A Master Politician Takes Charge
THE PASSIONATE LOVE AFFAIR with the French Revolution that Thomas Jefferson had contracted in Paris was still alive in his own mind and heart—and in the minds and hearts of James Madison and James Monroe and tens of thousands of other members of the Democratic-Republican Party. They seethed with rage about the way President Washington had turned the Whiskey Rebellion into a political triumph—and incidentally added that dreadful (to them) word force to the power of the presidency. Even more infuriating was the President’s demolition of the Democratic Societies.
Washington strengthened the latter maneuver by having Secretary of State Edmund Randolph write a series of newspaper essays under the signature “Germanicus,” which explained the Societies’ treasonous role in the Whiskey Rebellion. The pen name was a clever use of Roman history. Germanicus was a general who crushed a rebellion by German tribes on the border of the Roman Empire.1
The Democratic-Republicans’ frustration did not find any plausible targets in the closing months of 1794. But James Madison was soothed by a reality that temporarily transcended politics: love. On September 15, 1794, while Congress was in adjournment, he married an attractive Philadelphia widow, Dolley Payne Todd. Among those who played important roles in the story of their meeting and engagement was Martha Washington. She reportedly told Dolley that in spite of their political differences, the President retained his affection for the “great little Madison,” as some people still called him for his leadership at the Constitutional Convention.
When the Madisons returned to Philadelphia as a married couple later in the fall of 1794, they received an invitation to dine with the Washingtons “in a family way.” This was a private meal with several other couples, far more intimate than the President’s weekly official dinners. Martha also demonstrated her fondness for Dolley by giving her a wedding present—an exquisite cream pitcher given to the President by a French nobleman.2
On November 19, 1794, the day that President Washington reported the end of the Whiskey Rebellion to Congress, John Jay signed a treaty of “Amity, Commerce and Navigation” with Great Britain in London. For the rest of 1794, Philadelphians exchanged rumors about the treaty and paid desultory attention to the aftermath of the Whiskey Rebellion—the treason trials of the twenty men Governor Henry Lee’s army had shipped to the nation’s capital. Only two of the accused rebels were convicted by federal juries, and President Washington pardoned both of them. They were obviously men of limited brainpower, duped into acts of rebellion by leaders like David Bradford, who remained beyond the reach of the law somewhere in the West.3
Washington was not optimistic about Jay’s treaty. In several letters to the envoy, he expressed his disgust with the anti-American hostility that prevailed in all parts of the British empire. He had no hope of achieving “any cordiality between the two countries.” He would be satisfied if the treaty avoided a war. But if London refused to surrender those forts in the West, “war will be inevitable.”4
From France, meanwhile, came reports that did not please the President any more than Britain’s arrogance. James Monroe had made a speech to the French National Convention, congratulating them on their revolution, and presenting them with an American flag. This was a bizarre move against the background of the hundreds of innocent men and women being guillotined daily. Monroe went on to say that America admired “the wisdom and firmness” of France’s current rulers, the Jacobins, as well as the valor of her armies, who continued to win victories on the battlefield. Jefferson’s disciple also declared French and American interests were “identical.”5
President Washington recommended and quickly approved a strong letter from Secretary of State Randolph, reminding Monroe that America was neutral and planned to stay that way. Randolph told the new diplomat that nothing in his instructions authorized “the extreme glow” of his speech. But the rebuke was neutered by another letter from the indecisive Randolph, admitting that the friendship of the French Republic was a matter of great importance, and should be promoted “with zeal.”6
On another front, the President had to endure further political extremism in the House of Representatives. When someone proposed that the House vote its thanks to General Anthony Wayne for his victory at Fallen Timbers, some Democratic-Republicans argued against the idea. Giving thanks to generals was the President’s job, not Congress’s, which represented the voice of the people, a large majority of whom hated standing armies. After more debate, the Congress decided to thank Wayne’s troops but conspicuously omitted their commander’s name. Secretary of War Knox, with Washington’s emphatic approval, ignored this idiocy and informed the general that he and his army had been voted “the unanimous thanks of the House of Representatives.”7
In Georgia, the legislature opened fifty million acres of Creek Indian land to white settlers. President Washington warned that the state’s decision might “deeply affect the peace and welfare of the United States.” But Congress was eager to adjourn. They did nothing about Georgia. The President dispatched three commissioners to talk with the Creeks and try to prevent another frontier war.
As the legislators departed, Washington informed each member of the Senate that he wanted them to return to Philadelphia for a special session on June 8, 1795. Their advice and consent was needed to deal with “certain matters affecting the public good.” Everyone knew he was talking about the Jay Treaty, which would almost certainly arrive by that time, and require their approval.
On March 7, 1795, three days after Congress adjourned, a weary Virginian named David Blaney stumbled into Washington’s residence. In his luggage was a copy of Jay’s treaty, which he embellished with a description of his harrowing three-month voyage in mountainous seas, capped by a temporary capture and search for contraband by a French cruiser.
Accompanying the treaty were numerous letters from Jay to Washington and other men in the government. The envoy told the President the document was the best agreement he could get, and he challenged anyone to do better. “It must speak for itself,” he wrote. “To do more was not possible.” He added that nothing would have been achieved without “the confidence reposed in your personal character” by the English negotiators. To his friend Tench Coxe, whom the President had briefly considered as Thomas Jefferson’s successor, Jay added even more surprising words: “It may seem strange…but next to the King, our President is more popular in this country (England) than any man in it.”8
If that were true, it was grim testimony to how bad the treaty might have been without Washington’s popularity as an inducement. The President’s heart sank as he read the twenty-eight clauses of the document on his desk. Only one paragraph cheered him—an agreement to evacuate the forts in the Northwest Territory. Another positive clause promised to reimburse Americans for the hundreds of ships and cargoes that had been seized in the West Indies when those “mistaken” Orders in Council were issued. But it would take months, possibly years, to agree on the amount of money owed for each ship. Otherwise, the paragraphs were a litany of British arrogance—or negotiating skills—or both.
Americans would be permitted to trade with the West Indies. Good news, until the President read the stipulation that no ships larger than seventy tons would be allowed. Not a word was said about the Royal Navy’s habit of kidnapping American sailors on the high seas. Nor was there even a murmur about paying Americans for the thousands of slaves the British took with them when they retreated from New York at the close of the War for Independence. One clause granted Britain most favored nation status—without conferring a similar privilege for American exports to Britain! (The term means that two countries agree to lower tariffs and/or high import quotas in their commerce with each other.) Another clause permitted the British to seize as contraband almost any cargo bound for France that Royal Navy captains thought would enable the enemy “to carry on the war.”9
It is not hard to imagine the President wondering if the document were a bad dream. But that massive calm George Washington was able to summon when confronting a crisis proved an invaluable resource. He focused for a long moment on the opening words: A Treaty of Amity. That was the essential phrase, the key to evaluating this lopsided diplomacy. Those words stated in the clearest possible terms that the British did not want a war with the United States. Keeping America neutral was the central reason Washington had sent Jay to London. But how could he persuade Congress or the voters to see this treaty as a bargain worth accepting?
The President summoned Secretary of State Randolph. After a single reading, he agreed that there was only one policy for the moment—absolute, total secrecy. No one else should see this creature until the Senate returned on June 8. If it got into the newspapers now, the uproar would make it impossible for the solons to consider it objectively.
On June 8, 1795, the Senate reconvened on schedule and found copies of the treaty resting on each of the thirty desks in their chamber. With them was a terse message from the President, asking them to decide “in their wisdom” whether to advise and consent to it. He urged all the members to discuss it behind closed doors, under a binding promise of secrecy until they reached a decision.
From the Federalists, the first reaction was horror; from the Democratic-Republicans, predictable rage. The New England Federalists were especially upset by the limitation on the size of American ships trading with the West Indies. They were mollified when one of their senators suggested they demand a revision of that clause. This proposal enabled the Senate leaders to call for a vote. The treaty was approved, 20–10. A single defection would have failed to achieve the two-thirds majority.
The treaty was rushed back to President Washington, who now had to decide whether to sign it. He decided it was time to listen to the voice of the people. With the treaty ratified, there was no longer any need for secrecy. Before he could release it to the press with an appropriate message, Benjamin Franklin Bache published a summary in his newspaper, now called the Aurora, and followed it with a twenty-seven-page pamphlet, containing the full text. It had been leaked to him by a Democratic- Republican senator from Virginia. Bache was thus able to crow that he was letting “the people” read what the President had withheld from them for months.10
A delighted James Madison told James Monroe that the treaty “flew with an electric velocity to every part of the union.” There was an explosion of fury from North to South and East to West. One of the wildest attacks came from New York, where Eleazer Oswald, a Washington enemy from Continental Army days, was publishing the Independent Gazetteer. Oswald had recently returned from France, where he had served as a lieutenant colonel of artillery in several battles. In his Fourth of July edition, Oswald proclaimed that “Mrs. Liberty” had died from a dose of “subtile (sic) poison” from King George III. The Jay Treaty made “our independence…not even nominal….Our sun, which rose with awful splendor, has sunk in pristine darkness.”11
This rant was reprinted in dozens of other Democratic-Republican papers. Late in the evening of July 4, an intoxicated crowd carried an effigy of Jay through the streets of Philadelphia and burned it, after fighting a battle with a troop of the city’s light horsemen who tried to disperse them. Soon other effigies of the envoy were burning in cities and towns across America.
The treaty was condemned in mass meetings in Boston, Charleston, and New York. Accelerating the process was editor Bache, who had departed from Philadelphia in a coach loaded with hundreds of copies of his pamphlet. In New York, on the wall of a building near Governor Jay’s home, a gigantic early venture in graffiti shouted: DAMN JOHN JAY. DAMN EVERYONE THAT WON’T DAMN JOHN JAY. DAMN EVERYONE THAT WON’T PUT LIGHTS IN THE WINDOWS AND SIT UP ALL NIGHT DAMNING JOHN JAY.
Jay wryly remarked that on the night of the Fourth of July, so many effigies of him were burning, he could have walked from Georgia to Massachusetts by the light of their flames. In Charleston, South Carolina, the rioters revealed their political orientation: they celebrated Bastille Day by burning the Union Jack in front of the British consul’s house.12
In Virginia, the “retired” ex-secretary of state was one of the most inflamed critics. The treaty’s only value, Jefferson wrote, was that it prevented war. But this supposed virtue ignored “an eternal truth, that acquiescence under insult is not the way to escape war.” This supposed axiom would come back to haunt him a decade later.13
The more Jefferson thought about the treaty in the quiet of his hilltop mansion, he saw it in purely political terms. Two months later, he told Madison that “a bolder party stroke was never struck.” It was an attempt to stifle the Democratic-Republican majority in one branch of the legislature (The House of Representatives) by using the presidency and the Senate to prevent the House from “restraining the commerce of their patron-nation.”
In another letter, Jefferson called the treaty “a monument of folly or venality.” To a third friend, he described it as “an infamous act, which is nothing more than a treaty of alliance between England and the Anglomen of this country against the legislature and people of the United States.” Straining to put a positive gloss on these remarks, Jefferson’s defenders have claimed he wrote only a comparative handful of letters containing such imprecations. But his correspondents included John Rutledge, the governor of South Carolina, and other men of distinction. There is little doubt that most of the nation’s politicians were aware that the former secretary of state, who had supposedly retired from politics, was among the most violent critics of John Jay’s Treaty of Amity.14
In Philadelphia, the President discussed the treaty with his new cabinet, and was not reassured by what they had to say. He sensed Secretary of State Edmund Randolph had serious doubts about the venture. The new Secretary of the Treasury, Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut, was a convinced Federalist. So was Timothy Pickering, the secretary of war. Their support of the treaty was political. The attorney general, William Bradford, had no experience in foreign policy, and had been chosen largely for his Virginia birth. Reluctantly, the President turned to a man who had given him a great deal of advice in the past: Alexander Hamilton. They had had almost no contact since he left office in January. On July 3, 1795, the President sent him a letter marked “private and entirely confidential.”
Washington apologized for disrupting Hamilton’s private life. But he would appreciate an analysis of the pros and cons of the treaty as soon as possible. Six days later, a masterfully organized avalanche of arguments and analyses began appearing on the President’s desk. It confirmed almost all of Washington’s thinking on the treaty. Two more installments arrived on the following two days.
Like Washington, Hamilton condemned the article banning all but toy sailboat-sized ships from the West Indies trade, and denounced the absurd attempt to make almost anything aboard a ship contraband of war if the British were so inclined. Once these were corrected, Hamilton maintained, the President should sign the treaty and America would be at peace with England. Then, “the force of circumstances will enable us to make our way sufficiently fast in trade.” Like Washington, Hamilton was convinced that it would not take long for a prosperous America to be strong enough to deal with the British as equals. War at this time would only delay and possibly ruin this happy prospect.15
There it was, the difficult but crucial truth, stated with almost uncanny matter-of- factness. Surrounded by screaming mobs and mass meetings in Philadelphia, the President must have regarded the words as unreal. But they gathered power from the promise that they held out. Here, in spite of the chaos that the treaty seemed to be causing, was the thorny path to the happiness he must somehow persuade America to pursue.
In Europe, the British and the French were still locked in all-out war, and American grain became a crucial commodity. The French were again facing famine and the British winter wheat crop had failed, exposing them to the same threat. Inevitably, the British resorted to the Royal Navy. They issued orders to begin seizing grain on American ships en route to France as contraband. This bad news reached Philadelphia as Washington pondered whether to sign the Jay Treaty. His reaction was instantaneous and decisive. He sent Secretary of State Randolph to the British envoy to tell him the treaty would never be signed until this latest contraband gambit was repealed.16
Washington made no attempt to answer the protestors in the streets of Philadelphia. During the worst of the uproar, he retreated to Mount Vernon and pretended to be absorbed in improving the operation of his farms. On his six-day trip south, the President talked with numerous men about the treaty, and found all of them hostile. In a letter to Hamilton, he revealed what he had learned. “The string which is most played on,” he reported, “is the violation, as they term it, of our engagements with France.” People saw the treaty as a “predilection to Great Britain at the expense of the French nation.” This opinion was, of course, an endlessly reiterated point in the massive Democratic-Republican assault on the treaty.
Proof of the accuracy of this presidential discovery is a letter that the gleeful but still retired ex-secretary of state wrote to James Monroe around this time. He told the envoy that the treaty had “completely demolished the monarchical party here.” The reason was delightfully simple. There was no need for anyone to try to “understand the particular articles” of the proposed agreement. “The whole body of the people” was condemning it because it wore “a hostile face to France.”17
In New York, Alexander Hamilton launched a vigorous counterattack against the Democratic-Republicans under another classical pen name that commented sharply on the contemporary clash—Camillus. In Plutarch’s Lives, he was a wise and virtuous Roman general who tried to tell hard truths to the people, and was exiled by the hotheads in their midst. But Camillus was recalled and played a hero’s role when an invading army of Gauls threatened to overrun the city. Along with vigorous arguments defending the treaty, Hamilton was suggesting that an army of Gauls (French) might descend on America if the Democratic-Republicans got their way, and the citizens might need George Washington’s military skills to deal with them.
Over the next six months, Hamilton published twenty-eight of these hard-hitting essays, which were reprinted in newspapers everywhere. His first effort was aimed at a target who was doing his best to stay hidden. Hamilton accused the Democratic-Republicans of using the protests to destroy John Jay as a future presidential candidate and elect their leader, Thomas Jefferson. From Mount Vernon came a letter that made it clear one of Hamilton’s readers was in agreement. “To judge of this work from the first number,” the President wrote, “I augur well of the performance.” He praised Hamilton’s “clear, distinct and satisfactory” style. This was a covert way of saying he agreed with every word of it.18
The President’s augury proved prophetic. As essay after trenchant essay appeared, many intimidated Federalist politicians began to take heart and join in defending the treaty. Hamilton was aided not a little by the news that in mid-August, Washington had signed the treaty, with the proviso that the disputed articles would be corrected in final negotiations.
In Virginia, another Hamilton reader grew more and more anxious. On September 21, 1795, Jefferson rushed a letter to James Madison, confessing that the former Secretary of the Treasury was a “colossus to the anti-republican party.” It began to look like he was going to “extricate” the monarchists and Anglomen from the trap they had sprung on themselves. Democratic-Republican attempts to answer him had been “only middling performances.” No one but Madison had the ability to challenge Hamilton’s arguments.19
To Jefferson’s dismay, Congressman Madison declined. He had his own plan to torpedo the treaty. It was based on Jefferson’s claim that the Federalists were working for their “patron-nation,” Britain. The Congressman began expounding a new theory: the House of Representatives could veto the agreement because the Constitution gave them the power to regulate commerce.
Madison must have known he was standing on its head the arguments he and Hamilton had made in The Federalist that the Senate alone should have this responsibility. His retired mentor at Monticello, who had warned him that the Constitution would not last very long in its original form, was enthusiastic about this total reversal. “I trust the popular branch of our legislature will….thus rid us of this infamous act,” Jefferson wrote.20
Hamilton, hearing of their scheme, pointed out what it would mean if Madison won. America’s foreign relations would no longer be primarily the president’s responsibility. Almost every “species of treaty,” Hamilton wrote, would be thrust into the hands of a Congress all too likely to talk it to death. An alarmed John Adams told his wife that if the Democratic-Republicans remained “desperate and unreasonable….this Constitution cannot stand. I see nothing but a dissolution of the government and immediate war.”
Other thinking men agreed with Adams. Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott predicted, “One month will decide the fate of our country.” Alexander Hamilton warned that if the treaty were not accepted, there would be a “foreign war” (with England), and if it were ratified in the present atmosphere, there might well be a “civil war.”21
In Philadelphia, hundreds of violent resolutions damning the treaty piled up on Washington’s desk. Most were too insulting to answer. Newspapers accused the President of plotting to dissolve all connections with France because he preferred a “monarchic ally”—England. Philip Freneau materialized from the pine trees of South Jersey to accuse Washington of planning to become King George I of America. Others told the President that Jefferson was describing him as senile and helpless in the hands of Hamilton and his friends.
In the midst of this barrage of insult and innuendo, Washington had to deal with an upheaval in his cabinet. The British had intercepted a ship carrying mail from Citizen Genet’s replacement, Minister Joseph Fauchet, to his government. In one letter, he informed his superiors of confidential conversations he had conducted with Secretary of State Randolph, in which the latter confirmed his deep sympathy for revolutionary France and offered to put pressure on the President if Fauchet would advance him enough money to buy the loyalty of certain Virginians. The British rushed the letter to George Hammond, their envoy in Philadelphia, who gave it to Secretary of War Timothy Pickering. This acerbic gentleman accused Randolph of treason.
In a painful scene, the President challenged Randolph to explain himself. Stunned and floundering, the Secretary of State called the demand an insult and resigned. He was soon at work on a long essay, defending his reputation and accusing Washington of betraying him to the Federalists in his cabinet. The President struggled for weeks to find a replacement for Randolph. A half-dozen prospects, from New Jersey’s William Paterson to Virginia’s Patrick Henry, turned him down. No one wanted to share the cascade of abuse that was descending on the President.
Washington finally offered the job to the admittedly undiplomatic Timothy Pickering, who accepted it with reluctance. That meant he had to be replaced as secretary of war. At this point, Attorney General William Bradford died, which led to a double round of offers, refusals, and final acceptances from two fairly distinguished men. Marylander James McHenry, a popular aide to General Washington during the struggle for independence, became secretary of war, and Charles Lee, brother of Governor Henry Lee, attorney general.
Somehow, in the midst of these distractions, Washington kept his temper under control and focused on the most important task on his presidential agenda—his annual message to Congress. He sent Alexander Hamilton a detailed outline of his remarks, and worked closely with him on the text. At one point, he told Hamilton to call a halt and wait until Washington sent him a new “ground plan” for the speech. It was a sign not only of how important the President sensed this public appearance was, but of how much he wanted it to reflect his own thinking.
Tension ran high in Congress and in the spectators’ gallery when Washington mounted the rostrum on December 8, 1795. They remembered the man who had condemned the Democratic Societies the year before. They expected even more thunderous denunciations of the mobs in the streets and the torrent of personal denunciations that were in every Democratic-Republican paper. Everyone knew how thin-skinned this man was—and how hot his temper could be. Senators and congressmen braced themselves for a memorable explosion.
Instead, the man who stood on the rostrum smiled solemnly at them and began speaking in a soft, unmistakably agreeable voice. “Fellow citizens,” he began. Never before had he come before them so convinced that they had “just cause for mutual congratulations.” He invited them to join him “in profound gratitude to the Author of all Good for the numerous and extraordinary blessings we enjoy.”
Gasps of astonishment, gapes of amazement, blinks of disbelief circulated through Congress. The President began to describe these blessings. General Anthony Wayne, the man James Madison and his colleagues had refused to thank for the victory at Fallen Timbers, had just negotiated a treaty with five of the most warlike tribes in the Northwest Territory, promising peace and the opening of millions of acres of land to settlement. At the other end of the thousand-mile western frontier, the commissioners he had dispatched to the Creeks had persuaded the Indians to confirm treaties negotiated in past years. Not even “wanton murders” perpetrated by frontier Georgians had deterred them.
Next the President reported peace with the Emperor of Morocco and the Algerine pirates, thanks to another treaty. The Algerines had even promised to restore “our unfortunate fellow citizens from a grievous captivity.” Then came truly sensational news. The special envoy to Madrid, Thomas Pinckney, had informed him that Spain had agreed to open the Mississippi River to American ships and products for export through New Orleans. This meant the discontent that was souring the public mind of Kentucky was banished, forever. The news would be greeted with equal pleasure by westerners in Virginia and Pennsylvania.
In the same mild voice, the President turned to Jay’s Treaty. Now would come the explosion, everyone thought. But all he said was what the legislators already knew. He had signed it with “a condition that excepts part of one article.” He had summoned the “best judgment” he “was able to form of the public interest” and with “full and mature deliberation added my sanction.” It was now up to “His Britannic Majesty” to accept the change.
Whereupon the President urged Congress to join him in “consoling and gratifying reflections” on the promising future these agreements offered to the nation. He could only hope that “prudence and moderation on every side” would produce an end to the “external discord” that had recently “menaced our tranquility.”
The dazed legislators were by now almost numb with surprise—or in some cases—disappointment. The President began discussing domestic matters. Now, surely, he would let the protestors and calumniators have it. Instead, he found “equal cause for contentment and satisfaction.” While Europe was being desolated by war and famine, our “favored country” was enjoying peace and prosperity. The President wondered if “it was too much to say” that America was becoming “a spectacle of national happiness” hitherto unseen in human history. He could only hope that Congress would continue to “unite” their efforts “to…improve our immense advantages.” It was the “fervent and favorite” wish of his heart to “cooperate with you in this desirable work.” Washington added a brief summary of what he called “internal disturbances.” He swiftly made it clear he was talking about the Whiskey Rebellion. “The blessings of quiet and order” now prevailed in western Pennsylvania. Next he urged Congress to do more for the nation’s defense. It was time to create a standing army and a decent-sized navy. Even more important was legislation to promote peace and understanding with their Indian neighbors. He spent several earnest minutes discussing how much this would please him and cast “luster on our national character.”
Finally came closing words in the same mild, cordial voice. There would no doubt be “important subjects” for them to consider in the coming session of Congress. “Mutual forbearance” when there was a difference of opinion was “too obvious and necessary” to need any recommendation from him.
It was perhaps the most extraordinary performance of George Washington’s life. The only comparable event was his resignation as commander in chief of the Continental Army in 1783. Then, he had rejected a crown and chosen to become a mere citizen again, subject to laws passed by a Congress that was almost hopelessly inept. Here, he was rescuing another Congress—and the entire federal government—as well as the nation he loved—from imminent dissolution. He was incidentally proving he was the master politician of his era.22