The Highest Calling, page 5
DR: What did he accomplish in his second term?
DB: The second term was critical, because he kept the United States out of war. It seems easy to stay out of war, but in fact it was very popular to try to get involved in the French Revolution on the side of the French people. He didn’t want to do that at all. In the second term, he expanded the U.S. Navy. The creation of the first six frigates of the United States Navy was done during that time. The Naturalization Act was critical. He established peace in the Ohio Valley by defeating a coalition of Native Americans who had been receiving support from the British. They had been at war with the United States for a long time.
One thing I didn’t mention about his first term, which is important, is that he traveled to every state in the union. The next president to do that was James Monroe. It helped Washington understand what people thought of this new form of government. As he said, he walked on untrodden ground, and everything he was doing was establishing a precedent. He also understood that this was government based on popular opinion, and he needed to have a way to directly reach people.
During those visits, he also established the role of the presidency as an aspirational voice for what America is about. For instance, on his famous visit to the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island, he assured the Jews of Newport that they not only would be tolerated, but they had freedom of conscience. They had the right to exercise their religion. Washington advocated over 18 times the principle of religious freedom throughout the country before the First Amendment to the Constitution was passed. As president, he was establishing not only the institutions of office but some of the aspirational values of what it means to be American.
DR: Why is his farewell address so well-known?
DB: The farewell address was circulated widely at the time. Throughout the nineteenth century, it was memorized by school kids and taught in various forms. The Senate still reads it every year on Presidents’ Day. I don’t know if they’re paying attention when they read it, but it’s a critical warning to the citizenry of the United States of the things they need to do to make sure that their great experiment in democracy will survive.
DR: Was it written by Alexander Hamilton?
DB: It was written largely by Hamilton with pieces from Madison that Washington had asked for when he tried to resign the first time. These are themes that Washington had been hammering on his whole life, including a call for a national university, something that Hamilton never supported. So Hamilton is the speechwriter, but Washington is the author.
DR: How much time did Washington put into designing and helping to build the new nation’s capital?
DB: A lot. He was named by Congress the head of the commission that helped create the Federal District. That not only meant laying it out but hiring the architects and picking the plans. Washington laid the cornerstone of the Capitol Building in 1792 in a Masonic ritual, which included a big barbecue. He was associated with the planning and the creation of the capital. In typical congressional fashion, Congress didn’t fund any of the buildings. Washington had to raise money privately to build the Capitol Building and the White House itself. We must be the only great nation in the world whose major public buildings were built through private efforts. To do that, Washington had to sell land, he had to borrow money. He had to get those buildings built, at least started and almost finished, when he was president. Otherwise, it was likely that the capital would never move to what became known as Washington, D.C.
DR: Washington retired after two terms, but he never actually served as president in Washington?
DB: That’s right. He’s the only president never to have served in Washington, D.C.
DR: What did he do upon returning to Mount Vernon?
DB: He once again jumped into his agricultural projects with enthusiasm. He was one of the most famous men in the world, so people were constantly coming to see him and get his advice. But even then he started new businesses. He started a distillery when he came back after the presidency. By the time he died, it was producing over 11,000 gallons of whiskey a year, one of the largest distilleries we can identify at the end of the eighteenth century. He was still very much engaged in business. He was also planning for his own future, and struggling to figure out how to deal with his estate. He’d been trying to figure out a way to free the people he held in slavery for years, which he began in earnest while president. In 1793, he wrote to some English agricultural reformers about his desire to try to figure out a way to emancipate the people he owned. It’s clear that he tried to purchase the people who were enslaved here by the Custis family, whom he couldn’t legally free. That’s a really interesting part of his history, because his reputation was on the line as much as his feelings of humanity.
DR: But in the end, he did free the enslaved people on his property upon his death and was the only founding father to do so, is that correct?
DB: That’s absolutely correct. He freed them in his will, and not only freed them, he provided for education for the ones who were too young to have professional work on their own. He established pensions for the ones who were too old. These pensions were paid out from his estate into the 1840s.
DR: How did Washington die?
DB: Washington died of an infection of the throat. His epiglottis eventually swelled up and kept him from being able to breathe, something like strep throat. It’s not clear when or how he got it. It is clear that the day he felt ill, he had been out on his horse all morning, in the snow and sleet and rain, then came back to Mount Vernon to dine with some visitors in the afternoon, at three o’clock. He didn’t change out of his wet clothes until after that, and that evening he had a sore throat. That was the beginning of the end.
DR: He used a technique that was common then, as I understand it, to let blood out of your veins. Theoretically, bad spirits go away.
DB: Medicine in the eighteenth century was still dependent on the Galenic system, tracing back to ancient Greece. There was an idea of humors that needed to be drained out, and so you bled people to do that. Washington was a great proponent of bleeding, asking to be bled before his physicians arrived. When his physicians arrived, they felt like he’d been bled enough. They did do other things like blister him. They gave him enemas. It sounds like an awful last 24 hours. He wasn’t getting better. He asked to get dressed, get out of bed, then he got back into bed. It was a long death. His final words were “ ’Tis well.” He asked Martha to bring up multiple wills from his study, and asked her to throw the ones he didn’t want into the fire and make sure that the latest will—which is critical, because it’s the will that freed all of his enslaved people—was the one that was recognized as the legal will.
DR: Where is Washington buried?
DB: He is entombed here at Mount Vernon, in a new tomb in a location that he asked for in his will. It is an interesting story, though, because Congress voted to have him entombed at the site of the new Capitol Building in Washington. John Adams wrote Martha and asked if Washington could be entombed there. Her only condition was that when she passed, she’d be able to be next to him. That was the plan. He was going to be moved to the Capitol. In fact, the Capitol vault was a tomb that was built for Washington and Martha, directly underneath the dome, which has that incredible mural of Washington floating up into heaven. He would have been buried in our Capitol. But the Capitol was burned by the British during the War of 1812. Congress later never got its act together. Ultimately, the executors of Washington’s estate would build his tomb here at Mount Vernon in the 1820s and’30s, and he was entombed here then.
DR: Has his coffin ever been open since he was buried?
DB: Between when he was first laid to rest in 1799 in the old tomb here, and then moved to his new location, his coffin was opened. There’s an oral history of a boy who claims that when he saw Washington, he looked as fresh as the day he was buried. Whether or not that was imagined or real, who knows, but it certainly hasn’t been opened since. But I think one of the reasons that Mount Vernon exists today is because he’s here. If the body had been moved to the Capitol, this place would have fallen apart. It’s made of wood. It wouldn’t have been preserved. It wouldn’t be the pilgrimage site that it became because people visited Mount Vernon to pay their respects to the father of their country and his tomb. That’s the reason this place became the birthplace of American preservation. The house itself was kind of an afterthought.
DR: What do you see as George Washington’s greatest legacy?
DB: The great experiment, democracy, the country that we have today is his legacy. Our independence was won by him, with help. He was the first president of the United States. He was an indispensable leader for us, and those institutions that are still governed by the Constitution would not exist without his leadership. The institutions he created are still with us. That’s a basic point. Another that bears talking about is that he gave us a model of republican leadership, that is to say nonmonarchical, noncorrupt leadership based in public service, with leaders who serve the public good and then go back into the citizenry. This is a model that we want our politicians to aspire to. When we complain about our presidents and say they’re not acting presidential, in some ways we’re thinking of the kind of president that Washington established in that office.
DR: Finally, what would you like to ask George Washington? If he were to come back at some point, what would you like to interview him and say?
DB: I have too many questions. As the head of Mount Vernon, I have all kinds of technical questions about how the house looks now, and what kind of wallpaper he had here and there. But aside from that, there are two things I’d want to know. One, who did he want to be the second president of the United States? If he could have chosen anybody, who would he have chosen? Because I don’t think he wanted Adams per se. Nobody had anything against Adams. I think Washington originally wanted Jefferson, but that became untenable when Jefferson became too much of an enthusiast for the French. The question is, would Washington have wanted Hamilton? Did he love Hamilton, like Hamilton claimed he did? Or was Hamilton a useful, powerful figure who would have been a bad president? I don’t know. So I want to know who would Washington have chosen as his next president.
A more modern question would be to understand his attitudes toward slavery and how they evolved over his lifetime. Why didn’t he free his slaves earlier? Was it impossible, was it political? Did he not want to do it? We might need to give him a truth serum first to answer that question.
2 GORDON WOOD
on John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826; president from 1801 to 1809); John Adams (1735–1826; president from 1797 to 1801)
If George Washington was the most prominent of the Founding Fathers responsible for the break from England and the successful fight against the British, clearly John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were second and third. But is that the right order?
John Adams, Washington’s vice president and the second U.S. president, was one of the strongest advocates for cutting ties with England at the Second Continental Congress, which ultimately voted on a motion proposed by Richard Henry Lee to split from England. And it was Adams who wanted to have Thomas Jefferson, his junior by eight years, serve on the committee that drafted the explanation for this withdrawal, now known as the Declaration of Independence. Adams later asked Jefferson to draft that Declaration.
To the surprise and consternation of Adams for the rest of his life, the Declaration became the symbol of the break from England. While Jefferson initially thought that the Second Continental Congress had “mutilated” what he had written, he later basked in the glory of the Declaration’s words. And indeed, on his tombstone, he wanted the authorship to be the first of his accomplishments to be listed.
Shortly after the war, cracks began to form in the relationship between these two towering figures of the Revolutionary era, but that did not prevent them from working together as representatives of the United States immediately after the war was won, when the U.S. government, operating under the Articles of Confederation, asked Adams and Jefferson to negotiate various trade and diplomatic agreements while they were both living in Europe. But those initial cracks later resurfaced when Adams and Jefferson served in the government created under the Constitution.
Most visibly, they disagreed on the all-important issue of who should be president. Jefferson served as Adams’s vice president, but then ran against Adams when Adams sought reelection, and—with the help of Alexander Hamilton—Jefferson beat Adams and effectively humiliated him. Adams had thought he was entitled to two terms, like Washington, and could not believe that his once good friend had run against him and defeated him.
That began a long period of estrangement between Adams and Jefferson. They barely had any contact for years. But ultimately, with the help of a mutual friend and fellow Revolutionary-era leader, Dr. Benjamin Rush, these two strong-willed leaders began a correspondence that brought the two historic figures together. And that lasted until they both died on July 4, 1826—fifty years to the day of the Declaration of Independence—an occurrence widely seen at the time as a sign from providence of the unique status of these two men.
The story of how Adams and Jefferson went from good friends to bitter enemies to good friends again was brought to life by Gordon Wood, one of the country’s leading scholars of the Revolutionary era, in Friends Divided, his 2017 book about their complicated relationship. I had a chance to interview this extraordinary scholar at a Congressional Dialogues session at the Library of Congress on February 14, 2018.
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DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): You’re probably the country’s most eminent scholar on the Revolution. What could the British have done to prevent the colonies from trying to withdraw from the Union?
GORDON WOOD (GW): If the British had offered in 1775 what they did as part of the Carlisle Peace Commission in 1778—which would have given the colonists everything they wanted, essentially a commonwealth status with no parliamentary authority over them—that would have undercut the radical position. Those seeking independence would have lost support. Eventually, America was growing so fast in population that there would have been some adjustment in the empire. America’s population had twice the growth rate of Britain’s. We would have surpassed them sometime in the early or mid-nineteenth century, and something would have had to have been done by then. But the actual break could have been postponed if the British had offered earlier what they ended up offering as part of the Carlisle Commission’s proposed peace deal. It was a desperate act by Prime Minister North’s government, which feared an American alliance with France. It was too late.
DR: If they had not withdrawn and there hadn’t been a Revolutionary War, your view is that eventually we would have broken away?
GW: We were so much bigger. Some adjustment would have had to be made, because we couldn’t be ruled by a small island.
DR: As schoolchildren in the United States, we were often taught that King George was a little crazy. Was he crazy or not?
GW: He suffered from a disease—porphyria, it was thought, though some are now suggesting that he was manic-depressive—but he didn’t show any of the symptoms while he was running the war. He was a hard-liner. He was certainly a hawk, and he certainly was the last person to give up. Prime Minister North simply tried to retire, to resign many times. Finally, Yorktown did it and the government fell, and George had to accept the results.
DR: It is often said that George Washington was the indispensable man in the Revolutionary War. If Washington had not existed, would we have won the war? Was he indispensable?
GW: I think if he had died, say, at Brooklyn Heights in 1776, another general would have emerged—someone, maybe Nathanael Greene. But by the time we get to the end of the war, Washington had taken on such iconic status that he seemed almost indispensable. And as president, he was indispensable in the sense that the country could not have held together without his presence. We would have been torn apart sectionally and every other way. He really was indispensable by the time you get to 1789–90. But during the war, somebody else would have emerged. It was very difficult for the British to put down a rebellion 3,000 miles away. We know about that; we’ve tried it in Vietnam. It’s very difficult to deal with situations so far away from your source of supply.
DR: Had we stayed with the Articles of Confederation and not gone to the Constitution, could the colonies have survived with that form of government?
GW: Jefferson’s presidential administration acted as if it was under the Articles of Confederation, with only the addition of the power to levy tariffs. Jefferson didn’t like the new Constitution. He thought that the Articles with the addition of a couple of amendments would be entirely satisfactory, and in effect he governed as if he were under the Articles. In the antebellum period, the federal government was very weak. Except for the delivery of the mail, people didn’t really know that they were living under a federal government. Since all they had were customs duties as indirect taxes, they could scarcely feel the presence of the national government.
