His Excellency_George Washington

by Joseph J. Ellis

  When ratification became official in the late summer of 1788, even though he had been plotting and cheerleading from the sidelines for nearly a year, Washington was still dancing his private minuet about what ratification meant for him. His correspondence is littered with tortured declarations of uncertainty and platitudinous statements about entering “a vale of tears” or “a field enveloped on every side with clouds & darkness.” By this time, however, he was dancing only with himself, since ratification had closed off any escape. Upon hearing that his former chief continued to mutter threats about rejecting the presidency, Hamilton sent a bracing rebuke, reminding Washington that by chairing the Constitutional Convention he had “pledged to take a part in the execution of the government.” All his personal anguishing implied that he had some choice in the matter, which was a delusion. Washington thanked Hamilton for the forthright message with its “manly tone” and stopped leaking threats about barricading himself at Mount Vernon. But he never completely ended his litany of lamentations, telling Knox on the very eve of his inauguration that “My movement to the Chair of Government will be accompanied by feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”65

  Though he unquestionably meant what he said, his thinking was multilayered, like his earlier expressions of reticence about becoming commander in chief of the Continental army. Modern sensibilities make it difficult to comprehend Washington’s psychological chemistry on this score and dispose us to interpret his routinized reticence as either a disingenuous ploy or a massive case of denial. But in Washington’s world no prominent statesman regarded the forthright expression of political ambition as legitimate; and anyone who actively campaigned for national office was thereby confessing he was unworthy of election. What makes then so different from now was the aristocratic assumption that any explicit projection of self-interest in the political arena betrayed a lack of control over one’s own passions, which did not bode well for the public interest. Washington carried this ethos to an extreme, insisting that any mention of his willingness to serve as president prior to the election violated the code.

  Of course he knew that he was a candidate; he also knew that Madison was counting the electoral votes for president as the different states tallied up the results in January 1789. But when a correspondent mentioned his foreordained presidency, he expressed outrage that the subject was raised or “even obliquely forced upon my mind.” This was both a sincere statement and a scripted role. Indeed, at the time he wrote it, Washington was outlining his domestic and foreign policy priorities as president to Lafayette and consulting with David Humphreys about the contents of a seventy-three-page draft of his inaugural address. In effect, by denying his interest in the office, he demonstrated that he was in control of his ambitions; by privately preparing to serve, he began to assume control of his forthcoming responsibilities. Part of him did feel old, and longed to live out whatever years remained beneath his vines and fig trees. Another part realized that Hamilton was right, and that part was beginning to gird up for the next appointment with destiny. The public posture melded the two feelings: he did not seek this assignment, indeed had hoped to avoid it; but when called he would be ready, once again, to serve.66

  As in 1775, when he was made commander in chief, the vote was unanimous. All sixty-nine electors voted for Washington, and enough of them, thirty-four, also voted for John Adams to make him vice president. On April 7 the Confederation Congress dispatched its secretary, Charles Thomson, to Mount Vernon in order to apprise Washington officially of the results. (Just as Washington had sustained the fiction that he was unaware of his candidacy, Congress sustained the fiction that, until informed, Washington did not know he had won.) Humphreys had already drafted an acceptance speech containing the customary platitudes about being called to an arduous task for which he was woefully unprepared. On April 14, surrounded by a small entourage of secretaries and servants, Washington at last ended his evasive dance, declaring officially to Thomson that the unanimous vote “scarcely leaves me the alternative for an option.”67

  The first presidential election had in fact been a plebiscite on who most embodied the values of the American Revolution. Although the debates in the Constitutional Convention and then in the state ratifying conventions had demonstrated that these values were bitterly contested, the unanimous vote for Washington demonstrated that one man provided a symbolic solution acceptable to all sides. There had been no campaign platform providing voters with his position on the contested issues, because there had been no campaign. He was not chosen for what he thought, but for who he was. In the political vocabulary of the day, there was no word fit to describe his unique status, but the word that came closest was stigmatized by the very values he had been chosen to embody. “You are now a king, under a different name,” wrote one thrilled supporter, James McHenry from Maryland, “and, I am well satisfied that sovereign prerogatives have in no age or country been more honorably obtained; or that, at any time they will be more prudently and wisely exercised.”68

  This was dangerous talk, and Washington knew it. The ill-defined powers of the American presidency left considerable room for honest disagreement, but one point on which all sides could agree was that it was not an electoral version of monarchy and George Washington was not the second coming of George III. (Writing from Paris, Gouverneur Morris reported the delectable piece of gossip that George III’s mounting insanity had produced a delusional fit in which he imagined himself to be the second coming of Washington.) In the lengthy first draft of his inaugural address—blessedly never delivered—Washington had seen fit to insert a defensive comment, observing that he had no direct heirs or “immediate offspring” and therefore “no family to build in greatness upon my Country’s ruin.” There could be no Washington monarchy because there could be no Washington dynasty. His decision to order several yards of superfine broadcloth from a Hartford manufacturer for his inaugural suit also suggested that he wanted to make a sartorial statement of republican simplicity that countered the royal image.69

  But no matter what he said or what he wore at his inauguration—eventually he discarded the broadcloth outfit for a suit of black velvet—Washington was revered by the bulk of the American citizenry as a quasi-king whose special status had been earned rather than inherited. The public reverence accorded to royalty was put on display during Washington’s weeklong trip from Mount Vernon to New York, which became one prolonged coronation ceremony. It began with crowds of more than ten thousand celebrants cheering him amidst cannon salutes and poetic tributes at Baltimore and Wilmington. Outside Philadelphia he was obliged to mount a white horse so that the twenty thousand spectators could see him as he crossed the Schuylkill. Charles Willson Peale had designed an arch of triumph over the bridge, and his daughter Angelica lowered a laurel crown upon Washington’s head as he passed under the arch. At Trenton a chorus of white-robed girls tossed flowers from their baskets in his path while singing a tribute to “The Defender of the Mothers, The Protector of the Daughters.” A congressional committee greeted him at Elizabethtown, where a fifty-foot barge manned by thirteen white-smocked sailors rowed him across the Hudson. A flotilla of decorated ships and sloops pulled alongside the barge as he approached New York Harbor and a chorus aboard one of the sloops sang an ode composed for the occasion to the tune of “God Save the King”:

  Thrice welcome to this shore,

  Our Leader now no more,

  But Ruler thou;

  Oh, truly good and great!

  Long live to glad our State,

  Where countless Honors Wait

  To deck thy brow.70

  And so the retirement which had begun in the expectation of solitude and the presumption of finality now ended with a plebiscite of unprecedented approval and the adoring voices of ordinary American citizens ringing in his ears. What was he thinking at this dramatic moment of transition back into the public arena? Reading Washington’s famously (and often purposely) enigmatic mi
nd is always a tricky business, never more so than on emotionally complicated occasions like his acceptance of the presidency. When he delivered his brief and willfully innocuous inaugural address in the Senate chamber of Federal Hall on April 30, one witness found his performance appropriately solemn and sure-handed. Another thought the speech uninspired and Washington’s demeanor awkward, as if he wished to be somewhere else, and more nervous before the audience than he had ever been when facing British cannon and muskets.71

  The inaugural address itself was deliberately elliptical, offering little indication of his political agenda for the new government. His fullest statement on that score had been made in a private letter to Lafayette the previous summer. It seemed to suggest that his twin priorities were the restoration of fiscal responsibility and the creation of political credibility for the nascent national government:

  When the people shall find themselves secure under an energetic government, when foreign Nations shall be disposed to give us equal advantages in commerce from dread of retaliation, when the burdens of the war shall be in a manner done away by the sale of western lands, when the seeds of happiness which are sown here shall begin to expand themselves, and when every one (under his own vine and fig-tree) shall begin to taste the fruits of freedom—then all these blessings (for all these blessings will come) will be referred to the fostering influence of the new government. . . . Indeed, I do not believe that Providence has done so much for nothing.72

  In effect, he hoped to lend his prestige to the fledgling federal government, thereby helping it survive its most formative and fragile phase, providing the necessary credibility until this nation-in-the-making began to feel comfortable behaving as a single people instead of a confederation of states.

  The contradictory reactions to his inaugural address probably reflected his own conflicting emotions. His reservations were real, we know, because the Cincinnatus pose had always been more than a pose. Physically, we know, he felt past his prime, no longer oblivious to the fatigue and demanding regimen that accompanied life at center stage in the public arena. Also on the negative side, his most intimate confidante, Martha, was not with him. She had elected to stay behind at Mount Vernon until the celebratory fireworks died down and accommodations in New York had been arranged. His personal servant, Billy Lee, who had accompanied him on all his previous campaigns, was also missing. He had tried to make the trip, but two crippling knee injuries had forced him to drop out of the procession in Philadelphia. Someone else would have to comb and tie Washington’s hair and anticipate his daily needs.

  But alongside his personal doubts about risking his hard-won reputation, alongside reservations about his advancing age, and the absence of his accustomed support system, there were those crowds of cheering well-wishers stretching from Virginia to New York, expressing their bottomless confidence that he was the indispensable man. If he were truly superhuman, as many of his admirers believed, he would have felt no surge of fresh energy listening to their cheers. But, of course, he was not. The protracted coronation procession served as the palpable companion of the unanimous electoral vote and probably combined to buoy him above his personal doubts—his silence and code of control precludes certainty here—propelling him forward toward the presidency. If this were not enough, the applause reinforced his lifelong experience of winning every wager against the odds, whether it was at the Monongahela, Princeton, or Yorktown. It seems likely that his remarks to Lafayette about American national destiny, namely that it was foreordained, also described his sense of his own fate. In any event, his inauguration now joined at the hip the two destinies, which boded well for both. If the doubts were real, the providential forces were more potent. When the mix of moods coalesced, he entered the presidency with a bittersweet sense that he had done everything humanly possible to avoid this outcome, but that he was, once again, the chosen instrument of history.

  CHAPTER SIX

  First in Peace

  LOOKING BACK over two hundred years of the American presidency, it seems safe to say that no one entered the office with more personal prestige than Washington, and only two presidents—Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt—faced comparable crises. The Civil War and the Great Depression, though distant in time, remain more recent and raw in our collective memory than the American founding, so we find it easier to appreciate the impressive achievements of Lincoln and Roosevelt in negotiating the nation through these latter-day challenges. Washington’s achievement must be recovered before it can be appreciated, which means that we must recognize that there was no such thing as a viable American nation when he took office as president, that the opening words of the Constitution (“We the people of the United States”) expressed a fervent but fragile hope rather than a social reality. The roughly four million settlers spread along the coastline and streaming over the Alleghenies felt their primary allegiance, to the extent they felt any allegiance at all, to local, state, and regional authorities. No republican government had ever before exercised control over a population this diffuse or a land mass this large, and the prevailing assumption among the most informed European observers was that, to paraphrase Lincoln’s later formulation, a nation so conceived and so dedicated could not endure.

  Washington’s core achievement as president, much as it had been as commander in chief of the Continental army, was to transform the improbable into the inevitable. The point was put nicely by a French nobleman visiting Mount Vernon in 1791 before setting out on a quest for the elusive (in fact, nonexistent) water route across the North American continent: “But it is less difficult to discover the North-West Passage,” he explained, “than to create a people, as you have done.”1

  Assessments of Washington’s presidency tend to be forward-looking, understandably concerned with the constitutional precedents he set for the executive branch in such specific areas as the cabinet system, control over foreign policy, the veto, executive appointments, and setting the legislative agenda. But, once again, any comprehensive appraisal of Washington’s legacy must also be backward-looking, which means recovering the highly problematical attitude toward executive power that pervaded the political culture when he assumed office.2

  When he observed that “I walk on untrodden ground,” Washington obviously meant that, as the first American president, everything he did set a precedent. Less obviously, his privileged perch at the Constitutional Convention allowed him to recognize that the ground surrounding the American presidency was not just untrodden; the air around it was filled with menacing memories of George III. There was an unspoken reason why the final draft of the Constitution devoted more space to the rules for electing or removing the president than to delineating the powers of the office itself. Much like the reluctance to mention slavery explicitly, the reticence about the scope of presidential authority reflected a widespread apprehension that any direct discussion of the subject subverted the core principles of republicanism itself.

  If slavery was the proverbial “ghost at the banquet” at the Constitutional Convention, monarchy was its spectral accomplice. When Patrick Henry claimed that the Constitution “squints toward monarchy,” he spoke for a potent collection of skeptics who regarded any projection of executive power as a betrayal of the “spirit of ’76.” Although Washington did not share Henry’s conspiratorial suspicions, he did understand that accepting the presidency meant living the central paradox of the early American republic: that is, what was politically essential for a viable American nation was ideologically at odds with what it claimed to stand for.3

  The specter of monarchy haunted Washington’s entire presidency, especially during his second term, when the monarchical murmurs became full-fledged attacks on both his policies and character; they wounded him more deeply than any criticism he received as commander in chief during the war. The personal criticism also stunned him because he was both intellectually and emotionally ill-equipped to comprehend the shrill partisanship that came to define the political culture of the 1790s an
d that shredded any and all efforts to stand above the fray. He found himself in the ironic position of being the indispensable man in a political world that regarded all leaders as disposable. Without him to center it, the political experiment in republicanism might very well have failed. With him, and in great part because of him, it succeeded; but in so doing it rendered the nonpartisan values he embodied anachronistic.

  Another specter that hovered over the Washington presidency was age. From the time that Governor Dinwiddie had dispatched him into the western wilderness as a youthful emissary, Washington’s physical prowess had been his most elemental asset. At the Monongahela, then in the battles at Trenton, Princeton, and Yorktown during the War of Independence, bullets and shrapnel seemed to veer away from his body as if he were surrounded by an electromagnetic field of invulnerability. Like a natural athlete who takes his superb body for granted, Washington was accustomed to commanding any room or scene visually and physically. As we have seen, chinks in his armor began to appear in the 1780s, when the inevitable ravages of age started to soften him. And these symptoms of physical deterioration gave palpable shape to his increasingly fatalistic recognition that Washington men were genetically programmed to wear out early and die relatively young.