by Ron Chernow
Until the publication of Hamilton’s report, James Madison had been Washington’s most confidential adviser. That began to erode on February 11, 1790, when Madison rose in the House and, in a surprising volte-face, denounced the idea that speculators should benefit from Hamilton’s program. It was a stunning shot across the bow of the administration. Madison favored a policy of so-called discrimination—that original holders of the debt, mostly former soldiers, should share in the windfall as the price of government paper soared. Many Americans found it hard to see speculators rewarded instead of veterans, and Madison’s speech tapped a powerful vein of discontent. Speculation in government debt, Madison affirmed, was “wrong, radically and morally and politically wrong.”8 As a Virginia congressman and budding advocate of states’ rights, Madison was moving away from the continental perspective that had united him with Hamilton when they co-authored The Federalist. For Madison, the funded debt and the expanding ranks of Treasury employees were far too reminiscent of the British model. Feeling betrayed by Madison, Hamilton argued that his former comrade’s discrimination proposal was simply unworkable. To track down the original holders of securities and parcel out their shares of the profits would be a bureaucratic nightmare. He also considered speculation to be an inescapable, if unsavory, aspect of functioning financial markets.
As the hero of the old soldiers, Washington confronted a ticklish dilemma, and Madison later attested that the president’s mind was “strongly exercised” by the debate. 9 On the one hand, Washington sympathized with veterans who had unloaded their IOUs to “unfeeling, avaricious speculators.”10 At the same time, he had warned his men at the end of the war not to part with these certificates, telling them bluntly in general orders in May 1783: “The General thinks it necessary to caution the soldiers against the foolish practice . . . of disposing of their notes and securities of pay at a very great discount, when it is evident the speculators on those securities must hereafter obtain the full payment of their nominal value.”11 Washington’s words had been prophetic. Because Congress had ordered Hamilton’s report, Washington did not want to overstep his bounds by lobbying for it, and he remained cagey in discussing it. To David Stuart, he wrote circumspectly, “Mr Madison, on the question of discrimination, was actuated, I am persuaded, by the purest motives and most heartfelt conviction. But the subject was delicate and perhaps had better not have been stirred.”12
While Washington introduced no ringing opinion during the debate, his silence was tantamount to approval of the Hamiltonian system. At this point he was still a sacred figure in American politics, making Hamilton a convenient lightning rod for protests. It was also expedient for Washington to allow Hamilton to engage in the rough-and-tumble of political bargaining, while he himself held fast to the ceremonial trappings of the presidency. Taken aback by Madison’s defection and the vehement schism provoked by the public credit report, Washington was especially disheartened that the country had split along geographic lines, placing him at odds with the South. He wrote privately that if the northern states moved “in a solid phalanx” and the southern states were “less tenacious of their interest,” then the latter had only themselves to blame.13
The debate over the Hamiltonian program opened a rift between Washington and his Virginia associates that only widened through the years. Reflecting their bias in favor of landed wealth and against paper assets, members of the chronically indebted gentry recoiled in horror at the northern financial revolution ushered in by Hamilton. The tobacco market had fallen into a deep slump, making these pinched Virginia planters ripe for tirades against northern speculators, who seemed to profit from easy winnings. Also, Virginia had already paid much of its debt and therefore opposed a federal takeover of state debt, which would reward irresponsible states that had repudiated their loans. Things went so far that in some Virginia circles Washington was regarded as almost a traitor to his class. When David Stuart reported that spring on extreme hostility in Virginia toward the new government, Washington grew distressed. “Your description of the public mind in Virginia gives me pain,” he replied. “It seems to be more irritable, sour, and discontented than . . . it is in any other state in the Union.”14 On February 22 Madison’s proposal to discriminate in favor of original holders of government debt was roundly defeated in the House, 36-13. In a preview of problems to come for Washington, 9 of the 13 negative votes came from his home state of Virginia.
THE DISCONTENT OF SOUTHERN PLANTERS was further inflamed in February 1790 when Quakers, clad in black hats and coats, filed a pair of explosive petitions with Congress. One proposed an immediate halt to the slave trade, while the other urged the unthinkable: the gradual abolition of slavery itself. Because they did not believe that God discriminated between blacks and whites, many Quakers had freed their own slaves and even, in some cases, compensated them for past injustice. Washington had torn feelings about the Quakers. The previous October he had sent an address to the Society of Quakers, full of high praise, asserting that “there is no denomination among us who are more exemplary and useful citizens.”15 At the same time the Quakers, as pacifists, had tended to shun wartime duty.
On the slavery question, Washington reacted with extreme caution. Although he had voiced support for emancipation in private letters, to do so publicly, as he tried to forge a still precarious national unity, would have been a huge and controversial leap. The timing of the Quaker petitions could not have been more troublesome. To David Stuart, he worried that the petitions “will certainly tend to promote” southern suspicions, then added: “It gives particular umbrage that the Quakers should be so busy in this business.”16 Washington and other founders who opposed slavery, at least in theory, thought they had conveniently sidestepped the issue at the Constitutional Convention by stipulating that the slave trade was safe until 1808. But because Benjamin Franklin, as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, had signed one of the Quaker petitions, they could not be summarily dismissed. James Jackson of Georgia warned grimly of civil war if the petitions passed, claiming that “the people of the southern states will resist one tyranny as soon as another.”17 Responding to planter panic, James Madison led congressional opposition to any interference with slavery, unfurling the banner of states’ rights. Although Hamilton had cofounded the New York Manumission Society, he, like Washington, remained silent on the issue, hoping to push through the controversial funding program. In fact, virtually all of the founders, despite their dislike of slavery, enlisted in this conspiracy of silence, taking the convenient path of deferring action to a later generation.
Washington tended to conceal his inmost thoughts about slavery, revealing them only to intimates who shared his opposition. He knew of the virulence of Virginia’s reaction to the Quaker petitions, especially when Stuart told him that the mere talk of emancipation had alarmed planters and lowered the price of slaves, with many “sold for the merest trifle.”18 In replying to Stuart, Washington seemed to have no sympathy with the petitions, which he dismissed as doomed. On the morning of March 16 he met with Warner Mifflin, a leading Quaker abolitionist, and deemed the conversation important enough to record in his diary. Mifflin had decried the “injustice and impolicy of keeping these people in a state of slavery with declarations, however, that he did not wish for more than a gradual abolition, or to see any infraction of the Constitution to effect it.” Washington listened attentively to Mifflin, then employed his famous gift of silence: “To these I replied that, as it was a matter which might come before me for official decision, I was not inclined to express any sentim[en]ts on the merits of the question before this should happen.”19
The Quaker memorials ended up stillborn in Congress. In late March, under Madison’s leadership, legislators quietly tabled the proposals by deciding they lacked jurisdiction to interfere with the slave trade prior to 1808. “The memorial of the Quakers (and a very mal-apropos one it was) has at length been put to sleep” and will not “awake before the year 1808,” Washington info
rmed Stuart.20 His failure to use the presidency as a bully pulpit to air his opposition to slavery remains a blemish on his record. He continued to fall back on the self-serving fantasy that slavery would fade away in future years. The public had no idea how much he wrestled inwardly with the issue. His final comments to Stuart on the Quaker petitions are complacent in tone, designed to conceal his conflicted feelings: “The introductions of the [Quaker] memorial respecting slavery was, to be sure, not only an ill-judged piece of business, but occasioned a great waste of time.”21
In April, shortly after his noble defeat over the slavery issue, Benjamin Franklin died. He was the only American whose stature remotely compared to that of Washington. During his final weeks Franklin had insisted that liberty should extend “without distinction of color to all descriptions of people.”22 In his will Franklin paid a typically ingenious compliment to Washington: “My fine crabtree walking stick, with a gold head curiously wrought in the form of the cap of liberty, I give to my friend, and the friend of mankind, General Washington. If it were a scepter, he has merited it and would become it.”23 After the Senate voted down a motion to wear mourning for Franklin, Jefferson turned to Washington for an appropriate tribute: “I proposed to General Washington that the executive department should wear mourning. He declined it because he said he would not know where to draw the line if he once began that ceremony.”24 One wonders whether, after the Quaker petitions, Washington had more than presidential etiquette in mind in the decision. The country was curiously devoid of public eulogies to Franklin; the National Assembly in Paris outdid Congress in its tributes, as the Count de Mirabeau paid eloquent homage to “the genius who liberated America and poured upon Europe torrents of light.”25
Washington very nearly followed Franklin to his grave. On Sunday, April 4, he reported in his diary: “At home all day—unwell.”26 Two days later he sat for a second portrait by Edward Savage, commissioned by Vice President John Adams. Unlike the earlier Savage portrait done for Harvard, which showed a man of magisterial calm, this one presented a far more troubled man, the left side of his face dipped in shadow. With a double chin protruding over his jabot and a prominent bag drooping under his right eye, he has a deeply unsettled look. People gossiped that a mysterious fever had gripped the president. “I do not know the exact state of GW’s health for a day or two last,” Pennsylvania congressman George Clymer wrote on April 11, “but it is observed here with a great deal of anxiety that his general health seems to be declining. For some time past, he has been subject to a slow fever.”27 Georgia congressman Abraham Baldwin agreed. “Our great and good man has been unwell again this spring,” he told a friend. “I never saw him more emaciated.”28 From April 20 through 24, in a concerted effort to rescue his health, Washington toured Long Island, traveling as far east as Brookhaven on the south shore before heading up to Setauket on the north shore, then circling back to Manhattan. Upon his return, everybody said Washington looked more robust; Robert Morris reassured his wife that the president had “regained his looks, his appetite, and his health.”29 The improvement did not last. By this point a severe influenza epidemic was proliferating in the city. James Madison had contracted it, and Washington imprudently asked him to stop by his house on April 27, which may have infected him with the influenza as well. On May 7 William Maclay informed Dr. Benjamin Rush that the president had “nearly lost his hearing” from the illness, which must have been a heavy blow for Washington.30
On Sunday, May 9, Washington noted: “Indisposed with a bad cold and at home all day writing letters on private business.”31 The next day he was confined to bed. By this time Madison, having rebounded from his illness, said that the president suffered from “peripneumony, united probably with the influenza,” and others mentioned pleurisy as well.32 This suggests that he suffered from a combination of labored breathing, sharp pains in his side, harsh coughing, and blood in his spittle. Whatever the original disease, it deepened into pneumonia. In addition to hearing loss, eyewitnesses mentioned that Washington’s eyes were rheumy and that he seemed prematurely aged. He was far from alone in a city seized by widespread illness. By mid-May the influenza had exploded in such epidemic proportions that Richard Henry Lee described Manhattan as “a perfect hospital—few are well and many very sick.”33
As fears mounted about whether the president would survive, three eminent doctors were consulted: Dr. Samuel Bard, Dr. John McKnight, and Dr. John Charlton. As Washington’s condition worsened, they decided on May 12 to summon Dr. John Jones, a surgeon from Philadelphia, who had been the personal physician to Ben Franklin. So as not to alert the public to Washington’s true condition, the presidential aides tried to sneak Dr. Jones in under conditions of extraordinary secrecy. “The doctor’s prudence will suggest the propriety of setting out as privately as possible,” Major William Jackson told Clement Biddle of Philadelphia. “Perhaps it may be well to assign a personal reason for visiting New York, or going into the country.”34
The street in front of Washington’s residence was again cleared of traffic and carpeted with straw to mute sounds. With such precautions, rumors inevitably circulated about Washington’s perilous condition. “Called to see the president,” William Maclay wrote on May 15. “Every eye full of tears. His life despaired of.”35 With Washington coughing up blood and running a high fever, Dr. McKnight hinted to Maclay that there was little hope of recovery and that death might be imminent. Beset by hiccups, Washington made strange gurgling noises that were interpreted as a death rattle. What one observer described as “a universal gloom” overspread a country long accustomed to Washington’s steady presence.36
On May 16, against all expectations and after the team of physicians had pronounced the case hopeless, the president rallied and underwent a startling improvement. At four in the afternoon he broke into a tremendous sweat, his coughing abated, and he spoke more clearly than he had in days. In a tone of joy and mild disbelief, Jefferson told his daughter that “from a total despair, we are now in good hopes of him.”37 On May 18 the president’s condition surfaced in a press that had preserved discreet silence. “The President of the United States has been exceedingly indisposed for several days past,” the New-York Journal informed readers, “but we are rejoiced at the authentic information of his being much relieved the last evening.” 38 For the next two weeks, although a convalescent Washington could not perform presidential duties, he was now clearly on the mend. In early June he assured Lafayette that he was well out of danger and had rebounded “except in point of strength.”39
Throughout the ordeal, Martha Washington supervised the sickroom and behaved with stoic equanimity. To Mercy Otis Warren, she admitted that the tremendous display of public sympathy had been “very affecting” to her. Her self-possessed husband, she said, had gone through the crisis with typical composure: “He seemed less concerned himself as to the event than perhaps almost any other person in ye United States. Happily, he is now perfectly recovered.”40 From the time he was a young man, Washington had faced death with uncommon fortitude, and this time proved no exception. By May 20 his fever had ebbed, and two days later Richard Henry Lee found him sitting up in a chair. Helped by his naturally hardy nature, the president made rapid strides. “The President is again on his legs,” Philip Schuyler reported the next day. “He was yesterday able to traverse his room a dozen times.”41 A couple of days later he was even out riding. On May 27 Jefferson declared an official end to the crisis when he stated that Washington was “well enough to resume business.”42 The country had narrowly averted catastrophe, for John Adams, whatever his merits, would never have been the unifying figure needed to launch the constitutional experiment. Still, Washington remained in a weakened state, so drained of energy that he did not resume his diary until June 24.
As in the crisis of Washington’s infected thigh a year earlier, the federal government had been poorly prepared for this serious lapse in the president’s health. With Tobias Lear out of town, Major William Jackson
effectively ran the presidential office. No official procedure for deputizing someone during a presidential illness existed, and Washington may have been reluctant to grant precedence to any cabinet officer. As he lobbied for his financial program, the high-flying Hamilton functioned as de facto head of state. In later unpublished comments about this anxious time, Hamilton said that Jefferson viewed him then for the first time as “a formidable rival in the competition for the presidential chair at a future period.” While others brooded about the president’s fate, Hamilton alleged, the situation “only excited the ambitious ardor of the secretary [of state] to remove out of his way every dangerous opponent. That melancholy circumstance suggested to him the probability of an approaching vacancy in the presidential chair and that he would attract the public attention as the successor to it, were the more popular Secretary of the Treasury out of the way.”43 Hamilton offered no proof to back up his assertion, and Jefferson likely would have made the same claim about Hamilton. Before too long the mutual suspicions simmering between the two men would burst into open warfare.
