The Father of His Country, George Washington was, of course, the first president of the United States (under the Constitution, at least), and his words and deeds would have an outsized effect on American history, for good or for ill. As such, it is unfortunate that the general was so thoroughly under the sway of Alexander Hamilton, that tireless enemy of liberty and solvency. Many of the presidential traditions that have been passed down through the years originated with George Washington, from the annual "State of the Union" address to the two-term limit (violated only once, by the megalomaniacal Franklin Roosevelt) to, sadly, the use of military power to collect taxes. It is there that we begin our analysis.
At the dawn of 1791, at the suggestion of then-treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, the Washington administration asked for (and received) the first excise tax in American history: a tax on domestically-produced spirits. Hamilton viewed this as a win-win proposition; it would bring in money for the federal government (which still owed tens of millions of dollars to creditors who helped finance the Revolutionary War), while, as a "sin tax," would discourage people from consuming spirits. In traditional Hamiltonian fashion, of course, the tax was designed such that it benefited large, entrenched interests at the expense of everybody else, since the tax was assessed by the gallon or as one large flat fee. The largest producers of spirits, obviously, would pay the flat fee, which pushed their per-gallon tax burden far below that borne by the smaller producers, thus artificially strengthening the large firms’ ability to compete on the market. Worse still, for many people living on the American frontier, whiskey wasn’t just a recreation; Spanish silver (the widely-accepted coin of the realm) didn’t often make its way out far from the urban northeast, and whiskey, due to its comparatively long life, ease of divisibility, and ubiquity became the de facto currency. A tax on whiskey, therefore, wasn’t just a "sin tax" that would discourage people from behaving in ways the eastern elite didn’t approve of; rather, it was a tax on every facet of daily life. Americans responded to this tax the same way they responded to the onerous excise taxes imposed by the British in the days leading up to the revolution: they ignored it.
Throughout the frontier region (predominantly the southwest of what was then the United States), the tax went almost entirely uncollected. Few people could be found who were willing to operate as tax collectors, and it was impossible to convict anybody of having evaded the tax. As Murray Rothbard put it in an essay about the Whiskey Rebellion:
Rather than the whiskey tax rebellion being localized and swiftly put down, the true story turns out to be very different. The entire American back-country was gripped by a non-violent, civil disobedient refusal to pay the hated tax on whiskey. No local juries could be found to convict tax delinquents.
This was a widespread issue, and it irritated president Washington, that true believer in "subordination and obedience to government," to no end. With no resolution in sight, he issued a proclamation on 15 September 1972, stating in part:
I, George Washington, President of the United States, do by these presents most earnestly admonish and exhort all persons whom it may concern to refrain and desist from all unlawful combinations and proceedings whatsoever having for object or tending to obstruct the operation of the laws aforesaid, inasmuch as all lawful ways and means will be strictly put in execution for bringing to justice the infractors thereof and securing obedience thereto.
And I do moreover charge and require all courts, magistrates, and officers whom it may concern, according to the duties of their several offices, to exert the powers in them respectively vested by law for the purposes aforesaid, hereby also enjoining and requiring all persons whomsoever, as they tender the welfare of their country, the just and due authority of Government, and the preservation of the public peace, to be aiding and assisting therein according to law.
Whatever else can be said of the man, it’s clear that George Washington possessed a certain rhetorical force that could render even a sentiment as gormless as this magisterial in tone. Clearly Washington’s proclamation is nothing more than a scolding; he could have gotten the same message across with the single word "behave," though it wouldn’t have sounded nearly as presidential. Regardless, Washington’s proclamation had little to no effect throughout most of the country — except in western Pennsylvania, an area that, while still rather backwoods and "frontier," nonetheless was settled enough to have an established class of rent-seekers looking to move themselves up in American politics. It was here that the Washington administration found its only allies in the quest to collect the excise tax, and so it was here that the situation came to a head, when, on
15 July 1794, Brigadier General John Neville, a federal tax inspector who (purely by coincidence, I’m sure) also happened to own the largest whiskey distillery in the area, attempted to arrest local farmer (and small distiller) William Miller for nonpayment of the tax. Miller refused to accept the writ, and his neighbors fired warning shots to drive the collectors away. The next day, thirty rebels marched on Bower Hill, Neville’s home, demanding that he resign his post as tax inspector and destroy the tax records; Neville responded by firing on them, killing Oliver Miller, William Miller’s nephew. The crowd dispersed, but returned the following day, now nearly six hundred strong and ready for battle. Rebel leader James McFarlane declared a cease-fire after about an hour of combat, and stepped forward to parley; he was immediately shot down. This rather cowardly act galvanized the rebels, who proceeded to burn Bower Hill to the ground, and instigated a dramatic upswing in the rebellion, which in turn would provoke a response from Washington.
Edmund Randolph, Washington’s secretary of state, urged caution and suggested that diplomacy would be the best course of action, but Washington was having none of it. His understanding of the situation was, in his own words:
No sooner was [marshal David Lenox] understood to be engaged in this duty [of collecting the tax] than the vengeance of armed men was aimed at his person and the person and property of the inspector of the revenue [Neville]. They fired upon the marshal, arrested him, and detained him for some time as a prisoner. He was obliged, by the jeopardy of his life, to renounce the service of other process on the west side of the Allegheny Mountain, and a deputation was afterwards sent to him to demand a surrender of that which he had served. A numerous body repeatedly attacked the house of the inspector, seized his papers of office, and finally destroyed by fire his buildings and whatsoever they contained. Both of these officers, from a just regard to their safety, fled to the seat of Government, it being avowed that the motives to such outrages were to compel the resignation of the inspector, to withstand by force of arms the authority of the United States, and thereby to extort a repeal of the laws of excise and an alteration in the conduct of Government.
It is perhaps interesting to note that the president’s description of the events omits the two men murdered in cold blood by his tax collectors. Nevertheless, president Washington’s ire had been raised, and he issued another proclamation, on 7 August 1794, declaring his intention to raise a militia to wage war on the tax protesters. The Washington administration had a difficult time recruiting militiamen to march against their fellow Americans, however, and ultimately resorted to conscription, pressing thousands of men into the ragtag army and sending them to kill their own countrymen against their will. This, of course, greatly exaggerated the unrest, and hundreds of draft resistors and protesters were arrested, some even killed, for "crimes" as serious as erecting a liberty pole — a cherished American symbol not twenty years earlier. Ultimately, Washington was able to impress some thirteen thousand men into his army — a force approximately as great as the army he led during the war — and drove them toward the rebellion.
Meanwhile, Randolph’s attempts at diplomacy had borne fruit. The negotiators promised the rebels amnesty and a sharply reduced tax burden if they’d agree to end the insurrection and pay the new, lower tax. The rebels grudgingly accepted these terms, and dispatched emissaries to meet with Washington and tell him to call off his attack. Washington, of course, did no such thing; he had raised his army, and he would have his war. The rebels scattered, and the federal troops had a field day. Historian William Hogeland puts it thusly:
President George Washington, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, and General Henry Lee began making mass arrests of American citizens. Authorized neither by warrants nor by any resolution of Congress, federal troops rousted from beds, rounded up, and detained on no charge hundreds of people against whom the executive branch knew it had no evidence. Officers administered warrantless searches and seizures of property and subjected detainees to harsh conditions and terrorizing interrogation. Some victims were told they’d be hanged unless they gave false testimony against the elected officials who had vainly opposed this and other executive-branch policies and operations.
After spending various lengths of time in privation and fear, most of the detainees were released. Detachments of troops meanwhile arrived at every home, in a region defined solely for the purposes of this operation, and required every male over the age of eighteen to sign an oath of loyalty to the government. Not surprisingly, most people complied.
Then, in the winter, the few remaining detainees were marched almost 400 miles to the capital, poorly shod and clothed, under the authority of an officer well-known by his superiors for the pleasure he took in denigrating prisoners. On arrival, the suspects were paraded in the streets as victory trophies, then imprisoned under conditions that were even more extreme than normal. Some still hadn’t been charged with a crime. Others had been charged only because the presiding federal judge — whom President Washington’s orders explicitly subordinated to an ad hoc military authority — himself felt intimidated by the federal troops and allowed indictments on what he later said he considered insufficient evidence.
In the end, therefore, juries indicted few and convicted almost none of the prisoners, many of whom had been left in jail for many months. Failure to prosecute didn’t inhibit the president from stationing federal troops indefinitely in the region where he’d rounded up those and so many others. The military occupied the area, directing and assisting the civil judiciary.
If this sounds disturbingly like the sort of behavior a later tyrant would engage in during a period of southern resistance to federal tax law, it should. The one saving grace for president Washington is that he stopped at besieging four counties in western Pennsylvania; he was insufficiently foolish to believe that his thirteen thousand could subjugate the entire American frontier, so he made his show of force and called it a day, silently conceding the right of the rest of the frontier to ignore the tax. The upshot of the whole issue is that excise tax became a dead letter in the United States; the whiskey tax was soon repealed, and, until the Republican conquest during the War to Prevent Southern Independence, there would be only one other excise tax in the history of the country: a short-lived tax during the War of 1812. The other lesson that would be learned from the Whiskey Rebellion, sadly, was that the new American government could, and would, gladly use force of arms to collect the taxes if the people refused to pay them — which action, when undertaken by the British, was the trigger for the revolution in the first place.
George Washington also began the tradition of American presidents fighting their own undeclared wars, as he committed thousands of troops to fight the Northwest Indian War without congress first declaring that any such war would be fought. One could argue that this war preëxisted the Washington administration, and that no declaration was necessary, but this is a thin reed; it is, in fact, the precise excuse James K. Polk would later trot out when he wanted a war with Mexico, and congress threatened not to declare it. The fact of the matter is that, without congress so much as considering the idea, president Washington on his own say-so ordered General Josiah Harmar and fifteen hundred troops against the Indians of the Ohio River valley in the summer of 1790. Congress had (at Washington’s urging) enacted a joint resolution on 29 September 1789 which, among other things, declared "that for the purpose of protecting the inhabitants of the frontiers of the United States from the hostile incursions of the Indians, the President is hereby authorized to call into service from time to time, such part of the militia of the states respectively, as he may judge necessary for the purpose aforesaid," thereby conceding to the president the authority to raise and deploy a militia defensively. Harmar’s escapade was "defensive," however, only in the sense that those Indians might someday attack the United States if they’re not killed now. The one good thing to be said about this is that at least president Washington didn’t claim the Miami had weapons of mass destruction.
The attempted preëmptive strike against the Indians of the northwest was an unmitigated fiasco. On 22 October 1790, Harmar’s men marched on the Miami village of Kekionga with the intention of razing it. The Indians were prepared for them, however, and, under the leadership of Little Turtle, swiftly routed their attackers, killing nearly two hundred American soldiers and militiamen. Harmar withdrew the remaining men and retreated to Ft. Washington, and then had the audacity to send a letter to secretary of war Henry Knox claiming the attack was a success. The devastating loss infuriated president Washington, and he responded by sending more and more troops against the northwest Indians for the entirety of his presidency, culminating in the utterly ruinous Battle of Wabash River, in which General Arthur St. Clair led two thousand troops against Kekionga once again, only to have nearly all of them killed when Little Turtle’s men ambushed them at the Wabash; American casualties were 97.4%, amounting to nearly a quarter of the entire army. Washington continued to throw more and more bodies onto the pile, however, until finally, in the summer of 1795, he decided it would be simpler just to pay the Indians off. The Treaty of Greenville, which formally ended the Northwest Indian War (which never formally began) seems, at first blush, like a major win for the Indians, who cede much of the Ohio River valley in exchange for "the United States relinquish[ing] their claims to all other Indian lands northward of the river Ohio, eastward of the Mississippi, and westward and southward of the Great Lakes and the waters." Of course, as we now know, the United States had no intention of living up to its part of this treaty. The treaty also contained one other curious provision:
And for the same considerations and with the same views as above mentioned, the United States now deliver to the said Indian tribes a quantity of goods to the value of twenty thousand dollars, the receipt whereof they do hereby acknowledge; and henceforward every year, forever, the United States will deliver, at some convenient place northward of the river Ohio, like useful goods, suited to the circumstances of the Indians, of the value of nine thousand five hundred dollars; reckoning that value at the first cost of the goods in the city or place in the United States where they shall be procured.
This is the Washington administration setting another precedent: the use of "foreign aid" to buy the complacency of potential enemies. Just like the modern system of foreign aid, this turned out to be the "foot in the door" the United States would use to gain influence over the various tribes.
President Washington’s inauguration was held on Wall Street in New York City, and this was perhaps a stroke of cosmic irony, as the Washington administration would begin the enduring commingling of the federal government and the financial elite. Washington, at Hamilton’s urging, requested congress to pass an "assumption bill," through which the federal government would agree to take on all the debts the state governments had accrued during the revolution. Through a bit of political chicanery engineered by secretary of state Thomas Jefferson (who later bitterly regretted it), Hamilton was able to get his assumption bill passed, thus beginning yet another long American political tradition: presidents pushing unconstitutional bills through congress. This also set the stage for the next plank of the Hamiltonian economic policy: the national bank.
The national bank, in Hamilton’s vision, would be a largely private bank (only 20% owned by the federal government) with the power to issue bank notes and to act as a creditor to the federal government (which, thanks to the assumption bill, had a pile of debts to pay off). This, of course, would be a massive windfall to the ownership of the bank, and was entirely unconstitutional besides. Hamilton’s argument in favor of the bank hinged on a rather novel reading of the "necessary and proper" clause of the Constitution; according to Hamilton, where the Constitution says "necessary," it really just means "convenient." Therefore, even though strictly speaking it isn’t necessary to have a central bank, the mere fact that the government would find it convenient renders it constitutional. Of course, this is baldly an argument that grants the federal government unlimited power, and it was one to which president Washington happily acquiesced. The third plank of the Washingtonian-Hamiltonian economic plan was a massive system of corporate welfare through which the federal government would subsidize favored industries (Jefferson opposed this also, but not on particularly libertarian grounds; he believed that American industry would be uncompetitive against the British and French, and that the federal government should encourage agriculture instead); though congress didn’t pass this third proposal, we can clearly see the Washington administration setting the precedent for the entirety of modern American economic policy: big public debt, central banking, and crony corporate welfare. This is the exact plan that would be championed by Henry Clay in the early nineteenth century, forced by Abraham Lincoln onto a conquered nation in the late nineteenth century, and utterly ubiquitous since.
President Washington gets a lot of respect from libertarians for his warnings against "entangling alliances" in his farewell address, but by and large he is misunderstood. Many libertarians take from Washington’s remarks the idea that he favored a sort of perpetual non-involvement in the affairs of other nations; in truth, he believed in nothing of the sort. His warning was only against permanent alliances with other nations — indeed, in the very same address, he advises that the country "may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies," in no way enjoining any manner of meddling and warfare that may seem "extraordinary" at the time. For a better example of Washington’s thought, here’s a longer quotation from, again, that same address:
Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.
Washington explicitly grants that the United States "may choose peace or war." Clearly he is not arguing for permanent, longstanding peace. What Washington is in fact saying is that the new nation needs to be careful in the immediate short term, while it builds itself up and the new government consolidates its power, but that "the period is not far off" at which whatever kind of foreign adventurism "our interest… shall counsel" will be perfectly fine. Washington’s admonitions against involvement in foreign affairs (including his admirable resistance to being dragged into the French Revolution) are based not on any love of peace or on any fundamental libertarian sentiment, but on simple strategic calculation. At this time, he is saying, it would be too costly to get involved, but pretty soon we’ll be ready. This is nothing a libertarian should celebrate.
Washington himself clearly illustrated this with his actions as well as with his words. While, as stated, he refused requests from both the French and the British to involve the United States in the French Revolution, declaring in his famous Neutrality Proclamation that "the duty and interest of the United States require, that they should with sincerity and good faith adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerant Powers," he was not so high-minded on the subject of the Haitian Revolution. While the Washington administration sent no troops to Haiti, it did agree to contribute a substantial amount of money and weaponry to the French for their (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to suppress the British-led uprising of the Haitians.
Upon the conclusion of his second term as president, George Washington was asked to run for a third, which request he unconditionally refused — he had agreed to serve a second term only reluctantly, and, by the time it was over, had had quite enough of being president. He retired to his plantation at Mount Vernon, Virginia, where, not three years later, he was suddenly overcome with a violent illness from which he would die in a matter of hours. The exact cause of Washington’s death is rather unclear, though it was probably hurried along by the quite excessive amount of bloodletting his physicians put him through in an attempt to cure him; bloodletting was a standard treatment for illness in the eighteenth century, and Washington himself was a firm believer in it.
George Washington was keenly aware of the fact that his every word and every deed would set a precedent for future generations, and in this he was not mistaken; if it seems my judgment of him is overly harsh in some cases, it is because his influence was overly large. It is probably true that George Washington was the only man who could inspire enough loyalty and enough reverence from the American people to have made the new government a success, and I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine whether or not that is a point in his favor. Washington never wanted to be president and refused outright to be king; it’s rather a shame, given all the precedents he set, that those two never caught on. What America needs is more people who want to be neither president nor king.