by Conrad Black
CHAPTER THREE
Creating a New Republic and Launching It in the World, 1789–1809
1. THE WASHINGTON PRESINDENCY
There was no precedent for Washington. It had been centuries since there had been even a marginally serious republic and there had never been a constitutional one. The whole notion of constitutional government was fragmentary. In Britain, some of the Swiss cantons, parts of the Netherlands and Scandinavia, and a few of the German and Italian jurisdictions there were some institutional restraints on executive authority and some rights vested in individual citizens. But the Bill of Rights guarantees of due process, insurance against capricious prosecution, just compensation for seized property, the presumption of innocence for accused, access to counsel, prompt justice, reasonable bail (almost all of which have become pretty moth-eaten in practice at time of writing)49 and the attribution of unallocated powers to the states or the people themselves showed at least a conceptual respect for individual liberties that was unique in the world and was widely acclaimed as such.
There was no assumption in the late eighteenth century that government had any purpose except defending the country, maintaining internal order, overseeing a currency of integrity, and generally administering laws and facilitating lawful and useful activities as defined from time to time. Washington had challenged the Continental Congress, when he took leave of his demobilized army in 1783, to maintain adequate armed forces, honor the Revolution’s debts with a reliable currency, maintain an indissoluble union, and promote a spirit of sacrifice and cooperation among all the states. The Congress and the states had completely failed to do any of that, and he intended to provide them himself. He saw himself, with perfect justice, as the emblem and symbol of the nation, not only for having led the armies of the Revolution to victory and presided over the assembly that wrote the Constitution, but as the man summoned by popular and general demand, and without opposition, to take the headship of the new nation and, by his conduct, define its presidency. In his inaugural address, he spoke of an “indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.” This was a rather unspecific message of exhortations and velleities, more remarkable in its serenity by the fact that Washington had lost a lot of money during the Revolution and had to borrow $100 at 6 percent interest just to attend his own inauguration.50
Washington toured most of the country in stages, reassuring people with his majestic presence, and promised in famous letters to the Newport synagogue and to the Roman Catholics of America (through the bishop of Baltimore) that their congregants and co-religionists would not be discriminated against in the new nation as they probably had been in the countries they or their forebears had departed. To the Jews, he wrote: “The Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.... May the children of the Stock of Abraham who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants; while every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” To the Roman Catholics he wrote: “May the members of your society in America, animated alone by the pure spirit of Christianity and still conducting themselves as the faithful subjects of our free government, enjoy every spiritual and temporal felicity.” He had not been as loquacious as Franklin in expressing confidence that the United States would relatively quickly become the premier nation of the world. But the whole ambiance of the new nation, the tenor of the wording of its earliest and most basic state papers, exuded confidence in the exalted and exceptional destiny of America, and of its unique and evangelical status as a light unto the whole world, showing the way forward for the rights of man and the organization of government. Implicit in this was America’s predestined and natural right to expand across America and become a country on a grander scale than any European nation.
This notion of destiny and exceptionalism was in part simply true and evident in the world’s only and revolutionary constitutional republic, in part reasonable supposition of growing immigration and the settling of the generally rich and largely vacant land westward to and beyond the Mississippi, and in part an act of levitation and denial, to rise above inconvenient facts, such as that there were other democracies in the world, that slavery was objectively evil, and that to patch the country together, indecent electoral Danegeld had had to be paid to the minority of the states where it was established. Washington, as president in Philadelphia, where the law was that after six months’ residence slaves were automatically free, cycled his slaves in from Mount Vernon for a little over 20 weeks and then platooned them with others, to avoid emancipation of them. To be arbitrary, the American claim to moral leadership was one-third pure virtue, one-third ambitious but plausible striving, and one-third humbug and hypocrisy. The virtue would be strained at times but not discarded or altogether sullied; the ambitions of the most ardent patriots to world leadership would be attained in prodigies of courage, imagination, and diligence; but the fraud and corruption would constantly nag and periodically haunt the nation through all the astounding times ahead.
Foreign affairs were to be entrusted to a department of state, which was directed ad interim by John Jay, and then by the first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson. At first, there was little to do in foreign affairs, though loose ends remained with the British, and France began her revolutionary perturbations with the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris less than three months after Washington’s inauguration. The American fiscal shambles was to be addressed by the brilliant, bold, and vehement Alexander Hamilton as secretary of the Treasury. Armed forces were in the hands of the secretary of war, Henry Knox, a journeyman colleague from the Revolutionary War, who presided over a permanent army of 5,000, the navy, shipyards, the armory, and Indian affairs. He was not at all of the quality of Jefferson and Hamilton, and nor was the attorney general, Virginia’s Governor Edmund Randolph, who did not have an office but took a retainer as the government’s lawyer. In these brave and halcyon days, what became the United States Department of Justice was not even an embryo. Samuel Osgood was the first postmaster general. Washington’s confidence in John Adams had been shaken by his advocacy of an all-militia army, and during his incumbency his office was, and would long remain, anomalous, although relations between the two men were satisfactorily revived later in the administration. It was a cabinet of only seven. But one of the very most important figures continued to be Congressman James Madison, who was Washington’s most trusted adviser, the champion of the Bill of Rights, and generally recognized and deferred to as the principal author of the Constitution. This group of five (Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison), who with Franklin are generally considered the principal founders of the United States, continued through all of the decade, and Jefferson and Madison through the first quarter of the next century, as leaders of the new republic’s public life, assuring and symbolizing continuity.
Washington’s only rival as the very greatest American and co-founder of the nation, Benjamin Franklin, finally passed away on April 17, 1790, aged 84. He had seen the new government in and fairly launched. Benjamin Franklin was universally saluted as a great man, statesman, scientist, inventor, writer, and publisher, and especially as a unique, wholly admirable personality. When he was buried, approximately half the whole population of Philadelphia, about 20,000 people, crowded the few blocks to the Christ Church cemetery, and the casket was preceded by all the clergy of the city, of every denomination.51
The main focus of the administration was in the complex series of measures very skillfully formulated and advanced by Hamilton to create fiscal and monetary stability. Hamilton’s plan came in three main proposals from January 1790 to March 1791: foreign debt, mainly in the hands of the former French and Dutch allies, was reckoned at $11.7 million, and was to be honored entirely with payment in guaranteed interest-bearing notes. The
domestically held debt of the defunct Confederation and the states was estimated at about $67 million, and all of this was to be “assumed,” which meant placed in a sinking fund where it would yield interest and be retired eventually. Hamilton had softened the onerousness of these assumptions of debt by quietly buying some of it at heavily discounted prices, but it was a very controversial plan. There was general agreement on the foreign debt but the uneven distribution of state debt led to fierce debate and it was initially narrowly rejected by the House of Representatives at the urging of Madison, but Hamilton arranged with Madison, in a deal brokered by Jefferson, that the debt-assumption proposals would be accepted in exchange for moving the capital of the country from Philadelphia to a new site on the Potomac adjacent to Virginia.
This instantly gave the U.S. government a respected fiscal status, competitive with the stronger European nations, put a lot of money in the hands of the administration’s grateful friends, presaged a number of Keynesian and monetarist policies of 130 to 150 years later, created a lively American capital market, subordinated the states to the central government, and deprived the states of much of their argument for access to tax revenues, as their debt vanished.
Hamilton’s second measure was the establishment of the Bank of the United States as the handler of large money transfers, the manager of the national debt, principal institutional lender, and issuer of supplementary currency as debt certificates. This generated heated constitutional argument with Jefferson, who considered it ultra vires to the government, but Hamilton’s view of the “implicit powers” of the government prevailed with Washington and Congress. Only 35 at this time, Hamilton, who had caught Washington’s attention as a young volunteer from the West Indies early in the Revolutionary War, was undoubtedly a man of genius, as all his contemporaries, including worldly figures such as the timeless French foreign minister, Talleyrand, agreed. Almost at a stroke he massively reinforced the basis of American government and union and planted the fast-growing seeds of American finance and the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, events that would change and astonish the whole world. A mint was established in January of 1791 to give America its own coinage and end the miscellaneous circulation of British, French, Spanish, and even German currency in America.
To ensure adequate revenue to deal with the debt assumption and the operations of the federal government, Hamilton proposed tariffs (with the additional benefit of stimulating manufacturing) and excise taxes, including a tax on distilled spirits. The tax fell heavily on the hinterland agricultural communities, as this was the chief destination of unsold grain for the distillation of spirits, and was strenuously challenged and often defied, in the Carolinas and Pennsylvania especially, and eventually led (in July 1794) to the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. Washington mobilized 15,000 militiamen, and under General Henry Lee, accompanied by former colonel Hamilton, the disobedience was suppressed. Two men were convicted of treason, but pardoned by Washington. The effect of these measures, including the unambiguous enforcement of the excise taxes, was to establish the unquestioned authority of the United States government as a fiscally responsible national administration that soon had a better international credit rating than the main European powers, and as an unchallengeably authoritative occupant of its constitutional jurisdictions, whose writ would run in all matters and throughout the land.
Hamilton’s proposed measures for encouraging manufacturing were not immediately adopted, but were very prescient and even visionary. In a report of nearly 100,000 words, Hamilton outlined proposals that went beyond the House of Representatives’ request for a plan to make the United States independent of foreign sources for military supplies. Hamilton “elaborated his grand vision of a powerful, integrated, and wealthy war-making nation that would be the equal of any in Europe, including Great Britain.”52 The political economy of the Federalists, hinted at in broad strokes by Washington and hammered into detailed proposals fit for legislation by Hamilton, was a fast track to an economic and military powerhouse. Despite the Jefferson-Madison advocacy of a rather bucolic and adjudicatory state, their political astuteness would bring them to the highest offices within a few years, where they were no less nationalistic than their Federalist predecessors. From right to left, country to city, South to North, patricians to the lower bourgeoisie, the small but talented American political class was straining like whippets to attract immigrants, settle the West, build industry, and make America a mighty nation in the world. And there was never the slightest hesitation to include military power and its application as a chief criterion of the new nation’s potential influence.
Washington and his Treasury secretary not only had got control of the debt problem that had been building and festering for nearly 10 years and established a strong currency, but had done so in a manner that was in accord with the adopted Constitution and was susceptible only to technical legal arguments by Jefferson and his followers, but not to comparisons with the unrepresented taxation and high-handed collection measures of the British. Almost at once, the new nation had a solid fiscal regime.
Where Washington desired a rather mystic national commitment to thrift, unity of purpose and sacrifice, with a balance between urban industry and agriculture, and Jefferson professed the greater virtue and desirability of rural life, Hamilton saw clearly the economic future and eschewed laissez-faire capitalism in favor of government participation to encourage centralized government, promotion of manufacturing and heavy industry, and a headlong pursuit of pure capitalism (pure apart from the fact that the government was channeling the direction of its progress). Hamilton saw the huge advantage the British and Dutch had over the other powers because of their private capital markets and sophisticated methods of funding public debt, compared with Colbert’s authoritarian methods of official financial regimentation in France.
Jefferson, though an elitist, favored a broad suffrage. Washington trusted the people less than Jefferson, but wanted them ultimately responsible for their own government, with an edge for more accomplished people, which in practice meant wealthier ones. Hamilton was fairly liberal in matters of civil rights, but was both a monarchist at heart and a meritocratic authoritarian in matters of devising and implementing public policy. Adams the Bostonian, despite his personal and intraparty disputes with Hamilton, partly shared the political and economic designs of the New Yorker, while Madison sided with Jefferson, his fellow Virginia plantation owner. Jefferson’s Enlightenment utopianism based on man’s inert decency and capacity for self-improvement vied with a Hamiltonian blend of Hobbesian cynicism, Adam Smith capitalism, and far-sighted industrialism. As in all things, Washington hovered majestically above it all, seeking excellence in men and policies and making it up as he went along. He thought Hamilton more practical in economic terms, but relied heavily on Madison for adaptation of the Constitution. It must be said that, on balance, the Constitution was so intelligently designed and the principal founders of the country so capable and highly motivated that the United States started its life with four to five decades of what would, in later periods, if not always at the time, be regarded as good government.
Washington had unsuccessfully demanded, and then promised, indissolubility of nationhood, adequate armed forces, fiscal integrity, and an example of incorruptible sacrifice. Having led in the establishment of the new nation, he wished now to do all he could to maximize the likelihood of its swift growth and undisturbed progress among nations, which at that time numbered only the five Great Powers in Europe that came through the Seven Years’ War (Britain, France, Austria, Russia and Prussia), the secondary powers (the Spanish, Portuguese, Ottoman, and Dutch Empires as well as Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and a few of the German and Italian kingdoms and principalities), and on rumor and belief, mysterious entities in the East, most conspicuously China. With its house increasingly in order, the United States was already reaching the upper levels of the second tier of powers, as its population passed the level of
half of Britain’s at about the end of Washington’s presidency, when it reached 5 million to Britain’s 10 million. And where the old empires were in decline, the United States, glamorized by its revolution and mythologized by the stirring tenor of its originating state papers, was, from its earliest days, a dazzling and steeply ascending comet among nations.
Washington was not trying to lead the Congress in a legislative program, beyond the instances and criteria of serious sovereign statehood that he had promised to pursue after the failure of the Congress and states to do so in the interregnum between Yorktown and Philadelphia, but he was determined to establish the presidency as a very republican but majestic office that was above faction, region, and partisanship. He alone was responsible for patronage and was very circumspect in resisting the importunity of office-seekers and filling the senior positions and federal bench with highly qualified people. (John Jay was a superlative choice as first chief justice.) Washington had an elegant (but not ostentatious) carriage, with six matched cream-colored horses, held rather ceremonious levees, and entertained somewhat opulently, with profusions of wigged footmen in full livery. Washington in public addresses referred to himself in the third person, and the iconography of his presidency, especially official portraits and medals, was an imitation of European monarchy. He never dined in a citizen’s private home and traveled somewhat elaborately but not with absurd trappings, as in his trips about New England in 1789 and through the South in 1791. There were criticisms that he had monarchical flourishes but he had made it widely known that he would resist at any cost any suggestion of such a transition for the presidency, and he encouraged Madison to oppose Adams’s effort to have the president referred to as “His Most Benign Majesty,” which would have reduced the office to an absurdity. (Adams was a terrible fidget with styles of address, and ruminated nervously aloud in the Congress about what he would be called when President Washington visited the Congress, since that title would preempt his as president of the Senate. The answer effortlessly emerged: Mr. Vice President.)