His Excellency_George Washington

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Two events early in his presidency reinforced these intimations of mortality. In June 1789 a large tumor appeared on his left thigh which eventually required surgery to remove. For a few days his condition was critical, and the street in front of the presidential mansion was roped off to prevent passing carriages from disturbing his recovery. Then in May 1790 he collapsed with influenza and lingered near death for three days with pulmonary complications. During his lengthy recuperation visitors reported that his eyes were permanently teary, his hearing was almost completely blocked, and his famously robust constitution seemed to have aged overnight. Washington himself acknowledged that recovery from the two illnesses had drained all his recuperative resources, so that another serious sickness, as he put it, would “put me to sleep with my fathers.” Jefferson’s gloss on Washington’s physical decline, as we shall see, is not to be fully trusted, but he suggested the assaults on the president’s body also had mental consequences: “The firm tone of his mind, for which he had been remarkable, was beginning to relax; a listlessness of labor, a desire for tranquility had crept on him, and a willingness to let others act, or even think, for him.”4

  Washington was not creeping toward senility, as Jefferson implied, nor was he too dazed to manage the duties of his presidency, as Jefferson claimed. But he was no longer the same vigorous man who had spent nearly eight years in the field leading the Continental army. Throughout his presidency he felt the sand in his personal hourglass running out, the relentless burdens of the office squeezing out the last remaining months, weeks, days, and hours of private serenity allotted him. Martha spoke for both of them when, soon after joining him in New York in May 1789, she exclaimed that she “felt more like a prisoner than anything else.” Washington’s constant refrain about retiring to bucolic splendor beneath his vines and fig trees was, true enough, a formulaic refrain within the leadership class of the revolutionary generation, especially the Virginia dynasty. And his previous declarations of reticence when called to command the Continental army or chair the Constitutional Convention were classical lines in a Ciceronian motif designed to conceal his ambitions from the world, and even, perhaps, from himself. But now the role of Cincinnatus had become his truly preferred destination. No president in American history wished to avoid the office more than Washington.5

  All of which helps explain one of the chief curiosities of his presidential correspondence. The longest letters, and more of them than he devoted to any official topic, deal with the management of his farms at Mount Vernon. Even when immersed in crucial diplomatic negotiations with France or controversial deliberations about Hamilton’s fiscal policy, Washington found time to compose meticulous instructions to his managers about plowing, weeding, worming, or grubbing schedules, about when to stock the ice house, about the personalities and work habits of different overseers or slave laborers, about proper food and rum rations at harvest time. One can read these letters as a continuance of his obsessive urge to remain the strenuous squire, the honest inclinations of a man who felt more genuine excitement discussing the merits of a new threshing machine than the intricacies of the Jay Treaty. Or one could, more speculatively, argue that the Mount Vernon correspondence allowed him to retain a zone of personal control amidst an increasingly discordant political world that seemed to defy control altogether. But, in the end, the most compelling explanation is that Washington’s soul, or at least the last sliver of his private personality, never made the trip to New York (and then Philadelphia) but remained ensconced at Mount Vernon.6

  One of the shrewdest of Washington’s biographers has suggested his private self had been effectively obliterated by the time he reached the presidency; that the man, if you will, had become the monument. While this was probably true for the way most of Washington’s contemporaries viewed him, it was not the way Washington viewed himself. And this personal perspective must stand as the final context for understanding his presidency. If the constitutional context looks forward to the landmark precedents for the executive branch, and if the historical context looks backward to the specter of monarchy haunting all energetic projections of executive power, the personal context looks southward toward Mount Vernon, the only place where he could shed his public role and be himself.7

  PRESIDING PRESIDENCY

  NOT MUCH HAPPENED at the executive level during the first year of Washington’s presidency, which was exactly the way he wanted it. His official correspondence was dominated by job applications from veterans of the war, former friends, and total strangers, most of whom pleaded for patronage in the highly deferential style that Washington himself had employed toward his British betters during the French and Indian War. They all received the same republican response: merit rather than favoritism must determine all federal appointments. As for the president himself, it was not clear whether he was taking the helm or merely occupying the bridge. Rumors began to circulate that he regarded his role as primarily ceremonial and symbolic, that after two years he intended to step down, having launched the American ship of state and contributed his personal prestige as ballast on its maiden voyage. There was talk of a brief and wholly presiding presidency.8

  As it turned out, even ceremonial occasions raised troubling questions, because no one knew how the symbolic centerpiece of a republic should behave, or even what to call him. Vice President Adams, trying to be helpful, ignited a fiery debate in the Senate by suggesting such regal titles as “His Elective Majesty” or “His Mightiness,” which provoked a lethal combination of shock and laughter, as well as the observation that Adams himself should be called “His Rotundity.” Eventually the Senate resolved on the most innocuous option available: the president of the United States should be called exactly that, no more and no less. Matters of social etiquette—how should the president interact with the public? Where should he be accessible and where insulated?—prompted multiple memoranda on the importance of what Hamilton called “a pretty high tone” that stopped short of secluding the president “like an Eastern Lama.” The solution was a weekly open house called the levee, part imperial court ceremony replete with choreographed bows and curtsies, part drop-in parlor social. The levees struck the proper middle note between courtly formality and republican simplicity, though at the expense of becoming notoriously boring and wholly scripted occasions only periodically enlivened by impromptu acts of spontaneity, as when Washington once bent over to kiss the widow of Nathanael Greene on the cheek.9

  The very awkwardness of the levees fit Washington’s temperament nicely, since he possessed a nearly preternatural ability to remain silent while everyone around him was squirming under the social pressure to fill the silence with chatty conversation. (Adams later claimed that this “gift of silence” was Washington’s greatest political asset, which Adams himself so envied because he lacked the gift altogether.) Washington also possessed distancing mechanisms that deflected intrusions into the space around his body much as they had deflected bullets on the battlefield. The formal etiquette of the levees combined with Washington’s natural dignity (or was it aloofness?) to create a political atmosphere unimaginable in any modern-day national capital. Namely, in a year when the French Revolution broke out in violent spasms destined to reshape the entire political landscape of Europe, and the Congress, under Madison’s deft guidance, ratified a Bill of Rights that codified the most sweeping guarantee of individual rights ever enacted, no one at the levees discussed these major events or expected Washington to comment on them.

  Washington’s urge to keep himself and his presidency hovering above the political fray received assistance from the only other unequivocal occupant of America’s pantheon. In April 1790 his sole rival as the premier American hero, Benjamin Franklin, finally went to his maker. In his will Franklin bequeathed his crabtree walking stick to Washington, explaining that “if it were a sceptre, he has merited it, and would become it.” (The notion of a crabtree scepter had the perfect Franklin touch, a seamless blend of the ordinary and the elevated.) A month e
arlier the first medal minted in the United States bearing Washington’s image on one side and his accomplishments on the other appeared in Philadelphia. And a month before then, in February 1790, the practice of celebrating Washington’s birthday as a national holiday became a tradition. It all contributed to the impression that Washington was not directing the government so much as floating above the infant republic as a sagacious and beloved guardian.10

  Even the matters of etiquette and symbolism, however, could have constitutional consequences, as Washington learned in August 1789. The treaty-making power of the president required that he seek “the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” He initially interpreted the phrase to require his personal appearance in the Senate and the solicitation of senatorial opinion on specific treaty provisions in the mode of a large advisory council. But when he brought his proposals for treaties with several southern Indian tribes to the Senate, the debate became a prolonged shouting match over questions of procedure. The longer the debate went on the more irritated Washington became, eventually declaring, “This defeats every purpose of my coming here.” He abruptly stalked out of the session, as one witness reported, “with a discontented Air . . . of sullen dignity.” From that time onward, the phrase “advise and consent” meant something less than direct executive solicitation of senatorial opinion, and the role of the Senate as an equal partner in the crafting of treaties came to be regarded as a violation of the separation of powers principle.11

  Though he never revisited the Senate, he did honor his pledge to visit all the states in the union. In the fall of 1789 he launched a month-long tour of New England that carried him through sixty towns and hamlets. Everywhere he went the residents turned out in droves to glimpse America’s greatest hero parading past. And everywhere he went New Englanders became Americans, at least for the duration of his visit. The only sour note was a patch of bad weather at the end, which produced an epidemic of respiratory infections among the throngs of well-wishers who had waited for hours in the cold rain to see him in the flesh. (In an ironic tribute, newspapers named the epidemic after him.) Since Rhode Island had not yet ratified the Constitution, he skipped it, then made a separate trip the following summer to welcome the proudly independent latecomer into the new nation. During a visit to the Jewish synagogue in Newport he published an address on religious freedom that turned out to be the most uncompromising endorsement of the principle he ever made. (One must say “made” rather than “wrote,” because there is considerable evidence that Jefferson wrote it.) Whatever sectional suspicions New Englanders might harbor toward that faraway thing called the federal government, when it appeared in their local neighborhoods in the majestic form of George Washington, they saluted, cheered, toasted, and embraced it as their own.12

  The southern tour was a more grueling affair, covering nearly two thousand miles during the spring of 1791. Instead of regarding it as a threat to his health, however, Washington described it as a tonic; the real risk, he believed, was the sedentary life of a desk-bound president. The entourage of eleven horses included his white parade steed, Prescott, whom he mounted at the edge of each town in order to make an entrance that accorded with the heroic mythology surrounding his military career. Prescott’s hooves were painted and polished before each appearance, and Washington usually brought along his favorite greyhound, mischievously named Cornwallis, to add to the dramatic effect. Much like a modern political candidate on the campaign trail, Washington’s speeches at each stop repeated the same platitudinous themes, linking the glory of the War of Independence with the latent glory of the newly established United States. (The linkage came naturally at places like Charleston, Camden, and Guilford Court House, former battlefields in the southern campaign that Washington was seeing for the first time.) The ladies of Charleston fluttered alongside their fans when Washington took the dance floor; Prescott and the four carriage horses held up despite the nearly impassable and often nonexistent roads; Cornwallis, however, wore out and was buried on the banks of the Savannah River in a brick vault with a marble tombstone that local residents maintained for decades as a memorial to his master’s historic visit. In the end all the states south of the Potomac could say they had seen the palpable version of the flag, which was Washington himself.13

  During the southern tour, one of the earliest editorial critiques of Washington’s rather conspicuous embodiment of authority appeared in the press. He was being treated at each stop like a canonized American saint, the editorial lamented, or perhaps like a demigod “perfumed by the incense of addresses.” But the chief complaint harked back to the primordial fear haunting all republics: “However highly we may consider the character of the Chief Magistrate of the Union, yet we cannot but think the fashionable mode of expressing our attachment . . . favors too much of Monarchy to be used by Republicans, or to be received with pleasure by the President of a Commonwealth.”14

  Such criticisms were rarely uttered publicly during the initial years of Washington’s presidency. But they lurked in the background, exposing how double-edged the political imperatives of the American Revolution had become. To secure the revolutionary legacy on the national level required a “singular character” who embodied national authority more visibly than any collective body like Congress could convey. Washington had committed himself to playing that role by accepting the presidency; indeed, he regarded his symbolic role as the core function of his presidency. But at the center of the revolutionary legacy lay a virulent suspicion of any potent projection of political power by a “singular figure.” And since the very idea of a republican chief executive was a novelty, there was no available vocabulary to characterize such a creature except the verbal traditions surrounding European courts and kings. By playing the role that he believed history required, Washington made himself vulnerable to the most potent set of apprehensions about monarchical power that recent American history could muster.

  He could justifiably claim to be the one and only “singular character” who could credibly insist that he had earned the right to be trusted with power. He could also argue, as he did to several friends throughout his first term, that no man was more poised for retirement, that he sincerely resented the obligations of his office as a lengthening shadow of public responsibility that kept spreading over his dwindling days on earth. If critics wished to whisper behind his back that he looked too regal riding a white stallion with a leopard-skin cloth and gold-rimmed saddle, so be it. He himself knew that he longed for a crabtree walking stick more than a scepter. In the meantime he would play his assigned role as America’s presiding presence; or, as the multiple toasts in his honor put it, “the man who unites all hearts.”

  THE GREAT DELEGATOR

  EXERCISING EXECUTIVE authority called for a completely different set of leadership skills than symbolizing it. Washington’s administrative style had evolved through decades of experience as master of Mount Vernon and commander of the Continental army. (In fact, he had fewer subordinates to supervise as president than he did in those earlier incarnations.) The cabinet system he installed represented a civilian adaptation of his military staff, with executive sessions of the cabinet resembling councils of war designed to provide collective wisdom in a crisis. As Jefferson later described the arrangement, Washington made himself “the hub of the wheel” with routine business delegated to the department heads at the rim. It was a system that maximized executive control while also creating the essential distance from details. Its successful operation depended upon two acquired skills Washington had developed over his lengthy career: first, identifying and recruiting talented and ambitious young men, usually possessing superior formal education to his own, then trusting them with considerable responsibility and treating them as surrogate sons in his official family; second, knowing when to remain the hedgehog who keeps his distance and when to become the fox who dives into the details.

  On the first score, as a judge of talent, Washington surrounded himself with the most intellectually sophisticat
ed collection of statesmen in American presidential history. His first recruit, James Madison, became his most trusted consultant on judicial and executive appointments and his unofficial liaison with Congress. The Virginian was then at the peak of his powers, having just completed a remarkable string of triumphs as the dominant force behind the nationalist agenda at the Constitutional Convention and the Virginia ratifying convention, as well as coauthor of The Federalist Papers. From his position in the House of Representatives he drafted the address welcoming Washington to the presidency, then drafted Washington’s response to it, making him a one-man shadow government. Madison’s unique combination of abilities as a profound student of politics and a brilliant political tactician had captured Washington’s attention even before the debates in Philadelphia, when he had helped to prepare Washington for his chairman’s role in the convention. Soon after the inaugural ceremony Madison showed Washington his draft of twelve amendments to the Constitution, subsequently reduced to ten and immortalized as the Bill of Rights. Washington approved the historic proposal without changing a word, and trusted Madison to usher it through Congress with his customary proficiency.15

  One of Madison’s early assignments was to persuade his reluctant friend from Monticello to serve as secretary of state. Thomas Jefferson combined nearly spotless revolutionary credentials with five years of diplomatic experience in Paris, all buoyed by a lyrical way with words and ideas most famously displayed in his draft of the Declaration of Independence. Though ironic in retrospect, Jefferson’s acceptance letter set a deferential tone and expressed a willingness to harness his vaunted powers to Washington’s foreign policy agenda: “My chief comfort,” he promised, “will be to work under your eye, & the wisdom of measures to be dictated by you, & implicitly executed by me.”16