Washington: A Life (142 page)

When the three commissioners met with local residents in western Pennsylvania in mid-August, they encountered defiant vows to resist the whiskey tax “at all hazards.”
³⁹
Only the “physical strength of the nation,” they told Washington, could guarantee compliance with the law.
⁴⁰
Governor Henry Lee of Virginia was deputized to lead the army formed to put down the insurgents. In confidence, Washington sent him a vehement letter about the revolt, which he thought had been fomented by Genet and other “
artful
and
designing
” men who wished to destroy confidence in government. “I consider this insurrection as the first
formidable
fruit of the Democratic Societies.”
⁴¹
He saw himself as the target of a whispering campaign conducted by his political opponents: “A part of the plan for creating discord is, I perceive, to make me say things of others, and others of me, w[hich] have no foundation in truth.”
⁴²
Washington’s political views sometimes sounded as if they were plucked from a study of
Plutarch’s Lives
or Shakespeare’s Roman plays, in which shrewdly ambitious demagogues preyed upon credulous masses.

The evidence of unrest in western Pennsylvania mounted. A mob descended on Captain William Faulkner, who had allowed John Neville to establish an office in his home, threatening to tar and feather him and incinerate his house unless he stopped giving sanctuary to Neville. New reports suggested that the turmoil might be spreading to Maryland and other states. Eager to show governmental resolve in the face of disorder, Hamilton had long spoiled for a showdown with the instigators. “Moderation enough has been shown; ’tis time to assume a different tone,” he had advised Washington.
⁴³
Having hoped for a diplomatic settlement, Washington reluctantly agreed that a show of force had become necessary in western Pennsylvania.

Amid the crisis, Washington bowed to the wishes of his Alexandria lodge and sat for a portrait by William Joseph Williams that featured him in a Masonic outfit. After suffering through many portraits early in his presidency, Washington had decided to scale back drastically. He admitted to Henry Lee in 1792 that he had grown “so heartily tired of the attendance which … I have bestowed on these kind of people [artists] that it is now more than two years since I have resolved to sit no more for any of them … except in instances where it has been requested by public bodies or for a particular purpose … and could not without offense be refused.”
⁴⁴
He detested the crude engravings of him made from paintings, which were crassly peddled by vendors. The pastel portrait that Williams executed on September 18, 1794, shows a particularly dour, cranky Washington, with a tightly turned-down mouth. Posing in a black coat, he wears Masonic symbols on a blue sash that slants diagonally across his chest. His face is neither friendly nor heroic but looks like that of a bad-tempered relative, suggesting that the presidency was now a trial he endured only for the public good. Unsparing in its accuracy, the Williams portrait shows various blemishes on Washington’s face—a scar that curves under the pouch of his left eye; a mole below his right earlobe; smallpox scars on both his nose and cheeks—ordinarily edited out of highly sanitized portraits.

On September 25 Washington issued a final warning to the whiskey rebels, who had dismissed his “overtures of forgiveness” and now constituted, in his view, “a treasonable opposition.”
⁴⁵
He viewed their actions as a grave test of the Constitution, raising the question of “whether a small proportion of the United States shall dictate to the whole Union.”
⁴⁶
Prepared to don his uniform to lead the fight, Washington told his tailor to make up an outfit patterned after the one he had worn during the war. He planned to travel as far west as Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where the Pennsylvania and New Jersey militia were encamped, before deciding whether to proceed farther west with the troops. Still recovering from his June back injury, Washington, accompanied by Hamilton, rode out of Philadelphia in a genteel carriage, rather than on horseback, as if they were going off on a peaceful jaunt in the autumn countryside. No longer accustomed to the alarums of war, Martha was all aflutter with fear. “The president … is to go himself tomorrow to Carlyle to meet the troops,” she wrote Fanny. “God knows when he will return again. I shall be left quite alone with the children.”
⁴⁷

In sallying forth to command the troops, Washington, sixty-two, became the first and only American president ever to supervise troops in a combat situation. It irked him that Knox had not returned as promised, then compounded his misdemeanor by not bothering to write to him. “Under the circumstances which exist to exceed your proposed time of absence so long is to be regretted,” Washington wrote Knox in unusually pointed language. “But hearing nothing from you for a considerable time has given alarm, lest some untoward accident may have been the cause of it.”
⁴⁸
Knox’s absence magnified the power of Hamilton, who believed in an overwhelming demonstration of military strength. “Whenever the government appears in arms,” Hamilton proclaimed, “it ought to appear like a
Hercules
and inspire respect by the display of strength.”
⁴⁹
For Hamilton, an armed force of thirteen thousand soldiers was a suitable number to confront an estimated six thousand to seven thousand insurgents, but Republicans thought he was conjuring up a phantom revolt to establish an oppressive army. The Whiskey Rebellion, Madison insisted, was being exploited to “establish the principle that a standing army was necessary for
enforcing the laws,
” while a skeptical Jefferson scoffed that an “insurrection was announced and proclaimed and armed against, but could never be found.”
⁵⁰

AS HE ROLLED WESTWARD toward the army assembled at Carlisle, Washington’s writing reverted to the factual almanac style of his travel diaries, as if he were a touring naturalist and not president of the United States: “The Susquehanna at this place abounds in the rockfish of 12 or 15 inches in length and a fish which they call salmon.”
¹
The president still had sufficient spunk and energy that, when his carriage forded the river, he drove it across himself. When he arrived at Carlisle, troops lined the roadway, eager to catch a glimpse of him, and Washington knew that, for this command performance, they wanted the charismatic military man on horseback, not the aging president ensconced in a carriage. A Captain Ford of the New Jersey militia thrilled to the sight of Washington: “As he passed our troop, he pulled off his hat, and in the most respectful manner, bowed to the officers and men and in this manner passed the line.”
²
From Washington’s dignified deportment, everyone recognized the solemnity of the occasion. A large, euphoric crowd had assembled in the town, and they were hushed into silence by his sudden appearance. When he reviewed the soldiers standing at attention in front of their tents, these men were also awed into “the greatest silence,” according to Captain Ford.
³

Experiencing “the bustle of a camp” for the first time in a decade, Washington kept a relatively low profile and was eager to accentuate the role of the state governors and their militias.
⁴
Eyewitnesses observed Hamilton briskly taking charge while Washington seemed a bit detached. One young messenger who deposited dispatches at headquarters said that Hamilton was clearly “the master spirit. The president remained aloof, conversing with the writer in relation to roads, distances, etc. Washington was grave, distant, and austere. Hamilton was kind, courteous, and frank.”
⁵

While Washington was at Carlisle, Henry Knox belatedly returned to Philadelphia. It must have dawned on him just how annoyed Washington was by his protracted absence, for he sent him a letter awash with “inexpressible regret that an extraordinary course of contrary winds” had delayed his return.
⁶
Knox volunteered to join Washington at Carlisle and must have been shocked by his curt reply: “It would have given me pleasure to have had you with me on my present tour and advantages might have resulted from it, if your return in time would have allowed it. It is now too late.”
⁷
This was a remarkable message: the president was banishing the secretary of war from the largest military operation to unfold since the Revolutionary War. In addition to giving Knox a stinging rap on the knuckles, Washington must also have seen that Hamilton had assumed a commanding posture and would have yielded to Knox only with reluctance.

With general prosperity reigning in the country, Washington found something perverse in the discontent of the whiskey rebels, telling Carlisle residents that “instead of murmurs and tumults,” America’s condition called “for our warmest gratitude to heaven.”
⁸
He faulted the insurgents for failing to recognize that the excise law was not a fiat, issued by an autocratic government, but a tax voted by their lawful representatives. To avert bloody confrontations, two representatives of the rebel farmers traveled to Carlisle to hold talks with Washington. Born in northern Ireland, Congressman William Findley was a solid foe of administration policies, and David Redick, also born in Ireland, was a former member of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council. On their way to Carlisle, the two had received disturbing reports of an unruly federal army that could not wait to wreak havoc on the western rebels. Rough, shrewd men from the Pennsylvania backwoods, Findley and Redick were realists and let Washington know that frontier settlers were now prepared to pay the whiskey tax.

At two meetings Washington received them courteously enough and pledged to curb vengeful feelings in his army. “The president was very sensible of the inflammatory and ungovernable disposition that had discovered itself in the army before he arrived at Carlisle,” Findley recollected, “and he had not only labored incessantly to remove that spirit and prevent its effects, but he was solicitous also to remove our fears.”
⁹
Washington, who sensed that the two emissaries were frightened, believed that the insurgents were defiant only when the army remained distant. He warned that “unequivocal
proofs
of absolute submission” would be required to stop the army from marching deeper into the western country.
¹⁰
He also stated categorically that if the rebels fired at the troops, “there could be no answering for consequences in this case.”
¹¹
Viewing the Whiskey Rebellion as the handiwork of the Democratic-Republican Societies, bent on subverting government, he did not intend to relent too easily. Such was his outrage over the menacing and irresponsible behavior of these groups that it threatened his longtime friendship with James Madison. In a private letter to Secretary of State Randolph, Washington wrote, “I should be extremely sorry therefore if Mr. M——n
from any cause whatsoever
should get entangled with [the societies], or their politics.”
¹²

As he proceeded west toward Bedford, the president cast a discerning eye on the surrounding scenery, not as a future battlefield but as a site for future real estate transactions. “I shall summarily notice the kind of land and state of improvements along the road I have come,” he vowed in his diary.
¹³
However conciliatory he was with Findley and Redick, he clung to the conviction that the incorrigible rebels would submit only under duress. When he heard reports of insurgents cowering as the army approached, he wrote cynically that “though submission is professed, their principles remain the same and … nothing but coercion and example will reclaim and bring them to a due and unequivocal submission to the laws.”
¹⁴

Reaching Bedford, Washington rode in imposing style along the line of soldiers—his back troubles had miraculously eased—and the army reacted with palpable esteem for its commander in chief. As Washington passed, a Dr. Wellington noted in his diary, the men “were affected by the sight of their chief, for whom each individual seemed to show the affectionate regard that would have been [shown] to an honored parent … Gen[era]l Washington … passed along the line bowing in the most respectful and affectionate manner to the officers. He appeared pleased.”
¹⁵
Washington must have been buoyed by his reception and the return to the rugged life of a field command, away from the sedentary urban duties of the presidency. Because the whole point of the expedition was to establish the sovereign principle of law and order in the new federal system, he warned his men that it would be “peculiarly unbecoming” to inflict wanton harm on the whiskey rebels and that civil magistrates, not military tribunals, should mete out punishment to them.
¹⁶
He huddled with Hamilton and Henry Lee to work out plans for two columns to push west toward Pittsburgh. On October 21, once the military arrangements were completed, he disappeared into his carriage and doubled back to Philadelphia through heavy rain, leaving Hamilton in charge and sending the Jeffersonian press into a frenzy. Benjamin Franklin Bache’s
Aurora
flayed Hamilton as a military despot in the making, construing his current position as but “a first step towards a deep laid scheme, not for the promotion of the country’s prosperity, but the advancement of his private interests.”
¹⁷

On October 28, after days of sliding along muddy roads, Washington rolled back into Philadelphia, right before Congress came into session. In his sixth annual address to Congress, on November 19, he defended his conduct in western Pennsylvania and singled out “certain self-created societies” as having egged on the protesters and assumed a permanently threatening character to government authority.
¹⁸
For those who missed the glaring reference, the Federalist Fisher Ames claimed that the Democratic-Republican Societies, inspired by the French Jacobin clubs, “were born in sin, the impure offspring of Genet,” and produced “everywhere the echoes of factions in Congress.”
¹⁹
Washington’s rare display of public temper generated a mood of high drama; one Federalist congressman vouched that he had “felt a strange mixture of passions which I cannot describe. Tears started into my eyes, and it was with difficulty that I could suppress an involuntary effort to swear that I would support him.”
²⁰