To Dare Even More Boldly; Washington and Hamilton as Supreme Chess Players
Contrary to Machiavelli’s dark fixation with Cesare Borgia, far more moral men and far more decent causes have been blessed with the long-term insights of chess players. Nowhere has this been more the case than with the birth and success of the American Republic, where beneath all the tumult, the basic foreign policy outlined by George Washington held in place for a full century, paving the way for America’s emergence as a global superpower. It is hard to think of a better example of chess playing: Almost wholly undetected by analysts, a long-term policy was established and successfully acted upon for the better part of 100 years.
The highly contentious 1794 Jay Treaty, negotiated between the fledgling American Republic and all-powerful Great Britain, was the seminal event that sent Washington’s foreign policy chess playing into motion. As tensions rose between great powers London and Paris with the advent of the French Revolutionary era, Americans in general were broadly inclined to support the French position.
The reasons for this were both emotional and ideological. France had been the invaluable ally of the American Revolution, supplying the hard-pressed colonies with troops, vital naval support (which helped win the critical Battle of Yorktown), and most of all, the money to keep the rebellion going. Many Americans, including francophiles Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, felt an immense debt of gratitude to the country for all that it had done for the American cause.
Then there was the fact that the French Revolution—bloody as it so quickly became—was at least founded on the same universalist principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity that had guided the American revolutionaries so recently. It would have taken hearts of stone for the Americans Founders not to have felt a genuine kinship with the French for what they were attempting to accomplish—following on from the American example—with their own revolution. By contrast, conservative, monarchist, elitist Britain served for many such as Jefferson as the glaring counter-example of what their new country must avoid degenerating into at all costs.
Fortunately, Alexander Hamilton—Secretary of the Treasury and the dominant figure in Washington’s administration—had a head as well as a heart. In many ways, the careers of both Washington and his headstrong, brilliant protege amount to being curious political throwbacks, as both served as bridge figures linking the recent, staid, American colonial past to the country’s future as a rough-and-tumble Republic.
In a lot of ways, Washington effectively served as America’s last king, with Hamilton playing the recognisable role of Prime Minister, his influence venturing far afield from his specific purview as Treasury Secretary. Fascinatingly, their great success as chess players in both winning and then crucially maintaining the viability of the Republic they created made the need for the two founding giants fleeting, as in the future it would be institutions and not great men that would make the country secure. But to give the national institutions brought into being by the Constitution time to organically take root, it was absolutely essential that America hew to a foreign policy that would not upend its promising experiment in self-government.
For Alexander Hamilton, this meant above all that tensions with Britain—the superpower of the age—had to be cooled, to avoid the chaos and tumult of another war on North American soil, one the Republic might well lose this time. With this mandate, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay was sent to London to bargain with the court of George III, resolving the issues left unsolved by the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which had ended the Revolutionary War.
At first glance, the specific provisions of the Jay Treaty seemed to greatly favour the Court of St. James. The new accord failed to end impressment, the odious British practice of kidnapping American sailors on the high seas, forcibly recruiting them into the Royal Navy. Economically, Britain was given most-favoured-nation trading status for its imports to America, without the same advantage being reciprocated for US goods. Jay also failed to win British compensation for slaves who had been taken by the United Kingdom at the end of the war, a fact that riled Southerners against the treaty in general.
For all that, the Jay Treaty was an undeniable diplomatic success for the United States. England finally consented to evacuating the forts it still held in northwestern America (today’s Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio); their continued occupation had greatly impeded immigration there. In terms of trade, London did consent to open the lucrative British West Indies to small American ships. American merchants were also compensated for their goods confiscated by the British navy on the high seas.
But beyond this mixed record of haggling over tactical provisions of the deal, one great strategic point loomed, which informed Hamilton’s passionate defence of the deeply unpopular treaty: The accord arrested a possibly fatal drift of the two countries toward war, as the weight of these myriad unresolved issues could well have lit a spark that would have plunged the new Republic into chaos. For that strategic chess-playing reason above all, the Federalist administration decided to back the treaty.
It took all of Washington’s unparalleled prestige and credibility with his countrymen to see the pact through the Senate, which debated it in secret in June 1795. In the end, the treaty was ratified by the necessary two-thirds Senate majority in August 1795, 20-10, without a vote to spare.
However, as the constitutional process moved along, the specific terms of the Jay Treaty were leaked to a furious public in early July 1795. As the gloomy Jay remarked, such was the displeasure of his countrymen with the accord that by July 4th, 1795, he had been burned in effigy in so many towns that he could have traversed the entire length of America by the glow of his own flaming figure. Things got so bad in terms of public opinion that pro-French protestors hurled stones at Hamilton while he attended a pro-treaty rally in New York.
Unsure of what to do, even questioning whether he should sign the accord in the firestorm of condemnation that shook America following the publication of the treaty’s details, Washington called on Hamilton (now having returned to his law practice in New York) for advice, asking him what he thought of the treaty. In his typical workaholic fashion, Hamilton replied with a masterful 53-page political risk assessment, urging the wavering president to sign the imperfect but vital agreement.
Washington kept his nerve, focusing on the key chess player rationale that he wasn’t about to risk the fruits of the revolution on a second war with Britain; he also gauged that the Jay Treaty would prevent a harmful deterioration in trade with the United Kingdom, on which the United States was entirely economically dependent, as it was by far America’s largest single commercial partner.
Washington duly signed the Jay Treaty in August 1795, with its provisions coming into effect on February 29, 1796. The president made it clear that in terms of America’s long-term foreign policy, the United States must—for its own long-term stability—remain neutral in the face of Europe’s great revolutionary wars.
The domestic political consequences of the controversy arising over the Jay Treaty were long-lasting, leading directly to the first party system in the United States. The treaty became the core dividing issue separating the two nascent political parties. Both the Federalists (who supported the Jay Treaty) and the Jeffersonians (who opposed it) became far more organised after the tumultuous days surrounding the treaty’s ratification, and then remained so. The Federalists were seen as being broadly pro-British, with the Jeffersonians strongly inclining to a more pro-French foreign policy position. Never again would the republic operate without two broadly opposed and organised parties endlessly battling to secure political power; the Jay Treaty was that seminal a domestic political event.
In practical policy terms, there is little doubt that the Jay Treaty proved a success for the American Republic. Even its arch-foe Thomas Jefferson did not repudiate the agreement when he became president in 1801, a sure sign of its efficacy. In terms of strategic chess playing, it was an unmitigated triumph, buying America more than a decade of peace and ever-increasing commerce with Great Britain in the midst of the French Revolutionary Wars and the rise of Napoleon. As Jospeh Ellis astutely notes, the Jay Treaty, ‘bet, in effect, on England rather than France as the hegemonic European power of the future, which proved prophetic.’
In the end, Washington and Hamilton’s insistence on cool, sober chess playing, even when it ran directly counter to American passions and ideological proclivities, carried the day. It is safe to say that the Republic itself was the great benefactor. As Ron Chernow notes, ‘With the Jay Treaty, Washington had made good on his solemn oath to maintain peace and prosperity during his presidency,’ a state of affairs that made possible the steady rise of America to the position as the world’s greatest global power.
Washington’s Farewell Address as a Chess-Playing Masterpiece
But America’s first president remained deeply troubled by the personal attacks that befell him as a result of the Jay Treaty, easily the most sensitive crisis of his highly successful presidency. Things had gotten so bad that Jeffersonians now openly (and for the first time) stopped drinking the customary toast to the president’s health after dinner. As his presidency entered its twilight days, for one final time, Washington felt the need to explain himself to the American Republic. The result was his Farewell Address, a magnificently straightforward defence of his sublime chess-playing strategy.
On its surface, the address amounts to an open letter written by Washington to the people of the United States near the end of his second term, before heading into a final retirement on his Mount Vernon estate. However, the address—originally published in the American Daily Advertiser on September 19, 1796—functions as something far more: It gives us a glimpse into the chess-playing credo that had steadily guided all of Washington’s actions during his presidency. As was so often the case, Washington turned to Hamilton, his long-time intellectual collaborator, to craft the address, even as its themes remained distinctly his own.
But Hamilton would also play a central role in the address’s success. He began work on the address with a series of notes Washington had given him that sounded petulant, almost defensive, of the criticisms he had endured. Hamilton’s draft erased this off-putting tone; instead, he wrote a letter that reads as a coolly statesmanlike document, the final utterances of a self-assured man speaking for a last time to posterity.
The address opens with Washington informing his countrymen that he will not run for a third term as president (despite the fact that he almost certainly would have won such a prize). The president sketches out broad, strategic vistas, imagining America’s grand future. To secure the country’s long-term political stability—his chess-playing goal—Washington argues that a series of dangers must still be overcome: America’s national identity must come to override sectional attachments, law and order must be maintained, and something must be done about political parties, which he rails against and sees—incorrectly, in history’s verdict—as a sign of domestic decay.
But beyond all this, Washington stresses that America’s western territories—the almost limitless geographical patrimony that ensured America’s future peerless position in the world—must be kept free at all costs from foreign encroachments. In other words, the US must not become a carbon copy of Europe, an area of limited geographic space endlessly fought over by a large number of powers, all of whom remain permanently unable to exercise political dominance. America had been blessed with a continent where eventually only it would hold sway. Such an unbelievable strategic gift must be safeguarded at all costs; everything must be done to secure this unparalleled advantage that luck and providence had bestowed on the American people.
It is only within this broader chess-playing context that the president’s actions over the Jay Treaty become explicable. For Washington and Hamilton, US foreign policy must be based, above all else, on practical interests rather than ideological passions of any sort. As Washington says in the address about the Jay Treaty, in a not so subtle dig at Jefferson’s emotional francophilia, ‘The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave.’
In the light of his view that neutrality remains the best strategy for America to pursue to safeguard its western frontier, suddenly Washington’s entire foreign policy becomes eminently clear: He is not for neutrality for neutrality’s sake; rather, given the highly favourable geopolitical position the US found itself in during the 1790s, such a practical policy is simply the best specific course of action for the young Republic. It is because of its geopolitical position, in other words, that as Washington put it, ‘Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.’
Like any good chess player, not only could Washington see the grand strategic picture, but he also kept his eyes firmly on that prize in day-to-day matters. America could successfully pursue a neutralist foreign policy specifically because it had two moats protecting it from foreign encroachments, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The internal forces that might work against American continental hegemony—Canadians, Mexicans, and the various Plains Indian tribes—were obviously not going to be able to stop the American Republic over the long term from dominating the whole of the North American continent.
Given this unique and highly advantageous geopolitical position, all the US had to do was not mangle its foreign policy too badly, giving major European powers no diplomatic excuse to intervene in far-off America. As such, permanent and entangling alliances with one or another of the European powers was about the only foreign policy mistake that had to be avoided, as it was the only policy that could conceivably compel a major European power to intevene on the North American continent.
A foreign policy based on neutrality would safeguard against the only calamity that could possibly derail America’s almost unbearably bright and inevitable future as a great power, master of the North American continent. It is in this chess-playing light that both Washington’s highly successful foreign policy and his Farewell Address must be viewed. The Jay Treaty was the practical culmination of this chess-playing strategy, affirming America’s neutrality vis-a-vis both Great Britain and France by correcting the pro-French tilt that had characterised US foreign policy in the earliest days of the Republic.
Washington’s foreign policy strategy proved so successful that it was not until the founding of NATO in 1949 that America fully dispensed with its first president’s advice, entering into a permanent military alliance with most of Western Europe. By then, Washington’s impossible dream of America’s halcyon future—made so explicit in the Farewell Address—had come to pass, largely as a result of his chess playing.