April 30, 1789: George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States. Then, standing before an eager crowd at Federal Hall in New York, he delivered the first inaugural address. The speech heavily emphasized virtue, a central concept to Washington’s republican ideology. Historian Stephen Howard Browne writes that most Americans at this time “understood virtue as describing a certain quality of character made intelligible by the willing capacity to superordinate the public good above the private.” He adds, “The term, certainly, presupposes a number of complex assumptions about human agency, the relationship of the subject/citizen to the state, and the nature of political obligation.” Despite the concept’s centrality in the entire day’s festivities, Washington only directly uses the word virtue once in the inaugural address. He states that “there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage; between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.” Given the centrality of notions of virtue to the creation of the United States, it is striking that the concept does not seem to have a twenty-first century word close in meaning. Or does it?
Citations: Stephen Howard Browne, The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020), 3, 10, Kindle edition; George Washington, “George Washington’s First Inaugural Address,” April 30, 1789, 5, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/1634180?objectPage=5; Currier & Ives, “The inauguration of Washington: as first President of the United States,” lithograph (c. 1876), https://lccn.loc.gov/2002699702.
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