His Excellency_George Washington

by Joseph J. Ellis

  That letter, of course, never appeared, and Washington went on to serve a second term. The immediate reason for his decision, reached with great reluctance, became obvious in several spirited conversations with Jefferson and Hamilton during succeeding months which exposed the widening chasm within his official family. Washington tried to treat the conflict as a fraternal spat between two of his surrogate sons. But the core of the disagreement, as Washington surely knew, went much deeper than that. Indeed, the only issue on which Jefferson and Hamilton could apparently agree was Washington’s indispensability. Beyond that, Jefferson accused Hamilton of plotting to commandeer the government after Washington’s departure, establishing his banker friends as a new American aristocracy and himself as king, emperor, or dictator, depending on Hamilton’s whim. For his part, Hamilton charged Jefferson with working behind the scenes to undermine the Hamiltonian fiscal program and subvert Washington’s policy of neutrality by aligning the United States with France, all part of a well-orchestrated Virginia conspiracy to capture the federal government for its slave-owning supporters.

  The hatred between the two men had become palpable, mutual, and personal. It had, in fact, been simmering for over a year, and only the patriarchal dominance of Washington’s personality had prevented it from exploding earlier. While Hamilton managed to restrain his anger in consultations with Washington, the customarily serene Jefferson eventually lost his composure. He told Washington he could no longer allow his reputation “to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has not only received and given him bread, but heaped its honors upon his head.”42

  Although no one knew it at the time—indeed no one yet possessed the vocabulary to talk or think about it sensibly—political parties were in the process of being born. The split between Jefferson and Hamilton was destined to foster the creation of the two-party system as a central feature in the American political universe. Though full-fledged parties, with national platforms, campaigns, and conventions, would not emerge until the 1830s, their embryonic origins first became visible during Washington’s presidency. Over time it would eventually become clear that a two-party system was a major contribution to modern political science; for by forcing the wide spectrum of political opinion into two camps, it institutionalized the ongoing dialogue into an organized format that routinized dissent. In retrospect, the two-party system has come to be regarded as one of the most significant and enduring legacies of the founding generation. But what is now seen as a great contribution was regarded by its creators as a great curse. And the man who did more to invent political parties expressed most memorably the loathing felt by all: “If I could not go to heaven but with a party,” declared Jefferson, “I would not go at all.”43

  The seminal impulse for what was to become the Republican Party began in Virginia during the spring and summer of 1790. First, the lengthy debate in the House over slavery startled most Virginia planters, whose livelihood was switching from tobacco and wheat to the sale of their own excess slaves to the burgeoning cotton plantations of the Carolinas. The mere suggestion that the federal government could legislate slavery out of existence generated panic within the Tidewater elite who dominated Virginia politics. Second, Hamilton’s financial program, especially the Assumption Bill and National Bank, signaled the triumph of northern commerce—what Jefferson called “that speculating phalanx”—over southern agriculture and Virginia’s economic stature as the dominant state in the union. Accustomed to regarding themselves as the leading citizens of the new American republic—as Adams so nicely put it, in Virginia “all geese are swans”—Virginians began to have second thoughts about the constitutional settlement of 1787–88, as they witnessed the emergence of a federal government moving in a direction hostile to their economic interest and beyond their political control.

  The key player in this unfolding drama, and the leader whose conversion to a Virginia-writ-large version of the nation best illustrated how the political templates were moving, was Madison. He led the fight in Congress against both federal jurisdiction over slavery and the entire Hamiltonian fiscal program. Jefferson soon joined him in mobilizing the opposition, claiming that he had been “duped by Hamilton” to support the Assumption Bill, “and of all the errors of my political life this has occasioned me the deepest regret.” What historians have dubbed “the great collaboration” began in earnest during the summer of 1791, when Jefferson and Madison made a so-called botanical tour up the Connecticut River to seek support in New England and New York for their agenda of opposition. Though both men were trusted members of Washington’s official family, and Jefferson a key officer of the cabinet, they launched an orchestrated attack on the administration they were officially serving. Jefferson hired Philip Freneau, a prominent poet and essayist, who wrote articles in the National Gazette castigating Washington’s policy of neutrality as a vile repudiation of America’s obligations to France. Madison wrote several anonymous essays for the same paper which gave a distinctive shape to the core arguments of what was beginning to be called the Republican Party.44

  The resonant term was “consolidation.” Madison described the aggregation of power by the federal government as an ominous second coming on American soil of the British monster that the American Revolution had supposedly banished forever. All the familiar chords in the old revolutionary melody then played themselves out accordingly: the executive branch had become a royal court; northern bankers were “monocrats” and “stockjobbers” who enjoyed privileged access to power at court; Hamilton’s program was a homemade version of the Stamp Act; the federal government was an imperial power that treated the states as mere colonies. In effect, the money changers had taken over the American temple, and the original promise of the Revolution had fallen into enemy hands.45

  The genius of this formulation was that it transformed a regional or sectional grievance rooted in economic interest into a patriotic rallying cry rooted in a rhetoric with all the hallowed echoes of 1776. Despite its rhetorical genius, Washington found it both flawed and fanciful: flawed because, unlike George III and Parliament, he had been duly elected, as had all the members of Congress; and fanciful because it confused a strong executive with monarchy, almost willfully so. When Jefferson expressed his personal conviction that Hamilton had monarchical intentions, Washington countered that “he did not believe that there were ten men in the United States whose opinions were worth attention who entertained such a thought”; and Hamilton, despite his impolitic remarks on that score at the Constitutional Convention, was not one of them.46

  More basically, Washington was immune to the virulent antigovernment strain of revolutionary ideology that Jefferson and Madison were deploying because he had witnessed its consequences as commander in chief. The Continental army had nearly starved to death, and the war itself had been prolonged and nearly lost, all for lack of a viable central government empowered to raise money and troops. In Washington’s version of “the spirit of ’76” the key lesson was that independence required a fully empowered federal government, thus making his own election the proper culmination of America’s revolutionary experience. Indeed, as Washington saw it, if one wished to talk about a hostile takeover of the American Revolution, the chief culprits were those Virginians, most of whom had never fired a shot in anger during the war, who were now trying to rewrite history in order to preserve their fading status and provincial privileges.

  Arguments about history aside, the fact remained that two of the most trusted and talented members of his inner circle were being described in the press as “the General and the Generalissimo” of the emerging opposition party. Jefferson’s continued presence in the cabinet struck several observers as the most glaring anomaly: “Beware,” wrote one anonymous Washington supporter. “Be upon your guard. You have cherished in your Bosom a Serpent, and he is now endeavoring to sting you to death. . . . His vani
ty makes him believe that he will certainly be your Successor. . . . Believe him not. He is a Hypocrite and is deceiving you.” But instead of regarding Jefferson as the serpent in the garden, Washington preferred to see him as the prodigal son who would eventually recognize the error of his ways and return to the bosom of the family. Washington’s confidence in both the correctness of his political vision and the strength of his dominating personal presence made him impervious to gossip about Jefferson’s duplicity. He continued to meet with Jefferson over breakfast to discuss recent dispatches from Paris or London. He continued to rely on advice from Madison and Jefferson about nettlesome details related to the construction of the city going up on the Potomac. The criticism of his policies that they were drafting or sponsoring in other quarters never came up, by mutual consent.47

  The psychological minuet had its corollary on the other side. Whenever Washington unburdened himself in private conversations with Jefferson or Madison about his physical fatigue, his declining energy, his insatiable urge for retirement to Mount Vernon, they recorded their recollections of the conversation as evidence of his growing mental detachment from the duties of the office. In effect, they apparently convinced themselves, and left a written record of their conviction, that the aging patriarch was not really in charge or fully responsible for the policies going forward under the protection of his own name. The satanic presence and true power behind the scene was, they believed, Hamilton. This somewhat strained interpretation of Washington’s genuine fatigue had two huge advantages: at the personal level, it allowed Jefferson and Madison to argue that they were not betraying their venerable father figure, who simply did not know what was going on; at a public level, it allowed for a distinction between their criticism of the Washington administration and of Washington himself, thereby avoiding the politically insurmountable task of taking on the most beloved and respected hero of the age.48

  Washington danced his own minuet throughout the summer of 1792, hoping against hope that it would carry him southward toward Mount Vernon. Ironically, it was Jefferson who most candidly informed him that the sectional tensions created by Virginia’s reaction to the Hamiltonian program rendered all such hopes superfluous. “North & South will hang together,” Jefferson warned, only “if they have you to hang on.” Though he himself planned to retire soon, Jefferson explained that Washington was not permitted the same luxury: “There is sometimes an eminence of character in which society have such peculiar claims as to control the predilection of the individual. . . . This seems to be your condition.” When Washington asked Tobias Lear to inquire discreetly about alternative candidates, Lear reported that “No other person is contemplated.”49

  Even as late as November, with the election imminent, Washington apparently clung to the illusion that he still had a choice in the matter. At least he told the prominent Philadelphia socialite Elizabeth Willing Powel that a second term remained inconceivable to both him and Martha. Powel reiterated Jefferson’s warning about sectional tensions, noting that Washington’s departure would be used “as an Argument for dissolving the Union.” She then went on to offer perhaps the most psychologically astute diagnosis of Washington’s unique status by any of his contemporaries: “Be assured that a great Deal of the well earned Popularity you are now in Possession of will be torn from you by the Envious and Malignant should you follow the bent of your Inclinations. You know human Nature too well not to believe that you have Enemies. Merit & Virtue, when placed on an Eminence, will as certainly attract Envy as the Magnet does the Needle.” In short, his host of admirers included ambitious men whose admiration barely concealed their latent hatred of his greater greatness. As long as he retained power they would be afraid to show themselves. But they were lurking in the background, poised to ravage his reputation and render his retirement less serene than he envisioned.50

  Washington took it all in and remained silent. Once again, he did not need to declare his candidacy. By keeping Madison’s draft of his “Valedictory address” in his drawer, his candidacy was presumed. Once again, the electoral vote was unanimous. His second inaugural address accurately expressed his mood. It was the briefest in presidential history, only two short paragraphs long, wholly devoid of content, respectful but regretful in tone.51

  UP AS A MARK

  IF WASHINGTON originally approached his presidency as a mandatory sentence ironically imposed on him for good behavior, the second term began as pure purgatory. And before the year was out events seemed to be tumbling toward hell: on the southern frontier McGillivray’s stabilizing influence eroded under Spanish prodding and bribes, producing violent clashes with white settlers from Kentucky to Florida; the Six Nations tried but failed to exercise control over the Ohio tribes, whose leaders declared war on “any person of a white skin” entering what they called “our Island”; the French Revolution moved from “liberty, equality, and fraternity” to the guillotine, and Lafayette, fleeing the chaos, was captured and placed in an Austrian dungeon; farmers in western Pennsylvania staged mass protests against an excise tax on whiskey, claiming it was an updated version of the Stamp Act; a yellow fever epidemic broke out in Philadelphia, forcing the government to take up makeshift quarters in Germantown; and the battle within the cabinet between Jefferson and Hamilton escalated, ending only at the end of the year when Jefferson took his wounds and principles back home to Monticello and retirement.52

  More personally, Washington’s favorite nephew, who was responsible for managing Mount Vernon, died of tuberculosis; a cancer-like growth appeared on Washington’s right cheek, requiring another debilitating surgery; finally, while Hamilton remained the chief villain in Republican editorials, the moratorium on Washington himself ended as both Freneau’s National Gazette and Benjamin Franklin Bache’s Aurora began targeting him as either a senile accomplice or a willing co-conspirator in the Hamiltonian plot to establish an American monarchy. Washington found the personal attacks “outrages on common decency,” but resolved to suffer in silence. “The arrows of malevolence,” he observed, “however barbed and well pointed, never can reach the most vulnerable part of me; though, while I am up as a mark, they will be continually aimed.” He would in fact be “up as a mark” for the remainder of his presidency.53

  He would also be enveloped by foreign policy challenges and their domestic ramifications. The cataclysmic event that shaped his political agenda occurred in April 1793, when war broke out between Great Britain and revolutionary France. Washington immediately recognized the threatening implications of this resumption of a century-old conflict between the two contending powers of Europe, this time with France brandishing its revolutionary obligation to extend an “empire of liberty” around the globe. As soon as the news arrived, he convened the cabinet—Jefferson had yet to depart—and extracted their unanimous support for a policy of strict American neutrality, which was released to the world as an executive proclamation the following week. But what was intended to sound a clear and conclusive note turned out to be just the start of a cacophonous story.54

  In a remarkably convenient sense, the interlacing strands of the story assumed a palpable shape in the recently arrived minister from France, Edmond Genet. Citizen Genet—the title a measure of France’s current intoxication with egalitarianism—arrived in America brimming over with assurance that there could be no such thing as neutrality when the cause of liberty was on the march. Several conversations with Jefferson confirmed his conviction that the spiritual bonds uniting the American with the French Revolution were more powerful than any presidential proclamation. A series of essays in the National Gazette reinforced this impression, arguing that the historic link between America and France, codified in the Franco-American Treaty of 1778, could not be repudiated by any executive decision. Genet then unburdened himself in a flurry of pronouncements that effectively doomed his mission: outfitting American privateers to oppose British control of the seas; scheming to send an expedition to seize control of New Orleans from Spain in the name of the
Franco-American alliance; and most preposterously, announcing that he, Citizen Genet, spoke for the true interests of the American people, and urging Congress to override Washington’s proclamation at its next session.55

  By then even Jefferson acknowledged privately that Genet, originally seen as an invaluable ally, had become an albatross for the Republican opposition. For his part, Washington confided to friends that no official rejection of Genet was necessary, since the man’s own suicidal instincts would suffice. But the Genet affair exposed for the first time that foreign policy had become inextricably entangled with partisan politics. Genet’s behavior was wildly irresponsible, but the cause of France was also wildly popular in 1793, producing mass demonstrations demanding war with Great Britain and activist organizations called Democratic Societies that modeled themselves on the old Sons of Liberty. These were powerful sentiments with resonant echoes of ’76 that the Republicans were determined to exploit, in part because it was good politics, in part because many Republicans, Jefferson for one, believed in them passionately.

  Washington was absolutely certain—and history eventually proved him right—that America’s long-term interest was best served by steering a neutral course that avoided war with any of the European powers. He was also convinced that his Republican opponents were manipulating popular opinion toward France as a political weapon. “It is not the cause of France (nor, I believe, Liberty) which they regard,” he observed, “for, could they involve the Country in war (no matter with whom) and disgrace, they would be among the first and loudest of the clamourers against the expense and impolicy of the measure.” And yet, while determined to have his own realistic assessment of America’s interest prevail, the reigning romance of all things French gave the Republican press new ammunition to depict him as an arbitrary monarch rather than a farsighted leader. Perhaps to offset the charges, he made a point at the height of the Genet affair of questioning his own authority to convene Congress in Germantown because of the yellow fever epidemic. Such modest gestures went unnoticed in the National Gazette and Aurora, where Washington himself now replaced Hamilton as the central target.56