Joseph J. Ellis (25 page)

Just a few weeks before he wrote these words, Jefferson had felt the urge to assure Washington that, contrary to the gossip circulating in the corridors and byways of Philadelphia, he was not responsible for the various rumors describing the president as a quasi-senile front man for the Federalist conspiracy against the vast majority of the American people. The historical record makes it perfectly clear, to be sure, that Jefferson
was
orchestrating the campaign of vilification, which had its chief base of operations in Virginia and its headquarters at Monticello. But Jefferson was the kind of man who could have passed a lie-detector
test confirming his integrity, believing as he did that the supreme significance of his larger cause rendered conventional distinctions between truth and falsehood superfluous.

Washington’s response was designed to let Jefferson know that his professed innocence itself sounded like the defensive comments of a guilty man, and that Washington already knew a good deal more than Jefferson realized about who was whispering what behind his back. “If I had entertained any suspicious before,” wrote Washington, “the assurances you have given me of the contrary would have removed them; but the truth is, I harboured none.” (Translation: Your protests confirm my suspicions.) Then Washington parted the curtain covering his soul just enough to show Jefferson a glimpse of what he truly felt: “As you have mentioned the subject yourself, it would not be frank, candid or friendly to conceal that your conduct has been represented as derogatory from the opinion I had conceived you entertained to me.” (Translation: I am onto your game.) “That to your particular friends and connexions you have described, and they have described me, as a person under a dangerous influence.” (Translation: My sources are impeccable.) “My answer has invariably been that I had never discovered any thing in the conduct of Mr. Jefferson to raise suspicions in my mind of his insincerity.” (Translation: I have not done unto others what they have been doing unto me.)

Washington concluded with an impassioned defense of his support for Jay’s Treaty: “I was using my utmost exertions to establish a national character of our own, independent, as far as our obligations and justice would permit, of every nation of the earth.” But somehow he had “been accused of being the enemy of one Nation [France], and subject to the influence of another [England]; and to prove it, that every act of my administration should be tortured, and the most insidious misrepresentations of them be made (by giving one side only of a subject, and that too in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter; or even to a common pickpocket.) But enough of this; I have already gone farther in the expression of my feelings than I intended.” (Translation: Even this mere glimpse into my soul is more than you deserve, my former friend.)

For the next year, Jefferson attempted to sustain at least the veneer of a friendship with Washington by writing him letters in the Virginia gentleman mode, avoiding politics and foreign policy altogether,
focusing instead on his crop-rotation scheme at Monticello, the vagaries of the weather, his vetch and wheat crop, and—a rather potent metaphor—the best way to spread manure. Washington responded in kind—that is, until the newspapers printed Jefferson’s old letter to Phillip Mazzei (the one about America’s degenerate Samson and Solomon). Then all communication from Mount Vernon to Monticello ceased forever.
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Beyond the purely personal dimensions of their estrangement, beyond Washington’s sense of betrayal and Jefferson’s artful minuet with duplicity, this episode provides an invaluable clue to the larger and more impersonal political concerns that were on Washington’s mind when he sat down to compose the Farewell Address. They went far past the loss of Jefferson’s friendship, important though it was, because Jefferson’s behavior was symptomatic of more than a betrayal of trust; it accurately reflected a fundamental division within the revolutionary generation over the meaning of the Revolution and the different versions of America’s abiding national interest that followed naturally from that disagreement. The words that were used at the time, or the words employed by historians later to capture the essence of the argument, are mere labels: Federalists versus Republicans; pro-English versus pro-French versions of American neutrality. Underlying the debate that surfaced in full-blown fashion over Jay’s Treaty lurked a classic confrontation between those who wished America’s revolutionary energies to be harnessed to the larger purposes of nation-building and those who interpreted that very process as a betrayal of the Revolution itself.

From Washington’s perspective, the republic established by the Constitution created a government of laws that must be obeyed once the duly elected representatives had reached a decision. That was why he had acted so decisively to put down the Whiskey Rebellion and why he expected compliance with Jay’s Treaty once its terms were approved by the Congress. From Jefferson’s perspective, on the other hand, all laws and treaties that reined in the liberating impulses of the Revolution were illegitimate. That was why he regarded the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion as reprehensible. Were not these Pennsylvania farmers protesting taxes to which they did not consent? As for Jay’s Treaty, who in his right mind would countenance the acceptance of neocolonial status within the hated British Empire? Not obeying, but
rather violating such unjust laws and treaties was the obligation of every citizen. Was this not the higher law that Americans should follow, arm in arm again with their trusted French brethren? In this formulation, political behavior that was, strictly speaking, traitorous and treasonable was, in fact, the only course that enjoyed the sanction of America’s most hallowed revolutionary principles.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this Republican mentality in action was James Monroe, a zealous Jefferson protégé currently serving as the minister to France. Though not in Jefferson’s league as a thinker or political strategist, Monroe more than made up for these deficiencies by embracing the core articles of the Republican faith with near-total abandon. He assured his French hosts that Jay’s Treaty would never be approved by the Congress, that the vast majority of the American people were eager to join France in war with England, that the U.S. government stood ready to advance France a $5 million loan to subsidize its military expenses and that, when none of these wild predictions materialized, the French government should patiently but firmly disregard all messages from the American president, since he obviously spoke for the aristocratic Anglomen and would soon be hurled from office by the people. In the meantime, the French should feel perfectly free to retaliate against American ships on the high seas. When they began to do so in the spring of 1796 and the first prize confiscated was a ship named the
Mount Vernon
, Monroe thought it was a providential version of poetic justice. And by the way, he hoped that Benjamin Franklin Bache at the
Aurora
would see fit to publish, under a pseudonym of course, some of his confidential communiqués from Paris protesting the most outrageous provisions of Jay’s Treaty. All this from America’s official emissary to the French government.
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A slightly less extreme but infinitely more befuddled example of the same mentality had surfaced inside Washington’s cabinet at the very moment he was making the decision to send Jay’s Treaty to the Senate in August of 1795. The successor to Jefferson as secretary of state was Edmund Randolph, like Monroe a second-tier member of the Virginia dynasty, whose principal recommendation for the job was an unblinking loyalty to Washington, but whose chief political habit was to blink incessantly at any decision that demanded clear convictions of his own. Poor Randolph, an otherwise-decent man who was clearly in over his head, had granted an interview with the outgoing French minister to
the United States, Joseph Fauchet, who had then transcribed the high points of the conversation in a dispatch that was subsequently intercepted at sea by a British cruiser. The British were only too willing to forward the dispatch to the American government. The day after Washington read it out loud to the full cabinet, Randolph submitted his resignation.
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What the Fauchet dispatch claimed and what we know on the basis of subsequent scholarship are not synonymous. According to Fauchet, Randolph requested a bribe as part of some mysterious scheme in support of the Whiskey Rebellion. Although Randolph was almost certainly innocent of this charge, the whole tenor and tone of Fauchet’s account revealed Randolph confiding his personal opposition to the entire domestic and foreign policy of the Washington administration, lamenting the ascendance of a “financiering class” that aimed at the restitution of monarchy, decrying the enslavement of American trade to “the audacity of England,” depicting Randolph himself as the sole voice of “the patriotic party” within the government and the last hope for bringing a sadly dazed and thoroughly confused President Washington to his senses. Randolph’s unfortunate utterances were not truly treasonable, as he spent the remainder of his life trying vainly and in his foggy style to explain. In truth, he had simply allowed himself to get caught engaging in the same talk that Jefferson was conveying to friends and Monroe was sputtering out loud to anyone in Paris who would listen. The notion that a diabolical conspiracy of moneymen and monarchists had seized control of the federal government under Washington’s very nose was so widespread within Virginia’s political elite that they had lost all perspective on how conspiratorial their own words sounded to those denied the vision.
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And so when Washington sat down to draft his Farewell Address, three salient features rose up out of the immediate political terrain to command his attention: First, he needed to demonstrate that, while poised for retirement, he was still very much in charge, that those rumors of creeping senility and routinized ineptitude were demonstrably wrong; second, he wanted to carve out a middle course, and do so in a moderate tone, that together pushed his most ardent critics to the fringes of the ongoing debate, where their shrill accusations, loaded language, and throbbing moral certainty could languish in the obscurity they deserved; third, the all-time master of exits wanted to make
his final departure from the public stage the occasion for explaining his own version of what the American Revolution meant. Above all, it meant hanging together as a united people, much as the Continental Army had hung together once before, so that those who were making foreign policy into a divisive device in domestic politics, all in the name of America’s revolutionary principles, were themselves inadvertently subverting the very cause they claimed to champion. He was stepping forward into the battle one final time, planting his standard squarely in the center of the field, inviting the troops to rally around him rather than wander off in romantic cavalry charges at the periphery, assuring them by his example that, if they could only hold the position he defined, they would again prevail.

T
HE MANNER
in which the Farewell Address was actually composed, as it turned out, served as a nearly perfect illustration of its central message—the need to subordinate narrow interests to the larger cause. Much ink has been spilled by several generations of scholars in an effort to determine who wrote the bulk of the words that eventually found their way into print and then into the history books. Like a false scent, the authorship question has propelled historians down labyrinthine trails of evidence in quest of the real and true author. Meanwhile, the object of the hunt sits squarely in the middle of the evidentiary trail, so obvious that it is ignored. Namely, the creation of the Farewell Address was an inherently collaborative process. Some of the words were Madison’s; most of the words were Hamilton’s; all the ideas were Washington’s. The drafting and editing of the Farewell Address in effect became a metaphor for the kind of collective effort Washington was urging on the American people as a whole.
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The story had its start four years earlier, in May of 1792, when Washington approached Madison to help him compose a valedictory address. At the time fully convinced that he would step down after one term, Washington had chosen Madison because his two most trusted cabinet members, Hamilton and Jefferson, were too closely associated with the party disputes he wanted to condemn. Madison made extensive notes on the basis of three conversations with Washington, then drafted a document that employed the president’s own language for many key passages: “a spirit of party in the Government was becoming
a fresh source of difficulty”; “we are all Children of the same Country”; the nation’s “essential interests are the same … its diversities arising from climate and from soil will naturally form a mutual relation of parts” and serve as the formulation for “an affectionate and permanent Union.” It was Madison who first proposed that the Farewell Address not be delivered as a speech to Congress, but that it be printed in the newspapers as “a direct address to the people who are your only constituents.” After Washington listened to the unanimous advice of all his cabinet officers and reluctantly agreed to serve a second term, he tucked away Madison’s draft for another day.
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That day arrived exactly four years later. On May 15, 1796, Washington sent Hamilton the “first draft” of a retirement address—no amount of persuasion could change his mind this time—that would announce his departure from public life. The first section of this document reproduced Madison’s draft of 1792, which was highly ironic, because Madison had become the primary leader of the Republican opposition to Washington’s policies in the Congress and was therefore a rather dramatic example of the party spirit that his former words had warned against. (The Federalists referred to Madison as “the general” of the opposition, calling Jefferson, his mentor secluded at Monticello, “the generalissimo.”) Washington included the earlier Madison draft for two reasons: First, it expressed in clear and forceful language a major point he still wanted to make about subordinating sectional and ideological differences to larger national purposes, all the more resonant because drafted by someone who seemed to have forgotten the lesson; and second, its inclusion publicized the fact that he had wanted to retire four years ago, so his current decision was really the culmination of a long-standing preference.
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