Oseph Ellis has written of George Washington and the Farewell Address that, "For twenty years, over the entire life span of the revolutionary war and the experiment with republican government, Washington had stood at the helm of the ship of state. Now he was sailing off into the sunset. The precedent he was setting may have seemed uplifting in retrospect, but at the time the glaring and painful reality was that the United States without Washington was itself unprecedented. The Farewell Address...was never delivered as a speech. It should, by all rights, be called the Farewell Letter, for it was in form and tone an open letter to the America people, telling them they were now on their own." (J. Ellis, Founding Brothers, 122)