George Washington, the military commander and war hero, was a unanimous choice to be the first President of the United States, but where were his political allegiances?

George Washington, when elected President for a first term in 1789 by the delegates of the first electoral college, was not a member of a political party. It could be said, in fact, that Washington is the only American president not to have been a member of one of the nation's two main parties.

Does this mean that Washington separated himself entirely from party politics? Not entirely.

In looking at American history, Washington's view of politics was not entirely dissimilar to the other military commanders who would become president after him.

Military Men Turned Presidents

Like George Washington, William Henry Harrison (President in 1841 for only a single month) focused his campaign more on his heroic military record than anything else.

Zachary Taylor (President from 1849-1850) also was elected based on his exemplary leadership in the military world. Though he was elected by the whig party, he never allowed himself to be controlled by his party, instead opting to run the country on a case by case basis, just as he would lead men in battle.

Ulysses S. Grant (President from 1869-1877) was a bit more political than those military men who came before him, but he absolutely demonstrated his military leadership skills once in office, championing radical reconstruction and taking a stand against racist violence in the south.

Dwight D. Eisenhower (President from 1953-1961) was elected as a republican in the 1952 election, though until shortly before that - throughout his long and storied military career - it was not certain if he was a republican or a democrat, and he was even considered by the Democrats as a possible successor to Harry Truman.

Military leaders, it would seem, have a tendency to become presidents who are not as tightly bound by the confines of political parties (though at the expense, perhaps, of poltical effectiveness), and George Washington was a perfect example of this fact.

Choosing Sides

To say that President Washington was entirely non-political, however, would surely be a bit foolhardy. While it's true that he publically refused to throw his hat into the ring of either party, and publically announced his hope that political parties would not emerge in the United States, he was not without his personal opinions.

In fact, there is a fairly simple test to determine where Washington's political allegiences may have lay while in office. The two (arguably) most important members of his cabinet, after all, were practically opposite, from a political standpoint.

Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, was the consumate Federalist. In favor of a strong national bank and tariff, he had been one of the chief proponents of the newly accepted constitution.

Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was a founding member of the Democratic-Republican party - opposed to the bank and the tariff, and a strong proponent of states-rights over the federal government.

With these two men working in the same cabinet during these first formative years with the first cabinet, disagreements were sure to arise. The most famous of these, perhaps, is the disagreement over the establishment of Hamilton's proposed national bank.

Both men made their arguments and Washington, as was his tendancy, sided with Hamilton, thus setting in place the precident of establishing a national bank. On another ocassion, Washington sided with Hamilton and fellow Federalist John Jay in designing the Jay Treaty, which renegotiated trade with Great Britain (halted, of course, after the Revolutionary War). Jefferson's party, on the other hand, was resoundingly pro-French (with whom Britain was almost continually at war) and thus strongly opposed the treaty.

There are several other examples of places in his political career where George Washington seemed to show his true colors, but in the end, it seems as if Washington certainly had greater leanings toward a Federalist point of view than a Democratic-Republican.

While he may not have been mostly non-partisan in public, George Washington did an admirable job of making the decisions that needed to be made based on the arguments presented to him, unbiased by the thick lens of black-and-white politics. In doing so, he became a great administator of the American government, and is quite deserving of his place near the top of the list of greatest Presidents.

References:

"Biography of George Washington." The White House.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/gw1.html

"Rediscovering George Washington." PBS. http://www.pbs.org/georgewashington/