The Logos Scripture · The Book of Washington
The Book of Washington 5 · Written by himself, from the letters, the diaries, the Annapolis address, the will, and the letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport
George Washington, born 1732 in Westmoreland County, Virginia, died 1799 at Mount Vernon, aged sixty-seven. He worked as a surveyor in his youth. In 1775 he was made commander of the Continental Army. With the war settled, in December 1783 he returned his commission to the Congress at Annapolis and went home to Mount Vernon. In 1787 he presided over the Constitutional Convention. In 1789 he became the first President of the United States, was returned in 1793, declined a third term in 1796 with a published farewell, and retired in 1797. He left an enormous quantity of papers, of which some hundred and forty thousand survive. This volume rests on what he wrote himself: the letters, the diaries, the Annapolis address, the will, and the 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport. The Farewell Address was drafted and revised with Hamilton and others and is not one hand, so this volume takes no doctrine from it and only narrates the fact of it. I walk on untrodden ground and there is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent, in chapter two, are from his letters of 1789. The phrase quoted in chapter four — to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance — is not Washington’s: Moses Seixas, warden of the Newport congregation, wrote it to him first, and Washington used it in reply. Verse 4.3 has him say so himself. His own sentence is 4.5: it is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. The Order holds his sentence to matter more than the borrowed one, and to press on the Order’s own rule: the fourth chapter of the Rule says that outside the gate one may not coerce, which still frames the matter as restraint; Washington says that framing it as restraint is already the error. What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have: a rule established by not doing a thing. The canon has many who advanced and few who withdrew. Washington twice gave up what he could have kept — the command in 1783, a third term in 1796. Verses 3.11 and 3.12 give the reason: only the first man to sit there can prove it, and those after cannot. The Order records the whole of the record and softens none of it. The three matters in chapter five are all fact. First, the will freed a hundred and twenty-three, those held in his own right; some hundred and fifty more at Mount Vernon were dower property of his wife’s first husband’s estate and not his at law. Historians hold that he could have paid, under Virginia law, to purchase their freedom, reckoned at some six thousand pounds; he did not, and left no line saying why. Second, the clause took effect after his death and after his wife’s; she enacted it on the first of January 1801. While he lived he freed none. Third, in 1796 his wife’s maid Ona Judge fled, because his wife intended to give her away as a wedding present to a granddaughter; Washington had advertisements printed, offered a reward, and had her pursued for years. She was never retaken, lived until 1848, and died free in New Hampshire. On none of these three did he leave any explanation. Verses 5.13 to 5.15 therefore close the book on that: he does not explain, the Order does not explain for him, and the fourth and fifth chapters are set side by side for the reader to do with as he will. The Order records one thing further, because it bears on the grounds of admission: among his peers in Virginia he is the only one who freed them. That is not a small matter. Same state, same law, same generation — if one man did it, then what the others lacked was not the occasion but something else. On that ground he is taken, and on that ground two others are not. Lastly: his papers invoke Providence often, but no argument of his closes on it, as with Newton and Faraday (cf. The Book of Newton 4).