He chose, as men choose, where most danger showed, Of petty cares, that gall great hearts the most, The noisy marvel of a day; His soul sate still in its unstormed abode. Washington's Resignation. His Address to Congress at Annapolis, December 23, 1783. THE great events on which my resignation depended having at length taken place, I have now the honor of offering my sincere congratulations to congress, and of presenting myself before them, to surrender into their hands the trust committed to me, and to claim the indulgence of retiring from the service of my country.. Happy in the confirmation of our independence and sovereignty, and pleased with the opportunity afforded the United States of becoming a respectable nation, I resign with satisfaction the appointment I accepted with diffidence; a diffidence in my abilities to accomplish so arduous a task, which, however, was superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of our cause, the support of the supreme power of the union, and the patronage of heaven. The successful termination of the war has verified the most sanguine expectations; and my gratitude for the interposition of Providence, and the assistance I have received from my countrymen, increases with every review of the momentous contest. While I repeat my obligations to the army in general, I should do injustice to my own feelings not to acknowledge in this place the peculiar services and distinguished merits of the gentlemen who have been attached to my person during the war. compose my family should have been more fortunate. Permit me, sir, to It was impossible the choice of confidential officers to recommend in particular those who have continued in the service to the present moment, as worthy of the favourable notice and patronage of congress. I consider it as an indispensible duty to close this last act of my official life by commending the interests of our dearest country to the protection of Almighty God, and those who have the superintendance of them to his holy keeping. Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of action, and bidding an affectionate farewell to this august body, under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life. The The completest and most interesting Life of Washington is that by Irving. admirable Life by Chief-Justice Marshall will always have a special interest as the work of a great man who knew Washington well. Sparks prefixed a biography to his edition of Washington's Writings, and this has been published separately and is one of the best. A good briefer biography is that by Everett; and the addresses and essays on Washington by Everett, Webster, Winthrop, Whipple, and Theodore Parker are important. The volume of "Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington," by George Washington Parke Custis, Mrs. Washington's grandson and the boy of the Mt. Vernon household, gives vivid and valuable impressions of Washington's private life and character. See also the article by Parton, "The True and Traditional Washington," in the Magazine of American History, 1879. Headley's "Washington and his Generals " contains brief biographies of Greene, Gates, Putnam, Wayne, Schuyler, and all of the leading generals of the Revolution, and there exist important separate lives of many of these. and the Campaigns of the Revolution, in Greene's "Historical View of the American RevoThe chapters on the Army of the Revolution lution," throw much light on the military conduct of the war. need to be reminded of Coffin's "Boys of '76;" and none must forget how often the poets and the story-tellers have devoted themselves to Revolutionary themes. For the fullest The younger readers hardly information concerning all books relating to the Revolution, the student is referred to Winsor's "Reader's Handbook of the American Revolution." Old South Leaflets. Washington and the Principles of the Revolution.' BY EDWIN P. WHIPPLE. The history, so sad and so glorious, which chronicles the stern struggle in which our rights and liberties passed through the awful baptism of fire and blood, is eloquent with the deeds of many patriots, warriors, and statesmen; but these all fall into relations to one prominent and commanding figure, towering up above the whole group in unapproachable majesty, whose exalted character, warm and bright with every public and private virtue, and vital with the essential spirit of wisdom, has burst all sectional and national bounds, and made the name of Washington the property of all mankind. This illustrious man, at once the world's admiration and enigma, we are taught by a fine instinct to venerate, and by a wrong opinion to misjudge. The might of his character has taken strong hold upon the feelings of great masses of men ; but, in translating this universal sentiment into an intelligent form, the intellectual element of his wonderful nature is as much depressed as the moral element is exalted, and consequently we are apt to misunderstand both. Mediocrity has a bad trick of idealizing itself in eulogizing him, and drags him down to its own level while assuming to lift him to the skies. How many times have we been told that he was not a man of genius, but a person of "excellent common sense," of "admirable judgment," rare virtues"! and, by a constant repetition of this odious cant, we have nearly succeeded in divorcing comprehension from his sense, insight from his judgment, force from his virtues, of 66 Reprinted from the essay on this subject in "Character and Characteristic Men," by kind permission of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. and life from the man. Accordingly, in the panegyric of cold spirits, Washington disappears in a cloud of commonplaces; in the rodomontade of boiling patriots, he expires in the agonies of rant. Now, the sooner this bundle of mediocre talents and moral qualities, which its contrivers have the audacity to call George Washington, is hissed out of existence, the better it will be for the cause of talent and the cause of morals: contempt of that is the condition of insight. He had no genius, it seems. O no! genius, we must suppose, is the peculiar and shining attribute of some orator, whose tongue can spout patriotic speeches, or some versifier, whose muse can "Hail Columbia," but not of the man who supported states on his arm, and carried America in his brain. The madcap Charles Townshend, the motion of whose pyrotechnic mind was like the whiz of a hundred rockets, is a man of genius; but George Washington, raised up above the level of even eminent statesmen, and with a nature moving with the still and orderly celerity of a planet round the sun -he dwindles, in comparison, into a kind of angelic dunce! What is genius? Is it worth anything? Is splendid folly the measure of its inspiration? Is wisdom that which it recedes from, or tends towards? And by what definition do you award the name to the creator of an epic, and deny it to the creator of a country? On what principle is it to be lavished on him who sculptures in perishing marble the image of possible excellence, and withheld from him who built up in himself a transcendent character, indestructible as the obligations of Duty, and beautiful as her rewards? Indeed, if by the genius of action you mean will enlightened by intelligence, and intelligence energized by will-if force and insight be its characteristics, and influence its test-and, especially, if great effects suppose a cause proportionably great, that is, a vital causative mind- - then is Washington most assuredly a man of genius, and one whom no other American has equalled in the power of working morally and mentally on other minds. His genius, it is true, was of a peculiar kind, the genius of character, of thought and the objects of thought solidified and concentrated into active faculty. He belongs to that rare class of men rare as Homers and Miltons, rare as Platos and Newtons- who have impressed their characters upon nations without pampering national vices. Such men have natures broad enough to include all the facts of a people's practical life, and deep enough to discern the spiritual laws which underlie, animate, and govern those facts. Washington, in short, had that greatness of character which is the highest expression and last result of greatness of mind; for there is no method of building up character except through mind. Indeed, character like his is not built up, stone upon stone, precept upon precept, but grows up, through an actual contact of thought with things the assimilative mind transmuting the impalpable but potent spirit of public sentiment, and the life of visible facts, and the power of spiritual laws, into individual life and power, so that their mighty energies put on personality, as it were, and act through one centralizing human will. This process may not, if you please, make the great philosopher or the great poet; but it does make the great man. - the man in whom thought and judgment seem identical with volition the man whose vital expression is not in words, but deeds - the man whose sublime ideas issue necessarily in sublime acts, not in sublime art. It was because Washington's character was thus composed of the inmost substance and power of facts and principles, that men instinctively felt the perfect reality of his comprehensive manhood. This reality enforced universal respect, married strength to repose, and threw into his face that commanding majesty, which made men of the speculative audacity of Jefferson, and the lucid genius of Hamilton, recognize, with unwonted meekness, his awful superiority. But, you may say, how does this account for Washington's virtues? Was his disinterestedness will? Was his patriotism intelligence? Was his morality genius? These questions I should answer with an emphatic yes; for there are few falser fallacies than that which represents moral conduct as flowing from moral opinions detached from moral character. Why, there is hardly a tyrant, sycophant, demagogue, or liberticide mentioned in history, who had not enough moral opinions to suffice for a new Eden; and Shakespeare, the sure-seeing poet of human nature, delights to put the most edifying maxims of ethics into the mouths of his greatest villains, of Angelo, of Richard the Third, of the uncle-father of Hamlet. Without doubt Cæsar and Napoleon could have discoursed more fluently than Washington on patriotism, as there are a thousand French republicans, of the last hour's coinage, who could prattle more eloquently than he on freedom. But Washington's morality was built up in warring with outward temptations and inward passions, and every grace of his conscience was a trophy of toil and struggle. He had no moral opinions which hard experience and sturdy discipline had not vitalized into moral sentiments, and organized into moral powers; and these powers, fixed and seated in the inmost heart of his character, were mighty and farsighted forces, which made his intelligence moral and his morality intelligent, and which no sorcery of the selfish passions could overcome or deceive. In the sublime metaphysics of the New Testament, his eye was single, and this made his whole body full of light. It is just here that so many other eminent men of action, who have been tried by strong temptations, have miserably failed. Blinded by pride, or whirled on by wrath, they have ceased to discern and regard the inexorable moral laws, obedience to which is the condition of all permanent success; and, in the labyrinths of fraud and unrealities in which crime entangles ambition, the thousand-eyed genius of wilful error is smitten with folly and madness. No human intellect, however vast its compass and delicate its tact, can safely thread those terrible mazes. "Every heaven-stormer," says a quaint German, “finds his hell, as sure as every mountain its valley." Let us not doubt the genius of Washington because it was identical with wisdom, and because its energies worked with, and not against, the spiritual order its "single eye was gifted to divine. We commonly say that he acted in accordance with moral laws; but we must recollect that moral laws are intellectual facts, and are known through intellectual processes. We commonly say that he was so conscientious as ever to follow the path of right, and obey the voice of duty. But what is right but an abstract term for rights? What is duty but an abstract term for duties? Rights and duties move not in parallel but converging lines; and how, in the terror, discord, and madness of a civil war, with rights and duties in confused conflict, can a man seize on the exact point where clashing rights harmonize, and where opposing duties are reconciled, and act vigorously on the conception, without having a conscience so informed with intelligence that his nature gravitates to the truth as by the very instinct and essence of reason? The virtues of Washington, therefore, appear moral or mental according as we view them with the eye of conscience or reason. In him loftiness did not exclude breadth, but resulted from it; justice did not exclude wisdom, but grew out of it; and, as the wisest as well as justest man in America, he was preeminently distinguished among his contemporaries for moderation - a word under which weak politicians conceal their want of courage, and knavish politicians their want of principle, but which in him was vital and comprehensive energy, tempering audacity with prudence, self-reliance with modesty, austere principles with merciful charities, inflexible purpose with serene courtesy, and issuing in that persistent and unconquerable fortitude, in which he excelled all mankind. In scrutinizing the events of his life to discover the processes by which his character grew gradually up to its amazing height, we are |