His Excellency: George Washington (27 page)

There was both a romantic and a realistic dimension to his thinking. On the romantic side, Washington continued to harbor his long-standing belief that navigation improvements on the upper reaches of the Potomac would provide the best access to the river networks of the Ohio Valley, eventually linking the Chesapeake Bay with the Mississippi and making Alexandria the commercial capital of the nation. As president of the Potomac River Company, he encouraged publications like
Potomac Magazine,
which described the confluence of the Potomac and the Anacostia as the world’s greatest natural harbor “where 10,000 ships the size of Noah’s arc” could comfortably dock. He urged Robert Morris to invest in the company, claiming that “I would hazard all the money I could raise” on the Potomac’s prospects. (Morris declined, though other misguided land speculations eventually landed him in bankruptcy.) Given the subsequent location of the national capital on the Potomac, it is ironic that the western drift of Washington’s Potomac thinking led him to oppose proposals in the Confederation Congress—this was in 1785—for a capital on the Atlantic Coast, arguing that “the Seat of Empire . . . will not remain so far to the Eastward long.” His embrace of the Potomac mythology also inspired some of his most visionary renditions of America as “the Land of promise . . . for the poor, the needy, & oppressed of the Earth.” Waves of immigrants would flow over the Atlantic and through “the front door” that was the Potomac, on to “the fertile plains of the Western Country,” in one rendition reaching all the way to California.
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The Potomac dream was an illusion, but we should be able to overlook one minor misstep by someone so otherwise prescient about where history was headed. And, on the realistic side, Washington’s Potomac obsession may have got the “front door” wrong, but it correctly grasped that westward migration would be the central theme of American history for at least the next century. In the 1780s he worried that the Confederation Congress was too distracted and divided by local interests to manage western expansion coherently. He favored what he called “Progressive Seating,” meaning the gradual but steady occupation of successive border regions, coupled with federal support for roads and inland navigation. (The Potomac River Company, in short, was a private model for what the federal government should be doing publicly.) If internal improvements were neglected, Washington feared that the swelling population west of the Alleghenies would drift into alien orbits and “would in a few short years be as unconnected to us, indeed more so, than we are with South America.” Already, he warned, the western settlements “stand as it were upon a pivot—the touch of a feather would turn them any way.”
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The most menacing western culprit in the Washington nightmare scenario—no surprise here—was Great Britain, whose troops remained stationed on the frontier in violation of the Treaty of Paris, surely hoping to recover some portion of the empire lost at Yorktown. Spain, the other European power with a presence in the American West, did not trouble him, because he regarded Spanish economic and military weakness as a chronic condition. In 1785 he counseled against diplomatic negotiations with Spain about navigation rights on the Mississippi. “Why should we, prematurely, urge a matter,” he asked, “if it is our interest to let it sleep?” In effect, he regarded Spain as a convenient holding company destined to be overwhelmed by the tidal wave of American settlers.
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Finally, there was a sharply personal edge to his thinking about the fate of those western lands. To be sure, all of Washington’s western concerns flowed directly out of his personal desire to assure that the national domain acquired by the victory over Britain
—his
victory—not be squandered away. In addition to that national legacy, however, Washington himself owned nearly sixty thousand acres of western land, including parcels in the Shenandoah Valley, western Pennsylvania, and—the mother lode—two huge tracts on the Ohio and Great Kanawha. Given the declining fortune of his Mount Vernon farms, his western properties had become his chief source of revenue, in the form of rental fees, as well as the foundation of his net worth. And the value of those lands depended heavily on the settling of western territories by the confederation government in a prompt and prudent fashion.
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In all other areas of his public life, Washington was acutely sensitive to any appearance of impropriety when his own financial interest was involved. His refusal to accept a salary as commander in chief, for example, reflected the rock-ribbed conviction that the purity of his motives must match the purity of the cause he served. In 1785, when his fellow trustees of the Potomac River Company offered him fifty shares of company stock as payment for his services, he tortured himself and his friends with questions about the proper way to decline the offer without appearing ungrateful. But in the Washington psyche land was different from stock or money. It triggered a set of alarm bells that rang in that portion of his memory predating his ascendance as a Virginia squire, before the Mount Vernon or Custis inheritances, all the way back to that youthful adventurer-on-the-make with only his physical prowess and military reputation to carry him forward. His appetite for acreage, then, was the single fault line that ran through his otherwise impregnable interior defenses and control points, because land represented the only tangible and abiding measure of his hard-won status, the only form of financial security truly worthy of the name.
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His avaricious attitude toward land was put on dramatic display in September 1784, when he decided to tour his western holdings and came upon several families who had settled on plots he owned in western Pennsylvania. One can only imagine the disappointment the settlers felt in learning that the land they had been cultivating as their own for many years actually belonged to an absentee owner, and that the owner was none other than George Washington. When they questioned the legality of his title, Washington hired a lawyer to have them evicted if they refused to leave or pay him rent as tenants. “I viewed the defendants as willful and obstinate Sinners,” he explained, “persevering after timely & repeated admonition, in a design to injure me.” He seemed to regard his land as an extension of himself, and therefore its occupation as a personal violation. The court case dragged on for two years, pitting the most powerful figure in the nation against a feisty delegation of impoverished farmers. Though he won the case, his victory did nothing to embellish his reputation for soaring majestically above his own private interests. The episode also exposed another anomaly produced by his insatiable hunger for land. Instead of the Jeffersonian model of independent yeoman farmers, Washington had opted for the Fairfax model of tenants and proprietary control, a choice almost calculated to slow westward migration, since no settler in his right mind would willingly opt to rent rather than own. If part of Washington’s mind was haunted by memories of his landless Virginia youth, it was also stuck in the hierarchical presumptions of that same earlier era.
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Both his memories and presumptions were called into question in the early months of his retirement, when a political firestorm broke out over his membership in the Society of the Cincinnati. Prior to their disbandment, the officers of the Continental army had formed a fraternal order of that name and quite naturally selected Washington as the first president. While its name announced the intention to avoid meddling in politics, and its constitution emphasized fraternal and philanthropic goals, the Society of the Cincinnati was an avowedly elitist enterprise designed to sustain the aristocratic ethos of superior virtue that officers in the Continental army had been harboring since Valley Forge. Most ominously, membership was defined in hereditary terms, passing exclusively to the eldest male descendant in the next generation. (Ironically, this provision meant that Washington’s line would die with him, since he had no direct heirs, male or female.) The society immediately became the focus of public ridicule, especially in New England, where the Massachusetts legislature condemned it as a vestige of European aristocratic decadence and a conspicuous threat to the republican values the American Revolution had supposedly established forever. Over in Paris, Franklin lampooned the hereditary requirement by calculating that the amount of patriotic blood passed on would be infinitesimally small after two centuries of primogeniture, so why not reverse the hereditary principle by designating ancestors rather than descendants, preferably mothers rather than fathers, who probably were more responsible for instilling patriotism in their sons than anyone else?
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Washington was initially tone-deaf to these criticisms, in part because he shared the fraternal ethos of its members, whom he believed to be the virtuous few who, more than anyone else, had won American independence, in part because his own version of independence also retained an elitist edge of its own. Which is to say that he believed the American Revolution had destroyed monarchy and British imperial rule, and in that sense was a significant political revolution, but he did not believe that it was also a social revolution that destroyed the world of privilege, rank, and deference in which he had risen to prominence before the war. For him, the Society of the Cincinnati did not defy the best ideals of the American Revolution; it embodied them.

Washington never changed his thinking about the society, which he described as an “innocent institution” with “immaculate intentions,” but he did change his mind about lending his own prestige to its purposes. Jefferson was apparently the first confidant to warn him that members of the society were widely regarded as an aspiring American nobility, its hereditary requirement “a violation of the natural equality of man,” and that Washington’s continued association with its agenda would do serious harm to his own reputation. In March 1784, he traveled to the first national meeting of the society in Philadelphia, convinced that he needed to resign the presidency, eliminate the hereditary principle, and, if Jefferson’s recollection of a conversation in Annapolis can be believed, call for the abolition of the entire enterprise if halfway measures proved inadequate. “If we cannot convince the people that their fears are ill-founded,” he explained, “we should . . . yield to them and not suffer that which was intended for the best of purposes to produce a bad one.”
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Accustomed to getting his way, Washington presumed that his warnings would be heeded and the society would die a speedy death. But the younger members, plus a delegation of French applicants, forced another meeting in May in which a few minor modifications of the bylaws, which did not include eliminating the hereditary principle, were approved as sufficient to answer the public criticism. Washington attended the May meeting and released a statement designed to put the best face on the proceedings, though in private he confessed that “we have been most amazingly embarrassed in the business that brought us here.” The Society of the Cincinnati not only remained alive, the members also continued to elect Washington as president, despite his best efforts to maintain a discreet distance from their meetings. Writing from France in 1786, Jefferson reported that the society posed even greater dangers than he had previously recognized, that it was like a cancer growing in the heart of the American republic, and that “a single fibre left of this institution will provide an hereditary aristocracy which will change the form of our governments from the best to the worst in the world.”
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The Society of the Cincinnati thus became a kind of lovable albatross tied permanently around Washington’s neck. It was lovable because he felt deep emotional attachments to most of the society’s prominent members, who were the “band of brothers” with whom he had shared the most intense experience of his life, and theirs. It was an albatross because the society became a convenient symbol of aristocratic attitudes and values, and therefore a lightning rod for the kind of conspiratorial fears that Jefferson, among others, harbored toward any institutionalized expression of social inequality. As his new aide, David Humphreys, put it in 1786: “I am sensible the subject is a very delicate one, that it will be discussed by posterity as well as by the present age, and that you have much to lose and nothing to gain by it.”
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Looking ahead, the accusations leveled at the society provided a preview of the ideological battles destined to engulf Washington during his second term as president. Looking backward, the charges echoed the arguments directed at the Continental army as a menacing threat to the very values the American Revolution claimed to stand for. Washington was on record as believing the latter charges were at best naive and at worst traitorous. And he confided to friends that he found the accusations against the society to be hyperbolic prejudices, “conjured up by designing men, to work their own purposes upon terrified imaginations.” That said, his association with the Society of the Cincinnati clashed with his chief preoccupation, which was the courting of posterity’s judgment, so throughout the 1780s he chose to keep his criticism of its enemies private and his connections with its public functions limited. Most tellingly, the outcry over the society forced him to realize, probably for the first time, that the American Revolution had released egalitarian ideas that he was at pains to understand, much less find compatible with his own version of an American republic, which was elitist, deferential, virtuous, and honorable—in short, pretty much like him.
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THIS SPECIES OF PROPERTY

I
N DECEMBER 1785,
Washington received a letter calculated to focus his mind on another worrisome association even more damaging to his abiding public image than the Society of the Cincinnati. It came from Robert Pleasants, a Virginia Quaker who had recently emancipated all eighty of his own slaves and minced no words in instructing Washington to do the same: “How strange then it must appear to impartial thinking men, to be informed, that many who were warm advocates for that noble cause during the War, are now sitting down in a state of ease, dissipation and extravigence on the labour of slaves? And most especially that thou . . . should now withold that inestimable blessing from any who are absolutely in thy power, & after the Right of freedom, is acknowledged to be the natural & unalienable Right of all mankind.” Pleasants somewhat gratuitously suggested that Washington had probably been too preoccupied with the inevitable details of his retirement routine to think about “a subject so Noble and interesting,” because once he did think about it, his response must be as self-evident as those truths that Jefferson had enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.