George Washington

by David O. Stewart

  Hamilton then dismantled Jefferson’s contention that a merely convenient measure is not necessary. It cannot be, he insisted, that legislation is permitted only when an enumerated power would otherwise be entirely “nugatory.” Very little legislation would ever be enacted under that standard. “Necessary” must mean “useful” or conducive to a public purpose. Thus, Hamilton continued, the national government might collect taxes without the bank, but the bank would make collection easier and more efficient; that was enough.

  Hamilton pointed to government actions already being performed that were not specified in the Constitution: building lighthouses to assist trade or creating a territorial government to manage the Northwest Territory (the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota). Neither was authorized by an enumerated power, yet no one dreamt of objecting to them as beyond Congress’s power. Indeed, the creation of territorial governments showed that Congress could erect corporations: in that instance, public corporations. Hamilton easily linked the bank legislation to enumerated congressional powers. The bank would facilitate tax collection and trade regulation by creating a medium for both. It would assist governmental borrowing by making loans. It would support national defense as a conduit for the payment of troops and suppliers.17

  Upon receiving Hamilton’s analysis, Washington had two days to make up his mind. He used all of it, signing the bill at the last minute on the afternoon of February 25. Hamilton had persuaded his audience of one, reassuring him that his inclination to support this government initiative would not violate the Constitution. Congress swiftly enacted the supplemental legislation affirming the boundaries of the new residence on the Potomac.18

  By their combined actions, Washington and Hamilton interred the argument that the Constitution granted Congress only those powers absolutely necessary to implement an enumerated power. The resulting doctrine of implied powers gave Washington the vigorous national government he wanted. And the bank itself was an immediate success. When its stock was offered for sale on the Fourth of July, it sold out in an hour. Northern legislators were delighted. In addition, Congress confirmed Washington’s choice of the Potomac location for the seat of government, which pleased Southerners. Once again, North and South each walked away with one win and one loss. Once again, only Washington got everything he wanted.19

  The bank episode, in particular, reflects characteristic elements of Washington’s leadership. Facing a momentous question, he consulted widely, not committing himself until he completed that process. And his decision was not based on a simple headcount among his advisers; all three Virginians had recommended a veto. Political expediency was not a controlling factor either. He had not sided with his fellow Southerners, nor had he worried that establishing the bank might make it more difficult to move the government to the Potomac. Rather, he adopted the argument that, in his view, led to the best government. As the First Congress receded into history, a New Englander proclaimed that “in no nation, by no legislature, was ever so much done in so short a period for the establishment of government, order, public credit, and general tranquility.”20

  * * *

  As soon as Congress adjourned in March, Washington turned to conducting the southern half of his national tour. He wanted to finish it before summer heat set in, so he left Philadelphia near the end of March.21

  He traveled first to Georgetown, where he met with commissioners of the future District of Columbia, negotiated with landowners, and reviewed surveys and designs for the new city. After a week at Mount Vernon, he set off with a larger entourage than he had taken to New England, including Major Jackson and eleven horses.22

  Compared to the New England journey, the distances in the South were greater, the roads worse, the settlements smaller and farther apart, and the accommodations often squalid. Choking dust from sandy roads tormented him until rain turned roads into bogs. He found no factories to tour, and many greetings were low-key. Tarborough, North Carolina, welcomed him, he recorded, with “as good a salute as could be given with one piece of artillery.” Crossing the Occoquan River, several carriage horses slipped off a ferry but the carriage did not.23

  The travel was not all misery. Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and Wilmington staged festive dinners and balls, allowing the president to record the women in attendance as elegant or respectable or well dressed and handsome. In his honor, some wore sashes or hats marked with eagles, or the legend “Welcome the Hero,” or the initials “G.W.” He reviewed abandoned British forts and battlefields of the war. At a Moravian settlement in Salem, North Carolina, he admired a system for piping fresh water directly into homes.24

  While still on the road, Washington received troubling news about his slaves at the president’s residence in Philadelphia. Attorney General Randolph’s slaves had asked about a Pennsylvania statute that granted freedom to enslaved persons who lived in Pennsylvania for six months. Randolph reported to one of Washington’s aides that Washington’s enslaved workers also knew of the statute, and warned that as many as nine of them might claim freedom. To stop them, Randolph suggested sending the slaves out of the state before they had stayed six months. With Washington’s approval, the aide implemented that dodge.25

  After almost two months of constant travel, Washington arrived at Mount Vernon and began meetings to plan the new seat of government. He pronounced himself pleased with his journey, having seen “with my own eyes the situation of the country.” The nation’s condition, he wrote, was improving and “tranquility reigns.” It was likely the high point of his feelings about his presidency.26

  * * *

  Less than a year later, nearing the end of his four-year term, Washington’s visceral instincts told him that it was time to leave office. The government was on a sound financial basis. No major upheavals threatened the country from within or without. His work, he hoped, was done. He was weary of his public responsibilities. For more than eight years during the war, then for four years as president, he had shouldered the psychic burden of being father to every American, the one person on whom everyone could depend to be wise and just. Even a consummate performer will tire of a role so demanding, one that saps his every internal resource, day in and day out.

  But the pleas poured in that he must serve another term, that no one else would do, that the union rested on his drooping shoulders. He pushed back, insisting to Madison that he was no longer necessary to the new government, and

  had from the beginning found himself deficient in many of the essential qualifications, owing to his inexperience in the forms of public business, his unfitness to judge of legal questions, and questions arising out of the Constitution.

  Washington also feared he was growing “more infirm and perhaps his faculties also” in a job that was “scarcely tolerable.”

  Moreover, the president knew that American politics were changing. He did not need opinion polls or focus groups to detect the shift. A new “spirit of party” was abroad, dividing Jefferson and Hamilton and prompting ever more personal attacks. Soon, he predicted, those attacks would turn on him; he had no wish to endure that.

  Madison responded that those trends made Washington all the more indispensable. Only he could mediate the emerging divisions.27 Unpersuaded, Washington asked Madison to draft an announcement that he would not accept reelection. But he never released that statement. Yielding to the entreaties of colleagues and friends, he agreed to serve another term.

  It was a decision Washington would regret. His exquisite sense of timing had told him that a second term would be grueling. The semi-Olympian place he occupied in American life could not be sustained indefinitely. The country was changing in ways that Washington had prompted by leading a successful revolution that established a republican government. The more democratic America would have a more bruising political style.

  Washington had matured in a political culture built on consensus within a small e
lite. He had operated brilliantly within that culture in the House of Burgesses, at the Continental Congress, through his army leadership, at the Constitutional Convention, and in the first two years of his presidency. But that culture was dissolving under the weight of broader popular engagement in politics, regional rivalries, western expansion, and bursting economic vitality. Washington was becoming—though had not yet become—an anachronism. The increasingly contentious political climate would make his second presidential term a sore trial, but he would still find ways to apply his unique political skills to the nation’s most pressing problems and make a contribution that, as Madison had insisted, no one else could.

  The election of 1792 brought no surprises. Washington won all 132 electoral votes. It was the fourth momentous election that he had won unanimously.

  PEACE

  Chapter 46

  Second-Term Blues

  On March 4, 1793, Washington walked the single block from his residence to Congress Hall, where he was to deliver his second inaugural address in the Senate chamber on the second floor. It was the shortest, most ornery inaugural address ever. Its four sentences contained a scant 135 words. Washington acknowledged the honor of his selection as president. He observed that he could be impeached if he “in any instance violated willingly or knowingly” his oath of office. He sat down. No soaring rhetoric. No calls to action or celebration of achievements. Merely an acknowledgment that although he was taking the job, he would be subject to criticism and removal. The speech seethed with resentment. It wasn’t quite civil.1

  Several factors underlay Washington’s sullen mood. He was feeling his age, admitting to a bad memory and difficulty recalling details. His body was betraying him. Even his noble horsemanship was declining. When his mount stumbled on a rocky stretch, Washington’s struggle to remain seated caused “such a wrench in my back as to prevent me from mounting a horse without pain.” Jefferson left a pitiless account of the aging Washington:

  The firm tone of mind, for which he had been remarkable, was beginning to relax; its energy was abated; a listlessness of labor, a desire for tranquility had crept on him, and a willingness to let others act, or even think, for him.2

  Management turnover at Mount Vernon exasperated the president. A few days before the second inauguration, his nephew and farm manager, George Augustine Washington, succumbed to tuberculosis, a hard loss that widowed Martha’s favorite niece. Mount Vernon’s next farm manager died of the same disease less than four months later, making the president frantic about lax affairs at his treasured home property.3

  Washington recruited another nephew to serve as interim manager, but the young man had little experience. Washington raged at the incompetence of his overseers, each of whom was responsible for one farm or a functional area like carpentry. With admirable alliteration, he denounced one as “sickly, slothful, and stupid.” To his lead carpenter, he erupted:

  To speak to you is of no more avail than to speak to a bird that is flying over one’s head . . . because you are lost to all sense of shame, and to every feeling that ought to govern an honest man.4

  The arrival of an able manager in early 1794 helped calm the president.5

  Washington tried to shed some of the worries that so oppressed him. He developed a plan to lease out Mount Vernon’s farms except one near the mansion house, so he could “live free from care, and as much at my ease as possible.” He circulated an advertisement offering to rent his farms to Europeans, who he thought were better farmers. That plan, never implemented, included a parallel notion of emancipating the slaves he owned. He tried again to sell his western lands. Owning faraway acres, he wrote, had proved “more productive of plague than profit.” But there still were no buyers at his prices.6

  Having set salutary precedents in his first term as president, Washington would endure some unhappy ones in the second, beginning with America’s first experience with divided government. In the 1792 elections, the republican interest led by James Madison, Washington’s old confidant, won control of the House of Representatives. That left Federalists in control of the Senate, Republicans ruling the House, and a president who denied being either.

  Worse yet, Washington’s cabinet simmered with conflict. Treasury Secretary Hamilton and War Secretary Knox usually agreed. When Jefferson differed with them, Attorney General Randolph became the deciding vote, a power Randolph often used to search for middle ground. Jefferson contemptuously called Randolph’s approach a “half-way system between wrong and right.”7

  For Washington, aiming to be nonpartisan, the cabinet disagreements provided the range of views he wanted and showed the country that he consulted with all factions. The naturally combative Hamilton was mostly untroubled by conflict in the cabinet, but confrontation was torture for the secretary of state, who felt besieged. Even though Washington often followed Jefferson’s advice, his fellow Virginian complained that Hamilton’s influence threatened to “swallow up the whole executive powers.”8

  The president valued both men. Hamilton’s brilliance was unmistakable even if his tact was wanting, while Jefferson brought acute political perceptions and a deft hand with diplomatic relations. But both were restless. Through persuasion, Washington kept Jefferson in office until the end of 1793. Hamilton remained for thirteen months longer; his departure would leave the president with a cabinet of bench players who commanded little respect.9

  Washington also had to deal with important state governments that were not inclined to support him. Pennsylvania, home of the federal government, was led by Governor Thomas Mifflin, that resilient figure from the Conway Cabal. Shrewd and charming, Mifflin had become a sort of karmic hair shirt for Washington, always closer at hand than desired. New York’s governor, George Clinton, was a personal friend but had opposed the Constitution and preferred a weak central government. In the 1792 election for president, many Republicans backed Clinton for vice president. The New Yorker won fifty electoral votes, finishing a respectable second to John Adams’s seventy-seven.10

  And then there was Virginia, where many now opposed Washington’s administration. The ideals that animated the Revolution had fostered a more popular style of politics. The near-worship of Washington was fading. Some were uncomfortable with his resemblance to a sovereign; the whiff of aristocracy clung to him. In the summer of 1793, a Republican-sponsored newspaper proclaimed that “suspicions are entertained that you have, indignantly, cast behind you those endearing principles of republicanism.” Washington feared that even ill-founded criticism could change minds, much as “drops of water will impress (in time) the hardest marble.”11

  In this shifting environment, Washington’s second term was beset repeatedly with the most central questions of statecraft: Should there be war or peace, and at what price? President Washington always chose peace, yet events assumed such a sour aspect by late July 1795 that he confessed that he had never seen a crisis “from which more is to be apprehended.”12

  * * *

  The foreign threats grew from conflict between revolutionary France and its monarchical neighbors, a conflict that came to divide Americans. In the early days of the French Revolution, most Americans embraced it as an affirmation of their own rebellion. But as France descended into bloody class warfare, American attitudes divided along existing political fault lines.

  That division might be portrayed as a conflict between heart and head. For Jefferson and Republicans, who mistrusted central government, France commanded sympathy as a sister republic and the ally who helped defeat Britain. For Washington and Federalists, who emphasized prosperity built on British trade and tariff revenues, French tumult looked like mob rule, nearly antithetical to careful American constitutionalism. With no navy and a puny army, Washington extolled the benefits of peace. He knew the terrible cost of war. If Americans, he wrote, cultivated “the great advantages which nature & circumstances have placed within our reach—many years will not revolve befo
re we may be ranked not only among the most respectable, but among the happiest people on this globe.”13

  Internal threats to peace came from the west. Migration to the frontier boomed after the Revolutionary War, producing the new state of Kentucky and scores of backcountry settlements from upstate New York to Georgia. But settlement brought conflicts with Indians, most often initiated by whites, who expected the government to back them up. Two army expeditions against northwestern Indians had ended in ignominious defeats. Shortly after his second inauguration, Washington began planning for treaty talks with the Iroquois while General Anthony Wayne drilled a new force to confront tribes in the Northwest Territory.14

  Westerners had economic grievances too. Farmers wanted to send their crops down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to Caribbean markets, but the federal government had failed to persuade Spain to open the Mississippi to American goods. That left westerners to distill their grain into alcohol that could be carried over the mountains in jugs, but the national government had imposed an excise tax on whiskey. Thus, government inaction sealed off one economic strategy while government policy punished the other. Western anger built.

  To address these problems, Washington would have to emerge from behind the curtain that had often cloaked his political activity. To achieve peace, both foreign and domestic, he could not hoard his political capital. Even as he became enmeshed in the daily give-and-take of events, Washington remained the essential unifying figure in American political life, almost a national security blanket. A correspondent expressed the view that largely prevailed through his tumultuous last years in office: “That whenever you are removed, the federal union will be dissolved, the states will separate, and disorder succeed.”15 Achieving honorable peace and a successful retirement from office proved the greatest political challenges the aging president had faced, challenges he would confront with virtually no trusted advisers by his side. In this final chapter of his public career, no one could question that it was Washington alone, drawing on talents and skills mastered over a lifetime, who steered the nation’s course.