The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817
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Being the observed of all observers, as he had once wished to be, exacted a cost. During the war, he had worried that when peace arrived, because of the cares he’d borne and the suffering, folly, and evil he’d seen, “I may be incapable of . . . social enjoyments.”63 Now his august celebrity isolated him; the national icon he had made himself into and that the country needed—the grave and majestic role he had first yearned, and then consented, to play—obscured the man. His “presence generally chilled my young companions,” Martha’s granddaughter Nelly Custis wrote, “and his own near relatives feared to speak or laugh before him. This was occasioned by the awe and respect he inspired and not from his severity. When he entered a room where we were all mirth and in high conversation, all were instantly mute. He would sit a short time and then retire, quite provoked and disappointed, but they could not repress their feelings.”64 Martha summed up the couple’s situation most succinctly: “I think I am more like a state prisoner than anything else,” she wrote.65
HOWEVER IRKSOME the adulation, he preferred it to the criticism that grew louder and nastier with every year of his two terms. Though he proved brilliant at inventing the presidency, setting a standard of probity, wisdom, and dignity that still measures his successors—and though his eight years in office yielded success upon success—his everyday experience as chief executive seethed with partisan bitterness that poisoned cabinet meetings, spewed out from a press as foul as today’s most noxious blogs, and exasperated and baffled him. If he had expected something like the miraculous “spirit of amity” and “mutual deference and concession” he had seen at the Constitutional Convention, he got instead the suspicion, backbiting, and recrimination that seem the natural fertilizer of democratic politics, where interest jars with interest, worldview with worldview, and ambition with ambition.
Almost no success of the Washington administration went unpunished. The rumblings of opposition began as legislators considered the first part of Hamilton’s 1790–91 financial plan, directing the federal government to pay the outstanding war debts of the states to help establish the credit of government paper, a measure odious to paid-up states (as Chapter Seven explains). Congress, Washington fretted, debated the issue “with a warmth & intemperence; with prolixity & threats; which it is to be feared has lessened the dignity of that body”; and in their letters home, individual congressmen ascribed “the worst motives for the conduct of their opponants; . . . by which means jealousies & distrusts are spread most impolitickly, far & wide.”66 The bill passed, after Congressman James Madison agreed to drop his opposition in exchange for Hamilton’s promise to round up votes to move the national capital to Philadelphia for ten years before permanently housing it in a new federal city on the Potomac. But such rancor was to be a keynote of American politics.
When the next year Hamilton dropped the second shoe of his financial plan, a scheme for a national bank, the vituperation exploded. Madison objected, in an eloquent speech on the House floor in its new home in Philadelphia’s State House, that the Constitution gave Congress no power to charter a bank. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Washington reported to Hamilton, charged, more darkly, that the plan would empower “corrupt squadrons of paper dealers,” who would seduce the legislature into changing America’s republican government into a British-style monarchy. That Hamilton’s sole speech in the Constitutional Convention had suggested a president for life, elected by the propertied but subject to impeachment, gave grounds enough for Jefferson’s long-lived canard that Hamilton favored an elective monarchy.67
At first, Jefferson assumed that Washington’s support for the new financial system blindly followed Hamilton’s lead. “Unversed in financial projects and calculations and budgets, his approbation of them was bottomed on his confidence in the man,” the secretary of state judged.68 But just as Washington had contentedly looked on as the Constitutional Convention, under Madison’s guidance, gave form to the energetic government he had long envisioned, so he ardently backed Hamilton as the Treasury secretary conjured into being the modern financial structure that the president knew from hard Revolutionary War experience was the basis of national power and prosperity. After dutifully weighing the arguments on both sides, he signed the bank bill in February 1791. And almost overnight, he reported in July 1791, “Our public credit stands on that ground which three years ago would have been considered as a species of madness to have foretold.”69
SO WHILE JEFFERSON, Madison, and their “levelling party” lambasted Hamilton as an antirepublican “monocrat” and “Angloman,” they gradually included Washington in the indictment, pointing to his levees, his stiff bow, his coach and horses as damning evidence that justified their “continually sounding the alarm bell of aristocracy,” Washington complained.70 The charges shocked him. Shortly after Yorktown, when a colonel had written urging him to be king, he replied, “I must view with abhorrence, and reprehend with severety,” a thought that “seems big with the greatest mischiefs that can befall my Country.”71 His notes for his Inaugural Address include the assurance that, as “the Divine Providence hath not seen fit, that my blood should be transmitted or my name perpetuated by the endearing, though some times seducing channel of immediate offspring,” he had “no family to build in greatness upon my Country’s ruins”—though the line didn’t make the final cut.72 And when, early in his presidency, a Philadelphia silversmith had asked permission to place the Washington coat of arms over his door and bill himself as “Silversmith to the President,” like purveyors to British royalty, Washington refused the request as “very disagreeable.”73
Even so, to rehash the litany of condemnation tirelessly, Jefferson hired angry third-rate poet Philip Freneau as a state department translator, a no-show job to support him while he ran an administration-bashing newspaper, the National Gazette, launched in October 1791. Typically, on July 4, 1792, Freneau printed a Page One piece denouncing Hamilton’s financial system as a recipe for “changing a limited republican government into an unlimited hereditary one”—and, typically, he cheekily had three copies dumped at the door of Washington’s rented house. A week later, when Jefferson visited, he found Washington fuming. Nobody planned to turn America into a monarchy, he exploded, as Jefferson recorded in his diary. “He considered [Freneau’s] papers as attacking him directly,” Jefferson reported him as spluttering. “That in condemning the admn of the govmt they condemned him, for if they thought there were measures pursued contrary to his sentiment, they must conceive him too careless to attend to them or too stupid to understand them.”74
At first, Washington didn’t know that his secretary of state and his congressman friend orchestrated these blasts. All he knew was that he wanted to go home to Mount Vernon when his term ended, and he had even sent Madison a sketch of a farewell address in May 1792, asking him to flesh it out.75 Though Madison complied, he begged Washington to stay on for a second term, arguing, he recorded, “that in the great point of conciliating and uniting all parties under a Govt which had excited such violent controversies & divisions, it was well known that his services had been in a manner essential.”76 Jefferson repeated the plea a few days later. “North and south will hang together if they have you to hang on,” he urged.77
In time, the president realized that much of the partisan bitterness sprang from the war between his secretaries of state and Treasury, and in late August he tried to make peace between them. “How unfortunate, and how much it is to be regretted, . . . that internal dissentions should be harrowing and tearing our vitals,” he wrote Jefferson. If, “instead of laying our shoulders to the machine after measures are decided on, one pulls this way and another that, before the utility of the thing is fairly tried, it must inevitably be torn asunder—And, in my opinion the fairest prospect of happiness and prosperity that ever was presented to man, will be lost.” Could there not be, he pleaded, “liberal allowances—mutual forbearances—and temporising yieldings on all sides”? To Hamilton he wondered a few days later why “Men o
f abilities—zealous patriots—having the same general objects in view, and the same upright intentions to prosecute them, will not exercise more charity in deciding on the opinions, & actions of one another.” Otherwise, he lamented, “I do not see how the Reins of Government are to be managed.”78
The truth was, no one but he could manage them, his irresistibly vivacious friend Elizabeth Powel wrote him in November, urging him to a second term by appealing with spot-on insight to every value he held most dear. Having won his countrymen’s faith that he was “the only Man in America that dares to do right on all public Occasions,” because he was immune to the seductions of power or flattery, how could he think of leaving half done a momentous task crucial not only to his fellow citizens but to posterity? “[You] have frequently demonstrated that you possess an Empire over yourself. For Gods sake do not yield that Empire to a Love of Ease, Retirement, rural Pursuits, or a false Diffidence of Abilities which those that best know you so justly appreciate,” Powel wrote. “[C]onvince the World then that you are a practical Philosopher, and that your native Philanthropy has induced you to relinquish an Object so essential to your Happiness. . . . That you are not indifferent to the Plaudits of the World I must conclude when I believe that the love of honest Fame has and ever will be predominant in the best the noblest and most capable Natures. Nor is the Approbation of Mankind to be disregarded with Impunity even by you.”79
Those arguments carried the day. He stood for reelection and again won unanimously on December 5. In an ostentatious display of republican modesty, he rode alone in his coach to his March 4, 1793, inauguration, delivered a no-frills 135-word address, and left “as he had come,” the Pennsylvania Gazette reported, “without pomp or ceremony.”80 He dutifully soldiered on as one of the people’s “public servants; for in this light I consider myself, whilst I am in this office,” he wrote in July; “and, if they were to go further and call me their slave, (during this period) I would not dispute the point.”81
BUT BY THEN the French Revolution had sharpened America’s political acrimony to a razor edge, since the revolutionaries had guillotined Louis XVI in January 1793, just after Washington’s reelection. Jefferson, Madison, and their followers—who now called themselves Republicans, to signal support for the new order in France as well as opposition to American “monocrats”—embraced the upheaval enthusiastically. They intensified their criticism of the Washingtonian “Federalists” as crypto-royalists and aristocrats for their dislike of the French regicides and refusal to join France in the war it had declared on the European monarchies in April 1792. In turn, the Federalists came to view the Republicans as leveling fomenters of violence, mobocracy, and anarchy—Shays’s rebels on a geopolitical scale.
Right from the start, Washington foresaw with uncanny clarity the transatlantic horrors to come. In October 1789, only three months after the Paris mob stormed the Bastille, he wrote that “the revolution is of too great magnitude to be effected in so short a space, and with the loss of so little blood.”82 Six months after that, he wrote the Chevalier de la Luzerne, Versailles’ former minister to the United States, that “nobody can wish more sincerely for the prosperity of the French Nation than I do,” but he warned that the revolutionaries might be “making more haste than good speed, in their innovations. So much prudence, so much perseverance, so much disinterestedness & so much patriotism are necessary among the Leaders of a Nation, in order to promote the national felicity, that sometimes my fears nearly preponderate over my expectations.”83
His fears had a more personal aspect too. He worried about Lafayette. Dubbed “le Vassington français” for his American exploits, he had stepped forth as a key leader of the moderate, constitutional-monarchy stage of the revolution, writing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in August 1789, with editorial help from Jefferson, just then winding up his four years as American minister in Paris. A few days later, as commander of the Paris National Guard, the marquis ordered the razing of the Bastille shortly after its capture, sending the huge key to “that fortress of despotism” to “my adoptive father,” along with a sketch he made of the ruins, both of which still hang in Mount Vernon’s central hall.84 Washington thanked him for “the token of victory gained by Liberty over Despotism,” which brought the distant uprising to his hand in cold iron, but he emphasized that the revolution had many dangers to navigate before it could boast of success.85
A year later, as the revolution turned more radical, Washington wrote the marquis of his worry about his protégé’s safety and cautioned him against the Paris mob. “The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded,” he wrote. “Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for a time all public authority, and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible,” especially when “wicked and designing men, whose element is confusion,” agitate them.86 Another year on, shortly before the Paris Commune imprisoned the king and queen and abolished the monarchy, he again warned his young friend that “cool reason, which can alone establish a permanent and equal government, is as little to be expected in the tumults of popular commotion, as an attention to the liberties of the people is to be found in the dark Divan of a despotic tyrant.”87
Lafayette’s fate confirmed Washington’s fears: condemned as a counterrevolutionary traitor for his resistance to fanaticism, he fled France just before the September 1792 massacres—in which, among other outrages in its five-day murder spree of 1,500 innocents, the drunken Paris mob speared the Princesse de Lamballe for refusing to disavow the king and queen, ripped her beating heart from her chest, and ate it.88 Lafayette escaped only to be imprisoned in Austrian and Prussian dungeons for five years as a dangerous revolutionary. Washington shrank from sparking an international incident by demanding his release—or even welcoming his fourteen-year-old son into his household instead of fobbing him off on Hamilton for months before taking him in—but Gouverneur Morris’s quiet diplomacy in Paris managed to keep the marquise from following her mother, sister, and grandmother to the National Razor in the blood-drenched frenzy of 1793 and 1794.89
A JOLT OF French revolutionary anarchy galvanized America in April 1793 in the fiery-haired, flamingly radical person of Edmond Genêt, thirty, Paris’s militantly undiplomatic new ambassador, who had begun his foreign-service career as an eighteen-year-old language prodigy, while his father was the ancien régime foreign ministry’s chief clerk. As Genêt landed in Charleston and made his slow, incendiary way to Philadelphia to present his credentials to the president, Washington learned that France, which had declared war on Austria in April 1792 in order to export liberté, égalité, and fraternité at the barrel of a gun, had also declared war on Britain in February 1793. The murder of Louis XVI had annulled America’s 1778 treaty with royalist France, Washington judged, and the United States could only lose by getting embroiled in European wars. Moreover, he saw that Britain was and would stay America’s chief trading partner. Accordingly, he issued a neutrality proclamation on April 22, declaring that the United States, out of “duty and interest,” would “pursue a conduct friendly and impartial to the belligerent parties.”90
But the antiauthoritarian Genêt paid no respect to such reactionary nonsense as he traveled northward. Defying Washington’s edict, he commissioned American privateers to prey on British shipping, perhaps hoping to spark an Anglo-American war, whether Washington liked it or not. And he harangued huge crowds along his way, firing them up with revolutionary zeal, which over the next year blazed up in dozens of pro-French Democratic-Republican Societies—soon just “Democratic Societies”—whose members staged rallies and banquets, called each other “citizen” and “citizeness” in French revolutionary style, and wouldn’t shrink, Washington believed, from “plunging this country in the horrors of disastrous war.”91
Jefferson, Madison, and their Republicans didn’t like the neutrality proclamation any more than Genêt did. Freneau blasted Washington’s ingratitude in abandoning his Revolutionary War allies and
treating “with cold indifference the struggles of those very friends to support their own liberties against an host of despots.”92 Madison, after sneering at “degenerate citizens . . . who hate our republican government, and the French revolution,” as if the two sentiments were inseparable, went on to say that declaring neutrality is a legislative act like declaring war or ratifying a treaty, so for the executive to do such a thing is in theory “an absurdity—in practice a tyranny” (though late in life he apologized for his article’s “intemperance of party” and its “perverted view of Presidt Washington’s proclamation of neutrality”).93
Even Jefferson had second thoughts after an emboldened Genêt arrived in Philadelphia in mid-May and went from excess to excess. That month, a French privateer had brought a captured British brigantine, the Little Sarah, into Philadelphia, and Genêt, deaf to the secretary of state’s warning not to do so, had her fitted out as a fourteen-gun privateer and sent her to sea in July, renamed La Petite Démocrate and partly crewed by American sailors. He had threatened to appeal to the American people over the head of “le vieux Washington” to overturn the neutrality proclamation, and, true to his word, he stirred up angry mobs of armed French tars and Democratic Society zealots to picket the president’s house. “The town is one continuous scene of riot,” the British consul wrote. “Genet seems ready to raise the tricolor and proclaim himself proconsul.” Much later, John Adams reminded Jefferson of “the terrorism excited by Genet in 1793 when ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in government or compel it to declare war in favor of the French Revolution against England.”94