The three cabinet ministers Washington had willed to Adams, men whom he had not trusted when he was in office, were now joining with other Federalists in sending the old man a barrage of letters insisting that Adams was insulting him; that Knox’s elevation would bring in squads of superannuated generals with Revolutionary seniority; and that Hamilton was indispensable. In his perturbation, Washington got firmly fixed in his mind two misconceptions. One, that he had made it a firm condition, which the President had accepted, that he appoint his own general officers. And two, that the action of the Senate obliged Adams to put Hamilton first and Knox last. Feeling thus on sure ground, he struck out in a manner that belied his former convictions.
Since that distant time when he was appointed commander in chief, Washington had been deeply concerned with fostering and preserving unity in the nation. Now he believed that the French would invade only if they judged the United States so divided that it could not or would not defend itself. But, on September 25, 1798, he wrote President Adams a letter in which he threatened, by clear implication, publicly to resign from the army if the order of major generals were not Hamilton, Pinckney, Knox. He commented to McHenry, “You will readily perceive that even the rumor of a misunderstanding between the President and me, while the breach can be repaired, would be attended with unpleasant consequences.” But, he added, “If there is no disposition on his part to do this, the public must decide which of us is right and which of us is wrong.”
Imagination could hardly conceive the chaos into which both political power and public opinion would have been thrown had the old hero carried out his angry threat. Adams had no choice but surrender.
Washington had blown up what was at its rational extreme a medium-sized disagreement into an issue that threatened to convulse the nation. And at various moments in the controversy, the brilliant pragmatist had lost contact with reality.
Not even the most resplendent hero is immune to the passing of the years.
FIFTY
Politics at Sunset
(1798–1799)
Washington, who had insisted that he would never again travel more than ten miles from his own lawn, set out for Philadelphia on November 5, 1798, to prepare a plan for the new army. On the road, he became worried because his nephew and house guest, Lawrence Lewis, had not been in the group that had waved him good-bye. If Lewis had come down for breakfast, he had been rude; if he had not come down, why, he was sick and Washington had been rude in not going upstairs to say goodbye to him. Wrack his brains as he would, Washington could not remember where Lewis had breakfasted. Deciding that he would rather apologize than risk being discourteous, Washington wrote Lewis that he had been made absentminded by hurry.
The reemerging Commander in Chief had already made it clear that he did not suffer from that proverbial weakness of generals: the determination to fight new wars in the way that they won the old. He wished all Revolutionary seniority to be forgotten so that he could get an officer corps of young men. And he believed that the guerrilla tactics for which he was famous would not do if the French invaded. Any expeditionary force would have to be attacked before it could establish itself, which meant foreseeable and thus more formal battles. In conference with Hamilton and Pinckney (who had accepted being inferior to Hamilton as Knox had not) he sought information concerning French fighting methods so that the army could be organized to counteract them.
Washington had eagerly wished that the army he raised to put down the Whiskey Rebellion should represent all political opinions. But now he was unwilling to give commissions to men recommended by opposition congressmen lest being pro-French, they “poison the army.” If the old General were preparing a force that in the wrong hands—and had he selected the wrong hands?—could serve tyranny, the fears and suspicions rolling in his brain made him unconscious of it.
But he did arrange matters so that Hamilton would have little control. True, he did not intend, himself, to be active unless a crisis beckoned. However, the southern states were to be mobilized under Pinckney. Hamilton was to have charge in the rest of the Union, but, since he would make his headquarters close to Philadelphia, he was to be under the continual supervision of Adams and McHenry. Conscious certainly that some cautious men feared that Hamilton might try to carve out for himself an empire as the Napoleon of the Southwest, Washington arranged that, if French activity demanded a protective march into Louisiana, the intelligence should be sent not directly to Hamilton but first to the Secretary of War. Washington had times of lucidity as great as his times of confusion.
Ever since he had been a little boy and his half brother Lawrence had set out resplendent in a British uniform for Cartagena, Washington had been fascinated with military regalia. He concerned himself with uniforms for his new army, designing particularly splendid regalia for himself. The Commander in Chief should wear “a blue coat with yellow buttons and gold epaulettes (each having three silver stars); linings, cape, and cuffs of buff; in winter buff vest and breeches; in summer a white vest and breeches of nankeen. The coat to be without lapels, and embroidered on the cape, cuffs, and pockets. A white plume in the hat to be a further distinction.” He left the order with Philadelphia’s leading tailor.
Back at Mount Vernon, he was amazed to discover that his nephew Lawrence Lewis, whom he designated a major, had resolved that “before he enters the camp of Mars, he is to engage in that of Venus.” To everyone’s pleasure, as it would join the Washington and Custis families, Lewis had become engaged to Martha’s resident granddaughter, Nelly Custis. Nelly announced that she would be married on the General’s sixty-seventh birthday. She begged him to inaugurate his new uniform at her wedding. He enthusiastically agreed.
Washington wrote McHenry, “On reconsidering the uniform for the commander in chief, it has become a matter of doubt with me (although as it respected myself personally I was against all embroidery) whether embroidery on the cape, cuffs, and pockets of the coat and none on the buff waistcoat, would not have a disjointed and awkward appearance.” He added that it was essential that he have the uniform before February 22.
Twelve days before the wedding, he reminded McHenry that the uniform should be “accompanied with cockades and stars for the epaulettes.” Eleven days before the wedding, he wrote the tailor concerning a quick way to get the uniform to Mount Vernon. Finally, a package did arrive, but it was discouragingly small. It proved to contain eagles for the cockades but not even stars for the epaulettes. And nothing more came. When Nelly was married on the 22nd at “about candlelight,” Washington wore his old uniform.
Washington now hoped to get his fine regalia for the Fourth of July. Letters poking up both McHenry and the tailor elicited the information that it had been impossible to find, in the entire United States, enough gold thread. But some was expected in the spring shipments from Europe. Four days before the Fourth, Washington wrote McHenry, “I shall send up to Alexandria on Wednesday but,” he added bravely, “shall feel no disappointment if the uniform is not there.” It was not there.
In final despair, the tailor sent the uniform off to Europe to be finished. Washington never had the pleasure of wearing it. Before it returned, he was dead.
In all American history, few pieces of legislation have had so obnoxious a reputation as the Alien and Sedition acts, passed by Congress during the XYZ hysteria in the same session that authorized the new army. The Alien Act greatly lengthened the period an immigrant would have to wait before he could apply for citizenship and empowered the President to expel any alien he considered dangerous. The Sedition Act prescribed punishment for false and malicious writings aimed at bringing the government into disrepute.
That Washington would as President have done what Adams did, sign the acts into law, seems improbable. He had, it is true, suffered from attacks by aliens who, he believed, were venting European grievances on American institutions which they misunderstood. Yet his continuing attitude had been that one of the major roles of the United States was to be a
haven for those unhappy or oppressed abroad. And, even when smarting under the most extreme newspaper libels, he had been an unvarying champion of freedom of the press (much more so than President Jefferson was to be).
The last portrait of Washington. Drawn by Charles Balthazar Julien Fevret de Saint-Mémin when the ex-President was in Philadelphia during November, 1799, organizing plans for an army to defend the United States from the French (Original lost. Reproduction courtesy of the New York Public Library)
But now the old man saw conspiracies. He wrote privately that there was no reason why aliens should be allowed to spread foreign poisons in the United States. Concerning a newspaper charge that the government was wallowing in British bribes, he commented that, if a fair and impartial investigation proved the accusations true, the editor would be “deserving of thanks and high reward for bringing to light conduct so abominable.” However, “if it shall be found to be all calumny … punishment ought to be inflicted.”
Having become a convinced Federalist, Washington finally broke—even if only behind the scenes—his rule of not intervening in an election. To weaken the Jeffersonian hold on Virginia, he set in motion a great political career by bullying John Marshall, the future trailblazing Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, to run for Congress. He also lured Patrick Henry out of retirement, even though the ailing patriarch did not live to serve in the Virginia assembly.
Although Adams had been defeated concerning Hamilton’s rank, he found, as the XYZ fever abated, an effective way of protecting the nation against a man he considered so dangerous. He simply brought the organizing of the army to a halt—he had come to consider it unnecessary anyway. Hamilton fumed and tried to incite Washington. Washington admitted that he was in an embarrassing position in relation to officers who had been promised commissions they had never received, and that, if the army had been intended as more than a mere threat, the delay in recruiting “baffles all conjecture.” But he added, “Far removed from the scene, I might ascribe these delays to the wrong causes, and therefore will hazard no opinion respecting them.”
At the end of January, 1799, Washington received a letter from Joel Barlow, a distinguished American resident in France, stating that the disagreements with the nation were all based on a misunderstanding, and that the Directory would now be happy to receive a minister from the United States. This epistle Washington forwarded to Adams, expressing the hope that it might lead to that “peace and tranquillity … upon just, and honorable, and dignified terms,” which he was “persuaded” was “the ardent desire of all friends of this rising empire.”
Adams’s reply stated that, as a result of many such communications, and primarily because of a letter from Talleyrand, he had determined to break the diplomatic stalemate by appointing the American Minister to Holland, William Vans Murray, Minister to France. Washington’s pleasure was quickly submerged by a flood of Federalist communications: Talleyrand’s letter had not been official. Furthermore, Adams had not consulted the Federalist leaders or his own cabinet.
Although, when President, Washington had avoided consulting the Federalist leaders and the very same crew of cabinet members, he allowed himself to be convinced that Adams had gone off half-cocked. He was relieved when the Senate placed roadblocks in the way of an immediate mission.
In mid-July, Washington opened a letter from Governor Trumbull of Connecticut, which carried the marks of being the result of a general Federalist consultation. It stated that to prevent the election of “a French President,” Washington would have to announce that he would again accept the office.
Washington’s answer was a tragic demonstration of how completely he had lost his belief that he could lead the whole nation; of how utterly he had been disillusioned in his ideal that an administration could represent all or almost all the people. He now believed that the only effective qualification for election as President was that the candidate be the choice of the leading faction. Let the opposition “set up a broomstick and call it a true son of liberty, a democrat, or give it any other epithet that will suit their purpose, and it will command their votes in toto.” Since the Federalists would be forced by self-defense to behave in the same manner, Washington was convinced that, despite all he had achieved, he would get no more votes than anyone else the Federalists designated. And in any case, Washington recognized that he was too old. If he allowed himself to be persuaded, he would be charged “with dotage and imbecility.”
Nelson’s great naval victory at the Battle of the Nile seemed so wildly to have swung the pendulum of the war that Federalists gleefully foresaw a restoration of the French monarchy. What was their horror when, at this very moment, Adams decided to unleash his embassy to the Directory! Washington himself was shocked and puzzled. “To those of us who are not behind the curtain,” he wrote, the President’s decision was “in the present state of European affairs, incomprehensible.”
Frantic to block a move which they felt would encourage the Republicans in the United States and perhaps tie the nation to the seemingly sinking fortunes of France, the Federalists turned to the only force that could stop Adams. They importuned Washington to publish a protest.
In reply to McHenry’s urging, Washington wrote, “I have for some time past viewed the political concerns of the United States with an anxious and painful eye. They appear to me to be moving by hasty strides to some awful crisis, but in what they will result, that Being who sees, foresees, and directs all things alone can tell. The vessel is afloat or very nearly so, and considering myself as a passenger only, I shall trust to the mariners whose duty it is to watch, to steer it into a safe port.”
This refusal to intervene against what turned out to be one of the happiest strokes in all American diplomacy was Washington’s last important political act.
FIFTY-ONE
Washington and Slavery
(1732–1799)
Ever since he had been called away to the Revolutionary War, Washington’s dream, when embattled in the great world, was to recapture the relaxation and pleasure of the plantation world that was his hereditary environment. But gradually his dream became tainted with nightmare.
Almost all southern patriots had to find some personal resolution of the dilemma that their search for liberty for themselves and other whites was conducted while they continued to hold blacks in slavery. They were likely to be most upset by this contradiction during their first flush of Revolutionary ardor. Thus, as the years passed, Jefferson shifted from active concern with emancipation to expressing high-sounding sentiments in letters, while he made use of his slaves as best suited his pleasure and profit.
Washington’s growing passion for consistency combined with his innate inability to separate theory from practice made his horror of slavery increase as Jefferson’s receded. Although his heart continued to yearn for peace in the world of his forebears and childhood, he began, during his second term as President, an active effort to tear, for the benefit of his blacks, Mount Vernon apart. He proved to be the only Virginia founding father to free all his slaves.
Historians, who have for so long looked nervously away from the role of the blacks in American history, have failed to recognize the extremely important fact that Washington’s repugnance to slavery was a major reason for his backing Hamilton’s financial planning against Jeffersonian attacks. He could not accept the contention that agrarianism, as exemplified in Virgina, was so basic to free institutions that all other ways of life should be discouraged. The Hamiltonian system had no need for slavery. Washington felt that it was the Virginia institution that would have in the end to give way. “I clearly foresee,” he told an English caller, “that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.” To Randolph, he revealed a conclusion that tore at his most deeply seated habits and emotions. He stated that should the Union separate between North and South, “he had made up his mind to move and be of the northern.”
S
lavery had seemed as inherent a part of the world in which Washington was raised as the sun that rose every morning.* Throughout his young manhood he accepted the institution without question. His small inheritance had included slaves, and in the prosperity that followed his marriage, he had not only purchased more land contiguous to Mount Vernon but more blacks to work it. In a document shocking to modern eyes, he wrote a high-spirited letter to a sea captain asking him to sell in the West Indies a rebellious black and invest the proceeds in “the best rum,” “mixed sweetmeats,” and other delicacies.
The first crack in Washington’s armor seems to have come from the observation that the blacks, deprived of other roots and with no property to take along, most dreaded being moved to a strange place from the plantation where they were part of a tight society of their own. Being, as he put it, “unwilling to hurt the feelings of anyone,” Washington resolved, towards the end of his pre-Revolutionary stay at Mount Vernon, that he would not sell or move any slave without that slave’s consent. Since consent was never (or hardly ever) given, Washington was soon carrying the economic liability of a work force larger than he could profitably employ. This was partly due to a high birthrate and partly because he had changed from tobacco to other crops that required much less labor.
In 1774, Washington made a statement the more revealing because it involved no conscious intention of expressing his opinion concerning blacks. He contended that if the Americans accepted British encroachments, “custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.” The final clause in this sentence reveals disgust at the behavior of the whites, but even more significant is the assumption that the “custom and use” which had debased the blacks would debase whites equally. Never in all his writings did Washington express even by implication agreement with the belief of Jefferson and many other southern leaders that the blacks were racially inferior.
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