Another event had nostalgic implications, for it played out in the western counties of Pennsylvania where Washington’s military career had begun forty years earlier. The story had its origins in 1791, when Congress passed an excise tax on whiskey to help pay the debt created by Hamilton’s funding and assumption program. Protests against the tax by western grain farmers followed immediately, claiming that it fell disproportionately on distilleries making the whiskey that allowed them to transport their product to eastern markets. Despite Washington’s efforts to work through the courts to punish offenders, resistance to the tax was so widespread that collectors were forced to flee for their lives. The protest movement culminated in August 1794, when more than six thousand men gathered in Braddock’s Field outside Pittsburgh, very near the scene of the Monongahela massacre. They set up mock guillotines to register their solidarity with French revolutionaries, imbibed freely of their favorite liquid, then defied the federal government to come after them. “Should an attempt be made to suppress these people,” warned one witness, “I am afraid the question will not be, whether you will march to Pittsburgh, but whether they will march to Philadelphia.” The rebels saw themselves, as had the Shays’s rebels in Massachusetts nearly a decade earlier, as actors in a dramatic sequel to the resistance movement against arbitrary taxation.57
“I consider this insurrection as the first formidable fruit of the Democratic Societies,” Washington insisted, meaning that it was inspired more by the French than the American Revolution and was encouraged by Republican operatives in Pennsylvania. He had earlier described military action against the rebels as “a dernier resort,” but by September 1794 concluded that rebel intransigence left him no alternative, claiming that these “self-created societies”—he nearly spit out the words—represented a tyranny of the minority against the will of the majority, and that their only revolutionary principle was that “every man can cut and carve for himself.” Moreover, he decided to take personal command of the thirteen thousand troops raised by militia enlistments to crush the insurrection.58
This decision produced a scene that provides the most graphic and dramatic illustration of the two competing versions of what the American Revolution had come to mean in the 1790s. On one side stood the rebels, a defiant collection of aggrieved farmers emboldened by their conviction that the excise tax levied by Congress was every bit as illegitimate as the taxes levied by the British ministry. On the other side stood Washington and his federalized troops, an updated version of the Continental army, marching west to enforce the authority of the constitutionally elected government that claimed to represent all the American people. It was “the spirit of ’76” against “the spirit of ’87,” one historic embodiment of “the people” against another. And there was Washington, back in the saddle again as commander in chief, with former aide-de-camp Hamilton at his side, traveling on the old Forbes Road he had objected to so strenuously as a route in his earlier incarnation as a soldier. It also turned out to be the first and only time a sitting American president led troops in the field.
In truth, Washington only accompanied the army as far as Carlisle. By then it was clear that the bravado of the rebels had evaporated at the approach of such a formidable force. Hamilton led the army in what became a triumphant parade to Pittsburgh, obeying Washington’s orders to offer amnesty to all rebels who signed an oath to obey the laws of the federal government. Back in Philadelphia, Washington addressed Congress, justifying his military response on the grounds that “certain self-created societies” were in fact subversive organizations that threatened the survival of the national union. He was not disputing the right of aggrieved citizens to dissent, but he was insisting that dissent could not take the form of flagrant violation of federal authority. Congress overwhelmingly agreed, congratulating him on defending the Constitution. Only Madison struck a sour note in an uncharacteristically rambling speech that worried about the precedent this set. Down at Monticello, the recently retired Jefferson confided to Madison that the Republican cause had suffered a massive blow, but that Washington on horseback trumped anything they could muster in response. A close reading of Washington’s speech to Congress somewhat consoled him, wrote Jefferson, since the language resembled “shreds of stuff from Aesop’s fables and Tom Thumb,” which he interpreted as evidence that Hamilton composed it, so that the grand old man probably did not know what he was doing or saying.59
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.60
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.61
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.62
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 t
he 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.”63
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.64
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.65
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.”66
THE FAREWELL
THE 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 atmo
sphere 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.67
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.
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