A Year With George Washington
On March 3, 1797, the final full day of his presidency, and what would be his last day of public service to his nation, President Washington wrote a letter to his Secretary of State, Timothy Pickering, which he wished “deposited in the office of the department of state, as a testimony of the truth to the present generation and to posterity.”
The letter concerned a two-decade-old attempt to discredit and dishearten the American people by the publishing of various correspondence purportedly written by the Commander-in-Chief in the summer of 1776. The missives were designed to cast doubt on Washington’s true allegiance and motives for continuing in the cause of liberty.
The forged letters, seven in number and first published in London, then in New York in 1777, were addressed not to his generals or person in the military, but instead, five were purported to have been written to his cousin, Lund Washington, who managed his agricultural concerns in his absence, one to his step-son, John Parke Custis, and one to his wife, Martha.
In one letter, purportedly written by Washington to Lund in 1776, Washington seems unsure of success and questions whether the American people deserve to succeed at all. “But, we have overshot our mark: we have grasped at things beyond our reach: it is Impossible we should succeed; and, I cannot with truth, say that I am sorry for it, because I am far from being sure that we deserve to succeed.”
In another letter, to his wife Martha, Washington expresses his fawning devotion to King George III. “I love my King; you know I do: a soldier, a good man cannot but love him. How peculiarly hard then is our fortune to be deemed traitors to so good a King!”
There was ample proof of the forger’s deception, as many details were accurate as to the circumstances of the moment, but the author repeatedly made errors in timing. John Laurens, an aide-de-camp to Washington, pointed out one such error in a letter he wrote to his father. “The letter said to be the Generals, is partly genuine and partly spurious. Those who metamorphosed the intercepted original committed an error in point of time, for Mrs. Washington was with the General in New York at the date of it.”
Some might find it curious that Washington should concern himself with letters written two decades before, and thus having no material import on his reputation. Setting aside his vociferous need to guard against any threat to his reputation, however old the slight, Washington’s concerns were well-founded on recent events.
Thomas Paine, the celebrated author of Common Sense and The American Crisis, had recently publicly attacked Washington for failing to support him when he was imprisoned during the French Revolution. Additionally, early in Washington’s first term, try as he might, the nation had effectively split into two parties aligned loosely around Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian principles. Newspapers and other publications orbited around one side or the other. Benjamin Franklin Bache, the nephew of Benjamin Franklin, edited the Philadelphia newspaper Aurora. The Aurora was brutal in its coverage of Washington and his administration and not above cleverly perpetuating a falsehood.
It is just these sorts of critics to which Washington was referring in the letter to Pickering when he lamented, “Another crisis in the affairs of America having occurred, the same weapon has been resorted to, to wound my character and deceive the people.”
Washington never found out the forger’s name, though, like his pursuit of the traitor Benedict Arnold, he made every conceivable attempt. To this day, historians and students of George Washington still do not know the author.
Worthington Chauncey Ford, in his book The Spurious Letters Attributed to Washington (Brooklyn, N.Y, 1889), surmised with a reasonable degree of certainty that the culprit was John Randolph, who served as the last King’s Attorney for Virginia and fled the country at the onset of the Revolutionary War. John Randolph’s son Edmund would work for the Washingtons at Mount Vernon, and thus had intimate knowledge of the goings on at the estate. Edmund may have unwittingly provided just enough detail to his father in his regular correspondence to help make the forgeries all the more credible.
Washington, clearly, never suspected any ill-will from Edmund, whom he made his first Attorney General and later appointed to replace outgoing Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. Edmund Randolph was, however, forced to resign in the middle of Washington’s second term when a letter was found in which he was highly critical of the administration’s approach to relations with France.
Like many of the founders, Washington kept one eye on the present and the other on posterity. He knew that his life’s work would be examined and scrutinized by every succeeding generation. In the spring of 1797, he also knew his end was near, as his father and virtually all of his grandfathers had died young. He didn’t know it at the time, but he would scarcely have two-and-a-half years left to live when he closed the door on his public service for the last time.
Washington’s extraordinary life has many lessons for us, the living. One lesson is to protect the truth and one’s reputation at all costs. He was no doubt aware of Shakespeare’s Othello when he lamented the possible loss of his reputation.
“Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.”
Thankfully, Washington’s immortal part remains intact despite many spurious efforts to undo it.
