Washington's Farewell Address for Seekers

Dear reader — George Washington's 1796 Farewell Address gets quoted by people on every side of American politics, usually for one line. Two lines get the most mileage: the one about "the spirit of party," and the one about alliances. Both are usually quoted wrong. This guide reads what he actually wrote, what he left out, and what happened right after, because the popular version of this speech is a better story than the real one and a worse guide to the facts.

Everything factual is tagged in the full Study Guide as Settled, Disputed or Popular myth, with a source.

What It Actually Was

First, it wasn't a speech. Washington never stood up and delivered it. It ran in a Philadelphia newspaper, Claypoole's American Daily Advertiser, on September 19, 1796, about ten weeks before the electors voted. It was written like a letter to the country.

So the father of the country is also the founding client of the ghostwriter.

He wanted out of the job early. In 1792 he asked James Madison to draft a farewell, and Madison wrote one that June. Then Washington got talked into a second term and the draft went in a drawer. In 1796 he tried again and asked Alexander Hamilton to write a new one or fix the old one. Most of the final text is Hamilton's work, built on Washington's framework. So the most revered civic document in the country was a joint project by two guys who would be arguing with Jefferson for the next decade.

The opening is the line that started a tradition: "I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made." That's a man saying he isn't running again. The two-term habit it started held for over a century and a half, until the 22nd Amendment made it law in 1951. And since 1896, the Senate reads the whole thing aloud every year around Washington's Birthday, with the reader alternating between the parties. The first reading was in 1862, in the middle of the Civil War.

The Alliances Line (A Myth, Cleared Up)

People say Washington warned against "entangling alliances." He didn't. What he wrote was "steer clear of permanent alliances." The phrase "entangling alliances with none" is Thomas Jefferson's, from his 1801 inaugural. It gets credited to Washington by people on every side of foreign-policy fights who want Washington backing them up. Quick fix: his word is "permanent," and he wrote it in the context of existing commitments he said should be kept.

The Warning About Party Spirit

Washington had just spent years refereeing his own cabinet. Hamilton and Jefferson fought over the national bank, over the French Revolution, and over the Jay Treaty with Britain, and newspapers on each side went after the other. The Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 and the opposition societies that criticized the government made him worry that organized dissent would turn into attacks on the government itself.

If he isn't the most American American, he's on the literal mountain.

So he warned against "the spirit of party generally" in terms that sound like a Founding Father at his most dramatic: "The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism." And: "It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration."

Here's the part that gets left out. He didn't say parties should be banned. He called party spirit "inseparable from our nature," rooted in "the strongest passions of the human mind." And he gave the other side's argument a fair hearing: "There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true." His objection was to excess. His remedy was public opinion: "A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume."

So the claim that Washington said parties are un-American is a popular myth. It gets used by people who want Washington's authority against parties, and by people who dismiss him for it. The text is a warning about heat, not a ban on fire.

Parties Built On Geography

His more specific worry was regional parties: "any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western." He feared "designing men" would convince each region that it had different interests from the others, and that parties would win influence in their own districts by misrepresenting the other districts.

Readers often connect that to the Civil War, when the country and the parties did split North and South. Historians disagree about how much to read into it. He was writing in 1796, when the fights were about the Jay Treaty and settlement of the West. What's safe to say is that he warned about parties built on one region, and that the pressure he described shows up in any era.

The Constitution Didn't Plan For Parties

The other myth worth killing: that the founders designed the two-party system. The Constitution never mentions political parties. And its original rules for electing a president assume they don't exist. Each elector cast two votes and the runner-up became vice president: "In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President." That works if the country's two most respected men fill the top two jobs. It does not work if there are teams.

Second place gets a gift card and an office. It stopped working the first time two teams showed up.

Parties showed up within a few years anyway. In 1796 John Adams, a Federalist, won with 71 electoral votes. Thomas Jefferson, from the opposing party, came second with 68 and became his vice president. It's the only time a president and vice president have come from opposing tickets. In 1800 the Jefferson and Burr ticket tied at 73 votes and threw the election to the House, which led to the 12th Amendment in 1804 and separate ballots for president and vice president. So the founders' own rules had to be rewritten once parties showed up.

Was Washington Above Party?

He never joined a party and never ran on a ticket. He put rivals in his first cabinet on purpose and both sides claimed him. But the record isn't simple. Jefferson resigned as Secretary of State at the end of 1793, partly over Hamilton's influence. Hamilton resigned in early 1795 and kept advising him. Washington backed the Jay Treaty, which the Senate ratified in 1795 over fierce opposition from the Democratic-Republicans, and his last cabinet members were close to Hamilton.

So how nonpartisan was he? One reading says he tried honestly to stay above faction: he built his first cabinet from rivals, chose policies on the merits (neutrality, a funded debt, a treaty to avoid a second war with Britain), and left office warning against organized factions, which a man defending his own side wouldn't have done. The other reading says he governed as a Federalist: by his second term his cabinet was Hamilton's people, his major policies were the Federalist program, and he treated opposition societies as a threat. Jefferson's resignation and the Republican reading of the Address show how it looked from the other side. Historians like Joseph Ellis, Ron Chernow and Richard Hofstadter weigh it differently. That one is tagged Disputed, for a reason.

What Happened To The Warning

Within a generation the American view of parties flipped. By the 1830s, Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson's supporters had built the first national party organizations and defended them: a loyal opposition, organized to win elections, was a feature of a free government and not a threat to it. Richard Hofstadter traced that shift in a 1969 book, The Idea of a Party System. Washington's warning stayed in the culture as something everybody quotes and nobody follows.

In about forty years, the fastest policy reversal in American history that nobody voted on.

Do parties help or hurt self-government? One side says they're how it works. Voters can't choose among thousands of individual candidates, and parties package ideas into a choice, recruit candidates, and take the blame when things go wrong. A loyal opposition gives dissenters a legal way to organize. Washington himself conceded that parties are useful checks within limits. The political scientist E. E. Schattschneider argued in 1942 that modern democracy is unthinkable without them, and Nancy Rosenblum has defended partisanship.

The other side says his warning still applies. When party loyalty outweighs everything else, members of each side stop checking their own and treat the other as an enemy, which is the "alternate domination" he feared. Both parties draw strength from fighting each other, and a lot of voters say they dislike both. Granting that parties are useful doesn't mean the present level of heat is fine. Both are serious positions, and both can quote him, with the part they like.

Where To Start

Read the party-spirit section in full, and make sure you get to the sentence about "useful checks." Most of the argument about what Washington meant comes down to whether you read that sentence. Then read why third parties lose, to see why the two-party pattern keeps repeating even though nobody designed it.