The problem with Jefferson’s vision is that it did not provide for dealing with the crippling debts left over from the Revolutionary War. Brilliant as he was—and this great Library of Congress is a monument to the energy and scope of his imagination—Jefferson was obtuse about economics. He never understood banking and finance and was deeply concerned that Hamilton’s solutions for the nation’s debt crisis would destroy the republic by placing inordinate power in the hands of financiers.
Hamilton’s experience as a soldier had convinced him that only a robust federal government could protect the republic from impotence and insolvency. Hamilton was in favor of a solvent federal government.
When Washington became president of the United States—you all may laugh at this—the United States was about $85 million in debt. I realize the national debt of the United States has increased $85 million while David and I have been talking. But $85 million was an enormous amount of money in 1789. It was so much money that few Americans imagined that the United States could get out of debt within fifty years even if all of the revenue that the government could expect to raise through customs duties, the chief source of federal revenue, was dedicated exclusively to retiring the debt without doing anything else.
Hamilton created a plan to save the United States from indebtedness by creating a reliable system for funding the debt. This stabilized the value of federal securities and increased market liquidity by making it possible for debt instruments to circulate like money. This in turn encouraged investment and entrepreneurship and helped to release the creative energy of the American economy. Jefferson never understood any of this. He saw it as a system that would fasten debt and taxes on the American people and deprive them of personal independence.
DR: Did Jefferson anonymously write articles or have them written criticizing Hamilton while he was secretary of state?
JW: Yes, and Washington knew it very well. I marvel when people say we live in a time of unprecedented political partisanship. In the Washington administration, the secretary of state put a man on the public payroll, ostensibly as a translator, whose actual role was to edit a newspaper critical of the Washington administration.
DR: Of which Jefferson was the secretary of state.
JW: Right.
DR: Ultimately Jefferson resigned, went back to Monticello, and said some things that are not so favorable about the intellect of George Washington. And I gather Washington never talked to him again. Is that true?
JW: Jefferson returned to Philadelphia in 1797 when he was elected vice president. They went in together to the hall where Adams and Jefferson would take their respective oaths of office—a fascinating scene, because Washington arrived at the door first but then stepped aside so Adams could walk through, leaving Washington and Jefferson in the doorway. Jefferson waved his hand, deferring to Washington, but Washington shook his head, insisting that the new vice president precede him. They shook hands, exchanged pleasantries, and never spoke again as long as they lived.
DR: All right. So Jefferson’s back in Monticello. Washington doesn’t really want to run for a second term, but people come to him and say, “You’re the only person, run again,” and he decides to run again. Is that correct?
JW: Washington had been reluctant to serve as president. He wanted to get out of the presidency as quickly as possible. In 1792, at the end of his first term, he sat down to write a farewell address. It’s not as eloquent as the one Hamilton helped him write later. It actually has a little Nixonian ring to it, a kind of “You’re not going to have George Washington to kick around anymore” tone. He was our first president, and he was the first person to get a real taste of what being president was like. Washington never got used to being criticized in the press, and by 1792 he was ready to retire.
His advisors, including Jefferson and Hamilton, talked him out of it. The last thing that I think Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton ever agreed on was that Washington had to accept a second term or the Union would fragment. Washington relented. He accepted a second term and came to regret it.
DR: At the end of that second term, when he leaves, he writes what’s called a farewell address that Hamilton helped write. But it wasn’t an address. He didn’t deliver it to anybody. He sent it out as a letter and left for Mount Vernon and just went home.
JW: He didn’t intend to give it as a speech. He issued it to the newspapers, explaining that he would not accept another term as president of the United States, and offering some parting advice. He left us to manage our own affairs. Hamilton helped Washington write it, but the sentiments are very much Washington’s own. And like our greatest state papers, it still has much to teach us.
DR: So he just went home to Mount Vernon and said, “You go elect somebody else”?
JW: He remained in Philadelphia through the election and inauguration of his successor, and then he packed up and went home. We are now so used to this ritual transfer of power that we no longer see how truly revolutionary it once was. In a world ruled by kings, there were no former heads of state.
DR: When he gets back to Mount Vernon, he becomes a country squire again. But at one point, when Adams was president and we were afraid that France might invade the United States, Adams went to Washington and said, “Would you lead the army again?”
Washington’s example, and his exploits, continue to resonate in American culture. This 1940s pie advertisement invokes the general’s famous crossing of the Delaware River.
JW: Washington agreed to command a provisional army organized to defend the nation in the event of invasion. He makes a couple of trips to Philadelphia to confer about the business and entrusted the organization of the army to Alexander Hamilton, who was made second in command at Washington’s request. Washington didn’t expect a French invasion, but he was willing to lend his prestige to the administration to calm public fears, which were soon dispelled.
DR: So Washington was back at Mount Vernon, and then one day it begins to sleet while he’s out riding around his estate. He comes back completely wet. He has guests for dinner. (I think I read that he and his wife had not had dinner alone together for twenty years because they always had guests.) Rather than go up and change out of those wet clothes—he didn’t want to be impolite and hold his guests up any longer—he sits down and has dinner with them. And then what happens?
JW: He had been out riding in sleet and rain for several hours, and by night he was very sick. Whether he would have avoided it by changing out of his wet clothes and warming up, we’ll never know. For a long time, historians thought he had developed pneumonia, but the current view is that he contracted epiglottitis, an infection of the cartilage covering the windpipe—something that can be cured very quickly with antibiotics today. When it is badly infected and swells, the epiglottis blocks the flow of air into the lungs. Every breath is agonizing, and the sufferer gradually suffocates.
DR: Three doctors came. They looked at him and said, “The treatment that you need is to get rid of your blood. You have too much blood.” So they let one quart of his blood out of his system.
JW: In their defense, therapeutic bleeding was a common early modern treatment, particularly for fevers. Washington was a big believer in therapeutic bleeding. He’d actually instructed one of his farm managers to come and bleed him before the doctors arrived. So it was his idea. The bleeding undoubtedly weakened him, but it probably didn’t cause his death.
DR: He was sixty-seven when he died. He said, “Do not bury me for two days.” What is the reason for that?
JW: There had been a great deal of literature in the latter part of the eighteenth century about people being buried prematurely—often people who were in shock, which is a medical condition doctors were only beginning to understand. Washington had read some of this literature and was worried about that.
DR: After he died, there was a debate about whether he should be buried up at the Capitol or at Mount Vernon. Where is he buried?
JW: Washington had directed t
hat his body should be placed in a simple tomb at Mount Vernon. Many public officials thought that Washington should be entombed in the Capitol, and Mrs. Washington, with considerable reluctance, agreed, but it took many years for the proposed crypt beneath the Rotunda to be finished. When it was finished, the new owner of Mount Vernon refused to allow Washington’s remains to be disturbed. The crypt in the Capitol is empty, and we have been spared a spectacle like Lenin’s Tomb. I think Washington would be pleased.
DR: Now, in his will, he did something that no other Founding Father, I believe—certainly none from Virginia—did, which is he freed his slaves. He had about 130 or so slaves, but he actually directed that they should be free upon the death of his wife. If you were Martha Washington and you were told that the slaves will be free as soon as you’re dead, is that a good thing for you to know? How did they resolve that?
JW: With great difficulty. George Washington had been born into a world in which slavery, as abhorrent as it is to us, was a part of everyday life. He benefited all of his life from the labor of people he deliberately enslaved. But during the Revolution and the years that followed, he came to the conclusion that slavery was both inefficient and unjust, and made plans to free his slaves.
The situation was complicated. Half of the roughly three hundred slaves at Mount Vernon in 1799 were so-called dower slaves. They, or their mothers or grandmothers, had once belonged to Martha Washington’s first husband, and George Washington did not own them. He benefited from their labor, but they were the legal property of the Custis heirs and would eventually go to Martha Washington’s grandchildren. George Washington could not free them. His own slaves had intermarried and mixed with the dower slaves, and freeing his own slaves while leaving the dower slaves in bondage would break up families.
The law, moreover, discouraged freeing slaves. Legislators were reluctant to facilitate the growth of the free black population, into which runaways might disappear. The market for the labor of freed slaves was limited. And while legislators rarely considered the interests of enslaved people, they discouraged slave owners from evading their responsibility to care, in a minimal way, for elderly, infirm, or chronically ill slaves by making it hard to free them. In anticipation of freeing them at his death, Washington worked to ensure that many of his slaves learned crafts that would provide them with marketable skills, and he provided funds to care for the elderly and infirm for the rest of their lives.
When the terms of Washington’s will became public, Washington’s slaves learned that they would be free when Mrs. Washington died. She decided not to wait and freed them herself.
Washington included a provision in his will to emancipate the enslaved people he owned. In this portrait of George and Martha with her grandchildren, the unidentified man in the background may be William Lee, an enslaved African American who served with the general during the Revolution.
DR: Washington’s most famous eulogy was given by Henry Lee, who said that George Washington was “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” As a scholar, you have spent your entire life studying George Washington. Do you admire him more now, or do you see his flaws and admire him less than when you started your studies?
JW: It has been the greatest privilege of my life to spend it in the study of this person. He’s the only historical character I’ve studied who rises in my estimation every year that I study him. Washington was an extraordinary person.
He had flaws and he made plenty of mistakes. But he learned from his mistakes, and rarely made the same one twice. He was an immensely prudent person. He was a man of great character. He was also an idealist—even a visionary. We don’t usually think of him that way, but we should. Here we are, in a city he imagined, in a nation he devoted his life to creating, living under a form of government he did more than anyone else to vindicate—a government dedicated not to the interests of kings and aristocrats, but to the interests of ordinary people. Nothing like it had ever been seen in the world.
There is another characteristic of George Washington I particularly admire. He thought in the long term. His correspondence is laced with the phrase “a century hence.” He thought about what our country would be like in a hundred or even two hundred years. And he did so in the crush of everyday political life, in which decisions had to be every day made under the pressure of events, in a hectic world like our own. He thought about us. He thought about the twenty-first century. He challenges us to think about a distant posterity—about the world we are making for generations yet unborn.
2 DAVID McCULLOUGH
on John Adams
“There’s present-day time and then there’s the time of history. And the best and most effective people in public life, without exception, have been the people who had a profound and very often lifelong interest in history.”
BOOKS DISCUSSED:
John Adams (Simon & Schuster, 2001)
Truman (Simon & Schuster, 1992)
David McCullough has devoted his life to telling the American story in eloquent and riveting prose. His books have won Pulitzer Prizes and regularly achieve New York Times number-one-best seller status, and he has garnered virtually every other honor possible for an author, including the National Humanities Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and more than fifty honorary degrees from the country’s leading universities.
David’s personal recounting of the stories and the individuals he has written about shows a love and enthusiasm for American history that is infectious. Listening to him talk about American history is even more compelling—if that is possible—than reading his words.
In this interview, David and I discuss John Adams, probably the least honored of the Founding Fathers until David’s book on him was published in 2001. That book, which won a Pulitzer Prize, reopened the eyes of Americans to our first vice president and second president, an individual who was perhaps most responsible for the resolution in the Second Continental Congress in 1776 that called for the dissolution of ties with England, leading to the American Revolution.
I have known and greatly admired David for a good many years and have interviewed him on numerous occasions. He really needs little prompting from an interviewer, for he is the consummate storyteller, raconteur, and spokesman for America’s history.
If there is today a living Mr. American History and Mr. American Spirit, it is David McCullough, not just because of what he has written and said or what he represents but also because of his great many human qualities.
One of these was evident to me at a recent award ceremony where David was being honored. Rather than just accept the award for his many accomplishments, he talked instead about how his wife, Rosalee McCullough, was his indispensable partner. She has read out loud to him every word he has written and is his best editor and critic. He actually seemed to be giving her the award—and it was clear from his talk how vital she was to his work. Few others would have shared the credit so convincingly and so lovingly.
In the interview, David points out that he originally intended to write a book about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. But in doing the early research, he realized how compelling (and relatively unknown) Adams was, and how a book on him—there had been few—would enable Americans to realize that the second president, while not as celebrated or as glamorous as the first and third, deserved real praise for his unheralded intellect, principles, scholarship, passion, and patriotism.
McCullough’s work did the trick. His book is in its forty-eighth printing and helped to move Congress to correct a major lapse in Washington. There is, after all these years, authorization for a monument to Adams in Washington, though no funding at this point.
David also won a Pulitzer Prize for his book on Harry Truman, and in the interview noted the similarities between his subjects: both men held firm to their core principles, were relatively simple in their interests, were not popular while in office, and reemerged in public acclaim only many years after they lef
t office.
After listening to David McCullough, it would be difficult to not really like and admire both Adams and Truman. But it would also be difficult to not really like and admire McCullough himself, in part for his writing skills and in part for his peerless description of what makes America so unique.
* * *
MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): David, thank you very much for doing this. Before we start, how many people here would rather hear David McCullough than be at the White House for the state dinner? Raise your hands. Okay.
So, David, you have written several books that have won Pulitzer Prizes, and we’re going to talk about one of them tonight. I would like to start by asking you this question. After your book came out, people were amazed that John Adams had this incredible life, and said, “How can it be the case that we have a monument to George Washington, we have a monument to Thomas Jefferson, but for the second president of the United States there’s no monument in Washington?”
Ten years after your book came out, there’s still no monument. So here are the people who can do something about that. Why should there be a monument to John Adams?
MR. DAVID McCULLOUGH (DM): In 2001, Congress voted to provide a place for a John Adams memorial within the District of Columbia, and it was signed by President George W. Bush, so that all the legal aspects of the idea have been covered. The real problem is to organize enough support for it, because John Adams doesn’t have a constituency, say, the way American nurses or teachers do.
The American Story Page 4