Washington- The Indispensable Man

by James Thomas Flexner

  Whether or not Jefferson and Madison began at this time building their political alliance with Clinton, it is certain that they did take the fateful step of recruiting Philip Freneau. They wished to create, by appealing to the people, a popular surge that would bring into the House of Representatives a majority following their principles. Freneau, a former classmate of Madison’s at Princeton, was not only a poet but a journalist brilliant at vituperative controversy. He was induced to move from New Jersey to Philadelphia. Jefferson appointed him translator to the Department of State, a salaried post that left him plenty of time for other pursuits. The Republicans then backed Freneau in founding the National Gazette. A journal not merely local but intended to be distributed all over the nation, the National Gazette would grapple with the only other comparable periodical, the Gazette of the United States, which was partly supported by Treasury advertising and was Hamiltonian.

  In February, 1792, Freneau opened a sustained attack on Hamilton’s measures: they would load the nation with unnecessary debt, encourage speculation, and lead to monarchy. “Artifice and deception,” Freneau charged, were fostering a “revolution in favor of the few. Another revolution must and will be brought about in favor of the people.”

  Hamilton did not need to hire a propagandist. He leapt into the newspapers himself under a series of aliases. Jefferson, he stated, was using the government payroll to mount a treacherous attack on the government and should resign. Jefferson’s objective was to undermine the national government by destroying financial credit. A bankrupt nation would slip into disunion and anarchy, opening the way for Jefferson to lead the United States down the bloody road of the French Revolution.

  “The newspapers,” Washington commented, “are surcharged and some of them indecently communicative of charges that stand in need of evidence for their support.” He feared for the unity or at least the harmony of the nation.

  The election of 1792 was not only for members of Congress. It was also a presidential year. Washington informed his cabinet and his old friend Madison that he did not intend to run again.

  This decision was partly due to his belief that his voluntary retirement—he knew that should he accept a second term he would not be opposed—was necessary to complete the republican experiment that he hoped would point to a glorious future for all mankind. Aristocratic theorists believed that the people could not peaceably engineer a turnover from one chief executive to another. If Washington were to stay on until he died in office, to be succeeded by his elected “crown prince,” the Vice President, the succession would resemble the practice of monarchies. Washington wished by stepping down to encourage such a “rotation in the elective officers” as would bring “liberty and safety” to the government.

  Washington’s personal reasons for seeking retirement were also strong. Most grievous was the fear that he was losing his mental powers. He was, it is true, only sixty, but the Washingtons were a short-lived family; he had suffered through many severe illnesses; he had been torn by decades of strain. To Madison he stated that even at the start of his Presidency he had “found himself deficient in many of the essential qualifications, owing to his inexperience in the forms of public business, his unfitness to judge of legal questions and questions arising out of the Constitution.” Now this situation had worsened.

  To Jefferson, Washington explained “that he really felt himself growing old; his bodily health less firm; his memory—always bad—becoming worse; and perhaps the other faculties of his mind showing a decay to others of which he was insensible himself. That this apprehension particularly oppressed him; that he found, moreover, his activity lessened. Business, therefore, [became] more irksome, and tranquillity and retirement became an irresistible passion.”

  Washington was still worried at having broken his promise, made on his resignation from the army, that he would never emerge from private life. Assurances that his participation would help the people accept a government “of sufficient efficacy for their own good” had lured him to the Constitutional Convention and the first Presidency. Were he to continue longer, “it might give room to say that, having tasted the sweets of office, he could not do without them.”

  The truth was that what sweets of office he had first enjoyed had turned sour. He told Madison that “his inclination would lead him rather to … take his spade in his hand and work for his bread than remain in his present situation.”

  The unpleasantness of that situation was being augmented by “a spirit of party” in his own government and by increasingly clear “discontents among the people.” Although, as he commented to Jefferson, Freneau’s National Gazette had refrained from attacking him personally, “he must be a fool indeed to swallow the little sugar plums here and there thrown out to him.” In condemning the executive “they condemned him, for if they thought there were measures pursued contrary to his sentiment, they must conceive him too careless to attend to them or too stupid to understand them.”

  Washington mourned that the United States had some “infamous newspapers.” However, if their misrepresentations were balanced against “the infinite blessings resulting from a free press,” there could be no doubt concerning the pitch of the scale. He urged on Congress postal laws that would encourage “the transmission of newspapers to distant parts of the country.” His personal conclusion was that, since his presence was not fostering harmony, “his return to private life was consistent with every public consideration.”

  This conclusion elicited protests from everyone to whom he confided his hopes. Jefferson and Madison as well as Hamilton stated that he must remain until the present controversy was resolved or at least abated. Fears sometimes reached great heights. Randolph warned of a possible “civil war” if Washington stayed home. Jefferson told Washington, “North and South will hang together if they have you to hang on.”

  To help him draft a farewell address, Washington called in not Hamilton but his older adviser, Madison. Madison was to point out “in plain and modest terms … that we are all children of the same country.… That our interest, however diversified in local and smaller matters, is the same in all the great and essential concerns of the nation.”

  The economic proclivities of the various regions could be made to key together to “render the whole (at no distant period) one of the most independent in the world.”

  He also wished to point out “that the established government, being the work of our own hands, with the seeds of amendment grafted in the Constitution, may by wisdom, good dispositions, and mutual allowances, aided by experience, bring it as near to perfection as any human institution ever approximated; and therefore the only strife among us ought to be who should be foremost in facilitating and finally accomplishing such great and desirable objects by giving every possible support and cement to the union.”

  Washington asked Madison to advise him on when to notify the electorate that he would not again be available. Madison insisted that he must stay on. Washington replied that his “disinclination to it was becoming every day more and more fixed.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  No Exit

  (1790–1793)

  Concerning such a changeover of power as Washington’s retirement would necessitate, the lessons of history were hardly reassuring. Contests over succession had proved so calamitous that monarchies consistently preferred the acceptance of a sadistic, half-witted legitimate heir to opening the crown to the bloody rivalry of pretenders. So that the government would go on as smoothly as possible, Washington wished his own withdrawal to be the only change in the executive. He wished the entire cabinet to remain, at least until the will of the new president was known. Washington confidently believed that as he himself withdrew, Jefferson and Hamilton would go on hand in hand. He did not recognize the depth of the disagreement between his two most important ministers.

  As long as men were seeking the same objective—in this case the strengthening of the nation through republican procedures—there was no reason, as Washing
ton saw it, why they could not argue concerning the best road but nonetheless proceed together. As he later put it, while recognizing marked differences in “political sentiments among his advisers,” he had “never suspected it had gone so far in producing a personal difference.” The discovery was, when it came, a shocking one: reason could reconcile political arguments, but personal differences?—hatreds?

  As he had listened to cabinet discussions, his mind had been so directed at the essence that he had discounted the fire and rancor with which arguments were presented. Preferring to comprehend each point of view in its pristine entirety, he had rarely intervened at the debates to bring the opponents into agreement. Because less time was then wasted on what he considered surface matters, he often asked each contestant to present him with a separately prepared written argument. His methods allowed every man his say, and he seriously attended to every opinion. He therefore expected all to accept his eventual conclusions.

  Washington prepared, if only in his mind, the agenda of the meetings, and was so opposed to deviations that his ministers could only initiate a subject if they could somehow hook it onto some matter the President had decided to discuss. He was convivial with his cabinet ministers, but at social occasions he engaged only in light talk. No government official and no adviser, not even Jefferson or Hamilton, was encouraged to request an interview on his own. At any interview the President did grant, he discouraged personal revelation. No one was allowed to weep on his shoulder.

  Washington seems never to have realized that he might seem overbearing when he failed to argue with his subordinates or to seek out their personal emotions, when he kept his own thoughts hidden until he announced his final decision. He felt that such behavior was essential if he were not to encourage trivialities and vitiate his own force in inconclusive palaver.

  The historical legend that Washington looked pompous while others decided for him could not be more incorrect. How he rode down even as strong a man as Jefferson is exemplified by the establishment of the new national capital, now known as Washington, D.C.

  Having voted in 1790 that the “Federal City” be somewhere along a sixty-seven-mile reach of the Potomac, Congress had left all other decisions up to the executive branch. As the great departments were then set up, the responsibility fell, after Washington, on the Secretary of State. Jefferson had been to Europe, where he had made a study of architecture; he was, indeed, to earn a second fame as an architect. Washington had never been to Europe, and his attitude towards architecture was not informed but pragmatic. He had designed Mount Vernon, as he put it, not to satisfy rules but to please the eye.

  Without consulting Jefferson, Washington chose the site for the city (as near as possible to Mount Vernon) and in March, 1791, appointed as town planner a Frenchman whom he had first known as a major of engineers in the Continental Army. Although the selection of Pierre Charles L’Enfant was another example of Washington’s gift for recognizing genius, Jefferson soon regarded the appointment as a disaster.

  In any case grandiose by temperament, L’Enfant decided to plan at once a capital that would serve for the great nation the United States would surely become. Only a tiny center would now be erected, but the design and the land acquired should spread out for miles so that the inevitable enlargement would enhance, not destroy, an artistic whole. Furthermore, advantage should be taken of the topography to create vistas and central points where legations and grand houses could be built, monuments erected. Washington, who had a surveyor’s conception of developing regions, a colonizer’s realization that surrounding land must be procured before improvements made values skyrocket, a taste for the grand, and an innate aesthetic sense, enthusiastically supported his appointee. L’Enfant’s design is rated (although it has subsequently been debased) a masterpiece of town planning.

  Suspecting (as was true) that Hamilton was egging L’Enfant on, Jefferson was outraged that the capital of the United States should be envisioned as one of those hives of aristocracy, business enterprise, and vice—a big city. Desiring an enlarged village, in scale less like Philadelphia than Virginia’s capital of Williamsburg, Jefferson had drawn up a plan that, except for the very central part, was an even grill of streets. This covered a small area. He jotted down that any necessary extension could be “laid out in the future.”

  Without identifying the author, Washington showed Jefferson’s plan to L’Enfant, who commented that it revealed “some cool imagination wanting a sense of the really grand and truly beautiful.” If extended, the grill of streets would “become at last tiresome and insipid.”

  Whether or not Jefferson saw this comment, he found L’Enfant and his ideas insupportable. Nor could he have been pleased by Washington’s reaction when he extracted from his files, as models which he would like to distribute to the builders of houses in the capital, cherished engravings he had collected in Europe “of the handsomest fronts of private buildings.” Much more concerned with original genius than traditional taste, Washington replied unenthusiastically that Jefferson’s scheme “may answer a good purpose” if it could be “carried into effect at a moderate expense.”

  Having entered the government determined to be a right hand to a man he then greatly revered, Jefferson carried out without protest presidential orders concerning the Federal City that went against his own convictions and his trained taste. Only after L’Enfant, who was utterly without tact or subordination, had got into a destructive quarrel with the local landowners and then defied all intervention including that of the President, did Jefferson see an opportunity to act. In reply to a request for advice from Washington, he urged L’Enfant’s dismissal. Commenting that “the feelings of such men [artists] are always alive,” Washington bent way over backwards. The intractable genius spurned all concessions. Since the entire project was endangered, Washington was at last forced to let L’Enfant go. He expressed extreme regret. Jefferson did not confide to his chief his jubilation.

  Washington’s insistence that the cabinet stay on while he retired knocked down the wall that had long hidden from him the rancor among his ministers. The shattering blow was Jefferson’s statement that nothing would induce him to stay, even if Washington himself stayed, into a second term.

  During the following months, Washington held, in his efforts to dissuade his Secretary of State from resigning, a series of discussions, in person or by letter, during which Jefferson at last felt free to speak. As he poured out to Washington his hatred for Hamilton and his fears of the Treasury’s policies, the President found, on at least one occasion, the talks too “painful” to proceed.

  Jefferson informed Washington of his belief that Hamilton’s “corrupt squadron” in the Congress were stuffing their own pocketbooks while voting measures that “chained … about our necks for a great length of time” high taxes. Hamilton’s system of paper money was no more than a “gaming table” which took the energies of the nation away from productive agriculture into destructive speculation. The Constitution was being perverted, the objective being to establish a monarchy.

  For once Washington argued, but he remained reticent. At the time of an early talk, Hamilton’s recommendations concerning government support for manufactures had not yet failed in Congress. Jefferson spoke of the proposal as the ultimate proof of how the government was being made into something quite different from what the people who had accepted the Constitution had intended. Here was an opportunity for Washington to soothe his Secretary of State of revealing that he also opposed, as unconstitutional and untimely, Hamilton’s plan. Washington remained silent.

  Using restraint in the other direction, Washington refrained from asking, when Jefferson insisted that the moneymen in Congress should be forbidden to vote on bills that affected their interests, whether the same strictures should not apply to agrarians and slave holders. He merely replied, “As to that interested spirit in the legislature, it was what could not be avoided in any government unless we were to exclude particular descriptions of men …
from all office.” Nor did Washington point out, when Jefferson complained of Hamilton’s attempts to interfere in his department, that Jefferson had done his best to interfere in Hamilton’s. Actually, Washington, who used his cabinet as a whole, was pleased to have one Secretary advise him concerning the department of another.

  To Washington’s gratification, Jefferson agreed that funding and assumption could not be reversed without destroying the honor of the government. But Jefferson did wish the abolition of the Bank of the United States. Washington replied that decision on the bank should be postponed until experience revealed how it would function. Although Jefferson, when himself President after 1800, decided that the bank’s record justified its continuance, in 1792 he was shocked by the President’s answer.

  Being unable to persuade Washington that the nation was tottering dangerously on the brink of a fatal subversion of republican principles, Jefferson came to the melancholy decision that the President had revealed himself as “really approving the Treasury system.” Jefferson refused to withdraw his resignation.

  After Jefferson’s worries and rancors had become clear to him, Washington decided that he must smoke out Hamilton. Copying from one of Jefferson’s letters the strictures on the Treasury, he sent them, with a false attribution of their source, to Hamilton.

  Hamilton replied that the obligations his measures had met were not of his making but inherited. The continuing national debt inherent in funding could not be paralyzing the economy since the parts of the nation where the greatest number of debt certificates were held also had the most circulating capital. Charges that the Congress had been corrupted were “malignant and false.” No corruption had been demonstrated. And surely grounding the republican government on a sound financial foundation was no way to foster monarchy.