himself) “to raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.”
