The seemingly endless dispatch had clearly been written at the time of the Whiskey Rebellion. There were glints here and there which indicated that Randolph had given political information to Fauchet, who considered him pro-French. Another passage dealt with the time when the Philadelphia Democratic Society was wavering as to whether it should support or oppose the use of force against the whiskey insurgents. Fauchet believed that Randolph, being “at the head,” had the power to determine the society’s decision. He “came to me with an air of great eagerness and made to me the overtures of which I have given you an account in my number six.” Fauchet’s sixth dispatch was not present, but the paper Washington was reading continued, “Thus, with some thousands of dollars, the [French] republic could have decided on civil war or on peace! Thus the consciences of the pretended patriots of America already have their prices.” However, the French Republic was too noble to sink to bribery.
Washington (who did not know that Hamilton and Jefferson and Wolcott had done the same thing) was worried that Randolph had discussed American politics with a foreign diplomat. But the real horror was the strong implication that he had requested a bribe. That he was always short of money Washington knew. Was he now in the French pay? Had Randolph been the mastermind behind the wave of protests against the Jay Treaty? Had he advised Washington to postpone ratification and himself dawdled in preparing documents in order to allow a conspiracy enough time to force the United States into war with Britain?
Having tossed all night in his bed, Washington concluded that national suspense concerning the Jay Treaty was too dangerous to be allowed to continue. If with all his accumulated prestige behind him, he presented the people with an irrevocable decision, the pro-French thrust—whether or not Randolph was actually among its instigators—would be blunted. It followed that, to avoid the most immediate danger—war with England—Washington would have to accept the treaty in the most positive manner open to him. Without further pause, he would follow the advice of the Senate exactly as it was given: not trying to reopen negotiations concerning other matters, he would ratify everything except the provisions concerning West Indian trade. He would make a separate protest against the Provision Order.
This conclusion involved another, from a personal point of view very painful. So that the Secretary of State would not be encouraged to fly into the opposition before he had carried through his essential part in the ratification of the treaty, Washington would have to dissemble with his old friend, pretending that everything was as before. Only later could Randolph be given an opportunity to defend (and, Washington hoped, exonerate) himself.
The next morning, August 12, 1795, Washington, to Randolph’s utter amazement, announced his firm intention of ratifying the Jay Treaty.
How was Washington to discover whether or not Randolph was actually guilty of treason? He had no secret service to put on the job. He could not request the courts to subpoena Randolph’s records or any witnesses from the Democratic Societies without publicly accusing his friend—who might be innocent—and creating vast internal turmoil. To ask the French for the missing, clarifying dispatches would be pointless, since, if a conspiracy existed, the French would surely supply a doctored text. Washington saw no expedient but confrontation. The incriminating document would, in the presence of the accusing Wolcott and Pickering, be sprung on Randolph without warning. Whether he was guilty or innocent would be revealed by the way he reacted.
As he prepared this trap, Washington, his heart sore, loaded Randolph with civilities. Then the awful day came round.
Randolph was amazed, when he came to confer with the President, to find that Wolcott and Pickering, who were so rarely consulted, had been asked to be there before him. After attempting some small talk, Washington said, “Mr. Randolph! Here is a letter which I desire you to read and make such explanations as you choose.”
It must have taken Randolph at least half an hour to read the long dispatch. Washington, Pickering remembered, had “desired us to watch Randolph’s countenance while he perused it. The President fixed his own eye upon him, and I … never saw it look so animated.” Finally Randolph looked up. He commented that, since this was all new to him, the implications were not clear in his mind. He could state little more than that he had never made a communication to Fauchet which he considered improper, and that he had never sought or received French money.
Washington then asked him to withdraw and wait in an anteroom while his three observers conferred. To Washington’s vast relief, Wolcott and Pickering were forced to agree that the accused had behaved “with composure” that indicated innocence. The President gleefully went to the door to call his exonerated friend back.
But it was a different man who returned. Randolph’s face was alive with agitation. He shouted that he “could not continue in the office one second after such treatment.” He ran from the room, down the stairs, and out of the Presidential Mansion.
According to the principles by which Randolph’s ordeal had been planned, he had demonstrated guilt. It was now Wolcott’s and Pickering’s time to be gleeful. They pushed the conclusion home to the President, who sat there in the dismay of an old man whose formerly clear judgment of his associates seemed to have clouded, a man of warm emotions whose close friend appeared to have revealed himself a traitor.
Washington had written that, if Randolph’s behavior proved him guilty, the government would have to protect itself by publishing the accusing dispatch. He would merit “no favor,” and if explanation were not given, “he and his friends” would use his separation from the government as a proof that the administration was pro-British.
Now Randolph turned on his former patron with all the fury of the spurned. To Madison, he wrote, “I feel happy at my emancipation from attachment to a man who has practiced on me the profound hypocrisy of a Tiberius and the injustice of an assassin.” He informed the newspapers that he would explain and justify his resignation in an “appeal to the people of the United States.” When Pickering, who had become Acting Secretary of State, refused to deliver up some private presidential dispatches, Randolph announced the matter in the press.
Faced with the actual issue, Washington found that he did not have the heart to fight back. Holding Pickering and Wolcott on as tight a leash as he could (they certainly leaked some information) he kept secret the incriminating French dispatch. He allowed his former friend to monopolize the public stage. And he decided that any effort on his part to suppress information would be more damaging than complete exposure. Although so doing would allow Randolph to show how the President had vacillated and then changed his mind concerning the Jay Treaty, the President gave Randolph permission to secure and “publish without reserve any and every private and confidential letter I ever wrote you: nay more, every word I have ever uttered in your presence.” Washington’s one request was that his permission be quoted in whatever vindication Randolph published. The public would, Washington hoped, “appreciate my motives even if it would condemn my prudence in allowing you the unlimited license herein contained.”
Washington, who hated suspense, had to wait a long time for the blow to fall. Two months passed before Randolph’s Vindication appeared on December 18.
Randolph’s defense concerning the implication that he had asked for a bribe was backed up by a purported transcript, which he had procured from the French, of the missing dispatch. The story was that he had wished to demonstrate that it was the British who were fomenting the Whiskey Rebellion. He believed that proof was in the hands of four New York flour merchants, but the mouths of these witnesses were sealed by debts which the British could use to ruin them. Randolph had suggested that the French make the evidence available by paying these debts.
Randolph further claimed that his behavior at the confrontation had been no demonstration of guilt, but had rather been made inevitable by Washington’s treating him, under the eyes of his enemies, in a manner insufferable to a man of honor.
The long and confused
pamphlet Randolph published bristled with anger against Washington. Although intended to wound, the description of the President’s vacillations and final about-face concerning the Jay Treaty was not altogether damaging, since it revealed his unhappiness concerning the document. Yet the picture of Washington that emerged from the 103 closely printed pages carried strong implications of weakness and indecision. This was partly because Randolph, in revealing the great influence he himself had had over the President, involuntarily revealed himself, as he wallowed in self-praise and self-pity, as a fool. He also stated nastily, for the whole nation to see, what Washington himself suspected and feared: that the President was losing his mental powers.
* Jay was home and Pinckney not yet back from Spain.
† Jay had resigned as chief justice to become governor of New York and Washington had eagerly grasped the opportunity to give more representation to the South by accepting a request for the post from the elderly South Carolina patriot John Rutledge. The Federalists charged that Rutledge, an ardent Republican, was senile.
FORTY-FIVE
Downhill
(1795–1796)
On returning to public life after the Revolution, Washington had mourned that he was placing again in the hands of fate the greatest reward he had earned during eight anguished military years: his fame, the love of his fellow citizens. Now his worst fears seemed to have come true. Rather than stilling public controversy as he had hoped, his ratification of the Jay Treaty had turned the anger on himself. The broad public, which had previously resented attacks on their hero, now accepted them with avidity. Every aspect of his career was insultingly discussed in the newspapers. He had been made commander in chief because he was such a nonentity that Congress was convinced that he could not become a tyrant—but how wrong Congress had been! Even the infirmities of old age were used to blast at him. Why did he not walk around or ride horseback as he used to do? That he only passed through the streets in his well-appointed carriage surely expressed anti-Republican disdain.
At this dark moment the opposition revealed—the facts seem to have been let out by Randolph—that Washington had consistently overdrawn his salary. Wolcott attempted a rebuttal: despite the overdrafts, Washington had been forced to dig into his personal funds to help pay presidential expenses. This did not impress those who believed that Washington was living too extravagantly, in a monarchical manner. The bad odor was increased by the memory that, at the time of his inauguration, Washington had seemed self-sacrificing when he had vainly tried to persuade Congress to pay him no salary, only expenses. Since Washington’s secretaries kept his accounts and the Treasury had not objected to the drafts they had submitted in his name, it is quite possible that Washington had been ignorant of the situation—yet he could not doubt that his image had been tarnished.
In another way, which Washington could not foresee, his image was much more grievously damaged. A painful physical disability was being grafted onto his legend so that in the minds of future Americans his attribute—like Saint Catherine’s wheel or Saint Sebastian’s arrows—became ill-fitting false teeth.
Washington did wear clumsy dentures. Only one of his own teeth was in his mouth in 1789 when he presided over the capital in New York. That tooth soon vanished. Washington wore terrifying-looking contraptions, made of substances like hippopotamus ivory. The upper and lower jaws, that were hinged together at the back of the mouth, opened and closed with the assistance of springs. He himself complained that they distorted his lips. However, as he could command the best dentists, he was probably no more disfigured than was then common among the elderly and prosperous.
Washington’s false teeth were propelled into legend by the ablest and most sophisticated portraitist who ever painted him. Born in Rhode Island, Gilbert Stuart had trained himself so well in that world capital of portraiture, London, that he was often considered there the younger painter most likely to succeed to the mantle of the great Sir Joshua Reynolds. But he was extravagant and intemperate. Having fled from debts, he appeared in Philadelphia during 1795, one of his projects being to pay for the floods of liquor that flowed down his throat by creating and selling a multitude of portaits of the world’s greatest man. Washington sat to him for three separate portraits, and Stuart expanded the number of images with copies running to several hundreds.
Alas, Washington and Stuart did not get on. The painter was in the habit of keeping his sitters amused and their faces alive by a flood of showy and outrageous talk. Washington, who always felt uneasy at remaining still and being stared at, was put out rather than amused. And Stuart, who believed that artists were fundamentally superior to all other men including Presidents, resented Washington’s formality. He could not forget what had resulted when, in trying to unstiffen the hero, he had gone to the length of saying, “Now, sir, you must let me forget that you are General Washington and I am Stuart the painter.”
Washington replied (as it seemed to him politely), “Mr. Stuart need never feel the need for forgetting who he is and who General Washington is.”
Stuart emphasized, as no other portraitist did, the distortions of Washington’s mouth, and none of the other artists who painted Washington had Stuart’s vast skill in creating a convincing likeness. The artist’s justification for dwelling on the deformity was that the effigy of so major a historical figure should be more a factual document than the likeness of an ordinary citizen. But it may well be that Stuart, who angrily used General Knox’s portrait as the door of his pigsty, was motivated in his relation with Washington also by rage. No other man’s rage did Washington’s historical image more harm.
Randolph’s resignation and the death of Attorney General Bradford left two vacancies in the cabinet, and soon there were also two in the Supreme Court: the Senate refused to confirm Rutledge as Chief Justice, and another justice resigned. To his dismay, Washington found a universal unwillingness to accept the odium of joining his government. He offered State, for instance, to William Patterson of New Jersey, former Governor Thomas Johnson of Maryland, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, and the old Virginia patriot Patrick Henry. Washington had selected these men as satisfactory to the Republicans. Since they had all declined, he decided that if the office were to be filled, he would have to accept a Federalist.
For the ten months since Hamilton’s resignation, Washington had kept his former adviser at arm’s length. Now, deserted by all others, Washington turned to Hamilton. Among his requests was that Hamilton discover whether New York’s Federalist senator, Rufus King, would accept State.
Hamilton replied that “the disgust which a virtuous and independent mind” feels at making itself a target for “foul and venomous shafts of calumny” induced King to refuse the office. “I wish, sir,” Hamilton continued, “I could present to you any useful ideas as a substitute, but the embarrassment is extreme as to Secretary of State.… In fact, a first rate character is not attainable. A second-rate must be taken with good dispositions and barely decent qualifications. I wish I could throw more light. ’Tis a sad omen for the government.”
All this time, the dour Pickering, who was Acting Secretary, was waiting angrily in the wings. When Washington was finally reduced to offering the post to him, Pickering made the President plead before he condescendingly agreed.
Still accepting the second-rate, Washington bagged three southerners: his former aide and drinking companion, James McHenry, as Secretary of War; Charles Lee, who practiced law near Mount Vernon, as Attorney General; and Thomas Chase of Maryland for the Supreme Court. This achieved, Washington felt he could appoint as Chief Justice a Massachusetts Federalist, Oliver Ellsworth.
“The offices are once more filled,” John Adams noted, “but how differently than when Jefferson, Hamilton, Jay, etc., were here!”
With anticipations often sadistic, politically minded Americans awaited Washington’s Seventh Annual Address. How would the President defend himself? How would he defend the Jay Treaty? Would he attack the independe
nt mass meetings that had blasted his policies as he had attacked the centrally organized Democratic Societies? Would he express personal bitterness as he had in his second inaugural? There was tenseness in the Senate chamber when Washington walked in on December 8, 1895. It soon changed to amazement.
“Fellow citizens of the Senate and the House of Representatives,” Washington began. “I trust I do not deceive myself when I indulge the persuasion that I have never met you at any period when more than at the present the situation of our public affairs has afforded just cause for mutual congratulation; and for inviting you to join me in profound gratitude to the Author of all good for the numerous and extraordinary blessings we enjoy.”
Then Washington began enumerating blessings: Wayne’s victory plus the entente with England promised peace on the northwest frontier; an accommodation was being reached with the Barbary pirates who had molested American shipping; Pinckney reported progress on a treaty with Spain. Washington then mentioned the Jay Treaty—everyone was agog—but he merely said that applying “the best judgment I was able to form of the public interest” he had followed the advice of the Senate. “The result on the part of his Britannic Majesty is unknown. When received, the subject will, without delay, be put before Congress.” Washington’s summary was that “prudence and moderation on every side” could now extinguish all causes of discord “which have heretofore menaced our tranquillity.”
Pro-French legislators, who insisted that the Jay Treaty was anti-French, could hardly believe their ears as Washington moved on from foreign affairs without mentioning France. But even in their incredulity they realized that the President had outflanked them. The discussion having been of nations that menaced American tranquillity, the omission could be taken as a recognition of common interest.
Washington- The Indispensable Man Page 37
