Chapo Trap House - Hell of Presidents: Episode 1 - Founding Daddies

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

Constitution - Washington Get in the Presidency, George. Episode 2 is up now on Stitcher Premium, with new episodes out on Fridays. To sign up and to get a free month of Stitcher Premium, go to stitcherpremium.com/hell on your mobile or desktop browser, click start free trial, select a monthly plan, and use promo code HELL. You'll get access to Hell of Presidents, Time for My Stories and Blowback Season 2, so, pretty good deal.

Hi, and welcome to Hell of Presidents. I'm Chris Wade, and I'm Matt Christman. And the story we're going to start telling you today is the story of the power invested in the executive branch of the United States government, where it comes from, who gets to wield it, and more importantly, how they get to wield it and how they are constrained. This is episode one, Founding Daddies. The characters who dominate our understanding of the presidency, like Joe Biden and Trump before him, are invested with a great degree of psychic energy. Just the idea of them, they embody values for the American citizenry. During the inauguration in January, you heard a lot about how Joe Biden embodies values of virtue and how he was personally a good man, as in if you could know that about anybody, certainly someone who is a 900-year-old political fossil, or that it could ever be true of a person who has been in politics for that long.

But the implication is, even if it was true, that their personal virtue is dispositive in some way to how they will govern, or even can be dispositive to the way they govern. The American presidency as construed in popular imagination is an office of heroes and great men who, through their personal virtues, stand a thwart history saying either stop or go. Yes, they are the crossing guards of the geist. But what we are going to attempt to describe in the series is a presidency that is constrained by the factors of history, by the factors of the president's constituencies, by the factors of their parties, by the factors of the very material conditions that brought them to power. And through these constrictions, what is often observed and remembered as decisiveness or the product of personal energy or virtue, it is often a response to a very limited set of possibilities presented in the circumstances. The success or failure of a presidency ends up depending on contingent events and the willingness and ability of a particular president to embody a historical moment,

not to shape it themselves. And often presidents come into office with a set of intentions that are completely invalidated by events. Before we get started, I just want to outline our roles in this series. Matt will be playing the Mr. Peabody, and I will be his loyal boy Sherman, relating the outlines of history for Matt to riff off of, and setting up a nice lattice work for Matt to grow a beautiful vine of historical analysis. And also, we're going to try to cover all of American political history in like 12 episodes a year, so we're going to move fast and give mostly sketches of some of these people in events, because what we're really going after here is an outline of the political economy of presidential history. So with that said, let's step into our way back machine and travel to a date 234 years ago. On January 25th, 1787, a group of insurgents led in part by ex-continental army captain Daniel Shays,

marched on the Federal Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts. This rebellion grew from a series of long simmering issues in the New American Confederation. The collapse of lines of credit for coastal merchants after the end of the War of Independence had been passed on to rural farmers. Many of these farmers were veterans who had went unpaid during the war and now found it difficult to collect wages from a weak federal government that had no real power to raise revenue, nor ability to raise troops to defend its armory. Though Shays' rebellion was dismissed by a whiff of grape shot by General Benjamin Lincoln, Daniel Shays and his band of Backwood's dirtbags had made it undeniable for the merchant and landowner-dominated state governments that something needed to be done about these weak tea articles of Confederation. They simply were not doing the job that they needed to do.

The original articles of Confederation were an attempt to create a government modeled on the principles that had motivated the American Revolution, namely the principle that being told what to do sucks and that you are not my dad. The war had been a revolt of portions of the ruling elite of the 13 different colonies against the mercantile demands of the London government, which was restraining them from expanding westward and restricting their ability to trade as they saw fit. And because they were a stride-a-continent of such bountiful resources and the prospect of power and riches were so tangible, nobody really wanted to hear that shit from a British government that they had essentially outgrown, at least they thought they had. And once they had defeated the British and cast off the royal yoke, they tried to create a government that would maximize the liberty of those constituent ruling classes in those constituent states. And the states at that point were still fully separated and largely had not integrated their economies with one another,

so they had no motivation to suborn any of their authority to a federal authority. So they created a system that attempted to operate on the principle of maximally weak federal government, maximally strong state government. But what's this? Oh, no, we're trying to build improvements to the infrastructure. We're trying to pay for federal payrolled officers. We're trying to raise revenue. Most importantly, we're trying to do something with all this native-held land to the west that could be taken and distributed and developed, but none of that is possible with 13 separate states operating as separate entities. They were essentially trying to create 13 little merchant republics. Yes, exactly.

But none of them were strong enough to override any of the others, which meant that they were all barred from the ability to scale beyond their local power centers. And in fact, they had to compete with each other over things like clearing land and making improvements and collecting tolls and tariffs. So there was a recognition among all the most successful political and economic leaders of the states, specifically the ones who had declared independence and led the Continental Congress during the Revolution, that some submission to and some alienation of power to a federal authority was going to be necessary in order to actually profitably exploit the bounty that they were sitting on. Now, this was not universal. There were those people, even of influence in the colonies, who did not want to see a new system that allowed for a greater degree of concentrated federal power to exist. But they were not able to marshal the force to resist those who were slightly more successful,

slightly more influential as a result of that in dictating the terms of what that new order would be. What's funny to me about this era is that the Articles of Confederation basically is the Gadsden flag. Don't tread on me era and the kind of libertarian ideal of minimal control or authority over people and regional authority. So it's funny when people bring that up as like the ideal of what America should actually be because we had a period where we ran that program and it failed miserably. Well, the whole arc of American political history is people in every generation having to freshly come to terms with the irresolvable conflict between America's founding conception of liberty, which is, I would argue, uniquely American, and the pragmatic necessities of government, the pragmatic necessities that allow for ruling classes to continue to rule and for economies of scale to continue to operate. Well, speaking of generations, let's talk about the first generation navigating those conflicts. Our original political elites are founding daddies.

As you alluded to earlier, the ruling coalition at this time is a very small cross-section of society. We're talking about state assemblies with a few hundred guys sending delegates to a constitutional convention that ended up having 55 guys in it, almost all merchants, lawyers, large landholders of similar class strata who would end up constituting the constitutional convention. And these guys were looking around and thinking clearly this is not going well. States were refusing to fund Congress, which in turn meant Congress was unable to pay for troops to the Frontier to protect trade. There was no coordinated trade policy, so as you were saying, Matt, if a large merchant state like Pennsylvania attempted to pass duties on foreign goods, other states like Delaware could undercut their prices. It was a mess. Delaware as a small state, of course, establishing its now eternal role in the American policy of undercutting trade policies of other states in the Union.

That is what Delaware is for, to provide the lowest bid in any possible financial transaction. We can thank the Swedes for that, by the way. Is that is Delaware a part of a Swedish tradition? The reason Delaware is a separate state, essentially, is that it was originally New Sweden. It was briefly, in the early colonial era, a Swedish colony during the period when Sweden was getting a little big for their britches and trying to be a competing great power of Europe. Pretending that they were a real great power? Yeah. And so their existence as a separate colony is sort of an artifact of that. And they've used their incredibly tiny status, and the fact that as a result, they don't really have a lot of resources to trade and compete with.

Just the fact that they have a government that can do things like levy tariffs or provide regulations for industry as a value add to capital. Delaware, cheaper than Pennsylvania since the 17th century. Exactly. So these 55 wool-coated, powder wig-wearing dudes sat down in Philadelphia in 1787 to hammer something out. And what I always think of when I think of the Constitutional Convention is what the smell in that room must have been like in the middle of August. Oh, like just 55 slowly baking hams, just wafting. I just like take Trump, for example. We all, I know anyway, in my mind, Trump viscerally, I believe that he smells like baby powder.

As an old man who's often worried about humidity, he definitely smells like baby powder. And these guys were powdered. Most of them, they wore wigs. And so imagine just Donald Trump in full regalia in a sauna. That's what it smelled like. 55 of them. Yes. No AC, tiny room.

I mean, you can look up pictures of the room. It is not that big. Awful. Just horrible conditions. Just sheets of sweat dripping off of all of our founding fathers. Just 55 of wet boys. Just yellow, sopping wet cravats around their neck. So that sets the scene in the room, but let's talk about this thing of ours that they're

working on, our Casa Nostra, our Constitution. And what it is, is a document of compromises. Yeah, exactly. The entire document revolves around settling this string of contradictions and competing interests among the founding generation. So I'm going to bring up a few of these compromises and Matt, maybe you can expand on them. We'll start with the most fundamental debate here, which is who is the governing body and what was big air quotes here, a democracy?

Well, there were various ideas about what democracy meant that were floating around during the revolutionary period. There was a big ferment and anytime you see any kind of political mobilization on that set, new ideas of that type, new ideas coming out, Thomas Paine's out there writing incendiary blacks. A lot of people get a lot of ideas in their head. And the commonist American settlers, the non-property owning, white population, even slaves and free blacks, even some Native Americans got some ideas.

Certainly the words of the Declaration of Independence themselves, declaring that all men are created equal, gave people ideas. And a lot of those ideas did fire a lot of the resistance to the British during that period and motivated people to fight for independence. But by the time the founding is complete and a new ruling elite in America is able to assert control over the political system in the United States, putting down Shay's rebellion is part of that whole process. The idea of who is to be directing the affairs of state as a democratic expression is boiled

down to property owning white males. So we accept the principle that property is liberty and the white males are the only people on the continent qualified to exercise that liberty and determine the course of events and determine the actions of government. And therefore, the people who are able to acquire the most property sort of by definition are the most able to exercise judgment. They've shown judgment by being able to acquire property. But not only does their land owning or their wealth show their wisdom, it also validates

their stake in government. The greater degree of property one has, the more as its stake for them in how the government carries out its mission. And then the notion that a landless person has no, as we can call it in economics, skin in the game, and as such, their opinion is essentially irrelevant. Yeah, from a philosophical level, and I mean, this gets into a lot of complicated things about like 18th century philosophy and English common law tradition. But it does seem to me like one of the most important things to grasp here.

And also one of the most profound spiritual fuck ups of the beginning of this country is that equalization on like a one to one level of liberty with property. And that very idea was only viable, only legible to people because of the bounty, because of how much land there was, and how there was no concentration of people on that land who could plausibly stop the American colonists and then Americans, citizens from seizing it. Historically, if there is a way to enrich a polity or ruling class and there is no concentrated power that can stop them from doing it, they will do it.

And having no restraint really other than maybe some distant concern about the other colonial powers that held land in the New World, it changes the way you think about the economy and about politics. A way that Europeans, the continent that these settlers were all from, honestly would not even have been able to fathom because of the tight sort of vestigially feudal nature of their social order and the extreme limitation of available land that characterized European society. And so what a people coming to an understanding of liberty in a context of free real estate

did was to fuse the two things together because the ability to sustain yourself on the land means that no one can realistically rule you. You cannot be compelled to do anything like a medieval surf by a landlord. And so their investment in government was an investment in maintaining their autonomy as property owners. Literally an impractice property was liberty. So the framers were keenly interested in balancing the power of unpropertyed masses with these property elites, which brings us to the guy Alexander Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton, Alexander

Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton, I honestly could. The masses who Alexander Hamilton described as turbulent and changing and who would quote seldom judge or determine right, make it necessary to give the rich quote, a distinct permanent share in government, which I mean, I would say that I guess he got his wish indeed. Well done. He also, by the way, called the people a great beast. So yes, once again, we have to manage two things. On the one hand, we have a broad population of the American states now, men, women, blacks

and whites, natives, poor people, rude mechanics, clerics, mudsills, people who whose destiny would be shaped by a choice of what the government did, but who did not have access to the erudition and access to social circles that would allow them to be part of the negotiation around the nation's destiny. And then on the other hand, you have the landowners and large merchants, the people who are quote, unquote, qualified, morally and legally justified to exercise authority over them. And the question became, how do you balance this? Because one thing that the people who founded the country, but first writing the articles

of confederation, and then when that was proving ineffective, coming together to write the Constitution, were deeply keenly aware of was the precedent of ancient Rome. These guys were all classically trained. They all read their Latin and Greek in their little short pants with their tutors. Or if they went to expensive schools in England, which many of them did, and what they learned there was government will always be essentially controlled by the best classes, the people who had shown their ability to exercise authority virtue by their ability to, to pile up and manage property, but that there will also be people who are technically citizens, technically

part of a policy, but who because of a lack of virtue, i.e. a lack of property, a lack of wealth, a lack of ability to function and thrive in the economic conditions of the community have to be managed. And the great danger that they foresaw was that if factions within the ruling class emerged, one group of the ruling class, in order to defeat the other over some question of material or ideological significance, could stir up the mob, basically. And every institution in the Constitution that ended up being built needs to be understood first as a compromise between the various ruling elites of the states, but also an undergirding

desire to create baffles and chambers that diffused popular energy and disallowed it to be manipulated from above, because one thing these guys all agreed on is that there could be no agency, no real political agency from below, there could only be manipulation from above. Well, good thing that there will never be parties that develop between the ruling class. Thank God. Thank God that will never come to pass. Actually let's talk about those conflicts between the ruling classes.

Oh, no, what? Oh, no. Oh, shit. Are you saying that? Oh, no. That different modes of production and economic systems produce conflicting material interests even at the top that cannot necessarily be managed by the fact that everybody's read fucking Ovid?

Oh, no. No, that certainly can't happen, but let's talk about that happening immediately and within the document itself. So the two main contradictions within the ruling class or these classes within the ruling class, as we are just talking about, is one of geography and of production. It's the Northeast merchants represented by Hamilton and the Southern landowners represented by Jefferson. So now that Thomas Jefferson's name has come off, Matt, you want to go off about those

yeoman farmers? Oh, the yeoman farmer, the ideal American citizen, the idea fix of American liberty to this day. I mean, we'll talk about it over the course of this podcast, obviously, but the ideal American citizen, one who is able to exercise free discretion and not be overawed by a overlords, either political or economic, is a self-sufficient yeoman farmer. And that became the ideal citizen in all really configurations of American liberty, but specifically and most fundamentally to the Jeffersonian model.

Now the main distinction between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian visions buzz-boiled down not to virtue, not to anything anybody described in Berger Locke, but from geography. Hamilton was a New Yorker. Hamilton lived among the rising merchant powers of the Eastern cities. Jefferson was a slave-owning property owner in Virginia, and their distances from the mechanisms of finance contributed to their relationship to the idea of a federal government in general, because Jefferson, living out in Monticello with his wine and his books all paid for by the labor of others, and also money he borrowed from those very Eastern

bankers, because dude loved to spend above his means, he could imagine in North America where liberty was always guaranteed by that access to property, and that governance was consensual and required no real authority vested in alienated institutions, because there's always land, and everyone who counts can be counted to maintain themselves. And most specifically, that vision is inextricably linked to slavery, which of course Jefferson would have bridled that because he was very public about his discomfort with slavery, and his desire to see it eventually wither away. Oh, it's so sad.

No, it's too bad. Oh, darn it. Oh, you know, I'd love to free you guys, but you know, the bank's been after me about my fucking time-life books that I just bordered, the 300th volume. The important thing to know about Jeffersonianism is that the small government ideal that he propagated was inherently attached to slavery because the only way you can have a country that can develop its economic power in the absence of alienated government institutions who have the power to compel the citizenry to do things like pay taxes to build roads

and canals and things like that. If most of the crucial productive labor is being performed by people who are outside of the concept of citizenship and are subject to private regimes of power, that is the way that the Jeffersonian ideal, which seems on its face absurd, you can't have a country if there's no alienated authority of any kind, and the answer is, well, you just have people who are branded by skin, for example, do all that work and then you don't need a government because their owner is in charge of making sure that they keep doing it. And you don't have to worry about, you know, getting together the funding to provide any

kind of infrastructure or government services because those can be privately provided by the people who are essentially able to just expropriate all of that surplus value to themselves and use part of it to maintain private power over these people who are humans but are not citizens. Now, Hamilton in New York, which by this time was already as many of the northern states were phasing out slavery because it was not economically viable absent the rich soils of the southern states, was in New York and was intimately familiar with the merchant economy that allowed that agricultural idol, the yeoman farmer that Jefferson rhapsodized

about to be possible. The cities that Jefferson hated, Jefferson second only to pull pot in his hatred of urban living, those cities he despised, they were a necessary economic counterpoint to the countryside and the two acted as a symbiotic relationship. Jefferson imagined the prosperity of yeoman smallholding farmers. Of course, Jefferson was not a smallholder, but he imagined a more democratic vision, so it would have to involve people who weren't able to buy a bunch of other people and work for them, people who might have to work with their own hands but on their own land, crucially.

What made the ability to live beyond a subsistence agricultural lifestyle is the ability to sell the surplus of your agricultural production, not just make enough to survive in a mud hut or in a cabin. The only way that you can sell your surplus is to sell it to people who aren't farming for themselves, the people who live in cities and in exchange for that surplus, you are given not so much currency as finished manufactured goods that could not be made on a homestead. Those relationships were unbreakable and Hamilton, because of his proximity to finance, understood that and understood that what Jefferson saw as the encroachment of tyranny was essentially

the encroachments of market and capitalism. Are those tyranny? Absolutely, but there is no way you could argue that the regime of the slave masters of the south was not also tyranny. Now Jefferson might have hated that and the smallholding yeoman who supported the democratic republicans, the party faction that he ended up forming, might have hated it too, but they were unable ever to deny the fundamental relationship that made it necessary. That really does explain how a nation that was overwhelmingly hostile to the federalist

ideas that Hamilton and another figure we'll be talking about shortly promulgated was because at the end of the day, it was a fundamental necessity to unlock capital to allow for this relationship to continue and for the country to continue to be developed. For people who have money to make more, and for people who don't have money to imagine themselves that they could start making some. This is kind of an aside, but I think one of the best ways to understand the Jeffersonian ideal of democracy is kind of do a mental find and replace in your head with the phrase yeoman farmers with small business owners, and that also goes for any, if you're watching

a political debate or a political speech today, you can do the same thing with small business owners and yeoman farmers, they're talking about the same class of people. It's precisely the same class of people, it's the same notion of liberty, and the only difference is time and the foreclosure of the frontier, when the possibility of endlessly expanding farmsteads for everybody, because remember, if people had one son maybe, if we had one kid each, you could maybe continue the yeoman tradition indefinitely on a limited land, but if you have more kids than one, they gotta go somewhere, and that necessitates, if you think that that's the basis for liberty, the basis for being a free citizen, that necessitates

endless expansion. Now, once we reach the limit of our ability to expand the land where we could send our kids to have their own farms, that notion of yeoman liberty transformed into being able to control one's destiny on the market. Not to sell their labor, because everyone at the dawn of the republic understood that to sell one's labor was to enslave oneself in a real sense, and that's always been the case. It's always been understood that there is a fundamental loss of liberty that comes with

having to alienate your labor for your survival, and American ideology has existed as it has for the past 200 plus years to obscure that reality, and one of the main ways it does that is by dangling the possibility of first yeoman farmer's self-sufficiency, and then business-owning self-sufficiency. So, even though, as we've just outlined, these two modes of production, southern slave land-holding agriculture and northern finance capital were intrinsically interlinked, they nonetheless were among these conflicts that were baked into the constitution. The conflicts between masses and elites, between basically modes of production based

on geography, navigating these contradictions is how we end up with all the wonky compromises and constructions in the constitution. Like Hamilton's idea for the Electoral College, a senate with equal membership based on states, the very idea of the presidency itself, all these systems to redistribute political economy up into and among the political elites who built the damn thing. And the fabled checks and balances that we love to talk about in social studies, senate and house, they exist because large states wanted population-based apportionment of representatives, and small states wanted state-by-state representation, because as we said, all of the states were

anxious about being subordinated to a power outside of themselves, because they had come in as a union voluntarily. They believed that they, like the model citizen they imagined, could not be compelled. And so those institutions were created to alleviate the concern of each party. And then things like the Electoral College and the very existence of the presidency came into being as ways to allow power to be exercised without fear of it being overwhelmed from below, but also kept vague enough so that more democratically aligned people, people like Jefferson and his southern supporters, generally would be willing to get on board

with it. I think it's important to remember that the original locus of power in the constitution is not in the presidency, it is in Congress, because Congress had been in the Anglo-American tradition the locus of resistance to monarchial authority since the English Civil War, hell, since the fucking Magna Carta, basically, and the judiciary and executive were sort of afterthoughts. Their powers were not really enumerated. It was assumed that real authority would rest with the Congress.

And this, of course, was necessary because of the hostility of the majority of citizens and even the majority of the ruling class in places like the south were incredibly hostile to the notion of concentrated authority in a thing like an executive, i.e., a king, and could only very reluctantly accede to their creation. And so those institutions sort of by necessity had to be left with a big sort of question mark to be determined in order to get a buy-in from them. And I think it's also important to note that the people at the time were aware of these difficulties and very much wary of federalist systems being created.

I like this quote from a Massachusetts farmer, Amos Singletree, they will swallow up all us little folks like a great Leviathan, just as the whale swallowed up Jonah. But there was a paternalistic bend to the Framers, you know, who thought that the system would represent the virtue of the people through their righteous leaders, who are leaders because they owned property, like Benjamin Franklin, who said that the government would quote, not become despotic unless the people shall become so corrupted as to need a despotic government. I mean, we're talking a little circularly here, but I think it's important to get down

to this link between property, liberty, power, and virtue in this founding generation. Because the argument really boils down to, we are the good people, we are operating from not our own self-interests, because our status at the top of the social economic period is the product of a natural rise to a natural position. And so our exercise of government will be, by definition, self-less. Maintaining our power is not something that we have to assert undue or corrupt influence to maintain. It is the natural order of things.

Ah, yes, natural order. And so flowing from the geography and political economy is that one final, great, flawed compromise of the Constitution, which is slavery. The issue of slavery is how we get things like the three-fifths compromise, which was done purposely to reproportion political economy to slaveholders without enfranchising slaves to solve the issue of population disparity between the southern states and the northern states, and between merchants and farmers. It's this great evil at the heart of this document, and what's so evilly ironic about

it and also key to how much more psychotic its proponents would become over the following century is how it's tied into this concept of American, quote, liberty. Liberty was property. Slaves were property. So slavery was liberty to the southern elites. And I think one of the things that gets brushed off about it is how they all basically knew at the time they were fucking up it by not addressing it. As James Madison said, it would be wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there

could be property in men, which is why the word slave or slavery is assiduously avoided within the document itself. Yes, very much. Very Marge Simpson. It's true. But he shouldn't say it. This does speak to the inability of any of the portions of the states to assert authority over the others, because already by the constitutional era, there was emerging a separation of the

modes of production in the southern states and in the northern ones. And it was determined, of course, by climate and geography. The southern states had a rich soil that was conducive to the growing of cash crops. And at that point, not cotton, but mostly tobacco. And in the north, the conditions of the terror were much rockier and less fertile. And all that could really be sustained profitably was relatively small farms growing staple crops and selling their surplus for finished goods in cities that traded internationally. And so that meant that the economic engines of the north were the cities, where the surplus

grown by those plots of land by those yeoman farmers was exchanged for the finished goods and the manufactured goods that then filled the households of those farmers. Now, in the south, that farming was done largely by compelled enslaved labor. And the surplus was not exchanged for household goods. The majority of actual land workers in the south lived on subsistence, their owners providing them with food and shelter through their own agricultural product. Instead, all of that surplus was converted into cash for plantation owners who still spent the money, but only as much as they could, which was, of course, much less than

the numbers of people who otherwise would be buying things with the surplus of their agricultural production if they had been free. So mostly what they spent their money on, the slave owners, was luxuries. And Jefferson, of course, is the sinequinon of this phenomenon. Even though he had a profitable slave empire, he still borrowed incredible amounts of money and died essentially broke after selling his library to the Congress to afford another bottle of wine because that was the, if you're sitting there on your veranda all day and you've read all of your Greek for the week, what do you do?

And the answer is buy fine teak and mahogany items and gigas and buggy whips. Jefferson and his class are basically the cat meme who's just reading the newspaper and saying, I think I should buy a boat. Yes. And what that means is that the development of cities in the South was much slower. There was less demand for household goods that could have furnished a, at that point, a craft economy in an urban environment where the surplus of agriculture could be consumed because the surplus of agriculture was cash crops for sale, not foodstuffs.

And so that meant that finance, banking emerged much more sluggishly and that created two different modes of social organization. Neither one could exist without the other. And so the Constitution, even though it was written by people who understood that incompatibility and many of whom were at some level morally opposed to slavery, were ignored because no one wanted to put down a marker that would make everybody else walk away from the table. And so most of the biggest questions were implicitly understood to be put down the road to be resolved later, which as we'll find out will become a grand American political

tradition. And one of the reasons that the founders felt that they could punt on slavery is that tobacco agriculture, which at that point was the backbone of the slave economy, was already running out its profitability, that it was leaching the land of its richness. It was pretty clear to that generation of slave owners that a new economic model was inevitable in the South, but one thing that they couldn't foresee, like the creation of the submachine gun was the creation of the cotton gin and of the unbridled economic engine of cotton production, which made the Southern slave economy much, much more viable in the

long term than it appeared to be at the time. So they punted on the question, like we punt on a lot of questions, such as how much power should the president, who is the closest thing to a king we can have, the one thing we hate more than anything, a concentrated locus of power, how much power should he have? Well, we'll find out. Yes, we'll leave that one blank for now. We'll come back to it. So speaking of not wanting to put down markers because you didn't want anybody to walk away,

resolving all these issues was necessary to get buy-in on this whole idea of a federal government from each of the states. And I think the thing we really want to get at with this whole section is that the Constitution, I mean, it's not so much a statement of ideals or principles as a patchwork way to bridge the material interests of a relatively small group of relatively wealthy people within these 13 mini-Republics, and to paper over enough issues to get the states invested enough at a federal level to the point where walking away would be difficult. And that is, of course, one of the things that makes our civic veneration of this document

so ridiculous. At least the Mormons can say that the gold plates were found buried underground by an angel. With the Constitution, we know how this sausage got made. We know every step of the process, and none of it had anything to do with embodying transcendent values it had to do with more than anything, mollifying a bunch of squirrely slave owners and allowing them to be yoked to Yankee capital so that they could actually start building some bridges, canals, allowing the trade to grow, competing with the European powers that

they now felt themselves to be now in the same community of nations with. And that was the actual nut of the question. But they were also constrained, the founders, the drafters of the Constitution, by their direct relationship to the revolution, this almost immediately mythological connection they had with the founding of the country. I mean, after all they had just fought eight years of an intense war to rest control away from their imperial overlords, and this was still a very fresh in their minds. So all these compromises, the whole idea of a federal government, could only be worked

through if it could be subsumed within that mythology, and in this case by a single person who would hold the office of president. And this person was a living myth. He was the modern Cincinnati's. He was Washington, Washington, six foot twenty fucking killing for fun, spread, spread, Delaware. He's coming, he's coming, he's coming. So George, no middle name given, Washington was born February 22nd, 1732, Westmoreland County, Virginia.

He came from a family of wealthy Virginia land speculators who were exactly the sort of people who came to the New World to make their fortunes, not poor, not the steerage class indentured servants who ended up becoming the rabble of colonial America, but middling gentry who, for some reason or another, found themselves limited in their prospects in the home country. In Washington's case, one of his direct descendants was an Anglican preacher who was essentially driven from his parish by rowdy Puritans. The Washington's who came to America with enough money to get a stake immediately and

get some land made their wealth by striving. They were the most American type of people. They were strivers, specifically by speculating on land in the new Virginia territory and also gaining influence in the distribution of that land by getting into public administrative positions like surveyor, like justice of the peace. By the way, I do love reading about like the frontier in the colonial era. I was looking up Westmoreland County and it's like, you know, 80 miles from Richmond or DC, basically the suburbs now.

And that was like, I know, like that was, that was the wilds. That was, that was, that might as well have been, yeah, Yosemite. Now, and Washington embodied the tradition. He was a striver. He was on that grind. He was of the founders. He was the one who was most practical minded. He didn't go to a fancy school like Jefferson or, or, or Adams.

He didn't, he wouldn't really that interested in abstract philosophical questions. He looked at self-improvement, not as a question of becoming a body or a virtue, but of finding and exploiting the main chance. He was a rise and grind guy. He was a, he was a let's get this bread guy. He was absolutely a rise earner grinder. Yes. He was a let's get this bread guy.

And like most of those people in American history, he has enough points in his life where his ability shine through and he is able to capitalize on his own intelligence and, and talent. But all of that was on a base of inherited wealth and position that allowed him to assert those qualities. And of course, as we all know in America, we have a tendency to focus both on our, as ourselves and culturally on the one side of that equation and to sort of ignore the other side.

Washington's father died very, died when he was 11, which meant he had already inherited a farm and 10 slaves by the time his balls dropped. He did not get the fancy English grammar school education of his brother, but he was trained in a practical job, land surveying. And he eventually worked for relatives and people his family knew as a surveyor, his half brother's father-in-law, William Fairfax, who is a, a form of uncle. He's a colonial uncle. In the colonial time.

Yes. Colonial uncle. Yeah. And so under Fairfax, Washington helped survey the Shenandoah Valley in Culpeper County, Kentucky. He familiarized himself with the frontier region and he got the, the mania of his family and of his country for land speculation, for buying and flipping real estate. He of course, over the course of his life was able to, through inheritance mostly, gain

a lot of land, but he also speculated in land flip. He's essentially a house flipper on the, on the frontier. He's a property brother. He was a property. One of our founding, founding property fathers. He was a pro, he was a property father. Yes. And his understanding of the frontier region served him well when he obtained a commission

in the Virginia militia and served in the French and Indian war, uh, which was a very interesting time for him because it sharpened that sense of a precarity that is really what drives, uh, the most productive Americans and really one of the defining distinctions between the ruling class of the new colonies and of the new nation of America and the old moribund powers of Europe was that sense of place. The rulers of the old monarchies were these feudal aristocrats whose, whose question of their ability to rule and their continued revenues was never even thought of. They were assumed.

It was, it was part of God's design in the world. Things were much more up for grab in the colonies, which meant that the people who were most successful in becoming prominent, uh, in politics and in the military and in finance were those who felt like they had to grind. And Washington was an absolute grinder. And one of the things that makes you grind is feeling like somebody out there doesn't think you're good enough. Somebody thinks that you don't deserve it.

And while serving in the colonial militia, Washington found himself in conflict with his British army commanders and overlooked for promotion because of his colonial origins, which is one of the things that helped take this man who would not necessarily have been a patriot because support for, uh, independence was much stronger in the merchant north than it was in the, in the South. The American revolution was much closer to a civil war in the Southern States. That's why Cornwallis marched into the South after, uh, taking New York was because they thought they could exploit the greater degree of Tory support there.

But one of the things that made Washington different was that he had experience with the British and did not like being looked down upon. And like a lot of these guys thought it would be better to form their own country where he could be at the top finally of a hierarchy of esteem. I have to imagine that, you know, it's much easier for a, an aristocrat who's maybe, you know, a colonel or a general in a militia to say, Oh, I, I deserve this position because my family has owned this land for 500 years when you're actually in England than when you're, you know, 2000 miles away in the backwoods of Virginia and say, Oh, why do I have this

commission because my family owned a plot of land in England 500 years ago, uh, and you don't deserve it because your family just owns land here. I mean, in that, in that way, yeah, Washington, even though they're all part of this elite strata, you could say that he got a kind of class consciousness from that. Yes. I mean, the idea that there was a distinction there that was premised on nothing so much as birth and that he was not comfortable with because it meant somebody out there didn't think that he was as good a goodie boy as he thought he was.

But I mean, that was one of the things that drove his sympathies towards the Patriots. But another one is, is that, uh, because he was so fixed on the idea of westward expansion as the key to his personal and to the colonial project of prosperity that put him in conflict with the British who by, uh, the outbreak of the war had pretty much committed to limiting westward expansion by the colonists because it was too expensive. And those two things really helped drive him towards the Patriots camp. And so after, uh, the French and Indian war, George goes home and gets planting and he amasses a huge estate.

One of the big reasons is that his older brother who was originally Lawrence Washington, who was originally to inherit the bulk of the family's land died when he was a teenager. And then his wife died too later, which meant that by a King Ralph ask series of, uh, of fortuitous deaths, he ended up inheriting pretty much all of the Washington family's estates. And he got to the work after the war of becoming a prominent man of Virginia, which is what he wanted. And that also meant, uh, becoming a political animal.

He joined the house of Burgesses and was a prominent member of political circles in Virginia. It did not come naturally to him and he did not enjoy it. He did not enjoy the rough and tumble of politics because as someone fixated as he was on standing and status and esteem, uh, he was aware that to be political, to be a political agent is to be hated by somebody is to be some group of people's enemy, which he really did not like the idea of. He hated the idea that there were people out there who did not think that he was doing his best and operating from the most pure Simon pure virtue.

I appreciate that. Uh, it is also important for me for everyone to think that I am nice and good. Exactly. Yes. We, you are definitely the, uh, the, the Washington of our founding fathers, this podcast here for sure. But to be a prominent person in Virginia was to be a political animal. And so he reluctantly, as always, he was always reluctant in his political pursuits,

but he reluctantly became a political animal and it was well there operating in those levels that he got into the conflicts about the coercive acts and the conflict over the stamp of the TX. And, uh, uh, after the coercive acts passed, Washington said that custom and you shall make us as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary slay. Oh, no, we could not have that. We cannot have that. Absolutely not.

Uh, it would be simply a tragedy if we were to be treated as we treat the blacks. Yes. Like the, I mean, Samuel Johnson during the revolution said, why do we hear the, the loudest yops of freedom from the driver drivers of Negroes? And I think that that connection is not just a cheap irony. They are, they generate one another to see the abjectness of the conditions of people can be in is to be hyper aware that one might be placed in that position. And so one's politics become organized around preventing that from happening, uh, but it's

very indicative of the natural raw framework that all of the political theory of that generation is flowing through them. The idea that there is no contradiction between the notion of the declaration of independence and slavery because these blacks that they rule over that are being held custody by us, we know better than them by virtue of our position above them. We have the land. We have the power. That means by definition, we should be in charge and that that justice and that righteousness

it flows from that material command of the land. Right. It is a validator of worth. Yes. So yada, yada, yada. Honestly, the war itself, you know what happened? Valley Forge, Von Stuben, uh, fucking across the Delaware, getting his ass kicked at the battle of, uh, Germantown, by the way, real debacle on that one if you want to look into

it. And that's the thing. Washington was not actually a very good tactical commander. He was good at preventing his army from getting their asses completely handed them. He was good at retreating, which when you're fighting with a colonial force against an overawing military power like the British army was at that point, that's a really good thing to be good at. But he wasn't really that great at the nuts and bolts of, uh, combat commanding armies

into the field. He was exceptional at running away. And I do just want to shout out that I am currently podcasting sitting almost directly on top of one of his most notable fleeing routes, uh, right on top of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, where he notably, nobly ran away from the battle of Brooklyn. So thank you, sir for skedaddled for bravely getting your ass out of here to secure my rights to talk shit about you 250 years later. You know, salute to alleged honestly, but yes, his command came under many challenges.

People were questioning him the whole time, but he was validated because he held the army together long enough essentially for the French to show up and win the war for us. And that performance over the course of the war, being that the one unchanging thing about that army is it was tossed through the tempest of war and it's ups and downs. Washington's sentinel command, his unquestioned air of authority, uh, it ended up generating a legend about him. He became the man who, who's, who's made the country, who, who single handedly kept together the squabbling brigades of militia to execute this victory.

Uh, that was so incredibly, uh, unlikely at unprecedented, uh, and the thing that made him more venerated really than anything is that at the end of the war, he refused what was possible, which was to claim power for himself. Now I think one of the reasons he did that is because it was, it would have meant people would have gotten mad at him and it would have said that he wasn't a good, good boy and his internal, uh, school mistress, I slapped him on the bottom and kept him away from that. But it was, uh, one way or another, his Cincinnati's like resistance to taking power. Uh, and in fact, at one point he turned down a, uh, request to essentially march on Philadelphia

and overthrow the constitutional convention as a result of, uh, pay dispute, the Newberry conspiracy, uh, that created, that made his legend even bigger. And so when it was time to get the constitution out together and when the necessity of a office like the presidency came into being, the only figure in America who could conceivably fill it was George Washington. Yes. Washington was the guy in everybody's mind, uh, during the constitutional convention, which is also funny to imagine him at, uh, since as you were describing, he seems to

have had no real interest in the politics of it all. And yet he had to preside over this constitutional convention. I just always imagine like a, like a jock in a history lecture. It seems like there were only maybe like three or four guys who were really having fun there, uh, like Madison, Jefferson, really Madison, of course, the guy who wrote the whole thing. He was, he was the, he was the fucking nerd at the front of the desk with his arm up the entire time, well, as, uh, Washington was in the back, just like throwing pencils at the ceiling.

Yeah. Yeah. It was essentially Comic Con for James Madison. But that then brings us back to the United States constitution, an eminently dispensable document in search of an indispensable man. As you were just saying, the framers wrote the constitution and developed the office of the president with the assumption that only Washington could be the first man in the role.

He was the only man in the country at the time with the credibility to put the whole thing together, which kind of results in one of the most boneheaded fuckups in the entire document, which is collapsing the head of state and head of government into the same guy. Uh, if only Washington would have just agreed to be the dang king. Yes. Washington was the synthetic figure who allowed the Frankenstein's monster to be formed because everyone at the convention knew that whatever the president was able to do, and none of

them would could really agree what the president's powers should be, uh, and they weren't enumerated in the document itself. The only person whose discretion they trusted to essentially find those powers through embodying the office was Washington and they let that fill in for everything else. They knew that Washington as assumed president would get more people on board to supporting the constitution, which would be required because it would have to be adopted by the states voluntarily in order to come into being. And that knowledge is the necessary background and grounding that allowed the constitution

and specifically the executive branch to be shaped the way that it was. The person of Washington himself dictated the office in many ways. I really love the image of Washington as the brain being lowered into this Frankenstein's monster of a national framework or maybe to put a more Evangelion spin on it. He is the Shinji who can pilot Eva one. Get in the presidency, Washington, get in the presidency, Washington, I'll do it. I'll be your pilot. And like Shinji, he did not want to do it.

Yes. He was, he was, he didn't want to do it because he knew that it was the politics were dirty in a way that conflicted with his view of himself. So Washington gets in the Eva, he gets in and, uh, as anticipated, a majority of electors from every state voted for Washington as president on February 4th, 1789, he was inaugurated on April 30th, swearing on a Bible provided by the Masons, which I only bring up because that will become important in about 40 years. Remember those Masons?

Yes. Masons are always, always worthy remembering the Masons. And it's also important to note that one of the big things that got Washington into the Eva because he was very wary of entering into a dirty political scene and to send him first to the Constitution Convention to sit with all those nerds, uh, was that he was actually kind of broke at the end of the war, uh, Mount Vernon and his surrounding lands that had been undersupervised during his time away. When he returned, they were in very poor condition.

There had been bad harvests and, uh, droughts. The fractured articles of confederation in post-war America made it difficult for him to call him debts that were owed to him and it left him owing taxes that he couldn't afford to pay. And it blocked his ability to gain profit from the speculations on the Potomac River and in the Western Reserve that he had made before the war. He actually needed to borrow $500 in cash from a friend to go to his own inaugural in New York because he didn't have that much liquidity.

The biggest landowner in the country, but totally cash poor. That's what the articles had done and why guys like Washington felt that they needed to be reformed. It's difficult to imagine him being so invested in the formation of the constitutional order in the absence of that motivator, wanting to see a stable financially grounded federal government that could allow him to make some goddamn money. It's just very funny thinking of George Washington, this stern, taciturn hero agreeing to become the leader of the first new Republic, uh, Republican country created on earth in generations

because he needed some walking around money. The United States of America is essentially a payday lending program for George Washington. It's true. It was a way for him to, to get a pension essentially. And in order to secure his finances and the social standing that went with them, Washington agreed to become a politician, the thing that he feared and hated becoming. But with the hope that because of who he was, he would be able to transcend politics, which as we will all find out is not a thing.

Well, let's get into it. Here we are. The Washington presidency. We've got a new constitution, a stronger federal government and the undisputed hero of the entire continent in there as president. Let's get to work. Let's link and build fam. Let's see where this takes us.

As he was in the war, Washington was a competent administrator and shaped many of the practices of the executive. But as we're talking about, he was a political almost to a fault and opposed the creation of political parties, which basically immediately a formed around his presidency, partially due to his elevation to the treasury secretary of one Alexander Hamilton. The real brains of the operation, because as we said, Washington was not really an intellectual. He was practically minded and he also wanted himself to be seen as above politics. But that did not mean that he did not have political principles and that being in the

office of president did not confer upon him certain motivations to see himself able to shape the course of events towards his liking. And one of the most darkly hilarious things about the constitution is that its framers accepted as a fact the idea that it would not work, that the entire thing would fail if it was peopled with representatives who operated from a faction, i.e. party, rather than some sort of vague understanding of the common good, which is what they all assumed they would represent. That is why in the original formulation, there was no vice presidential office to be elected

to, the second place electoral college vote getter just became vice president, because it was assumed that it would just be a contest between worthies. They probably wanted the same thing anyway, right? Everybody wants the same thing. What's the point? But as soon as the government came into formation, it was clear that there was a great difference, a great divide between the merchantial aspirations of Hamilton who wanted to create a modern state that could compete with the European states on equal terms in a global market and

the Jeffersonians who sought to maintain maximal personal freedom through agricultural exploitation. And lo and behold, that conflict very quickly shaped up to become a battle of factions, like immediately, instantly. This is the one thing we didn't want to happen. Over his first two terms, public discourse through newspapers and pamphlets became defined by Hamilton Jefferson and their various allies sniping at each other through anonymous letters and articles. They were basically forming these political parties around them.

They were the shit posters of their day. They shit posted themselves into the creating a superpower. It's pretty impressive. Very high level posting, which is why in some ways Trump is a perfect American political specimen, but we will get to that. Indeed. Hamilton's economic policies basically set the terms for the financial debate and the one that would become like one of the three major things people care about over the next

like 125 years, Hamilton advocated the assumption of a national debt and the creation of a national bank while Jefferson bitterly opposed it. And so you kind of outlined this before, but do you want to talk for a second about what the deal is with the bank and debt because this is again like 50% of what American politicians would be mad at until like the year 1900? Yes, because if freedom is the freedom to own property and be sustained by the land and the government is restrained from coercing you, then the only thing that could realistically coerce you would be a financial instrument.

Debt held by someone else, some banker in an Eastern city. And the fear that the Jeffersonians and their supporters and the majority of Yeomanry really and the colonies had was having debt replace those old feudal dues of Europe. And so they were vehemently opposed to the idea of the federal government assuming debt that could then be used as a form of control. But you really could not have a competitive modern state in the absence of a federal debt because the British, who at that point were the premier power in Europe and were in the process of building capitalism out of the ruins of feudalism, were doing so specifically

through the instrument of debt and through the creation of a central banking authority. And with the best practices being on display across the pond, Hamilton and the emergent federalist faction that he represented sought to impose one here. I find it kind of funny in retrospect, thinking of the Jeffersonian ideal of what in his imagination a just society would look like, just an infinite expanse of self-contained little farms with a guy sitting on a rocking chair on the front porch looking over a bunch of enslaved people going on and on into the distance forever. I think that in Jefferson's mind, eventually that slavery would have dissipated and the

slaves would have evaporated in some way. But it would have been replaced by just little small farms, little cabin, curl of smoke and some barley or whatever, and all the land that you can basically work yourself. And then, yes, your family finding their own land to work themselves, a sort of an infinite expanse of small farms where no white man was in charge of any other white man could compel any other white man to do whatever they wanted. But it does raise the question, how are they filling their homes with finished goods? What are they doing with the surplus of their agricultural production?

I don't know. How are you supposed to even amass a wealth that could make for a viable state? And of course, where do you spend your money? Because what you spend your money on is as much an expression of your virtue as anything else. Virtue through consumption. I wonder if that will come into play later on the line. Anyway, Hamilton was also creating trouble for Washington by getting an excise tax imposed

on distilled spirits to raise money for the federal government. This pissed a lot of people off, most notably farmers on the Pennsylvania Frontier, I mean the whole frontier, but Pennsylvania specifically, who basically used whiskey as money. Though whiskey was their money, the conflict escalated into outright defiance over the federal authority to tax in the 1794 whiskey rebellion. Yes, because your ability to enjoy the fruits of your labor on a farm is the ability to sell your surplus. But on an era when transportation infrastructure was rudimentary at best, it was often difficult

to get your surplus to a market before it went bad. And if you grew a staple crop like corn or wheat, a good way to store its value is to put it in the form of a shelf stable distilled alcohol. So whiskey stood in for currency in many parts of western Massachusetts, western Pennsylvania as well, places in the north that were far from trading areas where agricultural surplus could be traded or sold. And so that tax on it, which was necessary to help fund this new national debt, which had been the assumption of the state's debts that had been run up during the revolution,

was taken as an imposition, a federal imposition on the liberty of these small holders who were still operating on the belief in that Jeffersonian model of property autonomy as being inviolable. Which makes us the perfect little first conflict in federal versus rural, democratic, Republican yeomanry, whatever you want to call it issue, since it is the direct imposition of federal authority for the sake of federal financing on the life and trade possibilities and in that sense, liberty of the frontier yeomanry. And it's important to note Washington saw Hamilton as often starting fights that he

didn't want to have to pick a side in and making him become a partisan figure in a way he wasn't comfortable with. But he was fully invested in the federal position by then because he was motivated by the desire to see the country become prosperous. And in his mind, his vision of prosperity was the Hamiltonian model. And so his status and self-presentation has kind of allowed him to go off in history as an apolitical figure. But by the end of his first term, Washington was a committed federalist.

And part of the big reason for that is that the federalists were the only people who thought that he should be able to do anything as president, the job that he had taken in order to help put the country onto a stable foundation. The Jeffersonians were determined to prevent him from doing the thing they told him to do. And as a result, over time, he got more and more pissed with Jefferson and the Democrat Republicans and more sympathetic to the federalists. And he personally insisted on commanding the troops that went to put down the Whiskey

Rebellion. It's a good encapsulation of our conceit that we said at the beginning of this episode that as much as this can be portrayed as Washington like bravely standing up for the values of federal government that you might say he wholeheartedly believed in, but also he was given a job. And he took his job seriously. And he was, as I said, a competent administrator. And the only way for him to effectively prosecute this job was to engage in the action he took,

which was to muster and command state militias and put the rebellion down in a display of the early federal government's ability to enforce its will and protect its interests in the state. I mean, he basically, at that point, he's just executing the job description that he was given. And people started to fucking hate him for it. Jefferson and specifically the media empire around the emergent Democratic Republic faction started hurling brick bats at him, and he got really mad.

And that, in addition to his earnest desire to see the federalist program carried out, helped define him in his own mind as hostile to this other faction, even as he hated factions and the idea of being a factional figure, he was turned into one by the fact that he was carrying out a federalist position and doing so saw opposition in increasingly and increasingly hostile terms from this other faction, which only made him double down in his conviction on those questions. Move on to the foreign front. The signature accomplishment of Washington's administration was the J Treaty, designed

by, again, Alexander Hamilton and negotiated by John Jay in 1794. The treaty is notable for normalizing trade with Great Britain and thus strengthening Hamilton's financial system. But also, and I think this is important for us in the story we're trying to tell here, for the removal of British forces in the Northwest Territory, opening up the territory for encouraging one of the most powerful forces in American political economy, free real estate. This is where we need to really set it up. The people who came to America in the colonial era were pulled out of the feudal wreckage

of Europe and brought together to create a totally new social order, which had no embedded social relationships to generate trust or cooperation. And that problem, that conflict, was resolved in every sense and at every point by the fact of personal autonomy could be exerted through the claiming and exploitation of land. The key to understanding the ideology that has driven America throughout its history, and that has caused it to be such a schizophrenic political entity, is the reality of that free real estate. The biological and military war raged against the North American indigenous inhabitants meant

that by the time the colonies had formed themselves into coherent political entities, land was accessible in a way that allowed people, especially at the top of the political and economic totem pole, to imagine such a thing as an ungoverned life. Because all of the things that necessitate social cooperation and subordination of will towards a greater authority are about scarcity, about managing and dealing with scarce resources and distributing them from a central point. The dream of America was that the need to suborn the will or alienate authority out to an exterior force was not necessary, because freedom could be pursued individually.

And any conflicts could be resolved by the creation of self-sustaining autonomous citizens whose autonomy was guaranteed by their access to land. And so the availability of that land, and in some ways the assumption that there will always be more land to go to, was essential to the establishment of the country. And the availability of more land as a kind of release valve for social and political tensions was necessary for maintaining it. So of course, we have to get the British out of there, and of course Jefferson is going to go back to his entire small government shtick and buy half the goddamn continent

in his term. But that's what America is. We can only be free if we have free real estate. But we'll get to Jefferson. Right now we're talking about Washington and the J Treaty. And they got no credit for it. Jay was roundly castigated by Jeffersonian mobs across the country. He claimed that you could have piloted your way across the eastern seaboard by the light

of his effigies. And that was because in foreign policy orientation towards Great Britain was the big dividing line. Great Britain and the French in the aftermath of the revolution. The Jeffersonians supported France and their revolutionary government, and the Federalists supported Great Britain, mostly because they saw Great Britain as a model performing modern quasi-aristocratic proto-capitalist state. And also because they were the main trading partner, still, after the revolution with

the United States. And trade was their main prerogative. But the Democratic Republicans were furious that the J Treaty was too lenient and gave up too much to our hated former overlords. And so that was another case of Washington being like, what do you want from me, man? Come on. I'm here. You want me to go to war with England again?

It was not like it was easy the last time, man. Jesus Christ, we just did that. That's my old shit. I'm under the new shit. Washington left office in 1796 and retired to Mount Vernon. His farewell address was published in September 19th. And even though he had firmly moved into the camp of the Federalists, he left denouncing parties to the very end, writing,

However combinations or associations of the above description, he's talking about political parties, may now and then answer popular ends. They are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be able to subvert the power of the people and usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion. Of course, by this time, the formation of the American party system was well underway and Hamilton championed business and banking-friendly Fretalists in the North and East and Jefferson

with the Democratic-Republican Yeoman farmers to the South and West. We've now talked about this at length, but it is notable to point out yet again that even within one presidential administration's lifetime, the very machinery assumed into the document of the Constitution, i.e. a party-less system bound only by the interests of various regional powers and the powers of the states, is already falling apart. By being helmed by the singular person in George Washington who the entire thing was no States construction and distribution of resources.

In December 1799, after retiring to Mount Vernon, Washington, always tending to his dominion, went out to mark trees to be cut down. It was a snowstorm. He came back in with a wet coat, and he refused to take it off because he didn't want to keep his dinner guests waiting. He was such a proper boy to the end. Just a nice little lad who wanted to be thought of as nice by the people around him. He came down with a sore throat, and a few days later, after being a let of

nearly five pints of blood from his doctors, something I know that you always love to think about. I just love. I love the father of our country and they're just they're just pulling buckets of blood out of them. They're just collecting buckets next to his body. They're tapping him like a maple tree. Yep. They're like pressing on his stomach like a bellows to let the blood just shoot out of him, thinking like yeah, this is this is our science. There's no reason that we should ever

change a word in the document written by these guys. Yes, I knew everything. Yeah, of course, they're getting him dry as hell and letting people in to be like no, no, no, he's feeling fine. He's not dead. He's getting better. I feel happy after being let of nearly five pints of blood. George Washington died on December 14th 1799 at the age of 67. Rest in peace to our bone drive first president and he died at the very tail end of the Adams administration and Adams goes

down as like our first federalist president, right? Because we all still think of Washington as this transcendent figure. If you go on Wikipedia, it still has no party affiliation next to this shit. The all the stuff that Adams did that has marked him as a partisan figure passing the Alien Insidition Act and carrying out the quasi war with France. Those were all things that Washington whole heartedly supported in his letters. He said, give him hell, Johnny.

These fuckers have it coming. Shut down their fucking presses. Stop. Stop letting them make fun of me. I fucking hate you. And that is, you know, that's the great dramatic irony of Washington. He entered office hoping to embody the entire nation from an Olympian height, which in his role as a head of state, head of state, he did. But because of our constitution and its weird hybrid system, he was also the head of government. And as such, he pursued a series of

policies that were predicated on the idea of consolidating power to the government in accordance with the interests of the financial elites who formed the most coordinated concentration of influence in this new system, eastern banking interests, basically, complaining and protesting his innocence of partisanship the whole time Washington steadily enacted federalist policies, adopted federalist ideas and gained the enmity of the federalists enemies so that by

the time he left office, he was farewell address aside a convinced partisan of the federalist faction. He despised Jefferson. And during the Adams administration, he privately endorsed all of Adams putative actions. This figure who spent his whole life trying to pursue universal esteem ended his life as a fucking politician. Now, we don't remember him as one anymore. Because we need him to be that transcendent figure to bury the reality of material conflict as the basis

for the engine of our political deliberations. Because if that's not true, then the transcendent notions that are supposed to be undergirding and restraining power as its exercise in America are essentially convenient fictions that can and will be ignored when power deems it necessary, which while it may be true is something that is indigestible by our civic memory. And I think that is a good place to wrap up. I obviously don't have anything more thoughtful than

that to add other than that. I think that we will see over and over this conflict between what the men who occupy think of themselves and what the office forces them to do as you just described with Washington. Yes, we're going to see this over and over again. The office ends up shaping the man far more than vice versa. But that's the man how they're the man is remembered. That is determined by greater questions and by our general need to assert certain fictions to sustain our

allegiance to the system we have. We love our fictions, don't we, folks? We love our fictions, folks. We love our stories. We love the stories. But like David Byrne, we are telling you a true story now of the history of the presidency. This has been Episode One. The Constitution to George Washington continue with us down this road of American history, this bloody, messy, often stupid road of our history as we explore all of our presidents. Bye bye. Hell of Presidents is produced by me,

Chris Wade, with our talented co-producer Nick Quaz. Our theme music is by Nick Diamonds, who has a great new album called Islomania Out Now as his band, Islas, should check it out. Our show art is by the great Branson Reese, who you can find over on the Rude Tales of Magic podcast. And we'll talk to you next week for Adams to Adams. Let me lay it on the line. He had two on the vine. I mean two sets of testicles, so divine. On the horse made of crystal, he

patrolled the land with the mason ring and schnauzer in his perfect hands. Here comes George in control. Women dug his snuff and his gallant stroll. Eight opponents' brains. An invented cocaine. He's coming. He's coming. He's coming. Washington, Washington. Six foot twenty fucking killing for his plan.