George Washington, Volume II

by Henry Cabot Lodge

On the southern frontier there were no such fortunate results. While Washington was negotiating and fighting in the north and west, all his patient efforts were frustrated in the south by the conduct of Georgia. The borderers kept assailing the Indians, peaceful tribes being generally chosen for the purpose; and the State itself broke through and disregarded all treaties and all arrangements made by the United States. The result was constant disquiet and chronic war, with the usual accompaniments of fire, murder, and pillage.

On the whole, however, when Washington left the presidency, his Indian policy had been a marked success. In place of uncertainty and weakness, a definite general system had been adopted. The northern and western tribes had been beaten and pacified, and the southern incursions and disorders had been much checked. The British posts, the most dangerous centres of Indian intrigue, had been abandoned, and the great regions of the west and northwest had been opened to the tide of settlement. These results were due to a well-defined plan, and above all to the persistent vigor which pushed steadily forward to its object without swinging, as had been done before, between feverish and often misdirected activity on the one side and complete and feeble inaction on the other. They were achieved, too, amid many difficulties, for there was anything but a unanimous support of the government in its Indian affairs. The opposition grumbled at the expense, and said that money needlessly raised by taxation was squandered in Indian wars, while the great body of the people, living safely along the eastern coast, thought but little about the frontier. Some persons took the sentimental view and considered the government barbarous to make causeless war. Others believed that altogether too much of the public time and money were wasted in looking after outlying settlements. The borderers themselves, on the other hand, thought that the general government was in league with the savages, and broke through treaties, and destroyed so far as they could the national policy. St. Clair was hissed and jeered as he traveled home, but a wakeful opposition turned from the unsuccessful general to a vain attempt to prove that ambushed savages and sleeping sentries were due to a weak war department and a corrupt and inefficient treasury. The mass of moderate people, no doubt, desired tranquillity on the frontier, and sustained the President's labors for that end, but for the most part they were silent. The voices that Washington heard most loudly joined in a discordant chorus of disapproval around his Indian policy. No one understood that here was an important part of a scheme to build up a nation, to make all the movements of the United States broad and national, and to open the vast west to the people who were to make it theirs. Washington heard all the criticism and saw all the opposition, and still pressed forward to his goal, not attaining all he wished, but fighting in a very clear and manful spirit, and not laboring in vain.

The Indian question in its management touched, as has been seen, at various points our financial policy and our foreign relations, on which the history of the country really turned in those years. The latter had not risen to their later importance when the government began, but the former was knocking importunately at the door of Congress when it first assembled. The condition of affairs is soon told. The Revolution narrowly escaped shipwreck on the financial reefs, and the shaky government of the confederation had there gone to pieces. The country, as a political organism, was bankrupt. It owed sums of money, which were vast in amount for those days, both at home and abroad, and it could not pay these debts, nor was there any provision for them. All interest was in arrears, there were no means provided for meeting it, and the national credit everywhere was dishonored and gone. The continental currency had disappeared, and the circulating medium was represented by a confused jumble of foreign coins and worthless scrip. Many of the States were up to their eyes in schemes of inflation, paper money, and repudiation. There was no money in the treasury to pay the ordinary charges of government; there was no revenue and no policy for raising one, or for funding the debt. This picture is darkly drawn, but it is not exaggerated. That high spirit of public honor, which seventy-five years later rose above the ravages of war and the temptings of dishonesty to pay the debt and the interest, dollar for dollar in gold, seemed in 1789 to be wellnigh extinct. But it was not dead. It was confused and overclouded in the minds of the people, but it was still there, and it was strong, clear, and determined in Washington and those who followed him.

Congress grappled with the financial difficulties in the most courageous and honest way, but it struggled with them rather helplessly despite its good disposition. It could lay taxes in one way or another so as to get money, but this was plainly insufficient. It could not formulate a coherent policy, which was the one essential thing, nor could it settle the thousand and one perplexing questions which hedged the subject on every side. The members turned, therefore, with a sigh of relief to the new Secretary of the Treasury, asked him the questions which were troubling them, and having directed him to make various reports, adjourned.

The result is well known. The great statesman to whom the task was confided assumed it with the boldness and ease of conscious power, and when Congress reassembled it listened to the first report on the public credit. In that great state paper all the confusions disappeared, and in terse sentences an entire scheme for funding the debt, disposing of the worthless currency, and raising the necessary revenue came out clear and distinct, so that all men could comprehend it. The provision for the foreign debt passed without resistance. That for the domestic debt excited much debate, and also passed. Last came the assumption of the state debts, and over that there sprang up a fierce struggle. It was carried by a narrow majority, and then defeated by the votes of the North Carolina members, who had just taken their seats. Washington strongly favored this hotly contested measure. He defended it in a letter to David Stuart, and again to Jefferson, at a later time, when that statesman was trying to undermine Hamilton by wailing about a "corrupt squadron" in Congress.

To Washington, assumption seemed as obviously just as it does to posterity. All the debts had been incurred in a common cause, he said, why should they not be cared for by the common government? He had no patience with the sectional argument that assumption was unfair, because some States got more out of it than others. Some States had suffered more than others, but all shared in the freedom that had been won.[¹] He saw in it, moreover, as Hamilton had seen, something far more important than a mere provision for the debts and for the payment of money to this community or to that. Assumption was essentially a union measure. The other debts were incurred by the central government directly, but the state debts were incurred by the States for a common cause. If the United States assumed them, it showed to the people and to the world that there were no state lines when the interests of the whole country were involved. It was therefore a national measure, a breeder of national sentiment, a new bond to fasten the States to each other and to the Union. This was enough to assure Washington's hearty approval; but the measure was saved and carried finally by the famous arrangement between Hamilton and Jefferson, which took the capital to the Potomac and made the war debts of the States a part of the national debt. Washington was more than satisfied with this solution, for both sides of the agreement pleased him, and there was nothing in the compromise which meant sacrifice on his part. He rejoiced in the successful adoption of the great financial policy of his administration, and he was much pleased to have the capital, in which he was intensely interested, placed near to his own Mount Vernon, in the very region he would have selected if he had had the power of fixing it.

[Footnote 1: [(return)] Sparks, Writings of Washington, x. 98.]

The next great step in the development of the financial policy was the establishment of the national bank, and on this there arose another bitter contest in Congress and in the newspapers. A sharp opposition had developed by this time, and the supporters of the Secretary of the Treasury became on their side correspondingly ardent. In this debate much stress was laid on the constitutional point that Congress had no power to charter a bank. Nevertheless, the bill passed and went to the President, with the constitutional doubts following it and pressed home in this last resort. As has been seen from his letters written just after the Philadelphia convention, Washington was not a blind worshiper of the Constitution which he had helped so largely to make; but he believed it would work, and every day confirmed his belief. He felt, moreover, that one great element of its lasting success lay in creating a genuine reverence for it among the people, and it was therefore of the utmost importance that this reverence should begin among those to whom the management of the government had been intrusted. For this reason he exercised a jealous care in everything touching the organic law of the Union, and he was peculiarly sensitive to constitutional objections to any given measure. In the case of the national bank, the objections were strongly as well as vigorously urged, and Washington paused, before signing, to the utmost limit of the time allowed. He turned to Jefferson and Randolph, both opposed to the bill, and asked them for their objections to its constitutionality. They gave him in response two able reports. These he sent to Hamilton, who returned them with that most masterly argument, in which he not only defended the bank charter, but vindicated, in a manner never afterwards surpassed, the new doctrine of the implied powers of the Constitution. With both sides thus before him, Washington considered the question, and signed the bill.

Rives, in his "Life of Madison," intimates that Washington had doubts even after signing, but of this there is no evidence of any weight. He was not a man who indulged in doubts after he had made up his mind and rendered a decision, and it was not in his nature to fret over what had been done and was past, whether in war or peace. The story that he was worried about his action in this instance arose from his delay in signing, and from the disappointment of those who had hoped much from his hesitation. This pause, however, was both natural and characteristic. Washington had approved Morris's bank policy in the Revolution, and remembered the service it rendered. He was familiar with Hamilton's views on the subject, and knew that they were the result of long study and careful thought. He must also have known that any financial policy devised by his Secretary of the Treasury would contain as an integral part a national bank. There can be no doubt that both the plan for the bank and the report which embodied it were submitted to him before they went in to Congress, but the violence of the objections raised there on constitutional grounds awakened his attention in a new direction. He saw at once the gravity of a question, which involved not merely the incorporation of a bank, but which opened up a new field of constitutional powers and constitutional construction. When such far-reaching results were involved he paused and reflected, and, as was always the case with him under such circumstances, listened to and examined all the arguments on both sides. This done he decided, and with his national feeling he could not have decided otherwise than he did. The doctrine of the implied powers of the Constitution was the greatest weapon possible for those whose leading thought was to develop the union of States into a great and imperial nation; and we may well believe that it was this feeling, and not merely faith in the bank as a financial engine, which led Washington to sign the bill. When he did so he assented to the charter of a national bank, but he also assented to the doctrine of the implied powers and gave to that far-reaching construction of the Constitution the great weight of his name and character. It was, perhaps, the most important single act of his presidency.

It is impossible here, even were it necessary, to follow Washington's action in regard to all the details which went to make up and to sustain Hamilton's policy, to which, as a whole, Washington gave his hearty approval and support. The revenue system, the public lands, the arrangement of loans, the mint, all alike met with his active concurrence. He was too great a man not to value rightly Hamilton's work, and the way in which that work brought order, credit, honor, and prosperity out of a chaos of debt and bankruptcy appealed peculiarly to his own love for method, organization, and sound business principles. He met every criticism on Hamilton's policy without concession, and defended it when it was attacked. To Hamilton's genius that policy must be credited, but it gained its success and strength largely from the firm support of Washington.