Washington [531]
Washington never achieved the national unity he desired and, by the end, presided over a deeply riven country. John Adams made a telling point when he later noted that Washington, an apostle of unity, “had unanimous votes as president, but the two houses of Congress and the great body of the people were more equally divided under him than they ever have been since.”38 This may have been unavoidable as the new government implemented the new Constitution, which provoked deep splits over its meaning and the country’s future direction. But whatever his chagrin about the partisan strife, Washington never sought to suppress debate or clamp down on his shrill opponents in the press who had hounded him mercilessly. To his everlasting credit, he showed that the American political system could manage tensions without abridging civil liberties. His most flagrant failings remained those of the country as a whole—the inability to deal forthrightly with the injustice of slavery or to figure out an equitable solution in the ongoing clashes with Native Americans.
By the time Washington left office, the Union had expanded to include three new states—Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee—creating powerful new constituencies with outspoken needs. In this nascent democratic culture, the political tone was becoming brash and rude, sounding the death knell for the more sedate style of politics practiced by the formal Washington. Although he had securely laid the foundations of the federal government, he was still the product of his genteel Virginia past and accustomed to the rule of well-bred gentlemen such as himself. He would never have been fully at home with the brawling, roaring brand of democracy that came to dominate American politics in the era of Andrew Jackson. Nonetheless he had proved the ideal figure to lead the new nation from its colonial past into a more democratic future.
PART SIX
The Legend
Apotheosis of Washington, by David Edwin, after Rembrandt Peale, engraved circa 1800.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Samson and Solomon
FOR AT LEAST A SHORT INTERVAL, the return to Mount Vernon was a heavenly sensation for the wandering Washington family, who experienced again some modicum of normality after their long exile in the nation’s capital. “Since I left Philadelphia, everything has appeared to be a dream,” Nelly Custis told a friend. “I can hardly realize my being here and that grandpapa is no longer in office.”1 As far as Nelly was concerned, the ex-president had been restored to his natural habitat: “Grandpapa is very well and has already turned farmer again.”2 Martha basked in newfound domestic joy. “I cannot tell you, my dear friend,” she wrote to Lucy Knox, “how much I enjoy home after having been deprived of one so long, for our dwelling in New York and Philadelphia was not home, only a sojourning. The General and I feel like children just released from school.”3 Washington invoked his preferred pastoral image of domestic bliss: “I am once more seated under my own vine and fig tree and hope to spend the remainder of my days—which, in the ordinary course of things . . . cannot be many—in peaceful retirement.”4 Relieved to be at home, he spurned a wedding invitation from his nephew Lawrence Augustine Washington, explaining that “I think