George Washington's Farewell Address

By the year 1796, America was a newly sovereign nation and, having just won their independence, the people and their government were launched towards a blank canvas on which the foundation of the country would be set for centuries after. George Washington, as a founder of our nation and the first of many leaders, wrote his Farewell Address after eight years serving as the commander in chief, and the document’s message, even today, lives as an emblem of this country’s founding ideals. Throughout the Address, as he announces that he does not seek a third term of presidency, Washington also conveys his desires for the future of the country. He expresses the significance of unity, religion, and education to best benefit the wellbeing of the nation …show more content…
These values manifest themselves in Washington’s Address as he warns against such affairs. For example, Samuel Bemis mentions, “In Washington’s time avoidance of foreign alliances and of foreign entanglement was a question of independence and national sovereignty. What we generally construed as a policy of ‘isolation’ we ought to really interpret as a policy of vigilant defense and maintenance of sovereign national independence against foreign meddling in our own intimate domestic concerns” (Bemis, 1934). In the context of the time period, his Farewell Address communicates the strained relations between the United States and foreign nations, as it was a commonly held belief among American citizens that in order to preserve democracy, the government must primarily remain isolated from the monarchy that exists in Europe. In addition, this idea is shown in Arthur Markowitz’s article as he states, “The ideas contained in the Address did not originate with either Washington or Hamilton but were merely the restatement of commonly accepted principles of the time. The experience of twenty years of independence had made American statesmen very wary of close ties with Europe” (Markowitz, 1970). In the late eighteenth century, America mistrusted allying with European nations, having only just secured independence from those nations and, as Markowitz mentions, Washington’s Farewell Address expresses these widely-held suspicions. Overall, the reader notices that before he left the presidency, the father of our country cultivated the already well-established ideas of the time period in his Address to give to those people, particularly those related to isolationism as they would allow him to retire with a popular reputation and also leave an enduring message to benefit the future of the