His Excellency: George Washington (38 page)

Finally, the greatest crisis of the Washington presidency was the debate over the Jay Treaty. It seems safe to say no treaty in American history generated so many diplomatic, constitutional, and political reverberations; and no treaty so unpopular in its own day proved so beneficial over the stretch of time. What Hamilton’s financial program was to the first term, the Jay Treaty was to the second, a projection of executive power that most infuriated Washington’s enemies. Unlike the Hamilton program, which bore only his signature, Washington’s distinctive mark on the Jay Treaty was conspicuously registered at every step of the lengthy and anguishing process. It was his most besieged and finest hour.
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Here is the essential background. By 1794 the prospects of war with Great Britain were approaching a crisis. In defiance of the Treaty of Paris, British troops had remained stationed on the northwestern frontier, justified as a strategic response to America’s refusal to compensate British creditors for pre-revolutionary debts. (Virginia’s planter class owed the bulk of the money.) Merely as a symbol, the British military presence suggested a hovering reminder that American victory in the War of Independence was still incomplete. More substantively, British troops were encouraging the Ohio tribes to defy Washington’s efforts at accommodation. The outbreak of war between Britain and France had escalated the tensions, in part because the sentiments of the American citizenry were decidedly pro-French, and in part because British cruisers were scooping up American merchant vessels in the Caribbean with impunity in an effort to block all trade with France.

In April 1794, Washington dispatched Chief Justice John Jay to London to negotiate a realistic bargain that would remove the British troops and redefine commercial relations with Britain in terms that avoided war. This last item was most crucial in Washington’s mind. Whatever unfinished business remained between the two former adversaries, Washington believed that America could not afford to risk war with the British army or navy for at least a generation, or, as he put it, “for about twenty years.” A war before then would be economically and militarily disastrous. It also had the potential to kill the infant nation in the cradle.
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These were sensible and farsighted goals (indeed, the War of 1812 arrived right on Washington’s schedule), but at the time the very thought of negotiating with the British was wildly unpopular. The selection of Jay also created a furor within the Virginia camp, because he was known to favor payment of the long-standing debts to British creditors that Virginians preferred to finesse. Madison denounced Jay’s selection as a diabolical choice, though he confidentially noticed a silver lining in this dark cloud; namely, Jay’s unpopularity was likely to rub off on Washington and render the impregnable hero suddenly vulnerable. Bache’s
Aurora
joined the chorus of criticism, going so far as to suggest that Jay had been chosen because sending the chief justice to London would make impeachment proceedings against Washington impossible. This was preposterous, to be sure, but also an accurate barometer of the fanatical atmosphere surrounding the issues at stake.
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The terms Jay was able to negotiate only made matters worse. On the positive side, the treaty required the removal of British troops from the frontier; and it committed the British to arbitrate American claims of compensation for cargoes confiscated by their navy. But otherwise the terms were decidedly unfavorable, accepting British economic and naval supremacy in language that gave American neutrality a British tilt. Critics could plausibly argue, and Jefferson did, that the treaty created a neocolonial status for the United States within the British Empire. Advocates might have responded that American merchants would be the chief beneficiaries of this arrangement, which only codified diplomatically what was already a fact commercially: trade with Great Britain was the lifeblood of the American economy. But this would only become clear later.

In any event, the Republican press had a field day as soon as the terms of the treaty were leaked to the
Aurora
and made public. Jay claimed he could have walked the entire eastern seaboard at night and had his way illuminated by protesters burning him in effigy. Adams later recalled that the presidential mansion in Philadelphia was “surrounded by innumerable multitudes, from day to day buzzing, demanding war against England, cursing Washington, and crying success to the French patriots and virtuous Republicans.” Washington believed that Jay had probably gotten the best terms possible; and while not all that he had hoped for, the treaty averted a popular but misguided war and preserved economic relations with America’s major trading partner. But he also conceded that “at present the cry against the Treaty is like that against a mad dog; and everyone, in a manner, seems engaged in running it down.”
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Should he sign it? Strategically, he thought the treaty was a sensible compromise with British power that bought precious time for America to mature toward its own destiny as a player on the world stage. Politically, his cabinet was divided, and letters were pouring in from around the country describing the treaty as a pact with the British satan. Though he was probably leaning toward a positive decision, what pushed him over the edge was a dramatic crisis in his cabinet that graphically exposed the conspiratorial mentality of the treaty’s opponents.

Edmund Randolph, who succeeded Jefferson as secretary of state, had opposed the treaty. In August 1795, Washington was shown confidential documents exposing Randolph’s off-the-record conversations with the outgoing French minister, Joseph Fauchet. Although it is unlikely that Randolph requested a bribe to assist the French cause, as some documents seemed to imply, the whole tenor of his remarks conveyed the impression that Washington was a dazed, over-the-hill patriarch, the dupe of scheming northern bankers and closet monarchists, who were plotting to capture the republic for their own sinister purposes. As Randolph described the executive branch, only his own patriotic influence within the cabinet offered any prospect of rescuing the presidency from ruin. This, in effect, was Jefferson-talk, the kind of overheated and melodramatic depiction of the purported evil lurking in Washington’s administration that passed for self-evident truths within Republican headquarters in Virginia. The conspiratorial mentality was so widespread within the Virginia camp that Randolph had lost all perspective on how conspiratorial it sounded to those denied the vision. Washington accepted Randolph’s resignation on the spot and signed the Jay Treaty the next day.
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But the story did not end there. Jefferson could not believe that a treaty so unpopular could ever become law, since it was, as he said, “really nothing more than a treaty of alliance between England and the Anglomen of this country against the legislature and people of the United States.” Though the Constitution nowhere specifically mentioned it, Jefferson persuaded himself that the “true meaning of the constitution” gave the House of Representatives sovereign power over all legislation, including treaties. Madison’s more oblique but cunning formulation was that the House, which had authority over all money bills, could sabotage the Jay Treaty by denying the funds necessary for its implementation.

The drama played out in the House in the spring of 1796. During the debate, Robert Livingston of New York requested that Washington hand over all documents related to the treaty, implying that full disclosure would reveal mischief behind the scenes. Washington rejected the request as “a dangerous precedent” that violated the separation of powers doctrine by extending congressional scrutiny into the executive branch. (He also inquired on what grounds the House claimed any role in approving treaties.) Undeterred, Madison pressed on as the floor leader in the debate, confident that he had the votes to carry the day regardless of constitutional niceties. As the votes began to melt away, Madison experienced firsthand the humiliation that befell anyone who went up against Washington in a political battle he was determined to win. The treaty passed by a slim majority (51–48) on the last day of April.
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As he surveyed the wreckage from Monticello, Jefferson tried to console Madison with the observation that Washington’s stature alone caused the defeat, for he was “the one man who outweighs them all in influence over all the people.” He quoted a famous line from Joseph Addison’s
Cato,
Washington’s favorite play, and applied it to Washington himself: “a curse on his virtues, they have undone his country.” In the Jeffersonian formulation, Washington remained a marvelously well intentioned but quasi-senile front man for a Federalist conspiracy, inadvertently lending his enormous credibility to the treacheries being hatched all around him.

For his part, Washington described the Republican campaign against the Jay Treaty as a blatantly partisan effort masquerading as a noble cause, one that somehow the Virginians had convinced themselves was in the national and not just their regional interest: “With respect to the motives wch. Have led to these measures, and wch. Have not only brought the Constitution to the brink of precipice, put the happiness and prosperity of the Country into imminent danger, I shall say nothing. Charity tells us they ought to be good; but suspicions say they must be bad. At present my tongue shall be quiet.” He confessed to Jay that the vicious personal attacks and willful misrepresentations that dominated the debate were ominous signs of a new kind of party politics for which he had no stomach: “These things, as you have supposed, fill my mind with much concern, and with serious anxiety. Indeed, the trouble and perplexities which they occasion, added to the weight of years which have passed over me, have worn away my mind more than my body; and renders ease and retirement indisputably necessary to both during the short time I have to stay here.”
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THE FAREWELL

T
HE DEBATE
over the Jay Treaty exposed the major fault line running through the entire revolutionary era. On one side stood those who wished America’s revolutionary energies to be harnessed to the larger purposes of nation building; on the other side stood those who interpreted that very process as a betrayal of the Revolution itself. Washington did not try to straddle that divide in the Jay Treaty debate, or delegate the front-line position in the battle to surrogates. Just as he had at Trenton and Princeton during the war, he took the lead. But what no British musket or cannon had been able to do on the military battlefield, the Republican press had managed to accomplish on the political one. Washington was wounded, struck in the spot he cared about most passionately, his reputation as the “singular figure” who embodied the meaning of the American Revolution in its most elevated and transcendent form. The partisan character of the debate over the Jay Treaty rendered all claims to transcendence obsolete. Washington could neither accept that fact nor ignore the wounds that this new form of politics had inflicted on him and on his legacy.

The personal attacks became even more savage in the summer of 1796. In response to the Jay Treaty, the French Directory had declared commercial war on American shipping, and one of the first prizes captured was an American cruiser coincidentally named the
Mount Vernon.
Editorials in the
Aurora,
taking a line that would have been regarded as treasonable in any later international conflict, saluted the French campaign on the high seas and chortled over the capture of a ship associated with Washington’s reputation. Bache subsequently launched a direct assault on Washington’s character by printing documents purporting to show that the president had accepted a bribe from the British early in the Revolutionary War, so that all along he had really been a British spy in the Benedict Arnold mode. This bizarre charge was based on British forgeries during the war, which had long ago been exposed as part of a British scheme to have Washington removed as commander in chief. Washington tried to laugh off the smear campaign, observing that Bache “has a celebrity in a certain way, for his calumnies are to be exceeded only by his impudence, and both stand unrivaled.” But in the supercharged atmosphere of the time, all political attacks, no matter how preposterous, enjoyed some claim on credibility. Washington spent several days assuring that the official record of the British forgeries was put on file in the archives of the State Department.
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Another painful wound that he felt personally was Jefferson’s betrayal. Even though Jefferson had been describing him in private correspondence as quasi-senile, Washington learned of these charges from secondhand sources whom he chose not to believe. And Jefferson had taken care to assure that his own fingerprints were never left on any public documents. Indeed, when he retired from the cabinet late in 1793, Washington made a point of saluting Jefferson’s integrity and the personal trust that remained intact despite the policy differences between them. At some level Washington knew full well that Jefferson was orchestrating the Republican campaign against his presidency. But at another level Jefferson remained one of his cherished surrogate sons, perhaps prodigal, surely misguided in his romantic attachments to France and to a Virginia-writ-large vision of the American republic, but cherished nonetheless. Both men desperately wished to preserve the semblance of mutual trust and friendship.

The break came in July 1796. Perhaps out of a sense of guilt, perhaps because he realized how thoroughly his duplicity had been exposed, Jefferson wrote to offer assurances that he had played no direct role in the recent press attacks on Washington’s character. Washington’s response was a masterful example of how one Virginia gentleman tells another that he has violated the unspoken code: “As you have mentioned the subject yourself, it would not be frank, candid, or friendly to conceal, that your conduct has been represented as derogatory from that opinion I had conceived you entertained to me.” He then proceeded to list the litany of libels in the
Aurora,
accusations that “could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter; or even to a common pick-pocket.” Then came the devastating clincher. Though everyone had been warning him about Jefferson, “my answer invariably has been that I had never discovered anything in the conduct of Mr. Jefferson to raise suspicions, in my mind, of his sincerity.” From that moment, Jefferson knew that Washington no longer trusted him. The two men exchanged a few more letters the following year, all safely focused on agrarian topics like their respective vetch crops. Then, when one of Jefferson’s more offensive private letters condemning Washington’s leadership was reprinted in the newspapers—Jefferson claimed it was not quite what he had said—all correspondence between Monticello and Mount Vernon ceased. Historians have always had a difficult time trying to pinpoint the moment when the party system displaced a government founded on trust and bipartisan assumptions. For Washington, this was it.
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