George Washington

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George Washington

George Washington, the first president under the U.S. Constitution of 1788, was sworn into the new office on 30 April 1789 after being elected to that post, created with him in mind, by a unanimous electoral college.

Washington took unique prestige into the presidency. Since early 1775, he had been the living embodiment of American nationality. The Continental Army was the first national organization, and Washington was from the beginning its commander in chief. Washington insisted throughout the war that American military officials must defer to their nominal superiors in Congress. It is to him more than to anyone else that America owes its tradition of subordination of the military to the civilian authorities. The immortal illustration of this was Washington's voluntary surrender of his sword and commission to the Confederation Congress at the Revolution's end.

Washington also had presided over the Philadelphia convention which drafted the Constitution. As James Monroe put it in 1788, Washington's prestige had been the key to the ultimate ratification of the new federal charter, especially in his native state of Virginia—the most populous, most extensive, and wealthiest state.

establishing the new government

Once elected president, Washington had his choice of all the leading men in American politics to fill positions in his cabinet and in the new federal judiciary. Employing three tests for office—eminence, geographic diversity, and support for the ratification of the Constitution—Washington selected a "who's who" of American leaders to fill the new government's top posts. Thus, his friend John Jay of New York became the first chief justice of the United States. Others appointed to the Supreme Court included John Rutledge of South Carolina, a leading framer of the Constitution and his state's most significant politician, and James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who had played key roles both in the Philadelphia convention and in the ratification contest.

As in the days surrounding the Philadelphia Convention, Washington's foremost adviser in the early months of his first term was James Madison of Virginia, a newly elected member of the first House of Representatives. Besides drafting Washington's inaugural and first annual addresses, Madison also assisted Washington in assembling his cabinet. Madison persuaded Thomas Jefferson to serve as secretary of state and suggested his recent fellow contributor to The Federalist (1787–1788), New York's Alexander Hamilton, to be the first secretary of the Treasury.

The First Congress adopted several measures of enduring significance. Of most immediate importance was its creation of the major executive agencies: the departments of the Treasury, of state, and of war. Besides the heads of these agencies, the original cabinet also included Attorney General Edmund Randolph, the former attorney general, then governor, of Virginia.

Also of lasting importance was the Judiciary Act of 1789, which fleshed out the sparse provisions of Article III of the Constitution by creating a three-tiered judiciary very similar to the one that existed two-hundred-years later. Where Article III provided for a U.S. Supreme Court with a chief justice and such inferior courts as Congress cared to create, the new law established a six-member Supreme Court, at least one district court in each state, and six circuit courts of appeal.

The Judiciary Act of 1789 had two other provisions that bear mention as well. One, section 25, said that questions of federal law decided in state supreme courts could be appealed to the federal Supreme Court. Therefore, in matters of federal law the U.S. Supreme Court would have a supervisory role over all state courts, which would allow it to police the interpretation of federal law in all the state systems, thus theoretically ensuring that federal law would have a uniform meaning throughout the country. The other provision said that cases brought into federal court under federal diversity of citizenship jurisdiction would be decided according to the law of the forum state (the state in which the court sits); thus, there would be no federal common law of torts, contracts, or other everyday matters; making policy in these important areas would be reserved to state governments.

Bill of Rights. Madison had only narrowly been elected to the House of Representatives, and that after seeing his candidacy for the Senate defeated in Virginia's General Assembly. In order to ensure his election to the House, Madison had assured his constituents that he would pursue adoption of constitutional amendments as a congressman. Thus, to the consternation of many of his colleagues, Madison repeatedly drew their attention to the idea of adopting a bill of rights. He had opposed this idea when it was bruited by moderate Federalists and anti-Federalists during the ratification contest. Yet Madison had concluded that this politically expedient step might have the positive effect of winning the Constitution the support of men who might otherwise oppose it.

Anti-Federalists, including Virginia's two U.S. senators and Patrick Henry, the eminence of the General Assembly, wanted amendments that would more carefully define and limit the federal government's powers. Madison had no interest in that, but wanted simply to offer moderate men a harmless placebo of amendments to quiet their fears on the question of the new government's threat to individual liberties. He also futilely attempted to win approval of an amendment allowing federal courts to enforce select individual rights against state governments, thus inverting anti-Federalists' hopes for amendments limiting federal power.

Ultimately, Congress referred twelve amendments to the states. Ten of those amendments were ratified in 1791, and an eleventh—the Twenty-seventh Amendment—won ratification two centuries later, in 1992. Virginia's senators expressed their disappointment in the proposed amendments, saying that they would do nothing to limit federal power. The First Congress's amendments were rarely the subject of litigation in the eighteenth or the nineteenth century, and even more rarely did they affect the outcome of a case or the interpretation of a law, state or federal.

Formalities. The First Congress and President Washington were uncertain precisely how a republican government should behave. Washington, for his part, believed that he should be more accessible than was George III, yet he realized that his own fame made it impracticable for him to maintain the open-door policy of the presidents of the Continental and Confederation Congresses. One result was the famous levees, stilted social affairs held by Washington at his house in order to keep in contact with members of Congress and local notables. If the description of Pennsylvania's sardonic senator, William Maclay, is to be believed, the levees were so formal as to serve no purpose other than making Washington and his invited guests alike uncomfortable and impressing extreme democrats with the monarchical tendencies of the new government.

For its part, Congress could not even decide how the president should be addressed. In Europe at the time, monarchs—their countries' chief executives—commonly were addressed with long strings of titles indicating God's role in selecting them to reign and the territories over which they ruled. Vice President John Adams insisted that Congress should address Washington in a similar way, to ensure that his new office, and thus the new government of which it was the most visible symbol, received the proper respect.

This seemingly innocuous, not to say trivial, matter tied up the Senate for several days. Wags referred to the short, corpulent vice president as "His Rotundity." Finally, Madison led the House in refusing to accede to the Senate's desire to give Washington a title other than "President of the United States." For both Madison and Washington himself, as the president had confided, that was enough.

hamilton's financial policies

Constitutional reformers of the 1780s had desired to strengthen the central government chiefly to empower it to raise armies and taxes without the states' cooperation. The first concerns with which the fledgling government had to deal were financial. Hamilton believed that the United States needed to provide for the prompt repayment of its war debt. Since the states had amassed substantial debts during the Revolution as well, Hamilton also recommended that the Congress move to assume those debts. His goal was to concentrate responsibility for and power over those debts in the federal government.

One instrument for the management of the federal debt was to be the Bank of the United States, established in 1791, in which the federal government would be the most substantial, but still only a minority, shareholder. Hamilton believed that the United States could follow the British example in funding its debt, thus tying the economic interests of holders of debt instruments throughout the country to the success of the new federal government. Virginia's preeminent representatives, Madison and Jefferson, drove a hard bargain, however: in exchange for allowing the assumption bill to pass the House in 1790, they secured the permanent site of the federal capital on the Potomac River, Virginia's northern boundary, and a very favorable system of calculating the states' debts that ultimately made the Old Dominion a creditor of the federal government instead of—what it deserved to be—a significant debtor.

Secretary Hamilton differed from the other significant officers of the executive branch in having been born abroad. Since he had no felt affinity for any particular state, but was instead a patriotic American, Hamilton could see the interests of America generally in a way that few other Americans of his day could. Thus, the idea of having the federal government assume the states' debts, an obvious expedient for improving the country's creditworthiness, did not strike him as especially dangerous; localism or particularism simply did not factor into his mental makeup.

Once the federal government had assumed the state debts, a question arose concerning the extent to which the government debts should be repaid. Hamilton argued in favor of redeeming the government's debt instruments at face value, because to pay less than face value likely would affect American credit adversely. Hamilton's opponents, led by Representative James Madison, called this proposal unfair, and they said that only the original holders of wartime debt instruments should be able to redeem them at face value. Hamilton called his opponent's schemes for discriminating among debt holders impractical, besides potentially ruinous to the new government's fiscal reputation, and he won the debate in Congress.

Hamilton also wanted to follow the British government in funding the government's debt—-that is, in providing a perpetual stream of government income dedicated to payment of the interest on the government's debt. His opponents considered this a maneuver to give the Treasury influence over the financial markets, thus over the Congress, and argued against the idea.

constitutional issues, slavery, and rebellion

For some other leading players in American politics, the vector of Hamilton's policies seemed dangerous. Thus, when his bank bill came before Congress, Madison stood up in the House to argue against its constitutionality. There was no clause of the Constitution granting Congress power to charter a bank, or indeed a corporation of any kind, Madison noted. Madison said that only the enumerated powers were granted. Thus, he concluded, Congress had no power to charter a bank.

When the matter came before President Washington, he expressed his doubts on the question of constitutionality. Having Madison's objections in mind, the president asked his cabinet for written opinions. Jefferson, in a classic "strict constructionist" essay, essentially repeated his friend Madison's argument. Washington passed it on to Hamilton.

In his response, which subsequently formed the basis of Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in the crucial Supreme Court case of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Hamilton spelled out the "broad constructionist" reading of the Constitution. If the ends were clearly constitutional, Hamilton counseled, and the means were not prohibited, the means were permissible. Thus, he concluded, Congress's bill to charter the bank was constitutional. Washington, who sympathized strongly with Hamilton's financial goals for the government, signed the bill into law.

Hamilton also proposed that the federal government should adopt various excise taxes as part of its fiscal plan. Among the items he proposed to tax were carriages and whiskey. Both would become significant flash points.

Lurking behind the growth of organized opposition to the Washington administration, which historians generally date to 1793, was concern about the effect of Hamilton's approach to the Constitution on the future of slavery. As early as the First Congress, southern congressmen expressed grave concerns about slavery's future in the federal Union. Virginia pamphleteer John Taylor of Caroline linked the issue to concerns about the excise on carriages.

The carriage tax, Taylor said, was unconstitutional and unjust. He rested his claims concerning the tax's unconstitutionality on Madison's reasoning in the bank bill debate: there was no express grant of power to levy a carriage tax in the Constitution, and the Tenth Amendment stated that all undelegated powers remained in the states; therefore, only the states could tax carriages. His claim of injustice reflected the tax's sectional incidence: significant planters throughout Tidewater Virginia owned carriages, he said, but only two people in the entire state of Connecticut owned taxable carriages. Thus, Congress had chosen an item possessed almost entirely by people in one region to tax. If this precedent were allowed to stand, Taylor warned, there was another type of property whose owners lived principally in one part of the country; he did not have to say that he was referring to slaves.

In July 1794, opposition to federal excises took a far less refined form. The Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania saw violence launched against federal excise agents. In response Washington, at Hamilton's urging, amassed a force of fifteen thousand militiamen to enforce the federal law and mounted his horse at their head. Hamilton's purpose, besides cowing the opponents of what remained an experimental federal government, was to prove to European observers that the United States would take energetic measures, even use the military, to enforce its taxes.

The Whiskey Rebellion dissipated quickly in the face of Washington and, once the army had reached some distance from New York, Hamilton, but its effects were long lasting. It cemented for the administration's opponents what they had long suspected: that the Treasury secretary wanted to convert the Republic into an empire.

foreign policy

Understanding that suspicion requires understanding the international context of the Washington administration. In 1789, the same year the new Constitution took effect, the French Revolution began. At first, Americans sympathized with what they understood to be a move toward constitutional monarchy in the country that had aided them indispensably in securing their independence. Soon, however, the French king was overthrown, then executed; his wife and thousands of noblemen and clergymen followed him to the guillotine; Christianity was outlawed in France; and the new republic attacked all of its neighbors.

The chief dividing line in American politics, namely over constitutional interpretation (especially federalism), coincided with a principled division over foreign policy. In general, advocates of an energetic federal government, like Washington and Hamilton, favored neutrality in the European wars, while those who tended to favor the idea that legislative powers had been reserved to the states favored the French.

Hamilton's advocacy of neutrality had two bases: growing revulsion with the French Revolution and recognition that the financial prospects of the new government rested on a stable relationship with Britain, America's chief trading partner. On the other hand Madison, Jefferson, and their fellows believed that America owed France a moral debt for its assistance in the Revolution, considered the treaty of alliance signed in 1778 legally binding despite France's change of government, and sympathized with French efforts to establish a republic over first the objections, then the violent opposition, of other European nations.

Hamilton did not help matters with his repeated observations, in private settings and in political gatherings (most notably the Philadelphia Convention of 1787), concerning the great merits of the British Constitution. Jefferson, on the other hand, maintained an astounding equanimity as a number of his friends suffered death at the hands of French revolutionary authorities. Vice President Adams, too, told the two Virginia senators that the United States would soon find it necessary to establish a monarchy, fanning the flames of Republican suspicion.

For Jefferson, then, Hamilton's financial measures, explicitly modeled on those of Britain, smacked of monarchism; for Hamilton, Jefferson's and Madison's opposition to the Washington administration was "Jacobinical" (after the most radical, bloodiest, most warlike faction in the French Revolution). Hamilton had his way in 1793, when the European conflict elicited Washington's Proclamation of Neutrality over Jefferson's vociferous objections. Despite the treaty of 1778, any American who assisted either side would be prosecuted. Republicans were furious.

Jay's Treaty. Reactions to the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 perfectly summed up the situation on both sides, as Jefferson brooded concerning Hamilton's militaristic intentions for America and Hamilton gloried in the opportunity to employ the federal government in intimidating lawless Jeffersonian tax dodgers. The following year, Chief Justice John Jay returned from England with the treaty that soon would be known by his name. Passed on by President Washington to the Senate in secret, then ratified in executive session, Jay's Treaty seemed to implement the program Jefferson had feared of making the United States the tail of the British dog. Americans had chafed over British restrictions on American trade and over impressments of American sailors into the Royal Navy, and the treaty that Jay brought home did nothing about those complaints. It also forswore any American intention to use differential tariff rates to coerce Britain economically—a favorite scheme of Madison's.

What Jay did achieve, on the other hand, was a firm British commitment instantly to withdraw from military bases in the Old Northwest, along with a binding mutual obligation to maintain peace in an international environment that bade fair to draw the two Anglophone countries into armed conflict. From Washington's point of view, as from Jay's and Hamilton's, the essential point was that America remain aloof from European wars for another fifteen to twenty years, after which it could—to borrow a phrase—bid defiance to all the world.

The Democratic Republican opposition staged popular protests throughout the country upon learning the particulars of Jay's Treaty. Washington's acceptance of it made even him anathema to his administration's opponents. Although Jefferson and Hamilton had long since left his cabinet, only to be replaced by far lesser figures, they remained the guiding lights of their respective parties. Jefferson was happy to see the Democratic Republican clubs that supported him mushroom in the days after Jay's Treaty, and John Jay said that he could have walked from Charleston, South Carolina, to Boston by the light of his burning effigies.

farewell address

The partisan press, launched by Jefferson and Madison and somewhat effectively countered by Hamilton and his supporters, tore into Jay's Treaty. Washington, who had thought of retirement in 1792, determined that he had certainly had enough by 1796. He went to Hamilton for assistance in composing a farewell address.

That address, published in September 1796, served as a valedictory. Americans must maintain a strong union of the states, Washington wrote. Sectionalism in politics threatened the breakup of the United States, according to the retiring president. Washington also cautioned against entanglement in foreign alliances; neutrality was the best policy for a weak young country that must soon wax very strong. He also averred that the proper role of the average person in republican politics was to help in electing officials, then to let them run the country.

Washington's administration was very successful. The federal government's three branches were organized on lasting bases. The financial system established by Washington, with Hamilton's able assistance, made America fiscally stable and put the federal government at the financial center of what had always been a state-centered political culture—and would remain so for many decades to come. The Washington administration's policy of neutrality in international affairs was prudent, despite the heated insistence of Secretary of State Jefferson that America lend its slight weight to the feckless and sanguinary course of the French Revolution. Most important, Washington left office voluntarily, thus establishing a precedent that all of his successors have been bound to follow, whether they wanted to or not.

bibliography

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Elkins, Stanley, and Eric McKitrick. The Age of Federalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

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Leibiger, Stuart. Founding Friendship: George Washington, James Madison, and the Creation of the American Republic. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

McDonald, Forrest. The Presidency of George Washington. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974.

——. Alexander Hamilton: A Biography. New York: Norton, 1979.

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Walling, Karl-Friedrich. Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999.

Kevin R. C. Gutzman

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation