Fraunces Tavern: The Farewell That Built a Republic

On December fourth, seventeen eighty-three, the last British troops withdrew from New York City after seven years of occupation. That afternoon, George Washington gathered his officers at Fraunces Tavern on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan and said goodbye.

It was not a long address. Washington reportedly told them he felt how painful it was to separate from men he had served with and that he could not leave without expressing his heartfelt gratitude and his wish that they carry the memory of what they had done together. He embraced each officer in turn. He was fifty-one years old and had been commanding American forces for eight years. He then took a ferry to New Jersey and made his way to Annapolis, where the Continental Congress was meeting, and resigned his commission.

That resignation is one of the most consequential acts in the history of democratic government. King George III, told by his American painter that Washington would resign command after winning the war, reportedly said: 'If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.' He did. The transfer of military authority to civilian government, voluntarily, at the moment of maximum power, set a precedent that every subsequent American president has honored.

The tavern itself carries its own history. The building was constructed in seventeen nineteen and acquired in seventeen sixty-two by Samuel Fraunces, a man of Black Caribbean descent who ran it as a restaurant and meeting place. Fraunces supplied food to the Continental Army during the British occupation of New York. Washington later appointed him steward of his presidential household. The building was substantially rebuilt after fires in the eighteen thirties and eighteen fifties, and a major restoration in the early nineteen hundreds, but it stands on its original Pearl Street site, the oldest surviving commercial building in lower Manhattan.