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When Harriot committed the faux pas of not consulting Washington about the marriage, the paterfamilias was miffed.
Also, as the country grew—by the spring of 1792, Congress had approved the admission of Kentucky and Vermont as new states—Washington wanted to maintain a sense of national cohesion amid pellmell expansion. The
The same day that Hamilton delivered his report to Congress, Madison unleashed an anonymous assault on the Washington administration, accusing it of laying the groundwork for a monarchy.
“Had he done this,” wrote Washington, quoting Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “he would . . . have found many of his charges as unsupported as the ‘baseless fabric of a vision.’”
From the letter’s diffident tone, Washington would never have suspected Madison’s brazen role in pounding his administration in the National Gazette.
Publications were avowedly partisan and made no pretense of objectivity. It was a golden age for wielding words as rapier-sharp political weapons.
“The publications in Freneau’s and Bache’s papers are outrages on common decency,” he complained to Henry Lee, noting that their allegations only grew more flagrant when treated with silence.13
By the end of 1793 the diatribes against Washington no longer dwelled simply on his supposed imitation of the crowned heads of Europe. Now the opposition sought to debunk his entire life and tear to shreds the upright image he had so sedulously fostered. That December, the New-York Journal said that his early years had been marked by “gambling, reveling, horse racing and horse whipping,” that he was “infamously niggardly” in business matters, and that despite his feigned religious devotion, he was a “most horrid swearer and blasphemer.”68 For George Washington, American politics had become a
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Virginia enacted more stringent rules against slave gatherings as well as an “act against divulgers of false news.”
One of the first challenges for the new team was to figure out how to deal with the lawless North African, or “Barbary,” states—Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis—which plundered foreign vessels in the Mediterranean and enslaved their crews.
As American crews succumbed to these pirates and were threatened with forced conversion to Islam, Washington was offended by the need to pay bribes, especially after Algiers seized eleven American merchant
WASHINGTON’S LETTERS show that during his second term he was bruised and disillusioned by the scathing tone of the opposition.
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.”
One newspaper writer had charged that the president “insidiously aims to dissolve all connections between the United States and France and to substitute a monarchic for a republican ally.”10 Washington felt powerless to stop this sometimes-ludicrous barrage of falsehoods.
Frustrated with governmental inaction, Kentucky residents threatened to secede from the Union, prompting President Washington to post Thomas Pinckney to the Spanish court as envoy extraordinary.
In October 1796 Paine published in the Aurora an open letter to Washington, accusing him of “a cold deliberate crime of the heart” in letting him rot in prison, and he also took dead aim at his command of the Continental Army.
One visiting Frenchman resented its “marked antipathy to France and a predilection for England,” while an opposition paper characterized Washington’s words as “the loathings of a sick mind.”
There was no mourning for Washington’s departure in the editorial office of the Aurora, which had this to say about his retirement: “Every heart in unison . . . ought to beat high with exultation that the name of Washington from this day ceases to give a currency to political iniquity and to legalized
The Aurora enjoyed bidding good riddance to Washington. “If ever a nation has suffered from the improper influence of a man,” it intoned, “the American nation has suffered from the influence of Washington.”
Embittered by his dealings with Washington, Jefferson clearly thought that the first president had been terribly lucky and overrated.
Of the 277 slaves he and Martha controlled, no fewer than 98 were under the age of twelve. The trickiest issue he faced was strikingly evident: 90 slaves were reported as married. Many of Washington’s slaves had married Martha’s dower slaves or else slaves at nearby plantations.
“Have me decently buried and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.”21 Lear promised to honor his wish, which consoled Washington, making his breathing a trifle easier. This fear of premature burial was common at the time; Elizabeth Powel, for instance, left instructions in her will that the lid of her coffin should not be screwed on until minutes before it was lowered into the earth.
