I. He Could Have

1783. The War of Independence was reaching its victorious end. Peace placed another question on the table.

George Washington commanded the Continental Army. His standing extended far beyond its camps. Victory belonged to many people, but this name now carried a weight greater than the office alone.

Would the army become his personal power?

The temptation was not invented afterward. In 1782 an officer, Lewis Nicola, discussed monarchy in a letter and pointed toward Washington as a possible ruler. Washington rejected the proposal sharply. This was not a whole nation presenting a crown, but a road someone had actually suggested and he refused to take.

In the spring of 1783, officers at Newburgh were angry about unpaid wages and pensions. Washington again intervened against the danger of using the army to pressure civilian government. He acknowledged the soldiers' grievances without making those grievances a license for military rule.

History supplies enough figures who carried military victory into personal sovereignty: Caesar became dictator for life after civil war; Napoleon moved from general to emperor; Qin Shi Huang, Xiang Yu and Liu Bang each connected conquest with a new position of power. Their paths differed. They were not the inevitable fate of every victor. But that road was there.

Washington chose a turn away from it.

On December 23, 1783, he entered the chamber where Congress was meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, and surrendered his military commission. Entrusted authority went back to the body that had granted it. He said farewell and returned to Mount Vernon.

A story transmitted through the painter Benjamin West has George III responding to Washington's intention to retire by saying that such an act would make him one of the greatest men in the world. Versions and occasions differ; we need not mistake the story for a court transcript made that day.

A king's admiration circles around a man refusing to make victory his private property. The story endured because the action deserves our attention.

II. He Could Have Again

Six years later. 1789.

Under the Articles of Confederation, central authority was weak. Finance, debt and coordination among the states posed serious problems. In 1787 the Philadelphia convention proposed a new Constitution; after state ratification, the new government began operating.

The new office needed its first president. Many eyes returned to Washington.

His letters repeatedly express the wish to retire to the countryside. Mount Vernon meant agricultural experiments, wheat, livestock and the business of an estate he cared about. It was no refuge outside labor and power relations, but it was where he wanted to return.

In 1789 every elector who voted supported him. In 1792 they did so again. He was twice elected unanimously by the participating Electoral College.

He accepted the office. His reputation helped the new institutions win confidence. Duty, persuasion and personal judgment all belonged to the decision; we need not claim access to a single motive in his mind.

Four years. Four more. Two terms.

Late in his second term he retained great prestige while enduring bitter partisan conflict and attacks. No law prevented another candidacy. That does not mean everyone wanted him to stay, or that he could remain for life without further elections.

The road to a third candidacy was still open.

He did not take it.

In September 1796 he published his Farewell Address and announced that he would not stand again. In 1797 he completed the transfer and returned to Mount Vernon. No two-term constitutional prohibition had driven him out. That would come in 1951.

III. He Knew

Why not turn the army into one's own state? Why not keep occupying the presidential chair?

One answer is republican conviction: office comes from authorization, not possession. The Roman story of Cincinnatus surrendering his dictatorship and returning to his fields had also become a mirror in which people saw Washington.

Ideas and examples matter. Knowing a story does not mean being able to live it.

Between knowing and doing there may stand an entire army, or simply a chair in which you could remain seated.

Washington crossed that distance twice: first returning military command, then allowing the presidency to leave him and pass to a successor.

I read the gesture this way: if an office can be occupied only by me, it has not truly become a public office.

The struggle for independence had many sources. The Declaration grounded legitimate government in the consent of the governed, while the actual political people excluded many. Even at that narrow beginning, recasting victory as a personal hereditary entitlement would injure the republic's reason for being.

Leaving acquired a constructive meaning. The person walked out; the office remained. Others could enter, and they too should be able to leave.

In this series' language of carving, letting go is not an empty interval after the building. It is the final cut.

IV. Washington and Qin Shi Huang

The preceding essay followed Qin Shi Huang: a vast territory brought within one order, an order also subjected to enormous strain. The Qin empire fell about fifteen years after unification, while many of its institutions outlived it.

Now place these two figures beside one another.

One strengthened the sovereign's supreme position, organizing an empire around an irreplaceable center. The other, within a collective republican experiment, relinquished military office and eventually the presidency. Neither man made the whole of history himself. Their gestures can still illuminate one another.

This essay gives them an image: wearing the imperial robe, refusing it. That is not a claim about the clothing actually worn in the Qin period.

Titles reveal expectations too. In 1789 Congress debated an exalted form of address for the president. The Senate briefly favored a title beginning “His Highness.” The House resisted, and a simpler presidential designation prevailed. Washington did not single-handedly choose a word; the new republic was arguing over how to speak about itself.

Qin's center resembles a tower narrowing toward its summit. The American Constitution sought to distribute authority among offices and bind officeholders to rules. Making the rules stand above a person remains work to be done, not a guarantee already redeemed.

Qin's suppression, including book burning, can be set against the place reserved for criticism in republican arrangements. But the First Amendment came through Congress, the states and sustained political demands. It was not Washington's personal gift.

One movement seeks a more uniform command; the other must tolerate voices it cannot entirely control. Read this way, the gestures stand apart.

The Qin empire's short life and the American republic's survival across more than two centuries cannot be explained by one man's character. War, society, institutions and subsequent choices all enter the story. Lasting longer does not by itself mean being more just.

Zhuangzi writes that Hundun died when seven openings had been bored into him. We borrow a reminder to leave life room to breathe, not a claim that politics has experimentally proved a fable.

V. His Construction

But Washington was not against construction. He did not remain only in a clearing of questions, or speak once and disappear from politics.

He helped build a great deal.

He presided over the Constitutional Convention in 1787. He was not the Constitution's sole author, but his presence gave the proceedings weight. As president, he worked with Congress and officials to turn a written arrangement into everyday administration.

Hamilton at the Treasury, Jefferson at State: the two disputed the country's future fiercely. Washington judged between them and made choices. How a cabinet deliberates, how the president uses the veto already granted by the Constitution, how foreign affairs are conducted: precedents grew out of particular business.

He helped construct a government that could function.

It did not require every disagreement to disappear before it could go on.

Ratified in 1791, the First Amendment protected speech, publication and other liberties. Criticism of government should not be erased merely because it displeases those governing. Boundaries and enforcement would remain contested; this was no permission to say anything under any circumstances without restriction.

Separated powers and checks mean that decisions cannot always be completed by a single hand. They may delay action; they may prevent injury. Efficiency is not a sin, nor obstruction inherently noble. The questions are who can say no, and who can correct a mistake.

Retiring after two terms left successors a conspicuous precedent. Before Roosevelt's third election in 1940, no one won a presidential election for a third time. The practice was not originally law, nor did it go wholly unchallenged.

Only in 1951 did the Twenty-Second Amendment place a limit on the number of elections in the Constitution. A person's departure and a later legal rule are different moments, though a line connects them.

This construction has disputes and cracks. It needs amendment, and people repeatedly bringing promises on paper into actual life.

Being able to breathe is not being unable to suffer injury. It means those in power cannot be the only ones allowed to say that a wound exists.

VI. His Gap

Washington was not a perfect person. We need no mathematical theorem in order to take both a person's achievements and the harm he caused seriously.

The unavoidable fact is his life as an enslaver.

In 1799 Mount Vernon held 317 enslaved people. Washington legally owned 123; 153 belonged to the Custis estate, in which Martha held a life interest; another 41 were hired from other enslavers. The legal ledger had different columns. Labor and unfreedom occurred on the same estate.

His will gave William Lee freedom immediately upon Washington's death. The others whom Washington owned were to be freed after Martha died; she brought that date forward to January 1801. Those belonging to the Custis estate were outside the provision.

These arrangements changed some lives. They could not turn the years already lived in bondage into freedom. Washington expressed wishes for abolition in private letters, but did not lead a public abolition movement while president; he also pursued people who escaped his household.

A man who returned public military authority did not give everyone on his estate the same right to leave.

This was not an empty patch the Constitution had forgotten to color in. Its compromises over representation, the slave trade and fugitives embedded slaveholding interests in the new order. Enslaved people were not an abstract remainder waiting to be noticed. They were already there, with families, purposes and resistance of their own.

The language of liberty and the practice of enslavement stood together in this man's world.

Civil war would follow, then the abolition amendment of 1865, Reconstruction's hopes and defeats, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Struggle did not begin on those dates. Enslaved people, free Black people and abolitionists had long been pressing the country's promises against its practices.

The republic's history is no timetable of automatic improvement. Rights already gained can be eroded. Calling a system open does not by itself secure a place for someone it excludes.

Gödel's theorem cannot establish a constitution's ethical failures. Remainder is this essay's word for questioning exclusion, not a formula into which people disappear. No person can be merely another person's instrument. Washington's practice of slavery conflicts directly with that position.

We can recognize the importance of his relinquishing office and refuse to let that importance issue a certificate of innocence.

What needs protecting is not only a great man's chance to correct himself. It is also the standing of those he possessed to say no.

VII. Farming

Washington died at Mount Vernon on December 14, 1799, aged sixty-seven. The accounts describe severe throat symptoms, difficulty breathing and repeated bloodletting by his physicians. He died during an acute illness, not inside a picture of painless retirement.

He died at home, in his own bed. The estate was a place he managed, and a place where many enslaved people were compelled to live and work.

Look back through this series. Athens condemned Socrates; Rome executed Jesus. Qin Shi Huang died while traveling, and the succession became entangled in manipulation. Nietzsche suffered grave illness in his final years; Gödel died of malnutrition; Du Fu died late in a wandering life. Different deaths do not form a table of rewards and punishments for making the right choice.

Washington could return home. That matters. It does not mean the murdered gave others a reason to kill them, or that the ill had failed to learn how to let go.

He returned to managing a farm.

Wheat, mules, soil, accounts: outside politics, life contains these particular things. They are not pure or free of conflict. They remind us that an office should not consume all of a person's time.

Borrow Confucius' idea of transmitting for a limited comparison. Washington did not invent republican government. He inherited ideas and changed what he inherited through practice. His posture was not empty-handedness, but a willingness to release what his hands had held.

Kant spent much of his life in Königsberg; Washington returned to Mount Vernon. We can place a desk beside a field without turning Kant into someone who never left his city or had no concrete life.

Here are soil, seeds and seasons. Someone can leave public office and arrange the days anew. Such a return prevents power from pretending to be life's only height.

But ask: did the people farming for him share that freedom to go home? Without the question, the lovely picture of earth too easily smooths away their footprints.

VIII. The Man Who Would Not Wear the Crown

These figures encountered power differently. What follows is this series' juxtaposition, not a one-line verdict on each life.

Qin Shi Huang strengthened the imperial center. Alexander, the subject of the next essay, extended conquest ever farther and died at thirty-two. Kant questioned freedom at his desk; Socrates stayed in Athens asking questions; Confucius held office and continued teaching when his hopes went unfulfilled. Laozi departs in the legend. The Buddha's teachings direct practitioners toward themselves and the teaching, rather than making a teacher's personal authority a permanent crutch.

Washington's gesture is to accept power, return it, and go home.

We need not declare him free of desire, or invent a secret wish to become king. What we can see is a boundary he set himself when continuing to hold power remained possible.

Self-restraint allows an office eventually to cease being mine without the institution ceasing to function.

Kant insists that people must not be treated merely as means. Washington's refusal to make the army and presidency permanently his own can be read beside that demand. His enslavement of people forces us to see that he did not extend it to everyone.

He was not a saint. Two relinquishments do not erase the estate's unfreedom. That unfreedom does not require us to pretend the two relinquishments never happened.

At this essay's imagined bridgehead, another person arrives. He wears no imperial robe, but the clothes of someone returned to work at home, earth on his hands. He stands beside Qin Shi Huang. One man's clothing points toward the highest position; the other's toward a life able to leave that position.

There is soil underfoot. But the image must also leave room for those forced to labor on the same land. They are not a silent backdrop to a great man's homecoming.

Soil can crack too. It can also be turned and sown again. Being alive is not having no fissures. It is remaining open to repair, with more than one pair of hands at work.

Notes

The May 22, 1782 letter to Lewis Nicola, the March 15, 1783 Newburgh Address and the December 23 resignation before Congress are separate events. They do not constitute a formal national or congressional offer of a crown. George III's praise comes through reports associated with Benjamin West and others, with differences of wording and retirement occasion; the essay retains it as a transmitted story.

The convention met in 1787; government under the new Constitution began in 1789. Unanimous electoral support in 1789 and 1792 does not mean that all residents had a vote or agreed. The Farewell Address appeared in newspapers in 1796, with an earlier Madison draft and Hamilton's assistance in its composition. Washington left office in 1797. The Twenty-Second Amendment, ratified in 1951, limits elections and makes specific provision for succession cases.

The Senate's history documents the debate over presidential titles; Mr. President cannot be credited to Washington as a solitary invention. The Constitution, cabinet practice and Bill of Rights developed collectively. The First Amendment, ratified in 1791, originally addressed the federal Congress; its later application to the states is a separate history. Efficiency and oppression are not equated here.

The 317/123/153/41 breakdown for 1799, the will's emancipation conditions and their execution in 1801 follow Mount Vernon records and the will. Custis ownership limited the Washingtons' unilateral power of manumission, not their responsibility for benefiting from and exercising control within slavery. Constitutional compromises were not mere omissions, and Black freedom struggles long predated civil war or 1964. Ona Judge's experience is one case behind the mention of escape and pursuit.

The death account follows contemporary testimony and Mount Vernon's documentation. Modern retrospective diagnoses such as laryngitis and epiglottitis differ; this essay makes neither a definitive diagnosis nor a single-cause claim about bloodletting. The montage keeps the historical limits noted in the other essays. Illness and execution do not reward or punish thought. Kant did leave Königsberg; Du Fu's exact place of death remains disputed.

The imperial robe, construction, remainder, the comparison with Qin and the bridgehead's clothing and earth are interpretations or literary images, not documented scenes. Non dubito here means not wavering on the subject's standing as an end, not merely a means; it is not a claim of personal innocence. Gödel's theorems prove neither human imperfection nor the ethical defects of a political arrangement.

Sources: Letter to Lewis Nicola, 1782; The Newburgh Address, 1783; Resigning the military commission; Writing and publishing the Farewell Address; The presidential-title debate; The Constitution; The Bill of Rights; Enslavement at Mount Vernon; The 1799 will and emancipation; Death and final-illness records

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives