Although he agreed to serve a three-year term as president, he later said that it was “much against my inclination,” a way to salve any wounded feelings among his fellow officers. 12 His success in purging the society of its disputed features was only partial. He wanted the group to discard national meetings and limit assemblies to state chapters, which, among other things, would lower his own high-profile connection with it. Openly opposing him, delegates voted to retain the general gatherings, and several state chapters refused to accept the alterations adopted at the national meeting, leaving the hereditary feature intact. If Washington had shown political agility in tackling the group’s problems and juggling conflicting demands, he had also seen that he couldn’t determine the final outcome and was reluctant to be party to something beyond his control.
Having quieted the uproar temporarily, Washington knew that “the jealousies of the people are rather asleep than removed on this occasion.”13 Had it not been for his deep sense of solidarity with American and French officers and a respect for the group’s laudable work for widows and orphans, Washington probably would have severed his ties with the Cincinnati and proposed its abolition. The intransigence of state societies in contesting reforms only hardened his resolve to insulate himself from them. He devised a compromise whereby he remained a figurehead and signed official forms, while keeping a self-protective distance, planning all the while to step down as president before the next general meeting in 1787.
A far happier association was with the Masons. Whatever conspiracy theories later circulated about the group, the brotherhood provoked no suspicions in late-eighteenth-century America, and Washington seldom missed a chance to salute their lodges. The group’s soaring language, universal optimism, and good fellowship appealed to him. When he was sent Masonic ornaments late in the war, he recast the struggle in Masonic imagery, saying that all praise was due “to the Grand Architect of the Universe, who did not see fit to suffer his superstructures and justice to be subjected to the ambition of the princes of this world.”14 In June 1784 he was inducted into the Alexandria lodge as an honorary member, which gave him dual membership there and in the Fredericksburg lodge. Later elevated to master of the Alexandria lodge, he earned the distinction of being the only Mason to hold this post while simultaneously serving as president of the United States. Where he had kept a wary attitude toward the Cincinnati, he proudly embraced Masonic rituals. When an elderly resident of Alexandria, William Ramsay, was buried in 1785, Washington noted in his diary that he had not only attended the funeral but “walked in procession as a free mason, Mr. Ramsay in his lifetime being one and now buried with the ceremonies and honors due to one.”15
In 1785 Washington formed an institutional tie that led him ineluctably back into national politics. His western trip the previous autumn had rekindled his fervent faith in the Potomac River as the gateway to America’s interior. After the trip he lobbied Virginia governor Benjamin Harrison to form a company that would make the Potomac, with its stony obstructions, waterfalls, and rapids, navigable to the headwaters of the Ohio. Completing the linkage would require additional canals, locks, and portages. However partial he was to the Potomac, Washington also held out the possibility of extending the James River. He pressed Madison and others in the Virginia House of Delegates to champion the navigation project, then took up the same cause with Maryland legislators in Annapolis. Since Virginia and Maryland shared rights to the Potomac, any project required the joint approval of both states. “It is now near 12 at night,” an exhausted Washington wrote to Madison from Annapolis on December 28, “and I am writing with an aching head, having been constantly employed in this business since the 22nd without assistance from my colleagues.”16 Madison was agog at Washington’s stamina. “The earnestness with which he espouses the undertaking is hardly to be described,” he remarked to Jefferson, “and shows that a mind like his, capable of grand views . . . cannot bear a vacancy.”17
Washington’s advocacy of the Potomac project united a private motivation (to enhance the wealth of western landowners such as himself) with a political motivation (to bind western settlers to the United States and forge a national identity). He was disturbed by ongoing clashes between settlers and Indians but thought it fruitless to try to stem the restless droves of immigrants pushing ever farther westward. Although the government couldn’t halt this tide, it could guide it into constructive channels. “The spirit of emigration is great,” he told Richard Henry Lee. “People have got impatient and tho[ugh] you cannot stop the road, it is yet in your power to mark the way.”18
Washington became something of a monomaniac about the Potomac River project, and more than one Mount Vernon visitor was trapped in the talons of this obsession. When Elkanah Watson stayed there in January 1785, he described the inland navigation scheme as Washington’s “constant and favorite theme.”19 Waving away questions about the Revolutionary War and dwelling compulsively on the river project, Washington computed the distances from Tidewater Virginia to spots in the interior. “Hearing little else for two days from the persuasive tongue of the great man,” wrote Watson, “I confess completely infected me with the canal mania.”20
In early January 1785 Virginia and Maryland decided to survey the two potential waterways to the Ohio Country and incorporated a pair of private companies, the Potomac River Company and the James River Company, to extend those rivers into the interior. To finance this extensive work, the legislatures would allow entrepreneurs to charge tolls on the waterways. Imagining that the companies would be quite lucrative, Washington had no qualms about businessmen booking large profits as long as their work served the public weal and provided a model for future government action.
While Washington rejoiced over his legislative victories, the state of Virginia threw him into a profound dilemma by deeding him a gift of fifty shares of Potomac River Company stock and one hundred shares of James River Company stock to recognize his services to the state. Having sacrificed a salary throughout the war, Washington was not about to accept payment now; nor did he want to seem vain or offend his fellow Virginians by brusquely dismissing their kind gesture. He admitted to Governor Harrison that “no circumstance has happened to me since I left the walks of public life, which has so much embarrassed me.” If he spurned the gift, he feared, people would think “an ostentatious display of disinterestedness or public virtue was the source of the refusal.” On the other hand, he wanted to remain free to articulate his views without arousing suspicions that “sinister motives had the smallest influence in the suggestion.”21 He valued his reputation for integrity, calling it “the principal thing which is laudable in my conduct.”22 Noting that such “gratuitous gifts are made in other countries,” Washington wanted to establish a new benchmark for the behavior of public figures in America and eliminate petty or venal motives.23
Perplexed, Washington sent a flurry of letters to confidants, asking how to handle the unwanted gift. Beleaguered by money problems at Mount Vernon, he nevertheless tried to project the cavalier image of an affluent planter who had far more money than he needed. Throughout his life he cherished the pose of noblesse oblige in public service, even if he could scarcely afford it. Referring to his lack of children, he told Henry Knox airily, “I have nobody to provide for and I have enough to support me through life in the plain and easy style in which I mean to spend the remainder of my days.”24 In fact, Washington had insufficient money to support himself, his wards, and his slaves, and his style of life was scarcely plain and easy. He came up with an enlightened solution: he would hold the gift shares in trust for public education, possibly for the creation of “two charity schools, one on each river for the education and support of the children of the poor and indigent,” especially those who had lost fathers in the war.25 The final disposition of the money was deferred for many years.