But the best explanation for Washington’s continued support of the Federalist program is the simplest. He shared the outlook of the principal Federalists. He was a partisan. Behind the mask he was himself a Federalist. Scholars have been loath to accept such a view. The historian who most recently studied the early presidents and party warfare concluded that Washington was “a patriot leader,” not a partisan leader.64 By Washington’s definition of partisanship he was correct. Washington’s view had remained consistent with the utopian ideology of republicanism that had accompanied the onset of the Revolution. Since, in his view, the sole end of government was to attain the public good, he sought, as a public official, to subordinate his private interests to the greater good of the whole. And to a degree that is remarkable in American history he succeeded. But in a pluralistic society there inevitably was more than one definition of the public good, and when President Washington threw his support to one faction that enunciated one definition of what was best for the nation he had become a partisan.
Washington’s choice should not have come as a surprise. Nothing could have been more logical, or more consistent with his lifelong quest for cohesion than was his support for the programs offered by his treasury secretary. Hamilton’s schemes served as the last act in the movement initiated by the Federalists in 1786 to save the Revolution from what they believed imperiled it. His economic nostrums were to be the last remedy for the fragmenting taking place among the states, and as such Hamiltonianism appealed as much to Washington’s unconscious side as to his rational self. All his life Washington had displayed a need for something or someone to identify with, for a substitute personna to allay his fears about his own insubstantiality. Identification with the interests of his colony, or with those of Britain in the war with France in the 1750s offered such objects; to secure the recognition and blessing of older, powerful men, figures such as the Fairfaxes and Dinwiddie, Braddock and Shirley, was a second path to enhanced self-esteem. But as he grew older the maintenance and perfection of the new nation that he had helped to create—the “offspring of our choice,” as he put it—grew in importance. The Union had become an extension of his person. Its survival was equated with his survival. For it to be weak and dependent symbolized his weakness. For it to remain cohesive and to grow was tantamount to self-fulfillment. From the time Washington had sought to escape Ferry Farm by linking his fortune to the British barons on the Northern Neck in Virginia, his drive for omnipotence had been characterized by his perception of the most powerful figures as his ideal objects. Now he merely repeated what long since had become commonplace behavior. For Washington the Union was the “main Pillar in the Edifice of . . . real independence”; it was a “fortress against . . . internal and external enemies” and the “Palladium of your political safety and prosperity.” Strengthen that Union by implementing Hamiltonianism, he in effect said, and America not only would be independent but with independence “the period is not far off when we may defy” all foes, when no nation could afford to “lightly hazard” provocations to the United States. The opposite course promised only “dependence” and a “precarious” state. To him the choice was clear, for the independence he sought, that he always had sought, brought with it “tranquility . . . safety . . . prosperity . . . Liberty.”65
Nor is there any reason to believe that Washington misunderstood what Hamilton was about. The president supported his secretary’s program because it was compatible with his own viewpoint. Hamilton neither led Washington nor misled him. The two shared a common outlook, the frame of reference of the dominant class in the urban North.
Even as a young adult, planting had taken a backseat to other pursuits in Washington’s mind, and if in the beginning that was due to his modest prospects for success as a farmer, such a factor can not explain his willingness to abandon his plow in 1775 or in 1789. By the end of the War of Independence Washington not only had discovered satisfactions in the world apart from isolated Mount Vernon but had found readjustment to the quiet pace of a planter to be difficult. To be sure, Washington often expressed his love for the agrarian way of life. It was part of his culture, and there can be little doubt that he uttered the truth when he spoke of the joys of farming. But it would be a mistake to think of Washington merely as a farmer. He had run a large operation at Mount Vernon, a venture that included manufacturing, a fishing industry, and a far-flung trading network. In addition, his interests veered off both into the world of investment securities and into the board rooms of two large business firms. Moreover, it often is forgotten that Washington spent much of his life in urban centers well removed from the bucolic fields of Mount Vernon. He grew to find these entrepots exciting, so much so, in fact, that in many respects the Washington of the 1780s-90s was far more likely to evince the tastes of the sophisticated urban dweller than of the rural farmer. His manner had become more the disposition of modernism, of the emerging bourgeois magnate who would dominate the next century, than of the landed patriarch who had prevailed in his eighteenth-century colonial world. Like the mercantile lords of the urban milieu, he too was oriented toward the goods of this world, and in the city he discovered the place where he could best indulge his acquisitive inclinations. He emulated the gracious style of living enjoyed by the commercial elite. Their pursuits became his pursuits. He was drawn to the theater and to museums; he became an art collector of considerable magnitude; he enjoyed his carriage rides about the city; he even abandoned hunting, the grand pastime, the very badge, of the Virginia landed aristocracy. A man rich in experience and travel, Washington unconsciously had so come to identify with his urban friends and their environment that his rural predispositions had receded. Where Jefferson, another son of the countryside, found cities to be “great sores” of humanity inhabited by “panders of vice,” Washington, notably, left behind no such vitriolic appraisal of America’s centers of commerce. Indeed, first through his intensive efforts to make his Potomac canal dream a reality, then through his endless endeavor to establish the new federal capital near Alexandria, Washington worked tirelessly to erect a burgeoning urban center on the very doorstep of Mount Vernon.
The diary entries that Washington made on his 1789 trip to New England and his 1791 journey through the South implicitly reveal his partiality for the more commercial societies of the northern states. He seemed to find the South backward and underdeveloped, its farmers generally comfortable but not so prosperous as their counterparts to the north. The people in the North, he found, were more enterprising, and he even commented on their physical attractiveness. His enthusiasm for things scientific and mechanical led him to be absolutely engrossed by what he discovered in the North. Even the “great equality” in the distribution of wealth that he found in the North seemed to him a virtue related to their commercial and manufacturing society. Of everything that he observed on his southern tour, the city of Charleston most impressed him, and it, of course, was a bustling urban trading center whose people seemed to be “wealthy—Gay—& hospitable; appear happy & satisfied. . . .” Of everything that he observed on his trek through New England, nothing elicited a more negative comment than the supposed ignorance of that region’s farmers, folk that he portrayed as so stupid as to be incapable of providing accurate directions to a weary traveler.66
It was from these predispositions as well that Washington conceived Hamiltonianism to be the best course for the new nation to pursue. He equated the “abundant fruits of . . . plenty” with “a flourishing commerce.” Debt retirement fostered “the increasing reputation and credit of the Nation,” and it helped to augment “the progressive state of Agriculture, Manufactures, Commerce and Navigation.” The Bank restored “confidence in the Government.” Taken together these measures held the promise of strengthening the United States militarily, so that it might “convince the refractory” citizenry of the prowess of the new government while at the same time it could deal with the Native Americans and the European powers. No less important, the growing abundance that
was to be ushered in by these fiscal measures would elevate the “social happiness” of the American people.67
Both Jefferson and Hamilton envisioned the aggrandizement of the West, but Washington believed that Hamiltonianism offered the best hope for realizing that end. Only a strong, armed Union could open the West, Washington thought, and the treasury secretary’s program, he concluded, offered the means of most rapidly building the nation’s muscle. That alone, the president believed, could dash British and Spanish influence in the West, could induce the Native Americans to part with their lands, could open new frontiers. For Jefferson, moreover, the West was the key to forestalling America’s rapid industrialization and urbanization; an agrarian America, he thought, would preserve the uniqueness of the young nation, safeguarding it from a steadily encroaching Europeanization. Washington had a very different vision. For him the West loomed as a quasi-colony of the East, the means by which a province such as Virginia could diversify its economy and enjoy those fruits of civilization that Washington had witnessed in the North. Virginia would be a winner through the transformation, but the nation would win as well, for the deadly divisions that had rent the provinces since the initial anti-British boycott in 1774 soon would be submerged beneath the interests of an integrated, single-minded people.68
How the factions would act in 1792 depended on what George Washington did. In some states the two groups were coalescing into political parties, Federalists who supported the administration and an opposition faction that called itself “republican.” The appelation was deliberate. Reacting to the fears of monarchy aroused by Washington’s formal, aristocratic manner, use of the term “republican,” as historian Norman Risjord observed, amounted to “a choice of names that was a standing rebuke to the president.”69 The Republicans planned to contend for some state offices, and at the national level some in the opposition had begun a quiet, concerted campaign to dump Vice President Adams, seeking to replace him with Hamilton’s old rival, George Clinton of New York. But whether there would be a contested presidential election was up to Washington. The president remained tight-lipped about his intentions through the interminable first session of the Second Congress, a conclave that dragged from October 1791 into the next spring. As that session was winding down, however, he told each department head that he did not plan to serve a second term, and on May 5 he asked Madison’s counsel on the best means of making public his intention to retire. The two men talked at some length that afternoon, and again four days later.
Compelling reasons lay behind Washington’s talk of retirement. Two serious illnesses, as well as the recent reappearance of the tumor in his thigh, left him more concerned than ever about the time that he had left. He would be sixty-one at the end of his first term. He had lived longer than had most males in his family, and he knew that precious few years remained, a fact that may have made the tranquility of Mount Vernon more attractive than usual. Besides, he told Madison, what with the bitter division between Hamilton and Jefferson and the upsurge in journalistic vitriol toward his administration, he was anxious to lay aside his burdens before his reputation was sullied permanently. Yet, while Washington’s inclination was unmistakable, he was pursuing a familiar pattern, one of hesitating to continue in office until men begged and pleaded for his service. It was a ritual, possibly a virtual exorcising of the guilt that he bore for daring to seek power, a way of convincing himself that he acted not because he loved power but because public weal demanded it.
Madison sought to dissuade him from retirement. The divisions would only grow in his absence, the younger man argued. Moreover, there was no heir apparent. Jefferson had little following in the North. Adams and Jay were too widely suspected of pro-monarchical inclinations to have broad support. Hamilton was out of the question. The new nation needed Washington’s service for four more years, or it might not survive. If Washington was moved, he did not change his mind. He asked the young Virginian to prepare a draft of a formal farewell address.70
The day after their second conference Washington commenced a whirlwind trip to Mount Vernon (he was back in Philadelphia eighteen days after his departure), and six weeks later he journeyed home again. It was as though he already had begun to disassociate himself emotionally from the presidency, although problems at Mount Vernon also were responsible for both treks. In the spring, word arrived in Philadelphia that George Augustine Washington’s health had further deteriorated. The sojourn at Berkeley Springs had done little for the young man, and the doctors in Virginia now prescribed a total abstention from work. The president had witnessed all this once before, watching helplessly as Lawrence fought his forlorn battle with the same disease, occasionally seeming to rally or to hold his own before sinking ever more deeply into the deadly grasp of his adversary. Washington knew he had no choice but to replace his incapacitated nephew, and during his brief spring holiday at home he named Anthony Whiting as his plantation’s new manager. It was a logical selection. Whiting had come to work for Washington two years before as the overseer at one of Mount Vernon’s five farms, eventually moving up to take charge of all the agricultural operations at this vast Potomac estate. For at least nine months, moreover, he already had run the place, for George Augustine had been absent at the Springs, or resting with Fanny at Eltham, or just too ill to tend to his duties. Still, President Washington wanted to be there to talk to Whiting in person and to scrutinize his work.71
Washington departed on his second trip to Virginia in July, knowing that the journey afforded an opportunity to transact one item of public business as well. While on vacation he rode over to the new federal district to meet with the three commissioners and to select a design for the presidential residence. Much had changed in the year since he had ridden with L’Enfant through these thick woods along the Potomac. For one thing, L’Enfant was gone, the victim of his own obstinancy. Trouble first had arisen late in the previous year when the hot-tempered planner clashed with a local landowner who had endeavored to build a house too near one of the projected streets. Without a court order or other such amenities, the Frenchman simply had his workmen tear down the house. Jefferson was appalled. So was Washington, but so loath was he to lose the “en grande” visions of L’Enfant that he only gingerly rebuked him. Within a few weeks another problem, one even more troubling, had cropped up. L’Enfant refused to cooperate with the district commissioners, clashing with his superiors over financial considerations and the work schedule, clawing to secure control of every last detail involving the construction of the city. An exasperated Jefferson spoke bluntly to the voluble architect, in no uncertain terms making it clear that he would be dismissed if he could not work under the commission. Washington then sent out Tobias Lear to reason with his bullheaded engineer. L’Enfant refused to listen to reason or even to speak about the matter with Washington’s emissary. Insulted, the president fired L’Enfant in February 1792.72
Thus when Washington and the commissioners met that summer to look through the stack of designs that had been submitted for the president’s house, L’Enfant’s projected palace-country house was not considered. Jefferson anonymously entered two designs, one modeled on a Parisian style that he had admired while serving as a diplomat in France and one bearing a close resemblance to Andrea Palladio’s Villa Rotunda. However, Washington’s eye fastened on a plan offered by James Hoban, an Irish native who had been trained in Dublin and whose drawings were recommended by an influential Charleston, South Carolina, acquaintance of the president. Washington, leaning toward “the established rules which are laid down” by architects, particularly liked the fact that Hoban’s plan was patterned after plates published in English architectural manuals. The commission acquiesced in Washington’s recommendation, and orders to commence work on the White House soon were issued.73
If Washington made his trip to Mount Vernon hoping to escape public affairs, he failed. While Washington was in Virginia tending to the spring planting, Jefferson dispatched an extraordinary letter to his
president, one that combined a brutal philippic against Hamilton with an eloquent appeal for Washington to stay on in power. All his pent-up hatred and jealousy toward the treasury secretary poured out, and when he was finished he had accused his rival of nothing less than plotting to overthrow the government, supplanting it with an American monarchy. This would mean disunion, Jefferson wrote, and only Washington could prevent such a train of events. “North and South will hang together if they have you to hang on,” he contended, and he pleaded with Washington to serve at least a portion of another term. The secretary of state even dropped by Mount Vernon to reinforce his appeal, telling Washington that “there was no other person who would be thought anything more than the head of a party.” By 1794 or 1795, he went on, his followers would have built a majority in Congress. Then both republicanism and the Union could be safeguarded.74
The president waited nearly three months before replying, weighing the counsel of those who urged him to stay on, watching as the rival party newspapers bubbled and boiled throughout the summer, grieving at the “internal dissensions . . . tearing our vitals!” Late in August he composed nearly identical letters to Jefferson and Hamilton, ingenuous missives in which he never mentioned his intention of retiring, although both were heavy with the implication that he would refuse a second term if the bitter carping between the two men did not cease. Fight in private, he told them both, but once a decision was made abide by it, for if “one pulls this way and another that” the policy and ultimately the Union “must, inevitably, be torn asunder.” “And,” he went on, if the Union disintegrated “the fairest prospect of happiness and prosperity that ever was presented to man, will be lost, perhaps for ever!”75
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