Newburgh Address

Why this matters here

Mount Vernon’s Newburgh Address entry recounts Washington’s March 1783 speech to officers considering action against Congress, including his appeal to their shared service and the moment he put on spectacles and remarked that he had grown gray in their service and was becoming blind. The World We Make Together uses that gesture to show how the person in authority can make the cost of the chair visible without inventing new policy. The encyclopedia establishes the episode; the book asks what the chair does when legitimacy must hold a room that command alone cannot settle.