by Alexis Coe
My earnest wish, and my fondest hope therefore is, that instead of wounding suspicions, & irritable charges, there may be liberal allowances—mutual forbearances—and temporising yieldings on all sides. Under the exercise of these, matters will go on smoothly, and, if possible, more prosperously. Without them every thing must rub—the Wheels of Government will clog—our enemies will triumph—& by threwing their weight into the disaffected Scale, may accomplish the ruin of the goodly fabric we have been erecting.
I do not mean to apply these observations, or this advice to any particular person, or character—I have given them in the same general terms to other Officers of the Government—because the disagreements which have arisen from difference of opinions—and the Attacks wch have been made upon almost all the measures of government, & most of its Executive Officers, have, for a long time past, filled me with painful sensations; and cannot fail I think, of producing unhappy consequences at home & abroad.23
On the 26th, Washington wrote much the same to Hamilton, if in a softer tone:
How unfortunate would it be, if a fabric so goodly—erected under so many Providential circumstances—and in its first stages, having acquired such respectibility, should, from diversity of Sentiments . . . brought us to the verge of dissolution—Melancholy thought! But one, at the same time that it shows the consequences of diversified opinions, when pushed with too much tenacity; exhibits evidence also of the necessity of accomodation; and of the propriety of adopting such healing measures as will restore harmony to the discordant members of the Union, & the governing powers of it.24
The men responded quite differently. Hamilton promised that “if any prospect shall open of healing or terminating the differences which exist, I shall most chearfully embrace it; though I consider myself as the deeply injured party.” He listed the many ways “I know” Jefferson had wronged him, but promised “not directly or indirectly [to] say or do a thing, that shall endanger a feud.”25
Jefferson’s letter was about three thousand words longer, and ended with his resignation. He reviewed the many ways Hamilton had manipulated and wronged him, starting with the Compromise of 1790: “I was duped into by the Secretary of the treasury and made a tool for forwarding his schemes.” He strongly denied any involvement with partisan newspapers: “not a syllable of them has ever proceeded from me . . . no cabals or intrigues of mine have produced those in the legislature.” And then Jefferson gave his notice. He would serve Washington until the end of his first term and then retire to his plantation, Monticello.26
When Washington had the same idea earlier that spring, Jefferson had talked him out of returning to Mount Vernon after four years in office. “North and South will hang together, if they have you to hang on.”27 On this point, Hamilton agreed, and so did everyone Washington came into contact with. He spoke at length about resigning with Elizabeth Powel, one of his closest friends in Philadelphia, who followed up with a dramatic letter; it would be the end of him, she said, and the end of the country.
Your Resignation wou’d elate the Enemies of good Government and cause lasting Regret to the Friends of humanity. The mistaken and prejudiced Part of Mankind, that see thro’ the Medium of bad Minds, would ascribe your Conduct to unworthy Motives. They would say that you were actuated by Principles of self-Love alone—that you saw the Post was not tenable with any Prospect of adding to your Fame. The Antifederalist would use it as an Argument for dissolving the Union, and would urge that you, from Experience, had found the present System a bad one, and had, artfully, withdrawn from it that you might not be crushed under its Ruins—that, in this, you had acted a politic Part.
Near the end of the letter, Powel also pointed out that Washington was often wrong about where and when he would find peace. He’d spent his last retirement, for instance, fretting from afar about the state of the country.
Have you not often experienced that your Judgement was fallible with Respect to the Means of Happiness? Have you not, on some Occasions, found the Consummation of your Wishes the Source of the keenest of your Sufferings?28
Had Washington left after one term, it would undoubtedly have been on a high note. “We are in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us,” Madison had written to Jefferson in 1789, at the beginning of Washington’s first term.29 By 1792, the first president had set up a functioning executive branch and established conventions for future presidents to either follow or reform. He had overseen the passage of the Bill of Rights; appointed all ten Supreme Court justices, thirty-eight federal judges, and twenty-eight district judges; declared the first Thanksgiving; welcomed Rhode Island, Vermont, and Kentucky into the union; formed armies under federal regulation; and signed the Naturalization Act, which granted citizenship to any free white person who had been in the country for at least two years.30 There were banks and an official currency, a Copyright Act and a capital city underway.
But he didn’t leave. Washington, then sixty, was once again named on the ballot of every presidential elector.31 He did not so much agree as capitulate to a second term, a decision Washington must have regretted on March 4, 1793, when he took his second oath of office against a backdrop of such immense international unrest, it threatened America’s very ability to survive.
CHAPTER 17
“Political Suicide”
On April 11, 1793, Washington buried George Augustine, his favorite nephew and heir apparent, at Mount Vernon. The young man had died from tuberculosis, leaving Fanny a widow with three children to raise. She was so distraught that she asked the Washingtons to postpone filing her husband’s will in court; she wasn’t ready to face the realities of life after him. Washington had little time to comfort her.
His second inauguration had passed uneventfully only a little more than a month earlier, but as the spring air slowly warmed and flowers bloomed, a series of conflicts threatened to become crises. Two days after George Augustine’s funeral, Washington received a letter from Hamilton: France had declared war on Great Britain. The president called an emergency meeting of the cabinet at his house in Philadelphia on April 19.1 He sent thirteen questions in advance, but one was the most important: Had America’s 1778 treaty with France been guillotined a few months earlier alongside King Louis XVI?
Washington was inclined to ignore the treaty and declare neutrality; he felt that the country shouldn’t be bound by an agreement that the Continental Congress, which no longer existed, had made with the French crown, which also no longer existed. America’s land forces could offer nothing meaningful to the conflict, and there were almost no sea forces to speak of; he wouldn’t even sign the Naval Act into law for another year, and those six frigates had yet to be built.
Even a declaration of public support was risky; it was likely to encourage American privateers to attack the ships of the opposing side, which would surely drag the government into the conflict. And the prospect of war was already causing divisions in the young and volatile country. As soon as news of it reached America, citizens declared their allegiances. To some people, the French motto “Liberty, equality, fraternity” sounded an awful lot like their own “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; they often gathered, wearing red, white, and blue ribbons, to celebrate news of French military victories. Great Britain’s supporters, who wore golden eagles or black rose-shaped badges, were just as loyal, if not more orderly.
But Washington wasn’t just being careful. He was being savvy. If America remained neutral, it could sell goods to both nations.
The issue split the cabinet down the middle. Hamilton was a known Anglophile, but he argued for neutrality. Although often alone in his own ideological corner, he won the support of Henry Knox, the secretary of war. According to Jefferson’s notes, Knox sided with Hamilton even as he acknowledged, “like a fool as he is, that he knew nothing about it.”2
Jefferson, whom Washington had persuaded to stay on as secretary of state for a few months into the president’s s
econd term, surprised everyone: After voicing his support for the French Revolution, even as thousands of people were being executed and imprisoned, he suggested that America play coy. France and Great Britain, he said, should come to them and make an offer; American loyalty would go to the highest bidder.
On April 22, Washington issued a Neutrality Proclamation that Attorney General Edmund Randolph put into final form. The document declared that the United States “should with sincerity and good faith adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent powers” and warned “the citizens of the United States carefully to avoid all acts and proceedings whatsoever, which may in any manner tend to contravene such disposition.” At Washington’s request, Jefferson distributed printed copies of the proclamation to state executives and diplomatic officials in European capitals.3
Washington had to follow the rules, too. He chose not to receive Marquis de Lafayette’s brother-in-law, who arrived with other counterrevolutionary émigrés, and agonized over what to do when the marquis’s son, Washington Lafayette, landed in 1795. He quietly arranged for him to enroll at Harvard—“The expence of which, as also of every other mean for his support, I will pay”—but young Lafayette instead chose to join Hamilton in New York, hoping the trip would be a quick stopover before an invitation to the President’s House materialized.4
Washington, meanwhile, sought advice on the French visitor from those most likely to be critical of him: Madison and his Republican-dominated House of Representatives. They were surprisingly supportive; Lafayette was a reminder of the Revolution, something they could all still rally around, and his son was very welcome in America. “A few jokes passed between the President and young Lafayette, whom he treats more as his child than a guest,” Benjamin Latrobe, one of the architects who designed the U.S. Capitol, recorded in his diary.5 He ended up living quietly with Washington for two years.
* * *
Jefferson did emerge with one diplomatic win: Washington agreed to receive Edmond-Charles Genêt, the first ambassador from the French Republic. But when Genêt arrived in the spring of 1793, he didn’t go straight to Philadelphia, as he should have, to pay his respects to the president. Instead, the young redheaded ambassador began a monthlong anti-neutrality tour from Charleston, South Carolina, to New York. He urged Americans to openly defy Washington—whom he described as “a man very different from the character emblazoned in history”—by pressuring Congress to declare support for France, sending privateers to seize British merchant ships, and wresting control of Florida and Louisiana from the Spanish, who were now also at war with France.6
Crowds gathered wherever he went; his words agitated citizens and critics alike. “The Spirit of 1776 is roused again,” the editors of the National Gazette wrote in a taunting open letter to Washington, who had once been the embodiment of that spirit.7 “You certainly never felt the Terrorism, excited by Genêt, in 1793,” John Adams recalled in a letter to Jefferson in 1813, “when ten thousand People in the Streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his House, and effect a Revolution in the Government, or compell it to declare War in favour of the French Revolution, and against England.”8
Washington, slowed with illness, had plenty of time to stew about it. Jefferson described his situation to Madison in a letter on June 9.
Little lingering fevers have been hanging about him for a week or ten days, and have affected his looks most remarkeably. He is also extremely affected by the attacks made and kept up on him in the public papers. I think he feels those things more than any person I ever yet met with. I am sincerely sorry to see them. I remember an observation of yours, made when I first went to New York, that the satellites and sycophants which surrounded him had wound up the ceremonials of the government to a pitch of stateliness which nothing but his personal character could have supported, and which no character after him could ever maintain.9
But after the French privateer Embuscade, hoping to tempt Americans into joining them, had the gall to send prizes it had captured into Philadelphia’s port, even Jefferson agreed: Genêt had gone too far. It took Washington a full year to have him recalled.
* * *
Right after Washington refused to use military force against a foreign nation, he turned it on his own people in what would ultimately be the biggest overreaction of his life.
In 1794, the government was having trouble collecting an excise tax—a part of Hamilton’s plan to pay back foreign debt—from distillers in the Kentucky and western Pennsylvania backcountry.10 Whiskey was their main export and sole profitable activity past basic farming, they wrote in a petition to Congress. Higher prices would make their product less attractive to consumers, and the expectation that they, rural folk, should repay a disproportionate share of foreign debt was unfair and untenable.
When the petition didn’t work, the peaceful gatherings began. The largest numbered around six thousand and took place on Braddock’s Field in Pittsburgh, where, almost four decades before, a young Washington had picked up the sash of his fallen commander and emerged a hero.
The distillers’ complaints went unheard. Their frustrations mounted. The tax collectors closed in. Then, finally, violence erupted. Hamilton informed Washington that a crowd in Pennsylvania had seized an unlucky collector named Robert Johnson, “tarred and feathered him cut off his hair and deprived him of his horse, obliging him to travel on foot a considerable distance in that mortifying and painful situation.” Another man, he said—no more than a messenger—was “seized whipped tarred & feathered, and after having his money & horse taken from him was blind folded and tied in the woods, in which condition he remained for five hours.”11 And around four hundred rebels set fire to the Pittsburgh home of John Neville, the collectors’ supervisor.
Washington seems to have taken this personally. He was no king; he had not handed down the tax to fund his jewel habit or build a seventh castle. Rather, democratically elected officials had voted it into law. He saw these local attacks as a direct challenge to legitimate federal authority and was determined to quash the protest and have its participants tried for treason. But according to the Constitution, the commander in chief could send in troops only at the request of state officials, and Pennsylvania governor Thomas Mifflin wasn’t ready to take that step.
Washington saw a rebellion, but Mifflin saw isolated (and largely whiskey-fueled) acts of desperation from a community that felt unheard. Only land-owning white men could vote, and land ownership in western Pennsylvania had fallen dramatically since the earliest period of white settlement. In some townships, none of the locals owned any land at all; their landlords—the ones who were allowed to vote—lived in the big cities. Much of the population covered rent and other necessities by bartering crops or whiskey. They rarely paid in cash, which was scarce in the region. For the majority of the population, then, even a low yearly tax would leave them with nothing.
Mifflin didn’t make excuses for the rebels, but he believed the courts should decide how to resolve the impasse. Washington did not. In an extraordinary showing of executive overreach, he sidestepped both Mifflin and the Constitution, securing a judicial writ from Associate Justice James Wilson, called out state militia for federal service, and hired a tailor to make him a uniform modeled after the one he’d worn in the war.12
“Whenever the government appears in arms, it ought to appear like a Hercules,” Hamilton would write in 1799, and the twelve thousand soldiers he led toward what is now Pittsburgh showed he meant it.13
Washington, sixty-two, was there, too. He became the first and only president to take up arms against his own citizens, and to come along for the ride—though he did so mostly from a carriage, dismounting only when it was time to review the troops. Knox, who had gone to Maine to see about a house he was building, was noticeably absent from the forces gathering in Pennsylvania. He had neglected, despite the situation, to communicate his personal plans
in a timely fashion. When he finally offered to meet up with the president’s party on the road, Washington was livid. It would have been nice to have Knox by his side, he wrote in a passive-aggressive letter on October 9, 1794, “if your return, in time, would have allowed it. It is now too late.”14 Excluding Adams from the business of the executive branch was one thing; telling the secretary of war he was unwelcome during a military campaign was quite another.
A VIOLENT END TO INDIAN RESISTANCE
Knox was not completely missing in action. He had exchanged a handful of letters with Washington about another unfair fight.
In 1794, after diplomatic negotiations with the Indians in the Northwest Territory failed, Washington called General Anthony Wayne out of retirement and sent him to secure U.S. holdings. Wayne, popularly known as Mad Anthony, trained and led four thousand troops into the Ohio River Valley and overpowered the Ottawas, Shawnees, and other tribes that had been resisting white settlement. During the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the Americans destroyed their villages, burned their crops, and murdered an estimated forty Indians, including several war chiefs. Survivors—including a young Tecumseh—fled for nearby British forts. Fearing retribution, the British turned their old allies away. The following year, thirteen tribes ceded more than twenty-five thousand acres of land to the federal government, in exchange for $25,000 down and an annual payment of $9,500.
A year after that, Washington wrote a paternalistic letter to the “Beloved Cherokees” in which he suggested, at great length, that they be more like Virginia farmers: