In late May Washington began the journey northward and used the opportunity to tour scenes from the Revolutionary War that he had watched from afar, including Camden and Guilford Court House. He exhibited mounting irritation with the attention bestowed on him—only between towns did he have some modicum of privacy. To his annoyance, the North Carolina governor sent an escort for him. “On my approach to this place [Guilford],” he wrote, “I was met by a party of light horse, which I prevailed on the governor to dismiss and to countermand his orders for others to attend me through the state.”52
In undertaking this lengthy trip, Washington had wanted to learn the state of public opinion directly rather than by hearsay. Most of all, he hoped to ascertain whether the South was as discontented as legend claimed. In his diary, he professed pleasure with what he saw, convinced that the people “appeared to be happy, contented and satisfied with the gen[era]l government under which they were placed. Where the case was otherwise, it was not difficult to trace the cause to some demagogue or speculating character.”53 Contrary to reports that the South would resist the whiskey tax, Washington found general approval for it. In writing to Catharine Macaulay Graham, he cited the “prosperity and tranquillity under the new government” and added that “while you in Europe are troubled with war and rumors of war, everyone here may sit under his own vine and none to molest or make him afraid.”54 Clearly Washington’s picture of the southern mood was overly rosy; perhaps local politicians didn’t care to deliver upsetting news to a heroic president on a jubilant tour. Within a year the country would be hopelessly divided over Washington’s policies, and the primary locus of discontent would be centered in the southern states.
On June 11 the presidential caravan arrived at Mount Vernon, giving Washington two weeks of rest before he returned to Philadelphia. After a rocky start, the tour had unfolded with miraculous precision, and Washington was relieved that it had proceeded without “any interruption by sickness, bad weather, or any untoward accident.”55 In a major logistical feat, he had arrived at each town on the exact date set on his itinerary. The three-month trip had also been a tonic to his health. Escaping from his office and filling his lungs with fresh air, he had put on weight and wiped away the gaunt look of the previous year. Not only had his health improved, but he told one correspondent that “my happiness has certainly been promoted by the excursion.”56 The trip ended in a fitting spirit on July 6, when he rode into Philadelphia to the sound of cannon and the ringing of church bells and set eyes on Martha for the first time in nearly four months.
No sooner had Washington returned than a tumor reappeared on his thigh, in exactly the spot as the one excised in June 1789. It threw the government into a state of general gloom. “The president is indisposed with the same blind tumor, and in the same place, which he had the year before last in New York,” Jefferson alerted Madison. Although it seemed not as bad as the earlier tumor, Jefferson said that Washington was “obliged to lie constantly on his side and has at times a little fever.”57 The protuberance was lanced, and pus and other matter cleaned out, and within a month Washington declared that he was fully recovered. Still, this was the third time that he had been leveled by an ailment as president, and it must have made him wonder about the wisdom of continuing in office.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Running into Extremes
EARLY IN HIS ADMINISTRATION, George Washington had figured out that for foreign policy advice he would have to rely on his cabinet rather than the Senate, but the cabinet members were no less split in the foreign policy realm than they were on pressing domestic issues. The most divisive topic was whether the United States should lean toward France or Great Britain. Even after waging war against Britain for more than eight years, Washington took a coldly realistic view of the strategic need for cordial relations with London. The federal government depended upon customs duties as its principal revenue source and could scarcely afford to antagonize its major trading partner. After the war, as American trade with England swiftly rebounded, Washington had observed, “Our trade in all points of view is as essential to G[reat] B[ritain] as hers is to us.”1 In the postwar period, American merchants had bristled at the exclusion of their ships from the British West Indies. Scarcely a raging Anglophile, Washington had a long list of other grievances against the English—their refusal to make restitution for runaway slaves, their unwillingness to evacuate western posts, their reluctance to send a minister to the United States—but he never allowed those complaints to stymie his earnest efforts to improve relations with the Crown.
In the autumn of 1789 Washington decided to post the witty Gouverneur Morris to England as an unofficial envoy to iron out problems between the two governments. Jefferson feared that America would import Britain’s monarchical ways along with its products and strongly favored warmer relations with France, whose revolution he monitored with enthusiasm. Where Hamilton and Jay supported Morris’s appointment, Jefferson staunchly opposed it, viewing Morris as a “high-flying monarchy man” and overly friendly to England.2 He later faulted the fun-loving Morris for prejudicing Washington’s mind against the French Revolution.
Because Jefferson did not take office until March 1790, Hamilton was able to poach on territory usually reserved for the secretary of state and attempted to strengthen ties with Great Britain, with whom the United States still lacked formal diplomatic relations. In October 1789 he conducted a secret meeting with a British diplomat, Major George Beckwith, assuring him, “I have always preferred a connection with you to that of any other country. We think in English and have a similarity of prejudices and predilections.”3 Washington likewise believed that the common laws, language, and customs of America and England made them natural allies, and he fully concurred with Hamilton’s desire to negotiate a commercial treaty between the two countries. By the summer of 1790 Morris’s talks in London began to bear fruit. After a meeting with Beckwith, Hamilton relayed to Washington the startling news that Sir Guy Carleton, now the governor general of Canada, “had reason to believe that the Cabinet of Great Britain entertained a disposition not only towards a friendly intercourse but towards an alliance with the United States.”4 Jefferson scoffed at such views emanating from an unofficial emissary.
Accepting the need for creative diplomacy, Washington sought to profit from the back channel established by Hamilton with Beckwith. That summer the specter of war between England and Spain arose after their military confrontation at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island in western Canada. Not ready to choose sides, Washington noted in his diary the instructions he had given Hamilton, saying that “the Secretary of the Treasury was to extract as much as he could from Major Beckwith and report it to me without committing . . . the Government of the U[nited] States.”5 In subsequent meetings with Beckwith, Hamilton warned the British diplomat that while Washington was “perfectly dispassionate” toward a commercial treaty with England, Secretary of State Jefferson “may possibly frustrate the whole.”6
In September 1791 the overtures made by Hamilton, with Washington’s approval, resulted in a major breakthrough in Anglo-American relations, as George III named George Hammond as the first British minister to America. When Hammond and his secretary, Edward Thornton, arrived that autumn, they immediately sensed the amicable disposition of the treasury secretary and the implacable hostility of the secretary of state. Writing home, Thornton evoked Jefferson’s “strong hatred” of the British and his “decided and rancorous malevolence to the British name.”7 Not surprisingly, Hammond and Thornton gravitated to the pro-British circle clustered around Hamilton.