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. Had he sided with Jefferson and Madison, it might have deepened irrevocably the cleavage between North and South and opened an unbridgeable chasm seventy years before the Civil War.
