Washington: A Life (143 page)

Washington’s allusion to the new societies, which sounded sinister, produced deep reverberations in American politics. The Senate applauded his warning, but in the House James Madison denounced what he saw as the censure of legitimate political clubs. “If we advert to the nature of republican government,” he said, “we shall find that the censorial power is in the people over the government, and not in the government over the people.”
²¹
It was an astounding development: James Madison, the former confidant of Washington, was now openly condemning his mentor. So unwarranted did Madison consider Washington’s criticism of the “self-created societies” that he privately told Jefferson that it was “perhaps the greatest error” of Washington’s political life.
²²
Madison descried a strategy to denigrate the societies by associating them with the Whiskey Rebellion, and then to denigrate congressional Republicans by associating them with the societies—all as part of an effort to boost the Federalist party. For Jefferson, Washington’s speech was a patent attack on free speech, confirming a monarchical mentality that was “perfectly dazzled by the glittering of crowns and coronets.”
²³
For Madison and Jefferson, this was the pivotal moment when Washington surrendered any pretense of nonpartisanship and became the open leader of the Federalists.

As Washington anticipated, the display of military might in western Pennsylvania caused the uprising to wither. But it would stand as the biggest display of armed resistance to the federal government until the Civil War. Approximately 150 prisoners were taken into custody, and Washington showed commendable clemency in dealing with them. After two rebel leaders were tried and sentenced to death, Washington, drawing on this constitutional power for the first time, pardoned both men. Throughout the ordeal, he had shown consummate judgment, acting with firmness and moderation, trying diplomacy first but then, like a stern parent, preparing to dole out punishment. Given the giant scale of the protest and the governmental response, there had been remarkably few deaths. In a classic balancing act, he had conferred new luster on republican government, showing it could contain large-scale disorder without sacrificing constitutional niceties, and his popularity only grew in consequence.

The aftermath of the Whiskey Rebellion led to a dramatic shift in Washington’s cabinet. If the episode augmented Republican fears about Hamilton’s influence, the treasury secretary had a surprise in store for them. On December 1, the same day he returned to Philadelphia, he notified Washington that he planned to relinquish his Treasury post at the end of January, a decision possibly influenced by his wife’s miscarriage in his absence. As the contrasting behavior of Hamilton and Knox during the Whiskey Rebellion made clear, Washington warmed to Hamilton because the latter never let him down, never disappointed him, and always delivered in an emergency. Washington had allowed no Republican diatribes against Hamilton to weaken his opinion of a supremely gifted, if sometimes flawed, public servant. Just how highly Washington rated Hamilton was shown in the letter he wrote in accepting his resignation, an encomium that embraced both his wartime and his government service: “In every relation which you have borne to me, I have found that my confidence in your talents, exertions, and integrity has been well placed. I the more freely render this testimony of my approbation, because I speak from opportunities of information w[hi]ch cannot deceive me and which furnish satisfactory proof of your title to public regard. My most earnest wishes for your happiness will attend you in your retirement.”
²⁴
To replace Hamilton, Washington elevated the comptroller of the treasury, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., the Connecticut lawyer who had earlier been the department’s auditor.

Even as the Whiskey Rebellion deepened the bond between Washington and Hamilton, it appeared to dissolve the almost-twenty-year connection between Washington and Knox. Underscoring his displeasure with Knox, Washington sent him few letters that fall. In early December Knox told a friend that he contemplated stepping down at the end of the month, a decision only strengthened by another episode. On December 23 Senator Pierce Butler complained to Washington about abuses committed during the construction of the new U.S. frigates. In forwarding this letter to Knox, Washington was notably brusque, merely saying, “I request that strict inquiry may be instituted into the matter and a report thereupon made to me.”
²⁵
Knox knew how to read his chief’s subtleties. On December 28 he submitted his resignation to Washington, beginning the letter with the frosty “Sir” instead of the customary “Dear Sir.” In explaining his decision, Knox cited the claims of “a wife and a growing and numerous family of children” and tried to end on a personal note. “But in whatever situation I shall be, I shall recollect your confidence and kindness with all the fervor and purity of affection of which a grateful heart can be susceptible.”
²⁶

Where Washington had accepted the resignations of Hamilton and even Jefferson with “Dear Sir” letters, he addressed Knox as “Sir.” He made no effort to urge him to stay in office, and his letter, while correct, did not begin to capture the former warmth of their relationship: “I cannot suffer you, however, to close your public service without uniting, with the satisfaction which must arise in your own mind from a conscious rectitude, my most perfect persuasion that you have deserved well of your country. My personal knowledge of your exertions … justifies the sincere friendship which I have ever borne for you and which will accompany you in every situation of life.”
²⁷
One senses that Washington was trying to temper old gratitude with recent disenchantment. He had never made personal excuses for himself at times of crisis and apparently had little tolerance for Knox’s doing so. It is hard to avoid the impression that Washington thought Knox had behaved negligently during the whiskey crisis, and Knox was never fully reinstated in his good graces.

For Knox’s successor, Washington chose Timothy Pickering, a curmudgeonly character who, during his wartime stint as adjutant general, was critical of Washington. In 1791 the president had chosen him as postmaster general and also employed him periodically on diplomatic missions to the Indian nations. The choices of Wolcott and Pickering confirmed that Washington could not duplicate the quality of his first-term team and was moving toward a more overtly Federalist cabinet. After the flap over the Democratic-Republican Societies and his estrangement from Jefferson, Washington began to think that he deserved absolute loyalty from department heads and could no longer strive for political balance. The departures of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Knox only made Washington long more wistfully for the solace of Mount Vernon. In January 1795 he told Edmund Pendleton that “altho[ugh] I have no cause to complain of the want of health, I can religiously aver that no man was ever more tired of public life, or more devoutly wished for retirement, than I do.”
²⁸
Unfortunately, the cabinet turnover pushed the day of retirement ever further into a cloudy future.

EVEN WITH THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT, George Washington insisted that, in sending John Jay to England, he had selected the person best qualified to ensure peace. Because of long delays in transatlantic communications, Washington had no precise notion of the deal Jay was hammering out in London and warned his emissary that “many hot heads and impetuous spirits” wished him to speed up his work.
¹
While not wanting to rush Jay, he reminded him, quoting his beloved Shakespeare, that “there is a ‘tide in human affairs’ that ought always to be watched” and that he should proceed with all possible haste.
²
By February 1795 reports made the rounds in Philadelphia that Jay had concluded a treaty and would shortly arrive on American shores.

On March 3, with Congress set to adjourn, Washington notified legislators that he would convene a special session on June 8 to debate the treaty, which would surely arrive in the interim. As it happened, four days later the document sat on his desk. Washington must have quietly gagged as he pored over its provisions, which seemed heavily slanted toward Great Britain. The treaty failed to stem the odious British practice of seizing American sailors on the high seas. Shockingly, it granted British imports most-favored-nation status, even though England did not reciprocate for American imports. Once the treaty was revealed, it would seem to many as if Jay had groveled before his British counterparts in a demeaning throwback to colonial times. The treaty would strike southerners as further damning proof that Washington was a traitor to his heritage, for Jay had failed to win compensation for American slaves carted off at the end of the war. For all that, the treaty had several redeeming features. England finally consented to evacuate the forts on the Great Lakes; it opened the British West Indies to small American ships; and it agreed to compensate American merchants whose freight had been confiscated. And these concessions paled in comparison to the treaty’s overriding achievement: it arrested the fatal drift toward war with England. On balance, despite misgivings, Washington thought the flawed treaty the best one feasible at the moment.

Fully aware of its explosive contents, Washington elected to shroud the treaty in “impenetrable secrecy,” as Madison termed it, until Congress reconvened in June. By the time the Senate debated it, Jay had returned from England, having been elected in absentia governor of New York. (He would shortly resign as chief justice.) It was not an auspicious homecoming for Jay. The Senate had agreed to debate the treaty in secret, but Republicans gasped in horror as they perused its contents. Its fate seemed uncertain until the Federalists granted the Republicans a critical concession: they would oppose the notorious Article XII, which limited American trade in the British West Indies to ships under seventy tons. Strengthened by this compromise, the treaty effectively passed the Senate in late June by a 20-to-10 vote, the bare minimum needed under the Constitution’s two-thirds rule. The next step would be for Washington to sign the treaty, which caused him an agony of indecision.

In early July, word came that the British had issued bellicose new orders to seize ships laden with food bound for France. Having crafted delicate compromises to steer the treaty through the Senate, Washington was appalled at British insensitivity and protested to resident minister George Hammond. Washington felt sufficiently jittery about signing the treaty that he privately asked Hamilton, now returned to legal practice in Manhattan, to aid him with a high-level crib sheet. Evidently Washington and Hamilton had not been in touch, since Washington admitted that he did not know how Hamilton had been occupied of late. “My wishes,” Washington explained, “are to have the favorable and unfavorable side of
each
article stated and compared together, that I may see the bearing and tendency of them and, ultimately, on which side the balance is to be found.”
³
That Washington turned to Hamilton for guidance reflects his lack of confidence in his newly installed cabinet and his continuing reliance on Hamilton as his economic tutor. When Hamilton was treasury secretary, Washington had had to keep him at arm’s length, juggling him against Jefferson, but he had no such inhibitions with Hamilton out of office. Despite reservations about the Jay Treaty, Hamilton provided Washington with a generally laudatory fifty-three-page analysis, urging him to sign the highly imperfect document. Amazed at the breadth of this sparkling dissection, Washington in his reply sounded sheepish about having inadvertently taken up so much of Hamilton’s time.

Before he put his signature on the treaty, Washington was preparing to publish it when the
Aurora
printed a précis on June 29 that left the public so aghast that Madison said the treaty “flew with an electric velocity to every part of the union.”
⁴
On July 1 the paper issued the complete text, and an official version ran in the Federalist
Gazette of the United States
. The uproar was overwhelming, tagging Jay as the chief monster in the Republicans’ bestiary. In the treaty, Republicans saw a blatant partiality for England and equally barefaced hostility toward France. Critics gave way to full-blown paranoid fantasies that Jay, in the pay of British gold, had suborned other politicians to introduce a monarchical cabal. Some protests bordered on the obscene, especially a bawdy poem in the Republican press about Jay’s servility to the British king: “May it please your highness, I John Jay / Have traveled all this mighty way, / To inquire if you, good Lord, will please, / to suffer me while on my knees, / to show all others I surpass / In love, by kissing of your———.”
⁵
By the July Fourth celebrations, Jay had been burned in effigy in so many towns that he declared he could have traversed the entire country by the glare of his own flaming figure.

The targets of the protest went far beyond Jay. At a rally in New York, when Hamilton rose to defend the treaty, protesters hurled stones at him, while in Philadelphia a menacing mob descended on George Hammond’s residence, smashed the windows, and “burned the treaty with huzzahs and acclamations.”
⁶
Treaty opponents had no compunctions about besieging the presidential mansion, and John Adams remembered it “surrounded by an innumerable multitude from day to day, buzzing, demanding war against England, cursing Washington, and crying success to the French patriots and virtuous Republicans.”
⁷
From across the country, inflammatory resolutions against the treaty piled up on Washington’s desk, many of them too obnoxious to warrant replies. “No answer given. The address too rude to merit one,” Washington scrawled atop a New Jersey petition, while he chided another from Virginia thus: “Tenor indecent. No answer returned.” On still another from Kentucky, he scribbled: “The ignorance and indecency of these proceedings forbade an answer.”
⁸
Though tepid in his enthusiasm for the treaty, Washington was not prepared to go to war with England and thought the treaty would prevent a harmful deterioration in Anglo-American trade.