Founding Brothers (20 page)

Third, when Washington talked about
independence from foreign nations, his understanding of what American
independence entailed cut much deeper than the patriotic veneer customarily
suggested by the term. Once again, the war years shaped and hardened his
convictions on this score, though the basic attitudes on which they rested were
in place long before he assumed command of the Continental Army. Simply put,
Washington had developed a view of both personal and national independence that
was completely immune to sentimental attachments or fleeting ideological
enthusiasms. He was a rock-ribbed realist, who instinctively mistrusted all
visionary schemes dependent on seductive ideals that floated dreamily in
men’s minds, unmoored to the more prosaic but palpable realities that
invariably spelled the difference between victory and defeat. At its
psychological nub, Washington’s inveterate realism was rooted in his
commitment to control, over himself and over any and all events with the power
to determine his fate. At its intellectual core, it meant he was the mirror
image of Jefferson, for whom ideals were the supreme reality and whose
inspirational prowess derived from his confidence that the world would
eventually come around to fit the pictures he had in his head. Washington,
however, regarded all such pictures as dangerous dreams.

In 1778, for
example, at a time when patriotic propagandists were churning out tributes to
the superior virtue of the American cause, Washington confided to a friend
that, though virtue was both a wonderful and necessary item, it was hardly
sufficient to win the war: “Men may speculate as they will,” he
wrote, “they may draw examples from ancient story, of great achievements
performed by its influence; but whoever builds upon it, as a sufficient basis
for conducting a long and bloody War, will find themselves deceived in the
end.… For a time it may, of itself, be enough to push Men to Action; to
bear much, to encounter difficulties; but it will not endure unassisted by
Interest.”
²²

Another
example: In 1780 Maj. John André was captured while attempting to serve
as a British spy in league with Benedict Arnold to produce a major strategic
debacle on the Hudson River at West Point. By all accounts, André was a
model British officer with impeccable manners, who had the misfortune to be
caught doing his duty. Several members of Washington’s staff, including
Hamilton, pleaded that André’s life be spared because of his
exceptional character. Washington dismissed the requests as sentimental,
pointing out that if André had succeeded in his mission, it might very
well have turned the tide of the war. The staff then supported
André’s gallant request that he be shot like an officer rather
than hanged as a spy. Washington also rejected this request, explaining that
André, regardless of his personal attractiveness, was no more and no
less than a spy. He was hanged the next day.
²³

A final
example: Shortly after the French entry into the war in 1778, several members
of the Continental Congress began to lobby for a French invasion of Canada,
arguing that the likelihood of French military success was greater because
Canada was populated mainly by Frenchmen. Washington opposed the scheme on
several grounds, but confided his deepest reasons to Henry Laurens, president
of the Continental Congress. He feared “the introduction of a large body
of French troops into Canada, and putting them in possession of the capital of
that Province, attached to them by all the ties of blood, habits, manners,
religion and former connexions of government.” The French were
America’s providential allies, to be sure, but once they were ensconced
in Canada, it would be foolish to expect them to withdraw: “I fear this
would be too great a temptation to be resisted by any power actuated by the
common maxims of national policy.” He went on to offer his advice to the
Congress in one of his clearest statements about the motives governing nations:
“Men are very apt to run into extremes,” he explained,
“hatred to England may carry some into an excess of Confidence in
France.… I am heartily disposed to entertain the most favourable
sentiments of our new ally and to cherish them in others to a reasonable
degree; but it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that
no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest; and no
prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it.” There
was no such thing as a permanent international alliance, only permanent
national interests.
²⁴

The clearest
statement Washington ever made on America’s national interest came in his
Circular Letter of 1783, the last of his annual letters to the state
governments as commander in chief. He projected a panoramic and fully
continental vision of an American empire and he expressed his vision in
language that, at least for one moment, soared beyond the usually prosaic
boundaries of his subdued style: “The Citizens of America, placed in the
most enviable condition, as the sole Lords and Proprietors of a vast Tract of
Continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of the World, and
abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life, are now by the
late satisfactory pacification, acknowledged to be possessed of absolute
freedom and Independency; They are, from this period, to be considered as
Actors on a most conspicuous Theatre, which seems to be peculiarly designated
by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.”
²⁵

The
breathtaking sweep of this vision is remarkable. Washington had spent his young
manhood fighting with the British to expel the French from North America. With
the victory in the American Revolution, the English had then been expelled. The
entire continent was now a vast American manor, within which the people could
expand unrestricted by foreign opposition. (Presumably the Native Americans
would be assimilated or conquered; and the Spanish west of the Mississippi,
Spain being Spain, would serve as a mere holding company until the American
population swept over them.) Within the leadership of the revolutionary
generation, Washington was, if not unique, at least unusual, for never having
traveled or lived in Europe. (His only foreign excursion was to Barbados as a
young man.) His angle of vision for the new American nation was decidedly
western. The chief task facing the next several generations was to consolidate
control of the North American continent. Anything that impaired or deflected
that central mission was to be avoided at all costs.

In the same
Circular Letter, he laid down the obligations and opportunities implicit in his
national vision, again in some of the most poetic language he ever wrote:
“The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance
and Suspicion, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better
understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.” He then
went on to specify the treasure trove of human knowledge that had accumulated
over the past two centuries—it was about to be called the
Enlightenment—and which constituted a kind of intellectual or
philosophical equivalent of the nearly boundless natural resources waiting to
be developed in the West. It was the fortuitous conjunction of these two vast
reservoirs of philosophical and physical wealth that defined America’s
national interest and made it so special. “At this auspicious
period,” he wrote, “the United States came into existence as a
Nation, and if their Citizens should not be completely free and happy, the
fault will be intirely their own.”
²⁶

The modern
British philosopher Isaiah Berlin once described the different perspectives
that political leaders bring to the management of world affairs as the
difference between the hedgehog and the fox: The hedgehog knows one big thing
and the fox knows many little things. Washington was an archetypal hedgehog.
And the one big thing he knew was that America’s future as a nation lay
to the West, in its development over the next century of a continental empire.
One of the reasons he devoted so much time and energy to planning the
construction of canals, and shared in the misguided belief of his fellow
Virginians that the Potomac constituted a direct link to the river system of
the interior, was that he knew in his bones that the energy of the American
people must flow in that direction. Europe might contain all the cultural
capitals and current world powers, but in terms of America’s national
interest, it was a mere sideshow and distraction. The future lay in those
forests he had explored as a young man. All this he understood intuitively by
the time of his first retirement in 1783.
²⁷

G
RAND VISIONS
, even ones that prove as
prescient as Washington’s, must nevertheless negotiate the damnable
particularities that history in the short run tosses up before history in the
long run arrives to validate the vision. In Washington’s case, the most
obvious corollary to his view of American national interest was the avoidance
of a major war during the gestative phase of national development. It so
happened, however, that England and France were engaged in a century-old
struggle for dominance of Europe and international supremacy, a struggle in
which both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution were merely
peripheral sideshows, and which would only end with Napoleon’s defeat at
Waterloo in 1815. Washington’s understanding of the proper American
response to this global conflict was crystal clear: “I trust that we
shall have too just a sense of our own interest to originate any cause that may
involve us in it,” he wrote in 1794, “and I ardently wish we may
not be forced into it by the conduct of other nations. If we are permitted to
improve without interruption, the great advantages which nature and
circumstances have placed within our reach, many years will not revolve before
we may be ranked not only among the most respectable, but among the happiest
people on earth.”
²⁸

The
linchpin of his foreign policy as president, it followed naturally, was the
Proclamation of Neutrality (1793), which declared America an impartial witness
to the ongoing European conflict. His constant refrain throughout his
presidency emphasized the same point, even offering an estimate of the likely
duration of America’s self-imposed alienation from global politics:
“Every true friend to this Country must see and feel that the policy of
it is not to embroil ourselves with any nation whatsoever; but to avoid their
disputes and politics; and if they will harass one another, to avail ourselves
of the neutral conduct we have adopted. Twenty years peace with such an
increase of population and resources as we have a right to expect; added to our
remote situation from the jarring powers, will in all probability enable us in
a just cause to bid defiance to any power on earth.” In a sense, it was a
fresh application of the same strategic lesson he had learned as head of the
Continental Army—namely, to avoid engagement with a superior force until
the passage of time made victory possible, what we might call “the
strategy of enlightened procrastination.” In retrospect, and with all the
advantages of hindsight, Washington’s strategic insights as president
were every bit as foresighted as his strategic insights as commander in chief
during the American Revolution, right down to his timing estimate of
“twenty years,” which pretty much predicted the outbreak of the War
of 1812.
²⁹

Since Washington’s seminal insight was also the core piece of foreign
policy wisdom offered in the Farewell Address, and since every major American
statesman of the era also embraced the principle of neutrality as an obvious
maxim, the meaning of the Farewell Address would seem to be incontrovertible,
its message beyond controversy. But that was not at all how the message was
heard at the time; in part because there was a deep division within the
revolutionary generation that Washington was trying to straddle over just what
a policy of American neutrality should look like; and in part because there was
an alternative vision of the national interest circulating in the higher
reaches of the political leadership, another opinion about where history was
headed that could also make potent claims on the legacy of the American
Revolution. All this had come to a head in Washington’s second term in
the debate over Jay’s Treaty, creating the greatest crisis of
Washington’s presidency, the most virulent criticism of his monarchical
tendencies, and the immediate context for every word he wrote in the Farewell
Address.
³⁰

Jay’s Treaty was a landmark in the shaping of American foreign
policy. In 1794, Washington had sent Chief Justice John Jay to London to
negotiate a realistic bargain that avoided a war with England at a time when
the United States was ill prepared to fight one. Jay returned in 1795 with a
treaty that accepted the fact of English naval and commercial supremacy and
implicitly endorsed a pro-English version of American neutrality. It recognized
England’s right to retain tariffs on American exports while granting
English imports most-favored status in the United States; it implicitly
accepted English impressment of American sailors. It also committed the United
States to compensate English creditors for outstanding pre-revolutionary debts,
most of which were owed by Virginia’s planters. In return for these
concessions, the English agreed to submit claims by American merchants for
confiscated cargoes to arbitration and to abide by the promise made in the
Treaty of Paris (1783) to evacuate its troops from their posts on the western
frontiers. In effect, Jay’s Treaty was a repudiation of the
Franco-American alliance of 1778, which had been so instrumental in gaining
French military assistance for the winning of the American Revolution.
³¹