You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

by Alexis Coe

In London, writer Samuel Johnson railed against the hypocrisy of “these demigods of independence” in a forty-page pamphlet asking, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”4

He worried that “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of Government.”10 Political partisanship, Washington predicted, would reduce the government to a crowd of bickering representatives who were very good at thwarting each other but got very little accomplished for their constituents. And for all his talk of unity, he had come to see people as for or against his administration and had little patience for criticism. Unbridled partisanship was his greatest fear, and his greatest failure was that he became increasingly partisan.