First of Men

by Ferling, John;

  The fight in Virginia was similar to the battle elsewhere, for here, too, men of the Anti-Federalist persuasion saw themselves as old-line Whigs battling to protect the people’s liberties from hegemonic government. They disapproved of the absence of a bill of rights from the proposed constitution, and they warned that the states would be imperiled by the powerful new national government. In addition, they predicted that both the House and Senate would be dominated by aristocrats, and they argued that the limitations on the national government’s power were too inexplicit. George Mason denounced the charter as undemocratic. The people never would elect the president, he complained. Moreover, the branches were not adequately divided to suit him; he believed the “Constitution has married the President and Senate” by giving the two such coequal powers. Unlike their comrades elsewhere, Virginia’s Anti-Federalists were beset by two gnawing fears. Mason and others fretted that the northern majority would barter away the Mississippi River, as the Yankee merchants had tried to do two years earlier, and some worried that Congress’s commercial powers would make the state’s tobacco exporters mere slaves of northern carriers, as “ill-fated Ireland” had been to England, according to one delegate. But on the 25th, when the issue was decided, the Federalists had the votes—narrowly. The tally was eighty-nine to seventy-nine. A switch of six votes, just one-quarter of the uncommitted delegates, and the Constitution would have been rejected by Virginia.51

  On the day the vote was cast, an unusually cool, windy June day, Washington rode about his farms, looking after the planting of Irish potatoes in one sector, watching his slaves hoe corn in another, and in still another area dropping in to visit his kiln where more brick was about to be fashioned. Two days passed before news of the ratification vote eddied this far inland, and only a few hours after the courier arrived bearing those tidings another dispatch rider galloped by with more news: New Hampshire likewise had affirmed the Constitution. Ten states now had acted positively. The new compact was over the top. All that remained was to elect the officials. The momentous vote in Richmond had come almost twelve years to the day after Congress had voted independence, but Washington noted that the victory celebration he attended in Alexandria on the 28th came on the tenth anniversary of the battle at Monmouth. Perhaps it was not strange for him to think now of that engagement, for his “victory” that day, as well as the subsequent excision of General Lee that resulted from the events of that chaotic afternoon, had, he believed, been his real day of independence.52

  If Washington ever had doubted that he might be his countrymen’s first choice—only choice, really—to be the nation’s initial president, such notions had to have evaporated within a few days of the crucial votes in Virginia and New Hampshire. At July 4th celebrations in various states his name was mentioned in that regard, and soon, too, newspaper essayists were alluding to him almost as if he already was the chief executive. He disavowed any interest in the post. There was his “increasing love of retirement,” he said. It was his “sincerest wish” merely to live and die a private citizen at Mount Vernon. Washington’s disclaimers usually have been taken at face value by historians. In fact, his protestations were not terribly convincing. All his life Washington had sought recognition and acclaim; granted he now had renown aplenty, enough to satisfy most men many times over. But he was not Everyman. His inner need to expand his identity was never likely to be fully satisfied. True, he must have relished the leisure of retirement and been loath to once again shoulder the burdens of public office. Yet he must also have missed the stimulation and acclaim that went with activism. His return to the sites of his military adventures, to Germantown and White Marsh, to Trenton and Valley Forge, his telling recollection of Monmouth, disclosed a yearning for a time of activity and glory. In 1788, while he disavowed an interest in leaving Mount Vernon, he was rehearsing what he had done previously. Until he was called, he would not leave his estate to resume command of the Virginia Regiment in 1755, nor would he take an active role in the colonists’ protest movement, nor, indeed, would he attend the Constitutional Convention. Now he awaited still another call. And there could not have been much doubt about his final decision on this matter. Despite his disclaimers, he was careful never to unequivocally close the door to serving. What he really said—and on more than one occasion—was that he did not wish to appear to be soliciting the office, and that he fretted, in light of his ballyhooed retirement, that to accept the post might expose him to the charge of “inconsistency and ambition”53

  Hamilton was one to whom he conveyed such views, certain that the young New Yorker would find a way to banish his worries. His former aide was up to the task: “The absolute retreat [from public life] which you meditated at the close of the late war was natural and proper,” he began. Now, however, “the crisis” leaves “you no alternative but to comply” with the “unanimous wish of your country” to lead the new government. There could be no censure for abandoning retirement, Hamilton went on, inasmuch as the “necessity of your filling the station in question is so universal that you can run no risk of any uncandid imputation, by submitting to it.” But to fail to serve, he added, would be to venture “greater hazard to that fame, which must be and ought to be dear to you,” for if the new Constitution should fail—and well it might if he refused to serve—he, as one of the framers, might be brought into “disrepute,” since by his actions at the Convention he had “pulled down one Utopia . . . to build up another.” Washington must have read Hamilton’s missive closely. Shortly after receiving it he announced that he would accept the position if he was convinced that “the partiality of my Countrymen had made my services absolutely necessary.” He even began to reflect on how he would cooperate with the vice president.54

  By early January 1789, when the members of the Electoral College were selected, Washington had been beseeched to accept the presidency so often that he could not mistake the country’s mood. He was mentioned frequently in public discourses, and Federalist devotees such as Madison and Robert and Gouverneur Morris came to Mount Vernon to urge him to serve. At month’s end he spoke of accepting the presidency, albeit with “unfeigned reluctance.”55

  The electors from the eleven ratifying states—Rhode Island and North Carolina had refused to sanction the charter—met in their respective state capitals on February 4 to vote for a president and vice president. Although the results would not be official for about thirty days, Washington received reports during the period that left no doubt that he was the unanimous choice for the presidency. He began to speak of it being his “inevitable fate to administer the government,” and early in March when he called on his ailing mother he seemed certain that he never again would see her, an indication that in his own mind he already had decided to abide by the electors’ choice. Within three weeks or so, in fact, he not only was concerning himself with the question of accomodations in New York, but with the necessary arrangements for the relatives who would be left behind at Mount Vernon.56

  When Charles Thomson, still the secretary of Congress, as he had been since the first day the Continental Congress had gathered back in 1774, arrived at Mount Vernon on April 14 with the official Electoral College results, Washington’s acceptance was a mere formality. Indeed, when Thomson informed him that his selection had been unanimous and that John Adams had been elected to the vice presidency, Washington responded with a letter of acceptance that he had written days before. The vote “scarcely leaves me the alternative for an option,” he had written. To the very end he felt the need to convince himself that, like Cincinnatus, he was serving only because he had been summoned to do his duty.57

  Scarely forty-eight hours later, following a farewell dinner in Alexandria and a last round of superintendency at his estate, Washington was on his way to New York. Receptions in Baltimore, Wilmington, and Philadelphia slowed the journey, but not by much; traveling by carriage, accompanied by Thomson and his former aide David Humphreys, he completed the trek in six days, roughly two days faster than on
his 1756 and 1773 trips along more or less the same route. At times this journey took on the overtones of a royal procession at least insofar as a fiercely republican people would permit themselves to indulge in such festivities. In each metropolis bells and booming field artillery, parading militia companies and flag-bedecked streets and harbors greeted him, and in Philadelphia twenty thousand inhabitants lined the sidewalks to catch a glimpse of this man. In many small towns, too, his carriage paused for simpler ceremonies, stays that must have been quite brief, for on days when he halted for as many as five such festivities the party still advanced about forty miles. At Trenton, crossing the bridge that spanned Assunpink Creek, his carriage passed under a sign that proclaimed him the “Mighty Chief! once more,” and in New Brunswick and Elizabeth Town, in Bridgetown and Rahway, he was serenaded by trainbandsmen with fife and drum. Then on the 23rd he crossed onto Manhattan Island, his first time back since his real farewell to his officers on that cold December day six years before. There the greatest of all celebrations was held. Luncheons followed parades, speeches followed banquets, and a throng of thirty thousand turned out to once again salute the man who had tried so hard and for so long to secure this city’s liberation.58

  New York must have outdone itself that day, for the Inauguration Day festivities a week later were simple by contrast. Indeed, even though this age loved pomp and ceremony, the rites of April 30 seldom have been surpassed in simplicity or brevity by any subsequent inaugural observance.

  George Washington, by Joseph Wright (1790). Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum, Henry B. Hurlbut Collection. Washington was fifty-eight and had been president for only about one year when this portrait was made.

  The citizenry was awakened at dawn by festive blasts from artillery posted at the Battery. Three hours later, at 9:00 A.M., church bells summoned New Yorkers to prayer services. At noon Congress assembled, and each house dispatched a delegation to Washington’s residence to fetch him to the capitol; thirty minutes later the procession rumbled over the city’s cobblestone streets, returning to Federal Hall. Five military companies marched at its head, followed in turn by the mayor and sheriff of New York, each on horseback. The Senate committee, squeezed into one carriage, came next. Then came Washington, seated alone in a large coach drawn by four dobbins. He was followed by the House committee, then by John Jay and Henry Knox, the two executive department heads under the Articles government; Chancellor Robert Livingston of New York and assorted local notables brought up the rear. At about 1:00 P.M. they arrived at their destination, Congress’s partially completed new quarters just south of Wall Street. Accompanied now by a committee of legislators, Washington was ushered before the two houses, where he was greeted by John Adams, whose duties included presiding over joint sessions of Congress.

  They were in the Senate’s chamber, a modest, forty-by-thirty-foot room. Portraits of Christopher Columbus, Washington, and various Revolutionary heroes decorated the walls; another painting, this one of a sun and thirteen stars, looked down on the room’s occupants from a tall, arched ceiling. Washington was escorted to a canopy-draped platform in the front of the hall. He looked out on the members of the House, sitting to his right, and on diplomats and senators to his left. Behind him were three doors which led onto a balcony.

  The vice president, nervous and trembling so badly that he could speak only with difficulty, opened the festivities with a few remarks. The swearing-in followed. A problem had arisen over who could administer the oath of office, for until the president was in office there would be no federal judges. In the end it was agreed that Chancellor Livingston, a state official, would have to do. He and Washington stepped through the doors and onto the balcony above Broad and Wall streets. There, standing beneath a red-and-white-striped canopy and behind a red velvet draped table, and in full view both of Congress and the citizenry below, he took the oath.

  It was over in seconds. Outside the crowd surged and cheered, and ships in the nearby harbor boomed their salutations, even the Galveston, a Spanish sloop-of-war moored in these waters, joining in with a deafening greeting; inside the congressmen applauded politely.

  What Washington must have reckoned the least pleasant part of the day followed—his Inaugural Address. Dressed in a simple American-made brown broadcloth suit, white stockings, and white gloves, his sword strapped to his side, the president reentered the Senate chamber and mounted the low plat form to read his speech. Mercifully, he had discarded an oration prepared by David Humphreys, a seventy-three-page manuscript; instead, he proceeded with an address of only seven paragraphs. With one hand plunged into his pocket, he slowly read his remarks. He was almost inaudible. Characteristically, he spoke in a low voice, and on this day it also was “a little tremulous.” some witnesses thought him embarrassed. One thought he was “grave, almost to sadness.” Surely he was uneasy. What his audience heard was not particularly memorable. One of Pennsylvania’s senators thought it a “heavy, dull, stupid” speech, and, indeed, not one ringing, enduring phrase emerged from his remarks.

  He began by reiterating that he had not sought his office, that he was there “in obedience to the public summons.” As for public matters, he hoped his term would be free of “party animosities,” and he exhorted his countrymen to behave virtuously, for liberty and republicanism were at stake. Perhaps to the surprise of his audience, he declined to accept a salary, an offer which Congress soon would refuse.

  In less than twenty minutes it was over. Washington and the members of Congress, together with other notables, walked nearly half a mile to St. Paul’s Chapel, an Anglican church, for a brief service, and that evening they were regaled with a fireworks show.59

  Once again George Washington was at the throbbing heart of public affairs, but then he had been there already for a full three years. Only he had refused to acknowledge that fact.

  PART FOUR

  15

  The Early Presidency

  “All things. . . seem to succeed”

  If George Washington sensed that change was in the air in the 1780s he did not record those thoughts. Of course, he was aware of the changes that he had helped to make. British authority, with its titled aristocracy, its class prerogatives, its royal governors and other “lordly masters,” not to mention its convenient commercial ties and its generous subsidies, was gone, and with it had gone about 250,000 inhabitants of America who had chosen to remain loyal to the Crown. From the sidelines he had watched as other changes occurred. Every northern state had taken steps to abolish slavery, and all thirteen states had elected to stop the importation of African slaves. There were written constitutions and more elected officials than ever before, and the legislatures were more broadly representative than in the colonial days. Now, too, there was a new national government. Upon its success, Washington believed, hung the fate both of the American political union and the American Revolution.

  Momentous as were these changes, there remained a sense of continuity with the past, so much so in fact that contemporaries at times seemed almost ready to shrug off the departures ushered in by the Revolution. During his ride north from Mount Vernon, for instance, much of what Washington glimpsed must have appeared as it had thirty-five years before when he first rode along this very route. Today change is so pervasive, so continuous, that a period of thirty-five years seems almost a millennium, a period during which customs and popular culture and society’s artifacts can be altered and extirpated many times over. But for Washington and his contemporaries the hum of daily life must have seemed unchanged. In 1789, for example, the means of land travel remained what it had been all his life: people and things moved by horseback or horse-drawn carriage—a slow, wearying transit across dusty (or muddy or frozen) country roads, fording rivers and streams by ferry or by rustic, hazardous wooden bridges. Nor had men’s and women’s clothing fashions changed substantially in the course of Washington’s fifty-seven years. The dances and amusements that he first had enjoyed three decades earlier were no less popular
in 1789, and they remained unchallenged by new conventions. Newspapers and pamphlets and books looked no different than at mid-century, furniture styles had hardly changed, and the architecture of the newly erected houses and buildings that Washington gazed upon as he passed through Baltimore and Wilmington and Philadelphia that spring still resembled the forms used in edifices constructed decades before. People’s day-to-day lives, from the moment they rose at dawn until they snuffed out the evening’s last candle upon returning to bed seemed to vary little from year to year.

  Nor had conditions abroad seemed to change appreciably since the end of the War for Independence. George III still was the king of England, though he was so plagued by mental disorders that until a few weeks before Washington’s inauguration he had to be confined in a straitjacket. A Pitt—William Pitt the Younger—again was the prime minister in London, and Lord Cornwallis, Washington’s victim at Yorktown, had risen to be governor general of Britain’s dominion in India. Prussia and Austria still were preoccupied with Poland, hapless nation which they initially had partitioned in the year when the Continental Congress first met; and Russia once again was at war with Turkey. Moreover, for all the negotiating and all the killing of the last three decades, the French and Spanish empires looked about as they had since 1763.

  But on that April 30 when Washington’s simple little inaugural took place, the western world was on the threshold of great change. Already French legislators were gathering at Versailles for the opening session of the Estates-General, the first time the nation’s parliament had met since 1614; within weeks that body would set in motion events that would forever alter the political face of Europe. Yet an even greater transformation already had begun, a process that has been termed a “deep change,” a course of modernization that in the next few decades would modify virtually every aspect of the world that Washington knew, from the size of its families to its understanding of technology to the environment in which people lived and worked, until, finally, in its wake, the eighteenth century would come to seem but a relic of some enigmatic, ancient past.1 Ironically, however, while Washington’s administration came at the tag end of a dying age, the decisions it made would have an enormous impact on the destiny of America’s political future, leaving virtually every subsequent generation of the nation’s political and constitutional leaders in its debt.