Sons of the Father: George Washington and His Protégés

“General Washington Did Not Harbor One Principle of Federalism”

From the earliest decade of the nineteenth century, Americans have always wanted to have their George Washington and their Thomas Jefferson too. Peter Parish has suggested that the National Mall in Washington, D.C., symbolizes America’s “secular trinity”: Washington, the Father; Abraham Lincoln, the Son; and Jefferson, the “guiding spirit.”1 But for this analogy to work, Washington and Lincoln have needed to get right, as it were, with the spirit. Lincoln was able to do this actively and more or less consciously, accommodating Jeffersonianism to the Market Revolution and wrenching Jeffersonian antislavery from conditional termination toward the positive liberty that produced the Emancipation Proclamation and the Reconstruction amendments. But, with Washington, such a move was more problematic. By the time the spirit descended, or manifested itself, so to speak, Washington was dead. Worse, while Washington was alive, he had become increasingly estranged from Jefferson, the man, and from a Jeffersonian vision of the national meaning and future. From at least Washington’s second administration, then, the father of the nation, if such a thing could be imagined , was at odds with what was to become the national spirit. Jefferson recognized this as a problem and spent a not inconsiderable amount of energy and thought reconciling Washington to the republicanism that was sweeping the land in his own name after Washington’s death. This would involve, Jefferson understood, turning Washington away from the Federalism of his later life—his partisanship—and back into the nonpartisan symbol of American unity that Washington himself embraced. Only, in Jefferson ’s version, Washington would serve the Republican cause—which, in “General Washington Did Not Harbor One Principle of Federalism” Thomas Jefferson Remembers George Washington Brian Steele Thomas Jefferson Remembers George Washington 73 Jefferson’s view, was a way of rescuing Washington from the grip of partisanship after all. This project was made much simpler by Washington himself, who consistently worked to shape his own image as beholden to no party, an image that has been compelling to historians for generations. But if we think of Washington in these terms today, it is at least partially due to the largely overlooked fact that Jefferson chose to embrace Washington as a Republican. Jefferson did so partly for partisan purposes—to shape his own image and that of his party as embodying the nation itself. But in the process, ironically, the partisan Jefferson helped transform the partisan Washington into a symbol transcending party in a way that made the single greatest symbol of American nationhood safe for the Jeffersonian Republicanism that was becoming the American ideology. Jefferson was first elected to the House of Burgesses in 1769, where, presumably , he met Washington for the first time. Jefferson was only twenty-five (Washington had been a delegate since 1758), and it took a few years before the two men became confidants. Both also served in the Continental Congress as delegates from Virginia, and during the Revolutionary War remained in close communication, especially when Jefferson served as governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781. Jefferson, deferential to the older man, developed an “almost filial reverence” for the general during the war, and must have been particularly gratified—in light of the House of Delegates’ inquiry into Jefferson ’s alleged negligence in preparing to meet Benedict Arnold’s invasion of Virginia—by Washington’s praise of his conduct as governor.2 The admiration was genuine and mutual. In 1786, Washington told Lafayette that “Mr. Jefferson . . . is a man of whom I early imbibed the highest opinion.”3 He elsewhere expressed a desire for “a continuation of [Jefferson’s] friendship and correspondence,” and was soon asking Jefferson’s advice on a host of topics.4 In turn, Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, offered Washington as an example of American excellence. Washington’s memory, Jefferson asserted , “will be adored while liberty shall have votaries, his name will triumph over time, and will in future ages assume its just station among the most celebrated worthies of the world.”5 While Jefferson and Washington’s friendship was developing, something was happening to Washington that would complicate nearly all of his relationships from then on. As Jefferson’s encomium indicates, over the course 74 Brian Steele of the American Revolution Washington became a symbol of American nationhood and an international hero of the Enlightenment. He began to be celebrated as a man without ambition—a Cincinnatus, above politics...