The Republicans’ timing, however, was off. By the winter months of 1796, the treaty still had fervent opponents, especially in the South, but opinion was shifting. A leading Republican moaned that the treaty had initially been opposed by “nineteen twentieths of our citizens, [but] is now approved of . . . by the same proportion.” Sensing the movement, tuning out the static coming from rabid treaty opponents, Washington delayed his request for treaty-related funding. With public attitudes coming his way, he had the discipline to wait. When official copies of the treaty arrived from Britain, the astute Washington still waited. Time was on his side.38
The tide running in Washington’s favor triggered a jubilant birthday celebration on February 22, with ringing bells, roaring cannons, and well-wishers descending on his residence. On that day, the new treaty with Spain arrived with exhilarating terms: unrestricted access to the Mississippi for Americans, a midriver boundary line between the two nations, the right to use the port of New Orleans, and a boundary with Spanish Florida at the thirty-first parallel. The United States had secured every objective. The Senate unanimously and speedily ratified it.39
After George III’s acceptance of the Jay agreement arrived, Washington declared it in effect. Still, however, he did not submit his funding request, allowing the joyous news of the Spanish treaty to spread. The president ventured into the public eye for the first time in more than six months. When he and Martha entered Ricketts’ Theater in late February, they were greeted with three rounds of spontaneous applause. A voice then rang out, “Damn me if that is enough for the Old Fellow, let’s give him three cheers,” which the crowd did.40
Feeling the situation slipping away, Republicans launched their first attack three days later. They demanded that Washington turn over the treaty instructions given to Jay. Washington took his time responding, seeking advice from Hamilton and others. At issue was the president’s authority over foreign policy. Washington, who had recently pledged to respect the Constitution in all such matters, refused to deliver the papers, adopting Hamilton’s argument that the treaty power rested exclusively with the president and the Senate. He was, he explained, simply following the Constitution.41
The Republicans moved on to their attempt to deny funding for treaty enforcement. The Federalist minority fought back on several fronts. They organized local meetings to demand funding. They linked money for the Jay Treaty to money for the spectacularly popular Spanish treaty. In floor debate, they contended that if America backed out of the agreement with Britain, war would follow, then dissolution of the union.42
There were no votes to spare. The House divided evenly, so the presiding officer broke the tie in favor of funding the treaty obligations; a second vote came in at 51–48 for funding. Washington credited the public petitions for the victory, but Jefferson thought it was the president who made the difference. “One man outweighs them all in influence over the people,” he wrote, adding, “Republicanism must lie on its oars, [and] resign the vessel to its pilot.”43
The Republican chief did not mention, however, Washington’s adroit management. Never abandoning his position that the treaty was good and that only the executive and the Senate were responsible for treaties, he patiently withheld his funding requests while public opinion moved. Then he waited some more. He stood, he reminded the people, with the Constitution. And when his position was strong enough, he struck.
The Jay Treaty’s benefits met Washington’s modest expectations. Within a few weeks of the House vote on funding, the British began evacuating the western posts. According to a senator from Pittsburgh, that “completed the measure of our political happiness.”44 Frontier trade rebounded and settlement of the Northwest Territory proceeded.
As Washington also had predicted, relations with France deteriorated. He tried to placate the sister republic, recalling American minister Gouverneur Morris and sending in his place James Monroe, a pro-French Republican.45 But Washington would not change his core policy, stated to Hamilton in May 1796: “We will not be dictated to by the politics of any nation under heaven, farther than treaties require of us.”46 With less than a year remaining in office, Washington lacked the time to execute a strategy for dealing with the ever-shifting French government. France would be a problem for the next president.
Chapter 50
Farewell, Again
In his sixty-fourth year, the final year of his presidency, Washington made a powerful impression on Henrietta Liston, wife of the new British minister and twenty years his junior. She found his face “rather pleasing, particularly when he smiles.” He moved with “a dignity which even the general coldness of his address did not lessen.” On visits to Mount Vernon, Mrs. Liston admired his “majestic figure,” natural grace, and sense of style. He laughed readily at others’ jokes, although his own humorous remarks were “the flash of a moment; gaiety was not natural to him.” She marveled at his mastery of etiquette, “how acquired, Heaven knows.” Mrs. Liston evidently did not know of Washington’s early studies with the Fairfaxes of Belvoir.
The Englishwoman offered perceptive judgments about the statesman as well as the man, finding him “naturally grave and silent . . . [with] prudence his striking trait.”
Most people say & do too much;—Washington, partly from constitutional taciturnity,—but still more from natural sagacity and careful observation, never fell into this common error.
Although the president knew no language but English and could not be called learned, she found he “possessed, not only great good sense and a sound judgment, but was a man of observation and of deep reflection,” never speaking on a subject he had not mastered. She portrayed his personality as a mix of hot temper, coolness, and reserve.1
In his final year as president, opposition attacks grew ever more furious, trying his fabled temper. The Aurora of Philadelphia accused him of seeking “the greatest good for the least number possessing the greatest wealth,” and proclaimed that “thousands among [us] . . . equal you in capacity and excel you in knowledge.” Another Aurora issue called for his impeachment, accusing him of wishing to be king. A third regretted that “a good general may be a most miserable politician.”2
Harsher words came from Thomas Paine, whose pamphlets had rallied Americans during the Revolutionary War. Paine, who blamed Washington for not prying him out of a French jail where he rotted for months, called the president “treacherous in private friendship . . . and a hypocrite in public life,” declaring “the world will be troubled to decide whether . . . you have abandoned good principles, or whether you had any.” The Aurora strained to match Paine’s invective:
If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by WASHINGTON. If ever a nation was deceived by a man, the American nation has been deceived by WASHINGTON. . . . Let the history of the federal government instruct mankind, that the masque of patriotism may be worn to conceal the foulest designs against the liberties of a people.
Some Virginia gentlemen drank a new toast: “Speedy death to General Washington.”
The attacks reflected a spreading anxiety that Federalists were intent on preserving a stratified, class-based world. The new financial system appeared to favor the wealthy; the Jay Treaty seemed to align Federalists with aristocratic Britain and against revolutionary France; by suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion, Federalists used the power of the state against ordinary people with grievances. Now often seen as a party leader, Washington became fair game for partisan attack.3
The president sometimes professed indifference to the attacks, but they tortured a man who cared deeply about his reputation. “I think he feels these things,” Jefferson wrote, “more than any person I ever yet met with.” Occasionally Washington vented his fury in private, denouncing “infamous scribblers” who attacked him “in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pickpocket.” In the Jay Trea
ty battle, Washington had shown that he could operate effectively in the partisan brawling style that was emerging, but it was neither natural to him nor comfortable. No one in the House of Burgesses ever had to endure such calumny.4
Yearning to deliver a last word to his country, Washington began to imagine a valedictory address. Just as his presidency had set so many precedents, Washington wanted his departure to serve as a model. He wished to rise above the squabbles of the moment and highlight ideas and traditions that should become part of the American legacy. Washington the consummate performer would make the most of his final days on the public stage.
Four years before, when he had hoped to retire at the end of his first term, he had collaborated with Madison on a draft retirement address. When he agreed to a second term, he put the draft away. Because Madison was now an adversary, this time Washington recruited Hamilton’s help.5
In May 1796, Washington shared with Hamilton a draft of the key points to be made in the address, urging that the ideas be stated plainly. After nearly two months, Hamilton sent back an entirely new draft, one that covered the subjects noted by Washington but more simply and without defensiveness. As Washington had asked, Hamilton retained elements of Madison’s draft from four years before, a political stroke designed to limit Republican critics. Out of respect, Hamilton sent Washington an alternative that adhered more closely to the president’s original writing.6
Never prideful about his own compositions, the president preferred the draft Hamilton prepared from scratch, finding it “more copious on material points, more dignified on the whole, and with less egotism.” But the ideas were all Washington’s. He asked that Hamilton review it with John Jay.7
Washington (Latrobe sketch, 1796)
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
In early September, Hamilton returned another version. Washington edited this one line by line, striking out passages and substituting words to capture his thoughts more firmly. When he was done, he sewed the pages together with silk thread—the eighteenth-century version of a stapler. Though the document was dated September 7, two Philadelphia newspapers published it twelve days later, as Washington traveled back to Mount Vernon.8
Washington’s Farewell Address, professing to be “disinterested warnings of a parting friend,” became a classic, articulating principles that guided successors for generations. Schoolchildren memorized passages and politicians pledged fealty to it. On the first Washington’s Birthday of the Civil War, President Lincoln ordered commanders to read portions to their troops, while Congress read the entire document aloud at the Capitol.9
* * *
Though often remembered as a warning against entangling alliances with foreign nations—a phrase that appears in Jefferson’s first inaugural, not in Washington’s farewell—the farewell’s core was a thoughtful examination of the causes and dangers of unbridled partisanship, which Washington considered the great threat to American liberty.
Political differences not only fueled newspaper denunciations, but also the burning of effigies, public mobbing, and the stoning of Hamilton during the Jay Treaty fight. In a note to Jefferson in July 1796, implicitly pleading for restraint from the opposition leader, Washington confessed that he had never dreamt that “parties would, or even could, go to the length I have been witness to.” His plea went for naught. Jefferson, though amiable in person, proclaimed it “immoral to pursue a middle line.” The political choice, he explained, was between “honest men and rogues.” He recognized no common ground.10
Washington was not a starry-eyed idealist, not after more than four decades of political engagement, beginning with colonial politics during the war with France, sitting at the knee of Colonel Fairfax, Speaker John Robinson, and Governor Dinwiddie. He had stumbled clumsily then, a neophyte trying to navigate the British bureaucracy. His sixteen years in the House of Burgesses educated him in coalition-building, political timing, and persuasion. He learned from Speaker Peyton Randolph, Edmund Pendleton, George Mason, and Richard Henry Lee, then from younger men like Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson.
The Continental Congress made Washington’s perspective continental, introducing him to skilled agitators like Sam Adams of Massachusetts, to aristocratic revolutionaries like the Rutledges and Laurenses of South Carolina, and reintroduced him to the canny Franklin. To sustain his position atop the Continental Army, he drew support from the rotating cast in the Continental Congress and scores of state and local officials. When his leadership was challenged within the army, Washington isolated his rivals, then neutralized them.
After the war, he became the face of the Constitutional Convention and the new charter of government. With allies like Madison and Hamilton, he was the necessary keystone of the ratification effort. As president, he held in one cabinet the disparate views of Hamilton and Jefferson, securing enactment of the essential fiscal program and placing the seat of government on the Potomac. As politics fractured on partisan lines, Washington faced down Genêt, sustained neutrality, brought the Whiskey Rebellion to a bloodless end, and shouldered the Jay Treaty into law.
In short, Washington’s political acumen, acquired through the sort of close observation and careful reflection that impressed Henrietta Liston, was beyond question. As a leading historian concluded, no one of his generation understood power so well. Perhaps no American leader ever has.11
Washington had come to believe that partisanship is inevitable; in the Farewell Address, he called it “inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind.” Partisanship infects all governments, he continued, though authoritarian regimes suppress it. In popular governments, “it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.”
Washington offered a sophisticated view of its costs. As factions succeed each other in power, they develop a “spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities.” Upon winning control, each faction settles old scores and reverses policies, even successful ones. Yet there is a worse outcome. The factional “disorders and miseries . . . gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual.” Eventually, “the chief of some prevailing faction more able or more fortunate than his competitors turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” In short, tyranny.
Washington warned that because partisanship will never go away (is “a fire not to be quenched”), it must be controlled (“demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame”). Unconstrained, partisans run amok. For Washington, constraint must be built into a structure that fractures power among the branches of government, “dividing and distributing it into different depositories,” arming each to resist incursions by the others. For the pragmatic Washington, reciprocal checks on the government’s centers of power preserved popular control and individual liberty.
In the Farewell Address, Washington called on his countrymen to appreciate their self-interest in preserving the union, using the term “union” nearly two dozen times.12 Union was, he insisted,
a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very Liberty which you so highly prize.
Washington specified how each region benefitted from union. Northerners prospered by trading the South’s agricultural goods, enriching Southerners in turn. East and west would develop similar connections as canals and roads fostered trade between those regions. Attempts to divide people, Washington warned, often were based on lies about those in other regions.
Moving to foreign affairs, the farewell stressed the importance of correctly judging America’s interests and resisting “the insidious wiles of foreign influence.” Washington warned against both “inveterate antipathies against” other nations or “pas
sionate attachments for” them. Both emotions give foreigners the power “to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils.” For Washington, limiting American commitments to other nations was one more method for staving off the factionalism that could destroy self-government.
The Farewell Address included other teachings. Washington insisted that a stable society must include religion and morality. He preached, as he always had, that there can be no government without revenue, no revenue without taxes, and that “no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant.” Americans could grumble about taxes, as Washington did, but to preserve their freedom, they must pay them.
His vision was of a virtuous, independent republic, strong enough to defy foreign powers. He closed with his personal hope for retirement under “the benign influence of good laws under a free government.”
A striking feature of the Farewell Address is that Washington warned Americans to guard against someone very like him: a national hero whose popularity cloaks the consolidation of power and the destruction of self-government. In view of Washington’s popularity and the power of his personality, he could have been the greatest threat to American liberty. After painting the president’s portrait, Gilbert Stuart reported that “had he been born in the forests . . . he would have been the fiercest among the savage tribes.” The Farewell Address was powerful because that man had restrained his ferocity and promoted self-government. Now he called his countrymen back to the cause of liberty. His impending retirement, his final act of relinquishing power, was proof that he remained faithful to that cause.13
George Washington Page 48
