Washington: A Life (131 page)

 

 

AS EARLY AS THE FALL OF 1789, Washington emphasized to General Arthur St. Clair, first governor of the Northwest Territory, that he preferred a peace treaty with the hostile Indians of the Ohio Country to war. On the other hand, as long as those tribes, instigated by the British, pursued depredations on frontier communities, the government would be “constrained to punish them with severity.”
⁴⁷
During the summer of 1790 the Miami and Wabash tribes flouted peace overtures from the government and conducted fierce raids against American traffic on the Ohio and Wabash rivers. In response, Washington and Knox instructed St. Clair to summon the militia and destroy crops and villages of the offending Indians, hoping a show of strength would prod them into a negotiated peace. Selected to command the fifteen-hundred-man force, made up mostly of militia, was Brigadier General Josiah Harmar, a Revolutionary War veteran whose drinking habits caused concern in Philadelphia. Henry Knox scolded Harmar for being “too fond of the convivial glass” and pointed out that Washington was aware of this problem.
⁴⁸

At the end of that September, Harmar led his men on an expedition against the Wabash Indians northwest of the Ohio River. By mid-November, with the fate of the operation wrapped in mysterious silence, Washington girded for bad news and confessed to Knox his forebodings of a “disgraceful termination” to the expedition. Always moralistic about alcohol problems, he reserved harsh words for General Harmar. “I expected
little
from the moment I heard he was a
drunkard,
” he told Knox.
⁴⁹
Washington’s worries about the expedition were prescient: Harmar’s men suffered a stunning defeat at a Miami Indian village near the present-day city of Fort Wayne, Indiana. The dreadful performance of American troops—they killed two hundred Indians but suffered an equal number of casualties—only reinforced Washington and Knox’s long-standing prejudice against militia. Nonetheless, a military court of inquiry vindicated Harmar, labeling his conduct “irreproachable.”
⁵⁰

Washington always tried to be evenhanded in dealing with the Indians. He hoped that they would abandon their itinerant hunting life and adapt to fixed agricultural communities in the manner of Anglo-Saxon settlers. He never advocated outright confiscation of their land or the forcible removal of tribes, and he berated American settlers who abused Indians, admitting that he held out no hope for pacific relations with the Indians as long as “frontier settlers entertain the opinion that there is not the same crime (or indeed no crime at all) in killing an Indian as in killing a white man.”
⁵¹
When addressing Seneca chiefs that December, he conceded provocations by American settlers: “The murders that have been committed upon some of your people by the bad white men, I sincerely lament and reprobate, and I earnestly hope that the real murderers will be secured and punished as they deserve.”
⁵²
Nevertheless Indians saw only a pattern of steady encroachment and unrelenting westward advancement by white settlers that threatened their traditional way of life. In the end, Washington’s hope of “civilizing” the Indians by converting them to agriculture and Christianity was destined to fail.

It was only a matter of time before Washington and Knox got authority to raise a new regiment and mount a major reprisal against the Indians. Arthur St. Clair, elevated to a major general, was to lead fourteen hundred troops to the Miami village with an unsparing mandate: “Seek the enemy and endeavor by all possible means to strike them with great severity.”
⁵³
Born in Scotland, trained as a physician, St. Clair was a seasoned officer who had fought in the French and Indian War. Patriotic if a bit pompous, he had turned in a mixed record during the Revolutionary War but performed well enough that Washington valued him as a soldier in “high repute.”
⁵⁴
For his 1791 expedition, St. Clair led a threadbare, inexperienced army described by one officer as “badly clothed, badly paid, and badly fed.”
⁵⁵
As this force dragged brass field pieces through the wilderness, it was depleted by illness and desertion. St. Clair, suffering from agonizing gout, had to be borne aloft on a stretcher. The general grew peevish over lax discipline among his men and paused during the march to construct a gallows to punish insubordination.

On November 4, 1791, right before sunrise, St. Clair and his men were camped near the Miami village when up to fifteen hundred Indians pounced in a surprise attack. Hurling aside artillery and baggage, the Americans fled in a panic-stricken rout. All discipline broke down amid the general slaughter, and gruesome stories of butchery filtered back from the wilderness. As one soldier related, “I saw a Capt. Smith just after he was scalped, setting on his backside, his head smoking like a chimney.”
⁵⁶
The heart of General Richard Butler was supposedly sliced into pieces and distributed to the victorious tribes. In a ghoulish warning to stay off their land, the Indians stuffed the mouths of some victims with soil. St. Clair’s troops suffered shocking casualties—900 out of 1,400 men—versus only 150 Indians.

According to an account based on an 1816 talk with Tobias Lear, the dreadful tidings arrived in Philadelphia on December 9, in the middle of one of Martha Washington’s demure Friday-evening receptions. After knocking at the president’s door, the courier informed Lear that he had dispatches to deliver directly to Washington. After being pulled from the reception, the president was closeted for a time with this unusual messenger and read St. Clair’s description of “as warm and unfortunate an action as almost any that has been fought.”
⁵⁷
When he returned to the reception, he apologized to his guests but revealed nothing of the extraordinary news. Instead, he went dutifully through his social paces, conversing with each lady in attendance. With extraordinary self-control, Washington allowed nothing in his demeanor to hint at the pent-up rage churning inside him. When the guests were gone, Washington and Lear sat alone by the parlor fire, and Washington blew up in tremendous wrath, throwing up his hands in agitation, scarcely able to contain his emotions. The editors of the George Washington papers note that the story “contains some credible details” but also point out that by the date in question “unofficial reports of the defeat already were circulating in Philadelphia.”
⁵⁸
At a later cabinet meeting, Washington, reaching back to his early frontier experience, faulted St. Clair for failing to keep “his army in such a position always as to be able to display them in a line behind trees in the Ind[ia]n manner at any moment.”
⁵⁹

In early January the first news reports of the disaster cast St. Clair in a heroic light. In February the tenor abruptly changed when Colonel William Darke published an anonymous diatribe against Washington for having dispatched a woefully infirm general, bedridden and propped up with pillows, into battle: “That the executive should commit the reputation of the government … to a man who, from the situation of his health, was under the necessity of traveling on a bier, seems to have been an oversight as unexpected as it has been severely censured. A general, enwrapped ten-fold in flannel robes, unable to walk alone, placed on his car, bolstered on all sides with pillows and medicines, and thus moving on to attack the most active enemy in the world was … a very tragicomical appearance indeed.”
⁶⁰
Congressman William B. Grove labeled the St. Clair defeat “the most complete victory ever known in this country obtained by Indians.”
⁶¹

When Knox submitted a request to Congress for an expanded army and a new assault on the refractory Indians, several congressmen took advantage of it to condemn administration policy. One critic rebuked the administration for “preparing to squander away money by millions” and contended that nobody, “except those who are in the secrets of the Cabinet, knows for what reason the war has been thus carried on for three years.”
⁶²
In general, Washington did not dignify such criticisms with responses, but he asked Knox to draw up a document that could also be published as a broadside—a distinct departure showing a new sensitivity to public opinion. Knox’s statement recounted the deaths of white frontier settlers and numerous peace overtures toward the Indians. But these measures having failed, he now argued for a new and larger army. In early February the House voted its approval of five new regiments, with almost a thousand men apiece. To allay fears of a standing army, the new units were to be disbanded once the Indian threat in the Northwest Territory subsided.

The wrangling between Congress and the administration over Indian warfare reached a crisis when legislators launched an investigation and asked Knox in late March for his correspondence relating to the ill-fated St. Clair campaign. Aware that revealing these papers might redefine the separation of powers, Washington assembled his cabinet and told them, according to Jefferson, that he wished their decision “should be rightly conducted” because it might “become a precedent.”
⁶³
The cabinet ruled that “the executive ought to communicate such papers as the public good would permit and ought to refuse those the disclosure of which would injure the public.”
⁶⁴
This equivocal decision left the question of executive privilege up in the air. In its final report, Congress vindicated St. Clair’s management of the debacle, placing the onus squarely on Washington’s administration by lambasting the logistical support the army had received.

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.

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 manner, annealed in the heat of conflict.

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 cannot free all the slaves in the United States.”
³

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 planned to collect botanical specimens, but they actually intended to recruit political partisans, especially on Hamilton’s home turf of New York. A courtly, charismatic leader, Jefferson was adept at fostering camaraderie among like-minded politicians. If more circumspect, Madison was no less crafty or committed to the cause. The long-standing friendship of these two men now deepened into a powerful political partnership.