Letters from an American - December 22,2024

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

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December 22, 2024. On December 23, 1783, General George Washington stood in front of the Confederation Congress, meeting in the Senate chamber of the Maryland Statehouse, to resign his wartime commission. Negotiators had signed the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War on September 3rd, 1783. And once the British troops had withdrawn from New York City, Washington believed his job was done. The great events on which my resignation depended, having at length taken place,

I now have 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," he told the members of Congress. 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. Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theater 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. In 1817, given the choice of subjects

to paint for the rotunda in the US, being rebuilt after the British had burned it during the War of 1812, fine artist John Trumbull picked the moment of Washington's resignation. James Madison, I have thought that one of the highest moral lessons ever given to the world was that presented by the conduct of the commander in chief in resigning his power and commission as he did, when the army perhaps would have been unanimously with him and few of the people disposed to resist his retaining the power which he had used with such happy success and such irreproachable moderation. Madison agreed, and the painting of a man voluntarily giving up power rather than becoming a dictator hangs today in the rotunda of the US Capitol. ["The Sound of the U.S. Capitol"] capital.