Joseph Ellis has written of George Washington and the Farewell Address that, “For twenty years, over the entire life span of the revolutionary war and the experiment with republican government, Washington had stood at the helm of the ship of state. Now he was sailing off into the sunset. The precedent he was setting may have seemed uplifting in retrospect, but at the time the glaring and painful reality was that the United States without Washington was itself unprecedented. The Farewell Address...was never delivered as a speech. It should, by all rights, be called the Farewell Letter, for it was in form and tone an open letter to the America people, telling them they were now on their own.” (J. Ellis, Founding Brothers, 122)

Later Ellis states, “Whatever the Farewell Address has come to mean over the subsequent two centuries of its interpretive history, Washington intended it as advice to his countrymen about how to sustain national unity and purpose . . .” (J. Ellis, Founding Brothers128)

Question: In your opinion what was the most important piece of advice Washington gave? How, according to Washington, were Americans to maintain unity and devotion to the ideals of the American Revolution?


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