Washington

by Ron Chernow

  On June 11 the presidential caravan arrived at Mount Vernon, giving Washington two weeks of rest before he returned to Philadelphia. After a rocky start, the tour had unfolded with miraculous precision, and Washington was relieved that it had proceeded without “any interruption by sickness, bad weather, or any untoward accident.”55 In a major logistical feat, he had arrived at each town on the exact date set on his itinerary. The three-month trip had also been a tonic to his health. Escaping from his office and filling his lungs with fresh air, he had put on weight and wiped away the gaunt look of the previous year. Not only had his health improved, but he told one correspondent that “my happiness has certainly been promoted by the excursion.”56 The trip ended in a fitting spirit on July 6, when he rode into Philadelphia to the sound of cannon and the ringing of church bells and set eyes on Martha for the first time in nearly four months.

  No sooner had Washington returned than a tumor reappeared on his thigh, in exactly the spot as the one excised in June 1789. It threw the government into a state of general gloom. “The president is indisposed with the same blind tumor, and in the same place, which he had the year before last in New York,” Jefferson alerted Madison. Although it seemed not as bad as the earlier tumor, Jefferson said that Washington was “obliged to lie constantly on his side and has at times a little fever.”57 The protuberance was lanced, and pus and other matter cleaned out, and within a month Washington declared that he was fully recovered. Still, this was the third time that he had been leveled by an ailment as president, and it must have made him wonder about the wisdom of continuing in office.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Running into Extremes

  EARLY IN HIS ADMINISTRATION, George Washington had figured out that for foreign policy advice he would have to rely on his cabinet rather than the Senate, but the cabinet members were no less split in the foreign policy realm than they were on pressing domestic issues. The most divisive topic was whether the United States should lean toward France or Great Britain. Even after waging war against Britain for more than eight years, Washington took a coldly realistic view of the strategic need for cordial relations with London. The federal government depended upon customs duties as its principal revenue source and could scarcely afford to antagonize its major trading partner. After the war, as American trade with England swiftly rebounded, Washington had observed, “Our trade in all points of view is as essential to G[reat] B[ritain] as hers is to us.”1 In the postwar period, American merchants had bristled at the exclusion of their ships from the British West Indies. Scarcely a raging Anglophile, Washington had a long list of other grievances against the English—their refusal to make restitution for runaway slaves, their unwillingness to evacuate western posts, their reluctance to send a minister to the United States—but he never allowed those complaints to stymie his earnest efforts to improve relations with the Crown.

  In the autumn of 1789 Washington decided to post the witty Gouverneur Morris to England as an unofficial envoy to iron out problems between the two governments. Jefferson feared that America would import Britain’s monarchical ways along with its products and strongly favored warmer relations with France, whose revolution he monitored with enthusiasm. Where Hamilton and Jay supported Morris’s appointment, Jefferson staunchly opposed it, viewing Morris as a “high-flying monarchy man” and overly friendly to England.2 He later faulted the fun-loving Morris for prejudicing Washington’s mind against the French Revolution.

  Because Jefferson did not take office until March 1790, Hamilton was able to poach on territory usually reserved for the secretary of state and attempted to strengthen ties with Great Britain, with whom the United States still lacked formal diplomatic relations. In October 1789 he conducted a secret meeting with a British diplomat, Major George Beckwith, assuring him, “I have always preferred a connection with you to that of any other country. We think in English and have a similarity of prejudices and predilections.”3 Washington likewise believed that the common laws, language, and customs of America and England made them natural allies, and he fully concurred with Hamilton’s desire to negotiate a commercial treaty between the two countries. By the summer of 1790 Morris’s talks in London began to bear fruit. After a meeting with Beckwith, Hamilton relayed to Washington the startling news that Sir Guy Carleton, now the governor general of Canada, “had reason to believe that the Cabinet of Great Britain entertained a disposition not only towards a friendly intercourse but towards an alliance with the United States.”4 Jefferson scoffed at such views emanating from an unofficial emissary.

  Accepting the need for creative diplomacy, Washington sought to profit from the back channel established by Hamilton with Beckwith. That summer the specter of war between England and Spain arose after their military confrontation at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island in western Canada. Not ready to choose sides, Washington noted in his diary the instructions he had given Hamilton, saying that “the Secretary of the Treasury was to extract as much as he could from Major Beckwith and report it to me without committing . . . the Government of the U[nited] States.”5 In subsequent meetings with Beckwith, Hamilton warned the British diplomat that while Washington was “perfectly dispassionate” toward a commercial treaty with England, Secretary of State Jefferson “may possibly frustrate the whole.”6

  In September 1791 the overtures made by Hamilton, with Washington’s approval, resulted in a major breakthrough in Anglo-American relations, as George III named George Hammond as the first British minister to America. When Hammond and his secretary, Edward Thornton, arrived that autumn, they immediately sensed the amicable disposition of the treasury secretary and the implacable hostility of the secretary of state. Writing home, Thornton evoked Jefferson’s “strong hatred” of the British and his “decided and rancorous malevolence to the British name.”7 Not surprisingly, Hammond and Thornton gravitated to the pro-British circle clustered around Hamilton.

  America’s fervent attachment to France arose from gratitude for its indispensable help during the Revolutionary War, and no country saluted its revolution with more fraternal warmth. In a variety of ways, the French Revolution had been spawned by its American predecessor, which had bred dreams of liberty among French aristocrats who fought in the war, then tried to enshrine its principles at home. The most visible standard-bearer of these hopes was the Marquis de Lafayette, who told Washington from Paris that the “ideas of liberty have been, since the American Revolution, spreading very fast.”8 As Jefferson stated proudly, the French had been “awakened by our revolution . . . Our proceedings have been viewed as a model for them on every occasion.”9 As early as 1780 Washington had predicted that France, to pay for its American adventure, would face a huge deficit and resort to ruinous taxes that “the people of France are not in a condition to endure for any duration.”10 Those taxes and other hardships had provoked immense discontent, leading King Louis XVI to convene a special advisory assembly called the Estates-General in May 1789, which mingled commoners with the clergy and nobility.

  Always a perceptive student of politics, George Washington, from the first stir-rings of the French Revolution, was astonishingly prophetic about its course. He regarded Louis XVI as a good-hearted but fallible king who would make a clumsy, self-destructive effort to foil revolutionary impulses. “Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth,” Washington remarked to Madison in 1788. “The checks [the king] endeavors to give it . . . will, more than probably, kindle a flame which may not easily be extinguished, tho[ugh] for a while it may be smothered by the armies at his command.”11 With his sure instincts, Washington intuited that the French Revolution might veer off into fanaticism and warned Lafayette “against running into extremes and prejudicing your cause.”12 On the other hand, he also thought that if the king managed change properly, a constitutional monarchy might ensue. Paradoxically, Jefferson, an eyewitness to the revolution’s outbreak, seemed blind to its violent potential. In August 1788 he blithely reported to James Monroe from
France, “I think it probable this country will, within two or three years, be in the enjoyment of a tolerably free constitution and that without its having cost them a drop of blood.”13 Perhaps because of his association with enlightened Parisian intellectuals, Jefferson missed the bloodthirsty spirit of the French Revolution, its lust for gore and its gratuitous butchering of innocent victims.

  The early days of the French Revolution, so giddily triumphant, produced general rejoicing among Americans. In the spring and summer of 1789 they applauded the creation of the National Assembly and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, written by Lafayette with assistance from Jefferson. The Bastille’s downfall, however, displayed the bloody predilections of the Parisian mobs, who decapitated the prison governor and sported his head on a pike. Such grisly details seemed lost upon many Americans cheering the event. The day after the Bastille was stormed, Lafayette, who hoped for a “fusion between the royalty and the people,” was named head of the National Guard of Paris, further encouraging Americans to believe that their revolution had engendered a fitting sequel in France.14 In a masterful stroke, Lafayette sent Washington the ponderous old key to the Bastille gate plus a sketch of the infamous fortress. “Give me leave, my dear general, to present you with a picture of the Bastille just as it looked a few days after I had ordered its demolition, with the main key of that fortress of despotism,” he wrote. “It is a tribute which I owe as a son to my adoptive father, as an aide-de-camp to my general, as a missionary of liberty to its patriarch.”15 Later on, the president hung the key inside a wall lantern at Mount Vernon, with the picture below it, spurring Chateaubriand’s mordant comment, “If Washington had seen the ‘victors of the Bastille’ disporting themselves in the gutters of Paris, he would have felt less respect for his relic.”16

  While careful to support France in public, Washington succumbed to deep foreboding in private and predicted a cascading series of violent events. Like other Americans, he wanted to embrace the French Revolution, but he recoiled from its excessive zeal. In October 1789 he told Gouverneur Morris that while France “has gone triumphantly through the first paroxysm, it is not the last it has to encounter before matters are finally settled. In a word, the revolution is of too great magnitude to be effected in so short a space and with the loss of so little blood.”17 He feared both the frenzied mobs and the benighted aristocrats plotting to restore their privileges. Morris’s letters from Paris had a profound impact on Washington, as Jefferson suspected, because they captured with a cool eye the demagogic logic of the revolution and the fanaticism fast taking hold.

  Lafayette’s tragedy in the French Revolution was that he tried to model himself after Washington and re-create his success in a situation that mocked his ambitions. In January 1790, calling himself Washington’s “filial friend,” Lafayette wrote to say how often he had wished for his mentor’s “wise advices and friendly support!”18 He was not oblivious to the revolution’s defects, but he thought they would be mended in time and hoped for the French equivalent of a Constitutional Convention in ten years. There was a note of quiet apprehension in Lafayette’s letters, a lonely whistling in the dark, as he recorded the wholesale destruction of the aristocracy, while hoping that liberty would somehow thrive in the resulting vacuum. Still wedded to replicating the American Revolution, he wrote in the slightly defensive tone of a man trying too hard to convince himself that all was well.

  As news of Parisian atrocities reached American shores, Washington remained guardedly supportive of the French Revolution in public, confining his misgivings to a small circle of intimates. Writing to Rochambeau on August 10, 1790, he dismissed the horror stories printed in the London papers as reminiscent of British propaganda during the war: “Happily for you, we remembered how our own armies, after having been all slain to a man in the English newspapers, came to life again and even performed prodigies of valor against that very nation whose newspapers had so unmercifully destroyed them.”19 In truth, Washington lent considerable credence to British reports, as he confided to Lafayette: “I will avow the accounts we received through the English papers . . . caused our fears of a failure almost to exceed our expectations of success.”20

  When deputies in the National Assembly abolished aristocratic titles in June 1790, Lafayette surprised his fellow noblemen by supporting the measure, claiming it had “something of the American character.”21 Henceforth, the Marquis de Lafayette was known simply as Lafayette. Even as he curried favor with the masses, however, Lafayette worried that mob violence would supplant the rule of law, telling Washington in August 1790, “I have lately lost some of my favor with the mob and displeased the frantic lovers of licentiousness, as I am bent on establishing a legal subordination.”22 It was Lafayette’s misfortune that the lower classes regarded him as too conservative while patricians jeered at him as too radical. Nothing better illustrates the distance between the American and French revolutions than the fact that Lafayette, who was so at home in the Continental Army, seemed tragically out of place in France, naïvely pursuing the chimera of a constitutional monarchy among political cutthroats on the Paris streets.

  Among those trying to place the French Revolution squarely in the American grain, perhaps none was more influential than Thomas Paine. In 1791 he published The Rights of Man as a response to Edmund Burke’s influential denunciation, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke had condemned the royal family’s mistreatment and prophesied bloodshed to come. Paine, in contrast, portrayed events in France as reprising the spirit of 1776 and called for a written constitution, with an elected assembly and chief executive. Paine, who could be both arrogant and presumptuous, dedicated his polemic to Washington without first seeking his permission and published his screed in London on February 22, 1791—Washington’s birthday. Drawing further parallels to the American Revolution, Paine informed Washington that he wanted to “make a cheap edition, just sufficient to bring in the price of the printing and paper, as I did by Common Sense.”23

  Thomas Jefferson helped to arrange for publication of The Rights of Man in Philadelphia, telling the printer that he was “extremely pleased to find it will be reprinted here and that something is at length to be publicly said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us.”24 Jefferson professed amazement when the printer used this letter as a preface to Paine’s work. Since Jefferson’s reference to “political heresies” was widely construed as a swipe at the supposed crypto-monarchism of John Adams’s treatise Discourses on Davila, it created a brouhaha. The mortified Jefferson wrote a long, repentant letter to Washington, claiming that his letter had been used without permission and denying any intention to vilify the vice president. Washington’s failure to acknowledge Jefferson’s apology suggests his silent fury. Jefferson’s own letters to Paine reflect his fear of highly placed monarchists in Washington’s administration who were “preaching up and panting after an English constitution of king, lords, and commons and whose heads are itching for crowns, coronets, and mitres.”25

  Because of the controversy over Paine’s work, Washington responded to his letter with a blandly evasive reply. He pleaded the pressing duties of office and his imminent return to Mount Vernon as reasons why he couldn’t react in detail: “Let it suffice, therefore, at this time to say that I rejoice in the information of your personal prosperity and . . . that it is the first wish of my heart that the enlightened policy of the present age may diffuse to all men those blessings to which they are entitled and lay the foundation of happiness for future generations.”26 Washington had a matchless talent for skirting unwanted controversies.

  In June 1791 King Louis XVI and the royal family fled Paris in disguise—the king dressed as a valet, the queen as the children’s governess—only to be stopped and arrested by Lafayette’s National Guard at Varennes, northeast of Paris. Although Lafayette duly informed the king and queen that the National Assembly had placed them under a full-time guard, he was nonetheless denounced as a traitor on the Pari
s streets, and Danton accused him of engineering the royal family’s escape. The underground press in France went so far as to caricature Lafayette in pornographic poses with Marie-Antoinette. These events dimmed any hope for a constitutional monarchy. Jefferson delivered to Washington the stunning news from Paris. “I never saw him so much dejected by any event in my life,” Jefferson reported of his reaction.27 A crestfallen Lafayette was dismayed by the behavior of the royal couple, lamenting that Marie-Antoinette was “more concerned about looking beautiful in the face of danger than about staving it off.”28

  In September 1792 the monarchy would be abolished. Beset by terrible premonitions, Washington was extremely concerned about Lafayette’s endangered position and, in a letter to him, identified a cardinal characteristic of the French Revolution that especially upset him: the urban mob. “The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded,” he wrote. “Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for the time all public authority, and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible.” 29 In October 1791 Lafayette resigned from the National Guard and retreated to the rural serenity of his home, the Château Chavaniac. He sent Washington a letter that breathed contentment, as if his troubles had suddenly evaporated. “After fifteen years of revolution, I am profiting from a new and agreeable life of calm in the mountains where I was born.”30 Given the turbulent events unfolding in Paris, this peaceful interlude was fated to be of short duration.