When Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 Washington considered the United States a threatened republic, already at war with France on the ocean, and liable to be attacked by an invading army in the near future. He pointed to the fate of the Republic of Venice, which had thought of itself as a French ally, and was now a mere province of their empire. For the ex-president, the possibility of such a fate justified both the Alien and the Sedition Acts. They were war measures, needed for the security of the nation in a time of crisis. Congress stipulated that they would expire in two years, when the lawmakers assumed the conflict would be over.
Future presidents, such as Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, would sponsor far harsher measures during the wars of their time. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned thousands of government critics in federal jails for indeterminate sentences, and looked the other way while hostile newspapers were wrecked and burned by rioters often led by Union soldiers. Wilson’s administration created the American Protective League—some two hundred fifty thousand volunteer enforcers who tapped telephones, opened letters, and otherwise spied on those suspected of disloyalty and treason. Roosevelt arrested tens of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans, and confined them in detention camps for the duration of the war.19
Washington saw the nation as similarly threatened in 1798. The French government’s fondness for publishing official letters in anti-Federalist newspapers was, for him, a vivid example of divide and conquer tactics. He saw the French refusal to negotiate with Federalist envoys John Marshall and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and their readiness to parley with Democratic-Republican Elbridge Gerry, as part of the same strategy.
When Washington read Thomas Jefferson’s Kentucky resolutions and James Madison’s Virginia version, he was appalled. He saw both as horrendous threats to the future of the American union. He wrote to Patrick Henry, urging him to emerge from retirement and become a candidate for the Virginia Assembly, so he could launch a movement to repeal Madison’s resolutions. “The tranquility of the Union and of this state in particular is hastening to an awful crisis,” he wrote. The ex-president cited the Madison claim that the offending acts had violated the compact between the states, giving Virginia the right “to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil.” For Washington, the word “interpose” meant the same thing as Thomas Jefferson’s “nullify”—the dissolution of the American union. In both words, he saw the hand of the leader of the Democratic-Republican Party and the chief appeaser of France.20
Although the sixty-three-year-old Henry had recently told a friend he was “too old and infirm” to venture into politics again, he recognized a solemn summons to duty in Washington’s letter. He immediately responded, declaring himself a candidate. “My children would blush to know that you and their father were contemporaries, and that when you asked him to throw in his mite for the public happiness, he refused to do it.”21
In the same spirit, Washington wrote to John Marshall and Henry Lee, urging them to run for Congress as Federalists in the upcoming elections to defend the country against Jefferson’s subversion. The ex-president was providing the kind of political leadership the Federalists desperately needed—and President Adams was not giving them. Depressed by the constant barrage of criticism from the Aurora and other papers, the President began retreating to his farm in Massachusetts for months at a time, running the government by mail. His absence demoralized his cabinet and his supporters in Congress.
In December 1798, when Generals Washington and Hamilton met in Philadelphia to discuss the organization of the new army, they listened closely to President Adams’s second annual address to Congress. He called for continuing defensive preparations for war, but repeatedly said the United States was ready and willing to achieve a peaceful understanding with France. These words proved to be a prelude to an even more unexpected message. On February 18, 1799, Adams went before the Senate and informed them that he had appointed a new envoy to France—William Vans Murray, the American minister to the Netherlands.
Everyone, including Washington, Hamilton, and President Adams’s cabinet, was astounded. The President had consulted no one before making this move. It was based on an extremely unorthodox French diplomatic maneuver. Foreign Minister Talleyrand had sent a letter to Louis Andre Pichon, the French Chargé d’Affaires in the Netherlands, declaring France was sincerely interested in peace negotiations with America. Pichon had passed the letter to Murray, who forwarded it to Adams. The President instantly decided to respond to it.
Washington had grave doubts about this decision. He suspected Talleyrand was playing “the same loose and round-about game he had attempted the year before with our envoys” in the XYZ affair. The ex-president thought Adams should have made it clear that he would only negotiate when he was sure that the rulers of France, the Directory, were involved in the process. But Washington told Secretary of State Pickering he would make no public comment on the President’s decision. He was only a spectator in this drama, without access to all the information that he assumed President Adams possessed.
The ex-president feared that Adams’s impulsive response would deflate the defiant mood in Congress and the nation that had induced them to spend millions for an army and navy. As Washington knew from experience, Americans did not like the discipline and hardships of military service. Only a fervent belief that the country was in danger persuaded them to accept it. “Unless a material change takes place, our military theater affords but a gloomy prospect to those who are to perform the principal parts in the drama,” he warned Major General Alexander Hamilton.22
This grim prophecy was fulfilled in the next few months. General Washington was soon asking Secretary of War James McHenry why recruiting for the army was moving so slowly. A letter from General Hamilton reported that he was getting no help in New England from friends and allies of President Adams. Even worse was the disarray on the political front. Secretary of State Pickering called the Murray mission “a degrading and mischievous measure…dishonorable to the United States.” Massachusetts Senator George Cabot described his own reaction as: “Surprise, indignation, grief and disgust.” Senator Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts told General Hamilton: “Had the foulest heart and the ablest head in the world have been permitted to select the most embarrassing and ruinous measure, perhaps it would have been precisely the one which has been adopted.”23
Among the Democratic-Republicans, no one was more pleased with President Adams than his vice president. Thomas Jefferson called the decision to send Murray to France “the event of events.” Delight was in every phrase of his letter to James Madison, describing Murray’s appointment. “This had obviously been kept secret from the Feds of both houses, as appeared to their dismay.” Jefferson concluded that the Federalists’ “mortification” proved that “war had been their object.”
In the grip of his partisanship, Jefferson could not see that the Federalists were dismayed not by the possibility of peace with France, but by President Adams’s timing. The nation was approaching the presidential election year of 1800. It was vital to keep their followers in an anti-French mood until John Adams was reelected for another four years. Then would come the right time to negotiate from strength with the arrogant French.24
The politically inept Adams could not or would not see that if the French responded to Murray’s mission, the Democratic-Republicans would cry “We told you so.” They would claim the French about-face proved that the Federalist Party were warmongers, rushing to create an army and navy to fight an enemy that did not exist. Vice President Jefferson had intimated this all too clearly in his letter to Madison. The Aurora, eager to widen the breach in the enemy party, hailed the President’s decision, declaring that it was about time Adams realized he had, like Washington, been “deluded and deceived” by their corrupt pro-British advisors. This swiftly became a party line repeated by other Democratic-Republican editors.
The desperate Federalists conferre
d with President Adams, who remained adamant. When they threatened to veto Murray’s appointment, Adams agreed to name two other men, both dependable Federalists, to bolster the youthful Murray—Patrick Henry and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Oliver Ellsworth. When Henry declined because of his faltering health, Adams chose another southern Federalist, Governor William Davie of North Carolina. Watching from the sidelines, a gloomy George Washington sensed this concession would prove to be only a bandage on a fatal political wound.25
CHAPTER 24
The Death That Changed Everything
TO GEORGE WASHINGTON’S INTENSE satisfaction, John Marshall, Henry Lee, and Patrick Henry, the three candidates whom he had urged to run for office to combat Thomas Jefferson and James Madison’s attacks on the Alien and Sedition Acts—and the federal union—all won their elections in the spring of 1799. But bad news came on the heels of these victories. In June, before Patrick Henry could take his seat in the Virginia legislature, he succumbed to chronic ill-health.
From Philadelphia came word that President Adams’s peace mission to France had brought recruiting for the army to a virtual halt. Washington told Hamilton he now doubted if they would achieve more than the “embryo” of an army. One of Hamilton’s New York friends told him it was progressing “like a wounded snake.” With the threat of war removed, the Democratic-Republicans were protesting the trials of several other editors under the Sedition Act with devastating effect.1
More and more Federalist leaders began to give up on President Adams as a candidate for reelection. In mid-July 1799, Washington received a letter from his old friend, Governor Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut, which had taken more than a month to reach him. Washington instantly concluded that it had been circulated to a number of prominent Federalists before it went into the mail. Trumbull urged Washington to consider running for a third term. He was the nation’s only hope of avoiding a “French president”—Thomas Jefferson.
Washington’s reply could not have been more forthright. He told Trumbull that even if he agreed to run, he did not think he could win. The opposition could “set up a broomstick, call it a true son of liberty, a democrat, or give it any other epithet that will suit their purpose, and it will command their votes in toto.” He would be charged “with concealed ambition which waits only an occasion to blaze out—in short, with dotage and imbecility.”
The ex-president was telling Trumbull that a man who had written a Farewell Address and rejected another term in 1796 could not reverse himself without permanent damage to his reputation. Washington responded to a second letter from Trumbull with unequivocal words: “I must again express a strong and ardent wish and desire that no eye, no tongue, no thought” may be turned toward him as a potential candidate.2
In October 1799, President Adams, ignoring desperate objections from his cabinet and Federalists in Congress, dispatched his two-man delegation to join William Vans Murray in negotiating a peace with France. Also ignored was a huge upheaval in the government of France. Shattered by defeat and headlong retreat from their conquests in Europe, the virtually bankrupt former revolutionists reeled toward collapse.
General Napoleon Bonaparte decided that leadership by a corrupt and divided Directory no longer made sense. In November 1799, his soldiers ousted these feckless executives and created government by a Consulate, which had a vague echo of the ancient Roman Republic, with its reputation for integrity. But this government was a consulate that Emperor Augustus Caesar would have understood at a glance. Bonaparte was the First Consul, and he had far more power than the two other members of the pseudo-triumvirate.
George Washington was baffled and not a little appalled by Adams’s decision to send envoys to a seemingly disintegrating France. He thought fate had handed the President a perfect opportunity to abandon the idea. But Adams had become determined to have his way, no matter what anyone told him. Frantic Federalist politicians again wrote to Washington, begging him to make a public statement, disagreeing with the President. Washington admitted that an “awful crisis” seemed to be brewing on the political front, but he did not feel it was his duty to speak out. He was “a passenger only” and he would “trust to the mariners” whose duty it was to steer the national vessel to “a safe port.”3
On December 12, General Washington wrote a cordial letter to General Alexander Hamilton, praising his proposal to establish a military academy to produce trained and educated officers for the American army. He had repeatedly called for creating this institution while he was president, but Congress, still locked in their opposition to a standing army, had ignored him. Once more, he reiterated his enthusiasm for the idea.
Within an hour of signing his name to this letter, Washington was on his horse, riding through wintry gusts of rain and snow to confer with the overseers of his five farms. He came back to Mount Vernon not a little damp and chilled, and awoke the next morning with a cold and sore throat. He stayed indoors until about four o’clock, when he went out to mark some trees that he wanted removed to broaden Mount Vernon’s view of the Potomac.
That evening, Washington’s voice was noticeably hoarse as he read to Martha and his secretary, Tobias Lear, the latest political news and editorials from various papers. When Martha withdrew to visit her granddaughter, Nelly, who had recently had a baby, Lear shared some news he had picked up from a neighbor: the state legislature had elected James Monroe governor of Virginia.
The ex-president said he could not imagine a worse choice. He suspected the Jeffersonian majority in the legislature intended their vote to be an insult to him. Lear listened politely and said nothing. He had long since made it clear that he favored the Democratic-Republicans. Washington accepted his stance without acrimony.
Perhaps trying to change the subject, or show he was in other respects a loyal secretary and friend, Lear expressed concern for Washington’s sore throat. He urged him to take some medicine. “You know I never take anything for a cold,” he replied. “Let it go as it came.”4
At Monticello, Vice President Thomas Jefferson, alarmed at Patrick Henry’s return to politics as a Federalist, had persuaded James Madison to run for the Virginia Assembly to oppose him. Their alarm had deepened when they learned that ex-President Washington was Henry’s backer, and was recruiting men like John Marshall and Henry Lee to run for Congress. The prospect of Washington as an active opponent was bad news for Jefferson’s hopes of becoming the next president.
Both men were also dismayed by the icy reception their protests against the Alien and Sedition Acts had received. Not one other state legislature had joined Virginia and Kentucky. Every northern state had rejected the protests and the southern states, where Democratic-Republicans had a majority, remained mute. Massachusetts and a half-dozen other states had passed resolutions endorsing the laws. No less than sixty-three members of the Virginia legislature had voted against Madison’s resolutions. At the urging of this group, John Marshall wrote a hard-hitting pamphlet, defending the acts as constitutional.5
More and more, both sides began talking about a resort to force. The Gazette of the United States called the Address of the Virginia Assembly, enlarging on Madison’s resolutions, “little short of treasonable.” Senator Theodore Sedgwick thought it was virtually “a declaration of war.” General Alexander Hamilton agreed with him. He wondered if his regular army might be needed “to subdue a refractory and powerful state.”6
John Nicholas, the Albemarle County Federalist who had warned George Washington about Jefferson’s possible role in the Langhorne letter, charged that the Virginia government was collecting weapons and ammunition in Richmond. A Federalist leader in North Carolina claimed that “Jacobins” in Virginia were talking loudly about secession and were doing everything in their power to prepare the state’s militia for battle. Vice President Jefferson opposed this talk of violence. “Firmness on our part, but a passive firmness, is the true course,” he told Madison.7
The Vice President saw signs that the Middle States were l
eaning in their direction. But he could not have been happy with the outcome of the congressional elections in Virginia. Eight Federalists had won seats—an increase of four in their delegation. But in the elections for the state legislature, the Democratic-Republicans had won in a landslide. Among the victors was James Madison.
During the summer of 1799, Jefferson had invited Madison to Monticello to discuss their next move. In a note, he explained that he felt a need to do something about the states that were “disregarding the limitations of the Federal compact” by supporting the Alien and Sedition Acts. He wanted to express in “affectionate and conciliatory language our warm attachment to union with our sister states.” They should declare that they were willing to sacrifice “every thing except [the]… rights of self government.” They did not want to make every error or wrong “a cause of scission [secession].” They were willing to wait patiently until “the passions and delusions” that the federal government had “artfully and successfully excited …to conceal its designs” subsided.8
However, Jefferson continued, they should make it clear Virginia was determined, if disappointed, in this expectation, “to sever ourselves from that union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self government…in which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness.” As some historians have wryly pointed out, the author of the Declaration of Independence here wrote a Declaration of Divorce. The fact that the writer was Thomas Jefferson gave it a resonance that would echo down the decades.9
The Great Divide Page 34