Washington: A Life

Like all other plantation owners, Washington had become so accustomed to slavery that the bizarre began to seem normal. He had always kept a strict separation between his social and professional lives and for a long time went foxhunting and toured his farms on separate days. Then on January 4, 1786, he began to mix these two incompatible tasks, riding to hounds and visiting field hands at the same time. “After breakfast, I rid by the places where my Muddy Hole and Ferry people were clearing,” he wrote in his diary. “Thence to the [grist] mill and Dogue Run plantations and, having the hounds with me, in passing from the latter toward Muddy Hole plantation, I found a fox, which, after dragging him some distance and ru

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

The Ruins of the Past

WHEN WASHINGTON CONSENTED IN 1783 to serve as first president of the Order of the Cinci

But the formation of a hereditary society, with membership inherited through eldest sons, awakened the hostility toward aristocracy bred by the Revolution. Blasted as elitist, the society raised the dread specter of a military caste that might dominate American political life. That Washington lacked a male heir spared him no criticism. After all, the society’s very name paid tribute to his ineffable mystique. In hunting down monarchical plots, the new nation displayed an active, often paranoid imagination. In later years Jefferson stated that it had “always been believed” that some army officers, especially Steuben and Knox, had offered a crown to Washington and started the Cinci

When Benjamin Franklin’s daughter transmitted to him press reports about the new society, he replied that he could understand the Chinese practice of honoring one’s parents, who after all had achieved something. To honor descendants, however, merely from the accident of biology, was “not only groundless and absurd but often hurtful to that posterity.” Any sort of hereditary society, he declared, would stand “in direct opposition to the solemnly declared sense” of the new country.3 John Adams also went on the warpath against the Cinci

No sooner had Washington a

Always jealous of his reputation for republican purity, Washington hated to have his integrity questioned. To defuse the controversy, he was eager to eliminate the group’s more odious features. As he told Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., “If we ca

By the time of the Philadelphia meeting, Washington was eager to respond to criticism swirling around the group. Some of it he thought maliciously exaggerated “by designing men to work their own purposes upon terrified imaginations,” but he acknowledged the genuine kernel of discontent.9 In his inaugural speech, he stated categorically that the Society of the Cinci

Washington’s performance in Philadelphia showed that he could be a forceful orator who spoke at length and with passion if he wanted to. That he often failed to do so was because he preferred to keep his own counsel and reveal only a tiny portion of his thoughts, keeping his options open. He knew his power before a crowd of people, as shown during the Newburgh uprising, and could turn on the spigot of his oratory at will. The speech also showed Washington’s awareness of his unique political standing—and his willingness to exploit it by threatening to resign if objectionable traits of the Cinci