Washington Close-Up

Nearly 200 years after his death, George Washington seems so remote and stodgy that his essential human qualities are nearly lost. The image of our first president has shrunk to fit the department store sales and cherry pie promotions that now serve as the national celebration of his birth on Feb. 22, 1732. Yet a quietly powerful exhibit at the Huntington Library reminds us why grief-stricken Philadelphians staged an elaborate mock funeral after Washington’s death at his Mount Vernon estate in Virginia and why gold medallions cast shortly thereafter grieved, “He in Glory, the World in Tears.”

“The Great Experiment: George Washington and the American Republic,” which runs through May, brings together the largest collection of Washington documents ever assembled. Next month, a traveling collection of objects from Mount Vernon will be added to the Huntington’s show. It is an exhibition to take in slowly, far from the drone of talking heads in the nation’s capital.

Americans familiar with the severe image etched on the $1 bill might not know that Washington was a tall, graceful dancer and splendid horseman. By his early 20s, he had tramped alone through the wild Ohio and Shenandoah valleys. A peace pipe he shared with an Indian chief along the way and an autographed survey are part of the exhibit.

A commission in the Virginia militia during the French and Indian War led Washington to the Virginia Assembly and soon after to command of the new Continental Army. In 1776, he ordered the Declaration of Independence read to every soldier “in an audible voice.” “So valuable a blessing” was independence that “no man should hesitate a moment to use arms in its defense.”

With victory at Yorktown, a hero’s reward of money and power could have been his. Instead, Washington promptly resigned his commission, asked only for his expenses and set off for Mount Vernon. The gesture, as sincere as it was dramatic, only raised his stock.

Washington’s retirement, at the height of his power, was short-lived. He soon was leading the Philadelphia Convention, which drafted the Constitution; a copy of the first draft, with his margin notes, is part of this exhibit. And in 1789, as every schoolchild is taught, he was elected the first president of the new United States. But his personal insecurities and foreboding about the fragile new republic were profound.

“My movements to the chair of Government,” he wrote a friend, “will be accompanied by feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution: so unwilling am I, in the evening of a life nearly consumed in public cares, to quit a peaceful Abode for an Ocean of difficulties.”

Washington’s 18th century hesitations and regrets about the government he helped create contrast sharply with the bluster and misdeeds of modern leaders. His 1796 farewell address, delivered after two terms as president, was a product of the political passions of the day, yet his warning about the evils of partisanship echoes eerily through contemporary wrangles over videotaped depositions and wiretapped conversations in the city that bears his name.