by Ron Chernow
As if he didn’t have troubles enough, Washington had to make a sudden return to Mount Vernon to cope with the death of Anthony Whitting, who had replaced George Augustine as manager of Mount Vernon. The president, at his wit’s end, complained that “my concerns at Mount Vernon are left as a body without a head.”52
On July 8, while Washington was at Mount Vernon, the cabinet discussed what to do about La Petite Démocrate, anchored in the Delaware River. Hamilton and Knox wanted to fortify Mud Island, farther down the Delaware, to intercept the ship if it tried to sail—advice rejected by Jefferson. Two days later Jefferson took up the matter with Genet, who assured him that the renegade ship would stay put until Washington returned. Swollen with power, Genet also threatened, in a grave violation of diplomatic protocol, to appeal over Washington’s head to the American people to overturn the neutrality policy. Washington was incensed over Genet’s conduct, which brought to the surface his bottled-up rage against Jefferson. He flatly asked his secretary of state: “Is the minister of the French Republic to set the acts of this government at defiance—with impunity and then threaten the executive with an appeal to the people?”53 Struggling with a fever, Jefferson relayed to Washington Genet’s assurance that the ship would stay put until Washington determined its fate. Within a day or two Genet violated his promise as La Petite Démocrate slipped past Mud Island and fled out to sea, in a flagrant breach of American neutrality. The beleaguered president, weary of the tussle between the French and British ministers, told Henry Lee that since his return to Philadelphia “I have been more than ever overwhelmed with their complaints. In a word, the trouble they give is hardly to be described.”54
In the absence of a Justice Department, Washington intermittently turned to Chief Justice Jay for legal advice. In July the cabinet sent Jay twenty-nine queries to clarify the meaning of neutrality and rule on American jurisdiction over the French seizure of ships in American waters. On August 8, replying on behalf of the Supreme Court, Jay declined to render an advisory opinion. The Constitution, he said, had set up three independent branches of government, and it would be improper for “judges of a court in the last resort” to issue an opinion that could be accepted or rejected by the president.55 This decision set a major precedent, placing a protective barrier between the presidency and an independent judiciary and sharply defining lines that had hitherto been indistinct. In lieu of the Court’s opinion, Washington’s cabinet issued a set of rules governing the conduct of belligerents, prohibiting them from arming privateers or bringing prizes captured in American waters into American ports.
Genet’s conduct stirred up a tempest in Philadelphia, and howling mobs of his supporters marched on the presidential mansion. “The town is one continuous scene of riot,” the British consul reported. “French seamen range the streets night and day with cutlasses and commit the most daring outrages. Genet seems ready to raise the tricolor and proclaim himself proconsul.”56 This British hyperbole was corroborated by John Adams, years later, in a letter to Jefferson: “You certainly never felt the terrorism excited by Genet in 1793 when ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the government or compel it to declare war in favor of the French Revolution and against England.”57
Against this backdrop Washington convened a tense cabinet session on July 23 to discuss whether there was a way to demand Genet’s recall without insulting France. Refusing to be swayed by the Frenchman’s blackmail, he thought Genet’s intemperate letters should be shown to the French. Hamilton seized on the occasion to float his theory that a “faction” wished to “overthrow” the government and that, to stop people from joining these “incendiaries,” the administration should disclose the whole story of Genet’s insolent conduct.58 Of course, Hamilton knew that the chief instigator of that faction sat right there in the room: Thomas Jefferson. At this point even Jefferson concluded that Genet was “absolutely incorrigible” and was harming the Republican cause.59 After repeated brushes with Genet, Jefferson described him in these caustic terms: “Hot-headed, all imagination, no judgment, passionate, disrespectful and even indecent toward the president.”60
By this point the vicious cabinet infighting was tearing Washington apart. No sooner had he agreed to serve a second term than he regretted it. He was staggered by the rabid abuse spewed out by the Republican press. During his presidency, many newspapers had gone from being staid and neutral to being organs of party politics and propaganda. In May he asked Jefferson to dismiss Freneau from his State Department job after the editor made the nonsensical statement that Washington had issued the neutrality statement only after “Anglomen” had threatened to chop off his head. Jefferson resisted the presidential request. Then at a memorable cabinet meeting on August 2, Henry Knox brought a copy of a Freneau squib entitled “The Funeral Dirge of George Washington and James Wilson, King and Judges.” Knox showed the president a savage satirical cartoon in which his head was being inserted in a guillotine, as if he were Louis XVI. It triggered a volcanic display of Washington’s temper. The graphic scene was recorded by Jefferson:The President was much inflamed; got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself; ran on much on the personal abuse which has been bestowed on him; defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government which was not done on the purest motives; [said] that he had never repented but once the having slipped the moment of resigning his office and that was every moment since; that by God he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation; that he had rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world; and yet they were charging him with wanting to be a king. That that rascal Freneau sent him three of his papers every day, as if he thought he would become the distributor of his paper; that he could see in this nothing but an impudent design to insult him. He ended in this high tone.61
So concerned was Henry Knox about Washington’s nervous strain that he sat down three days later to compose a letter on the need for the president to pull himself together and project an aura of calm fortitude: “The prudent and sober part of the community regard, as in the case of a storm, the mind and countenance of the chief pilot. While he remains confident and composed, happiness is diffused around, but, when he doubts, then anxiety and fear have their full effect.”62 It was a measure of the trust between the two men that Knox could write such an unvarnished message to Washington.
For all the bitter strife in his cabinet, Washington valued the superior talents of Hamilton and Jefferson and was dismayed at the thought of losing them. On July 31 Jefferson submitted a letter announcing his intention to leave office at the end of September. A week later Washington stopped by Jefferson’s country house and made a personal appeal for him to postpone his departure. The president referred to his own regret at having stayed in office, commenting “how much it was increased by seeing that he was to be deserted by those on whose aid he had counted.”63 Few men were better versed in foreign affairs or the intrigues of foreign courts than Jefferson, he said. In response, Jefferson alluded to his “excessive repugnance to public life” and how hard he found it to serve when “merchants connected closely with England” as well as speculators “bear me peculiar hatred.”64 Washington then tackled head-on the ubiquitous conspiracy theories. He credited the good intentions of the Republicans and said he understood that sincere people had fears of a monarchical party. But, he went on, “the constitution we have is an excellent one, if we can keep it where it is; that it was indeed supposed there was a party disposed to change it into a monarchical form, but that he could conscientiously declare there was not a man in the U.S. who would set his face more decidedly against it than himself.”65 Washington successfully cajoled Jefferson into staying stay in office a little longer.
Meanwhile Citizen Genet was not about to depart quietly. In mid-August, when John Jay and Rufus King revealed in a New York newspaper that Genet had threatened to make a dire
ct appeal to the American people over the president’s head, the country reacted with righteous indignation. Genet’s intemperance ultimately proved a bonanza for the Federalists. In late August the cabinet agreed unanimously to demand his recall and give the French a full accounting of his behavior. As it happened, the Jacobins had already dispatched his successor, Jean-Antoine Fauchet, who had orders to send Genet home to stand trial for “crimes” against the revolution. Whatever his misgivings about Genet, Washington did not care to send him to his death and granted him asylum in the United States. The Frenchman married the daughter of Governor George Clinton and passed the remainder of his days in upstate New York.
The saga of Citizen Genet had an ongoing afterlife, since his visit spawned a new form of political club—the so-called Democratic-Republican Societies. Their organizers intended them to evoke the Sons of Liberty chapters, while apprehensive Federalists found them eerily reminiscent of the French Jacobin clubs. The first one was established in April 1793 in Philadelphia; ten more were formed before year’s end, and at least two dozen more the next year. Washington always distinguished between legitimate criticism of government and an illegitimate, “diabolical” sort that sought to destroy confidence in public servants. Early on, he concluded that the new societies were of the illegitimate variety, spouting popular rhetoric while tearing down the fabric of government, “even at the expense of plunging this country in the horrors of a disastrous war.”66 He regarded them as tools of a French plot to destroy American neutrality and drag the country into war. While he acknowledged their right to protest, he was persuaded that the new societies constituted a menace because their permanence showed a settled hostility to the government.
Washington’s views on dissent were colored by his political philosophy. Along with other Federalists, he thought that officials, once elected, should apply their superior judgment and experience to make decisions on behalf of the populace. As he enunciated this position: “My political creed therefore is, to be wise in the choice of delegates—support them like gentlemen, while they are our representatives—give them competent powers for all federal purposes—support them in the due exercise thereof—and, lastly, to compel them to close attendance in Congress during their delegation.”67 As an extension of this view, Washington believed that voters, having once elected representatives, should lend them support. He found it difficult to execute the philosophical leap that voters reserved the right to a continuing critique of their elected officials. The Republicans, by contrast, wanted representatives to be continually responsive to voters and receptive to political criticism.
Some historians have faulted Washington for being intolerant of dissent, but mitigating circumstances should be cited. The concept of republican government was new, and nobody knew exactly how much criticism it could withstand. From the close of the war, Americans had worried about foreign intrusion, especially attempts by European imperial powers to roll back the Revolution, and many members of the new Democratic-Republican Societies openly flaunted their admiration for the French Revolution. Also, many members of the opposition, most notably Jefferson, had opposed or felt highly ambivalent about the Constitution, and it was not unthinkable that they would repudiate it once in power. Washington did not see himself, as did many critics, as leader of the Federalist party, so the Republicans struck him as a harmful faction rather than simply the opposing party. Once again Washington was a transitional figure who bore many traces of the colonial past while slowly evolving into the representative of a more egalitarian age.
What is indisputable is that the Democratic-Republican Societies led to a much more raucous style of American politics. Instead of discussing politics politely at dinner tables or in smoky taverns, these groups were likely to take to the streets in mass rallies. These government critics also had fewer qualms about chastising their leaders. By the end of 1793 the diatribes against Washington no longer dwelled simply on his supposed imitation of the crowned heads of Europe. Now the opposition sought to debunk his entire life and tear to shreds the upright image he had so sedulously fostered. That December, the New-York Journal said that his early years had been marked by “gambling, reveling, horse racing and horse whipping,” that he was “infamously niggardly” in business matters, and that despite his feigned religious devotion, he was a “most horrid swearer and blasphemer.”68 For George Washington, American politics had become a strange and disorienting new world.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Bring Out Your Dead
THE FORCE THAT COOLED, at least temporarily, the fervid agitation of the Democratic-Republican clubs was not political but medical: the yellow fever epidemic that lashed the capital during the summer of 1793. Later on John Adams was adamant that “nothing but the yellow fever . . . could have saved the United States from a total revolution of government.”1 One of its first victims was a treasured figure in the presidential household, Polly Lear, the wife of Washington’s secretary Tobias, who had assisted Martha with numerous household duties. Martha had converted her into another surrogate daughter, while George valued her as “an amiable and inoffensive little woman.”2 When Polly died on July 28, age twenty-three, Washington honored her with the sort of full-dress funeral that might have bid farewell to a cabinet officer. Deviating from his strict policy of never attending funerals, he led a procession that included Hamilton, Jefferson, Knox, and three Supreme Court justices as pallbearers. It was the one time that Washington attended a funeral as president. When Tobias Lear, after a seven-year association with Washington, resigned his post to make money in business, he was replaced by Martha’s nephew Bartholomew Dandridge and George’s nephew Howell Lewis. “In whatever place you may be, or in whatever walk of life you may move,” Washington assured Lear, “my best wishes will attend you, for I am and always shall be your sincere friend.” 3
As August progressed, the yellow fever scourge spread from the wharves to the city’s interior: victims ran high fevers, spewed black vomit, hemorrhaged blood from every orifice, and developed jaundice before they expired. By late August the sights and smells of death saturated the city, especially the groaning carts, stacked high with corpses, that trundled through the streets as their drivers intoned, “Bring out your dead.”4 To stem the fever, the authorities tried burning barrels of tar, which polluted the air with a potent, acrid stench. The epidemic was by then carrying away twenty victims daily. Emptied by spreading panic, most public office buildings shut down, and government employees decamped from the city. The Supreme Court sat for only two days before deciding to swell the general exodus.
Whether from instinctive courage or a stoic belief in death as something fore-ordained, George Washington again behaved as if endowed with supernatural immunity. He showed the same sangfroid as when bullets whizzed past him during the French and Indian War. He urged Martha to return with their grandchildren to Mount Vernon, but she refused to desert him. By early September yellow fever had taken a grim toll on government workers: six clerks died in the Treasury Department, seven in the customs service, and three in the Post Office. On September 6, upon learning that Hamilton had shown early symptoms of the fever, Washington rushed to him six bottles of wine, coupled with a sympathetic message. Treated by his childhood friend Dr. Edward Stevens, Hamilton survived the disease and then fled with his wife, Elizabeth, to the Schuyler mansion in Albany. Since Martha wouldn’t abandon him, Washington opted to leave for Mount Vernon on September 10, departing in sufficient haste that he left behind his official papers. He and Martha invited Eliza Powel to escape with them to Virginia. Though deeply touched by the gesture, Powel decided that she could not abandon her husband, then the speaker of the Pennsylvania Senate, lest he get sick and require help. “The conflict between duty and inclination is a severe trial of my feelings,” she told the Washingtons, “but, as I believe it is always best to adhere to the line of duty, I beg to decline the pleasure I proposed to myself in accompanying you to Virginia at this time.”5 Her caution was prophetic: three
weeks later her husband joined the growing list of fatalities. Ironically, Eliza was off at her brother’s farm at the time and experienced “a lasting source of affliction” for not having been present at her husband’s bedside at the end.6
After urging him to safeguard the War Department clerks, Washington left Henry Knox in charge as acting president, with instructions to submit a weekly report on developments in the now-deserted capital. The doughty Knox was the last high-ranking official to depart. “All my efficient clerks have left me from apprehension,” Knox reported in mid-September, noting that fatalities in the capital had zoomed to one hundred per day. “The streets are lonely to a melancholy degree. The merchants generally have fled . . . In fine, the stroke is as heavy as if an army of enemies had possessed the city without plundering it.”7 After Jefferson found only a single clerk toiling at the State Department, he decided it was high time to head for Virginia. By mid-October 3,500 Philadelphians, or one-tenth of the population, had succumbed to yellow fever, leaving the city, in Washington’s words, “almost depopulated by removals and deaths.”8
Eager to resume government operations and show that the republic could function even under extreme duress, Washington wanted to convene emergency sessions of Congress outside the capital, but he was unsure of their constitutionality. To his credit, he did not automatically assume autocratic powers in a crisis but tried to conform faithfully to the letter of the law. As alternate sites, he considered several nearby cities, among them Germantown, Wilmington, Trenton, Annapolis, and Reading. When he stopped at Mount Vernon, Jefferson, a strict constructionist, gave Washington his opinion that the government could lawfully assemble only in Philadelphia, even if Congress had to meet in an open field. Reluctant to be ham-strung by this restrictive view, Washington turned to the one person guaranteed to serve up a more liberal view of federal powers: Alexander Hamilton. In tapping his treasury secretary, Washington hinted broadly at his preferred outcome, telling him that “as none can take a more comprehensive view and . . . a less partial one on the subject than yourself . . . I pray you to dilate fully upon the several points here brought to your consideration.”9 Engaging in fancy semantic footwork, Hamilton cracked open the legal logjam by saying that Washington could recommend that the government meet elsewhere, although he couldn’t order it. Hamilton favored Germantown, close to Philadelphia, as the optimal site, and it was duly chosen.
