His Excellency_George Washington

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Throughout the summer of 1798, Washington came under increasing pressure from Hamilton and two members of Adams’s cabinet, Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and Secretary of War James McHenry, to take the French threat seriously. They urged him to make two commitments: first, to agree to serve, if only provisionally, as commander of the Provisional army, meaning he would not need to take the field unless and until hostilities commenced; second, to appoint Hamilton as his next in command and, as Pickering put it, “the Chief in your absence.” Washington should have sensed that something was awry at this moment, since the urgency of the political pressure he was receiving was at odds with the urgency of the strategic threat it was designed to meet. But he did not.12

  On July 11, McHenry appeared at Mount Vernon to make a personal appeal, which produced reluctant consent from Washington, again on the condition that he need not budge from Mount Vernon “until the Army is in a Situation to require my presence, or it becomes indispensable by the urgency of circumstances.” As for Hamilton’s rank, Washington thought it made eminent sense, but he needed to apprise Henry Knox of the decision, since Knox had outranked Hamilton in the previous war and might be offended at serving under him in any subsequent conflict. Knox responded immediately, deeply wounded at the suggestion of deferring to what he caustically described as “the transcendent military talents of Colonel Hamilton.” Then Knox expressed bewilderment at this rush to judgment, both to create an army and to elevate Hamilton to its head, and confided that he smelled something foul lurking in the background, speculating that “there has been a species of management in this affair of which you are not apprised.” Washington wrote back plaintively to Knox, disappointed that he had taken the rank matter so personally, and assuring him that “if there was any management in this business, it has been concealed from me.”13

  There was, and it had. In collusion with disaffected and disloyal members of Adams’s cabinet, Hamilton had hatched a scheme to transform the Provisional army into a permanent military establishment and an instrument for his expanded power within the Federalist Party. To be fair, Hamilton had convinced himself that Napoleon’s imperial ambitions did include North America, not an implausible conviction, and that he alone possessed the vision and energy not only to thwart such threats, but also to out-Napoleon Napoleon himself. In typical Hamiltonian fashion, his plans were quite grandiose; if his letters to fellow Federalists are to be believed, he envisioned marching his army through Virginia, thereby intimidating the Republican leadership in its major sanctuary, then launching a preemptive invasion of Florida and the Louisiana Territory, where French and Spanish residents would be offered citizenship in a vastly expanded American empire, then marching his force southward through Mexico and Central America. Washington was unwittingly providing the imprimatur of his name to this wild scheme. And by insisting on Hamilton’s appointment as his second in command, then refusing to take the field while the army was being raised, Washington was inadvertently playing directly into Hamilton’s hands. Two years later, after Washington’s death, Hamilton made the remarkable comment: “He was a useful Aegis to me.” This was perhaps the moment he had in mind. At any rate, the moment exposed the dangerous tendencies of Hamilton’s genius once released from Washington’s control.14

  There is little question that Washington would have condemned the more bizarre features of Hamilton’s plan if he had known what was afoot. True enough, he believed in the creation of national institutions that would focus the energies of a far-flung population: a capital city, a national university, the National Bank, a conspicuous chief executive. He also favored a modest expansion of the regular army, along with a military academy to educate a new corps of professional officers. But a permanent standing army marching across the countryside conjured up the kind of menacing and thoroughly coercive embodiment of government power that epitomized the dreaded “consolidation” the Republicans had always been warning against. Washington’s entire presidency had been spent assuring the citizenry that such fears were unfounded, hyperbolic, and politically motivated. Now, with one bold stroke, Hamilton was inadvertently undoing all of Washington’s painstaking work. Almost as bad, Washington’s complicity in the plot lent credibility to the Republican claim that the old patriarch was a rather dazed front man for the conspiratorial manipulations of an evil genius behind the curtain.

  Hamilton’s scheme hit a snag in the fall of 1798, when Adams insisted on ranking Knox as second in command. Pickering explained to Washington that “the President has an extreme aversion to Colo. Hamilton—a personal resentment—and if allowed his own wishes and feelings alone, would scarcely have given him the rank of brigadier.” Again, Washington was called to the rescue; again, he played his appointed role; and again, he should have known better. Pickering and McHenry explained that Adams would be forced to reverse his decision once Washington made it abundantly clear that Hamilton was his own unequivocal choice. Washington complied, providing Adams with a description of Hamilton that probably prompted one of Adams’s Vesuvial eruptions. It was also a characterization that an elder statesman might have made of a younger Washington: “By some he is considered as an ambitious man, and therefore a dangerous one. That he is ambitious I shall readily grant, but it is of that laudable kind which prompts a man to excel in whatever he takes in hand. He is enterprising, quick in his perceptions, and his judgment intuitively great; qualities essential in a great military character, and therefore I repeat, that his loss will be irreparable.”15

  Adams was just beginning to suspect that members of his own cabinet were engaged in behind-the-scenes plotting with Hamilton, but he could not afford to alienate America’s preeminent hero. By forcing Hamilton on him, Washington violated the cardinal rule for all ex-presidents: Never interfere with the decisions of your successor. (And Adams, who believed that holding grudges was a measure of personal integrity, never forgave him for this.) It finally began to dawn on Washington that he was engaged in clandestine conversations with a hostile faction of Adams’s cabinet. “You will readily perceive,” he wrote McHenry, “that even the rumor of a misunderstanding between the President & me . . . would be attended with unpleasant consequences.” He asked McHenry to destroy all copies of their recent correspondence that mentioned Adams, warning that their publication “may induce him to believe in good earnest, that intrigues are carrying on, in which I am an Actor—than which, nothing is more foreign from my heart.” However sincere, this was a naive sentiment, which we know about only because McHenry ignored the request and saved all the letters.16

  Knowing as we do that the French invasion was a mirage, and that Hamilton was fully prepared to exploit it for personal and political purposes, Washington’s blinkered response to the ongoing intrigue becomes difficult to explain, except perhaps as a serious lapse in judgment occasioned by his dwindling powers of concentration, his distance from political headquarters in Philadelphia, and his excessive trust in Hamilton’s motives. Such an explanation, in fact, captures a lion’s share of the truth, and therefore must serve as a somewhat sad, near-the-end exception to an impressive list of extraordinarily prescient judgments made when a misstep of equivalent magnitude would have possibly put the survival of the republic at risk.

  What the explanation misses—and the irony here runs deep—is how Washington’s previous experience helped lead him astray in this instance. Both sides, Federalists and Republicans, believed that the fate of the republic was very much at risk in 1798. Both sides viewed the crisis through the prism of the American Revolution. The Republicans saw the Provisional army, now being referred to as the New army—an ominous acknowledgment that it was intended to remain intact forevermore—as a domestic version of the standing army the British had imposed on the colonies in the 1770s. The Federalists saw it as the second coming of the Continental army, which had not only won an improbable victory over Great Britain, but also had provided the only reliable source of national unity when all else was collapsing in huge heaps of politica
l and economic chaos. Washington was uniquely vulnerable to the Federalist interpretation, since it touched all the patriotic chords that reverberated in his memory and aligned itself with the story line that had defined the shaping experience of his public life. The fact that it recast the elder statesman in his more youthful role as savior of the embattled republic only added to its psychological appeal. Part of its appeal to Hamilton was that it allowed the surrogate son to assume the patriarchal role as commander in chief.

  The potency of the old revolutionary memories was put on graphic display in November 1798, when Washington traveled to Philadelphia, the only time he ranged very far from Mount Vernon during his retirement. He had agreed to confer with Hamilton and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, South Carolina’s contribution to the triumvirate of the New army, all Revolutionary War veterans who spent ten hours a day for six weeks huddled over lists of candidates for the new officers’ corps. It quickly became clear that the Continental army would be the model for the New army and that previous service in the old army would be the chief criterion for inclusion in the new one. Although several battle-scarred veterans were judged to be over the hill, younger men who lacked the revolutionary credentials were deemed untrustworthy. Washington’s memory of old comrades-in-arms was prodigious, reflected in the detailed notes he made on more than sixty candidates based on their conduct under his eye during the War of Independence: “unquestioned bravery & great popularity,” read one entry, “but a great Gambler & weighs 4 or 500 lbs. Good for nothing.”17

  Washington also placed an order with a Philadelphia tailor for an exact replica of his old “buff and blue” uniform, complete with precise specifications about the cuffs, buttons, sashes, and embroidery to assure an authentic match. The tailor was able to come up with all the items, except the gold thread for the embroidery. Then, when a special shipment of the proper thread arrived from New York, the tailor was forced to tell Washington that he could not find an embroiderer capable of duplicating the design perfectly, so the uniform was never completed. This little episode served as a nice metaphor for the larger project of re-creating the Continental army. Memories of the old “band of brothers” were palpable for Washington, but the world had moved on, and the ghosts from a glorious past could never return except in memory. The New army, in fact, was destined to remain just as incomplete and fanciful as Washington’s new uniform.18

  Adams was determined to see to that. He never believed the French intended to invade America; and if they ever did he preferred a naval buildup, what he called “wooden walls,” to an enlarged army, which he associated with the much-feared standing armies of English and European history. Though he was slow to realize the full extent of the plotting between Hamilton and members of his cabinet, his antennae perked up as the enormous scale of planning for the New army took shape. Moreover, his personal loathing for Hamilton made him suspicious in all the ways that Washington was gullible. In February 1799, he stunned Federalists and Republicans alike by announcing his decision to send another peace commission to France. With this simple stroke Adams eliminated the prospect of war and thereby destroyed the rationale for the New army. Though it would take several months before the peace commission was dispatched to Paris, all of Hamilton’s hopes for military glory died with Adams’s decision. (So, for that matter, did Adams’s hopes for reelection, since he immediately became a pariah within the Federalist Party. But Adams never regretted the decision, indeed always described it as the crowning moment of his presidency.) For over a year Hamilton continued to work feverishly on the logistical and organizational details for a phantom army that chiefly existed only in his own imagination.19

  Washington, for his part, began to back away from the floundering project. He questioned the impulsiveness of the Adams decision, never fully understanding how Adams had in fact rescued him from an embarrassing blunder and the nation itself from a dangerous brush with martial law. He remained oblivious to the political machinations that had gone on behind the scenes to manipulate his cooperation until McHenry inadvertently provided him with a candid account of the rampant subversion within the Adams cabinet. “I have been stricken dumb,” he confessed upon receiving the news, “and I believe it better that I should remain mute than to express any sentiment on the important matters which are related therein.” He vowed never again to allow himself to be drawn into any decisions facing the executive branch: “I shall trust to the Mariners whose duty is to Watch—to steer it into a safe Port.” His remaining energies, he also realized, had plenty of problems to focus on within the expansive confines of Mount Vernon.20

  ENTANGLING ALLIANCES

  THE PROBLEMS came at him from multiple angles and in various sizes and shapes: the steady procession of houseguests that made Mount Vernon a hotel and Washington himself a perpetual host; the endless negotiations about building lots and construction schedules at Federal City; the ominously familiar conduct of George Washington Parke Custis, his step-grandson (son of Jackie), who dropped out of the College of New Jersey (Princeton), then idled away his days in a sullen stupor, all despite Washington’s best efforts at mentoring, and who seemed committed to the same downward trajectory as his father; the routine requests for financial assistance from indigent relatives and utter strangers pleading their plight. Washington’s correspondence during his final retirement conjures up the picture of a beleaguered patriarch, juggling his duties with due diligence, parceling out the pieces of his time and energy like an overscheduled chief executive no longer protected by a small army of secretaries, the ultimate embodiment of self-control who now found himself, near the end, completely controlled by the agenda of others.21

  But appearances, in this instance, are somewhat misleading, because the demand-driven character of Washington’s correspondence is not a reliable guide to what was on his mind; nor, for that matter, is it an accurate measure of his silent determination to exercise control over the one problem he cared about most. That problem could be summed up in one word, and Washington’s preference for a euphemism—“that species of property”—only confirms, albeit in a backhanded way, how much the unmentionable subject haunted him in those last years. “I shall frankly declare,” he confessed to one friend, “that I do not like to think, much less talk about it.” But it was an inescapable presence that enveloped his day-by-day experience from the moment he walked out the front door of his mansion until he returned from his midday ride around his farms.22

  The last time Washington had given slavery his full attention was during his first retirement in the 1780s. Three salient points are worth noticing about his thinking at this earlier stage: first, it represented a dramatic advance over his previous moral numbness on the issue, an advance that had been fostered by his experience commanding black troops during the war and his exposure to antislavery opinions never before encountered in pre-revolutionary Virginia; second, he was interested in liberating himself from slavery, in “getting quit of negroes,” but not in liberating his slaves, whom he still regarded as his property and therefore as valuable parts of his personal estate not to be surrendered without compensation; third, he had found his efforts to sell his slaves blocked, rather ironically, by a moral consideration—his refusal to break up families, which were intermarried with the dower slaves owned by Martha. Hovering over this complex tangle of moral and economic considerations was a personal calculus about his legacy. He knew that his place in posterity’s judgment depended on getting this right as much as any decision he had made as commander in chief.

  The first indication of a significant shift in his thinking occurred in May 1794, three years before his retirement. He was already beginning to plan for his return to private life and described to Tobias Lear the first glimmerings of a scheme to sell off all or most of his western land so that he and Martha could live comfortably in retirement on the interest from those sales. Then he added: “I have another motive which makes me earnestly wish for an accomplishment of these things, it is indeed more powerful than all
the rest, namely to liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings.” Here is the first clear statement of his intention to free, not sell, his slaves; in effect, to liberate his bondsmen as well as his own conscience.23

  The full outline of his plan materialized two years later, when he took out advertisements for the sale of his huge tracts on the Ohio and Great Kanawha alongside his offer to lease all the farms at Mount Vernon save for Mansion Farm, on which he and Martha would reside. He confided to David Stuart, who was married to Jackie’s widow, “that I am making an essay to accomplish what I communicated to you in confidence when last in Virginia.” The public part of the plan was a consolidation of his landed assets into cash in order to permit what he described as “tranquillity with a certain income.” The private, indeed secret, part of the plan was the emancipation of all his slaves once his new source of revenue made it possible. He asked Stuart to keep the secret part of the plan to himself, since it might take several years for full implementation and, once implemented, would generate considerable anguish within the slave quarters because of “how much the Dower Negros and my own are intermarried, and the former with the neighbouring Negros.”24

  The trouble with Washington’s plan was that its ultimate goal, the emancipation of his slaves, was the final step in a lengthy series of economic transactions, which effectively meant that the moral principle was held hostage to the caprice of the marketplace. The key variable was the sale of his western land. He did sell a few small parcels. And he received several tentative offers for his larger tracts, including one for his land on the Great Kanawha that would have yielded the handsome sum of $200,000. But all the major deals fell through, as did the multiple efforts to lease all the outlying farms at Mount Vernon. As a result, two years into his retirement he found himself in much the same predicament he faced at the start: an expanding slave population—he counted 216 in 1786 and 317 in 1799—only a minority of whom could be gainfully employed; ownership of tracts in the west that he valued at over $500,000, but that no one wished to purchase at a price he deemed fair; annual costs at Mount Vernon that were regularly outrunning his income; and the moral shadow of slavery still hanging over his head and his legacy. Economic rather than moral considerations seemed to weigh more heavily on his mind. In fact, his major moral concern—breaking up families—was in fact a deterrent to action: “It is demonstrably clear,” he lamented, “that on this Estate (Mount Vernon) I have more working Negros by a full moiety, than can be employed to any advantage in the farming system; and I shall never turn to Planter thereon. . . . To sell the surplus I cannot, because I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species. . . . What then is to be done? Something must, or I shall be ruined, for all the money . . . that have been received for Lands, sold within the last four years, to the amount of Fifty thousand dollars, has scarce been able to keep me afloat.”25