Joseph J. Ellis (21 page)

The symbolism of the scene was poignant, dramatizing as it did the passing of the prototypical American and the cause of gradual emancipation. Whether they knew it or not, the badge of mourning the members of the House agreed to wear also bore testimony to the tragic and perhaps intractable problem that even the revolutionary generation, with all its extraordinary talent, could neither solve nor face.

T
HROUGHOUT THE
first half of the 1790s, the closest approximation to a self-evident truth in American politics was George Washington. A legend in his own time, Americans had been describing Washington as “the Father of the Country” since 1776—which is to say, before there was even a country. By the time he assumed the presidency in 1789—no other candidate was even thinkable—the mythology surrounding Washington’s reputation had grown like ivy over a statue, effectively covering the man with an aura of omnipotence, rendering the distinction between his human qualities and his heroic achievements impossible to delineate.
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Some of the most incredible stories also happened to be true. During Gen. Edward Braddock’s ill-fated expedition against the French outside Pittsburgh in 1755, a young Washington had joined with Daniel Boone to rally the survivors, despite having two horses shot out from under him and multiple bullet holes piercing his coat and creasing his pants. At Yorktown in 1781, he had insisted on standing atop a parapet for a full fifteen minutes during an artillery attack, bullets and shrapnel flying all about him, defying aides who tried to pull him down before he had properly surveyed the field of action. When Washington spoke of destiny, people listened.
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If there was a Mount Olympus in the new American republic, all the lesser gods were gathered farther down the slope. The only serious contender for primacy was Benjamin Franklin, but just before his
death in 1790, Franklin himself acknowledged Washington’s supremacy. In a characteristically Franklinesque gesture, he bequeathed to Washington his crab-tree walking stick, presumably to assist the general in his stroll toward immortality. “If it were a sceptre,” Franklin remarked, “he has merited it and would become it.”
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In the America of the 1790s, Washington’s image was everywhere, in paintings, prints, lockets; on coins, silverware, plates, and household bric-a-brac. And his familiarity seemed forever. His commanding presence had been the central feature in every major event of the revolutionary era: the linchpin of the Continental Army throughout eight long years of desperate fighting from 1775 to 1783; the presiding officer at the Constitutional Convention in 1787; the first and only chief executive of the fledgling federal government since 1789. He was the palpable reality that clothed the revolutionary rhapsodies in flesh and blood, America’s one and only indispensable character. Washington was the core of gravity that prevented the American Revolution from flying off into random orbits, the stable center around which the revolutionary energies formed. As one popular toast of the day put it, he was “the man who unites all hearts.” He was the American Zeus, Moses, and Cincinnatus all rolled into one.
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Then, all of a sudden, on September 19, 1796, an article addressed to “the PEOPLE of the United States” appeared on the inside pages of the
American Daily Advertiser
, Philadelphia’s major newspaper. The conspicuous austerity of the announcement was matched by its calculated simplicity. It began: “Friends, and Fellow Citizens: The period for a new election of a Citizen, to Administer the Executive government of the United States, being not far distant … it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolutions I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those, out of whom a choice is to be made.” It ended, again in a gesture of ostentatious moderation, with the unadorned signature: “G. Washington, United States.”
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Every major newspaper in the country reprinted the article over the ensuing weeks, though only one, the
Courier of New Hampshire
, gave it the title that would echo through the ages—“Washington’s Farewell Address.” Contemporaries began to debate its contents almost immediately, and a lively (and ultimately silly) argument soon ensued about
whether Washington or Hamilton actually wrote it. Over a longer stretch of time, the Farewell Address achieved transcendental status, ranking alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address as a seminal statement of America’s abiding principles. Its Olympian tone made it a perennial touchstone at those political occasions requiring platitudinous wisdom. And in the late nineteenth century the Congress made its reading a mandatory ritual on Washington’s birthday. Meanwhile, several generations of historians, led by students of American diplomacy, have made the interpretation of the Farewell Address into a cottage industry of its own, building up a veritable mountain of commentary around its implications for an isolationist foreign policy and a bipartisan brand of American statecraft.
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But in the crucible of the moment, none of these subsequent affectations or interpretations mattered much, if at all. What did matter, indeed struck most readers as the only thing that truly mattered, was that George Washington was retiring. The constitutional significance of the decision, of course, struck home immediately, signaling as it did Washington’s voluntary surrender of the presidency after two terms, thereby setting the precedent that held firm until 1940, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke it. (It was reaffirmed in 1951 with passage of the Twenty-second Amendment.) But even that landmark precedent, so crucial in establishing the republican principle of rotation in office, paled in comparison to an even more elemental political and psychological realization.

For twenty years, over the entire life span of the revolutionary war and the experiment with republican government, Washington had stood at the helm of the ship of state. Now he was sailing off into the sunset. The precedent he was setting may have seemed uplifting in retrospect, but at the time the glaring and painful reality was that the United States without Washington was itself unprecedented. The Farewell Address, as several commentators have noted, was an oddity in that it was not really an address; it was never delivered as a speech. It should, by all rights, be called the Farewell Letter, for it was in form and tone an open letter to the American people, telling them they were now on their own.
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•    •   •

I
NSIDERS HAD
suspected that this was coming for about six months. In February of 1796, Washington had first approached Alexander Hamilton about drafting some kind of valedictory statement. Shortly thereafter, the gossip network inside the government had picked up the scent. By the end of the month, James Madison was writing James Monroe in Paris: “It is pretty certain that the President will not serve beyond his present term.” On the eve of the Farewell Address, the Federalist leader from Massachusetts, Fisher Ames, predicted that Washington’s looming announcement would constitute “a signal, like dropping a hat, for the party races to start,” but in fact they had been going on unofficially throughout the preceding spring and summer. In May, for example, Madison had speculated—correctly, it turned out—that in the first contested election for president in American history, “Jefferson would probably be the object on one side [and] Adams apparently on the other.” By midsummer, Washington himself was apprising friends of his earnest desire to leave the government when his term was up, “after which no consideration under heaven that I can foresee shall again with draw me from the walks of private life.” He had been dropping hints, in truth, throughout his second term, describing himself as “on the advanced side of the grand climacteric” and too old for the rigors of the job, repeating his familiar refrain about the welcome solace of splendid isolation beneath his “vine and fig tree” at Mount Vernon.
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But did he mean it? Lamentations about the tribulations of public life, followed by celebrations of the bucolic splendor of retirement to rural solitude, had become a familiar, even formulaic, posture within the leadership class of the revolutionary generation, especially within the Virginia dynasty. Everyone knew the classical models of latter-day seclusion represented by Cincinnatus and described by Cicero and Virgil. Declarations of principled withdrawal from the hurly-burly of politics to the natural rhythms of one’s fields or farms had become rhetorical rituals. If Washington’s retirement hymn featured the “vine and fig tree,” Jefferson’s idolized “my family, my farm, and my books.” The motif had become so commonplace that John Adams, an aspiring Cicero himself, claimed that the Virginians had worn out the entire Ciceronian syndrome: “It seems the Mode of becoming great is to retire,” he wrote Abigail in 1796. “It is marvellous how political Plants
grow in the shade.” Washington had been threatening to retire even before he was inaugurated as president in 1789, and he had repeated the threat in 1792 prior to his reelection. While utterly sincere on all occasions, his preference for a virtuous retirement had always been trumped by a more public version of virtue, itself reinforced by the unanimous judgment of his political advisers that he and he alone was indispensable. Why expect a different conclusion in 1796?
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The short answer: age. Throughout most of his life, Washington’s physical vigor had been one of his most priceless assets. A notch below six feet four and slightly above two hundred pounds, he was a full head taller than his male contemporaries. (John Adams claimed that the reason Washington was invariably selected to lead every national effort was that he was always the tallest man in the room.) A detached description of his physical features would have made him sound like an ugly, misshapen oaf: pockmarked face, decayed teeth, oversized eye sockets, massive nose, heavy in the hips, gargantuan hands and feet. But somehow, when put together and set in motion, the full package conveyed sheer majesty. As one of his biographers put it, his body did not just occupy space; it seemed to organize the space around it. He dominated a room not just with his size, but with an almost electric presence. “He has so much martial dignity in his deportment,” observed Benjamin Rush, “that there is not a king in Europe but would look like a valet de chambre by his side.”
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Not only did bullets and shrapnel seem to veer away from his body in battle, not only did he once throw a stone over the Natural Bridge in the Shenandoah Valley, which was 215 feet high, not only was he generally regarded as the finest horseman in Virginia, the rider who led the pack in most fox hunts, he also possessed for most of his life a physical constitution that seemed immune to disease or injury. Other soldiers came down with frostbite after swimming ice-choked rivers. Other statesmen fell by the wayside, lacking the stamina to handle the relentless political pressure. Washington suffered none of these ailments. Adams said that Washington had “the gift of taciturnity,” meaning he had an instinct for the eloquent silence. This same principle held true on the physical front. His medical record was eloquently empty.
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The inevitable chinks in his cast-iron constitution began to appear with age. He fell ill just before the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and almost missed that major moment. Then in 1790, soon after
assuming the presidency, he came down with influenza, then raging in New York, and nearly died from pulmonary complications. Jefferson’s statements about Washington were notoriously contradictory and unreliable, as we shall see, but he dated Washington’s physical decline from this moment: “The firm tone of his mind, for which he had been remarkable, was beginning to relax; a listlessness of labor, a desire for tranquillity had crept on him, and a willingness to let others act, or even think, for him.” In 1794, while touring the terrain around the new national capital that would bear his name, he badly wrenched his back while riding. After a career of galloping to hounds, and a historic reputation as America’s premier man on horseback, he was never able to hold his seat in the saddle with the same confidence. As he moved into his mid-sixties, the muscular padding around his torso softened and sagged, his erect bearing started to tilt forward, as if he were always leaning into the wind, and his energy flagged by the end of each long day. Hostile newspaper editorials spoke elliptically of encroaching senility. Even his own vice president, John Adams, conceded that Washington seemed dazed and wholly scripted at certain public ceremonies, like an actor reading his lines or an aging athlete going through the motions.
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