TIL that George Washington had the phrase "the ends justify the means" painted on his carriage. That's an honest if unsettling bumper sticker for a President.
Anyone reading Washington's May 31st 1776 letter to his brother, John Augustine Washington ( https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-04-02-... ) will note similarities if not references to Machiavelli in the 2nd paragraph as GW describes Britain ("...She is capable of the most delusive Arts...") and as he describes the weakness of certain members of Congress ("... feeding themselves upon the dainty food of reconciliation...")
So, although Machiavelli never said, "The ends justify the means" or "exitus acta probat", its not surprising that Washington - an avid reader and student of political/military thinking - would arrive at the same conclusion as Machiavelli; namely that acting out of necessity is a virtue, when the alternative is the loss of human rights or a return to what Hobbes described as the "State of Nature".
He felt Congress was kidding itself about alternatives to independence, and GW had the difficult task of motivating an entire army to stay the course.
I don't think he was alluding to Machiavelli.
'Washington, realpolitik-y pragmatist' is a perfectly sensible argument to make, I just don't think some verbiage on his carriage had much to do with it, one way or the other.
If that's not "ends > means", I don't know what is.
No, of course not, that was King George III :)
George Washington played a large role though.
> In May 1769, Washington introduced a proposal, drafted by his friend George Mason, calling for Virginia to boycott British goods until the Acts were repealed.
> Washington regarded the passage of the Intolerable Acts in 1774 as "an Invasion of our Rights and Privileges".
> As tensions rose in 1774, he assisted in the training of county militias in Virginia and organized enforcement of the boycott of British goods instituted by the Congress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_in_the_Ameri...
The conjoined colonies wouldn't have had any strategic advantage in their plans against Britain, without the South Carolina colony.
There were probably plenty of other less timeless decisions he had to make.
Many wanted the split from Britain to cause slavery to end. Nobody was proposing that it begin. Southern colonies insisted that they were going to continue slavery. If the north agreed to leave slavery unchanged, they would go along with the split, allowing other changes, and they would keep slavery. If not, they would not cooperate, there would be no split, no other changes, and they would keep slavery. Either way, slavery would remain unchanged.
The decision to leave slavery unchanged did not "allow slavery to occur".
Slavery was more important to the southern economy, but slavery existed in New York as fully legal until phaseout began in 1799. It wasn't eliminated until the 1820s.
Monied interests in most states/colonies would have have permitted the loss of their property without compensation.
There was no such decision to be made (or at least no such decision on the table).
The decision was whether to have slavery-permitting states in the US, or slavery-permitting states outside the US.
I think reasoning along the lines of "this decision negatively affects X group in an immediately unjust way, therefore it shouldn't be done" is naïve and conceited. People who use this type of reasoning are either knowingly playing the "I'm more moral than you" card and incidentally causing a net worse situation in the future, or they are just naïve and don't understand that local immorality can lead to net positives in the future.
I'm not arguing that hard decisions aren't necessary. I'm saying that aren't as necessary as sometimes claimed, and should be viewed with some skepticism.
No idea which bucket Washington fell into though, just a tangential observation.