Washington: A Life (153 page)

 

 

AFTER LEAVING OFFICE, Washington made a futile attempt to distance himself from politics. Because the post office lay nine miles away, he collected his mail only thrice weekly, so the bags when they arrived bulged with political letters, gazettes, and pamphlets. Inevitably, the irascible President Adams suffered from comparison with the tactful Washington. “There never was perhaps a greater contrast between two characters than between those of the present president and his predecessor,” James Madison observed. “The one cool, considerate, and cautious, the other headlong and kindled into flame by every spark that lights on his passions.”
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For all his vast legislative experience, the temperamental Adams was a complete tyro as an executive. Much as Jefferson predicted, Adams immediately had to contend with multiple crises as France seized nearly three hundred neutral American vessels and the popular mood turned bellicose. It did not help matters that Vice President Jefferson, far from aiding the president, functioned as a staunch opponent.

With the country irrevocably divided into two hostile camps, Washington expected to have no further dealings with Jefferson, whose followers had so vilified him. Then an incident occurred that ensured that there would be no rapprochement between the two Virginians. Jefferson had befriended a Florentine named Philip Mazzei, who sold wine in London before moving to Virginia, where he hoped to introduce vineyards. After Mazzei returned to Europe, he exchanged letters with Jefferson, who tended to express himself much more colorfully on paper than in person. In April 1796 Jefferson sent Mazzei a scathing letter about the Washington administration: “The aspect of our politics has wonderfully changed since you left us. In place of that noble love of liberty and republican government which carried us triumphantly thro[ugh] the war,” a monarchical party had “sprung up whose avowed object is to draw over us the substance, as they have already done the forms, of the British government … It would give you a fever were I to name to you
the apostates
who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their head shaved by the harlot England.”
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Though Washington was not mentioned by name, he surely qualified as the Samson, if not the Solomon, in question.

In a notorious lapse of judgment, Mazzei printed this private letter in a Florentine newspaper. It was then translated and published in a French and then an English journal, finally cropping up in Noah Webster’s
Minerva
in New York in May 1797. Pretty soon the letter appeared everywhere, and Thomas Jefferson was startled when he read it on May 9. Usually unflappable, he was completely nonplussed. “Think for me on this occasion,” he pleaded with Madison, “and advise me what to do.”
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In private, Jefferson insisted that the translation had misrepresented his original communication and that the Samsons and Solomons referred to were the Society of the Cincinnati. As someone who liked to duck uncomfortable public clashes, Jefferson beat a hasty retreat into diplomatic silence. He told Madison that he could offer no public explanations of the letter because it would create “a personal difference between Gen[era]l Washington and myself ” and entangle him “with all those with whom his character is still popular, that is to say, nine-tenths of the people of the U.S.”
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The letter gave the world a peek into a very different Thomas Jefferson: not the political savant but the crafty, partisan operative marked by unrelenting zeal. While Washington refused to dignify the episode with a response, it is widely believed that the Mazzei letter ended all further communication between him and Jefferson. “I never saw him afterwards or these malignant insinuations should have been dissipated before his just judgment, as mist before the sun,” Jefferson later said.
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Whatever the case, both Jefferson and Madison had disappeared from Washington’s life with stunning finality. When Washington alluded to Jefferson in a letter the following year, he referred to him with patent disdain as “
that man
.”
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Hamilton took an even greater pounding in the Republican press. Back in 1792 James Monroe and other Republican legislators had gotten wind of a possible scandal involving Hamilton, who had made secret payments to a man named James Reynolds. Monroe and two other legislators had then confronted the treasury secretary and demanded to know whether he had colluded with Reynolds to profit from surreptitious trading in government securities. While admitting to the payments, Hamilton explained that they represented hush money to cover up an affair with Reynolds’s beautiful young wife, Maria. There the matter temporarily ended. Then in June 1797 James T. Callender, a scandal-mongering journalist in the Republican camp, published a pamphlet that accurately described the payments but mistakenly charged Hamilton with insider trading. To vindicate his integrity as a public official, Hamilton confessed to the adulterous affair in a ninety-five-page pamphlet; even his closest friends thought a delicately worded paragraph or two might have done the trick nicely.

Opinion differed among Federalists as to whether Hamilton’s political career would survive these damaging revelations. “Hamilton is fallen for the present,” David Cobb, a former aide to Washington, conceded to Henry Knox, “but if he fornicates with every female in the cities of New York and Philadelphia, he will rise again.”
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Many other Federalists and a gleeful majority of Republicans thought Hamilton’s self-inflicted wound would prove mortal. Although Washington could easily have avoided the incident with polite silence, Hamilton had stood loyally by him through many crises, and he must have felt that the time had come to reciprocate.

Washington forwarded to Hamilton one of the silver-plated wine coolers that Gouverneur Morris had sent to him from Europe early in his presidency. The accompanying note was potent in its simplicity. “My dear Sir,” it began. “Not for any intrinsic value the thing possesses, but as a token of my sincere regard and friendship for you and as a remembrancer of me, I pray you to accept a wine cooler for four bottles … I pray you to present my best wishes, in which Mrs. Washington joins me, to Mrs. Hamilton and the family, and that you would be persuaded that with every sentiment of the highest regard, I remain your sincere friend and affectionate h[onora]ble servant Go: Washington.”
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This succinct note is a marvelous example of Washington’s social finesse. He expressed solidarity with Hamilton without ever mentioning the scandal or referring to Hamilton’s misbehavior. Although Hamilton’s career survived, albeit in a diminished state, he began a long, tragic descent. He had achieved his most stellar feats under Washington’s benign auspices and seemed to lose his moral compass when he no longer operated under his direct guidance. For all his brilliance, Hamilton’s judgment was as erratic as Washington’s seemed unerring.

In terms of politics, Washington’s life would have anything but a placid final stage. In a rather grisly joke, Philip Freneau kept sending him issues of his new publication, the
Time Piece,
until Washington, annoyed, asked to have it discontinued. In the privacy of Mount Vernon, he no longer felt muzzled in expressing scorching political opinions. He was appalled by the French Directory’s treatment of three American commissioners sent to negotiate peace and by French depredations against American shipping. Fiercely opinionated, even strident, Washington was now avowedly partisan in private, fulminating against the Republicans as pawns of the French in their attempt to manipulate American politics. As he told Thomas Pinckney, time would show the difference between those “who are true Americans” and “those who are stimulating a foreign nation to unfriendly acts, repugnant to our rights and dignity.”
³⁶

For Washington, the one bright spot in an otherwise dark political picture was the release from prison that September of Lafayette, with the expectation that he would proceed to Holland or even America. At once Lafayette lavished Washington with high-flown prose reminiscent of old times: “With what eagerness and pleasure I would hasten to fly to Mount Vernon, there to pour out all the sentiments of affection, respect and gratitude … to you.”
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Now plump and hearty, his ebullient self restored, Lafayette had a touching vision of landing in Chesapeake Bay, rushing to see Washington at Mount Vernon, and buying a farm nearby.

With tensions running high over French policy, Washington had to send his protégé deflating news that he would not be well received in America. To counter French moves, Congress had already authorized a military expansion and the construction of more frigates. Lafayette, as a Frenchman, would be snubbed by Federalists and/or embraced by Republicans, and either way the situation would prove untenable. However ardently Lafayette defended the French Directory as having peaceful intentions toward the United States, Washington was having none of it, replying heatedly that the United States would not “suffer any nation under the sun … to trample upon their rights with impunity.”
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With his wife still ailing, Lafayette deferred his trip to America, spending the winter in Denmark. He was a man marooned by history, a tragic figure freed from prison only to emerge into a world in which he could find no fitting place. No longer accepted in his own country, he could not flee to America either and had to content himself with rehashing anecdotes about the American Revolution.

Even without the persistent tensions with France, Washington’s mood would have been morose. His crops had been damaged by drenching autumn rains; then a winter of unusual severity froze nearby creeks and left the Potomac congested with ice floes. If business was bad, politics was even worse. In Paris Talleyrand waited five months to meet with the three American commissioners and, when he did, complained about anti-French innuendos that, he claimed, had pervaded Washington’s farewell address. For a long time the American public was kept ignorant about the fate of this diplomatic mission. “Are our commissioners guillotined,” Washington wondered aloud to James McHenry, “or what else is the occasion of their silence?”
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In early March 1798 one of the commissioners, John Marshall, alerted Washington to the scandalous news that the French had tried to extort money from the American diplomats, in what would be billed as the XYZ Affair, named for the three nameless agents employed by Talleyrand to extract the payments.

When President Adams finally released dispatches from the envoys to France, the American public was outraged and none more so than Washington, who felt grimly vindicated. “What a scene of corruption and profligacy has these communications disclosed in the Directors of a people with whom the United States have endeavored to treat upon fair, just, and honorable ground!” he told one senator.
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Federalists profited from the disastrous turn in Republicans’ fortunes produced by the XYZ Affair. France claimed the right to seize and confiscate British cargo aboard American ships; Adams promptly pushed through measures to protect American shipping and strengthen coastal defenses. In late April he signed legislation creating the Navy Department and a month later approved a new army of more than ten thousand men, styled a provisional army to quiet fears of a standing army, which would be activated in the event of a French invasion. In July Congress authorized an additional force of twelve regiments to be organized at once. As the United States abrogated its former treaties with France, American naval vessels were permitted to open fire on any French ships threatening American merchant vessels. The Quasi-War—or what President Adams called “the half war with France”—was now officially under way.
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War fever gripped the country and, judging by Nelly Custis’s letters, infected Mount Vernon itself. Insisting that Americans must “extirpate the
demons
”—the French—Nelly gave her friend some humorous advice on preparations: “You must procure a black dress, the
fashion
of it we will settle hereafter. We shall have black helmets of morocco leather, ornamented with black bugles, and an immense plume of black feathers.”
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Martha Washington also reacted in shrill tones to events in Paris, decrying the arrogance and deception of the French Directory.

Whether to his dread or secret relief, Washington felt a powerful tide tugging him back into politics. On May 19 Hamilton sent him a provocative letter saying that the Jeffersonians were conspiring with the French to subvert the Constitution and convert America into “a province of France.”
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Hamilton recommended that Washington tour the southern states, “under some pretense of health,” to make speeches combating virulent pro-French feeling in the region.
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“You ought also to be aware, my dear sir,” Hamilton continued, pulling him into the political vortex, “that in the event of an open rupture with France, the public voice will again call you to command the armies of your country.”
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Cooling off Hamilton’s overheated rhetoric, Washington replied that he could not make a tour for health reasons because his health had never been finer. He also foresaw no immediate threat of war or “formidable invasion” of America by France.
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Still, if war came, Washington thought the public would prefer “a man more in his prime.”
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Then just as it looked as if Washington, aged sixty-six, might slam the door shut on his political career forever, he nudged it open a crack. In the event of war, he declared, “I should like, previously, to know who would be my coadjutors and whether you would be disposed to take an active part, if arms are to be resorted to.”
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This statement—that Washington would sally forth only if accompanied by Hamilton—was to be pregnant with the most extraordinary consequences. For all his sentimental talk about vegetating under his vine and fig tree, Washington was still passionate about politics and incensed by French behavior. As he had told Lafayette with fervor, after having fought the British for American freedom, he could not “remain an unconcerned spectator” as France tried to obliterate that freedom.
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As soon as Washington responded to his gambit, Hamilton quickly upped the stakes, telling Washington that if he served under him, he would expect to be “Inspector General with a command in the line.”
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Because Washington did not expect to take the field, the inspector general would function as acting commander, charged with safeguarding both Washington’s reputation and national security. In short order, a deal had been struck that Alexander Hamilton would be second in command to Washington—an understanding that was to have fateful consequences for President Adams.