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late-eighteenth-century America, and Washington seldom missed a chance to salute their lodges. The group’s soaring language, universal optimism, and good fellowship appealed to him. When he was sent Masonic ornaments late in the war, he recast the struggle in Masonic imagery, saying that all praise was due “to the Grand Architect of the Universe, who did not see fit to suffer his superstructures and justice to be subjected to the ambition of the princes of this world.”14 In June 1784 he was inducted into the Alexandria lodge as an honorary member, which gave him dual membership there and in the Fredericksburg lodge. Later elevated to master of the Alexandria lodge, he earned the distinction of being the only Mason to hold this post while simultaneously serving as president of the United States. Where he had kept a wary attitude toward the Cincinnati, he proudly embraced Masonic rituals. When an elderly resident of Alexandria, William Ramsay, was buried in 1785, Washington noted in his diary that he had not only attended the funeral but “walked in procession as a free mason, Mr. Ramsay in his lifetime being one and now buried with the ceremonies and honors due to one.”15

In 1785 Washington formed an institutional tie that led him ineluctably back into national politics. His western trip the previous autumn had rekindled his fervent faith in the Potomac River as the gateway to America’s interior. After the trip he lobbied Virginia governor Benjamin Harrison to form a company that would make the Potomac, with its stony obstructions, waterfalls, and rapids, navigable to the headwaters of the Ohio. Completing the linkage would require additional canals, locks, and portages. However partial he was to the Potomac, Washington also held out the possibility of extending the James River. He pressed Madison and others in the Virginia House of Delegates to champion the navigation project, then took up the same cause with Maryland legislators in Annapolis. Since Virginia and Maryland shared rights to the Potomac, any project required the joint approval of both states. “It is now near 12 at night,” an exhausted Washington wrote to Madison from Annapolis on December 28, “and I am writing with an aching head, having been constantly employed in this business since the 22nd without assistance from my colleagues.”16 Madison was agog at Washington’s stamina. “The earnestness with which he espouses the undertaking is hardly to be described,” he remarked to Jefferson, “and shows that a mind like his, capable of grand views . . . cannot bear a vacancy.”17

Washington’s advocacy of the Potomac project united a private motivation (to enhance the wealth of western landowners such as himself) with a political motivation (to bind western settlers to the United States and forge a national identity). He was disturbed by ongoing clashes between settlers and Indians but thought it fruitless to try to stem the restless droves of immigrants pushing ever farther westward. Although the government couldn’t halt this tide, it could guide it into constructive channels. “The spirit of emigration is great,” he told Richard Henry Lee. “People have got impatient and tho[ugh] you cannot stop the road, it is yet in your power to mark the way.”18

Washington became something of a monomaniac about the Potomac River project, and more than one Mount Vernon visitor was trapped in the talons of this obsession. When Elkanah Watson stayed there in January 1785, he described the inland navigation scheme as Washington’s “constant and favorite theme.”19 Waving away questions about the Revolutionary War and dwelling compulsively on the river project, Washington computed the distances from Tidewater Virginia to spots in the interior. “Hearing little else for two days from the persuasive tongue of the great man,” wrote Watson, “I confess completely infected me with the canal mania.”20

In early January 1785 Virginia and Maryland decided to survey the two potential waterways to the Ohio Country and incorporated a pair of private companies, the Potomac River Company and the James