Real Life

George Washington (1732-99) was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, to a prosperous planter. After his father died in 1743, he was raised by his half-brother Lawrence at Mount Vernon, Lawrence’s Potomac River plantation. Washington became a surveyor—a powerful profession in colonial America—and helped lay out Belhaven, Virginia (now Alexandria). Following the death of his half-brother, Washington inherited Mount Vernon.

He left that beloved home to serve in the French and Indian War, returning afterward to Mount Vernon and service in Virginia’s House of Burgesses.

Washington made a happy—and opportune—marriage to a young and wealthy widow, Martha Dandridge Custis and by 1769 was a prominent leader of Virginia’s opposition to Britain’s oppressive colonial policies. During 1774-75, Washington was a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congress, and in June 17 75 was unanimously chosen as commander in chief of the Continental forces, which he led brilliantly.

After the war, Washington headed the Virginia delegation to the Constitutional Convention and was unanimously elected presiding officer. Upon ratification of the Constitution, he was unanimously elected president in 1789 and was reelected in 1792. In March 1797, when Washington left office, he left a well-established government and a stable financial system.

Unfortunately, the Father of His Country had little time to enjoy retirement at his beloved Mount Vernon. In mid-December 1799, he fell ill with acute laryngitis, which rapidly worsened. He died on December 14.

Main Event

In 1791, Congress levied a federal tax on corn liquor. In frontier Pennsylvania, farmers distilled whiskey to use up surplus corn, and the product became for them a form of currency. Farmers protested and often refused to pay the tax. In 1794, President Washington sent collectors, who were met by armed resistance in what constituted the first serious test of the new U.S. government’s ability to enforce a federal law. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton advised the president to call out the militia. In a bold exercise of federal authority, Washington did just that, and the Whiskey Rebellion collapsed.

1812 Overture

(1798-1812)

In This Chapter

The XYZ Affair and the Alien and Sedition Acts

Marbury v. Madison

The Louisiana Purchase

Neutralization of the Barbary pirates

The Embargo and its consequences

War in the West

When George Washington delivered his Farewell Address in March 1797, the United States was recognized by the world’s powers as a nation. That single fact was, in large part, his greatest accomplishment. In his speech, the outgoing president advised his fellow Americans to avoid “foreign entanglements,” to preserve the financial credit of the nation, and to beware of the dangers of political parties, which might fragment the nation.

Everyone agreed that the advice was good, but the second presidential election, in 1796, had already shown that political parties were dividing the nation. John Adams, a Federalist, was elected with 71 votes in the Electoral College. In those days, the runner-up became vice president, and that was Thomas Jefferson, leader of the Democratic-Republican party, with 68 electoral votes. Thus the president and vice president were of different parties and significantly different philosophies of government. Adams would have been called a conservative in his day, a believer in a strong central government. Jefferson, a liberal, wanted more authority entrusted to states and individuals. That these sharply different views did not tear the country apart was a measure of the essential strength of the new nation; yet its recently won liberty was put to severe tests as the 18th century yielded to the 19th.

Foreign Affairs

During Washington’s second term of office, intense friction developed between Britain and the United States. The British government refused to evacuate the frontier forts in the Old Northwest, despite having agreed to do so in signing the Treaty of Paris. Worse, many Americans were convinced that British traders as well as crown officials were encouraging the Indians to attack settlers. Finally, English naval vessels had begun seizing American merchant ships and impressing American sailors into the British service to fight its war against France. The British also complained that Americans had breached the terms of the Paris treaty by failing to pay pre-Revolutionary debts owed British creditors and by refusing to compensate Loyalists for confiscated property during the Revolution.

Anxious to avert a new war with Britain, Washington commissioned Chief justice John Jay to conclude a treaty, signed on November 19, 1794, to secure the British evacuation of the frontier forts and refer debt and boundary disputes to settlement by joint U.S.-British commissions. This amicable solution greatly alarmed the French, who feared that their former ally, the United States, would now unite with Britain against them. Certainly it was true that most Americans, especially the Federalists, recoiled in horror from the excesses of the French Revolution (1789-99). just a year before the Jay Treaty was concluded, Washington rebuffed the overtures of Edmond Charles Edouard Genet (1763-1834), a French diplomat sent to the United States to secure American aid for France in its war with England. “Citizen Genet” (as French revolutionary etiquette dictated he be addressed) defied Washington by plotting with American privateers to prey on British vessels in U.S. coastal waters. The president warned Genet that he was violating U.S. sovereignty. When Citizen Genet responded with a threat to make a direct appeal to the American people, Washington asked the French government to recall him.

In France, however, a new revolutionary party, the Jacobins, had replaced the Girondists, the party to which Genet belonged. In contrast to the United States, where political parties could “disagree without being disagreeable,” rival factions in revolutionary France settled their differences with the guillotine. The Jacobin government asked Washington to extradite Genet, but the president refused to compel Genet to return to France, whereupon Citizen Gen& chose to become a citizen of the United States.

As Easy as XYZ

The Genet episode, combined with the Jay Treaty, brought Franco-American relations to the verge of war. After the French Directory high-handedly refused to receive U.S. minister Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the new president, Adams, sent a commission consisting of Pinckney, John Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry to attempt to heal the breach by concluding a new treaty of commerce. Incredibly, French prime minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord (1754-1838) sent three agents to greet the American commissioners in Paris in October 1797. The agents told the commissioners that before they could even discuss a treaty, the United States would have to loan France $12 million and pay Talleyrand a personal bribe of $250,000.

On April 3, 1798, an indignant President Adams submitted to Congress the correspondence from the commission, which designated the French agents as “X,” “Y” and “Z.” Congress, equally indignant, published the entire portfolio, and the public learned of the “XYZ Affair.” Americans of all political stripes united in outrage, the nation mobilized for war with its erstwhile ally, and, in fact, an undeclared naval war was sporadically fought from 1. 798 to 1800. Fortunately, that conflict was limited, and international tempers cooled as the French Revolution came to an end.