Washington: The Indispensable Man

by James Thomas Flexner

“The assassination of Jumonville is a monument of perfidy that ought to enrage eternity,”

beg it may be remembered, by every gentleman in this room, that I, this day, declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with.”

Almost every revolution in the history of the world, however idealistically begun, had ended in tyranny. The American Revolution had now reached its moment of major political crisis.

“to arrest on the spot the foot that stood wavering on a tremendous precipice, to prevent the officers from being taken by surprise while the passions were all inflamed, and to rescue them from plunging themselves into a gulf of civil horror from which there might be no receding.”

The most important labor would be to solidify the government by cementing to it the allegiance of the people. This would be done by visible virtue, a spirit within the government not of contention but compromise, by soothing regional prejudices, by improving the prosperity of the nation.

If another lady happened to be sitting there when Abigail Adams arrived, he got the interloper to move with a tact that made Mrs. Adams comment, “This same President has so happy a faculty of appearing to accommodate and yet carrying his point, that, if he was not really one of the best-intentioned men in the world, he might be a very dangerous one.” She continued in a manner that would have irritated her husband: “He is polite with dignity, affable without familiarity, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity, modest, wise, and good.”

“As some of the gazettes of the United States have teemed with all the invective that disappointment, ignorance of facts, and malicious falsehoods could invent, to misrepresent my politics and affections—to wound my reputation and feelings—and to weaken, if not entirely destroy, the confidence you have been pleased to repose in me; it might be expected at the parting scene of my public life that I should take some notice of such virulent abuse.

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.

“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.”