Washington [343]
But the formation of a hereditary society, with membership inherited through eldest sons, awakened the hostility toward aristocracy bred by the Revolution. Blasted as elitist, the society raised the dread specter of a military caste that might dominate American political life. That Washington lacked a male heir spared him no criticism. After all, the society’s very name paid tribute to his ineffable mystique. In hunting down monarchical plots, the new nation displayed an active, often paranoid imagination. In later years Jefferson stated that it had “always been believed” that some army officers, especially Steuben and Knox, had offered a crown to Washington and started the Cincinnati only when he rejected it, hoping the hereditary order would “be engrafted into the future frame of government and placing Washington still at the head.”2 There was no evidence whatsoever that Steuben and Knox ever contemplated such an offer.
When Benjamin Franklin’s daughter transmitted to him press reports about the new society, he replied that he could understand the Chinese practice of honoring one’s parents, who after all had achieved something. To honor descendants, however, merely from the accident of biology, was “not only groundless and absurd but often hurtful to that posterity.” Any sort of hereditary society, he declared, would stand “in direct opposition to the solemnly declared sense” of the new country.3 John Adams also went on the warpath against the Cincinnati, damning the group as “the deepest piece of cunning yet attempted . . . the first step taken to deface the beauty of our temple of liberty.”4
No sooner had Washington announced the first national meeting, to be held in Philadelphia in May 1784, than he was taken aback by angry rumbles about the hereditary requirement, an early inkling of the boisterous democratic tendencies that would reshape the country and challenge the preeminence of the former officer corps. Henry Knox, the society’s first secretary general, summed up this dissent for Washington: “The idea is that it has been created by a foreign influence in order to change our forms of government.”5 Even Lafayette in Paris, heading the French chapter, wound up embroiled in conflict: “Most of the Americans here are indecently violent against our association . . . [John] Jay, [John] Adams, and all the others warmly blame the army.”6 For Washington, it was a painful contretemps: his first public act since the war had backfired, and it engulfed him in a flaming controversy. Since the group’s power derived largely from its identification with Washington, he lacked the option of staying aloof and remaining deaf to this rising storm of criticism.
Always jealous of his reputation for republican purity, Washington hated to have his integrity questioned. To defuse the controversy, he was eager to eliminate the group’s more odious features. As he told Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., “If we cannot convince the people that their fears are ill-founded, we should (at least in a degree) yield to them and not suffer that which was intended for the best of purposes to produce a bad one which will be the consequence of divisions.”7 As was his wont, he responded to criticism by soliciting disparate opinions. He turned to Jefferson, who predictably faulted the group for relying on “preeminence by birth” and also worried that some future president of the Cincinnati