Washington [548]
Thanks to the astute, if mercurial, diplomacy of John Adams, such an invasion never happened. When the president sent two envoys to France that October, without consulting his cabinet first, Washington was beset by serious doubts. “I was surprised at the measure, how much more so at the manner of it?” he told Hamilton. “This business seems to have been commenced in an evil hour and under unfavorable auspices.”31 But Washington proved wrong, and because of the administration’s successful diplomacy in resolving differences with France, he never had to take the field with the new army.
On November 10, 1799, McHenry warned Washington of burgeoning Republican strength in the upcoming campaign. For many Federalists, it foreshadowed a threat to the Constitution and the still-fragile strength of the federal government. “I confess, I see more danger to the cause of order and good government at this moment than has at any time heretofore threatened the country,” McHenry concluded.32 If Republicans saw the Federalists as threatening republican government, the Federalists saw themselves as upright custodians of the constitutional order. Previously unaware of the opposition’s strength, Washington claimed to be “stricken dumb” by McHenry’s letter and replied that political trends seemed “to be moving by hasty strides to some awful crisis, but in what they will result that Being, who sees, foresees, and directs all things, alone can tell.”33 So only weeks before his death, Washington, for all his long-term faith in America’s future, viewed its short-term prospects as fairly dismal.
On December 9 Gouverneur Morris added his voice to the Federalist chorus and made a last plea to lure Washington from retirement. The next president, he pointed out, would hold office in Washington, D.C. “Will you not, when the seat of government is in your neighborhood, enjoy more retirement as President of the United States than as General of the Army?”34 Making a shrewd pitch, Morris reviewed the way that each time Washington had returned reluctantly to the public stage, he had been catapulted to higher levels of glory: “If General Washington had not become [a] member of the [constitutional] convention, he would have been considered only as the defender and not as the legislator of his country. And if the president of the convention had not become president of the United States, he would not have added the character of a statesman to those of a patriot and a hero.”35 This clever, eloquent appeal went unanswered.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Freedom
IT MAY SAY SOMETHING about the American blind spot toward slavery that some of the most affecting vignettes of slaves at Mount Vernon emanated from foreign visitors, while American visitors selectively edited them from the scene. In April 1797 Louis-Philippe, a young French aristocrat who would become the so-called citizen king of France, toured Mount Vernon and showed commendable curiosity about the slaves’ condition. They were well aware, he learned, of abolitionist clubs in Alexandria and Georgetown and the violent slave uprising in St. Domingue, making them hopeful that “they would no longer be slaves in ten years.”1 No less fascinating was the Frenchman’s observation that many house servants were mulattoes and that some looked strikingly white. Because Washington was often away from Mount Vernon and seemingly could not have children of his own, suspicion has never settled on him as having sired biracial children, except for the questionable case of West Ford mentioned earlier.
When Julian Niemcewicz visited Virginia in June 1798,