By then he was telling others that whatever he decided, he simply hoped for the best. At one level the president must have genuinely wished to relinquish power. That autumn word came of the death of his neighbor George Mason, and sad tidings persisted of George Augustine’s decline; by October, moreover, he knew that Whiting, his new estate manager, also had contracted tuberculosis. He may well have felt that life was too short to squander four more years away from home. But his inner needs seemed also to keep him in the limelight. As early as the beginning of July Hamilton discerned that Washington had softened his threat to resign, although by late autumn the president still had not cleared the personal obstacles that inhibited him from making a forthright announcement that he would accept a second term. In fact, he never made such a declaration. Yet privately he knew he would remain in power. Hamilton and Jefferson had continued to beseech him to stay on, and both promised to curtail their public feud; the treasury secretary, moreover, had reemployed the same argument that he had used successfully when encouraging Washington to accept the office in 1789, once again telling him that his retirement would result in the “greatest evil” to the nation, a circumstance that would be “critically hazardous to your own reputation.” In addition, in public rallies and speeches and newspaper essays the great and the small pleaded for his continued service. Finally, as in 1789, his failure to issue a firm disavowal was construed to mean that he was committed to a second term.76
Early in 1793 the Electoral College unanimously reelected Washington. By a margin of one and one-half to one Adams also was reelected. With that Washington at last agreed to remain in office, but only because he was “again called upon by the voice of my Country to execute the functions of its Chief Magistrate.”77 It was a statement of fact.
Two years earlier, when Washington received from Lafayette the key to the Bastille and the etching of its seizure, he had reacted to the events in France in a positive manner. Like most Americans—including even Hamilton, who confessed that he had not felt such a fire in his breast since the days of Lexington and Concord—Washington viewed the prospects of a republican revolution in France with optimism, seeing the movement there to adopt a constitution and to restrain the power of the monarchy as coinciding with his and his fellow Americans’ most cherished views. Of course, he had lamented the mob violence that occurred episodically in the streets of Paris, and he had warned Lafayette not to expect tranquility until “your Constitution is fixed, your government organized, and your representative Body renovated.” Nevertheless, until 1792 he had remained cheery about the French Revolution, a stance made all the more easy because his beloved Lafayette had played a crucial role in the early reform movement.78
While Washington was busy disclaiming any intention of accepting a second term, France, in April 1792, went to war with Austria and Prussia. The most radical Frenchmen favored war as the best means of exporting their revolution. The king also was happy, thinking France surely would be defeated, bringing an immediate end to the domestic upheaval. Lafayette and the moderates hoped it would unite the nation in a blaze of patriotism, simultaneously consuming the most radical zealots. Washington’s friend and the monarch guessed incorrectly. The war only further radicalized French politics. In the aftermath of what has been called the “Second French Revolution” in August 1792, Lafayette fell from power; subsequently he was imprisoned in Austria. Early in 1793 Louis XVI was guillotined, and France declared war on Great Britain.
From the moment he learned that France was at war, the president’s tone toward the revolution changed. He grew “gloomy,” and he found the path taken by the French to be “disagreeable.” News of the First Terror, the execution of nearly one thousand Parisians during the initial days of the “Second Revolution,” filled him with foreboding. As he turned his eyes toward his second term George Washington understood all that was at stake in the terrible struggle half a world away. Those who value the “happiness of mankind,” he wrote, are “watching the progress of things with the greatest solicitude, and consider the . . . [French Revolution] as fixing the fate of man.”79
17
The Second Term Begins
“Thrown . . . into the flame”
While Washington waited in dreary, wintry-wet Philadelphia for his second inaugural ceremony, dark clouds seemed to be gathering all about him. Some were personal. In mid-February a packet from the South brought the word that he had dreaded. Major George Augustine Washington was dead, a victim of tuberculosis. He had perished at Eltham on February 5. The news was not unexpected, but that made it no easier to abide. Only days before the president had written a long, last missive to his young nephew, an uncustomary letter for Washington in that he sought to be consoling. His feelings were uttered in a rather stilted manner, for with all that he had mastered in his sixty-one years, Washington had not learned to feel comfortable with expressions of tenderness. He reiterated his “sincere regard and friendship,” and he told his ailing friend that the ways of God could not be understood, should not be questioned. When the terrible final word came Washington received it stoically. It was God’s will.1
Washington’s formula for coping with such melancholy events was a good one, although it was of less service to him in dealing with the mountainous public woes he was about to confront. What the president had feared was about to occur. Once again stable Europe was spiraling out of control. Miraculously, Washington had gotten through an entire term without having had to pay more than passing heed to the affairs of that continent. To be sure, he had explored solutions to America’s long-standing differences with Britain and France. But the events in Europe, cataclysmic as they had been, had had but slight impact on the New World. There was little prospect that his second term could enjoy such a luxury.
With the arrival fifteen months earlier of Great Britain’s first minister to the United States, hope had grown for the imminent resolution of some of the divisive issues that separated Britain and America. Washington had been especially anxious to resolve the commercial problems between the two nations. Since 1783 Britain had permitted only America’s naval stores and its nonmanufactured goods to be sold in its ports; it also allowed American tobacco, naval stores, and certain comestibles and provisions to be sold in the British West Indies, but it stipulated that these goods must be carried only in British vessels. The administration wished to broaden the trade and to attain shipping rights for United States merchants, and it sought to codify these agreements in a formal treaty. After all, even with the restrictions the commerce was too important to be left to transitory British legislation or whim. Almost one-half of all American exports went to Great Britain, and nearly 90 percent of its taxable imports arrived from the former parent state.2 But if Washington saw the long-awaited arrival of an envoy from London as a harbinger of hope, he was doomed to disappointment.
George Washington at age fifty-eight, by Edward Savage (1790). Courtesy of the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Adams National Historic Site, Quincy, Massachusetts, U.S.A. Washington sat for Savage early in his presidency. The work might be compared with that by Joseph Wright, which was completed in the same year.
Martha Washington at age fifty-nine, by Edward Savage (1790). Courtesy of the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Adams National Historic Site, Quincy, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
George Hammond, at twenty-seven a very junior British diplomat, had arrived in October 1791. He immediately engaged in talks with the secretary of state and even sojourned with the president at Mount Vernon for a spell, mingling tours of the estate with social festivities and official discourse. All the talking bore no fruit. In reality, the negotiations were hopeless from the outset, for Hammond had been directed merely to play for time until the turbid affairs of Europe were more discernible.
Whitehall was only serious about bargaining on one matter. Britain, too, wanted peace on America’s frontiers, for with Europe ablaze it was not in a position to offer the Native Americans mu
ch help. Hammond, thus, was to seek a new boundary between Canada and the United States so that an Indian buffer state could be erected in the zone between the new and the original border. The Washington administration was not disposed to surrender even an inch of soil, however, and, since Hammond was powerless to talk seriously about anything else, the talks dragged on in session after wearying, meaningless session.3
Had Hammond been given any flexibility the result in all likelihood would have been no different. He barely had begun to talk with Jefferson before Alexander Hamilton sabotaged the secretary of state. Jefferson planned to take a tough stance, making it clear that if London did not relax its commercial restraints the United States not only would seek closer ties with France, it would reciprocate with embargoes against British commodities. The man charged with formulating American foreign policy never had a chance to test the power of his threat. Hamilton counseled the envoy to ignore Jefferson. The president, he said in effect, would never countenance such steps. Hammond promptly relayed the felicitous news across the Atlantic, and if Whitehall ever contemplated concessions in 1792 the envoy’s dispatches persuaded the Pitt ministry to sit tight.4
The treasury secretary’s meddling nearly backfired. As the year dragged on with no hope of a breakthrough in the talks with Hammond, Washington instructed Jefferson to seek closer relations with France. What might have resulted can only be guessed at, for France desired even closer ties, and in February 1793 it established a virtual free-trade policy with the United States. But that same month Revolutionary France declared war on Great Britain, Holland, and Spain. Now everything had changed.5
When Washington rode to the Senate chamber to once again take the oath of office, he was unaware of the thirty-day-old Anglo-French war. During the two or three weeks preceding the ceremony, disquieting communiqués had arrived from Gouverneur Morris, for the past twelve months the United States minister to France. Washington’s old friend had chronicled the growing mayhem in troubled France, and he had discussed the likelihood of a wider war. But definitive word was lacking. Thus, in his Second Inaugural Address (the briefest such speech ever delivered, a two-paragraph oration) the president ignored foreign policy concerns altogether. That is not to say that those concerns were not on his mind.6
Two things about the changing situation in Europe struck the president. Should Spain be caught up in the maelstrom, the United States might face both opportunities and dangers. A beleaguered Madrid might be more willing to concede America’s navigation rights on the Mississippi, and it also might surrender its claims to the disputed territory it occupied in the Southwest. On the other hand, Spain might tie these concessions to an agreement by the United States to help defend its New World colonies against French attack. The latter option was something Washington would not countenance, and he directed Jefferson to instruct the two United States commissioners in Madrid—a team appointed late in 1791 to open discussions with the Spanish government—not to consent to any such bargain.7
The other thing that Washington had thought through was the question of American involvement in the European war. He was convinced that “sense of our own interest” should be sufficient to keep the United States neutral in the event of a general European war. America’s participation could, at most, only minutely affect the course of such a war, whereas the risk of loss to the new nation was considerable. Contrarily, isolation from Europe’s woes would permit the United States to develop internally; not many years of peace would pass, he thought, before “we may be ranked not only among the most respectable, but among the happiest people on this Globe.”8
For the time being the government could only await official word of Europe’s true situation. That left Washington with little to do in Philadelphia. Congress had adjourned on March 2 and was not due back until December. Besides, George Augustine’s death had left him more eager than ever to return to Mount Vernon, for he feared that the loss of his trusted estate manager would “cause my private concerns to suffer very much.” Anthony Whiting, the major’s successor, was new and unproven, prompting Washington to average more than one letter each week to him over the past five months, each communiqué a long compendium of explicit directions. Make the “lazy” miller work at night as well as during the day, Washington ordered in a typical missive, while in another letter he instructed Whiting to hire a “White-man” for certain carpentry jobs, as “none of my Negro Carpenters are adequate to the framing” of buildings. Anxious to be with his new man and to personally direct the spring planting, Washington at last was free to travel shortly after the inaugural ceremony had been completed.9
Late in March he began the ride south. He did not get out of Philadelphia quite fast enough to escape troubling news. Just an hour or two before he departed a ship arrived bearing fresh rumors that France was at war with Britain and Spain. As he passed through Baltimore three days later he was handed a dispatch from the state department that contained still more reports to that effect. But they were only rumors, and he enjoyed nearly two weeks at home before the long-awaited tidings arrived. Typically, it was Hamilton, not the secretary of state, who first conveyed definitive word that the European conflagration had spread, that war had been declared after both Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been guillotined by the government of the French Republic. The following morning, just as dawn slanted over his green fields, the president set out for Philadelphia. Preceding him was a letter he had dispatched the previous day, a note directing Jefferson to devise a plan that would enable the United States to “maintain a strict neutrality.”10
To Washington’s way of thinking strict neutrality meant being truly impartial toward all belligerents. That was not what the concept meant in Europe, however, where “neutral” nations frequently did everything but declare war in order to help themselves or to assist their traditional friends. Moreover, when the president arrived in the capital he discovered that his version of neutrality was not what Hamilton and Jefferson had in mind either. The treasury secretary was the first to see Washington, visiting with him only an hour or so after he had alighted from his mud-spattered carriage. Neutrality was essential to America’s interests, he told Washington. It was so important, he went on, that the Franco-American Treaty of Alliance of 1778 should not be permitted to stand in its way. Hamilton’s advice was for the United States to refuse to recognize the new republican government in Paris, a ploy by which the treaty could be discontinued. In fact, he added, the alliance should not be applicable because France was responsible for launching an offensive war, and the United States was required to provide succor only if its ally was confronted by a defensive war.
Beneath Hamilton’s advice lay his unbridled desire to witness the consummation of an Anglo-American alliance. A commercial treaty was as close as he likely would come to the realization of his goal, yet a trade agreement was serviceable. It not only would augment American power but would secure peace with a great power possessed of the strength to do serious harm to the United States. Economically stronger, and on friendly terms with Britain, the United States then could initiate a diplomatic and, if necessary, even a military offensive against Spain’s southern and southwestern possessions. In Hamilton’s view this was the first step toward the new United States’ government’s appropriation of the North American continent. But all was jeopardized by the European war, for he feared that even the suspicion of American favoritism toward France would set Whitehall against the United States.
The following morning at a formal cabinet meeting Jefferson finally saw Washington and expressed his views on the matter. The outlook of the secretary of state was more in keeping with European notions of neutrality. Thinking of the accords with France, Jefferson proposed that the United States should seek the “broadest privileges of neutral nations.” Treaties, he said, were made between nations, not governments. Therefore, the French treaty could not be disposed of so simply as Hamilton had suggested. Besides, he went on, the pact’s very existence might be used as a lever to
pry concessions from London. But Jefferson, too, thought neutrality was in the best interests of his nation, though he counseled that a formal proclamation of neutrality might diminish the chances of wringing an accommodation from Britain. In any event, the secretary of state added, neutrality was for Congress to decide, for it fell within the scope of its war-making powers. When Jefferson concluded his remarks, Henry Knox, a “fool” in the eyes of the secretary of state, immediately sided with Hamilton; Randolph, however, seemed to vacillate indecisively.11
Three long, acrid meetings were required to iron out a policy, sessions in which the extent of the raw-edged differences that separated Hamilton and Jefferson became clear to Washington. At the final meeting, conducted early the following week, something that resembled a compromise was reached. Washington agreed to a Proclamation of Neutrality, a document couched in carefully contrived language so as to suggest that its purpose merely was to warn the American citizenry against acting in a partisan manner toward any belligerent nation. In fact, Hamilton pretty much got what he wished, for it now was clear that the administration would not honor its alliance with France, and that issue had been the real key to the quarrel.12
Washington harbored no illusions that the Proclamation of Neutrality could both preserve domestic tranquility and secure peace for the new nation. To his chagrin, he soon learned that he was correct. Not only did the statement unleash a firestorm of internal discord, within a few months the United States, neutral or not, seemed on the verge of blows with Great Britain.
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