Washington [496]
The evidence of unrest in western Pennsylvania mounted. A mob descended on Captain William Faulkner, who had allowed John Neville to establish an office in his home, threatening to tar and feather him and incinerate his house unless he stopped giving sanctuary to Neville. New reports suggested that the turmoil might be spreading to Maryland and other states. Eager to show governmental resolve in the face of disorder, Hamilton had long spoiled for a showdown with the instigators. “Moderation enough has been shown; ’tis time to assume a different tone,” he had advised Washington.43 Having hoped for a diplomatic settlement, Washington reluctantly agreed that a show of force had become necessary in western Pennsylvania.
Amid the crisis, Washington bowed to the wishes of his Alexandria lodge and sat for a portrait by William Joseph Williams that featured him in a Masonic outfit. After suffering through many portraits early in his presidency, Washington had decided to scale back drastically. He admitted to Henry Lee in 1792 that he had grown “so heartily tired of the attendance which . . . I have bestowed on these kind of people [artists] that it is now more than two years since I have resolved to sit no more for any of them . . . except in instances where it has been requested by public bodies or for a particular purpose . . . and could not without offense be refused.”44 He detested the crude engravings of him made from paintings, which were crassly peddled by vendors. The pastel portrait that Williams executed on September 18, 1794, shows a particularly dour, cranky Washington, with a tightly turned-down mouth. Posing in a black coat, he wears Masonic symbols on a blue sash that slants diagonally across his chest. His face is neither friendly nor heroic but looks like that of a bad-tempered relative, suggesting that the presidency was now a trial he endured only for the public good. Unsparing in its accuracy, the Williams portrait shows various blemishes on Washington’s face—a scar that curves under the pouch of his left eye; a mole below his right earlobe; smallpox scars on both his nose and cheeks—ordinarily edited out of highly sanitized portraits.
On September 25 Washington issued a final warning to the whiskey rebels, who had dismissed his “overtures of forgiveness” and now constituted, in his view, “a treasonable opposition.”45 He viewed their actions as a grave test of the Constitution, raising the question of “whether a small proportion of the United States shall dictate to the whole Union.”46 Prepared to don his uniform to lead the fight, Washington told his tailor to make up an outfit patterned after the one he had worn during the war. He planned to travel as far west as Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where the Pennsylvania and New Jersey militia were encamped, before deciding whether to proceed farther west with the troops. Still recovering from his June back injury, Washington, accompanied by Hamilton, rode out of Philadelphia in a genteel carriage, rather than on horseback, as if they were going off on a peaceful jaunt in the autumn countryside. No longer accustomed to the alarums of war, Martha was all aflutter with fear. “The president . . . is to go himself tomorrow to Carlyle to meet the troops,” she wrote Fanny. “God knows when he will return again. I shall be left quite alone with the children.”47
In sallying forth to command the troops, Washington, sixty-two, became the first and only American president ever to supervise troops in a combat situation. It irked him that Knox had not returned as promised, then compounded his misdemeanor by not bothering to write to him. “Under the circumstances which exist