His Excellency: George Washington (41 page)

His letters began to describe “the French Party” or “the Bachites” as a well-organized conspiracy determined to destroy what he had painstakingly achieved over eight years of nation building, and to smear anyone, himself included, who stood in its way. He told Lafayette that “a party exists in the United States, formed by a combination of causes, who oppose the government in all its measures, and are determined (as all their conduct evinces) by clogging its wheels, indirectly to change the nature of it, and to subvert the Constitution.” Some of the conspirators, he claimed, wanted to turn the clock back to 1787, thereby repudiating the hard-won constitutional settlement. Others hoped to return to 1776, an urge that Washington regarded as a death wish for any national union. Moreover, at least as he saw it, those orchestrating this conspiracy were devoid of honor or any principle except the acquisition of power. They had seized upon the pro-French sentiment of the American populace during the debate over the Jay Treaty, but they would have grabbed at anything, he claimed, that served “as an instrument to facilitate the destruction of their own Government.” Their purported affection for France was a disingenuous ploy, “for they had no more regard for that Nation than for the Grand Turk, farther than their own views were promoted by it.” And they had seen fit to release their running dogs in the
Aurora
to libel him, even though the two chief conspirators—Jefferson’s and Madison’s names were too painful to mention—knew that Bache and his minions were practicing character assassination against a man the Virginians purported to admire.
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What could Jefferson and Madison have said in response to this indictment? Surely they would have not recognized themselves as the political villains Washington described. Probably they would have explained the accusations as clinching evidence that the aging patriarch had completely lost his mind. But, in truth, Jefferson and Madison were so caught up in their conspiratorial indictment of the Federalists that they lacked any perspective on how their own conduct appeared when seen from the enemy’s camp. Though there was a discernibly personal edge to Washington’s charges—the political wounds inflicted on him during his second term by the Republican press still festered—Jefferson and Madison
had
in fact been orchestrating a concerted and often covert campaign against the Federalists since 1791. They
had
played politics with foreign policy during the debate over the Jay Treaty. They
had
paid scandalmongers to libel Hamilton and Washington. And they
had
on several occasions (as in the Genet affair, endorsing Monroe’s conduct in Paris) engaged in skullduggery that would have been regarded as treasonable in any modern court of law. Doubtless Jefferson would have been able to pass a lie-detector test disavowing any knowledge of behind-the-scenes mischief, and would have then mounted an eloquent defense of the elevated principles governing his conduct and the Republican agenda. But Washington’s rebuttal would have enjoyed the benefit of a substantial body of historical evidence, documenting what Jefferson, in another context, had described as “a long train of abuses.”

All of which helps to explain what is otherwise inexplicable, and a major deviation from Washington’s usual pattern of behavior: namely, his decision to lend his name and prestige to a Federalist plot—whether it was a full-fledged conspiracy remains shrouded in mystery—designed to establish a standing army that could, among other uses, intimidate and eventually crush the Republican opposition. In the spring of 1798, President Adams released decoded dispatches revealing that the French Directory had demanded a £50,000 bribe as a precondition for negotiating with three envoys Adams had sent to Paris in order to seek a diplomatic solution to the ongoing crisis. Labeled the XYZ Affair—a reference to the initials used by the French operatives demanding the bribe—the revelations produced a dramatic reversal in public opinion toward France and a surge of hostility toward French supporters in America. Abigail Adams reported one Fourth of July toast: “John Adams. May he, like
Samson,
slay thousands of Frenchmen with the
jawbone
of Jefferson.” Anti-Jefferson editorials described him as the covert leader of “the frenchified faction in this country” and the secret head of “the American Directory.” War hysteria mounted as newspapers reported the existence of a 50,000-man French army, purportedly poised to cross the Atlantic and invade the United States.
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Washington’s initial response to the hysteria was characteristically measured. He thought the prospects of a French invasion were remote in the extreme, concurring with Adams’s more colorful assessment that seeing a French army in America was like imagining a snowball in Philadelphia at the height of summer. He did take some delight at the plight of Bache and his fellow scandalmongers at the
Aurora,
who were surrounded by a hostile mob after suggesting that the United States pay the bribe demanded by the French in order to avert war. And, more tellingly, he tacitly endorsed four pieces of legislation rushed through Congress by Federalist extremists and known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were designed to deport foreign-born residents suspected of French sympathies and shut down newspapers publishing “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States.”

Adams subsequently, if grudgingly, acknowledged that signing the Alien and Sedition Acts was the biggest blunder of his presidency. And historians have almost unanimously concluded that these statutes deserve to live in infamy as blatant examples of flagrant government repression. But they did not appear flagrant to Washington at the time, convinced as he was—and not without reason—that the Republicans had been waging a subversive campaign for many years against the very legitimacy of the elected government. In retrospect, the Federalists were exploiting the anti-French hysteria in the same partisan fashion that the Republicans had exploited the pro-French hysteria during the debate over the Jay Treaty. But the Federalists were also crossing a line they had never crossed as long as they enjoyed Washington’s leadership; namely, they were aiming to silence their political opponents. It is intriguing, though in the end futile, to speculate whether they would have overreached so fatally if Washington had remained in office, or if Washington himself would have thought differently if located in Philadelphia at the center of the deliberations. What can be said with certainty is that Washington cheered the ill-starred Federalist campaign from the sidelines.
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The plot had already begun to thicken even before passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts. In May 1798, Congress had approved the creation of ten new regiments, more than ten thousand men, for what was described as the Provisional army. The name conveyed the conditional character of the military commitment, which was contingent upon the threat of a French invasion. Additional legislation permitted the recruitment of an additional twenty regiments if and when a French fleet actually materialized off the American coast. Soon thereafter, Washington received a letter from Hamilton, warning him that duty was about to call him out of retirement again: “You ought to be aware, my Dear Sir, that in the event of an open rupture with France, the public voice will again call you to command the armies of your Country.” Washington’s initial response was dismissive. The prospect of a French army crossing the Atlantic still struck him as highly unlikely, especially since the French were fully engaged with the British in Europe. And even if war should occur, the American commander should be someone younger, “a man more in his prime.” Indeed, Washington concluded, he would regard another call to service “much as I would go to the tombs of my Ancestors.” But he left the door slightly ajar.
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Throughout the summer of 1798, Washington came under increasing pressure from Hamilton and two members of Adams’s cabinet, Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and Secretary of War James McHenry, to take the French threat seriously. They urged him to make two commitments: first, to agree to serve, if only provisionally, as commander of the Provisional army, meaning he would not need to take the field unless and until hostilities commenced; second, to appoint Hamilton as his next in command and, as Pickering put it, “the
Chief in your absence.
” Washington should have sensed that something was awry at this moment, since the urgency of the political pressure he was receiving was at odds with the urgency of the strategic threat it was designed to meet. But he did not.
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On July 11, McHenry appeared at Mount Vernon to make a personal appeal, which produced reluctant consent from Washington, again on the condition that he need not budge from Mount Vernon “until the Army is in a Situation to require my presence, or it becomes indispensable by the urgency of circumstances.” As for Hamilton’s rank, Washington thought it made eminent sense, but he needed to apprise Henry Knox of the decision, since Knox had outranked Hamilton in the previous war and might be offended at serving under him in any subsequent conflict. Knox responded immediately, deeply wounded at the suggestion of deferring to what he caustically described as “the transcendent military talents of Colonel Hamilton.” Then Knox expressed bewilderment at this rush to judgment, both to create an army and to elevate Hamilton to its head, and confided that he smelled something foul lurking in the background, speculating that “there has been a species of management in this affair of which you are not apprised.” Washington wrote back plaintively to Knox, disappointed that he had taken the rank matter so personally, and assuring him that “if there was any management in this business, it has been concealed from me.”
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There was, and it had. In collusion with disaffected and disloyal members of Adams’s cabinet, Hamilton had hatched a scheme to transform the Provisional army into a permanent military establishment and an instrument for his expanded power within the Federalist Party. To be fair, Hamilton had convinced himself that Napoleon’s imperial ambitions
did
include North America, not an implausible conviction, and that he alone possessed the vision and energy not only to thwart such threats, but also to out-Napoleon Napoleon himself. In typical Hamiltonian fashion, his plans were quite grandiose; if his letters to fellow Federalists are to be believed, he envisioned marching his army through Virginia, thereby intimidating the Republican leadership in its major sanctuary, then launching a preemptive invasion of Florida and the Louisiana Territory, where French and Spanish residents would be offered citizenship in a vastly expanded American empire, then marching his force southward through Mexico and Central America. Washington was unwittingly providing the imprimatur of his name to this wild scheme. And by insisting on Hamilton’s appointment as his second in command, then refusing to take the field while the army was being raised, Washington was inadvertently playing directly into Hamilton’s hands. Two years later, after Washington’s death, Hamilton made the remarkable comment: “He was a useful
Aegis
to me.” This was perhaps the moment he had in mind. At any rate, the moment exposed the dangerous tendencies of Hamilton’s genius once released from Washington’s control.
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There is little question that Washington would have condemned the more bizarre features of Hamilton’s plan if he had known what was afoot. True enough, he believed in the creation of national institutions that would focus the energies of a far-flung population: a capital city, a national university, the National Bank, a conspicuous chief executive. He also favored a modest expansion of the regular army, along with a military academy to educate a new corps of professional officers. But a permanent standing army marching across the countryside conjured up the kind of menacing and thoroughly coercive embodiment of government power that epitomized the dreaded “consolidation” the Republicans had always been warning against. Washington’s entire presidency had been spent assuring the citizenry that such fears were unfounded, hyperbolic, and politically motivated. Now, with one bold stroke, Hamilton was inadvertently undoing all of Washington’s painstaking work. Almost as bad, Washington’s complicity in the plot lent credibility to the Republican claim that the old patriarch was a rather dazed front man for the conspiratorial manipulations of an evil genius behind the curtain.

Hamilton’s scheme hit a snag in the fall of 1798, when Adams insisted on ranking Knox as second in command. Pickering explained to Washington that “the President has an extreme aversion to Colo. Hamilton—a personal resentment—and if allowed his own wishes and feelings alone, would scarcely have given him the rank of brigadier.” Again, Washington was called to the rescue; again, he played his appointed role; and again, he should have known better. Pickering and McHenry explained that Adams would be forced to reverse his decision once Washington made it abundantly clear that Hamilton was his own unequivocal choice. Washington complied, providing Adams with a description of Hamilton that probably prompted one of Adams’s Vesuvial eruptions. It was also a characterization that an elder statesman might have made of a younger Washington: “By some he is considered as an ambitious man, and therefore a dangerous one. That he is ambitious I shall readily grant, but it is of that laudable kind which prompts a man to excel in whatever he takes in hand. He is enterprising, quick in his perceptions, and his judgment intuitively great; qualities essential in a great military character, and therefore I repeat, that his loss will be irreparable.”
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Adams was just beginning to suspect that members of his own cabinet were engaged in behind-the-scenes plotting with Hamilton, but he could not afford to alienate America’s preeminent hero. By forcing Hamilton on him, Washington violated the cardinal rule for all ex-presidents: Never interfere with the decisions of your successor. (And Adams, who believed that holding grudges was a measure of personal integrity, never forgave him for this.) It finally began to dawn on Washington that he was engaged in clandestine conversations with a hostile faction of Adams’s cabinet. “You will readily perceive,” he wrote McHenry, “that even the rumor of a misunderstanding between the President & me . . . would be attended with unpleasant consequences.” He asked McHenry to destroy all copies of their recent correspondence that mentioned Adams, warning that their publication “may induce him to believe in good earnest, that intrigues are carrying on, in which I am an Actor—than which, nothing is more foreign from my heart.” However sincere, this was a naive sentiment, which we know about only because McHenry ignored the request and saved all the letters.
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