Founding Brothers (24 page)

Hamilton
eventually relented, though only grudgingly. At the last moment, he inserted a
brief two-sentence paragraph rather awkwardly near the middle of the Farewell
Address, calling for “Institutions for the general diffusion of
knowledge” and urging quite harmlessly that “public opinion should
be enlightened.” Washington was not satisfied with the result but decided
to let the matter drop. In so doing, however, he let Hamilton know that
something was being lost, that his hopes for a national university linked up to
something larger: “In the general Juvenal period of life, when
friendships are formed, & habits established that will stick by one,”
he explained, “the Youth, or young men from different parts of the United
States would be assembled together, & would by degrees discover that there
was not just cause for those jealousies & prejudices which one part of the
Union had imbibed against another part.… What, but the mixing of people
from different parts of the United States during the War rubbed off these
impressions? A Century in the ordinary intercourse, would not have accomplished
what the Seven years association in Arms did.”
⁶²

Here was a
characteristically Washingtonian insight—rooted in his experience during
the war years; simultaneously simple but essential; projecting developments
into the future on the basis of patterns that were still congealing and that
only now, in retrospect, seem so obvious. Like his misguided obsession with
those Potomac canals, his campaign for a national university in the capital
city never bore fruit. But both failed projects were also visionary projections
linked to larger expectations. In the case of the national university, it was
the recognition that the United States was still very much a nation in the
making because its population was still a people in the making. Time, indeed a
considerable stretch of time, would be required to allow the bonding together
of this large, widely dispersed, and diverse population. But institutions
devoted to focusing the national purposes, again like the Continental Army
during the war, could accelerate time and move America past that vulnerable and
problematic phase of its development when fragmentation, perhaps civil war, was
still a distinct possibility.

Throughout the Farewell Address
Washington had been exhorting Americans to think of themselves as a collective
unit with a common destiny. To our ears, it sounds so obvious because we occupy
the future location that Washington envisioned. But his exhortations toward
national unity were less descriptions than anticipations, less reminders of the
way we were than predictions of what we could become. Indeed, the act of
exhorting was designed to enhance the prospect by talking about it as if it
were a foregone conclusion, which Washington most assuredly knew it was not. In
the end, the Farewell Address was primarily a great prophecy, accompanied by
advice about how to make it come true.

It was also, at least
implicitly, a justification for the strong executive leadership Washington had
provided in the 1790s and that his critics had stigmatized as a monarchy.
Without a republican king at the start, he was saying, the new quasi nation
called the United States would never have enjoyed the opportunity to achieve
its long-run destiny; it would have expired in the short run. In a sense,
Washington was defending his presidency as an essential exception to
full-blooded republican principles. Down the road, when the common experience
of conquering the continent and the sheer passage of time had bound the
American people together into a more cohesive whole, the more voluntaristic
habits at the core of republican mentality could express themselves fully. For
now, however, the center needed to hold. That meant a vigorous federal
government with sufficient powers to coerce the citizenry to pay taxes and obey
the laws. Veterans of the Continental Army, like Hamilton and John Marshall,
fully understood this essential point. Intriguingly, the two chieftains of the
Republican opposition, Jefferson and Madison, had never served in the army.
They obviously did not understand.

How could this emerging nation
manage its way through this first post-Washington phase of its development? In
the Farewell Address Washington offered his general answer: Think of yourself
as a single nation; subordinate your regional and political differences to your
common identity as Americans; regard the federal government that represents
your collective interest as an ally rather than an enemy (as “us,”
if you will, rather than “them”). In his eighth and final message
to Congress, delivered the following December, Washington provided a more
specific directive. His Republican critics had described Jay’s Treaty as
a pact with the devil that was certain to produce domestic and diplomatic
catastrophe. Upon scanning the horizon for the last time, however, Washington
saw serenity setting in: Treaties with the hostile Indian tribes on the
southern and western frontiers were being negotiated; the British were removing
their troops from posts in the West in accord with Jay’s Treaty; thanks
primarily to the resumption of trade with Great Britain, the American economy
was humming along quite nicely, with revenues from the increased trade reducing
the national debt faster than had been anticipated. The only dark spot on the
political horizon was France, whose cruisers were intercepting American
shipping in the West Indies. Washington counseled patience with what would soon
be called this “quasi war” with the French Republic, predicting
(correctly, as it turned out) that “a spirit of justice, candour and
friendship … will eventually insure success.” Confidence, he
seemed to be saying, is a self-fulfilling prophecy, all the more so when the
confidence was justified.
⁶³

Even more
specifically, Washington suggested that his departure from the national scene
would require the enlargement, not the diminution, of the powers of the federal
government in order to compensate for his absence. He recommended that Congress
undertake a whole new wave of federal initiatives: a new program to encourage
domestic manufactures; a similar program to subsidize agricultural
improvements; the creation of a national university (his old hobbyhorse) and a
national military academy; an expanded navy to protect American shipping in the
Mediterranean and the Caribbean; increased compensation for federal officials
in order to ensure that public service was not dependent on private wealth. It
was the most expansive presidential program for enlarged federal power until
John Quincy Adams proposed a similar vision in his inaugural address of 1825.
It was the tradition that the Whig party of Henry Clay and the Republican party
of Abraham Lincoln sustained in the nineteenth century and that the Democratic
party of Andrew Jackson rejected. In the more immediate context of 1796,
Washington seemed to be saying that the departure of America’s only
republican king necessitated the creation of centering forces institutionalized
at the federal level to maintain the focusing functions he had performed
personally.
⁶⁴

Finally, who
were these American people being bonded together? If Washington wished the
national government to be regarded as “us” rather than
“them,” how did he define the “us”? He addressed his
remarks in the Farewell Address to his “Friends, and Fellow
Citizens.” While he undoubtedly thought this description cast a wide and
inclusive net that pulled in residents from all the regions or sections of the
United States, it did not include all inhabitants. The core of the audience he
saw in his mind’s eye consisted of those adult white males who owned
sufficient property to qualify for the vote. Strictly speaking, such men were
the only citizens. He told Hamilton that his Farewell Address was aimed
especially at “the Yeomanry of the country,” which meant ordinary
farmers working small plots of land and living in households. This brought
women and children into the picture, not as full-blooded citizens, to be sure,
but as part of the American people whose political identity was subsumed within
the family and conveyed by the male heads of household. They were secondary
citizens, but unquestionably Americans. Landless rural residents and
impoverished city dwellers lay outside the picture, though they—more
likely, their descendants—could work their way into the American
citizenry over time. If only potentially and prospectively, they were
included.
⁶⁵

The largest
unmentioned and presumably excluded constituency was the black population,
about 90 percent of which was enslaved. Washington said nothing whatsoever
about slavery in his Farewell Address, sustaining the silence that the Congress
had adopted as its official posture early in his presidency. Silence, of
course, can speak volumes, and in Washington’s case, the unspoken message
was that a moratorium had been declared on this most controversial topic, which
more than any other issue possessed the potential to destroy the fragile union
that he saw as his life’s work and chief political legacy. Since the
primary purpose of the Farewell Address was to affirm that legacy and foster
the promotion of his national vision, the last thing Washington wanted to
mention was the one subject that presented the most palpable threat to the
entire enterprise. Like Madison in 1790, he wanted slavery off the American
political agenda. Unlike Madison, however, and unlike most of his fellow
Virginians, there is a reason to believe that he thought the moratorium on
slavery as a political problem should lapse in 1808, when the Constitution
permitted the slave trade to end.

His silence on the slavery question
was strategic, believing as he did that slavery was a cancer on the body
politic of America that could not at present be removed without killing the
patient. The intriguing question is whether Washington could project an
American future after slavery that included the African-American population as
prospective members of the American citizenry. For almost all the leading
members of the Virginia dynasty, the answer was clear and negative. Even those,
like Jefferson and Madison, who looked forward to the eventual end of slavery,
also presumed that all freed blacks must be transported elsewhere. Washington
never endorsed that conclusion. Nor did he ever embrace the racial arguments
for black inferiority that Jefferson advanced in
Notes on the State of
Virginia.
He tended to regard the condition of the black population as a
product of nurture rather than nature—that is, he saw slavery as the
culprit, preventing the development of diligence and responsibility that would
emerge gradually and naturally after emancipation.
⁶⁶

By 1796, he
had begun to draft his last will and testament, in which he eventually made
elaborate provisions to assure that all his slaves would be freed upon the
death of his wife. He also made even more elaborate provisions to guarantee
that Mount Vernon would be sold off in pieces, part of the proceeds used to
support his freed slaves and their children for several decades into the
future. His action on this score, as usual, spoke louder than his words, for
they suggested an obligation beyond the grave to assist his former slaves in
the transition to freedom within the borders of the United States. Whether he
could conjure up a vision of blacks and whites living together in harmony at
some unspecified time in the future remains unclear. But he was truly rare
within the political elite of Virginia in leaving this question open.

He could and did imagine the inclusion of Native Americans. Late in August
of 1796, at the same time he was making final revisions on his Farewell
Address, Washington wrote his “Address to the Cherokee Nation.”
From a strictly legal point of view, each of the various Indian tribes east of
the Mississippi was already a nation, or an indigenous quasi-nation within the
expanding borders of the United States. Therein, of course, lay the chief
problem and the makings for an apparently inevitable tragedy. For in
Washington’s projection, the westward flow of the American population
would prove relentless and unstoppable: “I also have thought much on this
subject,” Washington declared to the Cherokees, “and anxiously
wished that the various Indian tribes, as well as their neighbours, the White
people, might enjoy in abundance all the good things which make life
comfortable and happy. I have considered how this could be done; and have
discovered but one path that would lead them to that desirable solution. In
this path I wish all the Indian nations to walk.”
⁶⁷

The
“one path” Washington identified required the Indians to
recognize that contesting the expansion of the white population was
suicidal. The only realistic solution required the Indians to accept the
inevitable, abandon their hunter-gatherer economies, which required huge tracts
of land to work effectively, embrace farming as their preferred mode of life,
and gradually over several generations allow themselves to be assimilated into
the larger American nation. Washington acknowledged that he was asking a lot,
that “this path may seem a little difficult to enter” because it
meant subduing their understandable urge to resist and sacrificing many of
their most distinctive and cherished tribal values. As he prepared for his own
retirement, in effect he was encouraging the Indian tribes to retire from their
way of life as Indians: “What I have recommended to you,” he wrote
somewhat plaintively, “I am myself going to do. After a few moons are
passed I shall leave the great town and retire to my farm. There I shall attend
to the means of increasing my cattle, sheep and other useful animals.” If
the Indians would follow his example, the peaceful coexistence of Indians and
whites could follow naturally, and their gradual merger into a single American
people would occur within the arc of the next century. Whatever moral
deficiencies and cultural condescensions a modern-day American audience might
find in Washington’s advice, two salient points are clear: First, it was
in keeping with his relentless realism about the limited choices that history
offered; and second, it projected Indians into the mix of peoples called
Americans.
⁶⁸