By an Associate.
Continuing the narrative that began here.
But of course Hamilton was restrained by no considerations of inconspicuousness, and he took on the management of Washington’s campaign with his accustomed vigor. The result, as readers will recall, was that the people overwhelmingly returned electors for Washington, and his presidency continued for another four years. These years, however, were marked by more difficulties than Washington had expected to meet, and he was forced to confront, on occasion, the unaccustomed sensation of not being universally loved.
One of the most severe tests of his resolve was the Whiskey Rebellion, which enraged Hamilton to such a degree that I thought the man might succumb to apoplexy. A tax having been placed on ardent spirits, certain men in the western part of Pennsylvania, where rye whiskey was the staple food, refused to submit to the collection of it, and had even attacked some of the gentlemen charged with the collecting. Hamilton persuaded Washington to put him in command of a body of soldiers to be sent across the mountains to crush the rebellion, and the enthusiasm with which he planned his campaign was startling to see.
“Of course they must be crushed utterly,” Hamilton said as he explained his plan to Susanna and me. “My strategy will be to come upon them with overwhelming force, thus teaching them that the United States Tax Code is not to be trifled with. I shall besiege and take Pittsburgh, burn the city to ashes, slaughter all the male inhabitants, and distribute the females as prizes to the soldiers. Once we have made an example of the largest settlement in those parts, the terror thus inspired will doubtless induce the rebels to submit forthwith, after which they can be sold as slaves to the islands in the Caribbean. Thus we shall establish the principle that the rule of law prevails in these United States.”
Susanna said nothing, and I was mildly surprised when Hamilton left the room without a blackened eye. But the next day, when we were with Washington, Susanna made a suggestion that ultimately had the effect of changing the aspect of the expedition considerably.
“Do you not think, sir, that as commander in chief of the army, you have a duty to take charge of this expedition yourself?”
“A duty? I had not thought of it, but…”
“The United States need their greatest military mind at this time of crisis,” said Susanna. “It is time for President Washington to don the buff and blue and become General Washington once more.”
“My word, Phillips, you’re right! I must see my tailor.”
Hamilton was furious at this change of plans, but of course he could say nothing against it. Washington visited his tailor—he now measured just under seventeen feet tall—and as soon as his new uniform was ready, we set out (for he insisted on having Susanna and me with him) to cross the Alleghenies.
Civilization had made great progress since our expeditions against the French many years before. At the flourishing town of Bedford in Pennsylvania, we met up with Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a prominent judge and literary man of Pittsburgh, who had come to meet Washington along the way in the hope of working out some peaceful resolution to the crisis. This Judge Brackenridge was a man famous for his wit, whose very amusing books had reached me in Alexandria, and I was glad of the opportunity to make his personal acquaintance.
We put up for the evening in a newly built inn west of Bedford, whose ample interior was just large enough to accommodate Washington if he stooped when he stood. Susanna and I having been distracted in our chamber, we arrived late to dinner, and came in just in time to hear Brackenridge finishing one of his amusing stories.
“And I replied, ‘I know what you mean very well; you want to have a shot at me, but I have no inclination to hit you, and I am afraid you would hit me; I pray thee therefore have me excused.’ ”
I had heard only the end of the story, but it must have been very clever, as the rest of the company were laughing boisterously—all, that is, except for Washington, who sat impassive, looking indeed very dignified, but not even smiling. I saw that Brackenridge was watching Washington’s reaction, and I could see in Brackenridge’s countenance the determination to make the great man laugh; his pride was hurt, and he was going to try harder. I ought to have taken him aside on some pretext and explained to him the peculiar nature of Washington’s sense of humor, but these things, alas! are clear in hindsight alone.
“Which reminds me,” Brackenridge continued, “of the story of the Indian-treaty man and his king of the Kickapoos”; and thus began a very amusing anecdote which had the whole company helpless with laughter—all, of course, but Washington, whose expression of serene benevolence did not change in the least.
That failure spurred Brackenridge to even greater efforts, and tears were running down the cheeks of most of the guests by the time he had finished with his tale of a hard-fought election in the west country of Pennsylvania. But Washington was not moved, and Brackenridge would not accept failure, until at last he had worn himself out and us as well. Washington thanked him for his very informative discourse, and I think Brackenridge was near ready to bite his own tongue off in frustration.
The long table was cleared and then made up to serve as Washington’s bed; Susanna and I went upstairs to our own chamber, extinguished the light, and never once considered the dreadful danger that awaited us.
Some time after midnight I was awakened by a thunderous crash that shook the bed. It had been more than ten years since Yorktown, but my first thought was that a cannon had gone off quite nearby. Then I heard whooping and pounding, and I knew that the long fuse ignited by Brackenridge earlier had at last reached the keg. Washington was laughing, and the sheer number of Brackenridge’s anecdotes, jokes, and aphorisms had led to an explosion of titanic proportions.
Susanna was already out of bed and had managed to light a candle in what was left of the fire. Another loud crash, and the whole floor shook, and then more whoops and howls, and a series of rapid hammerings that caused the whole inn to quake.
“Can you do anything?” Susanna asked me as she pulled on a robe.
“You know as well as I do that nothing can stop him once the fit is upon him.”
Suddenly the house shook in a very alarming way. Washington was whooping and laughing, and now shouts from elsewhere in the inn had joined the appalling din.
“I wonder whether we ought—” Susanna began, but she was interrupted by an extended crashing and smashing sound, as if a whole china cupboard had fallen over.
“You go see whether you can stop him, or get him outside,” Susanna told me. “I’ll go get—”
There was another cataclysmic crash, and the ominous sound of creaking and splintering wood.
“Go!” Susanna shouted. “I’ll get the rest out!”
I dashed out into the hall, where I found the other guests, or at least a good many of them, up and in an advanced state of panic. Another crash rocked the house, and toppled several of the guests in the hall; and when we regained our footing, the floor was on a pronounced bias. Susanna was urging the rest down the stairs; I seized a candle from one of them and ran down ahead of the group. As I reached the bottom of the stairway, a huge beam fell in the front parlor, sending plaster dust billowing though the whole ground floor. The pounding and crashing and whooping continued as I dashed back to the end of the hall and into the great dining-room, which looked like Lisbon after the earthquake. The table had fallen to the floor, most of the chairs were piles of splinters, and a great cabinet filled with china and glassware lay in a field of shards of all colors. There were holes in the walls, and the outer wall looked dangerously skewed. And Washington was still howling, kicking, and pounding. “Ten dollars for your scalp!” he bellowed, and then fell over so that his head crashed through the wall into the front parlor, his feet meanwhile kicking holes in the planks of the floor.
“Washington!” I shouted. “Come out before the house comes down!”
“They tarred and feathered the turkey!” he howled, rolling over and taking a good bit of the wall with him. This was too much for the floor above, which began to sag with an appalling ripping and cracking sound.
“Washington! Washington, the ceiling is collapsing!”
But Washington was still in the grip of his fit. Years earlier I might have dragged him out, but he had long since passed the dimensions where that was possible.
Suddenly a beam came down, and another beside it, just missing both of us and lying diagonally with one end of each on the floor and the other above us supported by the outside wall. And I do verily believe those beams saved both our lives, for now the whole house was coming down around us. It was the closest I have ever come to Armageddon, and it seemed to go on for hours, though I suppose it must have been less than a minute. Only the fallen beams above us, and the fragment of floor they supported, kept us from being crushed. It was only a temporary reprieve, however; for now the pile of rubble that once was an inn had caught fire, and we were trapped. I tried shouting, but I could not make myself heard over the din of Washington’s laughter. Fortunately he was still pounding and kicking, and the rubble in his pedal regions was flying in all directions. But for some bruises and cuts, I was not injured, and I was able to add my efforts to clear a passage, which were augmented by the efforts of the escaped guests outside; and before the flames could reach us, we were safely out of the wreckage, with Susanna clinging to me and kissing my scratches, and Washington now reduced to helpless sniggering. We were without shelter, but the burning inn sufficed to keep us warm.
The next morning there was nothing left of the inn but two stone chimneys and some fragments of charred wood clinging to them. But Washington made sure to attach one of his brass plaques to the remains. It is still in place today, so that if, on the road west of Bedford, you stop to examine the picturesque ruin now slowly being reclaimed by the devouring woods, you may learn that once upon a time George Washington slept there.
The end of the Whiskey Rebellion was something of an anticlimax. Washington, who enjoyed the trappings of war but preferred wars in which no one was seriously hurt, summoned the leaders of the rebellion to a parley. They came prepared to defy him, but they did not come prepared for his size. The appearance of a seventeen-foot Washington at the parley routed all opposition. Washington pardoned everyone, heard their grievances, and promised to ask Congress to consider them; but meanwhile he desired them to give him no reason to come back with an even more overwhelming force. They assured him that they had no desire to see him there again, and thus the matter was ended.
It might have been a happier time for Washington if all the crises of his administration had been so easily resolved. Partisan strife, however, began to creep into our government, and some in Congress were looking for excuses to oppose President Washington. They found one in the secret treaty negotiated by the mysterious John J., who always refused to reveal his surname even to his most intimate acquaintances, and responded to every attempt at guessing the name with an enigmatic smile. This treaty granted certain concessions to the British, and congressmen were not uniformly happy with all its provisions, raising questions especially about the clause granting any British ship the right to make rude gestures at any American ship without reprisals in kind. The Congress demanded to see the notes and memoranda generated by the President and his associates on the subject of the treaty. Washington quite correctly replied that there were no notes or memoranda: when he thought something ought to be done, he did it.
But then, somehow, the fact of Mr. Shelton’s secret recordings came to light—I have always suspected that Hamilton had something to do with it, but I have no proof—and Congress began to demand the president’s secret “tapes.” These Washington steadfastly refused to turn over, saying that it was the privilege of the executive to keep his private deliberations secret. Eventually, however, he agreed to have the relevant tapes transcribed (for he would not lose his originals). This course of action quelled the complaints for a time until it was found that, in one of the transcriptions which most interested the men in Congress, there was a gap of eighteen and a half pages, and that Mr. Shelton could not account for how he had lost the corresponding section of “tape.”
Thus the latter part of Washington’s presidency was filled with wrangling and vituperation, neither of which came naturally to the great man. And that is why, though it surprised the country and the world, Washington’s decision not to seek a third term did not surprise me.
“Hamilton,” he told Susanna and me, “has drafted an address for me, in which I shall announce my decision and offer a few parting words of wisdom to the people of my country. It will be good to have done with this business.”
At the mention of Hamilton’s name, Susanna’s ears seemed to move forward. “I should very much like to see this address,” she said, and Washington was happy to oblige her. Having read a few lines, she told him, “If you would like, I could give this a thorough perusal and correct a few trifling errors which have crept into the text, doubtless owing to the haste of the composition.”
“Oh, yes, Phillips, that would be very kind of you,” Washington replied; and so we ended by taking Mr. Hamilton’s manuscript home with us, where Susanna sat down and began running long lines through whole paragraphs of text.
“What are you doing?” I asked her.
“I am making a few trifling corrections,” she replied. “For example, here, where it says, ‘You must destroy their name from under heaven; you must put every male to the sword; you must leave nothing that breathes alive’—I am correcting it so that it does not say that.”
“I suppose Hamilton’s text admits of some improvement,” I said.
“I have also removed some specific references to Mr. Jefferson in which his parentage is called into question.”
“Probably a prudent alteration.”
“And the section that compares Mr. Adams to the back end of certain domestic animals has been struck out as well.”
“I’m sure Washington will be grateful to you for your diligence.”
And so Washington’s farewell address appeared in a somewhat milder form than that in which Hamilton had prepared it, but it was generally well received all the same. When he delivered it in public, however, Washington added one paragraph of his own which did not generally appear in the published versions of the address, and so I reproduce it here:
“It is also essential that you resist to the utmost degree the baneful influence of certain members of the animal kingdom, who, though they may not be visible in the strict sense, are, you may be sure, working incessantly to undermine the system of government, and the individual liberties, which we have labored so assiduously to obtain, and which are the most precious inheritance of our children. In warning you against the machinations of malevolent invisible animals, I am certain I give you no new information; but it is my hope that my words may remain in your memory, perhaps to recur to your minds at a time when their influence will be most profitable.”
The night before he turned over the presidency to Mr. Adams, Washington had a supper with a few of his most intimate friends; and, after the rest had gone, he desired that Susanna and I remain a while longer. Having poured us each another glass of Madeira, he told us, “I shall, of course, be retiring to Mount Vernon; and it would please me very much if I could have the assistance of both of you in maintaining the estate, which I intend to run as a model of a plantation managed on rational principles. I plan to leave some of it forested for game, and I believe you, Gist, would be the very man to take care of that; and I thought I could put Phillips in charge of the slaves. I hope I am not asking too much of you, but the fact is that it would cheer me greatly to see two of my oldest friends often on the grounds, and—Gist, do you think Phillips needs a thump on the back? He seems to be choking on his Madeira.”
To be continued in Chapter XV.