by Ron Chernow
Washington made clear to Adams that his acceptance of the post had been premised on the condition that “I shall not be called into the field until the army is in a situation to require my presence.”63 Adams seemed flummoxed by the matter of Washington’s deputy. On July 18 he sent to the Senate the three names Washington had submitted, hoping their order of priority would be reversed. “General Knox is legally entitled to rank next to General Washington,” Adams told McHenry, “and no other arrangement will give satisfaction.”64 To worsen matters, Adams also insisted that Charles Cotesworth Pinckney “must rank before Hamilton,” throwing everything into utter confusion.65
It may have been the stress of this situation that sent Washington into a medical tailspin. On August 18 he came down with an ague—chills and sweats—and succumbed a couple of days later to a fever so intense that he shed twenty pounds in short order. He was so weakened by illness that even writing letters proved a wearisome task. In late August McHenry warned Washington that Adams was hardening his stand about the ranking of the three generals.
Aside from Adams’s opposition to Hamilton, the touchiest matter for Washington was the likely wounded feelings of Henry Knox (a major general), who had far outranked both Hamilton (a colonel) and Pinckney (a brigadier general) during the war. Since Washington felt national security was at stake, he was not about to allow past friendships to overrule his military judgment. However close they had been during the war, Knox had gravely disappointed Washington during the Whiskey Rebellion. With all the diplomacy at his command, Washington wrote to Knox and explained that Pinckney had to precede him because the latter was a southerner and any war with France would likely unfold in the South. Washington also thought the French might try to foment a slave uprising to conquer the region. What he didn’t state openly was that he thought the Jeffersonians might form a fifth column in the South, aiding France and sowing dissension. Given the grave threat, he told Knox, “I would fain hope, as we are forming an army anew, which army . . . is to fight for everything that ought to be dear and sacred to free men, that former rank will be forgot.”66 Washington may have had sound military reasons for downgrading Knox, but if he thought Knox would accept this with good grace, he was a poor psychologist. When Knox received Washington’s letter, he was in the throes of yet another financial crisis. His life had also been blighted by family tragedy; the ninth of his twelve children had recently died—one room of his house was dubbed “the dead room” because so many dead children had been laid out there—and he must have been in a highly vulnerable state.67
Knox’s anguished reply made it manifestly clear how devastated he was by Washington’s letter. He had broken open the letter with delight, he said, only to absorb its contents with astonishment. He stated that “for more than twenty years, I must have been acting under a perfect delusion. Conscious myself of entertaining for you a sincere, active, and invariable friendship, I easily believed it was reciprocal. Nay more, I flattered myself with your esteem and respect in a military point of view. But I find that others greatly my juniors in rank have been . . . preferred before me.”68 By not consulting him first, he implied, Washington had exposed him to public humiliation.
In self-defense, Washington professed surprise that Knox had reacted so strongly in the matter and denied any intent “to see you in a degraded point of view.”69 He contended that the Federalists had chosen Hamilton as his second in command and presented the selection as a fait accompli—an atypical case of Washington shading the truth. In an emotional mistake, he pleaded that Hamilton had a large family to support and needed special inducements to accept the military post—which could only have bruised Knox after losing so many children. It was a sad denouement to the warm, fruitful relationship between Washington and Knox. Nevertheless, behind the scenes, Washington scrambled to see if he could give Knox seniority over Pinckney, “if it would satisfy Knox.”70 All the while Knox remained adamant that the rules should “decide in favor of [the] former rank” that prevailed at the end of the Revolution.71
Amid this impasse, John Marshall and Bushrod Washington appeared at Mount Vernon for a three-day visit. Washington entreated both men to run for Congress from their Virginia districts, stressing the need to oust Republican incumbents during a national emergency and lamenting the “violent and outrageous” mood prevalent in the state.72 In the past Washington had shied away from such blatantly partisan advice, but he was now almost bullheaded in supporting Federalist candidates, honestly believing that the Republicans were only pretending, for election reasons, to be ready to fight a French invasion.73 He thought it would be necessary to ban them as officers in the new army because they would “divide and contaminate the army by artful and seditious discourses.”74
Bending to his uncle’s inexorable request, Bushrod Washington, a young man with a small, pale face and large, brooding eyes, consented to run. The handsome, intelligent Marshall, a man of iron willpower, balked at the idea. At the end of his stay, he rose early in the morning, hoping to slip away unobtrusively before Washington could renew his pressure. No stranger to early-morning escapes, Washington anticipated Marshall’s flight and blocked his path on the piazza as Marshall moved toward the stables. In coaxing Marshall to stand for Congress, Washington pointed out that he himself had agreed “to surrender the sweets of retirement and again to enter the most arduous and perilous station which an individual could fill,” Marshall recalled.75 Unable to withstand such an appeal, Marshall agreed to become a candidate for Congress.
With his wide streak of envy, John Adams found it difficult to be president in the aftermath of Washington. By late August, he believed that the time had come to assert his presidential prerogative over his predecessor. He told McHenry that he would gladly resign the presidency to Washington, if he could, “but I never said I would hold the office and be responsible for its exercise, while he should execute it.”76 Suspecting intrigue between his cabinet members and Washington, Adams was determined to resist it. McHenry reported to Washington, “The president is determined to place Hamilton last and Knox first.”77 Pickering added what was already obvious: that Adams had “an extreme aversion to Colo. Hamilton—a personal resentment,” and would never let him supersede Knox and Pinckney.78 It was a unique moment in American history: a political stalemate between a current and former president. As if to spite his predecessor, Adams decided, without consulting Washington, to name his feckless son-in-law, Colonel William Smith, as a brigadier general. Washington grew enraged at the news. “What in the name of military prudence could have induced the appointment of [William Smith] as brigadier?” he tartly inquired of Timothy Pickering. “The latter never was celebrated for anything that ever came to my knowledge except the murder of Indians.”79 The Senate, agreeing with Washington, rejected Smith, but the incident further inflamed relations between Washington and Adams.
In high dudgeon, Washington sent Adams a stinging letter in which he did not bother to tone down his indignation. Intent upon showing who was still the more powerful figure, he reminded Adams that he had picked Washington to command the army “without any previous consultation of my sentiments.”80 If Adams had inquired first, he would have learned the conditions of his consent. Washington had stated plainly to McHenry that he would accept command only if he controlled his general staff. He reproached Adams for submitting the three names to the Senate in the order he suggested only to object to their ranking afterward: “But you have been pleased to order the last to be first, and the first to be last.”81 He also noted caustically that Adams had taken it upon himself to appoint his brigadier generals, including his own son-in-law.
Perhaps especially vexing to Adams was that Washington issued the most ringing endorsement of Hamilton he had ever uttered. He reviewed Hamilton’s history as his “principal and most confidential aide” during the war and later as treasury secretary. “By some he is considered as an ambitious man and therefore a dangerous one,” Washington wrote with genuine feeling. “That he is amb
itious, 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 to a great military character and therefore I repeat that his loss will be irreparable.”82 As for Knox, Washington said there was no man “for whom I have had a greater friendship. But esteem, love, and friendship can have no influence in my mind when . . . possibly our all is at stake.”83 Washington ended this brutally candid letter by asking Adams point-blank “whether your determination to reverse the order of the three major generals is final.”84
Washington felt so strongly on the subject that he was prepared to publish his grievances if Adams didn’t back down. The one flaw in his thinking was that he had assumed that McHenry had given Adams an honest account of their meeting at Mount Vernon, with the preconditions he had laid down for service. On the other hand, it was shockingly naive of Adams to imagine that he could woo George Washington as commander in chief, coax him from retirement, then dictate his general officers.
On October 9 President Adams sent Washington a conciliatory letter from his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. However furious he was inside, he wrote a nuanced message in which he was careful to affirm the president’s right to determine officer ranks but also promised that he would not override Washington’s judgment. Placated by this generosity, Washington emphasized to McHenry that he did not want knowledge of his confrontation with Adams to leak out, lest it injure the president. In replying to Adams, Washington, with consummate tact, made no mention of the controversy over the major generals and simply inquired after Abigail’s failing health. George Washington was always the maestro of eloquent silences.
Still grieved by his festering feud with Henry Knox, Washington sent him a lovely personal note, describing the “sincere pleasure” he would derive from having Knox as one of his major generals. He asked him to “share in the glory of defending your country” and pleaded with him to “display a mind superior to embarrassing punctilios,” such as disputes over rank.85 Not to be appeased, Knox informed Washington that all his friends had warned him against accepting any demotion. It still rankled that Washington tried to minimize the significance of the dispute over rank, which “precludes decisively my having the satisfaction proposed of sharing your fate in the field. I will not detain you one moment longer than to say, in the presence of Almighty God, that there is not a creature upon the face of the globe who was, is, and will remain more your friend than H. Knox.”86 While Washington had been uncharacteristically clumsy in the whole affair, Knox ended their exchange on a particularly bleak, bitter note.
Notwithstanding his pledge to stir no more than twenty-five miles from Mount Vernon in retirement, Washington spent five weeks in Philadelphia in November and December, conferring with Hamilton and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney about the new army. He traveled to the capital in relative simplicity: four servants and six or seven horses. Starting with the usual festivities in Alexandria, he again underwent the trial of public adulation and entered Philadelphia to clanging church bells, streets lined with cavalry, and an ovation from thousands of spectators.
In working sessions on the army, Washington seemed something of a figurehead. The vigorous Hamilton exercised the true authority, having beavered away at the task from a small office in lower Manhattan. The generals labored five hours daily, and Washington found the job of selecting officers for twelve new regiments an onerous task “of infinite more difficulty than I had any conception of.”87 In appraising candidates, Washington’s criteria had changed little from French and Indian days, and he was still glad to find “so many gentlemen of family, fortune, and high expectations.”88 Once again he stressed the need for handsome officer uniforms of blue and buff and took amazing pains to design his own uniform, including “a blue coat, with yellow buttons and gold epaulettes” and a white hat plume meant to add “a further distinction.”89 All the while Washington’s enthusiasm for the new army quietly began to wane.
While in Philadelphia, Washington delighted in joining Elizabeth Willing Powel for a number of teas and breakfasts that he conspicuously failed to enter into his diaries. We know of these encounters only from notes they exchanged. That Washington made efforts to conceal these meetings again raises the question of whether he was perhaps more attracted to Eliza Powel than he cared to admit. At the very least, there was a special emotional and intellectual rapport between them. Although Powel was careful to buy gifts for Nelly Custis and Martha Washington, one wonders whether this was a ploy to mask her true feelings for Washington. On the eve of his departure, she sent him a letter that suggests the deep bond between them: “My heart is so sincerely afflicted and my ideas so confused that I can only express my predominant wish—that God may take you into his holy keeping and preserve you safe both in traveling and under all circumstances and that you may be happy here and hereafter.”90 Perhaps Eliza Powel simply had a premonition that she would never again set eyes on her dear friend. As if wishing to lessen expectations and protect himself from prying eyes, Washington sent a more formal reply: “For your kind and affectionate wishes, I feel a grateful sensibility and reciprocate them with all the cordiality you could wish, being my dear madam your most obed[ien]t and obliged h[onora]ble servant Go: Washington.”91
Surely the most haunting reunion of Washington’s stay in Philadelphia was with his bluff, genial companion Robert Morris. Once so rich and powerful that a creditor crowned him the “Hannibal” of finance, Morris had become overextended in buying millions of acres of land and could not pay taxes or interest on his loans. In desperation, the financial wizard of the American Revolution auctioned off the plate and furnishings of his opulent home—all in vain. “I can never do things in the small,” he once said prophetically. “I must be either a man or a mouse.”92 Now Washington dined with Robert Morris in a milieu far distant from the sumptuous settings of past meetings: debtors’ prison. When Morris saw Washington, he grasped his hand in silence, tears welling up in his eyes. Morris wasted away in prison for three years.
While in Philadelphia, Washington made time to dine with President Adams and attempted to mend fences, but Adams still reacted to Washington in a manner tinged with paranoia. He had come to feel that his cabinet officers were “puppets danced upon the wires of two jugglers behind the scene and these jugglers were Hamilton and Washington.”93 One day in February 1799 Senator Theodore Sedgwick, a convinced Federalist, happened to ask Adams whether Washington would carry the title of General in the new army. The mere question kindled an explosive retort from the president. “What, are you going to appoint him general over the president?” Adams sputtered, his voice throbbing. “I have not been so blind but I have seen a combined effect among those who call themselves the friends of government to annihilate the essential powers given by the president.”94 The relationship between the first and second presidents never improved.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
A Mind on the Stretch
BY 1798 the Federalist party had grown haughty by being too long in power. “When a party grows strong and feels its power, it becomes intoxicated, grows presumptuous and extravagant, and breaks to pieces,” Johns Adams later wrote, having presided over just such a situation as president. As the political atmosphere became ever more combative, Federalist overreaching arrived at its apex with passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which tried to squelch criticism of war measures that President Adams and his congressional allies had undertaken during the undeclared Quasi-War with France. Among other things, these repressive measures endowed the government with broad powers to deport foreign-born residents deemed a threat to the peace; brand as enemy aliens any citizens of a country at war with America; and prosecute those who published “false, scandalous, or malicious” writings against the U.S. government or Congress, with the intent of bringing them “into contempt or disrepute.”1 This last act posed a special menace to civil liberties, since a largely Federalist judi
ciary would be pursuing Republican journalists.
The Alien and Sedition Acts reflected a prevalent Federalist assumption, shared by Washington, that American “Jacobins” colluded with France in treasonous fashion. While these acts were enacted on Adams’s watch, Washington lent them his quiet sympathy. Writing to a relative, he at first declined to comment on them, then observed that resident aliens had entered the country “for the express purpose of poisoning the minds of our people,” thereby estranging “their affections from the government of their choice” and “endeavoring to dissolve the Union.”2 On another occasion, he endorsed a Sedition Act prosecution of William Duane of the Aurora, who had accused the Adams administration of being corrupted by the British government. Given the sheer number of lies that he thought were being peddled in the service of propaganda, Washington’s dismay was understandable. At the same time, his support for censorship is disappointing given his exemplary record as president in tolerating even irresponsible press tirades against his administration. Washington often seemed blind to the perils of the Alien and Sedition Acts, arguing that Republican criticism was just another partisan maneuver to discredit the government and “disturb the public mind with their unfounded and ill-favored forebodings.”3