Washington [459]
The wrangling between Congress and the administration over Indian warfare reached a crisis when legislators launched an investigation and asked Knox in late March for his correspondence relating to the ill-fated St. Clair campaign. Aware that revealing these papers might redefine the separation of powers, Washington assembled his cabinet and told them, according to Jefferson, that he wished their decision “should be rightly conducted” because it might “become a precedent.”63 The cabinet ruled that “the executive ought to communicate such papers as the public good would permit and ought to refuse those the disclosure of which would injure the public.”64 This equivocal decision left the question of executive privilege up in the air. In its final report, Congress vindicated St. Clair’s management of the debacle, placing the onus squarely on Washington’s administration by lambasting the logistical support the army had received.
Thus far Washington’s Indian policy added up to a well-meaning failure: he had been able neither to negotiate peace nor to prevail in war. To restore the army’s battered reputation, he appointed Anthony Wayne, the quondam hero of Stony Point, to lead the new augmented army in the Northwest Territory. The redoubtable Wayne instituted tough measures to instill discipline in the new army and shaved, branded, and whipped soldiers to sharpen their performance. While pleased with Wayne’s rigor, Henry Knox introduced a caveat: “Uncommon punishment not sanctioned by law should be admitted with caution.”65 The creation of this new, more professional army only heightened the qualms of those who feared a standing army and exacerbated the growing political divisions in Philadelphia. Nonetheless, under Wayne’s leadership, the army would reverse the disastrous direction that Indian warfare had taken during the unsuccessful Harmar and St. Clair campaigns.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
A Tissue of Machinations
AS THE FIRST PRESIDENT, George Washington hoped to float above the political fray and avoid infighting, backbiting, and poisonous intrigue. He wanted to be an exemplary figure of national unity, surmounting partisan interests, and was therefore slow to spot the deep fissures yawning open in his administration. In June 1790 he told Lafayette, “By having Mr Jefferson at the head of the Department of State . . . Hamilton of the Treasury and Knox of that of War, I feel myself supported by able coadjutors, who harmonize together extremely well.”1 Washington always worked hard to appear impartial and to impress the electorate that he was president of all the people. This pose of immaculate purity was congenial to him, as he sought a happy medium in his behavior. Despite holding firm opinions, he was never an ideologue, and his policy positions did not come wrapped in tidy ideological packages. Rather, they developed in a slow, evolutionary manner, annealed in the heat of conflict.
Washington and other founders entertained the fanciful hope that America would be spared the bane of political parties, which they called “factions” and associated with parochial self-interest. The first president did not see that parties might someday clarify choices for the electorate, organize opinion, and enlist people in the political process; rather he feared that parties could blight a still fragile republic. He was hardly alone. “If I could not go to heaven but with a party,” Jefferson opined, “I would not go there at all.”2 Yet the first factions arose from Jefferson’s extreme displeasure with Hamilton’s mounting influence. They were not political parties in the modern sense so much as clashing coteries