The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  In August, amid all this commotion, Secretary of War Henry Knox brought to a cabinet meeting a broadside by Freneau, describing King Washington being guillotined. The president—who, portraitist Gilbert Stuart judged from long study of his face, normally kept under iron control “the strongest and most ungovernable passions,” which, “had he been born in the forests,” would have made him “the fiercest man among the savage tribes”—exploded.95 He “got into one of those passions where he cannot command himself,” Jefferson recorded; “ran on much on the personal abuse which has been bestowed on him; defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government which was not done with the purest motives; . . . that by God he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation; that he had rather be on his farm than made emperor of the world; and yet here they were charging him with wanting to be a king.”96

  ALL THE PARTISAN strife had begun to change something within Washington. It drove him deeper into himself. Instead of caring so much about how others understood and praised his actions and motives, he began to realize that he was the best judge of his own worth. In September 1792, just after he had tried to make peace between Jefferson and Hamilton, he wrote one correspondent: “If nothing impeaching my honor, or honesty, is said, I care little for the rest. I have pursued one uniform course for three score years, and am happy in believing that the world have thought it a right one: of its being so, I am so well satisfied myself, that I shall not depart from it by turning either to the right or to the left, until I arrive at the end of my pilgrimage.”97 At the height of the Genêt Affair, he wrote his friend, Light-Horse Harry Lee, in a letter marked “Private,” that, while “diabolical” men have been heaping abuse upon him, “as it respects myself, I care not; for I have a consolation within, that no earthly efforts can deprive me of, and that is, that neither ambitious nor interested motives have influenced my conduct. The arrows of malevolence, therefore, can never reach the most vulnerable part of me; though, whilst I am up as a mark, they will be continually aimed.”98

  By the fall of 1795, as his seventh year in office neared its close, this inner transformation was complete: he liked fame, but he loved virtue more, and the change gave him a new sense of inner wholeness and freedom, an austere and bleakly lonely self-possession, far deeper than the reserve he had learned from his childhood etiquette book. “Next to a conscientious discharge of my public duties, to carry along with me the approbation of my Constituents, would be the highest gratification my mind is susceptible of; but the latter being subordinate, I cannot make the former yield to it,” he wrote Knox. If there existed a “standard of infallibility to political opinions,” he wrote, no one “would resort to it with more eagerness than myself, so long as I remain a servant of the public. But as I have found no better guide hitherto than upright intentions, and close investigation, I shall adhere to these maxims while I keep the watch; leaving it to those who will come after me to explore new ways, if they like; or think them better.”99

  Almost twenty years earlier, he had declared that “to stand well in the good opinion of my Countrymen constitutes my chiefest happiness.” Now he cared more about how he stood in his own opinion. Eliza Powel was right: he now possessed an empire over himself, in which he was an absolute monarch, in exact measure as he was, in his sovereign judgment, the public’s most faithful slave. The emulative, convivial world of Fielding and Smollett, the anxiety about reputation, the worry about how his motives would appear—all that was largely behind him. He had had his own inner revolution, and for him, at least, the eighteenth century was over.

  At the climax of the Genêt Affair, the French Revolution lurched leftward again; the Jacobin dictators recalled Citizen Genêt, doubtless to add him to Paris’s mountain of headless corpses—for being too moderate. With the help (strangely enough) of Hamilton, he won refuge in America. Jefferson, worn out, retired from the cabinet at the end of 1793. And for a moment, calm returned.

  TO AMERICA, that is; but not to France, where the Terror reached its fever pitch of bloodlust and furnished an object lesson in what a revolution should not be, but can easily become. Everything Washington feared came to pass, and more. Perhaps even he could not have imagined over two hundred victims guillotined weekly for two years; people tied naked in groups and drowned in slowly sinking barges; children buried alive; victims flayed and their skin made into gloves, by brutal urban mobs agitated by artful and designing men like Maximilien Robespierre—a fanatic without a scintilla of Washington’s disinterestedness, conciliation, or the prudence to know there is no “standard of infallibility to political opinions,” so that not even someone as convinced as he of the purity of his motives has a right to sweep away everything that exists, in order to remake the world and human nature according to his vision of what is rational and just, killing everyone who doesn’t want to be remade. “You have driven out the kings,” Robespierre demanded, “but have you driven out those vices that their fatal domination bred within you?”100 If not, off to the guillotine, in the spirit of “No man, no problem,” as Stalin later put it. Washington had said again and again that mob anarchy ends in tyranny: and here was proof positive—terror indeed.

  In the summer of 1794, all the volatile elements that for four years had spewed noxious vapors into American politics—Hamilton’s financial system, the French Revolution, Genêt and his Democratic Societies—exploded into an uprising in western Pennsylvania that, Washington believed, threatened the very existence of the social order, just like the Paris mob.101 To fund the government, Hamilton’s 1790 financial plan included a liquor excise, galling to western farmers, who made their corn and grain into whiskey that didn’t spoil and was cheap to ship to eastern markets. For two years, the government tried to explain, forbear, and accommodate local needs, Washington wrote—to no avail.102

  In July 1794, armed Pennsylvanians torched a revenue agent’s house and shot at a U.S. marshal trying to serve summonses on tax-dodging distillers, before forcing both officers to flee for their lives. Speakers whipped up a riotous mob of 6,000, one urging them to burn down Pittsburgh as God had incinerated Sodom, another recommending a Committee of Public Safety, just like Robespierre’s.103 French-style liberty poles sprang up, and talk ran high of condemning local officials to the guillotine. The leader of this so-called “Whiskey Rebellion”: the vice president of the local Democratic Society.104

  That did it for President Washington. These are “acts which . . . amount to treason, being overt acts of levying war against the United States,” he thundered in his proclamation sending the militia into western Pennsylvania in August.105 If “the laws are to be so trampled upon, with impunity, and a minority . . . is to dictate to the majority, there is an end put, at one stroke, to republican government,” he wrote; “and nothing but anarchy and confusion is to be expected thereafter; . . . until all Laws are prostrate, and every one (the strongest I presume) will carve for himself.”106 And who was to blame? “I consider this insurrection as the first formidable fruit of the Democratic Societies,” he told Harry Lee, “instituted by artful and designing members . . . primarily to sow the seeds of jealousy and distrust among the people, of the government, by destroying all confidence in the Administration of it.”107

  After a final warning to the rebels in late September, Washington, with Hamilton as chief of staff, sallied forth to Pennsylvania in October—in a coach, since the sixty-two-year-old had thrown his back out—to lead 13,000 militiamen to put down the rebellion. To negotiate a settlement, the frightened insurgents sent two emissaries, whom Washington told that only “unequivocal proofs of absolute submission” would avert bloodshed. The envoys’ evident anxiety satisfied him that the rebels had lost heart, so he turned back to Philadelphia, leaving Hamilton to mop up. The militiamen took 150 rebels prisoner, and a court sentenced two leaders to death, though Washington later pardoned them.108

  He did not pardon Madison, however. His dawning suspicion that his onetime confid
ant was mixed up with the Democratic Societies sharpened when Madison faulted him for blaming, in his November 1794 annual message to Congress, “certain self-created societies”—guess which—for having incited the Whiskey Rebels to “crimes, which reached the very existence of the social order.” Such reproach, Madison told Congress, was out of line in republican government, where “the censorial power is in the people over the government, and not in the government over the people.”109 Washington, figuring that even a president had freedom of speech, was offering an opinion, not instigating a witch hunt, and when Madison’s rebuke made his views about the Democratic Societies clear, Washington ended their friendship. A more decisive end to an era was Hamilton’s resignation as Treasury secretary in January 1795, though Washington asked his advice at times of tension until the end of his presidency, and beyond.

  IT WAS ONE THING for Washington to proclaim neutrality in the European war but quite another to make it stick. While a wealth of international law existed on such matters, it was more theory than fact. Countries fighting for their lives did what they thought they had to; and Britain, seeing America’s enthusiasm for Citizen Genêt’s antics, concluded that its former colony intended war and responded accordingly. To starve the French, British warships began seizing American vessels trading with France or French colonies, and kidnapping American seamen, claiming that they were British nationals subject to conscription into a shorthanded Royal Navy. Nor would the British vacate their forts in the American Northwest, as the treaty ending the Revolution required, and, claiming the territory around them as their own, they incited their Indian allies to commit “murders of helpless women and innocent children along our frontiers,” an outraged Washington wrote Chief Justice John Jay.110 Misreading American intentions, Washington’s plain words notwithstanding, London was doing everything it could to provoke a war it didn’t want.

  Angry as he was at Britain’s “open and daring” provocations, the president resolved to make one last try to head off a war he thought inevitable otherwise.111 He sent the chief justice, who had brilliantly negotiated the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolution, to London in April 1794 to see what he could do.

  This time, Jay’s hard bargaining (as the next chapter recounts) yielded seemingly meager results. In the Jay Treaty, signed in November, he got the British to give up their American forts, and he won compensation for seized U.S. ships and cargoes, couched in terms so diplomatic, though, that few could see how big a concession he’d wrested. In return, he promised that American courts would make U.S. debtors pay their British creditors. Debt-swamped southerners fumed, claiming that the Revolution had canceled what they owed to British merchants, and they further reviled Jay for not demanding payment for slaves that the redcoats had carried to freedom at the war’s end. But what, they grumbled, could you expect from a man who as foreign secretary in 1784 had horrified them and westerners alike for briefly considering a treaty with Spain that would give up America’s right to navigate the lower Mississippi for twenty-five years—a vital interest to southwestern pioneers—to gain trading rights benefiting northerners? Francophile Republicans also fumed. First Washington’s neutrality proclamation had shrugged off America’s treaty obligations to France, and now his envoy was making a treaty with perfidious Albion?

  The Senate ratified the pact by the slimmest possible margin in June 1795. For all its apparent modesty, though, the Jay Treaty, like the neutrality proclamation, achieved Washington’s goal of avoiding a ruinous war that America could lose. After all, the president wrote, explaining his rationale, it doesn’t take a prophet to know “that if this country can remain in peace 20 years longer: and I devoutly pray it may do so to the end of time; such in all probability will be its population, riches, and resources, when combined with its peculiarly happy and remote Situation from the other quarters of the globe, as to bid defiance, in a just cause, to any earthly power whatsoever.”112 That’s why his policy was “to be upon friendly terms with, but independent of, all the nations of the earth.”113

  As Washington’s ex-friend Madison led a rancorous Republican-dominated Congress in drawn-out fussing over the Jay Treaty, the president announced a further pact, signed in October 1795: the Treaty of San Lorenzo, which gained Spain’s agreement to let Americans navigate the lower Mississippi.114 Despite the best efforts of “designing men . . . to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views” and “to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other Districts,” Washington later summed up, this treaty gave westerners “a decisive proof how unfounded were the suspicions propagated among them of a policy of the General Government and in the Atlantic States unfriendly to their Interests in regard to the MISSISSIPPI.” John Jay wasn’t trying to harm any American’s interest in 1784 any more than he was in 1794.115

  Only later did Washington realize that Jefferson was chief among those “designing men” sowing strife, and in July 1796 he reproached his former secretary of state for “his insincerity,” which he had never before suspected, as he gently put it. But now, he said, “it would neither be frank, candid, or friendly to conceal” that he had heard that Jefferson had spoken ill of him; and the more he wrote, the more he worked himself up. He could hardly believe it possible, he said, “that, while I was using my utmost exertions to establish a national character of our own, independent . . . of every nation of the earth; and wished, by steering a steady course, to preserve this Country from the horrors of a desolating war, . . . that every act of my administration would be tortured, and the grossest, most insidious mis-representations of them be made, . . . and that too in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero; a notorious defaulter; or even to a common pick-pocket.”116 A year later, Washington wouldn’t refer to Jefferson by name but only as “that man.” They never spoke again.117

  BUT FOR ALL the rancor—irksome to him but mere static in the music of history—he had done what he set out to do. He had made the new government an established fact. Peace and prosperity reigned, thanks to the neutrality proclamation, the two foreign treaties, Hamilton’s financial system, and the people’s “industry,” “frugality,” and “spirit of commerce,” which he had fostered, not squelched. With the Mississippi open, settlers poured into the Southwest—into the new states of Kentucky and Tennesee, and even farther south toward New Orleans. Others thronged into the Ohio country once the British had left their northwestern forts and Anthony Wayne had crushed the Indians whom they had spurred to war. Youngstown, Cleveland, and Dayton sprang up. On the banks of the Potomac, a new national capital slowly rose, whose site Washington had chosen, and whose planner and chief architects he had hired. The city, he predicted, would someday be “though not as large as London, yet of a magnitude inferior to few others in Europe.”118 Fittingly, it bore his name.

  By the spring of 1796, he felt he had done his duty and could go home when his second term closed in March 1797, setting another precedent for (most) future presidents. “Before the curtain drops on my political life, . . . I expect for ever,” though, he had a few more lines he wanted to deliver, and in May he sent Hamilton a Farewell Address, asking him to edit it, so it could appear before “the public in an honest; unaffected; simple garb.”119 The result, published on September 19, 1796, ranks with the wisest of the Federalist Papers, even as it highlights democracy’s thorniest dilemma.

  The Address developed more fully the idea of a culture of liberty that Washington had thought key to animating the Constitution. Like Edmund Burke, he took for granted that men act partly by reason but more often by tradition, by loyalties built up over time, by beliefs that gain authority through age, by unexamined cultural assumptions that take on the power of passions, because they are feelings of the heart as much as they are thoughts. That’s why “time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of Governments, as of other human institutions,” he explained in the Address. “With me, a predominant motive has been to endeavour to gai
n time to our country to settle and mature its yet recent institutions,” and to settle the “habits of thinking” crucial to a free country as well.120

  In such a country, he noted, education was crucial, for when “a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”121 But still more important: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports,” Washington counseled, in language that could have come from Burke’s Reflections. “The mere politician, equally with the pious man ought to respect and to cherish them,” because, quite apart from the question of their truth, they are “the firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens.” Nor should anyone “indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion,” for the majority act morally because they believe that an all-seeing judge watches their acts and thoughts, and dispenses rewards and punishments accordingly. A moment’s reflection confirms religion’s social utility: “Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice?”122 If you’re an unbeliever, what’s to stop you from lying when you put your hand on the Bible and swear to tell the truth so help me God?

  As to what kind of religion could do the job, Washington was genially undoctrinaire. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights,” the president had written the worried Newport, Rhode Island, Jewish congregation in 1790. “For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” This is a land, he assured the “Children of the Stock of Abraham,” in his favorite image of security, where “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”123 Indeed, he liked the story of the Jews’ deliverance from Egyptian bondage to the land God had promised Abraham well enough to mention several times that America would be to “the poor, the needy, & oppressed of the Earth . . . the second Land of promise,” where they could “dwell in peace, fulfilling the first & great Commandment.”124