His Excellency_George Washington

by Joseph J. Ellis

  The break came in July 1796. Perhaps out of a sense of guilt, perhaps because he realized how thoroughly his duplicity had been exposed, Jefferson wrote to offer assurances that he had played no direct role in the recent press attacks on Washington’s character. Washington’s response was a masterful example of how one Virginia gentleman tells another that he has violated the unspoken code: “As you have mentioned the subject yourself, it would not be frank, candid, or friendly to conceal, that your conduct has been represented as derogatory from that opinion I had conceived you entertained to me.” He then proceeded to list the litany of libels in the Aurora, accusations that “could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter; or even to a common pick-pocket.” Then came the devastating clincher. Though everyone had been warning him about Jefferson, “my answer invariably has been that I had never discovered anything in the conduct of Mr. Jefferson to raise suspicions, in my mind, of his sincerity.” From that moment, Jefferson knew that Washington no longer trusted him. The two men exchanged a few more letters the following year, all safely focused on agrarian topics like their respective vetch crops. Then, when one of Jefferson’s more offensive private letters condemning Washington’s leadership was reprinted in the newspapers—Jefferson claimed it was not quite what he had said—all correspondence between Monticello and Mount Vernon ceased. Historians have always had a difficult time trying to pinpoint the moment when the party system displaced a government founded on trust and bipartisan assumptions. For Washington, this was it.68

  By then Washington had already asked his other surrogate son to draft what came to be called the Farewell Address. Hamilton had left the cabinet more than a year earlier, but had remained Washington’s chief advisor throughout the Jay Treaty imbroglio. He also had more experience than anyone else at crafting language for Washington’s signature. In this instance, Washington let it be known from the start that more than his signature would be required on this final statement of his public career. He sent Hamilton a first draft comprised of his own words, plus Madison’s “Valedictory Address” of 1792, along with extensive instructions about content and style. On the latter score, he insisted on a conspicuously “plain style” that could “be handed to the public in an honest; unaffected; simple garb.” No amount of special pleading could change his mind this time about retirement, and Hamilton did not even try. But the announcement must in its very tone and language be discernibly republican. While the very act of stepping down voluntarily put the lie to the incessant charges that he harbored monarchical ambitions, the style itself must make the same antimonarchical point.69

  The inclusion of Madison’s draft from four years earlier was both ironic and essential: ironic because Madison had long since gone over to the other side and become Jefferson’s most invaluable acolyte; and essential because Washington wanted to remind all concerned that he had attempted to retire after his first term. By including the Madison draft, he undermined the claim currently circulating in the Republican press that he was now being forced out against his will and would be defeated if he ran again. This was a ludicrous claim, since Washington would have won another election handily, though not unanimously. But he was in a vulnerable frame of mind and wanted to leave nothing to chance. It was imperative that his decision to step down be perceived as a voluntary act, another dramatic surrender of power in the Cincinnatus mode, his last and greatest exit.

  The draft Washington sent to Hamilton contained the following passage, which never made it into the final version of the Farewell Address—Hamilton saw to that—but provides a revealing glimpse into his battered, thoroughly exhausted emotional condition at the time:

  I did not seek the office with which you have honored me . . . [and now can show] only the grey hairs of a man who has . . . either in a civil or military character, spent five and forty years—All the prime of his life—in serving his country . . . [who only wanted to] be suffered to pass quietly to the grave, and that his errors, however numerous; if they are not criminal, may be consigned to the Tomb of oblivion, as he himself will soon be to the Mansion of Retirement.

  This was all wrong: plaintive, self-pitying, verging on pathetic. It conveyed the impression of an aging patriarch beyond his prime, just the kind of image Jefferson had been whispering behind the scenes for years. One of Hamilton’s major responsibilities was to assure that the grand old man of the revolutionary era appear more grand than old. In this final performance on the public stage Washington did not need to be coached—he knew what he wanted to say—but Hamilton needed to ensure that the script moved forward in stately and dignified cadences.70

  Hamilton also realized that he was being asked to write for posterity. “It has been my object to render this act importantly and lastingly useful,” he confided to Washington, “and . . . to embrace such reflections and sentiments as will wear well, progress in approbation with time & redound to future reputation.” (This was precocious on Hamilton’s part, though not even he could have predicted the impact his words would have over the ages.) Several drafts were exchanged between the two men in late summer of 1796, with Washington deleting several passages, making marginal additions in pencil, and warning Hamilton to mark all revisions so that no last-minute changes could be smuggled in without his approval. When the final draft was ready for the printer in September, Washington sat with the text as the presses were being set and made changes in 174 out of the 1,086 lines in his own hand, a final scan, so the printer reported, “in which he was very minute.” It seems fair to resolve the perennial question about authorship of the Farewell Address by concluding that it was a collaborative effort in which Hamilton was the draftsman who wrote most of the words, while Washington was the author whose ideas prevailed throughout. It should also be noticed in passing that the document is somewhat misleadingly titled, since it was never delivered as an address or speech. Better to think of it as an open letter to the American people, published in newspapers throughout the country in the fall of 1796, offering Washington’s distilled wisdom on what he regarded as the true meaning of the American Revolution.71

  Sifting through the mound of scholarship that has built up around the Farewell Address over the past two centuries is a bit like joining an archeological dig. Each generation has discovered meanings that speak to its own problems; all generations have labeled it an American classic, though for different reasons. The central interpretive strain, however, has been to read the Farewell Address as the seminal statement of American isolationism. Ironically, the phrase most associated with this interpretive tradition, “entangling alliances with none,” is not present in the Farewell Address. (Double irony, it appears in Jefferson’s first inaugural, of all places.) Here are the salient words, which isolationists hurled against Woodrow Wilson in 1917 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1941: “Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are foreign to our concerns. . . . ’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign world.”72

  In truth, Washington’s isolationist prescription rests atop a deeper message about American foreign policy, which deserves more recognition than it has received as the seminal statement in the realistic tradition. Here are the key words: “There can be no greater error to expect, or calculate upon real favours from Nation to Nation. ’Tis an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.” Washington was saying that the relationship between nations was not like the relationship between individuals, which could periodically be conducted on the basis of mutual trust. Nations always had and always would behave solely on the basis of interest.73

  It followed that all treaties were merely temporary arrangements destined to be discarded once those interests shifted. In the context of his own time, this was a defense of the Jay Treaty, which repudiated the Franco-American alliance and aligned America’s commercial interests with British markets as well as the
protection of the all-powerful British fleet. It was also a rejection of Jefferson’s love affair with the French Revolution as a sentimental attachment, temporarily buoyed by popular opinion but blissfully oblivious to the long-term interests of the American public.

  In the larger historical context, the isolationist message was intended to have a limited life span that would last through the gestative phase of domestic expansion in the nineteenth century. The realistic message, on the other hand, was Washington’s eternal principle, intended to endure forever. Looking backward, it links Washington with the classical values advocated by Thucydides in the Melian Dialogue. Looking forward, it connects the Farewell Address with the foreign policy perspective of the likes of Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger. It was a vision of international relations formed from experience rather than reading, confirmed by early encounters with hardship and imminent death, rooted in a relentlessly realistic view of human nature.74

  The foreign policy sections of the Farewell Address were only a part, in fact the lesser part, of what he intended to say. His major point is difficult for us to hear, because the vision he projects has long since arrived, making it hard to appreciate the time when the vision remained visionary. Our eyes run quickly over those paragraphs urging New Englanders and Virginians to think of themselves as Americans, to understand their regional differences as complementary strengths in a flourishing national mosaic. The one brief section that Hamilton kept deleting and Washington kept restoring called for a national university in the new capital, Washington’s old request, designed to congregate the rising generation of future leaders on common ground. These national exhortations were not affirmations of what we were, but rather pleadings for what we must become. In this sense, the Farewell Address was primarily a great prophecy that the first word in the term “United States” was destined to trump the second.

  As a historical argument this was a frontal assault on the Republican interpretation of all that the American Revolution meant. The following passage was designed to make Jefferson and his colleagues squirm:

  This government, the offspring of our own choice uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the distribution of its owners, uniting security with energy, and containing within itself a provision for its own amendment, has first claim to your confidence and support. . . . The very idea of the power and right of the People to establish Government presupposes the duty of every Individual to obey the established government.

  Here was the lesson Washington had learned commanding the Continental army: American independence, if it were to endure, required a federal government capable of coercing the states to behave responsibly. This put him squarely at odds with the Republican argument that a sovereign national government violated the “spirit of ’76.” In the Farewell Address, Washington reiterated his conviction that the centralizing impulses of the American Revolution were not violations but fulfillments of its original ethos. As one who could claim considerable credibility on the question, he was planting his standard squarely in the national camp and urging his fellow American citizens to rally around him.75

  Apart from its core message—independence abroad and unity at home—the Farewell Address was a personal assertion of competence. All those rumors of creeping senility and fading mental powers would be forced to encounter the old commander in chief, still very much in charge. He was going out as he came in: dignified, defiant, and decisive; clear about what was primary, what peripheral; confident about where history was headed.

  Two huge subjects, slavery and Indian policy, are conspicuously missing from the Farewell Address, primarily because Washington wanted to sound a unifying note, and these topics had proved resistant to compromise or even conversation. By insisting that the federal government was the legitimate expression of America’s revolutionary intentions, he implicitly recognized that both forbidden subjects should be addressed at the federal rather than state level. This was precisely the point the Republicans contested so fiercely, at least in part because it threatened to place slavery on the national agenda beyond the control of the planter class living south of the Potomac. But Washington himself had conceded that slavery was the one issue that could not be pushed forward without placing the entire national experiment at risk. His silence on the subject in the Farewell Address accurately reflected his judgment that debate over slavery must be postponed for at least a generation.

  He did not feel the same way about the Indian question. In August 1796, while making final revisions in the Farewell Address, Washington decided to publish an open letter to the Cherokee Nation. No tribe had done as much as the Cherokees to accommodate itself to white encroachments on its tribal land and to adapt its own customs and mores to permit peaceful coexistence with the advancing wave of white settlements. “I have thought much on this subject,” Washington explained, “and anxiously wished that these various Indian tribes, as well as their neighbours, the White People, might enjoy in abundance all the good things which make life comfortable and happy.” He saw the Cherokees as perhaps the best hope for making his vision of sovereign Indian enclaves within the United States a reality. If the Cherokees would continue to do their part, Washington promised them that the federal government would enforce the treaties honorably so as to assure Cherokee survival as a people and a nation. Washington described his commitment as a matter of law as well as a personal promise. He meant every word, and the Cherokees responded by accepting it as the sacred vow of the retiring White Father. But despite his sincerity and personal commitment, this was one promise that even Washington could not keep.76

  In his final address to Congress he sounded an upbeat note: British troops were evacuating their western posts; border disputes in Maine and Florida were being sensibly adjudicated; the economy was humming along nicely; a new treaty with the Creeks offered hope for an end to frontier violence in the Southwest. The only dark cloud, French raids on American shipping in the Caribbean, was regretful, but surely the French would come to their senses. The tone was patriarchal, as if a father granted custody of an infant child was reporting proudly that the child was doing well and was now safely past its infancy.

  Then Washington made several specific recommendations. The nation desperately needed a small navy to police its coastline and protect American commerce from predatory Islamic pirates in the Mediterranean. It also needed a national military academy to provide a professional officer class for the army and, the old plea, a national university on the Potomac. Congress should also consider legislation to encourage the country’s nascent but latent manufacturing sector. Federal subsidies to encourage improved agricultural techniques were also a shrewd investment, as were increased salaries for federal employees in order to assure recruitment of the most able citizens. All in all, it was a call for an expanded federal mandate, so robust that nothing like it would be proposed again until John Quincy Adams assumed the presidency in 1824. The Republicans had always described such federal initiatives as Hamiltonian. The outgoing president wished to leave no doubt that they had always been Washingtonian as well. Though he liked to think of himself and his presidency as above the fray, he was going out as an avowed Federalist. Indeed, he suggested that his departure from the national scene would require even greater enlargements of federal power to compensate for his absence, that his retirement necessitated the creation of centering forces institutionalized at the federal level to sustain the focusing functions he had performed personally.77

  His correspondence during his last months in office makes no mention of the ongoing election to choose his successor. (Jefferson carried the same studied detachment to an extreme, claiming that he did not even realize that he was a candidate.) Washington was surely pleased when Adams won a narrow electoral victory, since it meant a continuation of Federalist policies, but his expression of congratulation was deliberately restrained and official. His one piece of advice to Adams was to retain J
ohn Quincy, his son, in the foreign service, despite the inevitable accusations of nepotism. Showing that his eye for young talent remained sharp, Washington described the younger Adams as a precocious lad who would “prove himself to be the ablest of all in the Diplomatic Corps.” Otherwise, he busied himself in packing for the move back to Mount Vernon, drafting final commands to the commissioners at Federal City to focus all their energies on the completion of the Capitol, complaining that the French Directory was misnamed because it lacked any sense of direction, and ordering new dentures to replace the temporary set, which did not fit and caused his lips to protrude discernibly in a way he found embarrassing.78

  The last days were spent hosting dinners and dances in his honor. The ceremonials culminated with the Adams inauguration, where, somewhat to Adams’s irritation, more attention was paid to the outgoing than incoming president. Adams reported to Abigail that he thought he heard Washington murmuring under his breath at the end of the ceremony: “Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest.” But the story is probably apocryphal. Washington’s diary entry for the day was typically flat and unrevealing: “Much such a day as yesterday in all respects. Mercury at 41.” The public man was already receding into the proverbial mists. The private man could not wait to get those new dentures and place himself beneath those vines and fig trees.79

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Testament

  THE VINE and fig tree motif suggested bucolic splendor, afternoon naps in the shade, relaxed routines aligned with the undulating contours of rolling hills. Nothing could have been more alien to Washington’s temperament. “We are all on litter and dirt,” he explained less than a month after his retirement, “occasioned by Joiners, Masons & Painters working in the house, all part of which, as well as the out buildings, I find, upon examination, to be exceedingly out of Repair.” While he had been tending to the business of the nation, no one had tended to the business of Mount Vernon, at least according to his own exacting standards. The required renovations meant hiring a small army of carpenters and painters, then adjusting to the chaos created by what he called “the Music of hammers, or the odiferous smell of Paint.”1