by Ron Chernow
On September 9 Hamilton wrote to Washington that he was the injured party to the dispute and that the day would soon come “when the public goodwill will require substitutes for the differing members of your administration.”64 For the first time, Hamilton singled out Jefferson as his adversary and accused him of starting the National Gazette to sabotage his fiscal program: “I know that I have been an object of uniform opposition from Mr. Jefferson from the first moment of his coming to the city of New York to enter upon his present office.”65 Although Hamilton and Jefferson were often on their best behavior when dealing with Washington, they were now like two rowdy, boisterous students, brawling in the schoolyard whenever the headmaster turned his back. Far from desisting in his broadsides against Jefferson, Hamilton, under the pen name “Catullus,” commenced a new series of newspaper essays, disputing that the Federalists were plotting to abolish the republic. Turning the tables, Hamilton said it was the Republicans, led by Jefferson, who were engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the government. He even made veiled references to Jefferson’s being a closet libertine, perhaps hinting at secret knowledge of his relations with his slave concubine, Sally Hemings.
The same day that Hamilton wrote to Washington to defend his conduct, Jefferson at Monticello did likewise. In an unusually long and heated letter, Jefferson charged that Hamilton had duped him into supporting his schemes and had trespassed on State Department matters by meeting with French and British ministers. He admitted hiring Freneau but made it seem as if Freneau had initiated the contact, and he swore that he had no influence over the National Gazette. This may have been technically true, since Jefferson turned to surrogates, especially Madison, for his political dirty work. The supreme populist of early American history then slandered Hamilton, the self-made immigrant, with the hauteur of a born aristocrat chastising a pushy upstart: “I will not suffer my retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has not only received and given him bread, but heaped its honors on his head.”66 Clearly, Washington’s efforts to arbitrate a truce between his warring cabinet chieftains had failed, but he never wavered in his effort to terminate the intrigue.
As Washington wrestled with the problem of whether to remain as president, he was preoccupied by the fading health of his nephew George Augustine, who had grown so weak that summer that he was spitting up blood and could scarcely walk. By early August he was confined to his room at Mount Vernon, and Washington did not expect him to survive much longer. If he recovered his strength, he would probably require a quiet interlude in some milder climate. His illness returned Washington’s thoughts to the management of Mount Vernon and made him eager to reassert control of his neglected business affairs.
On October 1, 1792, Washington, still at Mount Vernon, met with Jefferson before breakfast in yet another attempt to thrash out their differences. Still wavering about a second term, Washington cited his dislike of “the ceremonies of his office” and said his nephew’s plight made his presence at Mount Vernon desirable.67 For the first time Washington seemed to lean toward a second term, however, remarking that “if his aid was thought necessary to save the cause to which he had devoted his life principally, he would make the sacrifice of a longer continuance.”68 Jefferson stated that only Washington could rise above partisan wrangling and fortify the government. Washington confessed that, while he had been aware of political differences between Jefferson and Hamilton, “he had never suspected it had gone so far in producing a personal difference and he wished he could be the mediator to put an end to it.”69 In spite of everything, Washington wanted to retain Jefferson in the cabinet and maintain an ideological balance.
Until this point the discussion had been cordial. But now an exasperated Washington, fed up with conspiracy theories, squarely told Jefferson that “as to the idea of transforming this government into a monarchy, he did not believe there were ten men in the U.S. whose opinions were worth attention who entertained such a thought,”70 as Jefferson noted his words. This was tough language, tantamount to branding Jefferson a crackpot, and unlike anything Washington ever said to Hamilton. The secretary of state replied with stiff dignity: “I told him there were many more than he imagined . . . I told him that tho[ugh] the people were sound, there was a numerous sect who had monarchy in contemplation, that the Sec[retar]y of the Treasury was one of these.”71 Here the two men encountered a fundamental difference that could not be bridged. When Jefferson again talked about Hamilton corrupting the legislature, with many in Congress owning government paper, Washington described the problem as unavoidable “unless we were to exclude particular descriptions of men, such as the holders of the funds, from all office.”72 The president saw the real test of the funding system as its effectiveness and “that for himself, he had seen our affairs desperate and our credit lost and that this was in a sudden and extraordinary degree raised to the highest pitch.”73
At this point Jefferson must have realized that he had irrevocably lost the battle for George Washington’s soul to Alexander Hamilton. In his memo on the talk, he simply wrote in defeat at this point, “I avoided going further into the subject.”74 After this meeting the obdurate Jefferson never unburdened himself so openly to Washington again, and a coolness entered their relationship. In his diary, Jefferson speculated that the president’s mind was weakened by age and said that he showed “a willingness to let others act and even think for him.”75
Back in Philadelphia in mid-October, Washington again tried to negotiate a truce between Hamilton and Jefferson. At moments he seemed genuinely baffled by their intransigence, as if he could not believe that men of goodwill could not work out their differences. Perhaps the decisive stroke in convincing Washington to run for a second term came after a meeting with Eliza Powel that November, in which Washington said he might resign. In a masterly seven-page follow-up letter, Powel, a confirmed Federalist, gave Washington the high-toned reasons he needed to stay in office, shrewdly playing on his anxious concern for his historic reputation. If he stepped down now, she wrote, his enemies would say that “ambition had been the moving spring of all your actions—that the enthusiasm of your country had gratified your darling passion to the extent of its ability and that, as they had nothing more to give, you would run no farther risk for them.” She warned that the Jeffersonians would dissolve the Union: “I will venture to assert that, at this time, you are the only man in America that dares to do right on all public occasions.”76 Evidently she managed to convince Washington, who decided to stand for a second term.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Citizen Genet
ONCE HE DECIDED to serve a second term, George Washington was reelected by a unanimous 132 votes in the Electoral College. If one counted his selection as commander in chief, president of the Constitutional Convention, and president in his first term, he had compiled a string of four straight unanimous victories. Again inaction had been his most potent form of action, silence his most effective form of expression. Still, it was a subdued triumph for the overburdened president, who confessed to Henry Lee that he “would have experienced chagrin if my re-election had not been by a pretty respectable vote. But to say I feel pleasure from the prospect of commencing another tour of duty would be a departure from truth.”1
On December 13, 1792, Washington conversed with Jefferson about buying porcelain in Germany to dress up the presidential table. He had inquired whether Samuel Shaw, the U.S. consul at Canton, could acquire china there, but Shaw told him that it would take at least two years to arrive. Washington emphasized to Jefferson that he would be gone from office by then, and Jefferson recognized the heavy-handed hint. “I think he asked the question about the manufactories in Germany,” Jefferson concluded, “merely to have an indirect opportunity of telling me he meant to retire, and within the limits of two years.”2 Once again, if he thought he could cut short his captivity to public s
ervice, Washington was fooling himself, and people kept reminding him how much the Union needed him. “There is a prevailing idea in G[reat] B[ritain],” wrote one correspondent, “if not in other parts of Europe, that whenever you are removed, the federal union will be dissolved, the states will separate, and disorder succeed.”3
With a presidential victory assured for Washington, the Jeffersonians tried to register their disaffection and covertly chip away at his power by ousting John Adams as vice president. Purely as a matter of propriety, Washington never openly endorsed Adams, who retained office with 77 votes against a stiff challenge from Governor George Clinton of New York, a firm Jeffersonian, who garnered 50 votes. Washington likewise worried that, if he got involved in congressional races, he might trespass on the separation of powers. This same reasoning made him reluctant to veto legislation, and he did not overrule a bill until April 1792. As their populist rhetoric led to significant inroads among farmers, shopkeepers, and artisans, Republican adherents gained a clear majority in the House of Representatives, guaranteeing a contentious second term for Washington.
A notable feature of that term would be an end to Washington’s special exemption from direct criticism. That winter the new landscape was previewed when Freneau took direct shots at Washington in the National Gazette, accusing him of aping royalty in his presidential etiquette. He published a mock advertisement for a fawning poet laureate who would write obsequious birthday odes to the president. Even Washington’s habit of not shaking hands received a sinister slant: “A certain monarchical prettiness must be highly extolled, such as levees, drawing rooms, stately nods instead of shaking hands, titles of office, seclusion from the people.”4 It would now be open season for sweeping attacks on Washington.
However trying he often found the press, Washington understood its importance in a democracy and voraciously devoured gazettes. Before becoming president, he had lauded newspapers and magazines as “easy vehicles of knowledge, more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty . . . and meliorate the morals of an enlightened and free people.”5 In his unused first inaugural address, he had gone so far as to advocate free postal service for periodicals. As press criticism mounted, however, Washington struggled to retain his faith in an independent press. In October 1792 he told Gouverneur Morris that he regretted that newspapers exaggerated political discontent in the country, but added that “this kind of representation is an evil w[hi]ch must be placed in opposition to the infinite benefits resulting from a free press.”6 A month later, in a more somber mood, he warned Jefferson that Freneau’s invective would yield pernicious results: “These articles tend to produce a separation of the Union, the most dreadful of calamities; and whatever tends to produce anarchy, tends, of course, to produce a resort to monarchical government.”7
To an unusual extent, early American politics was played out in print—one reason the founding generation of politicians was so literate. Publications were avowedly partisan and made no pretense of objectivity. It was a golden age for wielding words as rapier-sharp political weapons. The penchant for writing essays under Roman pseudonyms, designed to underscore the writer’s republican virtues, lent a special savagery to journalism, freeing authors from any obligation to tone down their rhetoric.
For all his years in public service, Washington never developed a thick rind for the cut-and-thrust of politics, and Freneau’s barbed comments stung him to the core. As Jefferson wrote after one talk with Washington that February, the president had bemoaned the “extreme wretchedness of his existence while in office and went lengthily into the late attacks on him for levees &c.”8 One wonders whether Washington was implicitly blaming Jefferson for Freneau’s bruising critiques. Another newspaper tormenting the embattled president in his second term was the General Advertiser, later the Aurora, published by Benjamin Franklin Bache, whose scurrilous attacks on Washington earned him the nickname of “Lightning Rod, Jr.”9 Like Freneau, Bache made the modest presidential levees sound like lavish scenes of decadence from Versailles. Shameless in maligning Washington, Bache even accused him of incompetence during the Revolutionary War and, in the ultimate outrage, doubted that he had supported American independence. “I ask you, sir,” he confronted Washington in an open letter, “to point out ONE SINGLE ACT which unequivocally proves you a FRIEND to the INDEPENDENCE OF AMERICA.”10 Washington dismissed Bache as an “agent or tool” of those out to destroy confidence in the government.11
A president who carefully tended his image found it hard to see it falsely defined by his enemies. And a man who prided himself on his honesty and integrity found it painful to stare down a rising tide of falsehoods, misrepresentations, and distortions about his record. His opponents struck where he was most sensitive—questioning his sense of honor and accusing him of base motives, when he had spent a lifetime defending himself against charges, both real and imaginary, of being motivated by thinly disguised ambition. Pilloried by an increasingly vituperative press, Washington did not respond publicly to criticism at first, having once said that “to persevere in one’s duty and be silent is the best answer to calumny.”12 By the summer of 1793, however, he feared that falsehoods circulating in the press would take root and had to be rebutted aggressively. “The publications in Freneau’s and Bache’s papers are outrages on common decency,” he complained to Henry Lee, noting that their allegations only grew more flagrant when treated with silence.13
The vendetta against Washington’s administration took a bold new turn in January 1793, when Congressman William Branch Giles of Virginia launched an investigation of the Treasury Department and sought to oust Hamilton for official misconduct. Giles was an intimate of Jefferson, who secretly helped to draft the congressional resolutions condemning his fellow cabinet officer. Although Giles accused Hamilton of shuffling money dishonestly from one government account to another, the subsequent congressional investigation thoroughly vindicated the secretary. On March 1, 1793, all nine of Giles’s resolutions against Hamilton were resoundingly defeated.
That winter, Washington’s gloom deepened with the death of George Augustine Washington on February 5, leaving his widow, Fanny, with three small children. Penning a tender note to Fanny, the president invited her to live at Mount Vernon: “You can go no place where you will be more welcome, nor to any where you can live at less expense or trouble.”14 Though Fanny declined, the gesture typified Washington’s exceptional generosity in family matters. Among his many duties, Washington became executor of his nephew’s estate. As he brooded about the decaying state of his farms, he would never again have someone he trusted so totally with his affairs as George Augustine. The death also dealt a terrible blow at a moment when he worried about the future of his business. To David Humphreys, he confessed that “the love of retirement grows every day more and more powerful, and the death of my nephew . . . will, I apprehend, cause my private concerns to suffer very much.”15
As Washington approached his second inaugural on March 4, the National Gazette stepped up attacks on what it derided as presidential pretension. The sneering Freneau served up heaps of abuse about Washington’s birthday celebration—widely honored in Philadelphia—branding it a “monarchical farce” that exhibited “every species of royal pomp and parade.”16 This tirade may explain the extreme simplicity of Washington’s second inauguration. With no precedent for swearing in an incumbent president, Washington asked his cabinet for guidance, and they suggested a public oath at noon in the Senate Chamber, administered by Associate Justice William Cushing, whose circuit encompassed Pennsylvania. The cabinet also advised that “the President go without form, attended by such gentlemen as he may choose, and return without form, except that he be preceded by the marshal.” 17 Perhaps to advertise his lack of ostentation, Washington went alone in his carriage to Congress Hall, strode into the Senate Chamber with minimal fanfare, and delivered the shortest inaugural speech on record—a compact 135 words—in a ceremony intended as the antithesis of monarchical extravaganc
e. As the Pennsylvania Gazette reported, after taking the oath, the president retired “as he had come, without pomp or ceremony. But on his departure from [Congress Hall], the people could no longer refrain [from] obeying the genuine dictates of their hearts, and they saluted him with three cheers.”18
WASHINGTON’S SECOND TERM, a period of domestic strife, was dominated by the French Revolution and its profound reverberations in American politics. In March 1792, during a short-lived burst of optimism, Lafayette had reassured Washington that the anarchy in France was transitory: “Do not believe . . . my dear General, the exaggerated accounts you may receive, particularly from England.”19 That spring Austria and Prussia, bent upon snuffing out the revolutionary upstarts in Paris, invited England, Holland, and Russia to participate in an alliance of imperial states. Then in late April, France declared war against Austria and Prussia; they returned the favor by invading France a few months later. In the resulting atmosphere of fear and suspicion, the radical Jacobins declared a state of emergency. With formidable courage, Lafayette denounced the Jacobins to the National Assembly: “Organized like a separate empire in the city . . . this sect has formed a separate nation amidst the French people, usurping their powers and subjugating their representatives . . . I denounce them . . . They would overturn our laws.”20
In August 1792, to Lafayette’s horror, the Jacobins incited a popular insurrection that included the storming of the Tuileries in Paris and the butchery of the Swiss Guards defending the palace. The king was abruptly dethroned. Refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the civil constitution, nearly 25,000 priests fled the country amid a horrifying wave of anticlerical violence. A month later Parisian mobs engineered the September Massacres, slaughtering more than fourteen hundred prisoners, many of them aristocrats or royalist priests. Ejected from his military command and charged with treason, Lafayette fled to Belgium. “What safety is there in a country where Robespierre is a sage, Danton is an honest man, and Marat a God?” he wondered.21 Arrested by Austrian forces, he spent the next five years languishing in ghastly Prussian and Austrian prisons. With cruel irony, he was charged with having clapped the French king in irons and kept him in captivity. While claiming the rights of an honorary American citizen, Lafayette was confined in a small, filthy, vermin-infested cell.
