His Excellency: George Washington (34 page)

But that, of course, was also the reason why it proved so controversial. The debate over the Judiciary Act of 1789 exposed the latent hostility toward any consolidated court system. The act created a six-member Supreme Court, three circuit courts, and thirteen district courts, but left questions of original or appellate jurisdiction intentionally blurred so as to conciliate the advocates of state sovereignty. Despite his private preferences, Washington deferred to the trade-offs worked out in congressional committees, chiefly a committee chaired by Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, which designed a framework of overlapping authorities that was neither rational nor wholly national in scope. In subsequent decades John Marshall, Washington’s most loyal and influential disciple, would move this ambiguous arrangement toward a more coherent version of national law. But throughout Washington’s presidency the one thing the Supreme Court could not be, or appear to be, was supreme, a political reality that Washington chose not to contest.
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A second occasion for calculated executive reticence occurred in February 1790 when the forbidden subject of slavery came before Congress. Two Quaker petitions, one arguing for the immediate end of the slave trade, the other advocating the gradual abolition of slavery itself, provoked a bitter debate in the House. The petitions would almost surely have been consigned to legislative oblivion except for the signature of Benjamin Franklin on the second, which transformed a beyond-the-pale protest into an unavoidable challenge to debate the moral compatibility of slavery with America’s avowed revolutionary principles. In what turned out to be his last public act, Franklin was investing his great prestige to force the first public discussion of the sectional differences over slavery at the national level. (The debates at the Constitutional Convention had occurred behind closed doors, and even the sanitized record of those debates remained sealed in the vaults of the State Department.) If only in retrospect, the debates in the House during the spring of 1790 represented the final opportunity on the part of the revolutionary generation to place slavery on the road to ultimate extinction.
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Washington shared Franklin’s views on slavery as a moral and political anachronism. On three occasions during the 1780s he had let it be known that he favored the adoption of some kind of gradual emancipation scheme, and would give his personal support to such a scheme whenever it materialized. Warner Mifflin, one of the Quaker petitioners who knew of Washington’s previous statements, obtained a private interview in order to plead that this was now the ideal occasion for Washington to step forward in the manner of Franklin. And since he was the only American with more prestige than Franklin, Washington’s intervention at this propitious moment could make the decisive difference in removing this stain on the revolutionary legacy, as well as his own.
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We can never know what might have happened if Washington had taken this advice. He listened politely to Mifflin’s request, but refused to commit himself on the grounds that the matter was properly the province of Congress and “might come before me for official decision.” He struck a more cynical tone in letters to friends back in Virginia: “the introduction of the Quaker Memorial, rejecting slavery, was to be sure, not only an ill-judged piece of business, but occasioned a great waste of time.” He endorsed Madison’s deft management of the debate and his behind-the-scenes maneuvering in the House, which voted to prohibit any further consideration of ending the slave trade until 1808, as the Constitution specified; more significantly, Madison managed to take slavery off the national agenda by making any legislation seeking to end it a state rather than federal prerogative. Washington expressed his satisfaction that the threatening subject “has at last been put to sleep, and will scarcely awake before the year 1808.”
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What strikes us as a poignant failure of moral leadership appeared to Washington as a prudent exercise in political judgment. There is no evidence that he struggled over the decision. Whatever his personal views on slavery may have been, his highest public priority was the creation of a unified American nation. The debates in the House only dramatized the intractable sectional differences he had witnessed from the chair at the Constitutional Convention. They reinforced his conviction that slavery was the one issue with the political potential to destroy the republican experiment in its infancy. With one important difference, he embraced Madison’s resolution of the crisis, which established a moratorium on the subject at the federal level for the foreseeable future. In Washington’s view, the moratorium should last until 1808, when the larger subject of slavery could be taken up with the ending of the slave trade. But until then, and surely for the remainder of his presidency, the issue was too controversial to risk executive involvement and too combustible to talk about publicly at all.

Despite the vows of public silence, the taboo topic came up in an awkwardly personal way the following year, soon after the federal government made its scheduled move from New York to Philadelphia. Attorney General Randolph alerted Washington to the awkward fact that Pennsylvania law allowed any slave who was resident for six months within the state to demand emancipation. Washington asked Tobias Lear to look into the law in order to determine if the six-month rule could be skirted by removing his household slaves to Mount Vernon before the time expired, then returning them to Philadelphia to start the clock again. Part of his concern was financial, since the loss of any dower slaves would require him to reimburse the Custis estate. He was especially concerned with losing two of his most trusted slaves, Hercules and Paris. He instructed Lear to have Martha take them back with her to Mount Vernon, but without letting anyone except Martha know the motive for the trip. “I wish to both have it accomplished under pretext that may deceive both them and the public,” he confided to Lear. When Hercules got wind of the scheme, he expressed a sense of personal insult that his loyalty to Washington was not taken for granted. Eventually Hercules was allowed to stay in Philadelphia, where he remained Washington’s highly valued cook until the end of the second presidential term, at which point he absconded, much to Washington’s surprise and chagrin. The incident served to expose the widening gap on the slavery question north and south of the Potomac, as well as the gap between Washington’s professed convictions about slavery and his dependence on enslaved servants.
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Finally, the most dramatic delegation of all, Washington gave total responsibility for rescuing the debt-burdened American economy to his charismatic secretary of treasury. Before Hamilton was appointed in September 1789, Washington had requested financial records from the old confederation government and quickly discovered that he had inherited a messy mass of state, domestic, and foreign debt. The records were filled with floating bond rates, complicated currency conversion tables, and guesswork revenue projections that, taken together, resembled an accountant’s worst nightmare. The world in which fortunes were made and lost against a background of shuffling papers and shifting numbers felt to him like a foreign country. (This was one reason he always suspected that Cary & Company was cheating him in the pre-revolutionary days.) After making a heroic effort of his own that only confirmed his sense of futility, Washington handed the records and fiscal policy of the new nation to his former aide-de-camp, who turned out to be, among other things, a financial genius.
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Hamilton buried himself in the numbers for three months, then emerged with a forty-thousand-word document entitled
Report on Public Credit.
His calculations revealed that the total debt of the United States had reached the daunting (for then) size of $77.1 million, which was divided into three separate ledgers: foreign debt ($11.7 million); federal debt ($40.4 million); and state debt ($25 million). Several generations of historians and economists have analyzed the intricacies of Hamilton’s
Report
and created a formidable body of scholarship on its technical complexities. For our purposes, however, it is sufficient to know that Hamilton’s calculations were accurate and his strategy simple: namely, consolidate the messy columns of foreign and domestic debt into one central pile. He proposed funding the federal debt at par, assuming all the state debts, then creating a National Bank to manage all the investments and payments at the federal level.
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This made excellent economic sense, as the improved credit rating of the United States in foreign banks and the surging productivity of the commercial sector demonstrated after Hamilton’s financial plan was adopted. But it also proved to be a political bombshell that shook Congress for over a year with its reverberations. For Hamilton had managed to create, almost single-handedly, an unambiguously national economic policy that presumed the sovereign power of the federal government. He had pursued a bolder course than the more cautious framers of the Judiciary Act had followed in designing the court system, leaving no doubt that control over fiscal policy would not be brokered to accommodate the states. All three ingredients in his plan—funding, assumption, and the bank—were vigorously contested in Congress, with Madison (an ominous sign) leading the opposition on each front. The watchword of the critics was “consolidation,” an ideological cousin to “monarchy,” both terms suggesting a threatening aggregation of political power reminiscent of the tyrannical British government that the American colonies had defied and then overthrown. There was also a sectional edge to the criticism, especially the Virginia version, which described Hamilton’s financial plan as a hostile takeover of the American Revolution by northern bankers and speculators. “In an Agricultural Country like this,” Virginia’s governor wrote to Washington, “to erect and concentrate and perpetuate a large insured interest . . . must in the course of human events, produce one or other of two evils—the Prostration of Agriculture at the feet of Commerce, or a change in the present form of Federal Government, fatal to the existence of American liberty.”
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Washington did not respond. Indeed, he played no public role at all in defending Hamilton’s program during the fierce congressional debates. For his part, Hamilton never requested presidential advice or assistance, regarding control over his own bailiwick as a commander’s responsibility. A reader of the correspondence between them might plausibly conclude that the important topics of business were the location and staffing of lighthouses and the proper design of coast guard cutters to enforce customs collections. Privately, Washington confided to friends that he deeply regretted the accusations emanating from his home state, which were “poisoning the minds of the Southern people.” Virginia’s veiled threats at secession struck him as desperate gestures on the part of a state that needed to reassess its own inflated sense of importance. But no public statements were necessary, in part because Hamilton was a one-man army in defending his program, “a host unto himself,” as Jefferson later called him; and by February 1791 the last piece of the Hamiltonian scheme, the bank, had been passed by Congress and now only required the presidential signature.
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But the bank proved to be the one controversial issue that Washington could not completely delegate to Hamilton. As a symbol it was every bit as threatening, as palpable an embodiment of federal power, as a sovereign Supreme Court. As part of a last-ditch campaign to scuttle the bank, the three Virginians within Washington’s official family mobilized to attack it on constitutional grounds. Jefferson, Madison, and Randolph submitted separate briefs, all arguing that the power to create a corporation was nowhere specified by the Constitution; and that the Tenth Amendment clearly specified that powers not granted to the federal government were retained by the states. Before rendering his own verdict, Washington sent the three negative opinions to Hamilton for rebuttal. His response, which exceeded thirteen thousand words, became a landmark in American legal history, arguing that the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8) granted implied powers to the federal government beyond the explicit powers specified in the document. (Madison, ironically, had made the same argument three years earlier in
The Federalist Papers.
) Though there is some evidence that Washington was wavering before Hamilton delivered his opinion, it was not the brilliance of the opinion that persuaded him. Rather, it provided the legal rationale he needed to do what he always wanted to do. For the truth was that Washington was just as much an economic nationalist as Hamilton, a fact that Hamilton’s virtuoso leadership throughout the year-long debate had conveniently obscured.
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THE IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY

A
S BOTH
a symbolic political centerpiece and a deft delegator of responsibility, Washington managed to levitate above the political landscape. That was his preferred position, personally because it made his natural aloofness into an asset, politically because it removed the presidency from the edgy partisan battles on the ground. In three policy areas, however, the location of the national capital, foreign policy, and Indian affairs, he abandoned levitation or delegation for meticulous personal management in the mode of his Mount Vernon leadership style.

What was called “the residence question” had its origins in a provision of the Constitution calling for Congress to establish a “seat of government” without specifying the location. By the spring of 1790 the debates in Congress had deteriorated into a comic parody on the gridlock theme. Sixteen different sites had been proposed, then rejected, as the state and regional voting blocs mobilized against each alternative in order to preserve their own respective preferences. One frustrated congressman suggested sarcastically that perhaps they should put the new capital on wheels and roll it from place to place. An equally frustrated newspaper editor observed that, “since the usual custom is for the capital of new empires to be selected by the whim or caprice of a despot,” and since Washington “had never given bad advice to his country,” why not “let him point to a map and say ‘here’?”
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