Yorktown brought Washington home to Virginia after six years of war. Home to the places and faces he loved most. Home to victory and, alas, to tragedy. Jack Custis had for once overcome his mother’s fears and joined the army as a temporary aide on Washington’s staff. He fell victim of the dysentery which was so common in all armies at that time. Washington sent him to nearby Eltham, home of his aunt, ordered Dr. Craik to care for him, and summoned Martha, Jack’s wife, Nellie, and his children, from Mount Vernon. The best available medical skill and tenderest care were useless. Three weeks after Yorktown, Washington rode all night to reach Eltham at dawn to find Jack dying. Disappointing as Jack had been in many ways, he had a wonderful charm and Washington loved him deeply. When Dr. Craik told him there was no hope he is said to have flung himself on a bed in grief. In a few moments he composed himself and went to comfort the two weeping women.

A week later he paid a ceremonial visit to his mother. It must have been for Washington another deeply emotional moment. There he stood at forty-nine, the son she had tried so hard to tame at her apron strings, conqueror of the world’s mightiest empire. According to the family tradition, his mother did not say a single complimentary word to him. She called him George, worried about his health, noting how tired he looked after six years of war, then reminisced about old times and old friends. “But of his glory, not one word.”

Nevertheless, she did consent to attend a dance at Fredericksburg in his honor, entering the room on her son’s arm, accepting with him the storm of applause. She stayed only a few minutes, then announced, “It is high time for old folks to be in bed,” and had George escort her home. Washington came back to the party and soon convinced his old friends and neighbors that the British had not worn him down. In the shank of the evening, according to one eye witness, he “went down some dozen couple in the contre dance with great spirit and satisfaction.”

For Washington, Yorktown was by no means the end of the war. He was able to linger only two days at his beloved Mount Vernon, and then he rode north again for two more years of coping with a lackadaisical Congress and the reluctant states. Although there was no fighting, he saw it was absolutely necessary to keep an army together so that American diplomats could negotiate from strength at the peace table. It was the same old story, with food and clothing in short supply and money nonexistent. As rumors of imminent peace became more insistent, ominous signs of revolt appeared in the discontented army.

The trouble began with a sober memorandum submitted to Washington at headquarters by one of his colonels, arguing that the only hope of governing the country sensibly lay in a monarchy with George Washington as king. “Be assured, sir,” Washington wrote in reply, “no occurrence in the course of the war has given me more painful sensations than your information of there being such ideas existing in the army. . . . Let me conjure you if you have any regard for your country, concern for yourself or posterity or respect for me, to banish those thoughts from your mind. . . .”

Then Congress, bungling as usual, decided to welsh on promises it had made to the officers in regard to their back pay and a bonus of five years’ pay or half pay for life. Already reduced to selling their uniforms for vegetables and using their ammunition to kill game, the desperate men exploded. A handbill was circulated, a rabble-rousing call to arms if there ever was one. “Can you consent to be the only sufferers by this Revolution?” it shrieked. A few days later, another, even more inflammatory message was distributed. “If peace takes place, never unsheath your swords until you have obtained full and ample justice.”

Two days later, Washington called a meeting of the officers in a big log building called “the Temple,” with a raised platform at one end. This moment, so little known by those who love to paint the Revolution in glowing terms, was the real crisis in the nation’s birth. America stood at a crossroads on March 12, 1783, as these tough, angry men filed into that crude building and Washington and his general officers walked out on the stage. It was entirely in the power of George Washington to send America down that bloody, bitter path that almost every other revolution in the history of the world has followed: a dictatorship built on the army’s bayonets. Oliver Cromwell had done it in England. Napoleon would do it in France, Vladimir Lenin in Russia, and every nation in South America would commit the same terrible blunder. The American army was ready, even willing, to do it on that harrowing day in 1783, until George Washington rose to address them.

He walked to a lectern at the front of the stage and addressed “his brother officers.” He called upon them to renounce the proposals of the anonymous handbills and vowed he would do everything in his power to win justice from Congress. He implored them not to take any measures which “viewed in the calm light of reason will lessen the dignity and sully the glory you have hitherto maintained.” He urged them instead to “afford occasion for posterity to say when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to mankind, had this day been wanting, the world had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.”

Then Washington began reading a letter from Joseph Jones, a congressman from Virginia who was sympathetic to the claims of the army. His eyes, worn from so many hours of reading and writing dispatches by candlelight, could not make out the closely written sentences. He reached into his pocket and took out new spectacles, which he had recently received from Philadelphia. “Gentlemen,” he said as he fumbled with the glasses, “you must pardon me. I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.”

The simplicity and truth of this statement struck every heart in the hall. Dozens of these hard-bitten veterans wept openly. Washington finished the letter and left the stage. A few moments later the men voted to repudiate the mutinous handbills and place their hopes for the future in Washington’s hands.

Back in his headquarters, Washington demanded justice for his men in a letter that scorched the ears of Congress. “If retiring from the field they are to grow old in poverty, wretchedness, and contempt, if they are to wade through the vile mire of dependency and owe the miserable remnant of that life to charity which has hitherto been spent in honor, then shall I have learned what ingratitude is. Then shall I have realized a tale which will embitter every moment of my future life.”

Within the month, news of peace arrived and Congress voted to pay the departing officers full pay for five years. The Revolution had been rescued.

This was the negative side of Washington’s final achievement as a Revolutionary leader. He had saved the Revolution from plunging down the path of self-destruction. Now he turned his mind to guiding it along the path to national achievement. His farewell letter as commander-in-chief of the army was sent to the governors and legislatures of the thirteen states. In it, with keen foresight, he criticized the ramshackle Articles of Confederation by which the nation was attempting to govern itself and called for “an indissoluble union of the states under one federal head.” He also called on the people of the United States “to forget their local prejudices and policies, to make those mutual concessions which are requisite to the general prosperity and in some instances to sacrifice their individual advantages to the interest of the community.” But the “indissoluble union” was his main point. “Whatever measures have a tendency to dissolve the union or contribute to violate or lessen a sovereign authority ought to be considered as hostile to the liberty and independency of America and the authors of them treated accordingly.”

It took four years for Washington’s fellow citizens to realize the wisdom of these words. Only then did a Constitutional Convention finally meet in Philadelphia and hammer out a plan by which the quarrelsome, contentious states became a united America. The man who presided over this group of brilliant architects as president of the Convention was George Washington. When the battle over ratification of the Constitution divided the country, it was George Washington, again, who did more than any other man to win the nation’s approval. In Virginia’s ratifying convention, without making a single speech, he carried the day against fulminating Patrick Henry and a chorus of other orators, winning by a mere five votes. For most Americans, it was enough to know that George Washington approved the Constitution.

They also voted yea with the assurance that George Washington would be the man to administer that Constitution as the first president. Letters poured into Mount Vernon from men of influence in all parts of the nation, urging the task upon him. Washington recoiled at first. He said the idea cast “a kind of gloom, upon my mind.” He was fifty-seven years old and had, through eight years of toil and trouble, earned enough honor and reputation to satisfy any man. Now he was being asked to risk his good name again on a battlefield he feared and disliked, the gray and tricky landscape of politics. It meant another farewell to his beloved Mount Vernon and the inevitable neglect of this and his many other farmlands. (Only in the few years of Washington’s personal supervision did Mount Vernon show a profit.) But when the electoral college voted unanimously to make him the first president, he accepted the task as another call from his country in crisis.

“I go to the chair of government,” he wrote his old friend Henry Knox, “with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.” But he also went with an iron determination to prove the Constitution he had done so much to create and ratify was a workable document.

His task was formidable - nothing less than the creation of a government. Everything done or said, even down to such trivia as the title by which Congress should address him (they finally decided on “the President”), set a precedent. As an added difficulty, Washington had to cope at first with the executive departments of the old Articles of Confederation government. The heads of these departments - Foreign Affairs, War, Post Office, and Treasury - reported to Congress, not to the chief executive. A brusque assertion of authority could have been fatal to the relationship between the President and Congress. Here, as in a hundred other matters, Washington displayed his realistic wisdom.

He began by announcing he did not feel at the outset that it was “expedient” to make an official demand for reports from these departments. He let them go on reporting to Congress. He went assiduously to work, reading their files and dispatches, and within three months asked the men in charge for a summary that would give him a “full precise and general idea” of their work. Then, without so much as a ruffle of protest, he quietly took charge of the foreign affairs department because this was a power specifically granted to him in the Constitution. In the next few months, he slowly extended his control over the other departments. While Congress debated whether to give the president power to remove the heads of these departments once they were appointed under the new government, Washington was demonstrating the wisdom of executive control by practicing it under their noses.

Though he was firmly convinced of the need for a strong executive, Washington was at first ready to “consult” with Congress on such things as appropriations and foreign policy. He even went into the Senate chamber and sat by while the vice president read a presidential recommendation on how to pacify the restless Creek Indians. He was dismayed to find himself swiftly involved in a Senate debate, which ended in a resolution to postpone the whole matter. “This,” he said ruefully, “defeats every purpose of my coming here.” That rebuff and an appearance he made before a Senate committee to defend an appointment where he very nearly lost his temper, convinced Washington that the president should keep his distance from Congress and communicate in writing or by sending deputies to represent and defend his policies. He proceeded to create this basic pattern for our government, without bruising sensitive congressional egos.

At least as ticklish was the job of making hundreds of federal appointments, from revenue collectors at the nation’s ports to federal district attorneys to justices of the Supreme Court. There was no dearth of applicants. Military heroes and former presidents of the Continental Congress wrote unabashedly declaring their eagerness for a slice of the federal pie. James Wilson of Pennsylvania, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, blandly expressed a readiness to become Chief Justice. Washington’s nephew, Bushrod, a mere twenty-seven, felt he deserved a job as United States District Attorney for Virginia. To such importunings, Washington repeated a declaration he had made when he was leaving Mount Vernon to take over the government. Influences of “amity or blood” would be considered a minus, not a plus, in a man’s chances for office.

Nothing, in Washington’s view, was more important than the establishment of a sound federal court system. He spent hours pondering his list of possible Supreme Court judges, boiling it down from several hundred to thirty-five final contenders. He then decided that it was essential to have a geographic distribution, to give decisions the best possible chance of acceptance. He therefore chose the six justices (all that were permitted under the original act of Congress) from the six most populous states: Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. For the post of Chief Justice, which Washington called “the key stone of our political fabric,” he chose John Jay of New York, a man of unimpeachable integrity and legal reputation.

Not one of Washington’s judicial appointments was rejected by the Senate. He did almost as well with his other appointments, following the same policy of geographical spread so that no state could complain of favoritism. He also managed to show no mean skill at politics. For Attorney General, he chose fellow Virginian Edmund Randolph, who had opposed the Constitution. By converting an ex-foe into a member of his cabinet, Washington neatly muffled much lingering resentment against the federal charter in his native state.

For the rest of his cabinet, Washington showed a distinct preference for brains. He chose Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State and Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury. Young men both, they were undeniably brilliant - too brilliant, Washington eventually discovered, to tolerate each other’s presence at the summit of power. In the beginning they gave Washington invaluable and wholehearted assistance in creating a coherent foreign policy and internal economic stability. To their counsels the Washington added the steady if not as formidable intelligence of his trusted and trustworthy old artillery chief, Henry Knox, as Secretary of War. Washington early instituted the habit of consulting and debating with these men before reaching any important decision. He was also not in the least shy about picking the brains of others, outside the cabinet, notably Congressman James Madison. “I am very troublesome,” he wrote Madison, apologizing for seeking his advice so often. “But you must excuse me. Ascribe it to friendship and confidence.”

By the time Congress adjourned on September 29th, 1789, Washington could write his friend Gouverneur Morris, “. . . National government is organized and as far as my information goes, to the satisfaction of all parties.” Events within and without the United States soon made it clear how badly the nation needed the strength and decision Washington brought to the presidency.

When 7,000 farmers of western Pennsylvania decided to shoot and assault federal agents rather than pay taxes on their highly profitable whiskey stills, Washington assembled an army, put Lighthorse Harry Lee at its head, and quickly annihilated this abortive rebellion. When the frontier Indians defeated a poorly trained and poorly led American army, Washington chose the best of his remaining Revolutionary generals, Anthony Wayne, ordered the War Department and Treasury Department to give Wayne everything he wanted, and watched him secure the Northwest Territory for American settlement and haul down the British flag in Detroit.

Washington was keenly aware that in the power and prestige of the presidency lay America’s best hope of unity. During his two terms he made sure no one infringed on it. One anecdote that recalled his jousts with British generals over his proper title occurred when Washington made a state visit to Massachusetts. John Hancock was the governor, and the official plan for the visit called for Hancock to greet Washington in his rooms, followed by a state dinner at Hancock’s residence. Only a few minutes before the first meeting, Hancock sent word he was “indisposed.” Washington instantly saw that his old enemy in the Continental Congress wanted to emphasize the sovereignty of Massachusetts by making the president visit him first. Without a word of reproach, Washington coolly canceled the state dinner and ate in his rooms. The next day Hancock sent a flood of emissaries babbling apologies. When he received word that “the President of the United States” would be available from 1 P.M. until 2 P.M., Governor Hancock appeared within the hour to pay his respects to the presidency.

These state visits gave the country a chance to see the Washington in action - and with him the action was often more than they could handle. Visiting Providence, Rhode Island, he took a four-hour stroll. One congressman who tried to keep up with him moaned that it “completely fatigued the company which formed his escort.” The visits also gave Washington an opportunity to affirm the sense of brotherhood that had united Americans of all creeds and sections during the Revolutionary War. Visiting the Jewish synagogue at Newport, he declared, “The government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”

By far the greatest crisis of Washington’s presidency was the struggle to preserve neutrality between Britain and Revolutionary France in the war which erupted in 1793. The passions which this conflict aroused in the American people almost tore the nation apart. It divided Washington’s cabinet: Jefferson siding with France, Hamilton with England. There were moments when it seemed to threaten Washington’s life.

The French rebels had guillotined Louis XVI, with whom America, had made the treaty of alliance, attacked England, and called for “a war of all peoples against all kings.” France’s new rulers arrogantly demanded that the infant American republic enter the war as a partisan of liberty. No man had risked more for liberty than George Washington; but he was not the sort of man who plunged into a war simply because someone shouted a slogan. He replied that the treaty of alliance provided for mutual support only if France or America were attacked. In this war France was the aggressor. Moreover, the government with which America had signed the treaty was now totally defunct. Finally, the bulk of American trade was still with England. To go to war would be a death blow to the infant American economy. America, Washington informed the chagrined Thomas Jefferson, would maintain a “strict neutrality.”

The French and their supporters did everything in their power to make him change his mind. They attacked Washington in the public press. They sent mobs swarming into Philadelphia’s streets. Finally “Citizen” Edmond Genet, ambassador from the new French government, landed in Charleston, Carolina, and proceeded to act as if he, not Washington, was running the country. He commissioned privateers to attack British shipping; planned an invasion of Canada from the Northwest Territory; discussed raising a frontier army to attack Spain in Florida and Louisiana; and authorized French consuls in American ports to act as judges in the disposition of captured British vessels. He also launched a network of “Jacobin Clubs.”

En route to Philadelphia Genet was hailed by tumultuously cheering crowds; prominent citizens rushed to have dinner with him. Washington received him with frigid formality when he finally got around to presenting his credentials to the president (five weeks after his arrival in the country). The thirty-year-old Genet protested Washington’s lack of enthusiasm, and his supporters in the press lectured the president: “Let me caution you, sir, redeem yourself in the eyes of your people.”

Genet continued to act with almost unbelievable arrogance. He demanded that Washington release two Americans who had sailed on a privateer and had been arrested in Philadelphia for breach of the national peace. “I live in a round of parties,” he wrote home. “Old man Washington cannot forgive my success.”

Meanwhile, the pro-French press swung into vituperative action. It was led by Philip Freneau, a Jefferson protégé who had sat out most of the Revolutionary War in the West Indies. Freneau compared the president to a crocodile or a hyena. He pictured Washington as “lulled by an opiate of sycophancy” and warned him that the presidency was “temporary,” implying that there might be a guillotine waiting for Washington on the day he ended his term or sooner.

Encouraged by Freneau, other columnists were even more vicious. The “Bew letters,” lewd Tory forgeries of the Revolutionary War that pictured Washington as a seducer of his own servants, were reprinted. This reckless propaganda sent pro-French mobs storming through the streets, raising fears for the president’s safety. Enraged, Washington asked Jefferson to call off his curs. He made it clear that he bitterly resented being written about “in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero or notorious defaulter or even a common pickpocket.” Smarting under one particularly low fusillade, the presidential temper exploded at a cabinet meeting with a series of oaths that left politicians and secretaries trembling. “By God,” Washington thundered, “I would rather be in my grave than in this place. I would rather live out my days on my farm than be emperor of the world!”

The strain of the situation weakened the sixty-three-year-old president’s health. He ran a fever, and Jefferson in a letter to James Madison wept crocodile tears over how poorly he looked. “He is extremely affected by the attacks made and kept up on him in the public papers. I think he feels these things more than any person I ever yet met with. I am sincerely sorry to see them.”

Genet, meanwhile, was pirouetting around the country, gathering more ovations, and founding more Jacobin Clubs.

Publicly, Washington maintained an icy silence toward the ambassador and his abusive henchmen. The president knew exactly what he was doing; he was, in fact, playing his favorite game. He was waiting for the enemy to make the first wrong move. He had quickly obtained from the American minister in Paris an extensive intelligence report on Genet, which revealed a fatal weakness for anyone who dared to play for high stakes with George Washington. Genet had a tendency to talk too much and to the wrong people.

Washington let his cabinet officers deal with Genet. Steadfastly the president declined to do or say anything that might bring on a popularity contest between himself and the tactless young ambassador. He simply sat back, reinforced his policy with a ringing proclamation of neutrality, and watched Genet’s success go irrevocably to his feverish head.

Genet now had the effrontery to arm and equip as a privateer a captured British vessel, Little Sarah, in the port of Philadelphia, the capital of the United States. This was too much even for the pro-French Jefferson, who warned the reckless ambassador not to let the Little Sarah sail. Genet’s contemptuous reply was, “When ready I shall dispatch her.”

The Little Sarah sailed, and the British minister threatened war. Washington now took the nation’s foreign policy out of the hands of the vacillating Jefferson. He revoked the diplomatic standing of the French consul in Boston, who had been flouting the Proclamation of Neutrality. In a virulent speech, Genet threatened to appeal over the president’s head to the American people. This was the moment Washington had awaited. Would his fellow citizens support their president or this foreign intruder? Coolly, Washington helped them make up their minds by letting Alexander Hamilton leak to the press the bullying, insulting correspondence Genet had carried on with the American government since his arrival.

An avalanche of public indignation buried Genet. City after city held public meetings and forwarded testaments of loyalty to Washington. Now it was a simple matter to ask the French government for their ex-favorite’s recall. When his replacement arrived with a warrant for Genet’s arrest, the fallen idol panicked, realizing that he was a prime candidate for the Terror’s busy guillotine. With typical magnanimity, Washington permitted his ex-tormentor to remain in America as a private citizen.

For a man who was considered by many to be rather slow (though sound) in his thinking, Washington continuously outwitted French efforts to force the young republic into an open break with England. Another French minister, Pierre Adet, presented a richly ornamented silk flag to Washington. The previous year the American minister in Paris, James Monroe, had unofficially presented an American flag to French legislators, who gave it a permanent place of honor in their hall. In the light of Washington’s struggle for neutrality, this was indiscreet of Monroe. Adet eagerly took advantage of the chance to embarrass Washington by returning the compliment. Instead of rebuffing his offer, Washington accepted the tricolor with a speech so flattering and enthusiastic Adet was momentarily bewildered. He heaped superlatives on the French people. “To call your nation brave were to pronounce but common praise. . . . Ages that come will read with astonishment the history of your brilliant exploits. . . . The French colors,” he concluded, “would be deposited in the national archives.” It took Adet several days to realize that Washington had hoodwinked him. Instead of being displayed conspicuously in Congress, the flag moldered somewhere in the Department of State.

A sort of climax was reached when a French scholar (and notorious revolutionist) named Constantin Volney asked Washington for a letter of recommendation to ease his progress about the United States. The president forwarded the following diplomatic masterpiece.

C. Volney
needs no recommendation from
Geo. Washington

A more personal, but equally thorny diplomatic problem during this crisis-filled period was Lafayette. His attempt to ride the tigerish French revolution ended in disaster, and he narrowly escaped being devoured. Forced to flee his own countrymen, the Marquis was captured by the Austrians and flung into prison. Washington did everything in his power to help him, interceding with England and Austria through American diplomats abroad, and depositing 200 guineas of his own money in Amsterdam for the support of his friend’s family.

This was difficult enough. Lafayette multiplied Washington’s troubles by sending his son, George Washington Lafayette, to America at the height of the neutrality uproar. Washington decided, with the greatest reluctance, that he could not see the young man lest he be accused of favoring the anti-revolutionists in France. He made sure the boy was provided for handsomely in his travels about America. In New York, for instance, he had Alexander Hamilton look after him. Washington was determined, he told Hamilton, “under any circumstances to be in the place of a father and friend to him.”

At the end of his second term, Washington took the boy home with him to Mount Vernon, where he and his tutor stayed for over a year until Lafayette was released from prison. A line in Washington’s ledger testifies to his generosity. “By Geo. W. Fayette gave for the purpose of his getting himself such small articles of clothing as he might not choose to ask for - a hundred dollars.” When they said goodbye, Washington handed him another check for 300 dollars “to defray his exps. to France.”