Washington: A Life (135 page)

A notable feature of that term would be an end to Washington’s special exemption from direct criticism. That winter the new landscape was previewed when Freneau took direct shots at Washington in the
National Gazette,
accusing him of aping royalty in his presidential etiquette. He published a mock advertisement for a fawning poet laureate who would write obsequious birthday odes to the president. Even Washington’s habit of not shaking hands received a sinister slant: “A certain
monarchical prettiness
must be highly extolled, such as
levees, drawing rooms, stately nods instead of shaking hands,
titles of office, seclusion from the people.”
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It would now be open season for sweeping attacks on Washington.

However trying he often found the press, Washington understood its importance in a democracy and voraciously devoured gazettes. Before becoming president, he had lauded newspapers and magazines as “easy vehicles of knowledge, more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty … and meliorate the morals of an enlightened and free people.”
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In his unused first inaugural address, he had gone so far as to advocate free postal service for periodicals. As press criticism mounted, however, Washington struggled to retain his faith in an independent press. In October 1792 he told Gouverneur Morris that he regretted that newspapers exaggerated political discontent in the country, but added that “this kind of representation is an evil w[hi]ch must be placed in opposition to the infinite benefits resulting from a free press.”
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A month later, in a more somber mood, he warned Jefferson that Freneau’s invective would yield pernicious results: “These articles tend to produce a separation of the Union, the most dreadful of calamities; and whatever tends to produce anarchy, tends, of course, to produce a resort to monarchical government.”
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To an unusual extent, early American politics was played out in print—one reason the founding generation of politicians was so literate. Publications were avowedly partisan and made no pretense of objectivity. It was a golden age for wielding words as rapier-sharp political weapons. The penchant for writing essays under Roman pseudonyms, designed to underscore the writer’s republican virtues, lent a special savagery to journalism, freeing authors from any obligation to tone down their rhetoric.

For all his years in public service, Washington never developed a thick rind for the cut-and-thrust of politics, and Freneau’s barbed comments stung him to the core. As Jefferson wrote after one talk with Washington that February, the president had bemoaned the “extreme wretchedness of his existence while in office and went lengthily into the late attacks on him for levees &c.”
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One wonders whether Washington was implicitly blaming Jefferson for Freneau’s bruising critiques. Another newspaper tormenting the embattled president in his second term was the
General Advertiser,
later the
Aurora,
published by Benjamin Franklin Bache, whose scurrilous attacks on Washington earned him the nickname of “Lightning Rod, Jr.”
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Like Freneau, Bache made the modest presidential levees sound like lavish scenes of decadence from Versailles. Shameless in maligning Washington, Bache even accused him of incompetence during the Revolutionary War and, in the ultimate outrage, doubted that he had supported American independence. “I ask you, sir,” he confronted Washington in an open letter, “to point out ONE SINGLE ACT which
unequivocally
proves you a FRIEND to the INDEPENDENCE OF AMERICA.”
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Washington dismissed Bache as an “agent or tool” of those out to destroy confidence in the government.
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A president who carefully tended his image found it hard to see it falsely defined by his enemies. And a man who prided himself on his honesty and integrity found it painful to stare down a rising tide of falsehoods, misrepresentations, and distortions about his record. His opponents struck where he was most sensitive—questioning his sense of honor and accusing him of base motives, when he had spent a lifetime defending himself against charges, both real and imaginary, of being motivated by thinly disguised ambition. Pilloried by an increasingly vituperative press, Washington did not respond publicly to criticism at first, having once said that “to persevere in one’s duty and be silent is the best answer to calumny.”
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By the summer of 1793, however, he feared that falsehoods circulating in the press would take root and had to be rebutted aggressively. “The publications in Freneau’s and Bache’s papers are outrages on common decency,” he complained to Henry Lee, noting that their allegations only grew more flagrant when treated with silence.
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The vendetta against Washington’s administration took a bold new turn in January 1793, when Congressman William Branch Giles of Virginia launched an investigation of the Treasury Department and sought to oust Hamilton for official misconduct. Giles was an intimate of Jefferson, who secretly helped to draft the congressional resolutions condemning his fellow cabinet officer. Although Giles accused Hamilton of shuffling money dishonestly from one government account to another, the subsequent congressional investigation thoroughly vindicated the secretary. On March 1, 1793, all nine of Giles’s resolutions against Hamilton were resoundingly defeated.

That winter, Washington’s gloom deepened with the death of George Augustine Washington on February 5, leaving his widow, Fanny, with three small children. Penning a tender note to Fanny, the president invited her to live at Mount Vernon: “You can go no place where you will be more welcome, nor to any where you can live at less expense or trouble.”
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Though Fanny declined, the gesture typified Washington’s exceptional generosity in family matters. Among his many duties, Washington became executor of his nephew’s estate. As he brooded about the decaying state of his farms, he would never again have someone he trusted so totally with his affairs as George Augustine. The death also dealt a terrible blow at a moment when he worried about the future of his business. To David Humphreys, he confessed that “the love of retirement grows every day more and more powerful, and the death of my nephew … will, I apprehend, cause my private concerns to suffer very much.”
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As Washington approached his second inaugural on March 4, the
National Gazette
stepped up attacks on what it derided as presidential pretension. The sneering Freneau served up heaps of abuse about Washington’s birthday celebration—widely honored in Philadelphia—branding it a “monarchical farce” that exhibited “every species of
royal pomp and parade
.”
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This tirade may explain the extreme simplicity of Washington’s second inauguration. With no precedent for swearing in an incumbent president, Washington asked his cabinet for guidance, and they suggested a public oath at noon in the Senate Chamber, administered by Associate Justice William Cushing, whose circuit encompassed Pennsylvania. The cabinet also advised that “the President go without form, attended by such gentlemen as he may choose, and return without form, except that he be preceded by the marshal.”
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Perhaps to advertise his lack of ostentation, Washington went alone in his carriage to Congress Hall, strode into the Senate Chamber with minimal fanfare, and delivered the shortest inaugural speech on record—a compact 135 words—in a ceremony intended as the antithesis of monarchical extravagance. As the
Pennsylvania Gazette
reported, after taking the oath, the president retired “as he had come, without pomp or ceremony. But on his departure from [Congress Hall], the people could no longer refrain [from] obeying the genuine dictates of their hearts, and they saluted him with three cheers.”
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WASHINGTON’S SECOND TERM, a period of domestic strife, was dominated by the French Revolution and its profound reverberations in American politics. In March 1792, during a short-lived burst of optimism, Lafayette had reassured Washington that the anarchy in France was transitory: “Do not believe … my dear General, the exaggerated accounts you may receive, particularly from England.”
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That spring Austria and Prussia, bent upon snuffing out the revolutionary upstarts in Paris, invited England, Holland, and Russia to participate in an alliance of imperial states. Then in late April, France declared war against Austria and Prussia; they returned the favor by invading France a few months later. In the resulting atmosphere of fear and suspicion, the radical Jacobins declared a state of emergency. With formidable courage, Lafayette denounced the Jacobins to the National Assembly: “Organized like a separate empire in the city … this sect has formed a separate nation amidst the French people, usurping their powers and subjugating their representatives … I denounce them … They would overturn our laws.”
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In August 1792, to Lafayette’s horror, the Jacobins incited a popular insurrection that included the storming of the Tuileries in Paris and the butchery of the Swiss Guards defending the palace. The king was abruptly dethroned. Refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the civil constitution, nearly 25,000 priests fled the country amid a horrifying wave of anticlerical violence. A month later Parisian mobs engineered the September Massacres, slaughtering more than fourteen hundred prisoners, many of them aristocrats or royalist priests. Ejected from his military command and charged with treason, Lafayette fled to Belgium. “What safety is there in a country where Robespierre is a sage, Danton is an honest man, and Marat a God?” he wondered.
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Arrested by Austrian forces, he spent the next five years languishing in ghastly Prussian and Austrian prisons. With cruel irony, he was charged with having clapped the French king in irons and kept him in captivity. While claiming the rights of an honorary American citizen, Lafayette was confined in a small, filthy, vermin-infested cell.

On September 21 France abolished the monarchy and declared itself a republic. Two weeks later Madame Lafayette informed Washington of her husband’s dreadful plight and thwarted plans to defect to America: “His wish was that I should go with all our family to join him in England, that we might go and establish ourselves together in America and there enjoy the consoling sight of virtue worthy of liberty.”
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She pleaded with Washington to dispatch an envoy who might reclaim her husband in the name of the United States. However distraught he was about Lafayette, Washington was entangled in a political predicament. He could not afford to antagonize the new French republic, and Lafayette’s name was now anathema among the French revolutionaries. Gouverneur Morris, named minister to France in early 1792, warned Washington against undertaking any rash actions on Lafayette’s behalf. “His enemies here are as virulent as ever,” he cautioned.
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For the moment, the only permissible response was personal charity. Drawing on his own money, Gouverneur Morris extended 100,000 livres to Lafayette’s wife, while Washington deposited 2,300 guilders from his own funds into an Amsterdam account for her use. He assured Madame Lafayette that he wasn’t indifferent to her husband’s plight, “nor contenting myself with inactive wishes for his liberation. My affection to his nation and to himself are unabated.”
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Developments in France only aggravated the growing discord in American politics. Regarding the French revolutionaries as kindred spirits, Republicans rejoiced at the downfall of the Bourbon dynasty, while Federalists, dreading popular anarchy, dwelled on the grisly massacres. The fate of France was more than an academic question after it promulgated its Edict of Fraternity, promising fraternal support to revolutionary states around the globe. Amid this revolutionary camaraderie, in August 1792 the French conferred honorary citizenship upon Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Thomas Paine. For Jeffersonians, it fulfilled their fondest dream of a worldwide democratic revolution, while Federalists found the universal dream disturbing. Alexander Hamilton protested, “Every nation has a right to carve out its own happiness in its own way.”
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Among the imperial powers, the Edict of Fraternity generated widespread fear of subversion, sharpening tensions throughout Europe.

On January 21, 1793, the former King Louis XVI, who had helped win American independence, was decapitated before a crowd of twenty thousand people intoxicated with a lust for revenge. After stuffing the king’s head between his legs, the executioner flung his remains into a rude cart piled with corpses, while bystanders dipped souvenirs into the royal blood pooled under the guillotine. Vendors soon hawked patches of the king’s clothing and locks of bloodstained hair, in a spectacle of sadistic glee that shocked many people inside and outside France. On February 1 France declared war on Great Britain and Holland.

Thomas Jefferson seemed unfazed by the regicide and the large-scale massacres preceding it. After William Short wrote of horrifying beheadings in Paris, Jefferson saw little cause for alarm. “My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause,” he conceded, then added cold-bloodedly, “but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it is now.”
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Persuaded that tales of French atrocities were propaganda exploited by Federalists, Jefferson became an apologist for the burgeoning horrors of the Jacobins. “I begin to consider them the true revolutionary spirit of the whole nation,” he told Madison.
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Madison also viewed the revolution through rose-colored spectacles. While Washington and Hamilton refused to acknowledge their election as honorary French citizens, Madison sent back a warmly fraternal response, extolling the “sublime truths and precious sentiments recorded in the revolution of France.”
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