Before His Presidency: George Washington Prepares to Retire from Public Life Following the American Revolution

Background

Written in the fragile transition between the end of the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and the establishment of an enduring peace, this June 1783 letter finds General George Washington at his headquarters in Newburgh, New York, as the Treaty of Paris between Great Britain and the newly independent United States neared completion. Writing to his longtime friend Bryan Fairfax, Washington explains that once peace is formally confirmed, he will eagerly “bid adieu to public life” and finally return to Mount Vernon.

Absent for eight years from his home and private affairs, Washington was not yet president, nor contemplating a future in national politics. Exhausted by war, he was a military commander whose service kept him from Mount Vernon and led to financial hardship and several private lawsuits. Anxious to withdraw from public service, Washington writes that he has been “embarrassed by a thousand difficulties in the course of eight successive years” and that “the losses I have already sustained by an Eight years absence from home, & the total neglect of my private concerns, are already capitol by great.” Yet, the Commander of the Continental Army would remain a dedicated public servant almost literally until the day he died. 

Bryan Fairfax, one of Washington’s oldest and closest friends, represented an America in transition. The first member of the British peerage to be born on American soil, he grew up in Virginia on an estate bordering that of George Washington’s family. Fairfax’s father mentored young Washington and even launched his career as a land surveyor when he hired the sixteen-year-old Washington in 1748. And though Fairfax was one of Washington’s closest friends, he was not a revolutionary. Refusing to swear allegiance to neither the Crown nor Congress, he advocated peaceful resolution and was frequently arrested by both sides during the war. Washington, loyal to old ties, often intervened on his behalf. After the war, Fairfax became a clergyman, and Washington attended his Episcopal church in Alexandria, Virginia. 

Eight years of the Revolutionary War did not diminish the bond between these two men, who frequently corresponded over the course of it. During the war, Washington had written to Fairfax that "The friendship I ever professed, & felt for you, met with no diminution from the difference in our political sentiments—I knew the rectitude of my own intentions & believing in the sincerity of yours, lamented, though I did not condemn, your renunciation of the creed I had adopted." Their correspondence demonstrates Washington’s rare ability to separate political necessity from personal loyalty.

This letter also follows one of Washington’s most consequential yet less visible victories. In March 1783, just weeks before writing to Fairfax, Washington confronted what became known as the Newburgh Conspiracy, when unpaid officers, outraged by Congress’s neglect, came dangerously close to open mutiny against the civilian government. Washington’s intervention, his Newburgh Address, proved decisive. By appealing to honor, affirming civilian authority, and invoking his own sacrifices, he defused a potential coup and established a lasting precedent that the military would remain subordinate to civil authority. In doing so, he became something larger than the commander of the Continental Army: an indispensable guarantor of the Revolution’s principles.

Ironically, the letter foreshadows Washington’s political ascent. When he tells Fairfax that he longs to retire and escape “a mind always on the stretch,” he writes as a man who has established himself as not only the commander in chief of the nascent republic, but who somewhat unknowingly has recently earned the nation’s trust as the singular candidate to lead the political sphere.

Though Washington hoped to reclaim the private life he had long deferred, this proved impossible. His retirement lasted only a short six years before the presidency called him back into public service in April 1789 – a reality that gives the letter a poignant, almost fragile quality.

Physical Description

Two pages, quarto. This letter is accompanied by a separate autograph address leaf in Washington's own hand.