The Indians were to keep American settlements as far upriver as possible and to prevent any expeditions from floating down (either as freebooters or with the approval of a state or the federal government) to capture Louisiana and open the Mississippi by force. The tribes also contributed to Spanish prosperity by selling their furs to traders from Louisiana.
Holding the Mississippi closed reduced, by making settlement less profitable, the flow of frontiersmen above. It could also be used in an effort to pry the settlers who did appear away from the United States. The “Spanish Conspiracy,” which Washington inherited when he became President, involved offering trading concessions (and also bribes) to those individuals or groups who would move from American territory on the east bank of the Mississippi onto Spanish territory on the west bank; or else would seek to form independent nations allied with Spain.
Although during the Confederation, Washington had been frightened of such intrigue, writing that the settlers were as on a pivot that could turn any way, he was now convinced that the matter could be handled by effective administration. A strong, united, and prosperous United States would hold loyalty like a magnet. The Spanish Conspiracy did indeed fade, all the more because Congress extended governmental bodies across the mountains, establishing the Southwest Territory and admitting Kentucky into the union.*
Not Spanish intrigue but the state of Georgia created the greatest danger in the southern forests. Taking advantage of a fraudulent purchase, negotiated before the federal government had been established, Georgia authorized a vast land grab between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. The tribes, whose hunting grounds would be preempted, threatened a war, which might well bring the United States into conflict with Spain, the Indians’ ally. Washington leapt into the breach: he issued a proclamation forbidding settlement in the Yazoo tract, and negotiated with the Creek Indians the Treaty of New York (August, 1790) which returned to the tribes a quantity of land that Georgia claimed. Since Spain wanted war no more than did Washington, all parties except Georgia were pleased.
The southern frontier remained quiescent throughout Washington’s first term. Not so the northern, where Great Britain supported and incited Indian warfare.
The treaty which had ended the Revolutionary War had not ended British hostility. England had not only enacted trade regulations that were greatly to the disadvantage of American shipping, but had refused to establish diplomatic relations with the United States. Early in 1791, Washington departed from his usual hands-off policy with Congress. He backed Jefferson in a renewed attempt to secure laws that applied to British ships the same restrictions Britain applied to American.
Hamilton greatly admired the British. He believed that upsetting the existing pattern of commerce—the lion’s share was with Britain—would damage American prosperity, and also bankrupt the federal government, whose customs revenues depended on a flourishing trade. In a manner which would have horrified Washington (had he known of it) Hamilton conferred secretly with an undercover British representative in Philadelphia. He warned George Beckwith that the situation was dangerous, but added that it could be handled if the British soothed public opinion by finally opening formal diplomatic relations. A British announcement that they would send a minister worked as Hamilton had foreseen. Despite Washington and Jefferson, Congress defeated trade retaliation.
Although Washington was disappointed, the issue was by no means as grievous as those on the northern frontier.
At the post-Revolutionary peace conference, the British negotiators had revealed ignorance of American geography by ceding to the United States the forts on the Great Lakes, from Oswego to Niagara, which controlled the route along which the fur harvest from the northwest reached Canada. Another colossal error was granting to the new nation the fur-bearing forests south of the Great Lakes and north of the Ohio. These two mistakes threatened to destroy the Canadian fur trade, which was the most profitable single industry in North America.
When the British realized what had been sacrificed, they began taking steps to redress the blunder. They noted that the American negotiators had agreed that the pre-Revolutionary debts owed British merchants would be paid. The states, mostly southern, where the debtors lived, had refused to enact laws that would enforce compliance. The British used this American breach of the treaty as a justification for not surrendering their forts. Washington protested endlessly to the British, but the federal government lacked the power to clear up the situation by forcing payment on the delinquent states.
To hold the Ohio region, the British had a different strategy. Everyone agreed that the treaty provision concerning this land did not extinguish the Indian titles; it only gave the United States an exclusive right to buy. The British encouraged the tribes to insist that all purchases made by the Americans were fraudulent, and they saw to it that the warriors were armed. Americans who insisted on settling west of the Ohio were slaughtered.
It took Washington some time to realize the extent of British participation and the resulting seriousness of the menace. Thus, in the fall of 1790, he blamed “a small refugee banditti of Cherokees and Shawnees, who can be easily chastized.”
Having recognized the British role, Washington secured from Congress the enlargement of the tiny regular army by one regiment. In 1791, a force under General Arthur St. Clair advanced from Fort Washington (Cincinnati) into present-day Indiana to chastise the warring tribes. Washington warned St. Clair to beware of ambush. During November, St. Clair was ambushed in a replay of the defeat of Braddock that was perhaps Washington’s most dreadful memory.
A leading Revolutionary commander, General Anthony Wayne, was now empowered to raise a larger army. As his force gradually accreted during the summer of 1792, Indian terror spread to settlements east of the Ohio, and Washington undertook the most extensive effort in American history to find some better solution to the Indian problem than continual fighting.
He tried to impress on Congress and the state governments the importance of justice in Indian relations. The frontier would always be aflame if the murder of an Indian were not considered the same as the murder of a white man. The courts should protect Indian property, and he took it upon himself to order new negotiations with the tribes at which old treaties would be examined. If the treaties were found to have been unjustly negotiated, the Indians would be indemnified with new purchase money or given back their land.
Jefferson encouraged political alliance between the southern agrarians and those on the frontiers by protesting. He insisted that to return any land ever annexed by the United States was contrary to the Constitution. He demanded that military action against the Indians be not sacrificed to negotiation. Washington tried vainly to win Jefferson around, but was not deflected from his own course.
The Indians, whom he had denounced during the French and Indian War as “butchering” monsters, he now regarded as “poor wretches.” Anxious to prevent the inevitable western expansion from driving them ever deeper into exile, he wished to undertake “such rational experiments … as may from time to time suit their condition” to prepare the Indians to be absorbed, as so many other groups were being, into white American life. They would have to abandon their hunting economy, which required huge tracts of forest that would certainly be destroyed by settlement, but if they would learn farming and handicrafts, they could remain on their most fertile tracts as settlement came in around them.
Since this would involve not only a total revolution in Indian culture, but also a revolutionary reversal of the attitudes towards each other of frontiersmen and Indians, it may well have been the most impractical idea that Washington ever seriously espoused. In any case, no time could have been less ripe. Having defeated two military forces sent against them by the United States, the Indians felt confident that they could defeat any successors. And the British continued to egg them on.
Washington’s unofficial representative in London, Gouverneur Morris, reported that British policy was to make her control of the no
rthern Indians so clear that the United States would be driven to call her in as mediator. Britain would then establish an extensive permanent Indian territory north of the Ohio which would supply her fur trade, and, under her protection, act as a buffer for the defense of Canada.
Washington spluttered to Morris, “The United States will never have occasion, I hope, to ask for the interposition of that power or any other to establish peace within their own territory.” But the British continued to sabotage all efforts towards a peaceful settlement. Wayne’s army would probably have to march.
Washington was still trying to negotiate with the Indians when his first term ended.
The American diplomatic corps in Europe, which had in fact almost ceased to exist, had to be reorganized in response to the British recognition of the United States. Washington appointed as Minister to Great Britain Thomas Pinckney, a South Carolinian satisfactory to Jefferson. Jefferson was gratified by having his former secretary, William Short, appointed to Holland. Finally filling the vacancy left when Jefferson had accepted State, Washington appointed to France his own intimate friend Gouverneur Morris.
Morris was brilliant: the actual wording of the Constitution came from his pen. But Morris was sarcastic to those he considered more stupid than he, and possessed of such a reputation for licentiousness that the leg he had lost in a carriage accident was generally considered to have come off as a result of his jumping out of a lady’s window as her husband came in at the door. He was an inveterate prankster. Those who believed Washington was always proper and grave could not understand why he was intimate with such a man. They did know that Washington relished scapegraces who kept him amused.
As a financier intimately associated with the Hamiltonian circle, Morris belonged to the pro-British faction. Yet, as Washington’s unofficial representative in London, he had followed without deviation the interests of the United States, making reports Washington had used in his efforts to persuade Congress into commercial retaliation. Now, although Washington’s prestige carried the confirmation through, Morris was strongly opposed in the Senate.
Washington, usually so determined to keep personal affection from influencing his political acts, felt called on to write a remarkable letter. He had, he told Morris, appointed him “with all my heart.” But Morris should know that he had been charged in Congress with “imprudence of conversation and conduct. It was urged that your habits of expression indicated a hauteur disgusting to those who happen to differ from you.… That in France you were considered as a favorer of aristocracy.… That under this impression, you could not be an acceptable public character.” His critics believed that Morris lacked the “circumspection” that “should be observed by our representatives abroad.”
Washington blamed Morris’s reputation on “the promptitude with which your lively and brilliant imagination is displayed,” which allowed “too little time for deliberation and correction.… In this statement you have the pros and cons. By reciting them, I give you a proof of my friendship if I give none of my policy or judgment.” He was sure that Morris would use his own good judgment to reform.
The first major violent act of the French Revolution, the storming of the Bastille, resulted in Washington’s receiving a package from France. It contained the “main key” of the “fortress of despotism.” Lafayette had sent it as “a tribute which I owe as a son to my adoptive father, as an aide-de-camp to my general, and as a missionary of liberty to its patriarch.” Washington hung the key in the Presidential Mansion, but added, so as not to prejudice the foreign policy of the United States, an engraved portrait of Louis XVI.
Lafayette was leading the French revolt in an effort to reform the French monarchy peacefully rather than to overthrow it with violence. He was, in fact, trying to achieve such a benign social change as had eventuated from the American Revolution. Washington was, of course, extremely sympathetic, yet he was far from sanguine.
“I assure you,” he wrote his spiritual son, “I have often contemplated with great anxiety the danger to which you are personally exposed.… The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded. Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for the time all public authority and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible. In Paris, we may suppose these tumults are peculiarly disastrous at this time, when the public mind is in a ferment and when (as is always the case on such occasions) there are not wanting wicked and designing men whose element is confusion and who will not hesitate in destroying public tranquillity to gain a favorite point.”
Washington could only hope, so he wrote Gouverneur Morris, that the “disorders, oppressions, and incertitude … will terminate very much in favor of the rights of man.”
In mid-August, 1791, Washington was bowing repeatedly to the circle of gentlemen at one of his levees when he was notified that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had shattered Lafayette’s effort towards reform. The royal couple had been apprehended as they tried to flee from Paris to join a loyal military force that would protect them until the aristocratic armies of Prussia and Austria could come to their aid. Jefferson noted with disapproval that he had never seen Washington “so dejected by any circumstance.”
Jefferson continued to be concerned by Washington’s “forebodings.” Early in 1792, when the Terror was hardly more than a year away, the Secretary of State still believed that France was hurrying towards a political utopia. Why had Washington so little faith that he was worried lest France go ever deeper “into confusion”? The fault could lie with the dispatches of Morris, “a high-flying monarchy man” who, in Jefferson’s opinion, was “shutting his eyes and his faith to every fact against his wishes.” But why had Washington appointed Morris?
A dreadful thought which he could not repel formed in Jefferson’s mind. Perhaps the President was in fact at heart a monarchist!
* A balance between North and South was kept by simultaneously admitting Vermont, raising the number of states to fifteen.
THIRTY-THREE
Desire to Escape
(1791–1792)
In April, 1791, Washington set out on a tour of the southern states similar to his New England tour of the previous summer. In these days of redundant communication, it is hard to credit that, owing to a confusion of roads and mails, the President was completely out of touch with his government for two months. He had provided for decisions to be made in his absence, and, as it turned out, none of importance were called for.
Jefferson’s expressed concern about the President’s safety was not because he was taking along no secret service men, no guards—his companions were only his valet and hostlers—but because the roads would be perilously bad. Jefferson urged Washington to “lower the hang of your carriage” and to employ not a coachman but two postilions who would ride ahead, one for each pair of the four horses. Washington shrugged off precautions.
Washington had never before visited North Carolina, South Carolina, or Georgia. Traveling south along the coast—Halifax, Newbern, Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah—and back along the fall line—Augusta, Camden, Salisbury, Winston-Salem—he was surprised by the prevailing barrenness of the land and the wretchedness of the taverns. Populations were indeed so sparse that word of his advance did not travel before him. Far from being bothered, as in New England, by endless ceremonial greetings and dust-raising militiamen on horseback, he moved often through complete emptiness. Innkeepers were amazed when a little cavalcade that had turned into their dooryards—a coach, a baggage wagon, and some led extra horses—proved to contain “the greatest man in the world.”
As an agriculturalist and a student of manufactures Washington found little to record, but he was fascinated by the belles who crowded to meet him in every considerable settlement. He recorded in his diary that there were “about seventy” in Newbern, “sixty-two” in Wilmington, and in Charleston, a city where he much admired the “beauty” of the streets, “at least four hundred ladies, the number and appearance of which exceeded anything of the
kind I had ever seen.” He was later to send his “grateful respect” to the “fair compatriots” of Charleston who had so “flattered” him.
Having found amusement in keeping careful track, Washington noted that while away from Philadelphia he had traveled 1,887 miles. He was proud that “the same horses performed the whole tour and, although much reduced in flesh, kept up their full spirits to the last day.” He himself had “rather gained flesh.”
Washington diagnosed general satisfaction with the federal government, although he found anger in Georgia at the reversal of the Yazoo land grab. “Little was said of the banking act.” He was worried enough by rumors of frontier opposition to a tax which had been voted on whiskey that, on his way back to Philadelphia, he made a special trip to western Pennsylvania—Reading and Lancaster. He decided that nothing more was required to make the law palatable than certain minor changes. He concluded that the pockets of opposition to the government that he encountered were to be blamed on “some demagogue” or speculator in western land.
During that summer Jefferson and Madison also made a trip. They had it well in mind that a new House of Representatives was to be elected in 1792. Although they asserted that their journey through New York State was no more than a vacation, historians have reasoned that they were seeking political allies. This was to be done by reviving an old issue.
At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, opposition in New York had been particularly strong. States’ rights sentiment had by no means died away there. The perennial governor, George Clinton, distrusted federal power. Although Madison had been at the Constitutional Convention a passionate advocate of federal power, he now shared with Jefferson the belief that the federal government was becoming malign under the control of Hamilton. However inconsistently, he further agreed that, since opposition in the states (and particularly Virginia) was the most available antidote, the Republicans should advocate states’ rights. Why then should there not be a coalition between the Virginians and the powerful faction in New York which was ambivalent about the whole conception of federal government?
Washington- The Indispensable Man Page 28
