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Hamiltonian program opened a rift between Washington and his Virginia associates that only widened through the years. Reflecting their bias in favor of landed wealth and against paper assets, members of the chronically indebted gentry recoiled in horror at the northern financial revolution ushered in by Hamilton. The tobacco market had fallen into a deep slump, making these pinched Virginia planters ripe for tirades against northern speculators, who seemed to profit from easy winnings. Also, Virginia had already paid much of its debt and therefore opposed a federal takeover of state debt, which would reward irresponsible states that had repudiated their loans. Things went so far that in some Virginia circles Washington was regarded as almost a traitor to his class. When David Stuart reported that spring on extreme hostility in Virginia toward the new government, Washington grew distressed. “Your description of the public mind in Virginia gives me pain,” he replied. “It seems to be more irritable, sour, and discontented than . . . it is in any other state in the Union.”14 On February 22 Madison’s proposal to discriminate in favor of original holders of government debt was roundly defeated in the House, 36-13. In a preview of problems to come for Washington, 9 of the 13 negative votes came from his home state of Virginia.

THE DISCONTENT OF SOUTHERN PLANTERS was further inflamed in February 1790 when Quakers, clad in black hats and coats, filed a pair of explosive petitions with Congress. One proposed an immediate halt to the slave trade, while the other urged the unthinkable: the gradual abolition of slavery itself. Because they did not believe that God discriminated between blacks and whites, many Quakers had freed their own slaves and even, in some cases, compensated them for past injustice. Washington had torn feelings about the Quakers. The previous October he had sent an address to the Society of Quakers, full of high praise, asserting that “there is no denomination among us who are more exemplary and useful citizens.”15 At the same time the Quakers, as pacifists, had tended to shun wartime duty.

On the slavery question, Washington reacted with extreme caution. Although he had voiced support for emancipation in private letters, to do so publicly, as he tried to forge a still precarious national unity, would have been a huge and controversial leap. The timing of the Quaker petitions could not have been more troublesome. To David Stuart, he worried that the petitions “will certainly tend to promote” southern suspicions, then added: “It gives particular umbrage that the Quakers should be so busy in this business.”16 Washington and other founders who opposed slavery, at least in theory, thought they had conveniently sidestepped the issue at the Constitutional Convention by stipulating that the slave trade was safe until 1808. But because Benjamin Franklin, as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, had signed one of the Quaker petitions, they could not be summarily dismissed. James Jackson of Georgia warned grimly of civil war if the petitions passed, claiming that “the people of the southern states will resist one tyranny as soon as another.”17 Responding to planter panic, James Madison led congressional opposition to any interference with slavery, unfurling the banner of states’ rights. Although Hamilton had cofounded the New York Manumission Society, he, like Washington, remained silent on the issue, hoping to push through the controversial funding program. In fact, virtually all of the founders, despite their dislike of slavery, enlisted in this conspiracy of silence, taking the convenient path of deferring action to a later generation.

Washington tended to conceal his inmost thoughts about slavery, revealing them only to intimates who shared his opposition. He knew of the virulence of Virginia’s reaction to the Quaker petitions, especially when Stuart told him that the mere talk of emancipation had alarmed planters and lowered the price of slaves, with many “sold for the merest trifle.”18 In replying