Joseph J. Ellis (27 page)

How could this emerging nation manage its way through this first post-Washington phase of its development? In the Farewell Address Washington offered his general answer: Think of yourself as a single nation; subordinate your regional and political differences to your
common identity as Americans; regard the federal government that represents your collective interest as an ally rather than an enemy (as “us,” if you will, rather than “them”). In his eighth and final message to Congress, delivered the following December, Washington provided a more specific directive. His Republican critics had described Jay’s Treaty as a pact with the devil that was certain to produce domestic and diplomatic catastrophe. Upon scanning the horizon for the last time, however, Washington saw serenity setting in: Treaties with the hostile Indian tribes on the southern and western frontiers were being negotiated; the British were removing their troops from posts in the West in accord with Jay’s Treaty; thanks primarily to the resumption of trade with Great Britain, the American economy was humming along quite nicely, with revenues from the increased trade reducing the national debt faster than had been anticipated. The only dark spot on the political horizon was France, whose cruisers were intercepting American shipping in the West Indies. Washington counseled patience with what would soon be called this “quasi war” with the French Republic, predicting (correctly, as it turned out) that “a spirit of justice, candour and friendship … will eventually insure success.” Confidence, he seemed to be saying, is a self-fulfilling prophecy, all the more so when the confidence was justified.
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Even more specifically, Washington suggested that his departure from the national scene would require the enlargement, not the diminution, of the powers of the federal government in order to compensate for his absence. He recommended that Congress undertake a whole new wave of federal initiatives: a new program to encourage domestic manufactures; a similar program to subsidize agricultural improvements; the creation of a national university (his old hobbyhorse) and a national military academy; an expanded navy to protect American shipping in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean; increased compensation for federal officials in order to ensure that public service was not dependent on private wealth. It was the most expansive presidential program for enlarged federal power until John Quincy Adams proposed a similar vision in his inaugural address of 1825. It was the tradition that the Whig party of Henry Clay and the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln sustained in the nineteenth century and that the Democratic party of Andrew Jackson rejected. In the more immediate context of 1796, Washington seemed to be saying that the departure of
America’s only republican king necessitated the creation of centering forces institutionalized at the federal level to maintain the focusing functions he had performed personally.
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Finally, who were these American people being bonded together? If Washington wished the national government to be regarded as “us” rather than “them,” how did he define the “us”? He addressed his remarks in the Farewell Address to his “Friends, and Fellow Citizens.” While he undoubtedly thought this description cast a wide and inclusive net that pulled in residents from all the regions or sections of the United States, it did not include all inhabitants. The core of the audience he saw in his mind’s eye consisted of those adult white males who owned sufficient property to qualify for the vote. Strictly speaking, such men were the only citizens. He told Hamilton that his Farewell Address was aimed especially at “the Yeomanry of the country,” which meant ordinary farmers working small plots of land and living in households. This brought women and children into the picture, not as full-blooded citizens, to be sure, but as part of the American people whose political identity was subsumed within the family and conveyed by the male heads of household. They were secondary citizens, but unquestionably Americans. Landless rural residents and impoverished city dwellers lay outside the picture, though they—more likely, their descendants—could work their way into the American citizenry over time. If only potentially and prospectively, they were included.
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The largest unmentioned and presumably excluded constituency was the black population, about 90 percent of which was enslaved. Washington said nothing whatsoever about slavery in his Farewell Address, sustaining the silence that the Congress had adopted as its official posture early in his presidency. Silence, of course, can speak volumes, and in Washington’s case, the unspoken message was that a moratorium had been declared on this most controversial topic, which more than any other issue possessed the potential to destroy the fragile union that he saw as his life’s work and chief political legacy. Since the primary purpose of the Farewell Address was to affirm that legacy and foster the promotion of his national vision, the last thing Washington wanted to mention was the one subject that presented the most palpable threat to the entire enterprise. Like Madison in 1790, he wanted slavery off the American political agenda. Unlike Madison, however, and unlike most of his fellow Virginians, there is a reason to believe
that he thought the moratorium on slavery as a political problem should lapse in 1808, when the Constitution permitted the slave trade to end.

His silence on the slavery question was strategic, believing as he did that slavery was a cancer on the body politic of America that could not at present be removed without killing the patient. The intriguing question is whether Washington could project an American future after slavery that included the African-American population as prospective members of the American citizenry. For almost all the leading members of the Virginia dynasty, the answer was clear and negative. Even those, like Jefferson and Madison, who looked forward to the eventual end of slavery, also presumed that all freed blacks must be transported elsewhere. Washington never endorsed that conclusion. Nor did he ever embrace the racial arguments for black inferiority that Jefferson advanced in
Notes on the State of Virginia
. He tended to regard the condition of the black population as a product of nurture rather than nature—that is, he saw slavery as the culprit, preventing the development of diligence and responsibility that would emerge gradually and naturally after emancipation.
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By 1796, he had begun to draft his last will and testament, in which he eventually made elaborate provisions to assure that all his slaves would be freed upon the death of his wife. He also made even more elaborate provisions to guarantee that Mount Vernon would be sold off in pieces, part of the proceeds used to support his freed slaves and their children for several decades into the future. His action on this score, as usual, spoke louder than his words, for they suggested an obligation beyond the grave to assist his former slaves in the transition to freedom within the borders of the United States. Whether he could conjure up a vision of blacks and whites living together in harmony at some unspecified time in the future remains unclear. But he was truly rare within the political elite of Virginia in leaving this question open.

He could and did imagine the inclusion of Native Americans. Late in August of 1796, at the same time he was making final revisions on his Farewell Address, Washington wrote his “Address to the Cherokee Nation.” From a strictly legal point of view, each of the various Indian tribes east of the Mississippi was already a nation, or an indigenous quasi-nation within the expanding borders of the United States. Therein, of course, lay the chief problem and the makings for an apparently
inevitable tragedy. For in Washington’s projection, the westward flow of the American population would prove relentless and unstoppable: “I also have thought much on this subject,” Washington declared to the Cherokees, “and anxiously wished that the various Indian tribes, as well as their neighbours, the White people, might enjoy in abundance all the good things which make life comfortable and happy. I have considered how this could be done; and have discovered but one path that would lead them to that desirable solution. In this path I wish all the Indian nations to walk.”
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The “one path” Washington identified required the Indians to recognize that contesting the expansion of the white population was suicidal. The only realistic solution required the Indians to accept the inevitable, abandon their hunter-gatherer economies, which required huge tracts of land to work effectively, embrace farming as their preferred mode of life, and gradually over several generations allow themselves to be assimilated into the larger American nation. Washington acknowledged that he was asking a lot, that “this path may seem a little difficult to enter” because it meant subduing their understandable urge to resist and sacrificing many of their most distinctive and cherished tribal values. As he prepared for his own retirement, in effect he was encouraging the Indian tribes to retire from their way of life as Indians: “What I have recommended to you,” he wrote somewhat plaintively, “I am myself going to do. After a few moons are passed I shall leave the great town and retire to my farm. There I shall attend to the means of increasing my cattle, sheep and other useful animals.” If the Indians would follow his example, the peaceful coexistence of Indians and whites could follow naturally, and their gradual merger into a single American people would occur within the arc of the next century. Whatever moral deficiencies and cultural condescensions a modern-day American audience might find in Washington’s advice, two salient points are clear: First, it was in keeping with his relentless realism about the limited choices that history offered; and second, it projected Indians into the mix of peoples called Americans.
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R
EACTIONS TO
the Farewell Address fell into the familiar grooves. The overwhelming public response was tearfully exuberant, regretting the departure of America’s political centerpiece for the last quarter century,
but embracing his message, as one member of the cabinet put it, “as a transcript of the general expression of the people of the United States.” Meanwhile, the Republican press denounced his warnings against political divisions at home and diplomatic involvement abroad as “the loathings of a sick mind.” In the
Aurora
, Benjamin Franklin Bache reprinted the old charge that Washington had been a traitor who conspired with the English government during the war. “This man has a celebrity in a certain way,” Washington remarked concerning Bache, “for his calumnies are to be exceeded only by his impudence, and both stand unrivaled.” One of his last acts as president was to place on file in the State Department his rejoinder to Bache’s accusations, which historians have long since discovered were based on forged English documents. He left office in March of 1797 with the resounding cheers of his huge army of supporters and the howls of that much smaller pack of critics echoing in his ears.
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Passing through Alexandria on his way to Mount Vernon, he stopped to deliver a speech in which he reiterated his allegiance to the principles articulated in the Farewell Address. “Clouds may and doubtless often will in the vicissitudes of events, hover over our political concerns,” he announced, “but a steady adherence to these principles will not only dispel but render our prospects the brighter by such temporary obscurities.” He remained supremely confident that he was right to the very end, though the “temporary obscurities” being spewed out by the Republican press—France was America’s international ally and the national government its domestic enemy—produced fits of private despair and periodic flare-ups of the famous Washington temper. (Even ensconced under his “vine and fig tree” in retirement, he continued to subscribe to ten newspapers.) More than any great leader in American history before or since, he was accustomed to getting his way, and equally accustomed to having history prove him right. But his final two and a half years at Mount Vernon were beclouded by the incessant apprehension that his final advice to the country would be ignored, and his legacy, and with it his own place in history, abandoned.
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Part of his problem was a function of location. Mount Vernon, of course, lay within the borders of Virginia, and Virginia had become the homeland of the Republican opposition, which was dedicated to overturning the foreign policy and the entire edifice of national sovereignty
that Washington stood for. In effect, Mount Vernon became an enclave within enemy territory, surrounded by neighbors committed to a Virginia-writ-large version of the American republic. Washington, once the supreme Virginian, had in their eyes gone over to the other side. Once the all-purpose solution, Washington was now the stillpotent problem, a kind of Trojan horse planted squarely in the Virginia fortress. The fact that he devoted so much of his remaining time and energy to overseeing the construction of the new capital city on the Potomac—it was a foregone conclusion that it would be named after him—only confirmed their worst fears. For that city, and the name it was destined to carry, symbolized the conspiracy that threatened, so Jefferson and his followers thought, all that Virginia stood for. Washington, for his part, obliged his Virginia critics by urging his step-grandson to attend Harvard in order to escape the provincial versions of learning currently ascendant in the Old Dominion. Increasingly, he seemed to think of his home state in the same vein as the Indian tribes in his letter to the Cherokees. The destiny of the American nation was pointing one way, and if the tribal chieftains of Virginia chose to oppose that direction, so be it; but they were aligning themselves on the wrong side of history.
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The end came on December 14, 1799. The previous day, when it became clear that the combination of pneumonia and the bleeding and blistering remedies of his physicians could produce but one conclusion, Washington ordered the doctors to cease their barbarisms and permit him to die in peace: “I am just going,” he apprised those around his bed. “Have me decently buried, and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.… Do you understand me?” Though he had no illusions of his own immortality, he apparently feared being buried alive, perhaps believing that was really what had happened with Jesus. His last words were “ ’Tis well.” Self-sufficient as always, his last act was to feel his own pulse at the moment he expired.
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