Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story

by Wilfred M. McClay

If its theme could be summed up in a single term, that term would be national unity. All around him, Washington saw evidence of growing divisions, which presaged troubles to come. Washington began by making it clear how much he deplored “the baneful effects of the spirit of party,” the acrimony that was pushing the nation into the institutionalizing of partisan politics. He expressed his concern about the related rise of sectional conflict, in which northerners and southerners and easterners and westerners all seemed to be placing their local interests above those of the country as a whole, thereby forgetting all the ways in which their differences were mutually beneficial and necessary for the thriving of the whole.