Soon after the Residency Act designating a Potomac location passed in July 1790, the previous suggestion of the newspaper editor (i.e., give the messy question to Washington) became fully operative. Jefferson feared that the Potomac site would be sabotaged if the endless management details for developing a city de novo were left to Congress. So he proposed a thoroughly imperial solution: bypass Congress altogether by making all subsequent decisions about architects, managers, and construction schedules an executive responsibility “subject to the President’s direction in every point.”30
And so they were. What became Washington, D.C., was aptly named, for while the project had many troops involved in its design and construction, it had only one supreme commander. He selected the specific site on the Potomac between Rock Creek and Goose Creek, rather deceptively pretending to prefer a more upstream location in order to hold down the purchase price for lots in the ultimate site. He appointed the commissioners, who reported directly to him rather than Congress. He chose Pierre L’Enfant as chief architect, personally endorsing L’Enfant’s plan for a huge tract encompassing nine and a half square miles, thereby rejecting Jefferson’s preference for a small village that would gradually expand in favor of a massive area that would gradually fill up. When L’Enfant’s grandiose vision led to equivalently grandiose demands—he refused to take orders from the commissioners and responded to one stubborn owner of a key lot by blowing up his house—Washington fired him. He approved the sites for the presidential mansion and the Capitol as well as the architects who designed them. All in all, he treated the nascent national capital as a public version of his Mount Vernon plantation, right down to the supervision of the slave labor force that did much of the work.31
It helped that the construction site was located near Mount Vernon, so he could make regular visits to monitor progress on his way home. It also helped that Jefferson and Madison could confer with him at the site on their trips back to Monticello and Montpelier. At a time when both Virginians were leading the opposition to Hamilton’s financial program, their cooperation on this ongoing project served to bridge the widening chasm within the official family over the Hamiltonian vision of federal power. However therapeutic the cooperation, it belied a fundamental disagreement over the political implications of their mutual interests in the Federal City, as it was then called. For Jefferson and Madison regarded the Potomac location of the permanent capital as a guarantee of Virginia’s abiding hegemony within the union; as a form of geographic assurance that the federal government would always speak with a southern accent. Washington thought more expansively, envisioning the capital as a focusing device for national energies that overcame regional jealousies; in effect a place that would perform the same unifying function geographically that he performed symbolically. His personal hobbyhorse became a national university within the capital, where the brightest young men from all regions could congregate and share a common experience as Americans that helped to “rub off” their sectional habits and accents.
His hands-on approach toward foreign policy was only slightly less direct than his control of the Potomac project. The major foreign policy crisis of the Washington presidency did not occur until his second term, but the basic principles underlying his view of the national interest were present from the start, and he showed no reluctance in imposing them as the elemental convictions he had acquired from long experience in two wars for control of the North American continent.
Most elementally, he was a thoroughgoing realist. Though he embraced republican ideals, he believed that the behavior of nations was not driven by ideals but by interests. This put him at odds ideologically and temperamentally with his secretary of state, since Jefferson was one of the most eloquent spokesmen for the belief that American ideals were American interests. Jefferson’s recent experience in Paris as a witness to the onset of the French Revolution had only confirmed his conviction that a global struggle on behalf of those ideals had just begun, and that it had a moral claim on American support. Washington was pleased to receive the key to the Bastille from Lafayette; he also knew as well or better than anyone else that the victory over Great Britain would have been impossible without French economic and military assistance. But he was determined to prevent his personal affection for Lafayette or his warm memories of Rochambeau’s soldiers and de Grasse’s ships at Yorktown from influencing his judgment about the long-term interests of the United States.
Those interests, he was convinced, did not lie across the Atlantic but across the Alleghenies, in those forests and fields he had explored as a young man. To be sure, Europe was the cockpit of international affairs and the central theater in the ongoing Anglo-French struggle for global supremacy. But Washington regarded Europe as only a sideshow that must not divert attention from the enduring strategic interests of the United States. The chief task, as he saw it, was to consolidate control of the continent east of the Mississippi. Although Jefferson had never been west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he shared Washington’s preference for western vistas. (During his own presidency, Jefferson would do more than anyone to expand those vistas beyond the Mississippi to the Pacific.) Both men regarded the Spanish presence in Florida and the Mississippi Valley as a temporary occupation by a declining European power that was destined to be overwhelmed by waves of American settlers within two or three generations.
Tight presidential control over foreign policy was unavoidable at the start, because Jefferson did not come on board until March 1790. Washington immediately delegated all routine business to him, but preserved his own private lines of communication on French developments, describing reports of escalating bloodshed he received from Paris “as if they were the events of another planet.” He kept up a joke with Rochambeau about hot soup: the French were inclined to swallow it in huge gulps, they agreed, thereby burning their throats; the Americans preferred to sip it slowly, after it had cooled.32
This cautionary posture toward revolutionary France received reinforcement from Gouverneur Morris, the willfully eccentric and thoroughly irreverent American in Paris whom Washington cultivated as a correspondent. Morris minced no words, or perhaps designed them to maximize their political impact. He described France’s revolutionary leaders as “a Fleet at Anchor in the fog,” and he dismissed Jefferson’s view that a Gallic version of 1776 was under way as a hopelessly romantic illusion: the American Revolution, Morris observed, had been guided by experience and light, while the French were obsessed with experiment and lightning. Morris’s reports on the unfolding chaos eventually became invaluable documents in the historical record, famous for their combination of detachment and wit. Washington relied on them for accurate intelligence and eventually appointed Morris the American minister to France, over Senate opposition to his iconoclastic style. For his part, Morris returned the favor. Despite having a peg leg, he was a robust physical specimen who posed for Houdon as Washington’s stand-in when the sculptor needed a model to complete the statue of his more famous subject.33
In addition to his personal monitoring of the explosive events in France, Washington’s supervisory style as well as his realistic foreign policy convictions were put on display when a potential crisis surfaced in the summer of 1790. A minor incident involving Great Britain and Spain in Nootka Sound (near modern-day Vancouver) prompted a major appraisal of American national interests. The British appeared poised to use the incident to launch an invasion from Canada down the Mississippi designed to displace Spain as the dominant European power in the American West. This threatened to change the entire strategic chemistry on the continent and raised the daunting prospect of another major war with Great Britain.
Washington convened his cabinet in executive session, thereby making clear for the first time that the cabinet and not the more cumbersome Senate would be his advisory council on foreign policy. Written opinions were solicited from all the major players, including Adams, Hamilton, Jay, Jefferson, and Knox. The crisis fizzled away when the British decided to back
off, but during the deliberations two revealing facts became clear: first, that Washington was resolved to avoid war at almost any cost, convinced that the fragile American republic was neither militarily nor economically capable of confronting the British leviathan at this time; second, that Hamilton’s strategic assessment, not Jefferson’s, was more closely aligned with his own, which turned out to be a preview of coming attractions.34
Strictly speaking, the federal government’s relations with the Native American tribes were also a foreign policy matter. From the start, however, Indian affairs came under the authority of the secretary of war. As ominous as this might appear in retrospect, Jefferson’s late arrival on the scene effectively forced Knox to assume responsibility for negotiating the disputed terms of several treaties approved by the Confederation Congress. More significantly, for both personal and policy reasons, Washington wanted his own hand firmly on this particular tiller, and his intimate relationship with Knox assured a seamless coordination guided by his own judgment. He had been present at the start of the struggle for control of the American interior, and regarded the final fate of the Indian inhabitants as an important piece of unfinished business that must not be allowed to end on a tragic note.
At the policy level, if America’s future lay to the west, as Washington believed, it followed that the region between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi merited executive attention more than the diplomatic doings in Europe. Knox estimated that about 76,000 Native Americans lived in the region, about 20,000 of them warriors, which meant that venerable tribal chiefs like Cornplanter and Joseph Brant deserved more cultivation as valuable allies than heads of state across the Atlantic. At the personal level, as commander of the Virginia Regiment and then alongside Braddock at the Monongahela, Washington had experienced Indian power firsthand. He did not view Native Americans as exotic savages, but as familiar and formidable adversaries fighting for their own independence: in effect, behaving pretty much as he would do in their place. Moreover, the letters the new president received from several tribal chiefs provided poignant testimony that they now regarded him as their personal protector: “Brother,” wrote one Cherokee chief, “we give up to our white brothers all the land we could any how spare, and have but little left . . . and we hope you wont let any people take any more from us without our consent. We are neither Birds nor Fish; we can neither fly in the air nor live under water. . . . We are made by the same hand and in the same shape as yourselves.”35
Such pleas did not fall on deaf ears. Working closely with Knox, Washington devised a policy designed to create several sovereign Indian “homelands.” He concurred when Knox insisted that “the independent tribes of indians ought to be considered as foreign nations, not as the subjects of any particular State.” Treaties with these tribes ought to be regarded as binding contracts sanctioned by the federal government, whose jurisdiction could not be compromised: “Indians being the prior occupants possess the right of the Soil . . . To dispossess them . . . would be a gross violation of the fundamental Laws of Nature and of that distributive Justice which is the glory of a nation.” A more coercive policy of outright confiscation, Washington believed, would constitute a moral failure that “would stain the character of the nation.” He sought to avoid the outcome—Indian removal—that occurred more than forty years later under Andrew Jackson. Instead, he envisioned multiple sanctuaries under tribal control that would be bypassed by the surging wave of white settlers and whose occupants would gradually, over the course of the next century, become assimilated as full-fledged American citizens.36
Attempting to make this vision a reality occupied more of Washington’s time and energy than any foreign or domestic issue during his first term. Success depended on identifying key tribal leaders willing to negotiate and capable of imposing the settlement on other tribes in the region. Knox and Washington identified one charismatic Creek chief named Alexander McGillivray, a literate half-breed with diplomatic skills and survival instincts that made him the Indian version of France’s Talleyrand on the southern frontier. In the summer of 1790, Washington hosted McGillivray and twenty-six chiefs for several weeks of official dinners, parades, and diplomatic ceremonies more lavish than any European delegation experienced. (McGillivray expected and received a personal bribe of $1,200 a year to offset the sum the Spanish were already paying him not to negotiate with the Americans.) Washington and the chiefs locked arms in Indian style and invoked the Great Spirit, then the chiefs made their marks on the Treaty of New York, redrawing the borders for a sovereign Creek Nation. Washington reinforced the terms of the treaty by issuing the Proclamation of 1790, an executive order forbidding private or state encroachments on all Indian lands guaranteed by treaty with the United States. Ironically, it was a presidential version of George III’s Proclamation of 1763, which a younger Washington had found so offensive.37
But much like George III, Washington soon found that it was one thing to proclaim, and quite another to sustain. The Georgia legislature defied the proclamation by making a thoroughly corrupt bargain to sell more than fifteen million acres on its western border to speculators calling themselves the Yazoo Companies, thereby rendering the Treaty of New York a worthless piece of paper. In the northern district above the Ohio, no equivalent to McGillivray could be found, mostly because the Six Nations, which Washington could remember as a potent force in the region, had been virtually destroyed in the War of Independence and could no longer exercise hegemony over the Ohio Valley tribes.38
Washington was forced to approve a series of military expeditions into the Ohio Valley to put down uprisings by the Miami, Wyandot, and Shawnee, even though he believed that the chief culprits were white vigilante groups determined to provoke hostilities. The Indian side of the story, Washington complained, would never make it into the history books: “They, poor wretches, have no press thro’ which their grievances are related; and it is well known, that when one side only of a Story is heard, and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it, insensibly.” Worse still, the expedition commanded by Arthur St. Clair was virtually annihilated in the fall of 1791—reading St. Clair’s battle orders is like watching Custer prepare for the Little Big Horn—thereby creating white martyrs and provoking congressional cries for reprisals in what had become an escalating cycle of violence that defied Washington’s efforts at conciliation.39
Eventually Washington was forced to acknowledge that his vision of secure Indian sanctuaries could not be enforced. “I believe scarcely any thing short of a Chinese wall,” he lamented, “will restrain Land jobbers and the encroachment of settlers upon the Indian country.” Knox concurred, estimating that federal control on the frontier would require an arc of forts stretching from Lake Erie to the Gulf of Mexico and garrisoned by no fewer than fifty thousand troops. This was a logistical, economic, and political impossibility. Washington’s vision of peaceful coexistence also required that federal jurisdiction over the states as the ultimate guarantor of all treaties be recognized as supreme, which helps to explain why he was so passionate about the issue, but also why it could never happen. If a just accommodation with the Native American populations was the major preoccupation of his first term, it was also the singular failure.40
PARTIES AND PARTISANS
WHAT WASHINGTON had once imagined as a brief caretaker presidency lasting a year or two had, by 1792, grown into a judicious projection of executive power that was nearing the end of its designated term. He had performed his central mission flawlessly, providing invaluable legitimacy to the “more perfect union” that was still, in truth, a work in progress. He had demonstrated many of the same leadership skills in the political arena that he had previously displayed as commander in chief during the war. If victory then had meant preserving the Continental army by avoiding battles that risked its survival, he had fashioned a kind of Fabian presidency that sustained the credibility of the federal government by avoiding political battles (the court system and slavery, for instance) that threa
tened to push federal sovereignty further and faster than public opinion allowed. And just as he had once delegated control over the crucial military campaign in the south to Nathanael Greene, he had also delegated control over the crucial question of fiscal reform to Alexander Hamilton, who had performed just as brilliantly as Greene, while willingly absorbing the political criticism that would otherwise have been directed at Washington himself. The only major battle in which he had chosen to lead the charge personally, and lost, was the fight for federal jurisdiction over Indian affairs. But he did not regret that effort, which he continued to hope, perhaps like Brandywine or Germantown, would come to be regarded as a temporary setback on the longer road to ultimate victory. It was now time to resume his preferred role as Cincinnatus by declaring his heartfelt intention to retire at the end of his term.
In conversations with several members of his official family during the spring of 1792, he described his declining energy and appetite for the demanding work schedule, his advancing years, his resolute sense that now was the time to go. In May he called in Madison, reiterated his resolve, then asked Madison to draft “a Valedictory address” telling the American citizenry that he would not allow his name to be put forward as a candidate in the fall election. Madison protested the decision, as did all the members of the cabinet, but complied by preparing a three-page statement in the format of an open letter to the American people that was aimed for release to the newspapers the following September.41
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