By now the tobacco lands had given way to the moist green rice fields of the coast. A couple of days out of Wilmington he crossed the Waccamaw and entered Georgetown, South Carolina, a town of about five hundred that still was struggling to recover from the ravages of the British occupation ten years earlier. There he attended a tea party at which he was entertained by several belles dressed in flowing skirts and wearing headdresses upon which were printed such tributes as “Long life to the President,” and “Welcome to the hero.” On the road to Charleston he lodged with a rancher who raised cattle and razorback hogs, thence to Snee Farm, the rice plantation of Governor Charles Pinckney. On May 2 he was rowed across to Charleston, where he paused for a week. Washington’s itinerary was so crowded that he probably got only a bit of the rest that he needed. Dinners and concerts and balls took up each evening, affairs always made all the more enjoyable by the presence of several of South Carolina’s lovely maidens, young women whom Washington pronounced to be the most attractive creatures he had ever seen. By day he inspected the city’s sites, its forts and warehouses and homes, one day even visiting an orphanage, something he never before had seen.17
From Charleston, Washington headed for the southernmost point of his excursion. The heat of May already upon him, the President hurried over the sandy coastal littoral. Finding no public inns along his route, he lodged in carefully selected private homes each night, bypassing the log cabins with chimneys fashioned from “Split sticks filled with dirt between them,” that he discovered comprised the residences of most of the inhabitants of this region. Along the way he stopped at Mulberry Grove to visit Catherine Greene, the widow of his loyal general, then he proceeded to Savannah, arriving just as the last rays of the day’s sun bathed the town in splendor. As he alighted in St. James Square, cannon boomed from vessels on the Savannah River, the Chatham County Artillery Company went through its paces, and a band played “He comes, the Hero comes.” Washington lingered three full days in this tranquil southern town, spending one night with the state’s Order of the Cincinnati and its commander, Anthony Wayne, who like Greene had moved to Georgia following the war, and another evening at a dance attended by nearly one hundred “handsome” Georgia damsels.18
In mid-May Washington started home, a twenty-eight-day trek over a different route. It began with a long, difficult ride through the Georgia pine barrens, across roads so sandy that his horses tired quickly and the traveler fretted that at this rate he would not see Mount Vernon before Christmas. After pausing to pay his respects to Mrs. Greene once again, he continued on to Augusta; there, apparently for the first time during this trip, he was compelled to conduct public business, for the governor of Georgia wished to plead with the president for more federal assistance in obtaining runaway slaves. The next day Washington was back in South Carolina, visiting Columbia and, subsequently, Camden, where Gates had been compelled to flee for his life in 1780, and where he visited the gravesite of Baron de Kalb. From there he proceeded to Charlotte, up to Salisbury, then across the Yadkin to Salem, a fifteen-year-old Moravian settlement that was conspicuous for welcoming him with music—trumpets, French horns, trombones—not with gunfire. He had hoped to be home by June 1, but on that day he and the governor of North Carolina attended a singstunde, a song service provided by the German immigrants who inhabited this tiny village. The next morning he was on his way to Guilford Court House, where he inspected the site of Cornwallis’s Pyrrhic victory over Greene, the battle that sent the British army reeling to the coast and ultimately into Virginia in 1781. Two days later the president, too, was in Virginia, and a week later he reached Mount Vernon, arriving in time for his customary mid-afternoon dinner, a meal to celebrate the completion of a round trip of 1887 miles.19
The president enjoyed the lush, warm, green vista of Mount Vernon in summer for only two weeks before departing for the capital. Never would he take a more circuitous route back to Philadelphia. His first stop was in Georgetown to meet with the three commissioners for the federal district. But it was the project engineer, thirty-seven-year-old Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a former officer in the Continental army, a survivor of the clash at Savannah, with whom he most wished to talk. “Langfang,” as Washington persisted in calling the Frenchman, had a good track record, one that included the design of several buildings in New York—most importantly, the Federal Hall—which Washington had admired. L’Enfant seemed to display a mind that comingled order and art, one with a bent toward the grandiose and ostentatious, the “en grande,” as he put it. Thus, when he appealed to Washington for the opportunity to design the new capital, the president was interested, and when Hamilton, Knox, and Robert Morris endorsed him, Washington was certain that L’Enfant was his man.20
From the outset, however, the president and the secretary of state had conflicting views about the engineer’s duties. Jefferson seemed to think L’Enfant was only to pick the sites for the various buildings, while he designed the layout of the city and chose the proper architectural mode for its structures. In fact, Jefferson did prepare a schematic drawing for the city, one in which the new capital was to be arranged in a rectangular gridiron pattern, its buildings closely bunched and nearly every vestige of the bucolic countryside eradicated.21 L’Enfant characterized such a notion as “tiresome and insipid,” envisioning instead a city in which nature and art were intertwined. He preferred to leave much of the natural topography intact, planning streets around hillocks and creeks, with circles and wide boulevards intermingling with smaller thoroughfares, and minor streets abutting major arteries that coursed along at a slight angle, as if the designer had carelessly dropped an overlay atop his initial conception. Whether the president also thought Jefferson’s design was mundane cannot be known, but he did direct L’Enfant to prepare a plan.22
When Washington reached Georgetown on his return to Philadelphia, his first day was consumed by meetings with the commissioners and landowners. Several of the latter, having gotten wind of L’Enfant’s thinking, now were grumbling about the distended size of the planned city, fearing the sprawl might reduce their property values. The president once again quieted them with tough talk, and the next day he and his engineer rode about the area. L’Enfant still had not committed a final draft to paper, but his rough sketches were clear enough for Washington to grasp. The Frenchman also showed his visitor to the sites where the president’s house, the capitol, and the various department buildings would be located, waxing eloquent about parks and gardens and “grand fountains . . . with a constant spout of water,” and he may even have pointed out the site for the “Grand Equestrian” monument that Congress had voted in 1783 to erect in honor of General Washington. L’Enfant expounded a bit about the style of each building. Washington must have listened closely when he spoke of the president’s dwelling, a structure that the Frenchman thought should combine the “sumptuousness of a palace, the convenience of a house and the agreeableness of a country seat.” After an inspection that could not have lasted more than three or four hours, Washington gave his sanction to L’Enfant’s ideas. By the middle of the next week a journalist broke the news of what the new capital would look like. That was how Jefferson learned of the shape of the proposed city.23
By then the president was back in the temporary capital, having gotten there via a mini-tour that ranged from Georgetown to Frederick, Maryland, then up the Susquehanna to York (where he attended a worship service conducted entirely in German), east through Lancaster, and eventually to Philadelphia.24 Back in his office he found his desk laden with papers and reports that had accumulated during his four-month absence. Many concerned frontier issues and America’s relations with the principal European powers, matters that often were interrelated. These concerns had provoked much rhetoric and anxiety in the Articles of Confederation era, but in the first two years of the Washington administration other problems had forced them into the background. For the remainder of his term, however, neither matter ever would be far from the president’s tho
ughts.
Soon after the war with Britain ended, the national government, acting under the Ordinance of 1785, began to survey parts of the Ohio Country. Meanwhile, a succession of treaties negotiated by the Articles government with the Iroquois, Ottawa, Delaware, and other tribes opened to settlement an area that extended to the falls of the Ohio. United States citizens once again began to push west. Soon the flow of humanity into this region resembled an avalanche, as each month hundreds of adventurous settlers coursed down the Ohio into the newly acquired lands. Soon, too, land-hungry farmers crossed the river and squatted on lands which the Indians had not ceded, territory as far west as the present boundary of Indiana-Illinois. In fact, the Native Americans not only had never surrendered these lands, they saw no reason to recognize the Treaty of Paris, by which Great Britain had so magnanimously presented the trans-Appalachian West to the United States. Instead, the tribesmen in the Northwest took the position that the Ohio River was to be the outer boundary of the United States. Supported by the British, who continued to hold the old royal forts in this area, the Indians were far from powerless.
When negotiations in the mid-1780s failed to resolve the stalemate, it seemed to many that force alone would facilitate the ambitions of the new nation’s land-hungry citizenry. Unpropitiously, however, the United States was virtually without an army. In the final weeks of the War of Independence, while he lived at Rocky Hill outside Princeton, General Washington had testified before a congressional committee that an army of about 2000 men should be maintained; the committee, a panel chaired by Hamilton, eventually requested a standing force of 2500.25 But Congress did nothing, and six months after Washington’s retirement the United States had an army of only 80 men, 25 soldiers at Fort Pitt, the remainder at West Point; none held rank above captain. When relations with the Native Americans grew tense the following year, Congress enlarged the army to 700 men. On paper, anyway, it remained at that strength throughout the decade, although when Washington was inaugurated only 694 men actually were in uniform. The new president, a man with a long and deep interest in the West, envisioned a vigorous role for the new national government in the pacification of the frontier. He quickly prevailed on Congress to enlarge the United States army to over 1200 men.26
Even so, Washington was not unalterably committed to the use of force to resolve the problems in the West. Indeed, for the foreseeable future he believed that peace was imperative for the security of the United States. In this “still very early stage of our affairs,” he reasoned, a vast conflagration along the frontier might prove to be catastrophic. A conflict that was costly both in blood and in dollars was likely to erode support for the new federal union. In addition, a war in the Northwest with the Native Americans could escalate into a second war with Great Britain, this time, perhaps, with disastrous results.27
Of course, the president never contemplated an abrogation of what he conceived as the nation’s interests in the West. If for no other reason, the United States must control the West to keep Great Britain from establishing its suzeranity over the region. He dreamed of wresting control of the Indian trade, and he even spoke of American dominion as a means of putting an end to the area’s potential as a haven for fugitive slaves. The West was essential, too, for the preservation of America’s “primoeval simplicity.” The regenerative qualities of the frontier, he said, would serve as a counterpoise against the “luxury, dissipation, and corruption” likely to be endemic in the urbanizing, commercial East. Mostly, however, Washington portrayed the West as the “cement” of the Union, for he envisioned the transmontane region as a virtual colony of the North and the South, the lucrative bond that would make it worthwhile for the two very different sections to remain united.28
When Washington took office he sought to avoid the annihilation of the western Indians, both from humanitarian reasons and because he feared that rapid destruction of these people would open the West more quickly than he thought advisable. Washington believed that the United States should carefully control the flow of population onto the frontier. You “cannot stop the road,” he once told Congress, but you can “mark the way.” A West that grew too quickly, he feared, might go its own way, perhaps even separating from the United States. The West must be controlled and shaped, so that it would complement the interests of the existing states. Consequently, the Washington administration would keep western land prices at exorbitant levels, nearly fifteen times higher than they would be twenty years later. That policy would bind East and West, while it minimized the likelihood of a frontier war.29
In some respects Washington’s views toward the Native Americans were far ahead of those of his contemporaries. He had overcome much of his youthful prejudice, and now he could even envision the assimilation of the tribesmen into the society of the white settlers. As the frontiersmen slowly seeped into the West, Washington reasoned, the Native Americans’s hunting grounds would be destroyed. But this might be a gradual process, affording the Indians the opportunity to convert to Euro-American’s farming habits. He happily pledged federal assistance to aid the Indians in this conversion. If the Indians refused to acquiesce, there remained a simple and peaceful means by which the United States could obtain their lands. The Indian’s domain could be bought, he said, and it “can be had by purchase at less expense” than by the use of force.30
Events in the Northwest on the eve of Washington’s inauguration made it evident that urgent action was required of his administration. Recurrent clashes between settlers and Indians indicated that the frontier was tumbling quickly toward full-scale warfare. There was ample blame to spread about for this dismaying state of affairs. In part, said Washington, “incursions ... by certain banditti” among the Indians were responsible for the conflicts, a statement which signified that he believed only some tribes, perhaps even only some elements among the tribesmen, were to blame. Yet, if Washington reproached some Indians, he held the frontiersmen even more accountable. He spoke of the settlers “disorderly conduct,” and he acknowledged that the frontiersmen had crossed into Indian territory, “alienating their lands.” That, he charged, was the “main source of discontent and war.”31
Fearing that these border clashes might escalate until the frontier was everywhere ablaze, Washington acted quickly during his first year in office. It was at this point that he induced Congress to enlarge the regular army, and he additionally secured the legislators’ assent to authorize Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory, to mobilize fifteen hundred militiamen from Pennsylvania and Virginia. At the same time, Washington directed St. Clair to parley with the leaders of the Wabash and Illinois tribes.32
It was a muddled policy. The army’s chief mission was to restrain the frontiersmen, in Washington’s eyes the principal culprits in instigating the mayhem in the West. Yet, he made it clear that it was the behavior of the Indians that would determine whether the United States used force. If he concluded that the “security of the frontier inhabitants, the security of the troops, and the national dignity” were imperiled, his government would “be constrained to punish [the Indians] with severity.”33
Opposition to Washington’s policy was immediate. Some in Congress suspected that the president’s course was but a pretext for the fulfillment of the nationalists’ long-standing aim of establishing a permanent army. Others feared that the Washington administration, given an army to play with, would blunder into war. It had been wrong to create a department of war “when we were at peace,” complained Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania. “Give Knox his army,” Maclay now added, and “he . . . will have a war in less than six months.” New England objected for other reasons. Many in that section were notably un-enthusiastic about paying for a war to open a remote frontier. But Washington did not hear only from those who criticized his apparently truculent policies. Some frontier leaders, land speculators, and even some high army officers, carped at the administration for not taking forthright military action against the Indians.34
These critics did not have long to wait before the administration took a much tougher stance. In the spring of 1790 Washington concluded that St. Clair’s diplomatic endeavors had failed. By now the president was convinced that Great Britain was provoking and arming the Native Americans. Under such circumstances, he believed, it “will be in vain I fear to expect peace with the Indians.” Eschewing the essentially defensive policies it hitherto had pursued, the Washington government ordered an expedition into the troubled territory. However the Indians may have viewed the invasion, Washington saw the campaign as limited in scope. He sought to pacify the entire Northwest by authorizing a punitive expedition against the recalcitrant Native American “banditti” along the banks of the Maumee and the Wabash.35
Colonel Josiah Harmar, a brave commander but one with little experience in fighting Indians, and a man allegedly wont to nip too heavily at the brown jug, was selected to lead the frontier army. It was largely to be a militia operation, for Washington, fearing that the frontier soon might explode from the Lakes to the Southwest, doubted that he had time to raise and train a regular army. With fifteen hundred militiamen and about three hundred regulars under his command, therefore, Harmar debouched from near present-day Cincinnati into the Ohio wilderness.36
For three weeks the campaign appeared to be a replay of the Sullivan Expedition of 1779. The soldiers found nothing along the Maumee except deserted villages, which, together with stores of foodstuffs, were put to the torch. In mid-October, however, things began to go awry. First, a large unit of Kentucky train-bandsmen succeeded in walking into an ambush, which resulted in heavy losses. Two days later a similar fate befell Harmar’s regulars, and he was compelled to withdraw. The foray had resulted in the considerable destruction of Indian lives and property, yet, in return, the United States forfeited more than two hundred, killed and wounded, including the loss of nearly one in three men in its regular army. What is more, the expedition had failed to bring peace to the frontier.37
First of Men Page 64