There was silence from the floor, until Oliver Ellsworth, considered an authority on the Constitution, rose to his feet. “I find, sir,” he said, “it is evident and clear, sir, that whenever the Senate are to be there, sir, you must be at the head of them. But further, sir, I shall not pretend to say.”
Later, when Adams raised the question of whether the Senate should be seated or standing when the President addressed them, Richard Henry Lee offered that in England when the King spoke before a combined session of Parliament, members of the House of Lords sat and those of the House of Commons stood. Lee was followed by Ralph Izard, who said he could attest from personal observation of such occasions at Parliament that members of the House of Commons stood because in the House of Lords there were no seats for them.
On the day of his inauguration, Thursday, April 30, Washington rode to Federal Hall in a canary-yellow carriage pulled by six white horses and followed by a long column of New York militia in full dress. The air was sharp, the sun shone brightly, and with all work stopped in the city, the crowds along his route were the largest ever seen. It was as if all New York had turned out and more besides. “Many persons in the crowd,” reported the Gazette of the United States, “were heard to say they should now die contented — nothing being wanted to complete their happiness . . . but the sight of the savior of his country.”
In the Senate Chamber were gathered the members of both houses of Congress, the Vice President, and sundry officials and diplomatic agents, all of whom rose when Washington made his entrance, looking solemn and stately. His hair powdered, he wore a dress sword, white silk stockings, shoes with silver buckles, and a suit of the same brown Hartford broadcloth that Adams, too, was wearing for the occasion. They might have been dressed as twins, except that Washington’s metal buttons had eagles on them.
It was Adams who formally welcomed the General and escorted him to the dais. For an awkward moment Adams appeared to be in some difficulty, as though he had forgotten what he was supposed to say. Then, addressing Washington, he declared that the Senate and House of Representatives were ready to attend him for the oath of office as required by the Constitution. Washington said he was ready. Adams bowed and led the way to the outer balcony, in full view of the throng in the streets. People were cheering and waving from below, and from windows and rooftops as far as the eye could see. Washington bowed once, then a second time.
Fourteen years earlier, it had been Adams who called on the Continental Congress to make the tall Virginian commander-in-chief of the army. Now he stood at Washington’s side as Washington, his right hand on the Bible, repeated the oath of office as read by Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York, who had also been a member of the Continental Congress.
In a low voice Washington solemnly swore to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Then, as not specified in the Constitution, he added, “So help me God,” and kissed the Bible, thereby establishing his own first presidential tradition.
“It is done,” Livingston said, and turning to the crowd, cried out, “Long live George Washington, President of the United States.”
With the crowd in raptures, cannon pounding, church bells clanging, Washington bowed still again and then, Adams at his side, moved back to deliver his inaugural address to a seated Congress.
If the Vice President had seemed hesitant or nervous performing his small part earlier, the President was no better. Washington’s hands trembled holding his speech, which he read in a voice so low that many in the room had difficulty hearing what he said. No part of the address was particularly distinguished or memorable and the delivery was monotonous throughout. Several times his voice quavered. Yet none of this seemed to matter. He was Washington and many in the room had tears in their eyes. Representative Fisher Ames of Massachusetts later wrote of sitting “entranced,” as though he were witnessing “an allegory on which virtue was personified.” A French diplomat, Louis-Guillaume Otto, wrote with amazement at the effect Washington had. Never had “a citizen of a free country enjoyed among his compatriots a confidence as pure and as universal . . . a real merit and a faithful virtue must be the basis of it.”
Adams provided no comment on the day’s events. Writing to Abigail late the following day, he reported only that at a reception at the President’s house, Washington had greeted him “with great cordiality . . . affection, and confidence,” and that all had gone “very agreeably.”
Days later, in Paris, where he had only just learned of Adams’s election, Jefferson wrote warmly, “No man on earth pays more cordial homage to your worth or wishes more fervently your happiness.” Having requested temporary leave from his duties in France to settle private affairs at home, Jefferson hoped to reach Virginia by late summer.
But little at all went agreeably for Adams in the weeks to follow. In the Senate, the issue of titles, and particularly the question of how the President was to be addressed, superceded all other business. In the House a move to consider titles met with quick defeat. The House voted that the chief executive should be addressed simply as “George Washington, President of the United States.” But in the Senate the discussions became heated, with Adams taking part more than the members deemed appropriate.
According to some accounts it was the Virginian, Richard Henry Lee, who raised the issue, saying that titles were in use everywhere in the world, that there was something in the human makeup that responded to them, and that they were perfectly appropriate. Senator Izard, expressing agreement, moved that “Excellency” be the President’s title. When Senator Ellsworth observed how very ordinary the mere appellation of President sounded, Adams immediately concurred from the Chair. There were presidents of fire companies and cricket clubs, Adams observed.
A committee appointed to consider the issue reported back with the suggested title “His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of the Rights of the Same.” But it was Adams who took the lead in advocating titles, voicing his views in direct opposition to a strong-willed senator from Pennsylvania, William Maclay. Indeed, had it not been for Adams and Maclay the issue might have come to little more than it did in the House. Instead, it occupied the Senate for nearly a month.
Only Maclay was keeping a private journal of what transpired, and being the only account, it would be quoted repeatedly by latter-day historians. Maclay’s rendition of Adams was devastating. Adams’s version of what happened, written a few years later, would be quite different. According to Adams, his supposed passion for titles amounted merely to a reasonable request for advice from the Senate on how to address Washington:
Whether I should say, “Mr. Washington,” “Mr. President,” “Sir,” “may it please your Excellency,” or what else? I observed that it had been common while he commanded the army to call him “His Excellency,” but I was free to own it would appear to me better to give him no title but “Sir” or “Mr. President,” than to put him on a level with a governor of Bermuda.
Adams believed everything possible should be done to bring dignity and respect to the central government and thus strengthen the union. If the central government was to have greater authority and importance than the state governments, then the titles of federal office ought to reflect that. It was thus essential to adorn the office of the President, the highest office, with commensurate “dignity and splendor.” Titles were symbols, just as impressive buildings were symbols, except that titles, unlike buildings, cost nothing.
Like Richard Henry Lee, Adams believed the need for “distinctions” ran deep in human nature and that to deny this was unrealistic. The love of titles was like the love of parades and pageantry. The title did not make the man, of course, but it enhanced the standing of the man in the eyes of others. Rank and distinction were essential to any social organization, be it a family, a parish, or a ship, Adams would say. He cared intensely about the future of the repub
lic and, as he had tried to explain in his Defence of the Constitutions, he saw men of education, ability, and wealth as “the natural aristocracy,” the great strength and blessing of society, but potentially also a great threat to liberty, if their power and energies were misdirected. These were not hereditary titles he was proposing, but titles conferred by society for merit and that went only with positions of high federal responsibility. He was convinced that the modest compensation and heavy burdens of public service — the disruption of family life, the criticism and insults one was subjected to — must be compensated for, if ever people of ability were to take part. He believed that honorable titles of a kind not to be acquired in any other line of work could make a difference. To him personally, he insisted, they mattered not at all. It was his thought that Washington should be called “His Majesty the President,” or something of the sort.
But there was no popular support for grand titles. Adams was woefully out of step with the country. Had he been in New York two years earlier, almost certainly he would have seen a play called The Contrast, if for no other reason than it was written by Nabby’s former suitor, Royall Tyler. The first American play to be produced on stage, it opened with the lines:
Exult each patriot heart! This night is shown
A piece which we may fairly call our own:
Where the proud titles of “My Lord!” “Your Grace!”
To humble “Mr.” and plain “Sir” give place.
One wonders, too, what effect Abigail might have had on her husband had she been with him during his first weeks as Vice President. It was not titles that gave men preeminence in America, she had lectured the “haughty Scotchman” on her voyage to England and to the solid approval of her shipmates.
James Madison, in an address to the House, had expressed the conviction of most Americans when he said, “The more simple, the more republican we are in our manners, the more national dignity we shall acquire.”
But Adams would not be stilled. It was almost as if he had to go against the current, lest anyone doubt his independence. He repeatedly intruded on the Senate’s time to voice his views, even lecturing the Senate, as if back at his schoolmaster’s desk. “For forty minutes he harangued us from the chair,” wrote Senator Maclay of one such disquisition.
Maclay, the most radical and outspoken Anti-Federalist in the Senate, was a rough-hewn lawyer from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania who stood six feet three and believed he was serving among a “set of vipers.” Caustic, opinionated, he disliked just about everyone. In the privacy of his journal he called Alexander Hamilton “a damnable villain”; Robert Morris, “the greatest blackguard”; and referred to James Madison as “His Littleness.” For Adams he felt only contempt. Earlier Benjamin Rush had encouraged Maclay to support Adams for Vice President and to be friendly to him after Adams took office, with a view to the help Adams might provide in making Philadelphia the capital. “We knew his vanity,” Maclay wrote, “and hoped by laying hold of it to render him useful among the New England men in our scheme of bringing Congress to Pennsylvania.” Accordingly, Maclay treated Adams with feigned deference, hating every moment of it, as he wrote in his journal. He thought Adams “silly,” said he had “the face of folly.” Whenever he looked at the Vice President presiding in his chair, wrote Maclay, “I cannot help thinking of a monkey just put into breeches.”
It was the spirit of the Constitution that most Americans wanted, Maclay insisted, rising repeatedly to address the Senate. “Let us read the Constitution,” he declared. “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States.” Any such attributes were “contraband language” in America.
To judge by what Maclay recorded, Adams made a fool of himself every time he opened his mouth, while he, Maclay, remained the voice of reason and the people’s will. Possibly, Adams was as ludicrous as Maclay portrayed him. But given Maclay’s contempt for Adams — a contempt so blatant that some in the Senate urged him to exercise some self-restraint — it is hard to imagine that what he wrote was not highly colored by bias.
Persisting in his futile effort, Adams made himself a mockery, even among some who were on his side. When Ralph Izard suggested that Adams himself be bestowed with a title, “His Rotundity,” the joke rapidly spread. In the House, Representatives John Page of Virginia, Jefferson’s lifelong friend, and Thomas Tucker of South Carolina relieved the tedium of extended debates by penning and exchanging doggerel at the Vice President’s expense. “In gravity clad, He has nought in his head, But visions of Nobels and Kings,” wrote Tucker, as a poetic query, to which Page responded:
I’ll tell in a trice —
’Tis old Daddy Vice
Who carries of pride an ass-load;
Who turns up his nose,
Wherever he goes,
With vanity swelled like a toad.
On May 14, exactly as the House had done, the Senate voted that Washington’s title be simply and only “The President of the United States.”
Clearly the issue had been blown out of proportion. As even Madison admitted on the floor of the House, it was not a question of vital importance. Nor had Adams proven himself a monarchist, as some like Maclay kept insisting. Privately, Adams knew what a bad start he had made, and to be the butt of jokes, after all he had been through, was hurtful. But as any adverse or critical comment on Washington, any ridicule at all, would have been considered unacceptable at this stage, Adams served as a convenient target for mockery and humor, and would again, just as he would be subject to the easiest, most damaging of smear words: monarchist. He was the first, but by no means the last, Vice President to take abuse in the President’s place, though much of it, to be sure, he brought on himself.
Most serious perhaps was the damage he had done to his standing with Washington, who was privately advised that the fuss over titles had made Adams not just unpopular in Virginia but “odious.” Washington was thereafter to maintain an appreciable distance from Adams, thus diminishing still more the importance of the vice presidency and Adams’s part in the scheme of things.
Yet through it all, true to his promise, Adams had shown no anger or acted discourteously to anyone. At one point he also conceded from the chair that perhaps he had been out of the country too long and failed to know the temper of the people.
To compound his troubles, word had been passed to him for the first time explaining the “dark and dirty intrigue” used to deny him votes for Vice President, and it sickened him. “Is not my election to this office in the scurvy manner in which it was done a curse rather than a blessing?” he asked Benjamin Rush in a letter charged with disgust. He had not yet learned who was behind the scheme, only that it had originated in New York, and the more he observed of life in New York, the more disconsolate he grew. To William Tudor, he railed against the “corruption of ambition,” the “ungovernable rage” for money and luxury he saw on all sides. Later, Adams would attribute such “scrawls” to “gloomy times and desperate circumstances.” He felt miserably alone. His accommodations with John Jay were the finest possible, and occasional Sundays with Nabby and her family helped greatly. But his need for Abigail, his ballast, was acute.
By mid-May he had located a house and posted an urgent plea for her to come at once. From her letters he knew the trouble she was having finding someone to lease the farm, and that she was short of funds. He told her to borrow whatever she needed, or sell off some of the livestock, “anything at any rate” rather than delay a day longer. If no one would take the place, she should “leave it to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field,” he told her. In the meantime, he was desperate for books to be sent — Hume, Johnson, Priestley, Livy, Tacitus, Cicero, “and a Plutarch in French or English.”
As to the nature of his “difficulties,” he gave no explanation. Of all that had been going on in the Senate and his part in it, he said only that he had survived largely through prayer.
“My sincere thanks to Mr. Wibird for his remembrance of me in his prayers,” he tol
d Abigail. “It is to me a most affecting thing to hear myself prayed for, in particular as I do every day in the week, and disposes me to bear with more composure, some disagreeable circumstances that attend my situation.”
The suspicion that Adams was a monarchist at heart grew stronger, and understandably, as in his Defence of the Constitutions of Government he did seem to lean in that direction. Distraught over what he had heard, Benjamin Rush wrote to caution his “dear friend” to think again and remember all he had espoused at the start of the Revolution.
In fact, Adams had done serious damage to his reputation and among others besides Rush whose opinions he most valued. It appeared that the man who put such stress on balance in government was himself a little unbalanced. Writing Madison from Paris, Jefferson dismissed the Senate’s proposed title for Washington as “the most superlatively ridiculous thing” he had ever heard of, and called Adams’s part in such business “proof” that Franklin’s characterization of Adams as “sometimes absolutely mad” was the right one.
As so often before when feeling battered and unappreciated, Adams poured out his fury and frustration on paper. To Rush he insisted he was as much a republican as ever. Still, he did not see hereditary monarchy and aristocracy as necessarily contrary to human nature. Nor was it beyond reason to imagine that the time could come when America, of necessity, might have to resort to something of the kind — as “an asylum against discord, seditions, and civil war” — in order to preserve the laws and liberties of the people. He did not expect to see anything like this happen in his lifetime. He was only saying it was conceivable.
“I am a mortal and irreconcilable enemy to monarchy,” he would later tell Rush, after Rush expressed worry that Adams had abandoned the ideals of 1776. “I am no friend to hereditary limited monarchy in America,” Adams wrote explicitly. “Do not, therefore, my friend, misunderstand me and misrepresent me to posterity.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 197