George Washington, Nationalist

Edward J. Larson

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813938998
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

George Washington was the unanimous choice of his fellow founders for president, and he is remembered to this day as an exceptional leader, but how exactly did this manifest itself during his lifetime? In George Washington, Nationalist, acclaimed author Edward J. Larson reveals the fascinating backstory of Washington's leadership in the political, legal, and economic consolidation of the new nation, spotlighting his crucial role in forming a more perfect union.

The years following the American Revolution were a critical period in American history, when the newly independent states teetered toward disunion under the Articles of Confederation. Looking at a selection of Washington's most pivotal acts—including conferring with like-minded nationalists, establishing navigational rights on the Potomac, and quelling the near uprising of unpaid revolutionary troops against the Confederation Congress—Larson shows Washington's central role in the drive for reform leading up to the Constitutional Convention. His leadership at that historic convention, followed by his mostly behind-the-scenes efforts in the ratification process and the first federal election, and culminating in his inauguration as president, complete the picture of Washington as the nation's first citizen. This important and deeply researched book brings Washington's unique gift for leadership to life for modern readers, offering a timely addition to the growing body of literature on the Constitution, presidential leadership, executive power, and state-federal relations.

Gay Hart Gaines Distinguished Lectures

Preparation of this volume has been supported by The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon and by a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Lewis E. Lehrman.

CHAPTER ONE

Planning for Peace 1783

IN THE SPRING OF 1783, with the American Revolution drawing to a close, George Washington faced a critical decision, and he would face several more over the next six years. Nurtured in the Enlightenment values of elite Virginian society during the mid-eighteenth century, Washington believed in the Lockean natural rights of free men and the republican ideals of government by the consent of the governed.

Taking those values to heart, he had joined the patriot cause eight years earlier and, already known for his service as a colonel in the Virginia militia during the colonial French and Indian War, had been elected by the Continental Congress to lead the troops fighting first against British oppression and, after July 1776, for American independence. Those troops ultimately combined the militias of many states with continental units into a force that ranged freely across traditional colonial boundaries from Massachusetts to Georgia, with Washington personally directing major battles in five different states and commanding men from all thirteen.

This experience gave Washington a continental vision and a national perspective. No longer merely a colonial Virginian in outlook, with the war ending he would return his military commission to Congress and resume his prewar life as a Tidewater planter. But he could never really be the same person again. He could not lay down his nationalism as easily as he had his sword.

During eight years of war Washington repeatedly denied having any personal ambitions of his own in the fight for American independence. He served without pay or leave throughout the period and repeatedly vowed to retire at the war’s end. Indeed, reflecting his republican ideals, just ten days after his appointment in 1775 Washington famously declared that by becoming a soldier he “did not lay aside the Citizen.”¹ It was his way of affirming civilian rule and renouncing military pretensions. Yet, as the war wound down following the victory of combined state, continental, and French forces under Washington over British troops at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, the decision to step down as commander-in-chief and leave political power in the hands of thirteen sovereign states and their Confederation Congress might not have seemed as simple as it had in the heady days of the war’s outset.

The war itself had not gone as smoothly as either side had initially expected, and Washington had suffered a long learning curve as commander-in-chief. After winning public acclaim for successfully forcing the British to evacuate Boston in March 1776 without much loss of life on either side, Washington faced near disaster five months later when the British returned with overwhelming force to reclaim their colonies. Beginning with the Battle of Long Island in August, they routed Washington’s army in a series of clashes that had driven the Americans across the Delaware River and into Pennsylvania by the end of November. Seeking to consolidate their gains in New York and New Jersey, the British then settled in for the winter with the expectation of finishing off the rebels in the spring. Leading what was left of his beleaguered army back across the Delaware on Christmas night, however, Washington captured the advance British outpost at Trenton. The British viewed this setback as minor, but patriot propagandists made the most of it. Despite a disastrous summer, Washington grew in stature.

The summer of 1777 went much like the summer of 1776 for Washington, with the British pushing his army back through New Jersey and deep into Pennsylvania. In October, however, at the Second Battle of Saratoga, a separate American force under General Horatio Gates captured a British army invading from Canada, leading France to join the war on the patriot side a year later. The British responded by massing their northern troops in easily defended Manhattan and sending a second army south by ship to roll up the southern colonies, which they viewed as more valuable and loyal to Britain than the northern ones. For the next three years, Washington countered by keeping his main force in and around New York to contain the British there and relying mostly on southerners to defend themselves. Initially at least, the British strategy worked. After Savannah and Charleston fell, a British army under Lord Cornwallis pushed north into Virginia in 1781. Washington then took the risk of shifting his main army to Virginia, where with the aid of a French fleet it captured Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown, all but compelling Britain to accept American independence. Returning with his men to the lower Hudson River valley around Newburgh, New York, he guarded against an outbreak by the remaining British forces in Manhattan for nearly two years while American peace negotiators in Paris struggled to resolve the war on favorable terms.

Despite the decisive victory at Yorktown, problems persisted for the American union. Indeed, in some respects they worsened. Having not yet entered into a peace treaty, Britain continued to hamstring American trade on the high seas and to occupy three key American ports: New York, Charleston, and Savannah. Economic conditions deteriorated in many places. The end of British offensive operations on land, however, by reducing the sense of crisis at home, weakened the resolve of states to work together. Each increasingly went its own way in addressing domestic political and economic issues even at the expense of other states; none showed much concern for the central union, and many reduced their support for the Continental army. This worried Washington.

The United States then operated under the Articles of Confederation, which created a league of thirteen sovereign states. Although they created a Congress with authority over foreign affairs and the war effort, and Americans at the time viewed their revolt as a single combined effort rather than coordinated rebellions by thirteen separate states, the Articles reserved to the states the power to levy taxes, to appoint military officers below the rank of general, and to regulate commerce. To pay soldiers, purchase supplies, and perform other necessary functions, Congress relied on voluntary requisitions from the states coupled with foreign and domestic loans. Neither source, nor both together, brought in enough cash to cover expenses. Any enforceable national tax required ratification by all thirteen states, which never happened. Further, Congress itself operated at the whim of the states. Its members were chosen by the various state legislatures rather than by voters, recallable at will, and paid by their respective states. Each state, from tiny Delaware to massive Virginia with ten times as many free people (thirteen times more if one includes slaves), had but one vote, which was exercisable by a majority of its members present and subject to instruction by the state. Given its weakness, by the 1780s Congress rarely had a quorum of states present, and all thirteen were never represented at the same time.

Without taxing authority, Congress defaulted on some of its debts and all but stopped paying the troops. Fearing they would never be repaid, an increasing number of domestic lenders sold their government bonds to speculators — sometimes for pennies on the dollar — creating a new class of government creditors whom many citizens did not feel morally obliged to compensate. Further, in 1779, as the war wore on with no end in sight, the Continental Congress promised army officers, in return for remaining in the service, a postwar pension of half pay for seven years — and extended it to half pay for life a year later — creating another unfunded government obligation that many Americans opposed. These elite army pensioners would create a privileged class at taxpayer expense, critics complained.

These unpopular debts gave added excuses for cash-strapped states to cut their payments to Congress, which was on the verge of bankruptcy by the end of 1782. While war had served as a main reason for the states to cooperate, its impending end threatened to further undermine their support for Congress. Soldiers and creditors alike worried that once peace came, they would never be paid. This desperate fiscal situation created a combustible environment at Newburgh that was destined to test Washington’s republican ideas.

WITH WASHINGTON’S tacit approval, during the closing days of 1782 a delegation of officers from the Newburgh encampment led by Major General Alexander McDougall carried a petition to Congress, which then met in Philadelphia. Signed by Washington’s loyal second-in-command, Henry Knox, the petition appealed for the ascertainment of the amount owed each officer for back pay and expenses, with security established for timely payment. It also contained an offer to accept lump-sum payments in lieu of the officers’ unpopular half-pay pensions. Reading like the work of a committee, the petition awkwardly lurched from poignant first-person laments through objective-sounding accounts of the army’s neglect by Congress to a thinly veiled third-person threat. “We have borne all that men can bear,” the petitioners grumbled, “our property is expended, our private resources are at an end, and our friends are wearied out and disgusted with our incessant applications.” Whether because of Congress’s want of means or failure of supply, the petition observed, troops had suffered all manner of scarcity and shortage throughout the war. “The uneasiness of the soldiers, for want of pay, is great and dangerous,” it warned at one key point. “Any further experiment on their patience may have fatal effects.”²

Upon its arrival, McDougall’s delegation was embraced by Congress’s superintendent of finance, Robert Morris, who managed the government’s business operations with an iron fist. A cunning and wealthy Philadelphia merchant, Morris had championed the cause of a strong central government for so long and with such ardor that he had split Congress into pro-Morris and anti-Morris camps. During the mid-1780s these would evolve into recognizable nationalist and antinationalist factions, with the former favoring a strong central government within a federal system and the latter preferring a weak confederation of sovereign states. His tireless efforts to supply the troops during the war had made Morris a close ally of Washington, who ultimately emerged as the public face of nationalism.

Adding to the warmth of their welcome by some, the officers from Newburgh reached Philadelphia only days after Morris learned that the states had failed to ratify his proposal for a national tax, or “impost,” on all goods coming from overseas, which he had pushed through Congress as the means to pay past debts and finance ongoing operations. Nationalists in Congress saw the officers’ petition as a timely tool to revive the impost. All they needed to gain its ratification, some overly optimistic nationalists believed, was for the army to link its worthy cause and veiled threats with the creditors’ political clout and Congress’s proposed solution.³ More cynical nationalists privately conceded that it might take an actual show of force by the unpaid troops to secure taxing authority for Congress from the states. And there was no greater cynic among the nationalists than Robert Morris’s wise and worldly assistant, Gouverneur Morris, who on New Year’s Day 1783 wrote a cryptic note to the American peace negotiator John Jay in Paris about soldiers “with swords in their hands” securing that power for Congress “without which the government is but a name.” He promised Jay, “Depend on it, good will arise from the situation to which we are hastening.”⁴

Historians have long debated exactly which situation Morris had in mind — mere threats or actual insurrection — and how much the two Morrises and Washington’s former aide New York congressman Alexander Hamilton tried to hasten it. Certainly, they were wily politicians who fought fiercely for their ends and at the time viewed the taxing power as an essential end for stable government. After conferring with them, McDougall’s delegation began warning Congress that the troops might mutiny without pay. On January 9, 1783, McDougall wrote to Knox about the benefits of uniting “the influence of Congress with that of the Army and the public creditors to obtain permanent funds for the United States.”⁵ Here lay the conspiracy with the army at its heart.

In early February, after neither Congress nor the army took the bait, McDougall and Gouverneur Morris wrote to Knox reiterating the government’s dire fiscal situation and urging the army to join with other public creditors in pressuring the states to ratify the impost.⁶ Word of a peace treaty with Britain might come at any moment and undermine the army’s leverage, they warned. With peace, Congress could simply send the troops home without paying them. Writing under the ominous pseudonym Brutus, McDougall separately advised Knox that the army might refuse to disband until the troops were paid and pensions funded. Any message to Knox would surely reach Washington. Mutiny was in the air.

Despite these provocations, Knox remained silent, and Newburgh quiet, until mid-February, when word reached America that the British government had agreed to independence. Going over Knox’s head, Hamilton wrote directly to Washington warning him of rumors that to secure what was due them and maybe more, some unpaid officers at Newburgh might reject his leadership and use the army to secure their pay and pension.⁷ Hamilton’s letter could be read as urging Washington either to channel the insurrection in ways that would strengthen the central government at the expense of the states or to squelch it in advance. Hoping that either option might ultimately aid the nationalist cause, Hamilton probably intended both readings and left it to Washington to choose.⁸

Washington chose the latter option for himself, the army, and his country. Responding to Hamilton, Washington blamed the dissension in camp on General Horatio Gates —“the old le[a]ven,” he called him — and junior officers at Gates’s headquarters near Newburgh. Despite this mutinous faction and the injustices suffered by all, under his “steady” leadership “the sensible, and the discerning part of the Army” would remain loyal, Washington assured Hamilton. Reminded of his support and sacrifice, Washington wrote, the officers and their men would follow him into peaceful retirement even though “the prevailing sentiment in the Army is that the prospect of compensation for past services will terminate with the war.”⁹

Some officers were already falling into line. On February 21, presumably at Washington’s request, Knox had finally replied to McDougall’s conspiratorial missives. In his letter Knox had distanced himself and Washington’s army from any effort to use soldiers for domestic political purposes. “I consider the reputation of the American Army as one of the most immaculate things on earth,” he wrote in words that captured Washington’s views as well as his own. “We should even suffer wrongs and injury to the utmost verge of toleration rather than sully it in the least degree.”¹⁰ Despite Knox’s willingness to raise issues of dissension in the ranks as part of the officers’ petition for back pay, he would not brook strong-arm tactics or active disobedience to civilian authority. Washington felt similarly.

Notwithstanding these confident words from Washington and Knox, mutinous rumblings among junior officers at Gates’s headquarters agitated the encampment. With a nod from the General or perhaps even by his looking away, following word in mid-March of a preliminary peace with Britain those rumblings threatened to erupt into an army-wide revolt against civilian rule. At the time, Washington attributed this development to the arrival from Philadelphia of a former Gates aide, Walter Stewart, with promises of support from other government creditors and aid from nationalists in Congress should the army rise up and demand justice.¹¹ The cabal may have included Gates and the Morrises.¹² Hamilton almost certainly knew about it; some historians surmise that he orchestrated it.¹³

On March 10 the conspirators at Newburgh distributed an anonymous call for a general meeting of field offi...