Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

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.”

The delegates agreed that slavery wouldn’t be mentioned by name in the Constitution, giving way to transparent euphemisms, such as “persons held to service or labor.” Slaveholders won some substantial concessions. For the purposes of representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College, they would be able to count three-fifths of their slave population. This was no mean feat: slaves made up 40 percent of the population in Virginia, for instance, and 60 percent in South Carolina. The slave trade would also be shielded from any tampering for at least twenty years.

Once again he was preoccupied with presumed taunts and criticisms, the inner voice of his own unspoken fears.

at one point a cherubic boy, lowered above him by a mechanical device, popped a laurel crown onto his head.

the tradition of having slaves in the presidential household unfortunately lasted until the death in 1850 of Zachary Taylor, the last of the slaveholding presidents.

A taciturn man, Washington never issued opinions promiscuously. A disciplined politician, he never had to retract things uttered in a thoughtless moment.

Washington and other founders entertained the fanciful hope that America would be spared the bane of political parties, which they called “factions” and associated with parochial self-interest. 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.

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 believed in limited federal power, a dominant Congress, states’ rights, and an agrarian nation free of the corrupting influence of banks, federal debt, and manufacturing. While led by slaveholders such as Jefferson and Madison, the Republicans credited the wisdom of the common people.

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.

“There is a prevailing idea in G[reat] B[ritain],” wrote one correspondent, “if not in other parts of Europe, that whenever you are removed, the federal union will be dissolved, the states will separate, and disorder succeed.”