The state authorities concurred with Randolph. Mifflin, joined by Pennsylvania’s attorney general and the chief justice of the state, expressed doubts about the conspiracy hypothesis, and they sought to convince Washington that the dissidents still could be dealt with through the courts.58
The judiciary it would be, but not as Mifflin had envisioned. Inspired by the memory of Shays’s Rebellion, Congress had passed the Militia Act of 1792, a statute that gave the president authority to summon a state militia for the purpose of repelling a foreign invader, enforcing federal law, or suppressing insurrections. All that was needed was a judicial writ certifying that all other avenues toward a peaceful resolution of the crisis had been exhausted. A friendly associate justice of the Supreme Court—one of Washington’s appointees, of course—happily signed the paperwork, though, despite the widespread opposition in the back-country, the administration-prepared document merely declared that Washington and Allegheny counties in western Pennsylvania were in a state of rebellion. With that act Washington had removed his two obstacles to the use of force. He not only had legal sanction to act, he had ingeniously discovered a means by which he could avoid alienating the Kentuckians whom Anthony Wayne might wish to recruit for soldiering. Washington simply had closed his eyes and pretended that the rebellion was confined to western Pennsylvania.59
Only one dissenting voice continued to be heard. Secretary Randolph persisted in his objection to the use of force. He urged the president to issue a proclamation and to appoint emissaries to treat with the frontiersmen. At first, it seemed that Washington was listening. On August 7 he published a statement. Whereas “combinations too powerful to be suppressed” by judicial means had acted in a “dangerous and criminal” manner, it was his intention, his Delphic utterance warned, to use force if the insurgents had not dispersed by September 1. He added, however, that he was sending three commissioners to treat with the protestors, agents empowered to offer amnesty in return for compliance with the whiskey tax.60
His accommodating public remarks notwithstanding, Washington must already have decided that the use of force would be unavoidable. He could hardly have expected his emissaries to meet with success, inasmuch as he believed—as he now said privately—that the democratic societies were behind the protest, and that their “diabolical leader,” Edmund Genêt, had “poison[ed] the minds” of the westerners. In addition, whereas he earlier had believed that the use of force might prove destructive to the new central government, he seemed now to have come to think that to fail to use force might be fatal. Hamilton, moreover, was convinced that his arguments at the August 2 cabinet meeting had proved decisive in winning Washington’s commitment to use force; privately, in fact, he even carped that since Washington planned to use force when the commissioners failed in their undertaking, it was both tawdry and unenterprising of the president not to have called up the militia when he issued his proclamation.61
The commissioners, therefore, must have been dispatched only for show, as a means of whipping up public support for the pending campaign of armed suppression. There can be little doubt that Washington feared that he might be unable to raise an adequate military force. As what amounted to the United States army still was on an even more remote frontier with Anthony Wayne, the force that would invade western Pennsylvania would have to be composed of volunteers and militiamen, men lured—or dragged—away from America’s farms and back-country settlements. It was entirely possible that America’s yeomen might have little stomach for killing their counterparts in the Pennsylvania outlands. Thus, the commissioners. And to supplement their endeavors Hamilton was turned loose to conduct a propaganda blitz in the press. He penned a series of essays under the sobriquet “Tully,” pieces in which he depicted the insurrection as a “dark conspiracy” hatched by the democratic societies, a plot whose aims included bringing the United States into the European war on the side of France.62
When the first pessimistic reports arrived from his emissaries in Pittsburgh, Washington acted quickly to use force. Before the commissioners even opened talks with the insurgent leaders, they reported that there seemed to be no prospect of enforcing the whiskey excise save by resorting to “the Physical strength of the Nation.” Within twenty-four hours of reading this gloomy assessment Washington invoked the Militia Act, and he turned to his old friend Henry Lee, now governor of Virginia, and asked him to mobilize his state’s trainband units. In the next few days Washington requested assistance from other states. The response was gratifying. The media campaign and the well-publicized reports of the commissioners did the job, as, undoubtedly, did the public’s carnival thirst for participating in a martial crusade. In fact, so many volunteers came forward that the government had to close its recruiting offices lest the army become bloated and unwieldy. Even so, Washington soon had more than twelve thousand men under arms, poised to suppress an insurrection of tax evaders presumably confined to just two frontier counties.63
Washington did not immediately order the army forward, however. He waited two additional weeks, until early September. On the 8th still more pessimistic reports arrived from the commissioners, and, once again, within twenty-four hours Washington acted. He ordered the army to proceed against the “refractory counties.”64
On September 30 Washington left the capital to assume command of the invasion army. He intended to ride at least as far as Carlisle, about half way to the war zone. Events thereafter would determine his conduct. On the first night of his journey a messenger bearing important news about the frontier caught up with the president at his resting stop in a German settlement called the Trappe, a few miles beyond Norristown. The tidings, however, were not about the Pennsylvania frontier. Anthony Wayne, the president learned, at last had encountered the Indians in the Northwest. At a battle in Ohio he had accomplished what Harmar and St. Clair had been unable to achieve: the Indians had been dealt a staggering defeat.65
Thirty months had elapsed since Wayne had been commissioned to resume the United States offensive in the Northwest Territory. Setting up headquarters at Pittsburgh he had recruited his Legion of the United States, as his force pompously was called, then with pitiless fervor he had sought to whip an army into shape, ordering three malefactors shot and others branded and flogged. Late in the spring of 1793 he finally marched into the Ohio Country, but he remained near present-day Cincinnati for nearly a year. Not until mid-year, 1794, about the time that Washington had begun to consider action against the foes of the whiskey excise, and roughly two months after John Jay had sailed for England, did General Wayne march down the Maumee into disputed territory. Six weeks later, just below the western tip of Lake Erie, his army of thirty-five hundred men clashed with an Indian force only one-seventh its size. The fight took place in what once had been a lush primeval forest, since reduced to a tangle of rubble and refuse by a tornado. The Battle of Fallen Timbers was over in less than an hour. Only fifty tribesmen perished, but Wayne was right to call his victory a “brilliant success,” for it had broken the will of these Indians to continue a long war of resistance. Less than a year later the survivors signed the Treaty of Greenville, which formally surrendered much of Ohio and Indiana to the United States. Thereafter, the number of Miami tribesmen shrank steadily, until within twenty years William Henry Harrison, the Northwest Territory’s first delegate to Congress, characterized this once grand people as “merely a poor drunken set.” A century later fewer than five hundred of the Miamis even existed.66
Buoyed by the “pleasing” (the term used in his diary entry by this undemonstrative president) tidings of Fallen Timbers, Washington set off the next morning for the Pennsylvania frontier. He paused at Carlisle, where the Pennsylvania troops were assembling. There he heard a Presbyterian minister “Preach a political Sermon, recommendatory of order & good government,” and for the first time in nearly a dozen years he helped organize an army. He also met with two emissaries from frontier settlements, men who had been deputed to tell him that the back of the
dissident force already had been broken. Washington was not swayed, and soon he again was on his way. At Cumberland, Maryland, he paused for three days, greeting General Henry Lee, who had arrived with the troops from Virginia, and sitting through an endless succession of dreary staff meetings. When the army broke camp and entered Pennsylvania, Washington rode at its head, but at Bedford he decided to go no further. With Congress about to assemble in Philadelphia, he concluded suddenly, he must return to the capital “to attend the Civil duties of my office.” With rather more dramatic effect than the situation merited, he left a “farewell address to the army” to be read to the soldiery, put General Lee in charge, and, on October 21, turned for the six-day ride back to the Delaware.67
Washington did not miss much in his absence from the army. Indeed, as Randolph had predicted, no army of “Whiskey Men” awaited the United States force, a realization that must have dawned on Washington as the army pushed further west. The greatest danger to the troops came from within the ranks of the army itself. For instance, while Governor Mifflin, the commander of the Pennsylvania forces, was reeling in an alcoholic stupor, the trainbandsmen of his state shot up the New Jersey militia; as usual, however, the most serious threat came from severe camp diseases, ailments that cropped up randomly to carry many men to a less-than-heroic grave. After Washington’s departure the army drove on to the Monongahela, stumbling through incessant autumn rains. In the end it rounded up several hundred farmers for interrogation, actually jailing about 160 luckless sodbusters. Of these, most ultimately were acquitted. Only twenty alleged insurgents were brought back to Philadelphia in shackles, there to be paraded for the curious citizenry to behold. And after all the hysteria just two of these unfortunates were convicted of high treason and sentenced to death. Washington pardoned both. It was well that he did. One of the convicts was thought to be an imbecile, the other to be mad.68
By then Washington knew that Randolph had been correct, that Hamilton had erred, regarding the existence of an organized western conspiracy “to sow the seeds of. . . revolution.” But to acknowledge his error was not the president’s way. Publicly, he never wavered from the line that the democratic societies had fomented rebellion, although he now claimed that they had “precipitated a crisis for which they were not prepared.” Nor did he waver from the notion that the army’s majestic incursion into the West was warranted, for its end had been to display the supremacy of the new national government.69
As the autumn splendor turned quickly to winter’s bleakness, the seasonal changes must have reminded Washington that his second term was hastening to its end. The years 1793 and 1794 had been difficult, filled with party strife, domestic turmoil, and international tension. Whatever the future brought, the president knew by Christmas that he would have to face it without Hamilton and Knox. Though these men had exhorted Washington to sacrifice in order to serve the public, each now had announced his own intention to resign early in 1795.
Nevertheless, as he entered these final years of his presidency Washington seemed more confident than ever. Save for the continued warfare in Europe, he reflected, conditions were good. Even the congressional session of 1794–95 was remarkably tranquil compared to some of its predecessors. Only if John Jay’s negotiations in London were unsuccessful was real trouble likely, he thought. On that subject, the president was holding his breath.70
18
Last Tears in Office
“Trouble and perplexities”
President Washington remained in the capital throughout the winter of 1794–95. He would not leave while Congress was in session, and, in fact, he did not seem to mind spending these cold, wet months in Philadelphia. Not only was this the slow season at Mount Vernon, but William Pearce, his estate manager, had established firm control of operations back home.
This was the slow season in the capital as well. The Federalist program was in place, and with their comfortable majority in the Senate they easily could keep their foes under control. The Democratic-Republicans controlled the House, yet while the effects of the Whiskey Rebellion still resonated they seemed inclined to remain mute. From his vantage point as presiding officer of the Senate, Vice President Adams marveled at the serenity within the halls of Congress. Senators “have no feelings this session; no passions; no animation in debate.” Was it the calm before the storm, he wondered?1
Whatever it was, after the tumult of the preceding twelve months, the president must have welcomed the lull. During these weeks Washington’s concern turned principally toward Spain. Hoping to reopen talks that might unsnarl the Mississippi River question, he appointed an “envoy extraordinary” to Madrid. Washington had decided on such a mission months before, though he had delayed filling the post until the time was right. During the summer of 1794 evidence mounted that Madrid was edging toward terminating its alliance with Great Britain and improving its relationship with the United States. More optimistic now, the president offered the post to Jefferson, then to Patrick Henry, and finally, after each had declined the offer, he named Thomas Pinckney the American minister to Britain.2
Filling the vacancies left by Hamilton and Knox was more difficult. Timothy Pickering, just back from a diplomatic assignment that had sent him into western New York to parley with the Six Nations, became the new secretary of war. A dozen years younger than the president, the son of a prosperous farmer-businessman in Salem, Massachusetts, Pickering’s name first had become familiar at the outbreak of war in 1775 when he published an Easy Plan of Discipline for a Militia, a manual of arms that immediately was widely read by drillmasters throughout America. Soon Pickering was bearing arms himself. He saw combat on the Brandywine in 1777, and subsequently he went on to sit on the Board of War and to serve as quartermaster general. Without a fortune or an alternate income, the federal bureaucracy became his livelihood. His administrative experience led to his appointment as postmaster general of the United States in 1791, then to his selection as perhaps the administration’s principal diplomat in talks with the Native Americans. His success in keeping the Six Nations neutral in 1794 earned him the secretary of war post. Tall, slender, shy and reserved, severe in appearance, and, in fact, appropriately dour, he was at least his own man and not a tool of Hamilton as his political foes later charged.3
That could not be said for the new treasury secretary, Oliver Wolcott, Jr. Also a New Englander, the Connecticut-born Wolcott had considerable experience in dealing with fiscal concerns. After serving briefly as the controller of his state, he had joined the new national government in 1789 as the auditor of the treasury. Two years later, at Hamilton’s suggestion, he became the United States controller, a post he still held when Washington named him—once again at the behest of Hamilton—to fill the vacant treasury post. Affable and gentle in appearance, cultivated and courteous in manner, Wolcott’s darker side included a penchant for scheming, a compelling urge to do whatever had to be done to get ahead—and to see that in the course of things the Federalists’ and Hamilton’s interests were served.4
Word from John Jay was the most important matter on Washington’s mind, however. Early in March 1795, a month after the appointment of Wolcott, the long-awaited packets from the faraway envoy finally arrived. Jay had negotiated a treaty of twenty-eight articles. He believed he had pried as many concessions from the British as could be extracted, he told Washington and Secretary of State Randolph in attached cover letters. “To do more was not possible,” was how he put it, adding that much was left unresolved but that, at least, “the door of conciliation is fairly and widely opened.” Jay, in fact, had probably obtained the best treaty that he was capable of getting. But that is not to say that another diplomat might not have done better. And Jay might have been capable of more had his feet not been cut from beneath him by American officials in Philadelphia.5
Jay had arrived in London in mid-1794, and he had initialed the pact in November, a relatively short space of time for two unfriendly nations to resolve their many crucial differences. Befo
re Jay landed, it now is known, Whitehall already had decided to make major concessions on the issue of the western posts. What else the British were ready to concede cannot now be known. But it is clear that when the talks commenced Britain was chagrined at the course its war with France was taking. Spain seemed on the verge of breaking its ties with Great Britain and concluding peace with France. Reports indicated that the temporary United States embargo had caused real problems in Britain’s Caribbean holdings. French armies had scored amazing victories in several theaters. Economic woes had descended on the British isles, and food shortages were being reported. And on the eve of Jay’s arrival came word that Sweden and Denmark were busy constructing a coalition for the protection of neutral countries. If a league of armed neutralists was instituted, trade between the French empire and the outside was certain to be augmented; if the United States participated in such an association, the clout of the neutral nations would only be enhanced.6
Faced with this increasingly gloomy situation the British set about aggressively courting the American envoy. British agents in New York and Philadelphia had notified Whitehall that Jay would purr like a kitten if his vanity were stroked, prompting the diplomat’s counterpart in the pending talks, William Wyndham Grenville, to wheedle and flatter the American. But other information in the hands of the ministry probably resulted in more damage to America’s aspirations. Back in the 1780s, while he was secretary of foreign affairs, Jay injudiciously had taken it upon himself to apprise the British consul in New York of his sympathies for Great Britain in its lingering disputes with the United States. Moreover, if Britain did not know how loath Jay had been to break with the parent state in 1776, its officials had not done their homework; indeed, as early as 1776 some contemporaries even suspected that Jay had passed along to London information on the secret undertakings of the Continental Congress.7
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