His Excellency: George Washington (37 page)

The psychological minuet had its corollary on the other side. Whenever Washington unburdened himself in private conversations with Jefferson or Madison about his physical fatigue, his declining energy, his insatiable urge for retirement to Mount Vernon, they recorded their recollections of the conversation as evidence of his growing mental detachment from the duties of the office. In effect, they apparently convinced themselves, and left a written record of their conviction, that the aging patriarch was not really in charge or fully responsible for the policies going forward under the protection of his own name. The satanic presence and true power behind the scene was, they believed, Hamilton. This somewhat strained interpretation of Washington’s genuine fatigue had two huge advantages: at the personal level, it allowed Jefferson and Madison to argue that they were not betraying their venerable father figure, who simply did not know what was going on; at a public level, it allowed for a distinction between their criticism of the Washington administration and of Washington himself, thereby avoiding the politically insurmountable task of taking on the most beloved and respected hero of the age.
⁴⁸

Washington danced his own minuet throughout the summer of 1792, hoping against hope that it would carry him southward toward Mount Vernon. Ironically, it was Jefferson who most candidly informed him that the sectional tensions created by Virginia’s reaction to the Hamiltonian program rendered all such hopes superfluous. “North & South will hang together,” Jefferson warned, only “if they have you to hang on.” Though he himself planned to retire soon, Jefferson explained that Washington was not permitted the same luxury: “There is sometimes an eminence of character in which society have such peculiar claims as to control the predilection of the individual. . . . This seems to be your condition.” When Washington asked Tobias Lear to inquire discreetly about alternative candidates, Lear reported that “No other person is contemplated.”
⁴⁹

Even as late as November, with the election imminent, Washington apparently clung to the illusion that he still had a choice in the matter. At least he told the prominent Philadelphia socialite Elizabeth Willing Powel that a second term remained inconceivable to both him and Martha. Powel reiterated Jefferson’s warning about sectional tensions, noting that Washington’s departure would be used “as an Argument for dissolving the Union.” She then went on to offer perhaps the most psychologically astute diagnosis of Washington’s unique status by any of his contemporaries: “Be assured that a great Deal of the well earned Popularity you are now in Possession of will be torn from you by the Envious and Malignant should you follow the bent of your Inclinations. You know human Nature too well not to believe that you have Enemies. Merit & Virtue, when placed on an Eminence, will as certainly attract Envy as the Magnet does the Needle.” In short, his host of admirers included ambitious men whose admiration barely concealed their latent hatred of his greater greatness. As long as he retained power they would be afraid to show themselves. But they were lurking in the background, poised to ravage his reputation and render his retirement less serene than he envisioned.
⁵⁰

Washington took it all in and remained silent. Once again, he did not need to declare his candidacy. By keeping Madison’s draft of his “Valedictory address” in his drawer, his candidacy was presumed. Once again, the electoral vote was unanimous. His second inaugural address accurately expressed his mood. It was the briefest in presidential history, only two short paragraphs long, wholly devoid of content, respectful but regretful in tone.
⁵¹

UP AS A MARK

I
F WASHINGTON
originally approached his presidency as a mandatory sentence ironically imposed on him for good behavior, the second term began as pure purgatory. And before the year was out events seemed to be tumbling toward hell: on the southern frontier McGillivray’s stabilizing influence eroded under Spanish prodding and bribes, producing violent clashes with white settlers from Kentucky to Florida; the Six Nations tried but failed to exercise control over the Ohio tribes, whose leaders declared war on “any person of a white skin” entering what they called “our Island”; the French Revolution moved from “liberty, equality, and fraternity” to the guillotine, and Lafayette, fleeing the chaos, was captured and placed in an Austrian dungeon; farmers in western Pennsylvania staged mass protests against an excise tax on whiskey, claiming it was an updated version of the Stamp Act; a yellow fever epidemic broke out in Philadelphia, forcing the government to take up makeshift quarters in Germantown; and the battle within the cabinet between Jefferson and Hamilton escalated, ending only at the end of the year when Jefferson took his wounds and principles back home to Monticello and retirement.
⁵²

More personally, Washington’s favorite nephew, who was responsible for managing Mount Vernon, died of tuberculosis; a cancer-like growth appeared on Washington’s right cheek, requiring another debilitating surgery; finally, while Hamilton remained the chief villain in Republican editorials, the moratorium on Washington himself ended as both Freneau’s
National Gazette
and Benjamin Franklin Bache’s
Aurora
began targeting him as either a senile accomplice or a willing co-conspirator in the Hamiltonian plot to establish an American monarchy. Washington found the personal attacks “outrages on common decency,” but resolved to suffer in silence. “The arrows of malevolence,” he observed, “however barbed and well pointed, never can reach the most vulnerable part of me; though, while I am up as a mark, they will be continually aimed.” He would in fact be “up as a mark” for the remainder of his presidency.
⁵³

He would also be enveloped by foreign policy challenges and their domestic ramifications. The cataclysmic event that shaped his political agenda occurred in April 1793, when war broke out between Great Britain and revolutionary France. Washington immediately recognized the threatening implications of this resumption of a century-old conflict between the two contending powers of Europe, this time with France brandishing its revolutionary obligation to extend an “empire of liberty” around the globe. As soon as the news arrived, he convened the cabinet—Jefferson had yet to depart—and extracted their unanimous support for a policy of strict American neutrality, which was released to the world as an executive proclamation the following week. But what was intended to sound a clear and conclusive note turned out to be just the start of a cacophonous story.
⁵⁴

In a remarkably convenient sense, the interlacing strands of the story assumed a palpable shape in the recently arrived minister from France, Edmond Genet. Citizen Genet—the title a measure of France’s current intoxication with egalitarianism—arrived in America brimming over with assurance that there could be no such thing as neutrality when the cause of liberty was on the march. Several conversations with Jefferson confirmed his conviction that the spiritual bonds uniting the American with the French Revolution were more powerful than any presidential proclamation. A series of essays in the
National Gazette
reinforced this impression, arguing that the historic link between America and France, codified in the Franco-American Treaty of 1778, could not be repudiated by any executive decision. Genet then unburdened himself in a flurry of pronouncements that effectively doomed his mission: outfitting American privateers to oppose British control of the seas; scheming to send an expedition to seize control of New Orleans from Spain in the name of the Franco-American alliance; and most preposterously, announcing that he, Citizen Genet, spoke for the true interests of the American people, and urging Congress to override Washington’s proclamation at its next session.
⁵⁵

By then even Jefferson acknowledged privately that Genet, originally seen as an invaluable ally, had become an albatross for the Republican opposition. For his part, Washington confided to friends that no official rejection of Genet was necessary, since the man’s own suicidal instincts would suffice. But the Genet affair exposed for the first time that foreign policy had become inextricably entangled with partisan politics. Genet’s behavior was wildly irresponsible, but the cause of France was also wildly popular in 1793, producing mass demonstrations demanding war with Great Britain and activist organizations called Democratic Societies that modeled themselves on the old Sons of Liberty. These were powerful sentiments with resonant echoes of ’76 that the Republicans were determined to exploit, in part because it was good politics, in part because many Republicans, Jefferson for one, believed in them passionately.

Washington was absolutely certain—and history eventually proved him right—that America’s long-term interest was best served by steering a neutral course that avoided war with any of the European powers. He was also convinced that his Republican opponents were manipulating popular opinion toward France as a political weapon. “It is not the cause of France (nor, I believe, Liberty) which they regard,” he observed, “for, could they involve the Country in war (no matter with whom) and disgrace, they would be among the first and loudest of the clamourers against the expense and impolicy of the measure.” And yet, while determined to have his own realistic assessment of America’s interest prevail, the reigning romance of all things French gave the Republican press new ammunition to depict him as an arbitrary monarch rather than a farsighted leader. Perhaps to offset the charges, he made a point at the height of the Genet affair of questioning his own authority to convene Congress in Germantown because of the yellow fever epidemic. Such modest gestures went unnoticed in the
National Gazette
and
Aurora,
where Washington himself now replaced Hamilton as the central target.
⁵⁶

Another event had nostalgic implications, for it played out in the western counties of Pennsylvania where Washington’s military career had begun forty years earlier. The story had its origins in 1791, when Congress passed an excise tax on whiskey to help pay the debt created by Hamilton’s funding and assumption program. Protests against the tax by western grain farmers followed immediately, claiming that it fell disproportionately on distilleries making the whiskey that allowed them to transport their product to eastern markets. Despite Washington’s efforts to work through the courts to punish offenders, resistance to the tax was so widespread that collectors were forced to flee for their lives. The protest movement culminated in August 1794, when more than six thousand men gathered in Braddock’s Field outside Pittsburgh, very near the scene of the Monongahela massacre. They set up mock guillotines to register their solidarity with French revolutionaries, imbibed freely of their favorite liquid, then defied the federal government to come after them. “Should an attempt be made to suppress these people,” warned one witness, “I am afraid the question will not be, whether you will march to Pittsburgh, but whether they will march to Philadelphia.” The rebels saw themselves, as had the Shays’s rebels in Massachusetts nearly a decade earlier, as actors in a dramatic sequel to the resistance movement against arbitrary taxation.
⁵⁷

“I consider this insurrection as the first formidable fruit of the Democratic Societies,” Washington insisted, meaning that it was inspired more by the French than the American Revolution and was encouraged by Republican operatives in Pennsylvania. He had earlier described military action against the rebels as “a dernier resort,” but by September 1794 concluded that rebel intransigence left him no alternative, claiming that these “self-created societies”—he nearly spit out the words—represented a tyranny of the minority against the will of the majority, and that their only revolutionary principle was that “every man can cut and carve for himself.” Moreover, he decided to take personal command of the thirteen thousand troops raised by militia enlistments to crush the insurrection.
⁵⁸

This decision produced a scene that provides the most graphic and dramatic illustration of the two competing versions of what the American Revolution had come to mean in the 1790s. On one side stood the rebels, a defiant collection of aggrieved farmers emboldened by their conviction that the excise tax levied by Congress was every bit as illegitimate as the taxes levied by the British ministry. On the other side stood Washington and his federalized troops, an updated version of the Continental army, marching west to enforce the authority of the constitutionally elected government that claimed to represent all the American people. It was “the spirit of ’76” against “the spirit of ’87,” one historic embodiment of “the people” against another. And there was Washington, back in the saddle again as commander in chief, with former aide-de-camp Hamilton at his side, traveling on the old Forbes Road he had objected to so strenuously as a route in his earlier incarnation as a soldier. It also turned out to be the first and only time a sitting American president led troops in the field.

In truth, Washington only accompanied the army as far as Carlisle. By then it was clear that the bravado of the rebels had evaporated at the approach of such a formidable force. Hamilton led the army in what became a triumphant parade to Pittsburgh, obeying Washington’s orders to offer amnesty to all rebels who signed an oath to obey the laws of the federal government. Back in Philadelphia, Washington addressed Congress, justifying his military response on the grounds that “certain self-created societies” were in fact subversive organizations that threatened the survival of the national union. He was not disputing the right of aggrieved citizens to dissent, but he was insisting that dissent could not take the form of flagrant violation of federal authority. Congress overwhelmingly agreed, congratulating him on defending the Constitution. Only Madison struck a sour note in an uncharacteristically rambling speech that worried about the precedent this set. Down at Monticello, the recently retired Jefferson confided to Madison that the Republican cause had suffered a massive blow, but that Washington on horseback trumped anything they could muster in response. A close reading of Washington’s speech to Congress somewhat consoled him, wrote Jefferson, since the language resembled “shreds of stuff from Aesop’s fables and Tom Thumb,” which he interpreted as evidence that Hamilton composed it, so that the grand old man probably did not know what he was doing or saying.
⁵⁹