Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

Hamilton concurred that the president “consulted much, pondered much; resolved s...

Once a decision was made, Washington seldom retreated unless fresh evidence radically altered his view. “Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence,” Jefferson wrote, “never acting until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt but, when once decided, going through with his purpose whatever obstacles opposed.”

but he admitted that “no judgment was ever sounder.”

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

“Never be agitated by more than a decent warmth and offer your sentiments with modest diffidence,” he told his nephew Bushrod, noting that “opinions thus given are listened to with more attention than when delivered in a dictatorial style.”

There was cunning in Washington’s nature but no low scheming.

Christian Güllager,

In its sparsely worded style, the Constitution mandated that the president, from time to time, should give Congress information about the state of the Union, but it was Washington who turned this amorphous injunction into a formal speech before both houses of Congress, establishing another precedent. Trailing him in his entourage were the chief justice and members of his cabinet, leading to yet another tradition: that the State of the Union speech (then called the annual address) would feature leading figures from all three branches of government.

He sounded a theme already resonant in his wartime letters: the need to ensure a strong national defense: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.”

He also advocated the advancement of science, literature, and learning through the formation of a national university.

During the colonial era, the evasion of customs duties had become a time-honored practice, and Hamilton had to seek Washington’s approval for constructing ten boats called revenue cutters to police the waterways and intercept smugglers, giving birth to what later became the Coast Guard.

Dating back to their wartime frustrations with Congress, Washington and Hamilton had shared a common worldview and an expansive faith in executive power. They had seen firsthand how Britain’s well-funded public debt had enabled it to prosecute the war with seemingly limitless resources. Late in the war Washington had blasted the fanciful notion that “the war can be carried on without money, or that money can be borrowed without permanent funds to pay the interest of it.”

Washington and Hamilton thought nations should honor their debts if they aspired to full membership in the community of nations.

Peerless in crafting policies embedded with a secret political agenda, Hamilton knew how to dovetail one program with another in a way that made them all difficult to undo.

In a preview of problems to come for Washington, 9 of the 13 negative votes came from his home state of Virginia.

James Jackson of Georgia warned grimly of civil war if the petitions passed, claiming that “the people of the southern states will resist one tyranny as soon as another.”

The Quaker memorials ended up stillborn in Congress. In late March, under Madison’s leadership, legislators quietly tabled the proposals by deciding they lacked jurisdiction to interfere with the slave trade prior to 1808.

During his final weeks Franklin had insisted that liberty should extend “without distinction of color to all descriptions of people.”

In July Congress approved the Residence Act, naming Philadelphia as the temporary capital for ten years, followed by a permanent move to a ten-mile-square federal district on the Potomac by December 1, 1800.

Long after Washington died, John Adams stated baldly that Washington had profited “from the federal city, by which he raised the value of his property and that of his family a thousand percent at an expense to the public of more than his whole fortune.”12 Washington was also accused of high-handed behavior in arrogating the right to pick the spot instead of yielding to his three commissioners. Maclay seemed overwrought: “I really am surprised at the conduct of the president . . . To take on him to fix the spot by his own authority, when he might have placed the three commissioners in the post of responsibility, was a thoughtless act.”13 The controversy shattered some magic spell that had spared Washington from criticism, and people no longer felt muzzled about challenging him directly.

There is something sad about George Washington’s decking out his slaves in this gaily elegant clothing as part of the presidential retinue.

When the House asked Hamilton that December for further measures to strengthen public credit, he proposed an excise tax on whiskey and other domestically distilled spirits.

Washington must have sensed that the government’s switch to Philadelphia would complicate matters with his slaves, for Pennsylvania had been the first state to undertake the gradual abolition of slavery, in 1780.

Philadelphia, in particular, had a large community of free blacks and a robust abolitionist movement. In bringing his slaves north, Washington violated his long-standing policy of not breaking up slave families.

In early April 1791 Attorney General Edmund Randolph delivered a startling piece of news to the Washingtons. Under the 1780 Pennsylvania statute, any adult slaves resident in the state for six consecutive months were automatically free. Three of Randolph’s own slaves had served notice that they planned to claim their freedom. Bizarrely, the attorney general of the United States urged the president and first lady to evade this local law. Coaching them how to do so, he noted that once slaves were taken out of Pennsylvania and then brought back, the clock was reset, and another six months needed to elapse before they could demand their freedom.

Not taking any chances, Washington decided to shuttle his slaves back to Mount Vernon for brief stays before their six-month time limits expired. As minors, Christopher Sheels, Richmond, and Ona Judge were all debarred from seeking their freedom. To keep the adult slaves in bondage, Washington resorted to various ruses so they would not know why they were being sent home temporarily.

Such devious tactics ran counter to Washington’s professed abhorrence of slavery, not to mention his storied honesty.

This strange declaration shows that Washington had already told a few confidants of his intention to free his slaves someday, while saying that, in the interim, the slaves were somehow better off than if they were emancipated.

In August 1791, inspired by the French Revolution, slaves in the French colony of St. Domingue (later Haiti) began a bloody rebellion that raged for a dozen years. Many slave owners fled to American seaboard cities, where they stoked dread among American masters that their slaves, too, would stage a bloody insurrection. In 1792 the House of Commons in London enacted its first ban on the slave trade, further fueling fears among slave owners that abolitionism might spread.

Faced with such ferment, Washington struggled to find a stand on slavery that reconciled his economic interests with his private principles.

Still, Washington remained a tough master. Slavery depended on exerting a sizable degree of terror to cow slaves into submission.

George Washington desperately wanted to think well of himself and believed he was merciful toward the slaves even as the inherent cruelty of the system repeatedly forced him into behavior that questioned that belief.

By the time he was sworn in as president, Washington was down to a single tooth, a lonely lower left bicuspid, which bore the entire brunt of a complete set of dentures.

In an omen of future strife, the vote again divided sharply along geographic lines: the northern states were almost solidly for the bank, and the southern states were largely lined up against

When Washington signed the bill on February 25, 1791, it was a courageous act, for he defied the legal acumen of Madison, Jefferson, and Randolph.

Chief Justice John Marshall later seized upon the doctrine of “implied powers” and incorporated it into seminal Supreme Court cases that upheld the power of the federal government.

In approving the bank bill, Washington again championed Hamilton as an agent of modernity, a man who represented the thriving commerce of the seaport cities rather than the Virginia gentry from which he himself had emerged.

THE UPROAR OVER THE HAMILTONIAN SYSTEM made it all the more imperative that Washington undertake a tour of the southern states, much as he had done with New England.

Within a year the country would be hopelessly divided over Washington’s policies, and the primary locus of discontent would be centered in the southern states.

The most divisive topic was whether the United States should lean toward France or Great Britain.

Even after waging war against Britain for more than eight years, Washington took a coldly realistic view of the strategic need for cordial relations with London.

He never advocated outright confiscation of their land or the forcible removal of tribes, and he berated American settlers who abused Indians, admitting that he held out no hope for pacific relations with the Indians as long as “frontier settlers entertain the opinion that there is not the same crime (or indeed no crime at all) in killing an Indian as in killing a white man.”

Hamilton’s assertion of federal power also awakened fears that meddlesome northerners might interfere with southern slavery. As one Virginian later said, “Tell me, if Congress can establish banks, make roads and canals, whether they cannot free all the slaves in the United States.”

Washington sometimes found it hard to differentiate between legitimate dissent and outright disloyalty.

Washington and Hamilton believed wholeheartedly in an energetic federal government, whereas Jefferson and Madison feared concentrated power.

Though a planter, Washington was receptive to labor-saving gadgetry, even if it meant using female and child labor.

The fight over financial policy was fast becoming a fight over the proper direction of the country; Washington was caught in the blazing crossfire between his brilliant treasury secretary and his equally brilliant secretary of state.

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.

The episode showed Madison’s capacity for duplicity—that he could act as Washington’s confidant even as he betrayed him.

In spite of everything, Washington wanted to retain Jefferson in the cabinet and maintain an ideological balance.