His Excellency: George Washington (36 page)

But much like George III, Washington soon found that it was one thing to proclaim, and quite another to sustain. The Georgia legislature defied the proclamation by making a thoroughly corrupt bargain to sell more than fifteen million acres on its western border to speculators calling themselves the Yazoo Companies, thereby rendering the Treaty of New York a worthless piece of paper. In the northern district above the Ohio, no equivalent to McGillivray could be found, mostly because the Six Nations, which Washington could remember as a potent force in the region, had been virtually destroyed in the War of Independence and could no longer exercise hegemony over the Ohio Valley tribes.
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Washington was forced to approve a series of military expeditions into the Ohio Valley to put down uprisings by the Miami, Wyandot, and Shawnee, even though he believed that the chief culprits were white vigilante groups determined to provoke hostilities. The Indian side of the story, Washington complained, would never make it into the history books: “They, poor wretches, have no press thro’ which their grievances are related; and it is well known, that when one side only of a Story is heard, and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it, insensibly.” Worse still, the expedition commanded by Arthur St. Clair was virtually annihilated in the fall of 1791—reading St. Clair’s battle orders is like watching Custer prepare for the Little Big Horn—thereby creating white martyrs and provoking congressional cries for reprisals in what had become an escalating cycle of violence that defied Washington’s efforts at conciliation.
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Eventually Washington was forced to acknowledge that his vision of secure Indian sanctuaries could not be enforced. “I believe scarcely any thing short of a Chinese wall,” he lamented, “will restrain Land jobbers and the encroachment of settlers upon the Indian country.” Knox concurred, estimating that federal control on the frontier would require an arc of forts stretching from Lake Erie to the Gulf of Mexico and garrisoned by no fewer than fifty thousand troops. This was a logistical, economic, and political impossibility. Washington’s vision of peaceful coexistence also required that federal jurisdiction over the states as the ultimate guarantor of all treaties be recognized as supreme, which helps to explain why he was so passionate about the issue, but also why it could never happen. If a just accommodation with the Native American populations was the major preoccupation of his first term, it was also the singular failure.
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PARTIES AND PARTISANS

W
HAT WASHINGTON
had once imagined as a brief caretaker presidency lasting a year or two had, by 1792, grown into a judicious projection of executive power that was nearing the end of its designated term. He had performed his central mission flawlessly, providing invaluable legitimacy to the “more perfect union” that was still, in truth, a work in progress. He had demonstrated many of the same leadership skills in the political arena that he had previously displayed as commander in chief during the war. If victory then had meant preserving the Continental army by avoiding battles that risked its survival, he had fashioned a kind of Fabian presidency that sustained the credibility of the federal government by avoiding political battles (the court system and slavery, for instance) that threatened to push federal sovereignty further and faster than public opinion allowed. And just as he had once delegated control over the crucial military campaign in the south to Nathanael Greene, he had also delegated control over the crucial question of fiscal reform to Alexander Hamilton, who had performed just as brilliantly as Greene, while willingly absorbing the political criticism that would otherwise have been directed at Washington himself. The only major battle in which he had chosen to lead the charge personally, and lost, was the fight for federal jurisdiction over Indian affairs. But he did not regret that effort, which he continued to hope, perhaps like Brandywine or Germantown, would come to be regarded as a temporary setback on the longer road to ultimate victory. It was now time to resume his preferred role as Cincinnatus by declaring his heartfelt intention to retire at the end of his term.

In conversations with several members of his official family during the spring of 1792, he described his declining energy and appetite for the demanding work schedule, his advancing years, his resolute sense that now was the time to go. In May he called in Madison, reiterated his resolve, then asked Madison to draft “a Valedictory address” telling the American citizenry that he would not allow his name to be put forward as a candidate in the fall election. Madison protested the decision, as did all the members of the cabinet, but complied by preparing a three-page statement in the format of an open letter to the American people that was aimed for release to the newspapers the following September.
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That letter, of course, never appeared, and Washington went on to serve a second term. The immediate reason for his decision, reached with great reluctance, became obvious in several spirited conversations with Jefferson and Hamilton during succeeding months which exposed the widening chasm within his official family. Washington tried to treat the conflict as a fraternal spat between two of his surrogate sons. But the core of the disagreement, as Washington surely knew, went much deeper than that. Indeed, the only issue on which Jefferson and Hamilton could apparently agree was Washington’s indispensability. Beyond that, Jefferson accused Hamilton of plotting to commandeer the government after Washington’s departure, establishing his banker friends as a new American aristocracy and himself as king, emperor, or dictator, depending on Hamilton’s whim. For his part, Hamilton charged Jefferson with working behind the scenes to undermine the Hamiltonian fiscal program and subvert Washington’s policy of neutrality by aligning the United States with France, all part of a well-orchestrated Virginia conspiracy to capture the federal government for its slave-owning supporters.

The hatred between the two men had become palpable, mutual, and personal. It had, in fact, been simmering for over a year, and only the patriarchal dominance of Washington’s personality had prevented it from exploding earlier. While Hamilton managed to restrain his anger in consultations with Washington, the customarily serene Jefferson eventually lost his composure. He told Washington he could no longer allow his reputation “to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has not only received and given him bread, but heaped its honors upon his head.”
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Although no one knew it at the time—indeed no one yet possessed the vocabulary to talk or think about it sensibly—political parties were in the process of being born. The split between Jefferson and Hamilton was destined to foster the creation of the two-party system as a central feature in the American political universe. Though full-fledged parties, with national platforms, campaigns, and conventions, would not emerge until the 1830s, their embryonic origins first became visible during Washington’s presidency. Over time it would eventually become clear that a two-party system was a major contribution to modern political science; for by forcing the wide spectrum of political opinion into two camps, it institutionalized the ongoing dialogue into an organized format that routinized dissent. In retrospect, the two-party system has come to be regarded as one of the most significant and enduring legacies of the founding generation. But what is now seen as a great contribution was regarded by its creators as a great curse. And the man who did more to invent political parties expressed most memorably the loathing felt by all: “If I could not go to heaven but with a party,” declared Jefferson, “I would not go at all.”
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The seminal impulse for what was to become the Republican Party began in Virginia during the spring and summer of 1790. First, the lengthy debate in the House over slavery startled most Virginia planters, whose livelihood was switching from tobacco and wheat to the sale of their own excess slaves to the burgeoning cotton plantations of the Carolinas. The mere suggestion that the federal government could legislate slavery out of existence generated panic within the Tidewater elite who dominated Virginia politics. Second, Hamilton’s financial program, especially the Assumption Bill and National Bank, signaled the triumph of northern commerce—what Jefferson called “that speculating phalanx”—over southern agriculture and Virginia’s economic stature as the dominant state in the union. Accustomed to regarding themselves as the leading citizens of the new American republic—as Adams so nicely put it, in Virginia “all geese are swans”—Virginians began to have second thoughts about the constitutional settlement of 1787–88, as they witnessed the emergence of a federal government moving in a direction hostile to their economic interest and beyond their political control.

The key player in this unfolding drama, and the leader whose conversion to a Virginia-writ-large version of the nation best illustrated how the political templates were moving, was Madison. He led the fight in Congress against both federal jurisdiction over slavery and the entire Hamiltonian fiscal program. Jefferson soon joined him in mobilizing the opposition, claiming that he had been “duped by Hamilton” to support the Assumption Bill, “and of all the errors of my political life this has occasioned me the deepest regret.” What historians have dubbed “the great collaboration” began in earnest during the summer of 1791, when Jefferson and Madison made a so-called botanical tour up the Connecticut River to seek support in New England and New York for their agenda of opposition. Though both men were trusted members of Washington’s official family, and Jefferson a key officer of the cabinet, they launched an orchestrated attack on the administration they were officially serving. Jefferson hired Philip Freneau, a prominent poet and essayist, who wrote articles in the
National Gazette
castigating Washington’s policy of neutrality as a vile repudiation of America’s obligations to France. Madison wrote several anonymous essays for the same paper which gave a distinctive shape to the core arguments of what was beginning to be called the Republican Party.
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The resonant term was “consolidation.” Madison described the aggregation of power by the federal government as an ominous second coming on American soil of the British monster that the American Revolution had supposedly banished forever. All the familiar chords in the old revolutionary melody then played themselves out accordingly: the executive branch had become a royal court; northern bankers were “monocrats” and “stockjobbers” who enjoyed privileged access to power at court; Hamilton’s program was a homemade version of the Stamp Act; the federal government was an imperial power that treated the states as mere colonies. In effect, the money changers had taken over the American temple, and the original promise of the Revolution had fallen into enemy hands.
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The genius of this formulation was that it transformed a regional or sectional grievance rooted in economic interest into a patriotic rallying cry rooted in a rhetoric with all the hallowed echoes of 1776. Despite its rhetorical genius, Washington found it both flawed and fanciful: flawed because, unlike George III and Parliament, he had been duly elected, as had all the members of Congress; and fanciful because it confused a strong executive with monarchy, almost willfully so. When Jefferson expressed his personal conviction that Hamilton had monarchical intentions, Washington countered that “he did not believe that there were ten men in the United States whose opinions were worth attention who entertained such a thought”; and Hamilton, despite his impolitic remarks on that score at the Constitutional Convention, was not one of them.
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More basically, Washington was immune to the virulent antigovernment strain of revolutionary ideology that Jefferson and Madison were deploying because he had witnessed its consequences as commander in chief. The Continental army had nearly starved to death, and the war itself had been prolonged and nearly lost, all for lack of a viable central government empowered to raise money and troops. In Washington’s version of “the spirit of ’76” the key lesson was that independence required a fully empowered federal government, thus making his own election the proper culmination of America’s revolutionary experience. Indeed, as Washington saw it, if one wished to talk about a hostile takeover of the American Revolution, the chief culprits were those Virginians, most of whom had never fired a shot in anger during the war, who were now trying to rewrite history in order to preserve their fading status and provincial privileges.

Arguments about history aside, the fact remained that two of the most trusted and talented members of his inner circle were being described in the press as “the General and the Generalissimo” of the emerging opposition party. Jefferson’s continued presence in the cabinet struck several observers as the most glaring anomaly: “Beware,” wrote one anonymous Washington supporter. “Be upon your guard. You have cherished in your Bosom a Serpent, and he is now endeavoring to sting you to death. . . . His vanity makes him believe that he will certainly be your Successor. . . . Believe him not. He is a Hypocrite and is deceiving you.” But instead of regarding Jefferson as the serpent in the garden, Washington preferred to see him as the prodigal son who would eventually recognize the error of his ways and return to the bosom of the family. Washington’s confidence in both the correctness of his political vision and the strength of his dominating personal presence made him impervious to gossip about Jefferson’s duplicity. He continued to meet with Jefferson over breakfast to discuss recent dispatches from Paris or London. He continued to rely on advice from Madison and Jefferson about nettlesome details related to the construction of the city going up on the Potomac. The criticism of his policies that they were drafting or sponsoring in other quarters never came up, by mutual consent.
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