Washington: A Life

Thus far Washington’s Indian policy added up to a well-meaning failure: he had been able neither to negotiate peace nor to prevail in war. To restore the army’s battered reputation, he appointed Anthony Wayne, the quondam hero of Stony Point, to lead the new augmented army in the Northwest Territory. The redoubtable Wayne instituted tough measures to instill discipline in the new army and shaved, branded, and whipped soldiers to sharpen their performance. While pleased with Wayne’s rigor, Henry Knox introduced a caveat: “Uncommon punishment not sanctioned by law should be admitted with caution.”65 The creation of this new, more professional army only heightened the qualms of those who feared a standing army and exacerbated the growing political divisions in Philadelphia. Nonetheless, under Wayne’s leadership, the army would reverse the disastrous direction that Indian warfare had taken during the unsuccessful Harmar and St. Clair campaigns.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

A Tissue of Machinations

AS THE FIRST PRESIDENT, George Washington hoped to float above the political fray and avoid infighting, backbiting, and poisonous intrigue. He wanted to be an exemplary figure of national unity, surmounting partisan interests, and was therefore slow to spot the deep fissures yawning open in his administration. In June 1790 he told Lafayette, “By having Mr Jefferson at the head of the Department of State . . . Hamilton of the Treasury and Knox of that of War, I feel myself supported by able coadjutors, who harmonize together extremely well.”1 Washington always worked hard to appear impartial and to impress the electorate that he was president of all the people. This pose of immaculate purity was congenial to him, as he sought a happy medium in his behavior. Despite holding firm opinions, he was never an ideologue, and his policy positions did not come wrapped in tidy ideological packages. Rather, they developed in a slow, evolutionary ma

Washington and other founders entertained the fanciful hope that America would be spared the bane of political parties, which they called “factions” and associated with parochial self-interest. The first president did not see that parties might someday clarify choices for the electorate, organize opinion, and enlist people in the political process; rather he feared that parties could blight a still fragile republic. He was hardly alone. “If I could not go to heaven but with a party,” Jefferson opined, “I would not go there at all.”2 Yet the first factions arose from Jefferson’s extreme displeasure with Hamilton’s mounting influence. They were not political parties in the modern sense so much as clashing coteries of intellectual elites, who operated through letters and conversations instead of meetings, platforms, and conventions. Nonetheless these groups solidified into parties during the decade and, notwithstanding the founders’ fears, formed an enduring cornerstone of American democratic politics.

Disturbed by the expansion of federal power under Hamilton’s programs, Jefferson and Madison suspected a secret counterrevolution was at work, an incipient plot to install a monarchical government on the British model. Their defeat over the bank bill in late February 1791 convinced them that Hamilton had hopelessly bewitched the president. Hamilton’s assertion of federal power also awakened fears that meddlesome northerners might interfere with southern slavery. As one Virginian later said, “Tell me, if Congress can establish banks, make roads and canals, whether they ca

Unlike the Anglophile Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison often seemed to want to make the American government everything that the British government was not. To denigrate his foes, Jefferson applied to them hyperbolic labels, including “monocrats” and “Anglomen”—words with an evocative conspiratorial ring. As the French Revolution grew more sanguinary, Hamilton in turn demonized the Jeffersonians as involved in a worldwide Jacobin conspiracy emanating from Paris.

To organize opposition to the dangerous political backsliding that they perceived, Jefferson and Madison took a tour of New York and New England in May- June 1791. The cover story Jefferson supplied to Washington was that he needed a break “to get rid of a headache which is very troublesome, by giving more exercise to the body and less to the mind.”4 Jefferson and Madison supposedly pla

It seems strange that the revolt against Washington’s administration originated with a member of his own cabinet and a close confidant. When the president delivered his a

In an extreme act of duplicity, Madison and Jefferson installed a flaming critic of Washington right in the heart of his own government. They wanted to counter the views of John Fe

Before long the two factions took on revealing names. The Hamiltonian party called itself Federalists, implying that it alone supported the Constitution and national unity. It took a robust view of federal power and a strong executive branch, and it favored banks and manufacturing as well as agriculture. Elitist in its politics, it tended to doubt the wisdom of the common people, but it also included a large number of northerners opposed to slavery. The Jeffersonians called themselves Republicans to suggest that they alone could save the Constitution from monarchical encroachments. They believed in limited federal power, a dominant Congress, states’ rights, and an agrarian nation free of the corrupting influence of banks, federal debt, and manufacturing. While led by slaveholders such as Jefferson and Madison, the Republicans credited the wisdom of the common people. Washington and Hamilton believed wholeheartedly in an energetic federal government, whereas Jefferson and Madison feared concentrated power.