My understanding is that, while the Constitution was being written and argued over and ratified, most of the people had Washington in mind as President, and that the Constitution would have had a harder time being ratified if there hadn’t been someone of Washington’s stature to serve as first POTUS.
This. Little Nemo mentioned this upthread, but I was going to come in and elaborate on it, only gdave has already done so. Washington had already effectively renounced hanging on to power even before the Presidency was set up, and he did so again after his first term, thus setting the precedent we needed.
The story is not told as often today, about Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the 5th century BCE who was called in his old age from working his farm to lead the army and the state against a rebellion, after which he voluntarily relinquished power and returned to his farm. He was a revered idol of the idealized leader during the later Roman Republic, and even more so by the leaders of the Revolutionary War, who established the still-extant Society of the Cincinnati to promote this ideal. They’ve got a nifty headquarters at the Larz Anderson house on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington DC that also functions as a museum.
To the Founding Fathers, George Washington, pulled from his family farm at Mount Vernon multiple times – the Revolutionary War, the Constitutional Convention, the Presidency, and even as Commander in Chief organizing the army under president Adams – and returning each time afterwards voluntarily to Mount Vernon, he must have seemed the re-incarnation of Cincinnatus
I think it’s insufficiently appreciated how much the Founding Fathers practically worshipped the Roman Republic and emulated it as an ideal. Our very idea and name of the upper house as the “Senate” with “Senators” , many of the forms of the organization of our government, and so forth pretty much scream this. And I think that a lot of them read or saw Joseph Addison’s 1712 play Cato , about the Roman senator Cato the Younger who opposed the tyranny of Julius Caesar to become (as Wikipedia puts it) “an icon of republicanism, virtue, and liberty” . Many of our much-remember quotations from the Revolution were adapted from that play – “Give me liberty or give me death”, “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country”, etc.
To me, the praiseworthy thing about Washington was not his giving up power, but his taking it on. Being President was an enormous PITA, and he would rather have stayed home, but he served out of a sense of duty.
As I understand it, both. There are plenty of other accounts of him using reading glasses by that point in his life, and he seems to have genuinely suffered from common age-related decline of visual acuity. I think the “almost blind” part was pretty much pure hyperbole, though. But in an age when reading glasses were a common signifier of old age and encroaching decrepitude, for a strapping man’s man like George Washington to reveal a “weakness” like that was also definitely a bit of (brilliant) theater.