Washington [501]
CHAPTER SIXTY
Mad Dog
EVEN WITH THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT, George Washington insisted that, in sending John Jay to England, he had selected the person best qualified to ensure peace. Because of long delays in transatlantic communications, Washington had no precise notion of the deal Jay was hammering out in London and warned his emissary that “many hot heads and impetuous spirits” wished him to speed up his work.1 While not wanting to rush Jay, he reminded him, quoting his beloved Shakespeare, that “there is a ‘tide in human affairs’ that ought always to be watched” and that he should proceed with all possible haste.2 By February 1795 reports made the rounds in Philadelphia that Jay had concluded a treaty and would shortly arrive on American shores.
On March 3, with Congress set to adjourn, Washington notified legislators that he would convene a special session on June 8 to debate the treaty, which would surely arrive in the interim. As it happened, four days later the document sat on his desk. Washington must have quietly gagged as he pored over its provisions, which seemed heavily slanted toward Great Britain. The treaty failed to stem the odious British practice of seizing American sailors on the high seas. Shockingly, it granted British imports most-favored-nation status, even though England did not reciprocate for American imports. Once the treaty was revealed, it would seem to many as if Jay had groveled before his British counterparts in a demeaning throwback to colonial times. The treaty would strike southerners as further damning proof that Washington was a traitor to his heritage, for Jay had failed to win compensation for American slaves carted off at the end of the war. For all that, the treaty had several redeeming features. England finally consented to evacuate the forts on the Great Lakes; it opened the British West Indies to small American ships; and it agreed to compensate American merchants whose freight had been confiscated. And these concessions paled in comparison to the treaty’s overriding achievement: it arrested the fatal drift toward war with England. On balance, despite misgivings, Washington thought the flawed treaty the best one feasible at the moment.
Fully aware of its explosive contents, Washington elected to shroud the treaty in “impenetrable secrecy,” as Madison termed it, until Congress reconvened in June. By the time the Senate debated it, Jay had returned from England, having been elected in absentia governor of New York. (He would shortly resign as chief justice.) It was not an auspicious homecoming for Jay. The Senate had agreed to debate the treaty in secret, but Republicans gasped in horror as they perused its contents. Its fate seemed uncertain until the Federalists granted the Republicans a critical concession: they would oppose the notorious Article XII, which limited American trade in the British West Indies to ships under seventy tons. Strengthened by this compromise, the treaty effectively passed the Senate in late June by a 20-to-10 vote, the bare minimum needed under the Constitution’s two-thirds rule. The next step would be for Washington to sign the treaty, which caused him an agony of indecision.
In early July, word came that the British had issued bellicose new orders to seize ships laden with food bound for France. Having crafted delicate compromises to steer the treaty through the Senate, Washington