Washington [411]
Nevertheless, as the years progressed, Jefferson’s judgment of Washington grew far more critical. He viewed the president as a tough, unbending man: “George Washington is a hard master, very severe, a hard husband, a hard father, a hard governor.”24 Nor did he see Washington as especially deep or learned: “His time was employed in action chiefly, reading little, and that only in agriculture and English history.”25 He also found Washington leery of other people: “He was naturally distrustful of men and inclined to gloomy apprehensions.”26
If profound foreign policy differences emerged between Washington and Jefferson, some of this can be ascribed to contrasting outlooks. At least on paper, Jefferson was quixotic and idealistic, even if he could be ruthless in practice. Washington was a hardheaded realist who took the world as it came. Jefferson would be far more hostile than Washington toward the British and far more sympathetic to the unfolding French Revolution. While Washington grew increasingly apprehensive about the violent events in Paris, Jefferson viewed them with philosophical serenity, lecturing Lafayette that one couldn’t travel “from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed.” 27 Unlike Washington, Jefferson regarded the French Revolution as the proud and inevitable sequel to the American Revolution.
From the outset Jefferson was dismayed by the political atmosphere in New York. In his cultivated taste for fine wines, rare books, and costly furnishings, he was very much a Virginia aristocrat. One British diplomat noted his regal ways: “When he travels, it is in a very kingly style . . . I am informed that his secretaries are not admitted into his carriage but stand with their horses’ bridles in their hands, till he is seated, and then mount and ride before his carriage.”28 Nonetheless Jefferson was extremely vigilant about the possible advent of a pseudo-aristocracy in America. His years spent witnessing the extravagant court of Versailles had only confirmed his detestation of monarchy. As he made the rounds of New York dinner parties, he was appalled to hear people voice their preference for “kingly over republican government.”29 Only Washington, he thought, could check this fatal drift toward royal government, although he finally harbored doubts as to whether he would do so. It also upset Jefferson that Hamilton seemed to be poaching on his turf, a problem partly of Washington’s own making. With departmental lines still blurry, Washington invited all department heads to submit opinions on matters concerning only one of them, producing sharp collisions and intramural rivalries. On the other hand, this method gave the president a full spectrum of opinion, saving his administration from monolithic uniformity.
The first attorney general, Edmund Randolph, thirty-six, was a handsome young man descended from one of Virginia’s blue-ribbon families and well known to Washington. The son of a Tory father who had fled to England, he had graduated from William and Mary and studied law. He had even handled legal matters for Washington, who had chosen him partly because of his “habits of intimacy with him.”30 As Virginia governor, Randolph had led the state delegation to the Constitutional Convention but balked at signing the resulting document, only to switch positions during the Virginia Ratifying Convention, where he proved “a very able and elegant speaker,