Then came a blunt appeal from a trusted quarter. Hamilton wrote him with disarming frankness: “on your acceptance of the office of President the success of the new government in its commencement may materially depend.” No one, Hamilton said, had Washington’s stature, either at home or abroad. On the off chance that Washington feared for his legacy, Hamilton thought it worthwhile to add that if the new system “should miscarry,” the blame wouldn’t be assigned to Washington but to the men, such as Hamilton himself, who had constructed it.
As if the two beloved younger officers of his staff were acting in concert, Lafayette wrote as well, with his customary verve: “in the Name of America, of Mankind at large, and Your Own fame, I Beseech you, my dear General, Not to deny your Acceptance of the office of president.” Lafayette knew him as well as Hamilton did, understood his quiet vanity, and like Hamilton he added a note concerning Washington’s regard for his reputation, declaring his belief that the presidency “will furnish An Admirable Chapter in your History.”
In the end, Washington allowed his name to be put forth. Things happened very quickly. In February 1789, a letter arrived from New York. It was from Henry Knox, his old comrade-in-arms, who was following events. The electors had cast their ballots, he solemnly informed Washington, and “your Excellency has every vote for President, and Mr John Adams 28 for Vice President exclusively of New Jersey and Delaware whose votes for Vice are not Known.”
Martha was not pleased. His health had deteriorated; she considered him too old to begin a large public responsibility. And while she enjoyed entertaining guests at Mount Vernon, she had no taste for official pomp. He left in April; she said she would come later. He began his journey with “a mind oppressed.” He seems to have thought he could slip quietly through the countryside, accompanied by his two aides. In fact, he was waylaid with parades and celebrations in Alexandria, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton.
At the riverside in New Jersey a “presidential barge” was waiting for him, with musicians and white-clad oarsmen, ready to row him across the Hudson. A band of dignitaries greeted the barge as it pulled up to the dock on the Manhattan side. There were speeches. As Washington moved forward into the city, the crowd—soldiers, children, women in their spring hats—thronged him. Being a man of breeding, he bowed politely, over and over, to each well-wisher. They may have been a bit surprised at the sight. He was famous, after all, as a military man, but here he was dressed in a sober brown suit and white stockings. He did, however, have a sword at his side. He was older than they expected, too, having himself become aware of rapid, premature aging in the past few years: “descending the hill,” as he put it.
The Constitution stipulated a simple oath that would render a newly elected leader president. He stood on the balcony of Federal Hall next to Robert Livingston, the chancellor of New York, and repeated the words: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The crowd cheered. Then he and the other members of the government entered the Senate chamber. He had thought it fitting to give an inaugural address. He had given thought, in fact, to the many ways in which what he now did would, as he said, “serve to establish a Precedent.” He chose in his speech to paint in broad strokes, bringing the theme of the Revolution into the Republic, beseeching the legislators, who were likewise setting a precedent as the first Congress under the Constitution, to govern with “a reverence for the characteristic rights of freemen.” It was a short speech. Some members of Congress were struck by the weakness in his voice, and by the fact that he seemed to tremble as he spoke.
Eventually, he was able to be alone with his thoughts. Congress had rented a house at the corner of Cherry Street, a few blocks away, as the president’s mansion. There were oriental rugs and lots of mahogany furniture. It was tasteful. But of course it was not home. Outside the windows, the trees were in blossom. The whole city seemed overflowing with hope and affection for him. But he was alone. And Martha wouldn’t arrive for weeks.
To occupy himself constructively, he wrote a letter to his vice president, John Adams of Massachusetts. “The President of the United States wishes to avail himself of your sentiments on the following points,” he began. Basically, he was wondering what to do with himself. He was not a king, and did not wish to act like one; but he was by nature reserved, and, especially in his current mood, craved privacy. Did Adams think it would be suitable if he set aside just one day per week for receiving “visits of Compliment”? Would it be enough if he offered “about four great Entertainments in a Year”? And would there be “any impropriety in the President’s making informal visits—that is to say, in his calling upon his acquaintances”? He had only just entered the office of president, and already he seemed to be looking for ways out of it.
If you were fleeing London, and were a person of some ambition, there was really only one place to go. From a hill on the outskirts of Paris, Margaret Coghlan, runaway debtor, looked down, in the summer of 1787, into a shimmering whitewashed maze of architecture, punctuated by the grandest of steeples and spires, signifying nothing less than the epitome of human civilization. London was larger, but Paris was the home of luxury, refinement, art, science, fashion, theater and philosophy. It was the city of salons whose walls were studded with magnificent art and through whose exquisitely appointed spaces drifted the world’s most interesting people. It was the city of the future, which at this very moment was completing work on a novel project to affix a number to each building, so that every single resident could be scientifically accounted for. Yes, it was also a place that in many parts smelled like a sewer, with streets that crawled with disease and crime and cat-sized rats. But someone in Margaret’s situation had to focus on the positive. Paris was the city of silk and perfume and cognac and wine. It was the city of love. Paris, she felt, putting the best possible face on her circumstances, was her natural home.
Margaret Coghlan was not alone in fleeing her past. The practice of imprisoning people for inability to pay their bills forced many to such extremes. For her, starting over was an act of defiance, an assertion of the will to live.
She knew the city well enough to know where she wanted to be. And despite having to leave London in a hurry, she had done it in style, bringing her maid with her and as much furniture as she could manage. She settled in at her hotel, a fashionable place for foreigners in exile, and promptly found herself a companion. William Dalrymple was a Scot who had served in the American war as a major general and had recently been elected to Parliament. They had shared experiences over which to break the ice, he having served for two years in Halifax, the city where she was born. On the arm of an illustrious military man, she was back in her element. Dalrymple, she gushed, “made me acquainted with all the beauties of that superb and magnificent city; he introduced me into all the gay and brilliant circles, of which he himself shone the splendid ornament.” She was being kind regarding his splendor: Dalrymple was in his fifties, with a great round belly. Elsewhere she called him her “cicisbeo,” an Italian term for a gentleman who escorted a married woman in society, suggesting, perhaps, that she did not consider him an actual lover. Meanwhile, feeling secure enough to once again be excited by life, she allowed herself to become smitten by a younger relative of Dalrymple’s, and the two of them began a tryst behind the general’s back. Dalrymple suspected them, hid himself in her room and surprised them at what she referred to as the act “that lovers dedicate to the deity of their adoration.” Her association with both men ended at once.
After that she thought it best to change to another accommodation catering to foreigners. Her new headquarters was a fashionable hotel run by a Madame Lafar, a woman whom Margaret was assured respected her guests’ privacy, “never asking impertinent questions.”
Meanwhile, she could not escape noticing that the cobbled streets through which her coach rattled were thrumming with
nervous energy. The city was on edge. King Louis XVI, facing bankruptcy, had asked Parlement to issue new taxes, including a stamp duty similar to the one Americans had rebelled against, and Parlement had refused to do so. For a time, the atmosphere of impending strife made the gaiety of society that much gayer. Every evening Margaret was surrounded by “the greatest splendour,” tables “continually crowded by persons of the highest rank.” A wealthy gentleman named Mr. Beckett “flattered me by his addresses, at a time when all the Parisian beauties were emulous with each other for his affections.” She succumbed, and for four months she whirled through the city at his side, rubbing shoulders with the Duc d’Orléans, with Prince Louis d’Arenberg of Belgium. She even made the acquaintance of the Comte d’Artois, the handsome, thirty-year-old brother of the king.
Then the troubles descended. Riots broke out in the streets. The king ordered the members of the Paris Parlement out of the city for their insolence, and set his brothers the task of enforcing the new taxes. But at the Palais de Justice, the Comte d’Artois, Margaret’s royal acquaintance, encountered a furious crowd numbering in the thousands. He tried to advance, aided by mounted Swiss and French guards; the crowd rushed him. He fled the scene, pale and shaken at the unprecedented act of violence against a royal person.
Alongside British Whigs, French intellectuals—most notably Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—had given voice in the previous decade to notions of individual liberty and a society based on natural rights, and some had pointed to America as proof that a such a society could actually exist in the real world. People at the salons Margaret attended began whispering about a shocking notion being voiced: that Louis XVI, their absolute ruler, would be advised to allow some measure of popular rule. With even more anxiety, the powdered and bewigged crowd gossiped about Louis’ answer, which was transmitted through his Keeper of the Seals, Chrétien-François de Lamoignon. It was “universally acknowledged,” he declared with finality, that “the King alone must possess the sovereign power in his kingdom.” As to popular rule, de Lamoignon added, “the legislative power resides in the person of the King independent of and unshared with all other powers.”
Margaret meanwhile had her own personal turmoil—a familiar one. She had once again been living beyond her means. Her landlady insisted she pay her outstanding bill, which amounted to 500 pounds. She announced that she couldn’t pay, at least not right away. Later, at a party, she found herself accosted by the police. Her friends went to the English ambassador to ask him to intercede, but he was away. At two o’clock in the morning she was taken to the Hôtel de la Force, the debtors’ prison: the “mansion of slavery,” she called it. She was shown to her cell: empty except for a bed of straw on the floor and a blanket. In her arms was her two-year-old son. She was also seven months pregnant. She spent the night with her maid, who insisted on accompanying her, wailing at her fate, aghast that she had fallen so far. In the morning, she sent out appeals to friends, asking them, in her desperation, to contact the Comte d’Artois. Miraculously, they reached the king’s brother and he interceded in her behalf. She was released into his custody.
From rags back to riches: she spent the next six months as a guest of the prince. Soon, however, she learned that all of her belongings had been seized by her creditors. Margaret had spent lavishly in Paris, including purchasing not one but two expensive vehicles, a post-chaise and a chariot. Everything was now gone.
Summer came on in full force. It was July 1789. Enormous angry crowds massed in the streets. The king—absolute, untouchable monarch that he was—was being openly reviled. The air was heavy with the threat of violent change. Like many other foreigners, Margaret decided she had better leave the country.
George Washington was not settling contentedly into his role as first president of the American republic. Martha eventually joined him in New York, but she didn’t much like it either. Despite his long early years of studying the mannerisms of the Virginia gentry, he and his wife both felt like bumpkins in their new social circle, studded as it was with foreign dignitaries and members of what was for all intents and purposes an American aristocracy. At state dinners, Washington adopted a frozen smile. One participant remarked that in his boredom Washington “played on the dinner table with a fork or knife, like a drumstick.” One reason for his wandering attention may have been a growing deafness: the president simply couldn’t hear much that went on around him.
Yet he did work hard at setting up an executive administration. And he took careful note of events in the wider world. He was keenly aware that the fever for individual freedom that had occupied the whole of his adult life and led him to this position was at work elsewhere. When news reached New York that massive public demonstrations in Paris had climaxed with the storming of the Bastille, the medieval prison that stood as a symbol of French tyranny and injustice, and that an all-out revolution was taking place in Europe’s most deeply monarchic nation, Washington was stunned at the power and sweep of historical forces. His friend Lafayette was back in France; Washington had not heard from him since he had assumed the presidency. He picked up a pen: “The revolution, which has taken place with you, is of such magnitude, and of so momentous a nature that we hardly yet dare to form a conjecture about it. We however trust, and fervently pray that its consequences may prove happy.” Lafayette wrote back expressing his amazement that “Every thing that was is No More,” and his hope that “a New Building is Erecting, Not perfect By far, But Sufficient to Ensure freedom.” As events in France grew more menacing, however, Washington found himself fearing the worst. Where America’s revolt had been against the state, in the form of a distant empire, the French had taken up arms against both their king and the Catholic Church. The Enlightenment commitment to reason as a new organizing principle for society called in both countries for a radical change of government, and the installation of a rule by the people. But where American society was young and flexible, in France the political structure was ancient and deeply woven into the social fabric. And the ardent commitment by the revolutionaries to follow the dictates of reason in throwing off the “superstition” of the Church brought their fight onto an entirely different level, one that promised unprecedented violence and turmoil. Washington confided to Gouverneur Morris his fear that in France “the revolution is of too great magnitude.”
If part of Washington’s discomfort with the presidency had to do with New York, that situation at least changed in the summer of 1790, when he boarded a boat and sailed across the river to New Jersey, en route to a new, albeit temporary, national capital. Abraham Yates’s agreement to support the Constitution in hopes of keeping the capital in lower Manhattan had been for naught. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson had lobbied for the construction of a new capital on the banks of the Potomac River. Washington, their fellow Virginian, had liked the idea as well. Northerners, including Alexander Hamilton, were bitterly opposed. Meanwhile, the Congress became caught up in debating Hamilton’s proposal that the federal government should assume all the debts of the states, as part of a general reorganization of federal finances. In one quietly momentous dinner meeting, Hamilton, Madison and Jefferson reached a compromise. Hamilton agreed to move the capital to the Potomac, and in exchange the Virginians accepted the debt assumption. In order to win Pennsylvanians to the plan, they offered to make Philadelphia the interim capital for a period of ten years, until the new city was built. Thus, Washington made his stately way south to Philadelphia in August of 1790, met en route by parades and cheering crowds. Along with the rest of the government, he would have a new home.
As he settled in—he had been given a four-story mansion that was a much more comfortable home than he had had in New York—he was flooded with reports from the frontier. Following the war, the government had planned for future expansion by organizing a region officially known as the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio, which extended from the Pennsylvania border to the Mississippi River and as far north as Canada. Agents had negotiated treat
ies with Indians in this vast region similar to the one Cornplanter had agreed to at Fort Stanwix. Then the fighting began. Shawnees, Kickapoos, Wyandots, Ottawas, Miamis and other tribes were outraged by the terms of the treaties and by the groups of white settlers who began felling trees and building homes in their lands. And the Iroquois, with whom the Americans had the longest and closest association, had also racheted up their outrage, as Americans, exulting in their own freedom, set about constricting the Indians’ freedom.
Washington sent out an army to deal with the western tribes. The Iroquois, however, were closer to home; their concerns had to be heard. He agreed to take an active part in discussions. He had long known of the Seneca leader Cornplanter, who had been one of the fiercest enemies of America in the war but had since become one of the most pragmatic and diplomatic of Iroquois leaders. Now they would meet.
On the first day of December, Cornplanter, having returned to Philadelphia four years after his appearance at the Saint Tammany spectacle, stood outside the door of the presidential mansion along with two other Seneca leaders, Half-Town and Big Tree. Cornplanter had known of George Washington practically all his life. Back in 1753, his uncle Guyasuta had guided a twenty-one-year-old Washington to the French headquarters at Fort Le Boeuf. When Cornplanter was still a child, he learned of the white Virginian from his uncle, and knew to apply the name Town Destroyer to him. With the devastation of Sullivan’s army, the prophecy in the name had been realized.
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