When Washington received a letter from Senator George Cabot, announcing young Lafayette’s arrival in Boston, he reassured the boy that he would be like a “father, friend, protector, and supporter” to him privately but would have to remain steadfastly discreet in public. Many French émigrés having congregated in Philadelphia, Washington could not afford to invite young Lafayette to the capital, where he might be spotted on the streets, so he asked Cabot to enroll his godson temporarily at Harvard College, “the expense of which, as also of every other mean for his support, I will pay,” Washington emphasized.⁴³ Anxious to gauge the political response to the boy’s presence, Washington adopted a watchful posture. His fondness for Lafayette had not lessened one jot. “My friendship for his father,” he insisted to Cabot, “so far from being diminished, has increased in the ratio of his misfortune.”⁴⁴

That fall young Lafayette traveled incognito to New York to visit Alexander Hamilton. Washington told the boy that Hamilton was “warmly attached” to his father because of their wartime camaraderie and that he could rely on his friendship. ⁴⁵ Paralyzed by indecision, Washington took the extraordinary step of telling Hamilton that he should converse with the boy about what to do. Washington was plainly tortured by his predicament. When young Lafayette failed to reply to his letter, Washington concluded glumly that he must be furious. “Have you seen or heard more of young Fayette since you last wrote to me on that subject?” Washington wrote dolefully to Hamilton. “ . . . His case gives me pain and I do not know how to get relieved from it.”⁴⁶ Washington’s response shows both his ardent devotion to Lafayette and his rigorous self-discipline as a politician when U.S. interests were at stake.

In replying to Washington, Hamilton informed him that Lafayette junior was staying with him and would remain there through the spring; nevertheless he thought Washington should invite the boy to visit him. This advice threw Washington into a painful quandary. In response, he made a shrewd political move—for the first time in a long while, he consulted James Madison: “I wish to know what you think (considering my public character) I had best do to fulfill the obligations of friendship and my own wishes without involving consequences.”⁴⁷ In this manner Washington not only previewed Republican reactions but also forced Republicans to share responsibility in the matter. Until mid-February Washington wrestled with the issue, then asked Hamilton to send the boy and his tutor to see him in Philadelphia, “without avowing or making a mystery of the object.”⁴⁸ He stalled in the exact timing, however, suggesting that the two young Frenchmen should come in early April, when “the weather will be settled, the roads good, and the traveling pleasant.”⁴⁹ In the meantime the boy’s presence in America had a galvanizing effect on Washington, who sent word to the Austrians, via their London ambassador, that Lafayette’s freedom was “an ardent wish of the people of the United States, in w[hi]ch I sincerely add mine.”⁵⁰

Once Washington received young Lafayette, he displayed boundless generosity toward him. Discarding earlier caution, he informed Madison that if circumstances permitted, he would take the boy “with his tutor into my family and, in the absence of his father, to superintend his education and morals.”⁵¹ The sight of the boy and the “visible distress” on his face deeply moved Washington.⁵² After hearing his heartrending pleas on his father’s behalf, Washington decided, strictly as a private person, to dispatch a handwritten letter to the Austrian emperor, requesting that Lafayette be released and allowed to come to America.

Washington delivered on his pledge to bring young Lafayette and his tutor into the household as long as Lafayette senior was imprisoned. Not surprisingly, Washington grew extremely fond of his young ward, whom he found “a modest, sensible, and deserving youth.”⁵³ The boy was tall, kindly, and charming and delighted all who met him. Like his father before him, he made rapid strides in English, surpassing even his tutor. When architect Benjamin Latrobe stopped by Mount Vernon for dinner, he was very taken with young Lafayette’s savoir faire: “His manners are easy and he has very little of the usual French air about him . . . and seemed to possess wit and fluency.”⁵⁴ Latrobe noticed that the president doted on the youth: “A few jokes passed between the President and young Lafayette, whom he treats more as his child than as a guest.”⁵⁵ The situation was further testimony to Washington’s hidden emotional nature and his capacity to incorporate young people into his household as surrogate children. Young Lafayette and Félix Frestel remained with the Washingtons until October 1797, when word arrived that Lafayette had been freed after five years in prison. The two young men decided to sail back to Europe with all due speed. In a touching farewell, George Washington Lafayette wrote to his godfather how grateful he was for his efforts to rescue his real father and how happy he had been to form a temporary part of his family. Washington fully reciprocated the feeling. When young Lafayette was reunited with his father, he handed him a letter from Washington, who said that young Lafayette was “highly deserving of such parents as you and your amiable Lady.”⁵⁶ The boy’s family were astonished at how much he had grown, not to mention his striking resemblance to his father. Instead of coming to America, however, the impoverished Lafayette and his nomadic family spent the next two years wandering across northern Europe, living in Hamburg, Holstein, and Holland.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

The Colossus of the People

AMID THE TRAVAIL OVER THE JAY TREATY, Washington was able to claim a spectacular diplomatic breakthrough with Spain. Settlers in the western hinterland had long chafed at Spanish restrictions on shipping their produce down the Mississippi River. Frustrated with governmental inaction, Kentucky residents threatened to secede from the Union, prompting President Washington to post Thomas Pinckney to the Spanish court as envoy extraordinary. In October 1795, in the Treaty of San Lorenzo, Pinckney won the right for Americans to use the Mississippi freely and trade in the port of New Orleans. The treaty also gave the United States iron-clad guarantees that the waterway defined the nation’s western border, a signature achievement for a president whose spacious vision of America had always stressed westward expansion. The Spanish treaty coasted to victory.

In contrast, Washington continued to face a hue and cry over the Jay Treaty, which had been ratified by King George III but still lacked funding for major provisions. Having stood by helplessly as it cleared the Senate, House Republicans jumped at the chance to wreck the treaty through their budgetary powers. The boldest challenge arose from Edward Livingston of New York, who introduced a resolution demanding that Washington lay before Congress Jay’s original instructions and subsequent correspondence about the treaty. When the resolution passed the Republican-dominated House in March 1796, it opened up a constitutional can of worms. Did the resolution represent legislative encroachment on the executive branch? Did it undermine powers granting the president and Senate the exclusive right to make foreign treaties? And could the president assert executive privilege to protect the confidentiality of such internal deliberations?

Washington smarted at what he deemed a dangerous threat to presidential prerogative. “From the first moment,” he confessed to Hamilton, “and from the fullest conviction in my own mind, I had resolved to resist the principle w[hi]ch was evidently intended to be established by the call of the House of Representatives.”¹ Characteristically, despite fierce misgivings, he dispassionately polled his cabinet members, who unanimously advised resistance to the House resolution. To buttress his arguments, Washington requested a brief from Hamilton, who supplied an ample memorandum on the wisdom of withholding treaty papers. Now nearing the end of his second term, Washington thanked Hamilton tenderly, as if wishing to acknowledge his many years of loyal service, saying that he wanted to “express again my sincere thanks for the pains you have been at to investigate the subject and to assure you, over and over, of the warmth of my friendship and . . . affectionate regard.” He signed the letter “I am your affectionate . . .”² Such emotional flourishes were highly unusual in the often straitlaced correspondence of George Washington.