7

The Wider World

It has been said that during his first term Washington taught his successors how to be president and during his second term how not to be president. This is a half truth at best. Better to record that during his first term in office, he set up the executive branch of government, transformed the economic landscape with modern, forward-looking policies, successfully presided over the quarreling members of his cabinet, united diverse states and populations behind a new unified government and his own administrative and symbolic leadership. But better to grant, too, that while forging ahead with his vision of unity and prosperity, he never was quite capable of including in his concept of the people the “lesser” breeds or elements—the abjectly poor and uncouth and uneducated, hosts of American Indians, and slaves, including his own.

And better to grant that during his second term, though he established the executive branch as the sole formulator of the nation’s foreign policy, his own foreign policy, no less than some of his domestic policies, polarized citizens and spurred the development of political parties. Despite his unrivaled grasp of the interplay of ambitions and interests, Washington never fully understood the vital need for parties and partisanship as the only way, in the long run, to organize safely and creatively the grand conflicts inevitable in a healthy, dynamic democracy.

*   *   *

Leaving questions of credit and banking largely to his secretary of the treasury, the president had his own priorities for the nation: unity, security and order, and economic development—goals that, in his mind, were interdependent and inseparable.

Unity for Washington meant binding the states together through their commitment to the federal government as well as through trade. Internal commerce among the states, he believed, would “exterminate prejudices” and increase the “friendship of the inhabitants of one State for those of another.” Order, the sine qua non of civilized society, referred to Americans’ respect for the nation’s laws. Security entailed the right of Americans to navigate freely on the Mississippi; the evacuation by the British of their northwest posts; the settlement of the West without depredations by Indians; peace and friendship with European nations without entanglements in their wars. Economic development called for fair trade with Great Britain, access to her ports in the West Indies, the ability to export American products freely and to trade with France. While the goal of economic development would call for skillful negotiations with Great Britain, France, and Spain, the goal of security would require armed intervention against the Indians; and the goal of order would result in Washington’s crushing the “Whiskey” rebels in western Pennsylvania. Time and again, Washington would reveal himself a master of realpolitik, adept at seizing and wielding power—but at a price.1

Most important to Washington was the peaceful settlement of the Ohio Valley, the southern frontier, and other outlying regions. At stake were not only unity, security, and economic expansion but also, in Washington’s mind, the underlying moral strength of America. For he was convinced that American character and virtue would exist in their purest form in the West. While “luxury, dissipation, and corruption” would eventually infect the great cities on the Atlantic, he believed that the western states would retain their “primoeval simplicity of manners and incorruptible love of liberty.” How then to protect the orderly settlement of the West from Indian depredations?2

The new government considered the Indians “independent powers” and felt obliged to deal with them through treaties. It also recognized Indian ownership of tribal land and sought to buy as much of it as its agents could persuade the Indians to sell. This was American policy in a nutshell: negotiation, land purchases, shows of liberality, guarantees of protection from encroaching whites, and assurances of trade and education. But the Indians saw it differently: for them the deadly pattern was one of white advance, Indian defense, white retaliation.

For his part, the president insisted on moderation, patience, and justice, expressing sincere concern for the Indians’ plight. Because the “poor wretches” and “ignorant Savages” had no newspapers of their own through which to air their grievances, he wrote, only one side of the story—the white side—was known. Thus he wanted to “establish a conviction, in the minds of the Indians, of our love of justice and good faith.” Government agents “will not be suffered to defraud you,” he assured the chiefs of the Seneca Nation, “or to assist in defrauding you of your lands, or of any other things.” Recognizing that settlers were encroaching upon Indian territory, he insisted to the Indians as well as to his attorney general that treaties would be held sacred and infractors would be punished exemplarily.3

And yet American policy was not so straightforward. White Americans had a “responsibility of national character,” wrote Secretary of War Knox to Washington, to treat the Indians “with kindness, and even liberality.” But in his official report to the president on Indian affairs in 1789, Knox recommended land purchases—Congress would soon appropriate $20,000 for the purpose—and noted that as white settlers approached Indian territories, the game on which the Indians’ sustenance depended would grow scarcer, making the Indians more inclined to sell their land.4

Though the president stressed peaceful negotiations with the Indians, he was ready, as a last resort, to turn to force. In 1790, after General Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory, was unable to negotiate an end to clashes between white frontiersmen and Indians, Washington sent an army of about two thousand men, led by Colonel Josiah Harmar, into the Ohio territory. The result was a disaster for the Americans. Washington ordered preparations for a new offensive, this time led by St. Clair himself. St. Clair’s expedition was even more catastrophic; almost half his force—six hundred men—were slaughtered, exposing the administration to harsh criticism in Congress for its aggressive policies. In a peace move, the president invited fifty chiefs of the Six Iroquois Nations to negotiate with the Americans in Philadelphia in June 1792. But while promising fairness and negotiations, two months later, Washington persuaded Congress to raise five thousand troops and told Knox to “proceed as if war was inevitable.”5

By the spring of 1794, the Americans were ready. Washington sent out General Anthony Wayne, and in August his four-thousand-strong army decimated Ottawas, Shawnees, and other Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in the Ohio River valley, finally breaking Indian resistance to white settlement north of the Ohio. The next year, Indians from thirteen tribes ceded over twenty-five thousand square miles of eastern and southern Ohio for $25,000 and a $9,500 annuity. Washington conferred a medal on one of the Indian chiefs; it depicted the American commander in chief in martial attire, presenting a peace pipe to an Indian chief, while, in the background, a white man broke the land with a plow. That image captured Washington’s preferred notion of American policy.6

Indeed, a paternalistic and perhaps farsighted president ultimately seemed to favor some form of assimilation for his Indian “children.” Just as he believed that “the enlightened policy of the present age” would bring happiness to “all men,” he hoped “an unenlightened race of Men” might benefit from “rational experiments” that would bestow on them “the blessings of civilization.” His own rational plan for Indians was that, as the game on their hunting grounds grew ever more scarce, his “beloved Cherokees” and other Indian nations would become agricultural people, cultivating corn, wheat, and cotton, and raising cattle and sheep—privileged occupations that, he emphasized to the Cherokee Nation, he himself would soon take up once again at Mount Vernon. The savage Other, in Washington’s scenario, would become a Virginia planter.7

*   *   *

Hardly seven years after Shays’s Rebellion in western Massachusetts resulted in a constitutional convention, turmoil in Kentucky and western Pennsylvania seemed once again to threaten American order and security. This time the violence was provoked by farmers irate at the federal excise tax on distilled spirits. After an eruption of gunfire and two deaths at the home of a local excise collector followed by mob violence, Hamilton, who wanted the government to “appear like a Hercules,” counseled an immediate resort to military might. Washington agreed, reasoning that if “a minority (a small one, too) is to dictate to the majority there is an end put, at one stroke, to republican government.” The president steeled himself for a quick, decisive end to this challenge to American government—or rather to his government. For there was a personal element in Washington’s reaction. “Neither the Military nor Civil government shall be trampled upon with impunity,” he wrote, “whilst I have the honor to be at the head of them.”8

Did the federal government, though, possess the power to quash the revolt? Article IV of the Constitution stipulated that federal troops could be used “against domestic Violence” only at the request of a state. The Pennsylvania legislature was not in session, and the governor, Thomas Mifflin, believed that the matter could be handled adequately in the courts. Washington, however, was convinced that the judiciary was no match for “the treasonable fury” of the mob and decided to skirt Article IV by asking for a judicial writ, permitting him to call up the militias of four states to enforce federal law.9

It was a remarkable scene: the sixty-two-year-old president, in full military attire, the martial embodiment of the federal government’s authority to enforce national order, riding on horseback to western Pennsylvania in the fall of 1794—the only president ever to lead an army in the field. With him marched more than twelve thousand troops—as well as the man who was the principal target of rebel fury, Alexander Hamilton, the original excise man himself, whom the president, in an impolitic move, had named “acting secretary of war.”

In reality, the Whiskey Rebellion was never a true rebellion: it was oratory, mass meetings, and whiskey itself that largely kept the rebels going. The protesters were scattered, their leadership divided. And if there had been an attempt to evade the excise tax, there had been no attempt to overthrow the government. Despite the spectacular military overreaction, no armed confrontation between the farmers and militia ever took place. Not a “drop of blood” was spilled, Washington boasted. Instead, some rebels were arrested, two were convicted of treason. Convinced that the two miscreants had “abandoned their errors,” the president used, for the first time, his constitutional power of pardon. “Moderation and tenderness,” he decided, were not inconsistent with the public good. He was following Hamilton’s recommendation in The Federalist Number 74: “A well-timed offer of pardon to insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth.” Hamilton’s counsel of amnesty would similarly prove useful for President Lincoln, who pardoned Civil War deserters as well as supporters of the Confederacy, and for President Carter, who pardoned Vietnam War draft evaders.10

The insurrection “could never be found,” Jefferson scoffed. The whole performance, he wrote, “is too humiliating to excite any feeling but shame.” But Washington felt triumphant, pleased that now the Europeans would see that “republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination: on the contrary, that under no form of government, will laws be better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually dispensed to mankind.”11

When it was all over, Madison expressed relief that the insurrection had been crushed so easily, thereby thwarting any attempt to establish the principle that a standing army was necessary to enforce the laws. But Washington had nevertheless created the precedent that, in response to threats to domestic order and constitutional government, power and force would be concentrated in the hands of the most vigorous and single-minded branch of government.12

*   *   *

The triad of unity, security, and prosperity applied to foreign relations, too, and would involve the president in delicate negotiations with England and Spain.

How could Americans continue their westward expansion while Spain, in possession of Louisiana, west Florida, and east Florida, controlled navigation and trade on the Mississippi? Spain seemed bent on expanding its sphere of influence; not only was the Spanish government inciting Creek Indians to depredations against white American settlers, there were also signs of a murky conspiracy to set up an independent state friendly to Spain in the territory between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers.

Washington had long felt that the tide of history was on the side of the United States in its westward drive. No power on earth, he wrote in 1786, could ultimately deprive the growing American population of the use of the Mississippi. His policy was “neither to relinquish nor to push our claim to this navigation” and meanwhile to open all other possible waterways—he envisaged a canal linking the Ohio and Potomac Rivers—between the Atlantic states and the West. Still, by the time he became president, he realized that it was not enough to count on the momentum of American expansion. A diplomatic solution for the Mississippi would have to be found, and, in 1792, hoping for an agreement from which, he said, both the United States and Spain would derive “reciprocal advantages,” he sent William Short to negotiate in Madrid.13

But there was no progress. After two years, negotiations with Spain were in a state of “complete stagnation,” Secretary of State Randolph complained. That same year Americans in Kentucky and Pennsylvania finally demanded action to secure their right to navigate and trade on the Mississippi. Stung that the government seemed indifferent to their plight, Pennsylvanians sent a letter of protest to the president, contending that, while citizens on the Atlantic coast prospered, westerners were “kept in poverty.” “Attachments to governments,” they warned, “cease to be natural, when they cease to be mutual.” The specter of Kentucky’s separation from the union alarmed the president, and, several months later, after the Pennsylvanians’ veiled threat to take matters into their own hands and attack Spanish Louisiana, Washington finally acted. First he sent an envoy to calm the situation and then dispatched Thomas Pinckney as Envoy Extraordinary to Spain, where he successfully concluded the Treaty of San Lorenzo in 1795. Spain granted the United States the “privilege” (not the “right,” the Spanish underscored) of sailing freely on the Mississippi and using the port of New Orleans.14

Was this important treaty the result of Pinckney’s bold and skillful tactics? Of Spain’s weakness after a series of defeats at the hands of the French revolutionary army? Or, as one historian argued, of the strong character that Washington had conferred on the national government? Probably all of the above. But as Americans in Kentucky and Pennsylvania saw it, a lukewarm president, resenting the demands of protesters whom he regarded as a Jacobin fifth column, had been slow to lead and respond to their needs. Hamilton and Knox had even advised him to ignore the petition. Its language was “exceedingly reprehensible and improper,” wrote Attorney General William Bradford. But recalling that citizens possessed the constitutional right to petition the government, he advised against prosecution and suggested it was better to treat the protest “with the contempt it deserves.”15

Washington’s instinct had been to dismiss boisterous public opinion. Even so, he ultimately succeeded in securing for Americans the right to ship their crops and products on the Mississippi. The West would be bound to the rest of the nation through trade and prosperity: unity had been achieved and a crucial navigable avenue for commerce obtained.

*   *   *

Washington had few illusions about international relations. “It is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind,” he had written in 1778, “that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it.” As president, he had hard-nosed priorities for America’s relations with other countries: self-interest, self-interest, and self-interest. His doctrine, summed up in his Farewell Address, was not complicated: “Nations as well as individuals, act for their own benefit, and not for the benefit of others, unless both interests happen to be assimilated.”16

The young republic would be faced with a critical foreign relations dilemma when revolutionary France declared war on Great Britain in February 1793 and when the British responded with a blockade of France, their ancient foe. The Treaty of Amity and Commerce, signed by the Americans and the French in 1778, had stipulated that the two nations would defend each other against England. Would Americans now spring to the aid of France in her war against the British? Or would the president suspend the treaty, as Hamilton urged?

In his first Inaugural Address, Washington had underscored that the foundation of his domestic policy would be the “immutable principles of private morality.” He did not say that those principles would apply to international policy. Indeed, in 1796 no less than in 1778, he remained convinced that “there can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate upon real favours from Nation to Nation.” But what about the invaluable naval and military support the French had delivered to Washington in Yorktown?

France “has not such a claim upon our gratitude as has been generally supposed,” Washington would write in 1797. But in the early 1790s, Washington still felt friendship for France. True, he had diagnosed, not incorrectly, an excess of zeal among the French. In a 1790 letter to his friend the Comte de Rochambeau, he recalled that, during the War of Independence, French troops in Rhode Island “burnt their mouths with the hot soup, while mine waited leisurely for it to cool.” The affair of the hot soup, he wrote, illustrated “how immoderately you thirsted for the cup of liberty.” Still, Washington remarked to Jefferson in late 1792 that “there was no nation on whom we could rely at all times but France.” A month later, he called France the “sheet anchor of this country,” and, knowing how sympathetic Jefferson was to the French Revolution, asked him to return to Paris as the American minister.17

And yet Washington’s head, not his heart, would determine his policy. On April 23, 1793, he proclaimed American neutrality, “a conduct friendly and impartial towards the Belligerent Powers.” Neutrality would apply not only to the government but also to individual citizens who could be punished for “committing, aiding or abetting hostilities” against any of Europe’s belligerents. Even the passionately pro-French Jefferson, who had wanted to use the promise of American neutrality as a bargaining chip to extract concessions from Great Britain, reluctantly acceded to the prudent new policy. “I fear that a fair neutrality will prove a disagreeable pill to our friends,” he wrote to Madison, “tho’ necessary to keep out of the calamities of a war.”18

Still, Washington’s hardheaded foreign policy and his fondness for France were not mutually exclusive. For even while announcing his policy of neutrality, he continued to express affection for France. Indeed, in May 1793, against Hamilton’s recommendation, he received the young French minister Edmond Genet, thus recognizing the revolutionary government that had just guillotined its hapless monarch. So unwilling was the president to alienate the revolutionary government in Paris that, even as he tried, through unofficial channels, to secure the release from prison of his dear friend Lafayette, he declined in May 1793 to receive Lafayette’s brother-in-law who had arrived in the United States with other counterrevolutionary émigrés.19

Did the president have the authority unilaterally to declare neutrality? Or did such a declaration belong to the Senate? Hamilton and Madison, writing as “Pacificus” and “Helvedius,” debated the issue in a series of newspaper essays. Madison contended that the Senate’s power to declare war logically included other policies relating to war and peace. Hamilton, always eager for an expansive interpretation of presidential power, countered that congressional powers to ratify treaties and declare war were mere exceptions to the president’s overall responsibility for foreign policy. Still, he conceded that circumstances might sometimes allow for “concurrent authority” in Congress, which would presumably oblige both branches of government to cooperate and collaborate in policy making. Did that mean that the two branches of government could simultaneously declare war and peace? asked Madison. Hamilton’s idea, the Virginian wrote, was “as awkward in practice, as it is unnatural in theory.” And yet, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has pointed out, Madison was unable to explain how a constrained executive could conduct foreign affairs.20

Washington’s neutrality proclamation prevented the young nation from becoming entangled in a European war, though it did not create a precedent for such unilateral presidential declarations. Rather, Washington soon invited Congress to “correct, improve or enforce” his neutrality policy, not only making Congress a partner in his program but unwittingly leaving to it future declarations of neutrality—such as those of the 1930s. Even so, Washington’s proclamation marked another stage in the consolidation of executive control over foreign policy. The president had received the news of war in Europe at Mount Vernon on April 8; rather than convene a special session of the Senate, he met with his cabinet in Philadelphia on April 19, and four days later he issued his proclamation. He had seized the initiative and swiftly formulated national policy.21

American neutrality signaled not only the administration’s priority of national self-interest but also the deepening of Federalist conservatism. While many American citizens ecstatically hailed the French Revolution, calling one another “citizen” and “citizenness” in the new French style; while Madison complained that neutrality was a “most unfortunate error” that wounded “popular feelings by a seeming indifference to the cause of liberty”; and while even Washington continued to criticize “outrageous” British policies and express affection for France and his French friends, refusing to forward to the French minister the dry and abrupt missives written by Hamilton, his administration began to lean toward Great Britain. The reasons were multiple—a combination of factors including Hamilton’s pro-British stand; the departure of the Francophile Jefferson, the one cabinet member most able to counter Hamilton’s realpolitik; the machinations of the volatile French minister Genet who, before an exasperated Washington demanded his recall in August 1793, had successfully conspired to violate the policy of neutrality while also whipping up public feeling in favor of the French Revolution, encouraging the formation of “Democratic Societies,” and inciting hostility to Washington.22

Unlike Jefferson, who exuberantly believed that the liberty of the whole earth depended on the outcome of the revolution in France, Hamilton felt only contempt for the French project of exporting revolutionary fervor. In the French Assembly’s offer, in November 1792, of fraternal assistance to other peoples wishing to recover their freedom, Hamilton discerned “a general invitation and encouragement to revolution and insurrection,” a step that would surely “disturb the repose of mankind.” Whereas an idealistic Washington in 1792 had expressed the hope that the enlightened policies of the late eighteenth century would bring freedom and happiness to all, Hamilton had no such universalizing impulse. “Every nation,” he wrote, “has a right to carve out its own happiness in its own way.” Only a decade after the end of the War of Independence, “revolution” had become a scare word for Hamilton and his Federalist allies. Without compunction they repudiated America’s founding friendship with France as well as—according to Jefferson—the essential principles of the American Revolution.23

*   *   *

“We have already been too long subject to British prejudices,” Washington wrote to Lafayette in 1789. The president would have strenuously denied that his administration’s policies favored that empire. On the contrary, his catalogue of grievances against Great Britain was long. The British, he bitterly complained, were “without scruple,” refusing to fulfill their obligations under the peace treaty of 1783. They had never evacuated their posts on the northwestern frontier; they refused to provide restitution for slaves taken during the war. They permitted American goods to enter the British West Indies only if they were carried on British ships; and they were seizing American ships that traded in the French West Indies. After Gouverneur Morris’s attempt to negotiate with the British had ended in failure in 1791, Washington continued to rail against Great Britain. “Can it be expected,” he asked, “that there ever will or can be any cordiality between the two countries? I answer, ‘Νo!’”24

And yet, in formulating foreign policy, Washington chose Alexander Hamilton for his guide, a choice that would inevitably tilt American policy toward Great Britain. “We think in English,” Hamilton had famously written. But it was more than a common language that predisposed the New Yorker to admire everything English. “What a wonderful spectacle Great Britain exhibits,” he wrote. “Observe the mature state of her agricultural improvements under auspices of large Capitals … her navigation and external Commerce … the huge & varied pile of her manufactures … View her in fine the Creditor of the World … her public funds are a principal pillar of this astonishing edifice.” It was not surprising that Hamilton wanted to buttress his economic designs with a pro-British foreign policy. He had even suggested giving to British Canada use of some navigable section of the Mississippi. “The remedy,” Washington snapped, “would be worse than the disease.”25

In the spring of 1794, amid fury against England and enthusiasm for the revolution in France, the president sent John Jay, the chief justice of the United States, to negotiate with Great Britain, asking Hamilton to draft Jay’s diplomatic instructions. But when, a year later, Jay signed a treaty in London in which the British had made few concessions to American claims, Washington expressed dismay and for three months tried to keep its contents secret.

The treaty stipulated that the British would evacuate their northwest posts, but this was virtually their only outright concession. Britain would permit American ships to trade in the British West Indies only if the vessels were under seventy tons (Madison commented that Americans would have to trade in canoes); England did not accept Washington’s policy of neutrality and would continue to capture American vessels carrying “contraband” for France; Britain did not give up the practice of the impressment of American sailors or agree to compensate Americans for the slaves “stolen” and liberated during the Revolutionary War—though Americans were obliged to repay their revolutionary debts to English creditors; England could impose tariffs on American exports while she herself would enjoy “most favored nation” status in the United States.

Jay recognized that his work would not give “universal satisfaction,” but was unprepared for the furor. In the Senate, Republicans attacked the treaty as “dishonorable” and a “betrayal.” Still, in June 1795, the Senate ratified the treaty, though withholding approval of the article limiting tonnage of American vessels. But when the agreement’s contents were made public that same month, the outcry was deafening. In New York a mob burned a copy of the treaty in front of Jay’s house. When Hamilton attempted to defend the pact at a public meeting, people booed him, and a few hurled stones. In Philadelphia demonstrators smashed the windows of the British minister’s home, burning the treaty on his doorstep. In Boston harbor, a British ship was set ablaze. Jay was hung in effigy. As he himself remarked, he could have made his way across the country by the light of his burning effigies.

Madison blasted the treaty’s “insidious hostility” to France, asserting that it forfeited American neutrality. Jefferson called the treaty “nothing more than [an] alliance between England & the Anglomen of this country against the legislatures & people of the United States.” Protest meetings were held; handbills extolled France as America’s solid friend whereas Britain was denounced as the “universal Foe of Liberty.” Resolutions condemning the agreement poured in to Washington’s office. “No answer given—the address too rude to merit one,” he scribbled on a petition; “Tenor indecent—no answer returned,” he wrote on another. Newspaper articles called for his impeachment, and illustrators depicted him on the scaffold of a guillotine. Washington was shaken, perplexed at the torrent of abuse directed against him, at accusations that he headed a British faction. Even his revolutionary triumphs were disparaged. “With what justice,” demanded one critic, “do you monopolize the glories of the American revolution?”

Federalists shot back that the opposition was the creature of a violent Jacobin party. Merchants and chambers of commerce defended the treaty, predicting that it would bring public prosperity. During the summer of 1795, at Washington’s urgent request, Hamilton wrote more than two dozen newspaper essays, defending the treaty point by point. He argued that Americans should seek to close and heal the breach between the United States and Great Britain, for the alternative was war. Washington was pleased with the articles, and yet he hesitated to sign the treaty.

That July, Britain began seizing American ships. Unbeknownst to Washington, England, suffering from grain shortages, was determined to stop American vessels carrying grain to France and insisted on the right to capture enemy property carried aboard neutral vessels. From Paris, Ambassador James Monroe commented that England, threatened with famine, “would have refused us nothing, & we have yielded every thing.” Secretary of State Randolph, too, pushed for reopening negotiations with England and delaying final ratification until England stopped seizing cargoes of grain.26

Then, the bombshell. Returning from a brief vacation in Mount Vernon to Philadelphia in July 1795, prepared to consult a final time with his cabinet before making a decision on the treaty, the president was greeted by his secretary of war, Timothy Pickering. “That man in the other room,” Pickering blurted out, referring to Randolph, “is a traitor.” The smoking gun was a dispatch written by the French minister, Jean Antoine Fauchet, intercepted by the British and handed over to the new secretary of the treasury, Oliver Wolcott. That evening Washington sat down to read it. Composed a year before, at the time of the Whiskey Rebellion, it contained a blistering critique of the policies of his administration. Washington’s temper rose as he read Fauchet’s denunciation of Hamilton’s “immoral” taxation policies and his accusation that the American government deliberately provoked the Whiskey Rebellion in order to justify a large standing army. And then, reading on, he saw references to the “precious confessions of Mr. Randolph,” who had apparently confided in his French counterparts and, the dispatch suggested, also made “overtures” to Fauchet. The information was vague, but Fauchet hinted that there was a question of “some thousands of dollars” and wrote that “the consciences of the self-proclaimed patriots of America already have their price.” Randolph had apparently been egregiously indiscreet, but had he also sought a bribe from the French—perhaps, as Fauchet mysteriously suggested, to subvert the military response to the Whiskey rebels?27

The next morning, August 12, 1795, Washington hastily announced to his cabinet that he would sign the treaty, as ratified by the Senate. Then, a week later, he confronted an unsuspecting Randolph. “Mr Randolph! here is a letter which I desire you to read,” said the president coldly, “and make such explanations as you choose.” Randolph could only stammer a few sentences in his defense and then cried out that he “could not continue in the office one second after such treatment” and fled the presidential mansion. With only the incomplete and vague dispatch and no hard evidence that Randolph had sought a bribe, Washington probably rushed to judgment, discerning treason in Randolph’s pro-French sympathies. And yet, a few months later, Randolph would write a hundred-page “vindication” of himself that left even friends like Madison puzzled and disappointed.

On the heels of Randolph’s supposed betrayal, the president had abruptly decided to accept Jay’s treaty. Opposition to the treaty had boomeranged, and the president concluded that it was more prudent to approve the treaty “than to suffer matters to remain as they are, unsettled.”28

And yet even after his decision Washington continued to smolder with resentment against Great Britain. Only two weeks later, he railed at England’s “domineering spirit” and the “outrageous and insulting conduct of some of her officers.” In late December, in a letter to Gouverneur Morris, the president dwelled on his grievances toward the British. It was difficult to maintain a policy of neutrality, he wrote, “at a time when the remembrance of the aid we had received from France in the Revolution, was fresh in every mind” and when Americans could easily contrast the “affections” of the French with the “unfriendly disposition of the British government.” Indeed, when the French government presented him with a gift of the tricolor flag in January 1796, Washington effusively thanked the French minister. Revolutionary events in France, he wrote, had produced in America “the deepest solicitude as well as the highest admiration.… Wonderful people! Ages to come will read with astonishment the history of your brilliant exploits.” “The harangue of the President,” Madison gloated, “must grate the pro-British party.”29

In the spring of 1796, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives jumped into the act, threatening to withhold appropriations to put the treaty into effect and demanding that the president turn over copies of Jay’s diplomatic instructions. Indeed, a few months earlier Jefferson had expressed the hope that the “popular branch” of the legislature would find a way to “rid us of this infamous act.” But for Washington, the demand for documents “not only brought the Constitution, to the brink of a precipice, but the peace happiness and prosperity of the Country, into eminent danger.” When the Framers gave the president and Senate the power to make treaties, he insisted, it was not their intention to give the House a veto on their decision. “A crisis now exists,” wrote Federalist representative Fisher Ames, as the House and the president locked horns, “the most serious I ever witnessed.” Though some Republicans complained that the president was demonstrating “monarchical privilege,” the tide turned when Ames made an immensely effective and emotional speech, and the House went on to pass the necessary appropriations for the treaty. There remained no doubt that the president was the formulator of American foreign policy. He had refused to yield to popular pressure or to opposition in the House. Indeed, the idea that the president needed the sanction of Congress to make foreign policy, Hamilton would later remark, was “preposterous.”30

Did Washington make the right decision in signing the flawed Jay Treaty? He knew that he held no trumps in his hand: England possessed a monopoly on commercial might. And yet he did not lose the game. American commerce would flourish as a result of the Jay Treaty; after the British finally evacuated their northwest posts in 1796, new settlements—Cleveland, Dayton, Youngstown—quickly sprang up. “Since the treaty,” Ames happily remarked, “we see nothing but blue sky.”31

Even so, in accepting the treaty, Americans sacrificed a “measure of their own national self-esteem,” observed historians Elkins and McKitrick, though had they rejected it, they would have “sacrificed their own material prosperity.” And so the nation swallowed it, but with an accompanying “crisis of spirit.” Along with that, the treaty brought an escalation of tensions with the French that would lead to the so-called “quasi war” with France, while the differences with England left unresolved by the treaty would be among the causes of the War of 1812—problems that would confront Presidents John Adams and James Madison.32

*   *   *

While the president perceived himself high above the domestic political fray—a man “who is of no party, and whose sole wish is to pursue, with undeviating steps, a path which would lead this Country to respectability, wealth and happiness”—he could not grasp that, in truth, he did not stand above party, but that his foreign policy ideas, like his general outlook, were in fact Federalist. He had only to look around himself to see that, after Randolph’s resignation in 1795, he was surrounded solely by Federalists—and second-rate ones at that: Pickering at State, James McHenry at War, Oliver Wolcott at the Treasury. Indeed, after Randolph left, the president stated categorically that he would not “knowingly” appoint anyone to his administration “whose political tenets are adverse” to his administration’s policies, for that, he continued, “would be a sort of political Suicide.”33

Estranged from Jefferson, Madison, and Randolph, the president fell into the conservative Federalist orbit, surrounded by his own ideological team. One advantage of the situation was that he was able to create in the executive branch a stable ideological environment. The disadvantage was that the agenda of his cabinet, still stressing unity, order, prosperity, and might, still implying deference to an elite ruling class, seemed remote from the interests and aspirations of ordinary Americans and contained few ideas that could inspire and galvanize them.

Federalists and Republicans were not only divided over the year-to-year strategy and the everyday tactics of government, they were profoundly divided over ideology and sentiment, over their sympathies for Britain and France, over the kind of nation they were trying to build, over the kind of people Americans should become, over America’s political and symbolic place in the world.

Ordinarily, attitudes over foreign and domestic policy are not necessarily congruent; persons combining with one another over domestic issues often split over foreign policy. But in the 1790s, congruence was intensifying in the Federalist camp as well as among Republicans.

The result was a sharpening and hardening and deepening of attitudes separating and polarizing the Federalist and Republican groupings—a polarization that helped produce enormous popular participation in the debates over foreign policy but that confounded the president. And though Republican leaders almost as much as Federalists feared, spurned, and despised the idea of faction and party, their polarization laid the foundations for a powerful two-party politics. What other way was there for Madison and his like-minded friends to oppose Hamilton’s policies and the entrenched Federalists than to organize politically? Hamilton had unwittingly become America’s first party builder, for his radical policies galvanized the opposition. And unbeknownst to Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, as well as to Hamilton, a long ideological war in America had just begun, the shape of which could not be fully divined during Washington’s presidency.34

In February 1796, the House, dominated by Republicans, soundly defeated a motion to adjourn for a half hour so that representatives might congratulate the president on his birthday. Washington found himself in an unknown and bewildering land—one of personal attacks, shrill opposition, and nascent political parties. The Jay Treaty had ignited a spark that left much that was precious to Washington—national unity, the common good, his own reputation—in tatters. He had tumbled down to the level of mortals.