Edward J. Larson: George Washington, Nationalist. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.
Americans understood themselves as “a people” by the 1770s, at least, as the Declaration of Independence most famously indicates. But until the Declaration they couldn’t think of themselves as a self-governing people, a nation in full. Securing that nationhood took years of war, constitutional architectonics, and commerce both economic and social. The merit of historian Edward J. Larson’s compact and incisive essay begins in selecting for consideration the ‘middle’ years of Washington’s career, those between the war and his inauguration as our first president. In them we see not Washington the general or Washington the commander in chief, but Washington the adroit and great-souled politician, the man who used the fame he won during the war to take his country from domestic unrest and geopolitical insecurity to what he called an empire, what his sometime colleague Thomas Jefferson called an empire of liberty. Jefferson wrote the Declaration; Madison, James Wilson, and their colleagues wrote the Constitution; but Washington took the indispensable steps that enabled independence fought in defense of natural rights to issue in the security of those rights within a framework of constitutional and commercial republicanism.
This book’s “simple thesis,” Larson writes, holds that Washington was “the leading nationalist of the late Revolutionary era in American history.” By “nationalist,” he doesn’t mean blood-and-soil statism or even Burkean traditionalism but popular self-government. He commits an important misstep at the outset, saying that Washington “believed in the Lockean natural right of free men and the republican ideals of government by the consent of the governed”; obviously, if right is natural, it must belong to all men, as the Declaration affirms and as Washington recognized by emancipating his slaves in his will. Fortunately, this is just about the last mistake Larson makes, and it isn’t foundational to his argument, which centers primarily on practical policies not political theory. And he is exactly right to link Washington’s understanding of natural right to his commitment to the founding of a republican regime.
Having fought major battles in five states and coordinating troop movements in all thirteen, Washington understood American politics from “a national perspective” well before he re-entered civilian life. After the war, the English continued to prey upon American shipping and to occupy New York City, Charleston, and Savannah—all major ports, vital to American commerce. The union of the states, first asserted in the 1774 Articles of Association, weakened without a battlefield enemy on the ground who daily reinforced the sentiment of hanging together, lest we hang separately. Disunion led to reluctance by states to pay debts incurred during the war to the federal government, and this led to a regime crisis. Unpaid soldiers will grumble. Officers in Newburgh, New York became restive. They received some encouragement from such nation-builders as Robert Morris and Gouverneur Morris, who hoped that fear of a coup would spur the states to pay up. Major General Alexander McDougall was the point man for the proto-rebellion, threatening Treasury Secretary Henry Knox with refusal to disband the troops until payment was received.
Washington understood that such a rebellion would threaten republicanism itself by challenging civil authority. He decided to employ a peaceful form of what military men call tactical surprise, the civil equivalent of the Battle of Trenton. He made a unannounced visit to the officers’ meeting in Newburgh on March 15, 1782, reading what one historian has called “the most impressive speech he ever wrote.” Taking himself as his example, he cited “the great duty I owe to my country” to obey civilian authority, a duty deriving from the principle of government by the consent of the governed, itself derived from the equal natural rights of all human beings. Appealing to honor, the military virtue par excellence, he exhorted the officers to “express your utmost horror and detestation of the Man who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our Country, and who wickedly attempts to open the flood Gates of Civil discord, and deluge our rising Empire in Blood.” Who will rule this rising empire? Military men? If so, was Washington himself not the highest-ranking and most-honored such man in America? And had he not fought with them as comrades throughout the early defeats and hardships, sharing with them the final triumph? Instead of calling them to lay down their arms, could he not have led them on a march to the capital, taking over the government by force? He had done the opposite of that. The officers backed down.
“As word of the encounter first reached Congress and then spread across the land in newspaper accounts, Washington gained yet another laurel. Already first in war, he was now first in peace and clearly first in the hearts of his countrymen. He had no rivals.” Washington “use[d] his platform as America’s leading citizen to call for quickly and fairly compensating the troops, and ultimately for building a strong national union that could support those payments and some form of permanent military establishment”—an establishment which, going on 250 years, has yet to attempt a coup d’état against the people it is charged to protect or the civilian government those people have consented to be governed by. Working against any foolish potential backlash against the military as such, Washington advocated the maintenance of a small standing army, with a well-organized militia to supplement it, on the grounds that it could defend America’s northern border with British Canada and its northwest territories against Indian tribes and nations allied with the British.
Washington’s call for national union went well beyond national defense. In his 1783 Circular Letter to the states, he associated a stronger central government with the “happiness” of those states as parts of that union. “It is only in our united Character as an Empire, that our Independence is acknowledged” by foreign powers, and it is only by thinking of ourselves as “citizens of America,” by establishing our “National Character” that we can become “a happy Nation,” one so situated as to secure our natural rights of life, liberty, and self-government. By resigning his military commission at the national Assembly Chamber in Annapolis near the end of the year, and by declaring his intention to retire to private life, he astonished the world (and most particularly George III). As the “second Cincinnatus,” he “became the first American,” no longer merely a Virginian of great distinction but “a world-renowned personification of republican virtue.” In one of his many well-chosen quotations, Larson cites Thomas Jefferson: “The moderation and virtue of a single character probably prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.”
Returning to Mount Vernon, Washington put his long-neglected household in order then turned his attention to his properties along rivers in southeastern Pennsylvania and today’s West Virginia. He discovered that a grist mill he owned had been mismanaged and that a Calvinist sect called the Seceders had claimed squatters’ right on another of his tracts since 1773. For his pains, a group of Indians attempted to capture him at Great Kanawha, along the Ohio River. These unpleasant surprises galvanized his ambition to empower the federal government to permit orderly settlement of the West. “If Congress could open, sell, and settle these lands and thereby gain authority and revenue, it could bolster the union. If not, it risked losing them to a foreign power, and with them, much of the reason for a national government.” As a result, why would the settlers in the West not turn to Spain, which ruled the West’s geo-economic linchpin, New Orleans, and to Great Britain, which ruled the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, for both security and trade? “The touch of a feather, would turn [the Westerners] either way,” he wrote. To secure this portion of the Union, not only a well-funded military force but east-west transportation routes would be indispensable—the latter to be secured by linking the North Branch of the Potomac River to the headwaters of the Ohio River. To this end, he lobbied the Virginia and Maryland legislatures to establish a private toll route on the Potomac, while lining up investors. He played the role of what we would now call a ‘rainmaker’ with his usual skill, and by January 1785 “Washington had his company and soon would be elected its first president.” He proved a less successful entrepreneur, however, not because he lacked business acumen but because the Erie Canal soon became the main east-west corridor, due to its better positioning, closer to the commercial entrepots of New England.
Nonetheless, the project earned a substantial political profit. In obtaining the Mount Vernon Compact between Virginia and Maryland to cooperate on Potomac River commerce, he had partnered with the young Virginia state legislator James Madison, whom he enlisted in his broader intention to strengthen the Union. “We are either a United people, or we are not”; “if the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation,” with “national objects to promote, and a national character to support.” Madison concurred, proposing that the Virginia legislature “call a general meeting on interstate commercial regulations to be attended by delegates from all thirteen states.” Representatives of five states did attend the meeting, held in Annapolis in September 1786. This became the first step toward calling a national convention to revise the failing Articles of Confederation. But such a convention would need not only Washington’s support but his attendance, if it were to attract delegates from all the states. Madison and Washington’s former military aide Alexander Hamilton went to work on the general—who, in the end, needed little persuasion. Not only was the general well aware of the geopolitical dangers to Americans, he also worried about internecine conflicts, especially over borders and commerce, and, “perhaps most important,” the failure of states “to protect individual liberty and private property.” So were many of his fellow Virginians, who chose him to lead its delegation at Philadelphia. For his part, Washington worried that the convention wouldn’t be serious—that is, genuinely constitutional.
As he had done with his officers during the war, Washington consulted his most trusted advisers before going into battle. Madison, Knox, and Jay all advocated “a truly national government” with “separate legislative, judicial, and executive branches” and a bicameral legislature. Madison also argued for a fully articulated federal judicial system, which would “avoid local bias in expounding national laws and deciding cases involving citizens of different states.” All agreed that “in areas under its domain the national government must have the power to act directly on the people, not just through the states.” Washington “embraced their proposals and made them his own,” while wondering if, as he said to Jay, “the public mind [was] matured for such an important change.” He called the convention as “the last peaceable mode” of “saving the republic.” Virginia delegate John Randolph was designated to present what was immediately labeled “The Virginia Plan,” which in most aspects carried the day, with some compromises at the insistence of the smaller states. Respecting the office which everyone expected Washington to occupy, the new constitution broke with parliamentarism, electing the president not by legislative vote but through the novel Electoral College, which, tellingly, would dissolve at the end of each presidential election cycle, making the chief executive entirely independent of any standing set of officeholders in the national or states’ governments. Governmental powers would thus be not only separated but balanced.
At times bitter and hard-fought, the ratification contests in the several states saw determined opposition to the new constitution from advocates of the Articles of Confederation system. “Federalists would rely on the public’s trust in Washington to carry the day,” and it did. Further, once ratification was assured, it was crucial to ensure that anti-federalists didn’t control the first Congress. To this end, Washington set down three “main goals for the United States under the Constitution: respect abroad, prosperity at home, and development westward”—goals obtainable by policies of “effective tariffs, sound money, secure property rights, and a nonaligned foreign policy.” As Washington put it, “America under an efficient government, will be the most favorable Country of any in the world for persons of industry and frugality,” a country not “less advantageous to the happiness of the lowest class of people,” thanks to the vast tracts of land available in the West. “He saw it as a model for individual liberty and republican rule everywhere,” and candidates for the first Congress under the Constitution would see in that model what amounted to an exceptionally attractive political platform.
After his election, Washington journeyed to New York, stopping in Philadelphia and Trenton. At a City Tavern banquet in his honor, the diners raised their glasses to the toast, “To Liberty without licentiousness,” a republican slogan if ever there was one. At Assunpink Creek, near Trenton, where Washington’s troops had rounded on British forces in January 1777, a banner unfurled to read “The Defender of the Mothers, will be the Protector of the Daughters.”
This resembled a king’s progress across his realm, with one critical exception. The crowds who greeted the new president didn’t bow to him; he bowed to them. George Washington had become “the master of the correct gesture.” (Adams called him “the finest political actor he had ever seen.) The regime he had been instrumental in founding lodged sovereignty in the people, not in the government, and not in some elected monarch.
And the regime worked, far better than the Articles regime had done. Treasury Secretary Hamilton worked out a financial system capable of paying the war debt. Secretary of War Knox organized for war against the Western Confederacy, an alliance of Indians which had blocked American settlement in the rich lands of the Ohio Valley. John Jay negotiated a treaty with Britain that got them out of its forts in the Northwest Territory. North Carolina and Rhode Island finally ratified the Constitution; Tennessee and Kentucky also joined the Union. Congressman Madison floor-managed the Bill of Rights through Congress, “with Washington’s support.” Secretary of State Jefferson “devis[ed] a broad regime of federally protected intellectual property rights,” which would secure the innovations on which manufacturing and commerce depend.
Controversies over the national bank and Jay’s treaty caused tensions between Washington and his fellow Virginians Jefferson and Madison, who eventually began “a formal national political party with a states’-rights bent.” Thus what began as a controversy between big states and small states during the ratification contest morphed into a controversy between finance and agriculture by the turn of the century, a controversy that would eventually morph into the controversy between slavery abolition and slaveholding which nearly destroyed the Union. Far-seeing George Washington manumitted his slaves in his Last Will and Testament; had enough of his fellow slaveholders done that, there might have been no Civil War.
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