Washington- The Indispensable Man

by James Thomas Flexner

  Although the mother and son had been for so long at odds, her death revealed deep emotion on both sides. She left George her most personal possessions and, ignoring the fact that among her offspring he least needed a legacy, the lion’s share of her estate. And Washington, who usually saw no light on the other side of the grave, was moved into one of his very few references to the possibility of heaven: “awful and affecting as the death of a parent is,” there was consolation in “a hope that she is translated to a happier place.”

  After Congress had adjourned on September 30, 1789, Washington could look back on a period of great creativity achieved with a minimum of conflict. The constitutional skeleton had been fleshed out and a healthy government was striding across the land, “to the satisfaction,” Washington wrote, “of all parties.” When Jefferson reached the capital, he was amazed to find that “the opposition to our new Constitution has almost totally disappeared.” He credited primarily the behavior and influence of the President.

  * The term cabinet, although too useful not to be used here, was not current during most of Washington’s Presidency.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The Social Man

  (1789)

  The aspect of the Presidency that Washington came most quickly to dislike was that it forced his natural conviviality into unnatural channels. He had hardly been inaugurated before he discovered that it was impossible for him relaxedly to keep open house as he had in Virginia. He could not get his work done because people called all day long to mouth rotund compliments and put forward their pretensions to be employed in the government or further entertained. Although conscious that he might be accused of snobbery and worried lest he separate himself from personal contacts that would keep him informed concerning public opinion, he felt it necessary to establish a rigid schedule of whom he would receive, and when, and what kind of invitations he would accept.

  On her belated arrival from Virginia, Martha was outraged: “I live a very dull life here and know nothing of what passes in the town. I never go to any public place. Indeed, I think I am more like a state prisoner than anything else. There is certain bounds set for me which I must not depart from. And, as I cannot do what I like, I am obstinate and stay home a great deal.”

  Washington’s official schedule of entertaining specified three kinds of affairs: his “levees” for men only, every Tuesday from three to four; Martha’s tea parties, for men and women, held on Friday evenings; and official dinners staged on Thursdays at four in the afternoon.

  Down the middle of the presidential table stretched a glass plateau, designed in pieces that could be combined to form various lengths and shapes. To decorate and reflect in the plateau, he had twelve figurines of French bisque. The group here illustrated was the centerpiece (Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union)

  Wine cooler. One of four Washington purchased during his Presidency for use by the men, who remained at the dinner table after the ladies had departed. Made of English Sheffield silver, each cooler held on a bed of ice four quart decanters that were filled with four different wines (Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union)

  The levees were open without invitation to any respectably dressed male. (In the eighteenth century, none other presumed to come.) As aristocracies had learned by long experience, only ceremony can give satisfactory content to altogether formal entertaining. Washington’s aide, David Humphreys, did his best to supply the need. On one occasion, he arranged for the guests to gather in what he called the “presence chamber.” He accompanied Washington to the door, threw it open, entered first, and shouted, “The President of the United States.”

  Washington, so Jefferson’s account continues, was so disconcerted that he did not recover his composure during the whole time of the levee. When it was finally over, he told Humphreys angrily, “Well, you have taken me in once, but by God, you will never take me in a second time!” Thereafter, Washington was discovered standing uneasily in his most formal dress with a hat (designed to be thus carried) under his arm and his dress sword peeping out from under his black coat, when, on the dot of three, the servants threw open the doors to whatever was that day’s hustle of visitors.

  This situation brought to the fore that shyness which also made Washington so embarrassed under the scrutiny of portrait painters. When notified that rumor in Virginia accused him of snubbing good republicans, he answered that he could not imagine “what pomp there is in all this.… Perhaps it consists in not sitting”—but there was no room large enough in the house Congress had rented for the President to hold a third of the chairs that would be required. “Gentlemen, often in great numbers, come and go, chat with each other, and act as they please. A porter shows them into the room, and they retire from it when they please and without ceremony. At their first entrance, they salute me and I them, and as many as I can talk to I do.” As for the criticism that his bows were awkward, would it not be more charitable to ascribe this to old age or the unskillfulness of his teachers rather than to pride of office?

  The President was much more at ease at his wife’s tea parties. The ladies, having no more elegant presidential receptions to attend, did not spare the hairdressers and costumers. Washington, who enjoyed the company of the fair, circulated gaily without sword or hat. Martha remained seated. Perhaps the more because he did not get on well with the Vice President, Washington was careful to see that the seat to Martha’s right was assigned to the Vice President’s wife. If another lady happened to be sitting there when Abigail Adams arrived, he got the interloper to move with a tact that made Mrs. Adams comment, “This same President has so happy a faculty of appearing to accommodate and yet carrying his point, that, if he was not really one of the best-intentioned men in the world, he might be a very dangerous one.” She continued in a manner that would have irritated her husband: “He is polite with dignity, affable without familiarity, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity, modest, wise, and good.”

  To prevent any contest for invitations, Washington devoted his dinners to entertaining in orderly rotation government officials and foreign representatives. Since such of his best friends as Knox and Senator Robert Morris were in the government, the occasions could be gay, but there were also monumental failures like the party which William Maclay recorded for posterity.

  A hypochondriacal and puritanical senator from rural Pennsylvania, Maclay distrusted Washington and was highly suspicious of Philadelphia society. As he dressed in preparation for the presidential dinner, the Senator warned himself not to let his pure republicanism be undermined by the seductions of Washington’s entertaining. He was happy to see that the women all sat on one side of the table flanking Martha, with men on the other flanking Washington, but he gleefully suspected that a couple who had arrived together were not married.

  Seduction then approached in a form that endangered Maclay’s resolutions: food. “Soup, fish, roasted and boiled meats, gammon, fowls, etc.… The dessert was first apple pies, pudding, etc., then iced creams, jellies, etc., then watermelons, muskmelons, apples, peaches, nuts.” Unable to deny that the meal was the best he had ever experienced, Maclay nonetheless found soothing dissatisfactions: the room was “disagreeably warm,” and the food was eaten in solemn silence: “not a health drunk.”

  After the cloth had been removed, there were too many toasts. To Maclay’s disgust, the President “drank to the health of every individual by name around the table.” The guests imitated him, “and such a buzz of ‘Health, sir’ and ‘Health, madam’ never had I heard before.”

  Silence sank again until the ladies withdrew. Then Washington told an anecdote—about “a New England clergyman who had lost a hat and wig in passing a river called the Brunks”—which Maclay did not consider funny. Another guest delighted and horrified Maclay by referring to Homer when he meant Virgil.

  “The President kept a fork in his hand,” but instead of using it to open nuts, he “played with the fork, striking
on the edge of the table with it.” Maclay assumed that the President was being pompous and dull, but perhaps Washington was hearing yearningly in his mind’s ear laughter on the banks of the Potomac.

  Washington was eager to get back, for as long vacations as possible, to Mount Vernon, but during the break between sessions of the first Congress, in the fall and winter of 1789, he felt that his duty prevented any extended departure from the capital: his cabinet was brand new and also incomplete, as Jefferson hesitated and dawdled. Washington had to be satisfied with a month’s trip through New England. His object, he wrote his sister, was “relaxation from business and re-establishment of my health.” Policy was also involved. He wished to become familiar anew with an area he had known only in wartime, and to make, in this powerful part of the nation, the federal government visibly felt.

  In previous travel diaries, Washington had primarily jotted down agricultural observations. Now he concerned himself with nonagricultural economics. He noted the nature of exports and the number of ships which had sailed from various ports. He sought out and described the infant factories along his route. Most impressive was a sail factory in Boston where twenty-eight water-powered looms were tended by young women. Washington commented on the advantages of offering such respectable employment to “daughters of decayed families,” and observed the employees with admiration, “telling the overseer he believed he had collected the prettiest girls in Boston.”

  Skirting Rhode Island (the one state still delinquent, since North Carolina had by now joined the union), he traveled according to a prearranged schedule through Connecticut (Fairfield, New Haven, Hartford) and Massachusetts (Springfield, Worcester, Boston, Newburyport). He was received with cheers and ceremonies everywhere, but his sensitive ear did not perceive in the greetings that hysterical note which had so bothered him on his trip from Mount Vernon to his inauguration. He concluded that the people were no longer on edge. They had settled down comfortably with a satisfactory government.

  After he had reached the northernmost point of his trip, Washington decided that he could abandon his official progress and on his way back travel in the more agreeable role of a private gentleman. Yet he was too tensed up to relax. Rolling unannounced through the countryside, he found the inconveniences “intolerable.” The Massachusetts roads, he complained, “are amazingly crooked to suit the convenience of every man’s fields; and the directions you receive from the people equally blind and ignorant.” In Connecticut, he was annoyed at being trapped in the little village of Ashford because it was “contrary to law and disagreeable to the people of this state to travel on the Sabbath.” The tavern in which he was becalmed was “not a good one.” No diversions being offered except the morning and evening services in the local meetinghouse, Washington suffered through two “very lame” discourses “from a Mr. Pond.”

  On November 13, Washington “arrived at my house at New York, where I found Mrs. Washington and the rest of the family all well.”

  THIRTY

  Infighting Foreshadowed

  (1790)

  During the first session of Congress, solid foundations had been laid for the government of the United States. The second session presaged fissures that were to widen until they tore Washington’s administration apart.

  The main actors in the future controversy now met each other for the first time. Hamilton had been at work since the moment of his appointment as Secretary of the Treasury, but for three months Jefferson had hesitated, unable to decide whether to accept State, and then he had spent another month on private business. The congressional session was some five weeks old when, on March 21, 1790, Jefferson appeared in New York to undertake his duties and incidentally meet Hamilton.

  Washington had known both men well, although in different contexts. Hamilton had come to him at the age of about twenty as a military aide so brilliant that he rapidly became, in effect, chief of staff. All the more defiantly proud because of his illegitimate birth, this immigrant from the West Indies had rebuffed Washington’s advances of friendship, preferring, as he wrote, “to stand rather on a footing of military confidence than of private attachment.” After Washington had repeatedly demonstrated his unwillingness to lose his invaluable aide by giving him some more conspicuous assignment, Hamilton picked a quarrel and resigned his staff post in anger. Washington forgave, and belatedly rewarded the fiery youth with a glamorous opportunity at Yorktown. Yet the two men remained on no more than distantly friendly terms until brought again into close collaboration by the cabinet appointment.

  With Jefferson, Washington had not previously worked closely. Yet the fellow Virginians shared deep hereditary and environmental interests that were far out of Hamilton’s range. Between the Revolution and the Presidency they corresponded on what were then Washington’s two major concerns: agriculture and the Potomac Canal. When the retired Commander in Chief became, despite his wishes, reinvolved in public matters, he turned naturally to Jefferson for advice.

  Although no one had yet recognized the fact, Hamilton and Jefferson were born to hate each other. Alike in having dominant personalities, they were opposite in manners and temperament. A shorter man than Jefferson, Hamilton moved with military crispness; Jefferson slouched. Hamilton dressed meticulously; even Jefferson’s admirers felt he overdid the sloppiness of a philosopher. Hamilton’s mind moved in the straight line of a doer; Jefferson’s with the discursiveness of a thinker.

  The rivalry that was to arise between them was not only doctrinal and for political power. They competed for the admiration and countenance of Washington. Jefferson’s father had died when he was a child; Hamilton’s father was a ne’er-do-well who had soon drifted away. Both younger men found in the President a substitute father, whom neither was willing, as they came to hate each other, to share.

  All controversy, however, lay in the future. Madison was their mutual friend and brought them smilingly together. They felt the same anxiety when Washington was so stricken with pneumonia that on the fifth day of his illness he was, as Jefferson wrote, “pronounced by two of the three physicians present to be in the act of death.… You cannot conceive of the public alarm on this occasion. It proves how much depends on his life.”

  That same afternoon, while Jefferson was expressing “total despair,” Washington took a turn for the better. Soon he could ride out prone in his coach. When he was still too weak to attend to public business, the President comforted himself with the thought that “by having Mr. Jefferson at the head of the Department of State, Mr. Jay of the Judiciary, Hamilton of the Treasury, and Knox of that of War, I feel myself supported by able coadjutors who harmonize extremely well together.”

  Alexander Hamilton, by John Trumbull (Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society)

  Thomas Jefferson by Jean Antoine Houdon (Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society)

  At the time of Jefferson’s arrival and for some time after Washington’s recovery governmental attention was focused on Hamilton’s plans for meeting the debts which had been incurred during the Revolution. Despite the agitations of the financiers and Washington’s assurances to his soldiers when he had sent them home unpaid, these debts had for the most part been allowed to fester during the Confederation. Washington, who must have suffered from a sense of guilt that he had not been more successful in his efforts to procure recompense for his army, could only be pleased that his efficient Secretary of the Treasury was now purposefully grappling with the problem.

  Hamilton’s recommendations had, of course, been shown to Washington before they were sent to the House of Representatives, but the direct communication which Congress had established between the Treasury and the House absolved the President of specific responsibility. He would have no duty for decision until such bills as Congress passed came to him for signature or veto.

  After it had been decided that the federal government should meet the obligations incurred by the Continental Congress that were still outstanding, there remained three major issues: �
��discrimination,” “funding,” and “assumption.”

  Most of the original recipients had, in order to get some usable money in hand, sold their Continental paper to speculators. Arguing that it was unjust for those who had themselves bled or otherwise suffered to be excluded from the government’s belated act of justice, Madison proposed “discrimination.” He moved in the House that present possession of a certificate should only entitle the holder to part payment. The rest should go to the original holder.

  Although highly popular with everyone except the moneymen, discrimination proved on examination to be unworkable: it was illegal since the certificates had printed on them that the value be paid to the bearer; the cost of seeking out the original owners would be astronomical and most of them could probably not be found; and, since some of the paper had gone abroad to European capitalists, refusing completely to honor what had been bought in good faith would destroy the foreign credit of the United States.