Washington's End by Jonathan Horn

Author:Jonathan Horn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2020-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

I. The academy would soon become Washington College and eventually Washington and Lee University.

CHAPTER ELEVEN Washington Sinks

The pleas to return to public life never ceased. Friends dangled every conceivable office. Finally, in 1799, they offered a post from which they said he could “correct” the “abuses” associated with “executive powers,” a post for which he must surrender the “enviable… domestic life” he had found in the Virginia countryside. If elected, he could not refuse. To the governorship of Virginia, James Monroe would say yes.

Federalists, of course, would oppose the nomination. They wished “to exclude from offices” any man willing to stand against their corruption, any man who proved “honest and inflexible,” the very words Monroe used to describe himself. Already Federalists acting through their patron George Washington had excluded Monroe once before by recalling him in 1796 from his post as a minister to France (a country whose culture he loved almost as much as his own) all because he had cherished the relationship with America’s fellow republic. For this crime, the Federalists fabricated sensational stories about Monroe’s misdeeds abroad. They said he had shown disrespect during an obligatory toast to George Washington at a Fourth of July celebration in Paris.

It was James Madison who would defend Monroe against these charges in the Virginia assembly, which would choose the next governor. In early December, Madison asked Monroe for evidence that he had intended no insult to Washington at the celebration. Monroe had not; in fact, he had drunk to Washington’s name, even as less polite lips had hissed. Not that Monroe had blamed them. Only for so long would people continue to “dance” on Washington’s “birth night” and call him and his friends “great & good men” without noticing what they truly were: “little people.”

Surely, Washington would not wish to insert himself into the gubernatorial election. If for some reason he did, however, Monroe would meet the challenge. He had once scripted out what he would say to the old man if given the chance. “Your military career gained you the unreserved confidence of your countrymen, and your political career availed itself of that confidence for the purpose of oppressing them. It was the unceasing effort of your administration to wrest the government from the people and place it in the hands of an oligarchic faction.… If I were to select out from the general & comprehensive roll of your fellow citizens the person who had done most harm to his country for eight or ten years past, it would be yourself. Others had the will and did all the harm they could, but unaided by you, their efforts had been impotent and vain.”

Not even Washington, however, could save the Federalists from their greatest foe: themselves. “The more… that party is left to itself, the sooner will its ruin follow,” Monroe had told his mentor, Thomas Jefferson, the year before during the height of the war hysteria. “The administration will overwhelm itself by its folly & madness.” The currents that had carried the Federalists to power would soon sweep them from it.

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