by Ron Chernow
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Crowns and Coronets
AS HE ROLLED WESTWARD toward the army assembled at Carlisle, Washington’s writing reverted to the factual almanac style of his travel diaries, as if he were a touring naturalist and not president of the United States: “The Susquehanna at this place abounds in the rockfish of 12 or 15 inches in length and a fish which they call salmon.”1 The president still had sufficient spunk and energy that, when his carriage forded the river, he drove it across himself. When he arrived at Carlisle, troops lined the roadway, eager to catch a glimpse of him, and Washington knew that, for this command performance, they wanted the charismatic military man on horseback, not the aging president ensconced in a carriage. A Captain Ford of the New Jersey militia thrilled to the sight of Washington: “As he passed our troop, he pulled off his hat, and in the most respectful manner, bowed to the officers and men and in this manner passed the line.”2 From Washington’s dignified deportment, everyone recognized the solemnity of the occasion. A large, euphoric crowd had assembled in the town, and they were hushed into silence by his sudden appearance. When he reviewed the soldiers standing at attention in front of their tents, these men were also awed into “the greatest silence,” according to Captain Ford.3
Experiencing “the bustle of a camp” for the first time in a decade, Washington kept a relatively low profile and was eager to accentuate the role of the state governors and their militias.4 Eyewitnesses observed Hamilton briskly taking charge while Washington seemed a bit detached. One young messenger who deposited dispatches at headquarters said that Hamilton was clearly “the master spirit. The president remained aloof, conversing with the writer in relation to roads, distances, etc. Washington was grave, distant, and austere. Hamilton was kind, courteous, and frank.”5
While Washington was at Carlisle, Henry Knox belatedly returned to Philadelphia. It must have dawned on him just how annoyed Washington was by his protracted absence, for he sent him a letter awash with “inexpressible regret that an extraordinary course of contrary winds” had delayed his return.6 Knox volunteered to join Washington at Carlisle and must have been shocked by his curt reply: “It would have given me pleasure to have had you with me on my present tour and advantages might have resulted from it, if your return in time would have allowed it. It is now too late.”7 This was a remarkable message: the president was banishing the secretary of war from the largest military operation to unfold since the Revolutionary War. In addition to giving Knox a stinging rap on the knuckles, Washington must also have seen that Hamilton had assumed a commanding posture and would have yielded to Knox only with reluctance.
With general prosperity reigning in the country, Washington found something perverse in the discontent of the whiskey rebels, telling Carlisle residents that “instead of murmurs and tumults,” America’s condition called “for our warmest gratitude to heaven.”8 He faulted the insurgents for failing to recognize that the excise law was not a fiat, issued by an autocratic government, but a tax voted by their lawful representatives. To avert bloody confrontations, two representatives of the rebel farmers traveled to Carlisle to hold talks with Washington. Born in northern Ireland, Congressman William Findley was a solid foe of administration policies, and David Redick, also born in Ireland, was a former member of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council. On their way to Carlisle, the two had received disturbing reports of an unruly federal army that could not wait to wreak havoc on the western rebels. Rough, shrewd men from the Pennsylvania backwoods, Findley and Redick were realists and let Washington know that frontier settlers were now prepared to pay the whiskey tax.
At two meetings Washington received them courteously enough and pledged to curb vengeful feelings in his army. “The president was very sensible of the inflammatory and ungovernable disposition that had discovered itself in the army before he arrived at Carlisle,” Findley recollected, “and he had not only labored incessantly to remove that spirit and prevent its effects, but he was solicitous also to remove our fears.”9 Washington, who sensed that the two emissaries were frightened, believed that the insurgents were defiant only when the army remained distant. He warned that “unequivocal proofs of absolute submission” would be required to stop the army from marching deeper into the western country.10 He also stated categorically that if the rebels fired at the troops, “there could be no answering for consequences in this case.”11 Viewing the Whiskey Rebellion as the handiwork of the Democratic-Republican Societies, bent on subverting government, he did not intend to relent too easily. Such was his outrage over the menacing and irresponsible behavior of these groups that it threatened his longtime friendship with James Madison. In a private letter to Secretary of State Randolph, Washington wrote, “I should be extremely sorry therefore if Mr. M——n from any cause whatsoever should get entangled with [the societies], or their politics.”12
As he proceeded west toward Bedford, the president cast a discerning eye on the surrounding scenery, not as a future battlefield but as a site for future real estate transactions. “I shall summarily notice the kind of land and state of improvements along the road I have come,” he vowed in his diary.13 However conciliatory he was with Findley and Redick, he clung to the conviction that the incorrigible rebels would submit only under duress. When he heard reports of insurgents cowering as the army approached, he wrote cynically that “though submission is professed, their principles remain the same and . . . nothing but coercion and example will reclaim and bring them to a due and unequivocal submission to the laws.”14
Reaching Bedford, Washington rode in imposing style along the line of soldiers—his back troubles had miraculously eased—and the army reacted with palpable esteem for its commander in chief. As Washington passed, a Dr. Wellington noted in his diary, the men “were affected by the sight of their chief, for whom each individual seemed to show the affectionate regard that would have been [shown] to an honored parent . . . Gen[era]l Washington . . . passed along the line bowing in the most respectful and affectionate manner to the officers. He appeared pleased.”15 Washington must have been buoyed by his reception and the return to the rugged life of a field command, away from the sedentary urban duties of the presidency. Because the whole point of the expedition was to establish the sovereign principle of law and order in the new federal system, he warned his men that it would be “peculiarly unbecoming” to inflict wanton harm on the whiskey rebels and that civil magistrates, not military tribunals, should mete out punishment to them.16 He huddled with Hamilton and Henry Lee to work out plans for two columns to push west toward Pittsburgh. On October 21, once the military arrangements were completed, he disappeared into his carriage and doubled back to Philadelphia through heavy rain, leaving Hamilton in charge and sending the Jeffersonian press into a frenzy. Benjamin Franklin Bache’s Aurora flayed Hamilton as a military despot in the making, construing his current position as but “a first step towards a deep laid scheme, not for the promotion of the country’s prosperity, but the advancement of his private interests.”17
On October 28, after days of sliding along muddy roads, Washington rolled back into Philadelphia, right before Congress came into session. In his sixth annual address to Congress, on November 19, he defended his conduct in western Pennsylvania and singled out “certain self-created societies” as having egged on the protesters and assumed a permanently threatening character to government authority.18 For those who missed the glaring reference, the Federalist Fisher Ames claimed that the Democratic-Republican Societies, inspired by the French Jacobin clubs, “were born in sin, the impure offspring of Genet,” and produced “everywhere the echoes of factions in Congress.”19 Washington’s rare display of public temper generated a mood of high drama; one Federalist congressman vouched that he had “felt a strange mixture of passions which I cannot describe. Tears started into my eyes, and it was with difficulty that I could suppress an involuntary effort to swear that I would support him.”20
Washington’s allusion to the new
societies, which sounded sinister, produced deep reverberations in American politics. The Senate applauded his warning, but in the House James Madison denounced what he saw as the censure of legitimate political clubs. “If we advert to the nature of republican government,” he said, “we shall find that the censorial power is in the people over the government, and not in the government over the people.”21 It was an astounding development: James Madison, the former confidant of Washington, was now openly condemning his mentor. So unwarranted did Madison consider Washington’s criticism of the “self-created societies” that he privately told Jefferson that it was “perhaps the greatest error” of Washington’s political life.22 Madison descried a strategy to denigrate the societies by associating them with the Whiskey Rebellion, and then to denigrate congressional Republicans by associating them with the societies—all as part of an effort to boost the Federalist party. For Jefferson, Washington’s speech was a patent attack on free speech, confirming a monarchical mentality that was “perfectly dazzled by the glittering of crowns and coronets.”23 For Madison and Jefferson, this was the pivotal moment when Washington surrendered any pretense of nonpartisanship and became the open leader of the Federalists.
As Washington anticipated, the display of military might in western Pennsylvania caused the uprising to wither. But it would stand as the biggest display of armed resistance to the federal government until the Civil War. Approximately 150 prisoners were taken into custody, and Washington showed commendable clemency in dealing with them. After two rebel leaders were tried and sentenced to death, Washington, drawing on this constitutional power for the first time, pardoned both men. Throughout the ordeal, he had shown consummate judgment, acting with firmness and moderation, trying diplomacy first but then, like a stern parent, preparing to dole out punishment. Given the giant scale of the protest and the governmental response, there had been remarkably few deaths. In a classic balancing act, he had conferred new luster on republican government, showing it could contain large-scale disorder without sacrificing constitutional niceties, and his popularity only grew in consequence.
The aftermath of the Whiskey Rebellion led to a dramatic shift in Washington’s cabinet. If the episode augmented Republican fears about Hamilton’s influence, the treasury secretary had a surprise in store for them. On December 1, the same day he returned to Philadelphia, he notified Washington that he planned to relinquish his Treasury post at the end of January, a decision possibly influenced by his wife’s miscarriage in his absence. As the contrasting behavior of Hamilton and Knox during the Whiskey Rebellion made clear, Washington warmed to Hamilton because the latter never let him down, never disappointed him, and always delivered in an emergency. Washington had allowed no Republican diatribes against Hamilton to weaken his opinion of a supremely gifted, if sometimes flawed, public servant. Just how highly Washington rated Hamilton was shown in the letter he wrote in accepting his resignation, an encomium that embraced both his wartime and his government service: “In every relation which you have borne to me, I have found that my confidence in your talents, exertions, and integrity has been well placed. I the more freely render this testimony of my approbation, because I speak from opportunities of information w[hi]ch cannot deceive me and which furnish satisfactory proof of your title to public regard. My most earnest wishes for your happiness will attend you in your retirement.”24 To replace Hamilton, Washington elevated the comptroller of the treasury, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., the Connecticut lawyer who had earlier been the department’s auditor.
Even as the Whiskey Rebellion deepened the bond between Washington and Hamilton, it appeared to dissolve the almost-twenty-year connection between Washington and Knox. Underscoring his displeasure with Knox, Washington sent him few letters that fall. In early December Knox told a friend that he contemplated stepping down at the end of the month, a decision only strengthened by another episode. On December 23 Senator Pierce Butler complained to Washington about abuses committed during the construction of the new U.S. frigates. In forwarding this letter to Knox, Washington was notably brusque, merely saying, “I request that strict inquiry may be instituted into the matter and a report thereupon made to me.”25 Knox knew how to read his chief’s subtleties. On December 28 he submitted his resignation to Washington, beginning the letter with the frosty “Sir” instead of the customary “Dear Sir.” In explaining his decision, Knox cited the claims of “a wife and a growing and numerous family of children” and tried to end on a personal note. “But in whatever situation I shall be, I shall recollect your confidence and kindness with all the fervor and purity of affection of which a grateful heart can be susceptible.”26
Where Washington had accepted the resignations of Hamilton and even Jefferson with “Dear Sir” letters, he addressed Knox as “Sir.” He made no effort to urge him to stay in office, and his letter, while correct, did not begin to capture the former warmth of their relationship: “I cannot suffer you, however, to close your public service without uniting, with the satisfaction which must arise in your own mind from a conscious rectitude, my most perfect persuasion that you have deserved well of your country. My personal knowledge of your exertions . . . justifies the sincere friendship which I have ever borne for you and which will accompany you in every situation of life.”27 One senses that Washington was trying to temper old gratitude with recent disenchantment. He had never made personal excuses for himself at times of crisis and apparently had little tolerance for Knox’s doing so. It is hard to avoid the impression that Washington thought Knox had behaved negligently during the whiskey crisis, and Knox was never fully reinstated in his good graces.
For Knox’s successor, Washington chose Timothy Pickering, a curmudgeonly character who, during his wartime stint as adjutant general, was critical of Washington. In 1791 the president had chosen him as postmaster general and also employed him periodically on diplomatic missions to the Indian nations. The choices of Wolcott and Pickering confirmed that Washington could not duplicate the quality of his first-term team and was moving toward a more overtly Federalist cabinet. After the flap over the Democratic-Republican Societies and his estrangement from Jefferson, Washington began to think that he deserved absolute loyalty from department heads and could no longer strive for political balance. The departures of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Knox only made Washington long more wistfully for the solace of Mount Vernon. In January 1795 he told Edmund Pendleton that “altho[ugh] I have no cause to complain of the want of health, I can religiously aver that no man was ever more tired of public life, or more devoutly wished for retirement, than I do.”28 Unfortunately, the cabinet turnover pushed the day of retirement ever further into a cloudy future.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Mad Dog
EVEN WITH THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT, George Washington insisted that, in sending John Jay to England, he had selected the person best qualified to ensure peace. Because of long delays in transatlantic communications, Washington had no precise notion of the deal Jay was hammering out in London and warned his emissary that “many hot heads and impetuous spirits” wished him to speed up his work.1 While not wanting to rush Jay, he reminded him, quoting his beloved Shakespeare, that “there is a ‘tide in human affairs’ that ought always to be watched” and that he should proceed with all possible haste.2 By February 1795 reports made the rounds in Philadelphia that Jay had concluded a treaty and would shortly arrive on American shores.
On March 3, with Congress set to adjourn, Washington notified legislators that he would convene a special session on June 8 to debate the treaty, which would surely arrive in the interim. As it happened, four days later the document sat on his desk. Washington must have quietly gagged as he pored over its provisions, which seemed heavily slanted toward Great Britain. The treaty failed to stem the odious British practice of seizing American sailors on the high seas. Shockingly, it granted British imports most-favored-nation status, even though England did not reciprocate for American imports. Once the treaty was revealed, it would seem t
o many as if Jay had groveled before his British counterparts in a demeaning throwback to colonial times. The treaty would strike southerners as further damning proof that Washington was a traitor to his heritage, for Jay had failed to win compensation for American slaves carted off at the end of the war. For all that, the treaty had several redeeming features. England finally consented to evacuate the forts on the Great Lakes; it opened the British West Indies to small American ships; and it agreed to compensate American merchants whose freight had been confiscated. And these concessions paled in comparison to the treaty’s overriding achievement: it arrested the fatal drift toward war with England. On balance, despite misgivings, Washington thought the flawed treaty the best one feasible at the moment.
Fully aware of its explosive contents, Washington elected to shroud the treaty in “impenetrable secrecy,” as Madison termed it, until Congress reconvened in June. By the time the Senate debated it, Jay had returned from England, having been elected in absentia governor of New York. (He would shortly resign as chief justice.) It was not an auspicious homecoming for Jay. The Senate had agreed to debate the treaty in secret, but Republicans gasped in horror as they perused its contents. Its fate seemed uncertain until the Federalists granted the Republicans a critical concession: they would oppose the notorious Article XII, which limited American trade in the British West Indies to ships under seventy tons. Strengthened by this compromise, the treaty effectively passed the Senate in late June by a 20-to-10 vote, the bare minimum needed under the Constitution’s two-thirds rule. The next step would be for Washington to sign the treaty, which caused him an agony of indecision.