Presidents Day

In September of 1796, President George Washington published a remarkable document, his farewell address “to the People of the United States on his declining of the Presidency.”

After two terms as president, he was exhausted, tired of public service, and eager to return to his beloved Virginia plantation at Mount Vernon. When asked to serve a third term, he refused, and six months later he would retire and turn over the president’s duties to John Adams.

In his farewell address, Washington listed six concerns about the United States’s future.

First, he pled for unity rather than sectionalism. Th...