Just as the nation was sailing smoothly through profitable neutral waters, however, the British government stunned allies and enemies alike by blockading French waters and ordering its navy to seize all ships bound for France and the French West Indies—neutral or not. Still worse, it designated all goods bound for France as contraband: corn, wheat, flour—anything that might help sustain France or the French people. In the months that followed, the British made a mockery of Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation by seizing more than 250 American vessels.
Facing national humiliation or war, Washington’s political instincts devised a dual policy that combined bravado with wisdom: bravado, to placate war hawks in Congress and the American public and give pause to British policy makers, and wisdom, to further what he considered the best interests of the nation. He called on the nation to gear for war, asking Congress to raise an army of 15,000 and state governors to ready 80,000 militiamen. Virginia Governor Henry Lee had already put his state militia on alert, and Brigadier General John Marshall deployed his second brigade to protect the capital city of Richmond.3
While American war hawks flapped their wings, Washington coaxed the Federalist Anglophile, Chief Justice John Jay, to go to England to seek an understanding and rapprochement with the British government. To calm French fears that Jay would negotiate an Anglo-American alliance against France, Washington sent the outspoken Republican Francophile, Senator James Monroe, to France as minister plenipotentiary, with instructions to broaden Franco-American trade.
Before Monroe could sail, however, he and several Senate colleagues stumbled onto a scandal of sex and misuse of government funds that threatened the Washington administration and the Federalist Party with collapse.
In 1791 James Reynolds, a professional confidence man and speculator who had specialized in bilking veterans of bounty lands, found a way to blackmail Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton after Hamilton succumbed to the flirtations of Reynolds’s wife. Playing the outraged husband, Reynolds demanded—and Hamilton paid—$1,000 and gave Reynolds a low-level Treasury Department post. Arrested shortly thereafter for embezzling Treasury funds, Reynolds went to jail.
After a congressional clerk reported Hamilton’s ties to Reynolds, Congress appointed a committee of three to investigate. Two were Federalists—Speaker of the House Frederick Muhlenberg, an ordained Lutheran minister from Pennsylvania,* and Virginia Representative Abraham Venable. The third committee member was Antifederalist James Monroe, who had fought beside Hamilton in the Revolutionary War.
When the committee confronted Hamilton on December 15, 1792, the usually icy Treasury secretary uncharacteristically dissolved in tears and confessed to a sordid relationship—not with the Reynolds but with Reynolds’s wife. Far from misappropriating government funds, Hamilton had spent his own money for Mrs. Reynolds’s services and bribes to her husband to keep silent about the affair. Convinced that Hamilton had been a victim of blackmail and that “the affair had no relation to official duties,” the Congressmen declared the explanation “entirely satisfactory.”4 Monroe then offered to safeguard the dossier of the investigation but sent it to Hamilton’s avowed enemy, Republican leader Thomas Jefferson. Shortly afterward whispers in political circles asserted that Monroe had irrefutable proof of Hamilton’s collusion with Reynolds to misuse government funds.
As Jay and Monroe sailed off to their separate destinations overseas, Congress reinforced the President’s Neutrality Proclamation by passing a Neutrality Act forbidding US citizens to enlist in the service of a foreign nation and banning the refitting of foreign warships in American ports.
Beyond the confines of the Capitol, however, few Americans paid attention to the Neutrality Act. Jefferson had retreated to his aerie in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Genet disappeared in his cabbage patch in Long Island’s vegetable fields. But the Democratic Societies they had organized acquired lives of their own, inciting chaos wherever they could.
Depending on the temper of local citizens, club leaders howled for local self-rule, universal white-male suffrage, restoration of state sovereignty, violent overthrow of the federal government, or any other disruptive cause they could contemplate. In Richmond the Democratic Society hurled hate-filled criticisms at Washington, Governor Lee, and Marshall, whose seizure of the Unicorn had set off howls of protest among French sympathizers in Richmond.
“My constant effort,” Marshall explained, “was to show that the conduct of our government respecting its foreign relations were just . . . and that our independence was brought into real danger by the overgrown and inordinate influence of France.”5
The influence of Democratic Societies reached far beyond Virginia, however. Leaflets promised American protesters in South Carolina, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New York, and elsewhere support from the French revolutionary government:
“France has been called to lead a gigantic revolution and worldwide uprising to liberate the oppressed peoples of the world,” proclaimed Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, a mediocre journalist-turned-pamphleteer who thought himself a prophet and clawed his way to leadership among French revolutionaries. “All Europe will be Gallicized, communized, and Jacobinized,” he promised, and American Democratic Societies extended his pledge to include North America.6
At the time American farmers were chafing under a two-year-old federal whiskey tax on distilled liquors. The tax infuriated farmers west of the Appalachians, where almost every farm had a still to convert grain into whiskey. The absence of roads across the rugged Appalachians made it impossible to transport grain in bulk by wagon to eastern markets. By converting grain into whiskey, they could pour the fruit of their labors into jugs and barrels that mules could easily carry on the narrow mountain trails. Faced with what they called confiscation of their profits, many refused to pay the whiskey tax, and when collectors threatened to seize their properties, the farmers met them with pitchforks, tar and feathers, and gunfire.
Refusing to see the logic behind farmer discontent, President Washington called whiskey tax protests “the first formidable fruit of the Democratic Societies.” He blamed Genet for having “brought the eggs of these venomous reptiles to our shores.”7
Protests reached a climax at dawn on July 16, 1794, when a mob near Pittsburgh burned the homes of the whiskey-tax collector and the US marshal, forcing them to flee with their families. Remaining tax collectors in the area either followed or publicly resigned their commissions; the flow of tax revenues to the federal treasury from western Pennsylvania—an area with about 77,000 people and some 5,000 stills—came to a halt. Farmers in Kentucky, Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas quickly followed suit.
In Philadelphia Attorney General William Bradford declared Pennsylvania tax protests part of a “plan for weakening and perhaps overthrowing the general government.” Secretary of War Knox urged the President to send “a superabundant force” to crush the rebels.8
Washington agreed, then scrawled his name across a proclamation and ordered Treasury Secretary Hamilton to raise an army of 13,000 if the westerners refused to yield. Governor Lee ordered John Marshall, still a brigadier general, to lead the Virginia militia to Pennsylvania and join Hamilton’s army. Marshall, however, had also become the state’s acting attorney general and was prosecuting several critical cases. Governor Lee, therefore, took Marshall’s place as commander of the Virginia force.
On October 20 Washington ordered his combined forces to march on Pittsburgh, but when they arrived, the rebels had vanished. America’s first revolution against constitutional rule ended without a shot being fired.
PRESIDENT WASHINGTON’S LAST FULL YEAR IN OFFICE BEGAN WITH the resignation of his old friend Secretary of War Henry Knox. A beloved intimate of Washington since the beginning of the Revolutionary War, he cited the infirmities of advancing age for his decision. The President sent Knox his “regrets at parting with (perhaps never more to meet) the few intimates whom I love; among these be assured you are one.”9
No sooner h
ad Knox left his cabinet than Treasury Secretary Hamilton stunned the President by announcing that he too was resigning. As with Knox, the loss of Hamilton was an emotional as well as political blow. Washington had all but adopted the orphaned youngster after the boy’s heroics at the Battle of Trenton twenty years earlier. A surrogate son, he had served as Washington’s most trusted aide during and after the war. He had led the charge at Yorktown, then masterminded Washington administration fiscal policies that converted the United States from an impoverished debtor nation to a land of opportunity and prosperity. He was irreplaceable.
Although Hamilton did not disclose the “urgent motives” that impelled his departure, whispers of his infidelity at home had grown more audible around the capital. With his effectiveness threatened, he decided to return to New York to prepare for inevitable public exposure and spare Washington the pain and embarrassment of his presence in the presidential family.
Hamilton had no intention of relinquishing political power, however, and before leaving, he urged the President to fill cabinet vacancies with Hamilton allies. Washington thereupon appointed Postmaster General Timothy Pickering as secretary of war and Comptroller of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott Jr. as secretary of the Treasury. Pickering was a Harvard-educated Massachusetts lawyer who had served Washington as adjutant general in 1777 before becoming quartermaster general for the rest of the Revolution. He was a loyal federalist, had strongly backed ratification, and, like Hamilton, was an ardent Anglophile. Wolcott was the son of Connecticut’s governor and a devoted Hamilton loyalist. Only Secretary of State Edmund Randolph, an avowed Francophile, remained in the cabinet to try to offset the influence of Hamilton’s Anglophiles.
Soon after his appointment as Treasury secretary, however, Wolcott cut short Randolph’s career by giving Pickering a copy of a letter purportedly written by Randolph to the outgoing French minister, soliciting bribes to further French interests. Pickering showed it to Washington and accused the former Virginia governor of treason.
The letter and Pickering’s accusation staggered Washington. He had known and trusted Randolph for years—considered him a close personal friend. A wealthy plantation owner like Washington and a cousin of both Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall, Randolph came from one of Virginia’s oldest and most distinguished families. He had been Washington’s aide-de-camp in Cambridge at the beginning of the Revolutionary War in 1775. A dozen years later he had supported Washington in the struggle for ratification of the Constitution. Washington all but broke down in tears as he confronted Randolph with the letter and demanded Randolph’s resignation.
Adding to Washington’s despair over the departures of Randolph, Hamilton, and Knox was the death of Attorney General William Bradford in August. In only eight months the President had lost the four most important members of his cabinet.
To fill the post of attorney general for the remaining months of the administration, Washington turned to his own lawyer, John Marshall, but Marshall only added to the President’s despair by refusing the appointment. The Fairfax Manor Lands case—and the wealth it promised his family—still required his attention, as did his children and his ailing wife, Polly. Nothing in the world—no honors, powers, or emoluments—matched the value of his home and family. When he and Polly were together, he claimed, they became “the two happiest people on earth.”10
After Marshall refused to join Washington’s administration, the President faced rejections by two of his Supreme Court appointees. Even Patrick Henry refused, pleading a desperately ill wife and eight children to support along with “loss of crops and consequent derangement of my finances and . . . my own health.”11
At a loss for a replacement, Washington turned to former Treasury Secretary Hamilton for help: “Aid me, I pray you, with your sentiments. What am I to do for a Secretary of State? Mr. Marshall . . . has declined the office of attorney general and I am pretty certain would accept no other. I ask frankly and with solicitude and shall receive kindly any sentiments you may express.”12
On Hamilton’s advice, Washington elevated Pickering to the powerful post of secretary of state, then named the pliant James McHenry secretary of war.
With Pickering, McHenry, and Wolcott in the three most important cabinet posts, Hamilton suddenly had more influence on government in early 1795 than when he actually sat in the cabinet. Only Virginia’s Charles Lee, the younger brother of Governor Henry Lee, acted and thought independently of Hamilton, but as attorney general, he had little influence on policy. The attorney general’s function then was to act as the President’s lawyer and legal adviser—not as a policy maker.
Washington had no sooner installed his new cabinet when a barrage of criticism exploded over the Capitol and rioters poured into the streets calling for Washington’s resignation. Until then the Senate had been debating terms of the Jay Treaty in secret, but one or more Republicans with ties to Jefferson leaked details of the treaty to the Republican press. Bold headlines vilified John Jay—and his presidential patron: Jay had failed to negotiate an end to British depredations against American shipping and the cruel impressment of American crewmen.
“The whole country was agitated with that question,” John Marshall recalled later to his friend Associate Justice Joseph Story. “The commotion began at Boston and seemed to rush through the Union with a rapidity and violence which set human reason and common sense at defiance.”13
Southerners grew particularly irate when they learned that the northerner Jay had failed to win compensation for the loss of slaves the British had lured away during the Revolution. Indeed, the only concessions Jay won from the British were withdrawal of their troops from the Northwest Territory and resumption of limited American trade with Britain and the West Indies. They agreed to let a joint commission settle financial claims of British and American citizens against each other.
Jefferson pounced, firing a barrage of angry letters to Republican allies describing Jay’s treaty as a “monument of folly or venality” and labeling it “Hamilton’s Treaty.”
“I have always found,” he wrote to Mann Page, a Virginia attorney and Republican political leader, “that rogues would be uppermost, and . . . rising above the swinish multitude, always contrive to nestle themselves into the places of power and profit.”
These rogues set out with stealing the people’s good opinion and then steal from them the right of withdrawing it by contriving laws and associations against the power of the people themselves.14
Jay had, of course, hoped to win concessions on both the impressment and slave issues but found Britain with no incentive to yield on either question. Aside from sheer economic and military power, British warships had crushed the French fleet in a critical naval battle and seized full command of Atlantic waters, with no need to cede anything to any nation on earth.
When the terms of the Jay Treaty became public in March 1795, southern legislatures with Republican majorities instructed their senators in Philadelphia to reject it. Elections were still under way in Virginia, however, and Richmond’s Federalists hoped to win an Assembly majority to support the Jay Treaty by putting such popular figures as John Marshall on their list of candidates. Marshall’s wife, Polly, was pregnant again, however, and he refused to leave home to campaign. To his relief, she gave birth in September to another daughter, Mary, whom they nicknamed Polly. After Polly’s birth, John Marshall learned that, through no effort of his own, he had won the election, ensuring a Federalist majority in the Virginia Assembly and election of Federalists as the state’s US senators.*
“I was well satisfied at being again in the assembly,” Marshall admitted.15
Jefferson, however, responded bitterly to Marshall’s election victory, noting that “Marshall will be able to embarrass the Republican Party a good deal. . . . His lax lounging manners have made him popular with the bulk of the people of Richmond, and a profound hypocrisy [has made him popular] with many thinking men of our country.”16
In June 1795 the Federalist ma
jority engendered by the Virginia elections ensured ratification of the Jay Treaty and not only earned Marshall national political attention, it coincidentally earned him and his family untold wealth. In approving the treaty, Congress effectively recognized the legitimacy of pre–Revolutionary War claims by British citizens to lands confiscated by American states and individuals. It thus legitimized Denny Martin Fairfax’s claim of ownership of the Fairfax Manor Lands and his right to sell the lands to the Marshalls for the agreed upon £20,000.
Recognizing the Jay Treaty as the law of the land, John Marshall went to Philadelphia in January 1796 to obtain a final Supreme Court ruling in Hite v. Fairfax. It was the first time since his marriage more than a dozen years earlier that he separated from his beloved Polly, and he left ridden with anxieties.
“My Dearest Polly,” he wrote after his arrival in Philadelphia,
After a journey . . . beyond measure tedious . . . I am at length safe at this place. . . . I have not yet heard from my beloved wife and children. You ought not to keep me in suspense about you. . . . Kiss our children and especially our sweet little Poll for me and tell Tom I expect him to attend to his brother and to you. I count on Jacquelin’s great improvement before my return. I am, my dearest Polly, your affectionate
J. Marshall17
Press reports of Marshall’s eloquent defense of Washington and the Jay Treaty in the Virginia Assembly had preceded him, and, when he arrived in the nation’s capital, congressional Federalists embraced him as a new party leader.
“My arguments were spoken of in such extravagant terms as to prepare the Federalists of Congress to receive me with marked attention and favor,” he reported. “A Virginian with any sort of reputation who supported the measures of the government was such a rara avis that I was received by them all with a degree of kindness which I had not anticipated.”18
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