“Impeach President Washington!” (Fall 2017 | Volume: 62, Issue: 5)

“Impeach President Washington!”

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Authors: Michael Beschloss

Historic Era: Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)

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Fall 2017 | Volume 62, Issue 5

 

While attending the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Washington ordered a "dove of peace" weathervane which still sits atop Mount Vernon. His two terms as President, however, would not always be peaceful.
While attending the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Washington ordered a "dove of peace" weathervane which still sits atop Mount Vernon. His two terms as president, however, would not always be peaceful.

In August 1795, at Mount Vernon, as the rains pelted his red shingle roof, spinning the dove-of-peace weathervane, George Washington bent over his candlelit desk, dipped a quill in black ink and tensely scratched out letter after letter. He was feeling “serious anxiety” in a time of “trouble and perplexities.” 

For twenty years, since the start of the Revolution, he had taken as his due the bands playing “The Hero Comes!” and the lightstruck Americans cheering “the man who unites all hearts,” but now the national adoration for Washington was fading. Americans had learned that a secret treaty negotiated by his envoy John Jay made demands that many found humiliating. One member of Congress said the fury against “that damned treaty” was moving “like an electric velocity to every state in the Union.” 

Even in Virginia, veterans of the Revolution cried, “A speedy Death to General Washington!”

As the public tempest had swelled, some wanted Washington impeached. Cartoons showed the President being marched to a guillotine. Even in the President’s beloved Virginia, Revolutionary veterans raised glasses and cried, “A speedy Death to General Washington!”  Reeling from the blows, the sixty-three-year-old Washington wrote that the “infamous scribblers” were calling him “a common pickpocket” in “such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero.” 

In the spring of 1794, the British were arming Indians and spurring them to attack Americans trying to settle the new frontier lands that would one day include Ohio and Michigan. London was reneging on its pledge, made in the peace treaty ending the Revolutionary War, to vacate royal forts in the trans-Appalachian West—Oswego, Niagara, Detroit, Michilimackinac.

Washington choose Chief Justice John Hay to negotiate a treaty with Britain to avoid war.
Washington choose Chief Justice John Hay to negotiate a treaty with Britain to avoid war.

Because Britain was at war with France, British captains seized U.S. ships trading with the French West Indies. Renouncing the agreed-upon border between the U.S. and Canada, Britain’s governor in Quebec predicted a new Anglo-American war “within a year.” Former Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who hated England and adored France, demanded retaliation against the British. But Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton warned the President not to plunge into a war that America could not win.

The British were arming Indians, and spurring them to attack frontier settlements in what is now Ohio and Michigan.

Hamilton urged him to send an “envoy extraordinary” to London. A new Anglo-American treaty could secure U.S. trade on the Atlantic