Washington’s Birthday: The Man Who Gave It Back Twice

George Washington was born on 22 February 1732 in colonial Virginia. He was a surveyor, then a soldier, then a farmer, and by most accounts he wasn’t the cleverest man in any room he entered during the Revolution.

Jefferson wrote better. Hamilton thought faster. Franklin was wittier and better company. Washington knew all of this about himself. That’s part of what made him the one they all agreed to follow.

What he had instead was a quality that’s rarer than brilliance and considerably harder to fake: he could be trusted with power. Washington is the founder I’d most want running anything I cared about, and the reason is how little he needed to be the smartest person present. That kind of man is rare in any era, and 1783 still stuns me.

The First Time He Gave It Back

In December 1783, with the war won, Washington went to Congress and resigned his commission as commander of the army.

It’s difficult to convey how strange that was.

He commanded a veteran army that was owed years of back pay and was furious about it. Officers had approached him about marching on the government. The country had no functioning executive and no obvious alternative to him. Every historical precedent available said that the general who wins the war takes the country.

Caesar took it. Cromwell took it. Napoleon would take it within a generation, and a long line of men have taken it since in every part of the world.

Washington handed in his commission and went home to farm. George III, hearing that Washington intended to resign instead of rule, is reported to have said that if he did it he’d be the greatest man in the world. The king understood exactly what Washington was declining, because he understood what everybody else in that position had taken. That line thrills me because it comes from the man who lost the war. If he said it, George III had every reason to be bitter, and he still recognized exactly what he was looking at.

The Second Time He Gave It Back

Then he did it again, and that second refusal gets less attention and may matter more. He served two terms as president and then simply stopped. There was no law requiring it. He wasn’t tired of winning, since he would have won again comfortably. A meaningful number of people wanted him to stay indefinitely and some of them wanted him crowned. He left instead, and by leaving he invented the idea that the office is something you hold temporarily and then return. That norm held for nearly a century and a half on nothing but his example, until Franklin Roosevelt broke it and the 22nd Amendment wrote it into law.

One man’s decision became a constitutional principle because he made it twice and made it look obvious. It wasn’t obvious. Almost nobody had ever done it.

I admire this second refusal most. The first could be read as a soldier’s modesty. To leave an office he could have kept by simply saying yes is a different order of restraint, and it gets a fraction of the attention.

What He Was Good At

Washington lost a great many battles. He wasn’t a tactical genius and he knew it. He could, though, keep an army in existence through eight years of defeat, disease, desertion and no money. That’s a harder skill than winning engagements and it’s much less glamorous. The Continental Army survived because he refused to let it dissolve, and the war was won by not losing it.

He was also extraordinarily good at the thing nobody lists on a monument. That’s behaving consistently. People trusted him because he was the same man in every room, kept his word when it cost him, and didn’t scheme. In a revolution full of brilliant, ambitious and frequently untrustworthy men, that was the scarce resource.

I ran operations for twenty years and I’d take that person over the cleverest candidate every single time. Reliability adds up. Brilliance without it doesn’t.

The Fault That Has to Be Named

Washington enslaved people. That’s not a footnote and it doesn’t get softened.

He held human beings in bondage at Mount Vernon for his entire adult life, and their labor produced the wealth that let him serve without salary. He knew it was wrong. He said so privately. He didn’t free them in his lifetime, though his will provided for their emancipation after his wife’s death. That was more than most of his peers did and considerably less than the situation demanded.

You can hold both facts. A man can do something almost nobody in history has done, twice, and also participate in something monstrous. Pretending otherwise in either direction produces a worse understanding of him and of the period.

What I’d resist is the move that says the second fact cancels the first, because the two decisions he got right are the reason there was a country capable of eventually correcting the one he got wrong.

Why This Matters Now

The reason to know this is that the thing Washington declined is declined very rarely, and every generation gets to watch somebody somewhere fail to decline it.

Power doesn’t usually get handed back. The overwhelming pattern of human history is that whoever holds it keeps holding it, invents reasons why the circumstances are exceptional, and stays. Washington had every one of those reasons available and didn’t use them.

That pattern almost never breaks. Washington had a better claim to the exceptional-circumstances excuse than almost anybody who has used it since, and he went home anyway. He wasn’t a saint, he wasn’t the smartest man in the room, and he was in some respects a man of his time in ways we should be honest about. He was also, on the two occasions that counted most, considerably better than almost anybody has been before or since.

The Writing Lesson Underneath

Washington was a careful and rather formal writer who worked hard at it and never approached Lincoln’s ear for a sentence. Better than most, he understood that a decision communicates. His resignation and his departure were both, in effect, arguments made without a speech attached. He established a norm by doing the thing instead of advocating for it.

That translates directly. In any memoir I work on, the strongest material is what somebody did when it was expensive. Belief is cheap to claim. Conduct under cost is the evidence, and readers know the difference immediately. That’s also why I get impatient with memoir drafts built on stated values. A page of what somebody believes tells me very little, and one scene where it cost them something tells me everything I need. If you’re writing your own story and you’re unsure what belongs in it, look for the moments where you gave something up. Those are the ones that carry.

How do you mark Washington’s birthday?

The federal holiday is Presidents Day, on the third Monday of February. It sits near his birthday and covers everybody at once. If you want the day itself, read the Farewell Address, or at least the part about faction and about the country outlasting any individual. It’s long and formal and it repays the effort.

Or do the shorter thing, which is to spend a minute on 1783, when a victorious general with a loyal army chose to go home. Almost nobody does that. It’s the most consequential thing anybody did that century and it took the form of a man leaving a room.

I’d put that minute above anything else the holiday offers. A man walked out of a room he could have owned, and I can’t think of a better reason to remember his birthday.

Washington’s Birthday FAQ