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’Tis not in mortals to command success / But we’ll do more . . . we’ll deserve it,” a commentary on the fickle power of fate and how we must acquit ourselves nobly despite it, and “When vice prevails and impious men bear sway, / The post of honour is a private station.”
“Sir, you are too much exposed here,” urged Washington’s aide David Cobb, Jr. “Had you not better step a little back?” “Colonel Cobb,” Washington said coolly, “if you are afraid, you have liberty to step back.”
The normally prudent Washington, throwing caution to the winds, rhapsodized about America’s future, saying of the patriotic soldiers who had wrested freedom from Great Britain that “happy, thrice happy shall they be pronounced hereafter . . . in erecting this stupendous fabric of freedom and empire on the broad basis of independence . . . and establishing an asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions.”
His instincts were the antithesis of a demagogue’s: he feared his own influence and agonized over exerting too much power.
The Americans are a curious, original people. They know how to govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them.”
Ennobled by adversity and leading by example, he had been dismayed and depressed but never defeated.
His stewardship of the army had been a masterly exercise in nation building. In defining the culture of the Continental Army, he had helped to mold the very character of the country, preventing the Revolution from taking a bloodthirsty or despotic turn.
This statement tallied with Washington’s often expressed view that citizens had to feel before they saw—that is, they couldn’t react to abstract problems, only to tangible ones.
George Washington trusted the long-term wisdom of the American people, but his deep, abiding faith was often qualified in the short run by a pessimistic view.
What bothered Washington was less Mason’s opposition than his bullheaded rigidity. Of Mason’s followers, he said, “They are in the habit of thinking that everything he says and does is right and (if capable) they will not judge for themselves.”
Tailor-made for this transitional moment between the patrician style of the colonial past and the rowdy populism of the Jacksonian era, Washington could remain incommunicado as the electors voted.
Casting their votes on February 4, 1789, they vindicated Lee’s prediction: all 69 electors voted for Washington, making him the only president in American history to win unanimously.
Small wonder that John Adams said that if Washington “was not the greatest president, he was the best actor of the presidency we have ever had.”
Jefferson also retained a congenital distrust of politics, which he personally found a form of sweet torture, the source of both exquisite pain and deep satisfaction. He especially hated bureaucracy, whereas Hamilton had no such qualms.
Politics gave him more time to deliberate than did warfare, and he made fewer mistakes as president than as a general on the battlefield.
Washington’s fantasy of nonpartisan civility in politics was being rapidly eroded by growing polarization along north-south lines.
Complicating matters was the incipient feud between Hamilton and Jefferson. Now detecting signs of monarchy sprouting everywhere, Jefferson associated a funded debt with the British Empire and, despite his presence in the cabinet, secretly joined forces with Madison against Hamilton.
During this famous meal, in an apartment adorned with engravings of Washington, a grand deal was brokered. Jefferson and Madison agreed to aid passage of the assumption bill, while Hamilton promised to lobby the Pennsylvania delegation to endorse Philadelphia as the temporary capital and the Potomac as its final destination.
Only belatedly did Jefferson, a states’ rights advocate, realize his colossal strategic error, grumbling to Washington that he had been royally “duped by Hamilton” and saying that “of all the errors of my political life, this has occasioned me the deepest regret.”9 He believed that Hamilton, to consolidate federal power and promote a northern financial cabal, wanted to make the federal debt so gigantic that it would never be extinguished.
For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens
The city of Philadelphia had rented Morris’s house at 190 High Street (later Market Street) near the corner of Sixth as the new presidential mansion.
Washington’s slow, deliberate handling of this matter proved a model of the way he resolved complex disputes. First he impartially canvassed his cabinet officers to assemble the widest spectrum of opinion, making sure that, whatever he did, he could answer all critics.
This pose of immaculate purity was congenial to him, as he sought a happy medium in his behavior. Despite holding firm opinions, he was never an ideologue, and his policy positions did not come wrapped in tidy ideological packages. Rather, they developed in a slow, evolutionary manner, annealed in the heat of conflict.
The first president did not see that parties might someday clarify choices for the electorate, organize opinion, and enlist people in the political process; rather he feared that parties could blight a still fragile republic.
Washington sometimes found it hard to differentiate between legitimate dissent and outright disloyalty. He tended to view criticism as something fomented by wily, demagogic people, manipulating an otherwise contented populace.
Before long the two factions took on revealing names. The Hamiltonian party called itself Federalists, implying that it alone supported the Constitution and national unity. It took a robust view of federal power and a strong executive branch, and it favored banks and manufacturing as well as agriculture. Elitist in its politics, it tended to doubt the wisdom of the common people, but it also included a large number of northerners opposed to slavery. The Jeffersonians called themselves Republicans to suggest that they alone could save the Constitution from monarchical encroachments. They
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As an adjunct to this report, Hamilton fostered the growth of an organization, the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (SEUM), to demonstrate the feasibility of American manufacturing. At the Great Falls of the Passaic River in New Jersey, the society planned to set up the town of Paterson as a model for American manufacturing.
Three years later Washington told Edmund Randolph that, if the Union were to break up into North and South, “he had made up his mind to remove and be of the northern.”35 That Washington now identified with northern finance, commerce, and even abolitionism would have major consequences for American history.
In chatting with Madison, Washington also deplored the press onslaught against his administration, little knowing that the man from whom he was seeking commiseration was a secret author of some of those assaults. The episode showed Madison’s capacity for duplicity—that he could act as Washington’s confidant even as he betrayed him.
At this point Jefferson must have realized that he had irrevocably lost the battle for George Washington’s soul to Alexander Hamilton.
Again inaction had been his most potent form of action, silence his most effective form of expression.
However trying he often found the press, Washington understood its importance in a democracy and voraciously devoured gazettes. Before becoming president, he had lauded newspapers and magazines as “easy vehicles of knowledge, more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty . . . and meliorate the morals of an enlightened and free people.”
As press criticism mounted, however, Washington struggled to retain his faith in an independent press. In October 1792 he told Gouverneur Morris that he regretted that newspapers exaggerated political discontent in the country, but added that “this kind of representation is an evil w[hi]ch must be placed in opposition to the infinite benefits resulting from a free press.”
A president who carefully tended his image found it hard to see it falsely defined by his enemies. And a man who prided himself on his honesty and integrity found it painful to stare down a rising tide of falsehoods, misrepresentations, and distortions about his record.
Washington, a hardheaded realist, believed devoutly in neutrality and never doubted that nations are governed by their interests, not by their emotions.
“In whatever place you may be, or in whatever walk of life you may move,” Washington assured Lear, “my best wishes will attend you, for I am and always shall be your sincere friend.”
Washington’s strategy of building slowly and allowing for future expansion was an apt metaphor for his strategy for developing the entire country.
An essential difference between the American and French revolutions was that the American version allowed a search for many truths, while French zealots tried to impose a single sacred truth that allowed no deviation.
The massacre of French aristocrats widened the rift between Federalists, who feared that France would export anarchy, and Republicans, who cheered the radical spirit of events in Paris, whatever their unfortunate excesses.
He saw himself as the target of a whispering campaign conducted by his political opponents: “A part of the plan for creating discord is, I perceive, to make me say things of others, and others of me, w[hich] have no foundation in truth.”
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.
Washington reminded Randolph of the countless times he had heard him “lament from the bottom of my soul that differences of sentiments should have occasioned those heats which are disquieting a country otherwise the happiest in the world.”
Hamilton rescued Washington from such petty gripes and made the address coolly statesmanlike, the words of a self-assured man speaking to posterity. It was the lofty Washington, not the wounded man smarting with secret hurts, that Hamilton set out to capture.
In a paean to unity, he warned that national identity must trump local attachments: “The name of AMERICAN, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.”18 This continental perspective had informed his work ever since the Revolution.
Most of all he appealed to Americans to cling to the Union, with the federal government as the true guarantor of liberty and independence. As Joseph Ellis has written, “In the Farewell Address, Washington reiterated his conviction that the centralizing impulses of the American Revolution were not violations but fulfillments of its original ethos.”
For Washington, parties weren’t so much expressions of popular politics as their negation, denying the true will of the people as expressed through their chosen representatives.
While fearful of machinations, he told Trumbull, “I trust . . . that the good sense of our countrymen will guard the public weal against this and every other innovation and that, altho[ugh] we may be a little wrong now and then, we shall return to the right path with more avidity.” 15 It was an accurate forecast of American history, both its tragic lapses and its miraculous redemptions.
In a wide variety of areas, from inaugural addresses to presidential protocol to executive privilege, he had set a host of precedents that endured because of the high quality and honesty of his decisions.
He had restored American credit and assumed state debt; created a bank, a mint, a coast guard, a customs service, and a diplomatic corps; introduced the first accounting, tax, and budgetary procedures; maintained peace at home and abroad; inaugurated a navy, bolstered the army, and shored up coastal defenses and infrastructure; proved that the country could regulate commerce and negotiate binding treaties; protected frontier settlers, subdued Indian uprisings, and established law and order amid rebellion, scrupulously adhering all the while to the letter of the Constitution. During his
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In this nascent democratic culture, the political tone was becoming brash and rude, sounding the death knell for the more sedate style of politics practiced by the formal Washington.
