During his diplomatic mission Jay remained as chief justice, which struck some observers as unconstitutional. At the very least it softened the lines between the executive and judicial branches—lines that Jay himself had tried to sharpen. As Senator Aaron Burr argued, the decision created the prospect of the executive branch exercising a “mischievous and impolitic” influence over the judiciary.24 Washington was agile in making appointments, and to make the choice of Jay more palatable, he shrewdly juggled political forces. To mollify Republicans, he recalled Gouverneur Morris from France, sending in his stead the Francophile senator James Monroe. Hamilton’s influence had not been entirely neutralized, for when Jay sailed to England on May 12, 1794, applauded by a thousand bystanders on the New York docks, the instructions he carried bore Hamilton’s imprint. Among other things, Jay would enjoy the leeway to negotiate a full-fledged commercial treaty, should the English prove amenable—something that was anathema to the Republicans. In his own instructions to Jay, Washington breathed fire against English intransigence. Of the British surrender of the frontier posts, he said: “I will undertake, without the gift of prophecy, to predict that it will be impossible to keep this country in a state of amity with G[reat] Britain long if the posts are not surrendered.”25 No one who saw Washington’s correspondence could have imagined that he was a lackey of England or plotting to install a pro-British monarchy in America.
WASHINGTON’S LETTERS show that during his second term he was bruised and disillusioned by the scathing tone of the opposition. Increasingly deaf and embattled, he desperately needed rest at Mount Vernon, but the crush of public business allowed him only a brief stay there in June. While at home, as he was inspecting the canal and locks being built at the Little Falls of the Potomac, his horse lost its footing and nearly dashed him against the rocks. A masterful horseman, Washington nimbly pulled the animal away from danger with “violent exertions,” but the effort so badly strained his back that afterward he could not even mount a horse.26 Afraid his aching back could not withstand the long ride, he postponed his return to Philadelphia until July 3 and even then took the trip by easy stages. “I very much fear that it will be a troublesome complaint to him for some time,” Martha worried of his back condition, “or perhaps as long as he lives he will feel it at times.”27 That July and August, to escape the sweltering heat of a Philadelphia summer, he and Martha took a house in Germantown.
People noticed that Washington seemed worn down by his cares. When English manufacturer Henry Wansey breakfasted with him, he found the president affable, obliging, and fit for a man of his age, but he detected “a certain anxiety visible in his countenance, with marks of extreme sensibility.”28 Still, he thought the president looked much younger than Martha: “She appears something older than the president, though I understand they were both born in the same year. [She was] short in stature, rather robust, very plain in her dress, wearing a very plain cap, with her gray hair closely turned up under it.”29
Among the many burdens borne by Washington that summer was the fate of Anthony Wayne’s expedition against Indians on the northwestern frontier. In January Wayne had informed Knox of his belief that his well-drilled army, the Legion of the United States, was capable of avenging St. Clair’s ignominious defeat. The nation, in Wayne’s opinion, had a “golden opportunity . . . for advancing and striking . . . those haughty savages . . . with the bayonet . . . and fire of the American Legion.” 30 On August 20, in the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near present-day Toledo, Ohio, Wayne and a force of 3,500 soldiers delivered a stunning defeat to Indian tribes. The Americans went on an unbridled rampage, trampling Indian houses and crops over a vast territory. Nonetheless Washington sang Wayne’s praises for having “damped the ardor of the savages and weakened their obstinacy in waging war against the United States.”31 The victory broke the back of Indian power in the region and ended British influence with the dominant tribes.
While Washington dealt remorselessly with Indians who menaced white settlers, he never surrendered hope of a humane rapprochement with them. Both Washington and Knox recognized that Indian depredations were understandable responses to the impingement of white communities on their traditional lands. Neither man engaged in bullying jingoism, and Knox even regretted that whites who murdered Indians were not dealt with as severely as Indians who did the same to whites. “It is [a] melancholy reflection,” Knox wrote, “that our modes of population have been more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru. The evidence of this is the utter extirpation of nearly all the Indians in the most populous parts of the Union.”32 No less sympathetic to the Indians’ plight, Washington noted despairingly that “the encroachments . . . made on their lands by our people” were “not to be restrained by any law now in being or likely to be enacted.”33
Washington’s Indian policy was a tragedy of noble intentions that failed to fix a seemingly insoluble problem. He wanted to fashion a series of homelands that might guarantee the permanent safety of Indian tribes. In his last year in office, he issued his “Address to the Cherokee Nation,” which attempted to define a way for Americans and Native Americans to coexist in harmony. He again advised the Indians to abandon traditional hunting and gathering and to imitate the civilization of white settlers by farming and ranching. He urged them to domesticate animals, to farm crops, and to encourage spinning and weaving among their women. He even offered Mount Vernon as a model: “Beloved Cherokees, what I have recommended to you, I am myself going to do. After a few moons are passed, I shall leave the great town and retire to my farm. There I shall attend to the means of increasing my cattle, sheep, and other useful animals; to the growing of corn, wheat, and other grain; and to the employing of women in spinning and weaving.”34 As was so often the case when slavery was involved, Washington did not see the absurdity of presenting himself, a large slave owner, as a shining example for the Indians to emulate.
If the speech was enlightened in its warm, friendly tone toward the Cherokees, it was unrealistic in asking them to abandon their culture and adopt that of their rivals. It was, in essence, telling the Indians that to survive they had to renounce their immemorial way of life—that is, cease to be Indians and become white men. At bottom lurked the unspoken threat that, if they flouted this advice, harm would follow. For all of Washington’s good intentions, it proved impossible for the federal government to prod speculators and state governments into dealing fairly with the Indians, who continued to lose millions of acres from the rapacious practices of white men.
THE MAIN CRISIS that monopolized Washington’s time in the summer of 1794 came not from troublesome Indians but from restive white settlers. From the time Congress imposed an excise tax on distilled spirits in 1791—an important component of Hamilton’s plan to pare the federal deficit—Washington had expected resistance and vowed to exercise his legal powers “to check so daring and unwarrantable a spirit.”35 The new government, he believed, had to punish infractions and instill reverence for the law. If laws were “trampled upon with impunity,” he warned, “and a minority . . . is to dictate to the majority, there is an end put at one stroke to republican government.”36 The chief locus of opposition to the whiskey tax arose in western Pennsylvania, where many farmers owned small stills and converted their grain into whiskey to make it more portable to seaboard markets. They were especially outraged by the investigative powers granted government inspectors, who could inspect barns and cellars at will. Compared to inhabitants of eastern cities, frontier settlers had a more tenuous allegiance to the federal government and tended to resent its intrusions more keenly, especially when it came to internal taxes such as the whiskey tax.