SUSAN DUNN
AND
ROBERT F. DALZFLL,JR.
645
sonal conviction. He genuinely felt that a public trust should not be the
source of private financial gain.
And it was just such selflessness that Americans needed to see and
emulate - at least in the opinion of many of the country's leaders. For–
tunately, throughout the war Washington continued to oblige by pro–
viding any number of examples of that and other highly desirable virtues
like courage, patience, and fortitude, not to mention an unqualified ac–
ceptance of civilian control of the military. Then with the fighting at last
over, in a glorious - and brilliantly engineered - sequence, he bid
farewell to his troops, returned his commission to Congress, and rode off
to Mount Vernon, arriving at the doorstep of his beloved home on
Christmas Eve, 1783. Nothing more was required; the ultimate republi–
can act had been performed. Great power, steadfastly and unselfishly ex–
ercised for the good of all, had been voluntarily laid aside when the crisis
that had called it into being had passed.
No one who knew him would have claimed that George Wash–
ington was not an ambitious man. But he did manage to balance self-in–
terest with self-restraint, and that was what his friends and associates in
the patriot cause hoped large numbers of Americans would learn to do.
Yet for those who entertained such hopes - including Washington him–
self - the years immediately following the Revolution were a disap–
pointing time. States feuding with one another and torn from within by
competing factions, a national government powerless to act either at
home or abroad, and at the root of it all a population of individuals
who seemed increasingly bent on pursuing their own private aims, what–
ever the cost to society might be: that was the diagnosis, and eventually
it would result in the drafting of a new federal constitution, thereby set–
ting the scene for Washington's return to power and his last great
farewell.
Depending on one's perspective, it has never been hard to see in the
Constitution of 1787 a strong, counter-revolutionary thrust. The careful
orchestration by a small group - convinced that things were getting out
of hand - of the movement leading to the Philadelphia convention; the
delegates' decision to meet in private and keep their deliberations secret;
the early abandonment of the announced plan to alter the Articles of
Confederation in favor of creating an entirely new frame of government:
all of them would seem to lend weight to such an interpretation. Then
there is the document itself, calling for the establishment of a notably
strong central government in a republic lately born of a rebellion against
central governmental authority. If this was not counter-revolution, how
else would one describe it?
The truth was, of course, that the leaders of the Revolution -
many of whom were on hand in Philadelphia in 1787 - had never quar-
