What I Warned You About

I gave you a Farewell Address. I spent the better part of two years working on it, with Hamilton's considerable assistance in the drafting and Madison's in an earlier version I set aside, and when it was finished I was satisfied that it said plainly what needed to be said about the dangers that would face the republic I had spent eight years of military service and eight years of the presidency helping to establish. It was published in September of 1796. I am given to understand it was first read aloud in the Senate during the darkest year of a civil war, and has been read there every year since 1896.

I am also given to understand that it has been largely ignored.

I find this consistent with human nature, which I studied more carefully than I am generally credited with, having had occasion to observe it under the most trying conditions a man can arrange for himself — eight winters of war, two terms managing the ambitions of men who were simultaneously the most gifted and the most difficult people I had ever encountered, and a lifetime on a plantation that required me to participate in a moral catastrophe I knew to be a moral catastrophe, which knowledge did not move me to the action it should have required. I am not innocent of the charge of knowing better and doing otherwise. I make no claim to consistency.

What I made a claim to, in September of 1796, was foresight. Let me tell you what I said, and then let you tell me whether it required prophecy or merely observation.

I warned you about faction. Not about any particular faction — I refused, then and now, to name sides, because naming sides is how you help one side and I had spent twenty years trying to belong to the republic rather than to a party. I warned you that the spirit of faction was the republic's primary internal enemy: that it would channel the energies of ambitious men toward the interest of the party rather than the interest of the nation, that it would teach citizens to see their fellow citizens as enemies rather than countrymen, that it would make the institutions of government into instruments of faction rather than protections against it.

"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism."

I wrote that in 1796. I wonder what word you would use for it now.

I warned you about geographical sectionalism — the tendency to identify first as a Northerner or a Southerner, a coastal person or an inland one, and to treat that identity as more fundamental than the national one. The Civil War proved me right at a cost I cannot calculate without grief, and I observe that the habit did not die with the Confederacy. It merely found new coordinates.

I warned you about foreign influence — about the danger of permanent alliances that would draw the republic into the quarrels of other nations and, more subtly, about the danger of foreign interests finding purchase in domestic politics. I said: "The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest." I believed then, as I believe now, that a republic's foreign policy must serve the republic's interest, clearly reckoned, and not the passions of affection or resentment that foreign powers learn very quickly how to cultivate.

I warned you about religion in politics — not about religion itself, which I considered a source of the morality that a free people requires. I wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport in 1790 that the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” and I meant it. What I warned against was the weaponization of religious identity in political contest — the use of faith as a faction marker rather than a moral foundation. A republic in which citizens sort themselves by faith and vote accordingly is a republic that has found a new form of the sectarian warfare that destroyed the European peace for centuries.

I warned you about debt — not the existence of it, which is sometimes necessary, but its accumulation as a habit, the borrowing against the future of a people not yet born who have no voice in the transaction. "As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible." I said that. I meant it as a matter of intergenerational ethics, not merely financial prudence. The generation that consumes what the next generation must repay is not practicing self-government. It is governing others without their consent.

And I warned you — this above all — to tend the institutions. To understand that the Constitution was not self-executing, that the courts and the Congress and the executive were not machines that would run without maintenance, that the whole structure depended at every moment on the willingness of the people who held its offices to subordinate their personal ambitions to the obligations of those offices. I knew this because I had done it — not perfectly, not without error, but with the constant discipline of a man who understood that he was being watched by the whole of history and that what he did would set the terms for what came after.

I resigned my military command in 1783 when I could have used it to make myself king, because a republic is not a republic if its military answers to a man rather than a constitution. I left the presidency after two terms when I could have held it for life, because I had decided that the precedent of peaceful transfer was more important than any policy I might pursue by remaining. I did these things not because they were easy — they were not easy; I wanted, at moments, very much to stay — but because I understood that the institution mattered more than the man, and that a man who understood this and acted accordingly was the only kind of man a republic could afford at its founding.

I am not the judge of whether my successors have understood this. I am not the judge of whether you understand it now. I am the man who warned you, two hundred and thirty years ago, about precisely the conditions you are now debating, and I find that warning and being ignored is apparently my permanent condition, which perhaps explains why I was always more comfortable giving orders than advice.

But I will say this, and then I will let you return to your anniversary celebration, your fireworks, your speeches, your flags — all of which I approve of, ceremony being one of the few things that holds a people together when argument is pulling them apart:

The republic I helped build was not built for great men. It was built for ordinary ones — for citizens who would, in the ordinary business of their lives, maintain the habits of self-government: read, deliberate, petition, vote, serve on the jury, attend the meeting, hold the office when called, and relinquish it when the term was done. It was built for a people who understood that liberty is not a gift that arrives and stays, but a discipline that must be practiced daily or lost by degrees too gradual to notice until the loss is complete.

You have the tools. You have the documents. You have two hundred and fifty years of precedent showing what works and what does not, what holds and what breaks, what a free people looks like when it is governing itself and what it looks like when it has arranged to be governed.

I told you what I knew in 1796. I can only repeat it now.

The rest is yours.

George Washington
Ferry Farm, Virginia; Cambridge; Valley Forge; Philadelphia; Mount Vernon; and the long watch that does not end
June 20, 2026