The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic by Stephen Howard Browne (review)

Stephen Howard Browne has written a splendid, slim volume that analyzes and contextualizes George Washington’s first inaugural address with crisp, insightful, and accessible prose. Through Washington’s first inaugural address, Browne takes up the thorny, complex, and intertwined issues of ritual, rhetoric, political dissent, nation-making, and presidential character. Browne is to be commended for writing a book that makes this task look easy. This is a book that scholars should read, but it is also ideal for college students and general readers.

Browne demonstrates how Washington’s address was part of a broader effort to fashion a usable vision of the American nation and shows that this effort was not limited to him alone. He charts Washington’s journey from Mount Vernon to New York and argues that Washington’s interactions with the broader public made the public integral to the performance of nationhood, such as the invention of rituals meant to give form and shape to ethereal concepts like “virtue” that, especially to twenty-first-century sensibilities, may seem quaint or downright obsolete. En route to his inauguration, Washington participated in festivities meant to welcome him and to celebrate his election. He gently but firmly deflected eager applications for jobs in the administration with assurances that such decisions would be made on the basis of merit alone. And he responded with humility and thanks to adoring townspeople, pledging to undertake his duties with the solemn faith in “Divine Providence” and in the confidence of the people that the job required. This, Browne convincingly argues, was far from empty gesture. Instead, it was a “rhetorical craft” through which both Washington and the broader public collaborated in defining the republican “character” of the nascent American nation. This was “art of a distinctive kind, designed on the spot, as it were,” Browne writes, “to invest what might otherwise be faux royalism with a fully republican, fully American sense of shared values” (52).

Along the way, Browne offers a meditation on the context informing Washington’s thoughts on the nation he would be tasked with helping bring about. The project would take a leap of faith—like the Revolution, and indeed, as Browne tells us, like all revolutions—and it would not be his task alone. Like other leading eighteenth-century statesmen, and like the adoring public that celebrated Washington’s leadership on the way to New York, Washington believed that the new nation depended on a virtuous citizenry. Citizens because they possessed inalienable rights, virtuous because they would be expected to exercise those rights in service to the public good. They looked to Washington because he exemplified this virtuous citizenship, but their capacity for virtue also, at least ideally, would hold leaders to account. In short, Browne tells us, Washington’s nation measured freedom according to its citizens’ capacity to build for the future, not in their capacity to act only for themselves.

All of this acts as the crucial set-up for Browne’s analysis of Washington’s six-paragraph inaugural address, and for a concluding chapter that briskly recounts anniversaries of the address 50, 100, 150, and 200 years later. Washington’s address, not surprisingly, lacked rhetorical fluff. But Browne tells us it provided a kind of blueprint for republican citizenship that was both specific to the new president and his time and adaptable to his audience in 1789 and to future generations of Americans. Washington’s initial expression of awe at the duty before him; his faith in the Constitution, its framers, and the American people; and, above all, his insistence that “virtue alone” (161)—that is, a commitment to eschew private gain in favor of public good—should guide leaders entrusted with political power: These themes would be repeated ad nauseam in nearly every subsequent presidential address between Washington’s time and our own. Browne argues that they...