Everyone loved George Washington, until he became president
Seven years later, toward the end of his second term, he was so disliked that the House voted against adjourning for 30 minutes to wish him well on his birthday.
Nowadays, Washington’s birthday is officially recognized, but when he was alive, his legacy was very nearly ruined by his presidency. Historian Alexis Coe describes how and why in her new book, “You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington.”
“He had every reason to stay home as far as his personal preferences, what his wife wanted and his position in the world,” Coe recently told The Washington Post. “He had everything to lose by going into the presidency. And in some ways, he did.”
The first big problem was how frequently he was caught in the middle of infighting between the two nascent political parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. His Cabinet members were split between the two, and the infighting did not stay behind closed doors. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson funded a newspaper that criticized Washington’s every move, while Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton wrote under a pseudonym for a pro-Washington paper.
Although Washington never declared a party affiliation, only Federalists remained in his administration in his second term.
And that second term, which he had to be persuaded to even bother with, was when things got really bad.
Great Britain and France were at war, and both empires wanted the United States to side with them. At the same time, tensions between the United States and Britain were rising because Britain still had not withdrawn from forts it had agreed to vacate at the end of the Revolutionary War, and it was seizing American ships and sailors bound for France.
Of course, it didn’t help that France’s new ambassador to the United States went on a speaking tour up the East Coast to whip up support for the French, Coe writes. By then, the capital had moved to Philadelphia. Vice President John Adams later wrote that the French ambassador had incited “ten thousand People in the Streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threaten[ing] to drag Washington out of his House, and effect a Revolution in the Government.”
Then there was the Whiskey Rebellion debacle. To pay back foreign debt, Hamilton had proposed a tax on whiskey from Kentucky and western Pennsylvania. Distillers worried it would decrease sales and thought it was unfair that they take on the burden for the whole country.
“In an extraordinary show of executive overreach,” Coe writes, Washington called the state militia to federal service. He showed up in Pittsburgh in a military uniform to lead the charge against the tax opponents, becoming “the first and only president to take up arms against his own citizens.”
But there was no confrontation. Washington thought the better of it and returned to Philadelphia. When two insurrectionists were convicted of treason, he pardoned them, but the damage to his reputation had been done.
John Adams in 1812: “Too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station and reputation.” (Washington was largely self-taught but not illiterate or unlearned.)
And here’s Thomas Paine in a letter to Washington in 1779: “I shall never suffer a hint of dishonor or even a deficiency of respect to you to pass unnoticed.”
And in 1796: “The world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.”
Washington’s Farewell Address has become famous for warning Americans against political factions and foreign influence. Earlier drafts of the speech also show him railing against “malicious falsehoods” spread about him “to misrepresent my politics and affections; to wound my reputation and feelings.” Hamilton encouraged him to cut that part because he sounded too bitter.
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