First of Men

by Ferling, John;

  Mount Vernon enveloped the president and his homesick wife for nearly twelve weeks, long enough for them to watch the foliage magically undertake its ritual transformation from greens to resplendent reds and yellows, then to disappear altogether. He hardly could have had a more relaxing vacation. Conditions at his farm apparently pleased him, and the bliss which that induced went uninterrupted by public crises. So tranquil were the times that the president did not receive even a single diplomatic packet from his secretary of state. During those serene weeks only one item of public business faced Washington. He had to select the site on the Potomac for the new federal district. Actually, the Residence Act implied that a presidentially appointed commission was to fix the site, but Washington ignored the spirit of the law and made the decision unilaterally. Indeed, it now appears that he had made his choice even before leaving New York. He wished the federal district to be located from “just above the commencement of the [Potomac River Company] canal” to “the lower end of Alexandria,” and the “Federal city,” as he had begun to call it, constructed somewhere between the little village of Georgetown, on Rock Creek, and Carrollsburg, a “town” (it existed on paper only) at the junction of the Potomac and the Eastern branch of the great river.

  He could not immediately reveal his intentions, however, lest he antagonize the Congress, for the legislators expected the eighty-mile span between Carrollsburg and Williamsport to be scrutinized seriously; besides, pursuing Madison’s suggestion he concluded that an apparent inspection tour of the long stretch would induce rival aspirants “to bid against each other in offers of land or money.” Thus, he nosed about Georgetown a bit, where he found the drooling landowners willing to ante up four hundred free acres to the national government, then he journeyed seventy miles upriver to look over the region about the Conococheague. The inhabitants of that area outbid their eastern brethren. Antietam offered 475 acres and a grant of $4800, while Shepherdstown pledged over $20,000. There was no way they could have known that their furious endeavors to impress Washington were exercises in futility.3

  Other than the permanent site of the capital, his pending move to Philadelphia was the matter that seemed to weigh most heavily on Washington’s mind during these months. He wrote letter after letter to Lear, each a long and exhaustive compendium of assignments for his aide to oversee, some concerning the renovation of the Morris House, others given to intricate instructions about packing his furniture, and a few discoursing on the proper schooling for his grandchildren and his niece Harriet. Then, late in November, with the normally dry autumn soon due to give way to the customary seasonal rains, Washington and his family set out for the temporary capital. It must have been gloomy enough to be ending such an idyllic vacation, but a thoroughly unpleasant return trip conspired to make matters even worse. The President of the United States and his family were driven by an unskilled, habitually intoxicated coachman, a man who had to be removed from the presidential carriage to a wagon laden with trunks, then ultimately replaced altogether when, in his stupor, he succeeded in twice overturning that vehicle.4

  That frightful trip was an augury of what lay ahead. The final two years of his term would prove to be far less pleasant than the months that had gone before. The president barely had reached Philadelphia and made a start at trying to settle in amidst the carpenters and joiners who continued to toil inside his new residence before Congress reconvened. Persisting in the practice begun by the English monarch, America’s chief executive addressed the legislators at the opening of their session. Reading a speech drafted largely by Madison and Hamilton, he touched briefly on frontier issues, foreign policy concerns, and fiscal matters—the three problems that would dominate the remainder of his term. A day or two later Secretary Hamilton got the first crack at the legislators.5

  Two weeks before Christmas the treasury secretary sent up a report containing recommendations that fleshed out his venturesome economic program. Working assiduously in the library of the house he had rented, a dwelling that once had belonged to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Hamilton completed his lengthy fiscal blueprint. The report urged the creation of a national bank capitalized at $10 million, four-fifths of the total provided by private investors, the remainder by the government. The existence of such an institution would serve several ends. It would be a source for the accumulation of capital and a means of providing a greater accessibility of credit. It also would further wed the merchant-financial classes to the new national polity. The bank, therefore, would join with other devices to become a source of revenue for that government. Congress already had enacted a nondiscriminatory tariff, that is one whose burden fell equally on the merchandise of all nations. In addition, in his initial report earlier that year Hamilton had proposed that excise taxes be levied on certain commodities, but principally on distilled spirits. In a sense, the proposal was a sop to the South, for two-thirds of the nation’s distillers were in New York and New England, the rest out on the frontier. Previously Congress had balked at these duties, but now the so-called Whiskey Tax passed, and by the third week in February the Bank Bill also had been enacted.6

  Although the Bank Bill got through Congress with little difficulty, southerners in that body hoisted a red warning flag that troubled the president. Harboring the eighteenth-century farmer’s inherent antipathy toward banks, and assuming—correctly—that their region would realize few direct benefits from the proposed institution, most southern congressmen had opposed the bill, fighting its passage on the only terrain that might lead to victory. Introducing a whole new element into the simmering national factionalism, Madison raised the question of the scope of Congress’s power. Recanting the position he had taken at the Constitutional Convention, he now contended that the fundamental charter was a “grant of particular powers only.” For Congress to arrogate to itself a power not specifically delegated was not just unconstitutional, he said, but dangerous to the whole precept of limited government. President Washington, he implied, must veto the bill.7

  The president had no idea what to do. Jefferson, who sided with the bank’s foes, thought him “unready, short and embarrassed,” but, if so, the chief executive can be excused. Questions of this sort would divide constitutional experts in every subsequent generation. Actually, Washington responded as he often did when confronted by an abstruse problem. He sought advice. He elicited the opinions of Jefferson, Madison, and Attorney General Randolph, and after studying their strict constructionist views he asked Hamilton to submit a written opinion. A bit put off by the president’s doubts, the secretary nevertheless spent a week recording his ideas, and the result was a masterpiece of constitutional as well as pragmatic logic. The national government was sovereign, he began, and it possessed the “means” to do whatever was not specifically forbidden. For instance, everyone agreed that under its right to regulate trade Congress could expend money for the construction of lighthouses and buoys, although the Constitution did not explicitly spell out the legislature’s power to build these navigational devices. Moreover, a bank had considerable utilitarian value; through its resources, government would have immediate access to funds in the event of a national emergency, and even in the pursuit of its frontier military policies. If the Constitution was to endure, he went on, it must be flexible. If it was interpreted inflexibly, Congress’s authority would be suffocated and the new government would collapse as surely as had its impotent predecessor. Washington received Hamilton’s thoughts on the day after his fifty-ninth birthday. Two days later he signed the bill into law.8

  Hamilton’s cogent argument was not the only factor that induced Washington to sign the Bank Bill. Immediately after the Senate passed that legislation Washington revealed the site he had selected for the new capital. The district, he reported, would be a diamond-shaped area that included acreage both in Virginia and in Maryland, and it would run from just below the Great Falls of the Potomac through Alexandria. Some in Congress were annoyed that he had taken on himself the sole responsibility for making the
selection and others were provoked at his sleight of hand, but so considerable was the president’s prestige that his critics confined their grumbling to private letters and diaries. Nevertheless, Washington’s inclusion of Alexandria, which lay south of the Eastern Branch and thus outside the parameters that Congress had designated for the site of the district, clearly transgressed the legislator’s intentions. Washington’s decision was risky, too, inasmuch as it would require Congress’s consent, and that would reopen the entire residency question. The president realized the danger, and beginning several days before he announced his decision he undertook to court and flatter some legislators who earlier had openly resisted situating the district against the Potomac. If his artful tactics helped discourage the rekindling of the long, vexatious capital-site battle, so, too, did some political horsetrading. One senator thought a deal was struck so that in return for certain legislators’ consent, Washington would appoint Gouverneur Morris as America’s envoy to Britain, from whence he would be advantageously placed to peddle Robert Morris’s Scottish realty. In addition, other wily congressmen simply sat on the bill to amend the Residence Act until Washington saw fit to sign the Bank Bill. When the president agreed to Congress’s act, the legislators consented immediately to Washington’s decision regarding the district. What amounted to a second capital-fiscal compromise had occurred.9

  Washington never displayed more mysterious behavior than in the course of selecting the site of the federal district. He disregarded sound arguments for locating the district well up the Potomac. Defense considerations, particularly in light of Congress’s frequent peregrinations in the recent war, were a persuasive argument in behalf of a more inland site. Moreover, in its cession of lands for a district Virginia clearly had demonstrated its preference for a location at or above the Great Falls northwest of Georgetown. What is more, generous pledges of money and land had been made by hamlets near the Conococheague. Yet Washington had ignored all these considerations, ultimately even choosing a site lying outside the region designated by Congress.

  Some friends of the president endeavored to explain his behavior by suggesting that his choice was dictated by the handsome, scenic vistas alongside the Potomac. Such an explanation was palpable nonsense. It also has been proposed that the president’s decision grew from his concern about partisan politics in Virginia. According to this logic, he acted out of a desire to win over his neighbor, George Mason, a leading Virginia Anti-Federalist, who additionally was the owner of considerable property within the region Washington selected. The principal problem with such a hypothesis is that it, too, lacks substantiation; besides, Washington would have known that, while such a step might have assuaged Mason, it was bound to antagonize others, and as such it could not—and, indeed, did not—end the partisan wars that raged in his home state.10

  Better explanations exist for Washington’s behavior. Most historians agree that a part of the assumption-capital bargain in 1790 was that two Virginia congressmen would switch their vote to assure passage of Hamilton’s credit legislation. The two congressmen in question, Richard Bland Lee and Alexander White, each owned land about Georgetown. The selection of the area surrounding Georgetown to be the seat of the new Federal City was the political payoff of the capital bargain, and Washington, a skilled and worldly politician, simply was the instrument through which the final detail of the deal was consummated. Why did Washington and Jefferson turn to Lee and White? After all, other congressmen must have been equally willing to change their vote in return for a similar prize. Surely the answer must be that Washington’s interests dovetailed with those of Lee and White. There can be no doubt that Washington concluded that a Potomac site, one embracing both Georgetown and Alexandria, the two principal ports on that river, would cement both Virginia’s and the West’s shaky ties to the Union. At this moment, before the railroad, before the steamboat, before the Erie Canal, Washington continued to believe that the Potomac would be America’s highway to the frontier. Settling the capital on its blue-green waters must have seemed not only to assure the river’s ascendancy over all rivals but to guarantee that the economic and political center of the United States would be one and the same—and it would repose on what amounted to the soil of Maryland and Virginia.

  Was there still another motive? Did Washington seek personal gain through his selection of the Potomac site? Some contemporary politicians believed that he did, although none were so courageous as to publicly make such a charge. It is unlikely, however, that the directors of the Potomac Company were terribly disappointed in the conduct of their chairman of the board, George Washington.11 For the past two years they had undertaken a publicity campaign aimed at making Georgetown-Alexandria the site of the new capital, and once the decision was announced Washington confessed to them that his actions had been dictated by self-interest. His motives, he said, had been divided between “an intimate connection in political and pecuniary considerations.” In his behavior, he added, “Public and private motives combine. . . .”12

  Few public figures in American history could match Washington’s record of virtuous and selfless service, but even he stumbled when the vast potential of the frontier West was at stake. This was the man who had exhorted Forbes and Bouquet to cut a wilderness road through a route that would be of benefit to him, the man whose attentive amassing of the best bounty lands available to the Virginia Regiment bore the stench of scandal. That personal considerations, from the potential enhancement of his Mount Vernon properties to the added value that would accrue to the real estate he owned in Alexandria, should now have entered his thoughts can hardly come as a surprise. As always, he convinced himself that the nation was the chief beneficiary of his actions. If that was not quite the case, it nevertheless would be difficult to argue that the national interest was in any way harmed by his conduct.

  Within thirty days of the resolution of the Bank Bill and the federal district issue, Washington took his leave of Philadelphia, the commencement of a three-month absence from the capital. His first stop was on the banks of the Potomac, where he hoped to visit with the landowners of Georgetown and Carrollsburg. The president was anxious to clear away all impediments to the construction of the new capital city. The chief obstacle was that Congress had appropriated no money with which to construct the Federal buildings. Virginia and Maryland had pledged $200,000 for that purpose, but it would not go far. Washington needed land to sell; from the resulting revenue the new capital could be constructed. Three days of intense meetings between the president and landowners were required before he could announce that the haggling was “happily finished.” More than a little bit experienced in the art of landjobbing, Washington took a characteristically tough stance with these men. Make a deal or risk losing everything, he told them bluntly, reminding them that there were men in Philadelphia who would just as soon not let the national capital escape their city. In the end a fair deal was struck. All land between Georgetown and Carrollsburg (a length of one and one-half miles and a depth of one mile) was ceded to the national government. The United States would survey the region, divide it into lots, and return alternate lots to the original owners. In fact, even before this bargain was struck Washington was shepherding the venture toward actuality. He finally had named people to the three-member commission that Congress had created to oversee the undertaking, and he quietly had hired an engineer to lay out the new city.13

  During his first month as president, Washington had pledged to visit every state during his tenure in office, and since the beginning of the year he had planned an official trip into the South. He had never been to Georgia or South Carolina, and the only part of North Carolina that he had visited was the tiny segment where the Dismal Swamp lapped across the Virginia boundary. Everything hinged on getting away early enough, however, for in the wake of his two recent illnesses the president was determined not to face the miasmic southern climate after late May. When Congress adjourned early and he wrapped up the Potomac land transactions at the ve
ry end of March, the way was cleared for his journey. First he hurried from Georgetown to Mount Vernon to rest himself and his horses, and to look into the operation of his farms, then early in April 1791, he started south.14

  As with his last exit from Mount Vernon, this trip began badly. Crossing Occoquan Creek at Colchester, Washington’s lead horse stumbled off the ferry, dragging his three terrified teammates with him into the cold, swirling water. Fortunately, the quick-thinking driver succeeded in disengaging the animals before the carriage could also be pulled over. Miraculously all the horses rescued themselves by swimming safely to the shore, where they were restrained and re-hitched to the president’s vehicle. Within a few minutes Washington again was on his way. He spent two nights at his sister’s house in Fredericksburg, stopped the coach one afternoon to fish for a spell, inspected the progress of canal building on the James River, and everywhere, it seemed, he faced “a salute from cannon & an Escort of Horse.” So weary of the latter did he grow, in fact, that he fibbed to the commander of Petersburg’s trainband company, telling him that he would depart at 8:00 A.M., only to sneak out in serene privacy before sunrise.15

  “[T]ravelling in a continued cloud of dust” across Virginia’s primitive roads, Washington pressed into North Carolina on the ninth day of his trip, somewhat startled at the “few good Houses” and the “small appearances of wealth” that he observed as he proceeded. Yet everywhere he found the citizenry “orderly and Civil,” not to mention “happy, contented and satisfied.” Down now in the region where the armies of Greene and Cornwallis had struggled a decade earlier, he crossed the Roanoke River at Halifax, watched the marketing of tar at Greenville (recently named for the late general) on the Tar River, stopped and breakfasted one morning at what he thought was a tavern, only to learn later—to his considerable embarrassment—that it was the private residence of a member of the North Carolina legislature, attended a dance in New Bern, and near the end of the month arrived at Wilmington on the Cape Fear River.16