Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

Washington wanted to convene emergency sessions of Congress outside the capital, but he was unsure of their constitutionality. To his credit, he did not automatically assume autocratic powers in a crisis but tried to conform faithfully to the letter of the law.

Washington had favored importing indentured servants to do the building—he praised Germans for their steady work habits, Scots for their mechanical abilities—but there was no way that a southern capital could emerge without drawing heavily on slaves, given the local shortage of free labor.

To the sharp reports of cannon, Washington stepped into a trench, hoisted a trowel, and spread cement on the cornerstone before pouring oil, corn, and wine over it as spectators offered up Masonic chants.

Despite his theoretical opposition to slavery, he cautioned his overseers against the “idleness and deceit” of slaves if not treated with a firm hand.21

It seemed a terrifyingly vivid realization of the nightmares of slaveholders who feared the hatred that simmered deep inside their slaves. In response, Virginia enacted more stringent rules against slave gatherings as well as an “act against divulgers of false news.”

He dropped the salutation “My dear Sir” in favor of the cooler “Dear Sir.” Thus did the subtle Washington consign ex-colleagues to slow oblivion.

By July 1794 the revolutionary tribunal in Paris accelerated the tempo of its trials and issued nine hundred death sentences per month.20 Many victims of the Terror had been stalwart friends of the American Revolution.

Pulled from his quarters in the middle of the night, Thomas Paine had been tossed into prison and stayed there for months. From Paris, James Monroe, who replaced Gouverneur Morris as American minister, informed Madison that Paine was loudly blaming Washington for his predicament: “He thinks the president winked at his imprisonment and wished he might die in gaol, and bears his resentment for it; also he is preparing an attack upon him of the most virulent kind.”21 Whatever displeasure Washington might have felt toward Paine, there is no evidence that he wanted him either abused or incarcerated.

In sallying forth to command the troops, Washington, sixty-two, became the first and only American president ever to supervise troops in a combat situation.

Knox’s absence magnified the power of Hamilton, who believed in an overwhelming demonstration of military strength. “Whenever the government appears in arms,” Hamilton proclaimed, “it ought to appear like a Hercules and inspire respect by the display of strength.”49

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.30 “You slept away your time in the field till the finances of the country were completely exhausted,” he fumed, “and you have but little share in the glory of the event.”31 Paine alleged that Horatio Gates and Nathanael Greene deserved true credit for the patriots’ victory, abetted by French assistance: “Had it not been for the aid received from France in men, money, and ships, your cold and unmilitary conduct . . . would in all probability have lost America.”32

Not content to denigrate Washington’s military performance, Paine defamed him as an unfeeling man, lonely and isolated, who ruthlessly crushed anyone who crossed him. Among his associates, Paine contended, it was known that Washington “has no friendships; that he is incapable of forming any; [that] he can serve or desert a man or a cause with constitutional indifference.”33 Paine ended with the most vicious swipe of all: “As to you, sir, treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.”

While Washington could have informed Congress of his resignation, he went instead to the source of all sovereignty, the people, just as the Constitutional Convention had bypassed state legislatures and asked the people to approve the document directly through ratifying conventions.

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.”

While such groups “may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people.”21 It was still hard for Washington to conceive of parties that were not disloyal cabals against duly elected government. A party spirit exists in all types of government, Washington observed, “but in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.”22 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.

Although he said that debt should be used sparingly and paid down in times of peace, Washington endorsed the Hamiltonian program.

“The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave.”

Sympathy with a foreign nation for purely ideological reasons, he said, could lead America into “the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.”

’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”26 It was Jefferson, not Washington, who warned against “entangling alliances,” although the concept was clearly present in Washington’s message.

When the Washingtons discovered the escape, they were convinced that Judge would have fled only if she had been cajoled by a wily seducer. They flattered themselves into thinking that, as a supposedly contented slave, Judge would never have pined for freedom if some intriguing fellow had not planted the forbidden idea. They could not conceive of a slave being the agent of her own fate or running out of a simple hunger for liberty. They felt obliged to denigrate any man who helped her as an unscrupulous cad rather than someone who might have loved her and honestly wanted to assist her.

When Langdon realized that Martha Washington was nowhere to be seen and that Judge had escaped, she asked Judge, “But why did you come away? How can Mrs. Washington do without you?” “Run away, misses,” Judge replied. “Run away!” said Langdon. “And from such an excellent place! Why, what could induce you? You had a room to yourself and only light nice work to do and every indulgence.”“Yes, I know, but I want to be free, misses; wanted to learn to read and write.”

Abusing his presidential powers, Washington instructed Wolcott to have the Portsmouth customs collector kidnap Judge and send her back to Virginia: “To seize and put her onboard a vessel bound immediately to this place [Philadelphia] or to Alexandria, which I should like better, seems at first view to be the safest and least expensive [measure].”

Judge’s flight belied whatever sedative fantasies the Washingtons might have had that slaves developed familial relations with their masters, transcending the indignity of bondage.

Although Kitt made inquiries and verified Washington’s hunch that Hercules had indeed lingered in Philadelphia, the ex-slave was never caught and succeeded in winning his freedom. He paid a hefty price for it. He left behind his son Richmond, who had been sent back to Mount Vernon for allegedly stealing money, possibly the prelude to a joint escape with his father. He also had to say goodbye to a six-year-old daughter at Mount Vernon. When a French visitor confronted the little girl as to whether she was upset at her father’s action, she retorted, “Oh! Sir, I am very glad, because he is free now.”

For the most part, the speech was well received, although the lone congress-man from the new state of Tennessee, Andrew Jackson, who was enraged by the Jay Treaty, refused to salute the departing chief or join in the congressional response applauding him.

“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.

The presidential legacy he left behind in Philadelphia was a towering one. As Gordon Wood has observed, “The presidency is the powerful office it is in large part because of Washington’s initial behavior.”

In surrendering the presidency after two terms and overseeing a smooth transition of power, Washington had demonstrated that the president was merely the servant of the people.

Still, if war came, Washington thought the public would prefer “a man more in his prime.”47 Then just as it looked as if Washington, aged sixty-six, might slam the door shut on his political career forever, he nudged it open a crack. In the event of war, he declared, “I should like, previously, to know who would be my coadjutors and whether you would be disposed to take an active part, if arms are to be resorted to.”48

“When a party grows strong and feels its power, it becomes intoxicated, grows presumptuous and extravagant, and breaks to pieces,” Johns Adams later wrote, having presided over just such a situation as president.

Federalist overreaching arrived at its apex with passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which tried to squelch criticism of war measures that President Adams and his congressional allies had undertaken during the undeclared Quasi-War with France. Among other things, these repressive measures endowed the government with broad powers to deport foreign-born residents deemed a threat to the peace; brand as enemy aliens any citizens of a country at war with America; and prosecute those who published “false, scandalous, or malicious” writings against the U.S. government or Congress, with the intent of bringing them “into contempt or disrepute.”

While these acts were enacted on Adams’s watch, Washington lent them his quiet sympathy. Writing to a relative, he at first declined to comment on them, then observed that resident aliens had entered the country “for the express purpose of poisoning the minds of our people,” thereby estranging “their affections from the government of their choice” and “endeavoring to dissolve the Union.”

his support for censorship is disappointing given his exemplary record as president in tolerating even irresponsible press tirades against his administration.

The storybook ending might call for an elderly Washington to bask in the serene glow of wisdom. Instead he took to the warpath against the Jeffersonians with a vengeance. The nonpartisan dream enunciated in the farewell address had expired as the last vestiges of political civility disappeared. With Washington now a rabid booster of Federalist candidates,

After hearing criticism that the neighborhood near the Capitol would lack housing for congressmen, he bought adjoining parcels on North Capitol Street, between B and C streets, and constructed a pair of attached three-story brick houses designed by Dr. William Thornton. Boasting that they stood upon “a larger scale than any in the vicinity of the Capitol,” he said they would be capable of housing “between twenty and thirty boarders”—an excellent example of Washington’s take-charge spirit.

When Julian Niemcewicz toured the Capitol in 1798, it pained him to see slaves hard at work: “I have seen them in large numbers, and I was very glad that these poor unfortunates earned eight to ten dollars per week. My joy was not long lived. I am told that they were not working for themselves; their masters hire them out and retain all the money for themselves. What humanity! What a country of liberty.”10

“Mr. Custis possesses competent talents to fit him for any studies,” Washington promised the school’s president, “but they are counteracted by an indolence of mind, which renders it difficult to draw them into action.”

For the first time in his life, he took recourse to bank loans, renewed at sixty-day intervals and set at what he termed “ruinous” interest rates.

While public life forced Washington into expenditures beyond his control, during his entire adult life he had exhibited an inability to live within his means.

only weeks before his death, Washington, for all his long-term faith in America’s future, viewed its short-term prospects as fairly dismal.

Over the previous four decades, at least forty-seven slaves belonging to George and Martha Washington had made a brave dash for freedom.

“Upon the decease [of] my wife, it is my will and desire th[at] all the slaves which I hold in [my] own right shall receive their free[dom].”16 While he had “earnestly wished” to free them upon his own death, that would entail breaking up marriages between his own slaves and dower slaves, provoking “the most painful sensations, if not disagreeable consequences.”

They also evacuated Washington’s bowels with an enema. Joined at last by Dr. Brown, they took two more pints from Washington’s depleted body. It has been estimated that Washington surrendered five pints of blood altogether, or about half of his body’s total supply.14

“Doctor, I die hard,” Washington said, “but I am not afraid to go.”

“I feel myself going,” he told them early in the evening. “I thank you for your attentions, but I pray you to take no more trouble about me. Let me go off quietly. I cannot last long.”

Haunted by this moment, she never slept in that bedroom again.

Again and again the American people had entrusted him with power, secure in the knowledge that he would exercise it fairly and ably and surrender it when his term of office was up.

Weems rushed out the first edition of The Life of Washington in pamphlet form that year. In that and succeeding editions, he manufactured enduring myths about Washington refusing to lie about chopping down the cherry tree, hurling a silver dollar across the Rappahannock, and praying at Valley Forge.

To improve sales and with an eye on the main chance, Weems deleted all partisan references, boasting to his publisher, “Adams and Jefferson both will approve our little piece.”39

“She spoke of the election of Mr. Jefferson, whom she considered as one of the most detestable of mankind, as the greatest misfortune our country has ever experienced. Her unfriendly feelings toward him were naturally to be expected from the abuse he offered to Gen. Washington while living, and to his memory since his decease.”