Public Address Given at “Freeze the Senate” rally, Snohomish Indivisible – February 5, 2025; Photo Credit R. Taber-Hamilton, with The Rev. Allen Hicks – Trinity Episcopal Church, Everett, WA
In less than two weeks from now, America will celebrate Presidents Day on Monday, February 17th. The observed federal holiday is officially called “Washington’s Birthday.” The holiday Presidents’ Day helps us reflect on not just the first president but also our nation’s founding, its values, and what Washington calls in his Farewell Address the “beloved Constitution and union, as received from the Founders.” Also, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday is February 12, so by calling the holiday “Presidents’ Day,” we can also include another remarkable presidents in our celebrations.
Since 1862 there has been an often forgotten tradition in the United States Senate that George Washington’s Farewell Address should be read on his birthday. I would like offer the following sampling taken from his speech:
George Washington’s Farewell Address
Your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear you to preserve the other.
To put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a part, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community, are likely in the course of time and things, to become a potent engine by which cunning ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion. The domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension…the disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolutely power of an individual, and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns… to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty….
The continual mischiefs of the party are sufficient to make the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, and foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus, the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
It is important, [therefore] that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. To preserve reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power must be as necessary as to institute them.
Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious…while it’s tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.
My friends, our union as a nation was not created by the mere signing of a declaration and writing of a constitution. Rather, our union has been forged from the iron of the blood of millions of Americans who have died in service to the ideals and values they believed in, who fought to institute and sought to preserve the principles of liberty. From this nation’s founding and the Revolutionary War, through the domestic turmoil of our Civil War, and in the two world wars in which we fought beside allied nations against forces of tyranny and fascism, the blood of this nations ancestors is speaking to us now.
Our ancestors are with us today, they stand beside us and fill our hearts and minds with their wisdom, their foresight, and their ongoing commitment to those who have followed them and who are gathered here today. I say this as both a Shackan First Nations woman in the heritage of my mother and as a descendent of revolutionary soldiers and soldiers who served in the Union Army of the Potomac within my father’s American lineage dating back to the 17th century.
In our generation, through the words of Abraham Lincoln, “We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts; not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who would pervert the Constitution.” Lincoln also said, “I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”
The words spoken by Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863 to commemorate the memorial monument area on the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania contain an important message to us today. Listen; hear it word for word beyond the din of current events that are even now circumscribing the national and global battlefields of our time. Listen:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Commander of the 20th Maine Regiment of the Union Army said to his troops before marching to Gettysburg:
[We] are here for something new. This has not happened much in the history of the world. We are an army out to set other men free. America should be free ground — all of it. Not divided by a line between slave state and free — all the way, from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here, we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was. Here, you can be something. Here, is the place to build a home. But it’s not the land. There’s always more land. It’s the idea that we all have value — you and me. What we’re fighting for, in the end, we’re fighting for each other.
26 years later during the commemoration of a monument to those members of the 20th Maine who fell during the battle of Little Round Top within the larger strife of the Battle of Gettysburg, Chamberlain concluded his memorial speech with these remarks:
Honor and sacred remembrance to those who fell here, and buried part of our hearts with them. Honor to the memory of those who fought here with us and for us, and who fell elsewhere, or have died since, heart-broken at the harshness or injustice of a political government. Honor to you, who have wrought and endured so much and so well. And so, farewell.
Today, you and I have come to this place from all walks of life, representing a diversity of heritage and culture, of origin and experience. Yet we are here united and indivisible in the face of forces that would seek to divide us and plunder this nation. We are also united by the common ancestors of every kind who have forged this nation and given it unto our keeping for its preservation. We are here for something that our first president seems to have anticipated, we are here for something new that has not existed before. We have each of us been set in this time and in this place to answer a call that none of us thought would be laid upon us – we are the inheritors of the urgings and lessons of those who have gone before us in the aspirational but slow and painful process of freedom for all. We are those who have been summoned across time and place to take up their call to action in our time.
Across the four centuries of American history that unite us in a shared experience of pain and struggle, sacrifice and hope, we are those who have inherited the legacy of preserving the union that is the foundation of our nation’s liberty. Indeed, we are here to fight for one another, to stand beside one another even as they did, with courage of heart and determination of will in order to assure that a “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Amen.
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Link to Everett Herald Article: https://www.heraldnet.com/news/more-than-100-people-gather-in-everett-to-protest-recent-trump-actions/
Link to George Washington’s Full Farewell Address: https://www.owleyes.org/text/farewell-address/read/text-of-washingtons-address#root-54
Link to Col. Joshua Lawrence 20th Maine Memorial Dedication: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/chamberlains-address-20th-maine-monument-gettysburg
Greening Spirit 