Source: The Greatest Vexation of Washington’s Life: Protecting the Republic
The Unfulfilled Promise of The Republic
After the Revolution’s triumph, George Washington turned his attention toward the precarious position of the whole enterprise and asked whether the republic might turn out to have been a fool’s errand.
Washington did not consider himself an intellectual and was privately embarrassed in the company of lawyers and scholars. In 1785, he wrote in a letter, “I have not leisure to turn my thoughts to commentaries: a consciousness of defective education, and a certainty of the want of time, unfit me for such an undertaking.”
At 53, he soared above the reputations of all of his fellow Americans as a soldier who had held off the British for seven long years and ensured American independence, then retreated from all of it to return to a life of peace.
But in the two ensuing years since his resignation as the commanding general of the Continental Army, and since the disbanding of that army, the principles of republicanism were not faring well.
DAVE DOES HISTORY 
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