Even though dispirited from his surgery, to which in September was added the melancholy news of his mother’s death, President Washington continued to wrestle with the long list of appointments yet to be made. By early fall he had filled nearly 125 vacant office, ranging in importance from federal judgeships to ministerial posts to fairly trifling provincial postal offices. The more weighty selections were consented to by the Senate with little fanfare, but the president was flabbergasted to learn that his appointee to be the naval officer of the port of Savannah was rejected; Georgia’s two senators objected, and their colleagues in Federal Hall fell in step to thwart Washington. Their action established the precedent that came to be known as “senatorial courtesy,” a practice that in reality virtually entrusted minor local appointments to each state’s two senators.17
During that initial session of Congress, one additional item of business occupied the legislators. Nine states had ratified the Constitution with the understanding that a bill of rights soon would be amended to that charter, and, in fact, more than two hundred amendments containing about eighty substantive changes had been proposed by the ratifying conventions. Principally the Anti-Federalists had feared that a strong central government might encroach on individual liberties, although some feared that the Constitution might bestow rights on some folk whose liberties presently were restrained; hence one New England state longed for an emendation that would prevent “Jews, Turks and infidels” from holding office. Clearly Congress had to do something. In fact, the Federalist leadership was anxious to act hurriedly, if for no other reason than to head off the opposition’s calls for a second Constitutional Convention, something the framers looked upon—to quote Washington—as an “insidious” plot to destroy the national government by “set[ting] every thing afloat again.”18
Madison, as much of a Federalist kingpin as existed in a remarkably leader-less House of Representatives, wasted no time that spring. Using the recommendations of his home state’s ratifying convention as a guide, he distilled the multitude of disparate proposals from the various states down to a workable number and hurried them to a committee. In August the full House took up the issue, by September it was in the hands of the Senate, and three weeks later twelve amendments were on their way to the states for ratification. Two years later ten of the twelve had been added to the Constitution. In the inaugural address that he wrote but never delivered, President Washington had planned to recommend that it would not be prudent to immediately alter the Constitution in any manner. It seems unlikely, therefore, that he had anything to do with Madison’s decision to initiate the process, and there is no evidence that he played any role in the course of Congress’s consideration of the proposed amendments.19
By early autumn 1789, Washington, longing for a break from the tedium of his job, began to plan his initial presidential trip. Since boyhood he had been convinced that travel was a formative and educational activity; it was good exercise too, something he now could use to regain his vitality. Before setting out he tested his strength with periodic walks and horseback rides, and on one occasion he and Vice President Adams, together with a few congressmen and Chancellor Livingston, undertook a long trek out to Long Island to inspect a fifty-year-old botanical garden. By mid-october he felt fine once again, and when Congress voted to adjourn until after Christmas, the way was clear for his departure. New England seemed the logical place to go. Aside from his brief meetings with Rochambeau in 1780 and 1781, he had not been in that section since his first year as commander fourteen years before, and he had never been north of Boston. Hurrying to beat the onset of winter in that quadrant, he set out in mid-month, his second long journey that year, for in April he had traveled more than two hundred miles in riding from Mount Vernon to the capital.20
Once again he proceeded without his wife, for she preferred to remain at home with the grandchildren. A three-day ride, during which time he seems to have been chiefly absorbed by the state of the farming he observed (“their hogs large but rather long legged,” and “all the Farmers busily employed in gathering, grinding, and expressing the Juice of their Apples,” were typical of his diary entries), carried him through northern Manhattan’s forests, into Connecticut, and finally to New Haven. He spent a Sunday in that little college town, attending an Episcopal church in the morning and Congregational services in the afternoon. A couple of days later he reached Hartford, where he had come once before to confer with the French military leaders, and nine days after he left the capital he entered Cambridge, there to find Lieutenant Governor Samuel Adams at the head of a delegation sent to greet him and to escort him across the Charles River. In each village he had been greeted warmly, fêted, serenaded, paraded, saluted, and ushered about by the ubiquitous trainbandsmen.21
Boston was no different. A large and festive crowd turned out, oddly grouped by professions, each species of craftsman standing beneath a banner that identified its skill. Washington rode under an arch inscribed “To the Man who unites all hearts,” and on past a sign that announced “Boston relieved March 17, 1776.” It was gracious and charming, except for one thing. The governor of Massachusetts, John Hancock, had not bothered to welcome the president, nor had he offered his residence as a lodging. The President of the United States found quarters at the widow Ingersoll’s boarding house at Court and Tremont.22
The episode set Washington fuming. Not only did he feel slighted, but he perceived a constitutional issue in this absurd affair. He reasoned that protocol demanded that a lowly governor must call upon the president before the nation’s chief executive paid his respects to the state official. Under the circumstances Washington refused an invitation to dine at the governor’s mansion, taking his meal instead at Mrs. Ingersoll’s residence. When Samuel Adams dropped in during the meal to wanly plead that Hancock had been too ill to welcome the president, Washington remained obdurate, asseverating that he “should not see the Govr. unless it was at my own lodgings.” The next day things were straightened out. Alleging that he had been laid low by the gout, the governor had himself carried on a stretcher to Washington’s domicile, where he officially and complaisantly greeted the province’s guest.23
The following morning Washington awakened ill with a cold and an inflammation in his left eye, one of the first victims of an influenza epidemic about to sweep over Boston, an outbreak the citizenry soon would dub the “Washington flu,” as if he had brought it to town. Nevertheless, he went to tea at Hancock’s that afternoon, and he spent almost all of the following day attending state ceremonies. Departing Boston on the 29th he visited Harvard College, where he seemed to be astonished at the magnitude of its thirteen-thousand-volume library. Marblehead, whose sons had been indispensable in his escape from Brooklyn and his attack on Trenton in 1776, was next on his itinerary. The president had insisted on coming to this seaport town, but he was depressed at what he found, noting in his diary that the village’s “streets [are] dirty—and the common people not very clean.” During the next several days he called on a bevy of burgeoning little manufacturing towns, places like Lynn and Salem and Newburyport, where he lingered to watch the production of shoes and textiles and ships. Accompanied by John Adams he took his leave of Massachusetts at the end of the month, riding into the gaudy autumn splendor offered by New Hampshire. There he called on John Sullivan, the fiery general he had so trusted, fished a bit, visited several municipalities, and inspected still more textile mills.24
Washington journeyed as far north as Kittery, Maine, before turning back. He had planned to cross through Vermont to Albany, returning to New York City along the Hudson path that he knew so well. However, a heavy early-season snow in the mountains induced him to return by a more direct route. That was a lucky break in a way. During his stay in Boston he had hoped to visit Lexington, the little hamlet where the war had begun in 1775, but the junket had been postponed because of his brief illness. Now he took the opportunity to pass through the village, remaining just long enough to sightsee for a few mi
nutes and to have dinner. Although he never seemed to weary of the populace’s surfeit of good will, Washington found the return trip tedious and often unpleasant. His lodgings frequently were poor (widow Collidge’s house in Watertown being “indifferent” and Perkins’s Tavern in Pomfret, Connecticut, “by the bye is not a good one”), faulty directions provided by “blind & ignorant” farmers more than once caused him to go out of his way, and a detour to see “Old Put,” Israel Putnam, backfired inasmuch as he discovered that his former general did not live where he thought he did. Twenty-eight days after he set out, the president returned to New York, happy to find Martha and the grandchildren well, probably not so pleased to find that the First Lady had scheduled a levee and that he barely had time to change from his dusty traveling attire before he had to begin greeting the guests.25
The president had almost two months to rest before Congress returned in January 1790. In fact, the new government was forming so slowly that there was little work to undertake; that air of urgency that had driven the Federalists in 1786–87 seemed to have disappeared like an early morning fog under a hot sun. By year’s end only about 10 percent of the federal bureaucracy had been appointed. Moreover, Jefferson did not even learn of his appointment until ten days after Washington returned from his New England excursion, and he did not reach the capital until the first day of spring in 1790, nearly a year after the president’s inauguration. Randolph arrived even later.26
Washington relaxed while he awaited the new year. When the fall weather cooperated he walked or rode, and he particularly liked to make the “14 Miles round,” a long circuitous carriage ride about a portion of Manhattan Island, a journey he enjoyed in the company of Martha and sprightly Nelly and George Washington Parke Custis, or Wash, for “little Washington,” as Martha called him. These jaunts were undertaken as much for Martha’s serenity as for his own. She missed Mount Vernon terribly, and she seemed to feel cheated by Washington’s decision to quit his life of retirement. After the war, she said, the “dearest wish of my heart” had been that she and her husband could “grow old in solitude and tranquility together” in Virginia. Were she younger, she conceded, she might enjoy being First Lady. But she was too old even to partake of “the innocent gaities” of public life. Not only that, she was treated “like a prisoner,” tied down to her Cherry Street residence and unaware of what was happening in the city. Hers was “a very dull life here,” she told a relative. The rides helped her adjust to public life, and though she never overcame her homesickness she did come to appreciate New York both as a consumer’s paradise and for the educational opportunities it offered her grandchildren. During that fall the Washingtons attended the theater and a ball; the president sat for the artist Edward Savage; and, of course, the First Family entertained frequently. One of their parties almost ended disastrously. The ostrich feathers in the headdress worn by one of the guests brushed against a chandelier and caught fire, but one of the president’s young aides acted quickly and intrepidly, extinguishing the flames with his bare hands before the lady or anyone else was injured.27
During these weeks Washington’s behavior changed in only one way. After years of seldom attending church services, he once again regularly dropped in on Sunday devotions. He missed only one Sabbath worship service (and then because the weather was atrocious) during the last twelve weeks of the year, and he proclaimed the final Thursday in November a day of national thanksgiving.28
On January 7 his wait for the return of Congress ended. The following morning he rode to Federal Hall to deliver the first State of the Union Address. Dressed gravely in a blue-black suit, and speaking not only to the legislators and department heads but to a large number of citizens who pushed into the chamber, Washington, in the words of one of the senators, “read his speech well.” It was brief and innocuous in content, though couched in an upbeat tone. Washington announced that he sensed an “increasing good will” toward the new government, inasmuch as North Carolina at last had ratified the Constitution, leaving only recalcitrant Rhode Island outside the fold. Otherwise, he gave no hint of an administrative program, save for a few general remarks about “providing for the common defense.”
A week later Congress learned what the administration wished to do in the financial realm. Pursuing an earlier House of Representatives directive to prepare a plan for retiring the national debt, Secretary Hamilton unveiled his answer.29 Although poor record-keeping resulted in much confusion over specific accounts, there was not much question about the basic nature of the public debt in 1790. Totaling about $75 million, it fell into three classes: a foreign debt of about $12 million, about three-quarters of which arose from wartime loans made by France; about $40 million in debts and interest accrued by the pre-1789 Congress, once again most of it resulting from the war years when the national legislature had issued bonds (called “loan office certificates”) and promissory notes to obtain supplies and pay wages; and, finally, around $25 million in state debts that had arisen primarily after 1780 when a vitiated national government virtually had asked the states to pay for the conduct of the war.
Together with the roughly thirty-five other employees in the treasury department (its personnel ledger was about seven times greater than that of either of the other departments), Hamilton had spent the autumn and early winter hard at work on meeting the House’s instructions. Toiling in his chilly, sparsely furnished little office—all the furniture in the room would not have cost ten dollars a French visitor clucked—Hamilton quickly learned a few things.30 Almost everyone, he discovered, favored retiring the foreign debt and Congress’s indebtedness. The states’ debt was a different matter entirely, inasmuch as four or five states already had virtually met their obligations. In addition, there was not likely to be anything resembling unanimity on a proposal to redeem the Continental securities at their present value, nor would everyone favor recompensing the current owners at the original value of paper. Considering the magnitude of the problem, Hamilton worked with stunning swiftness. Within one hundred days he completed his labors, setting forth his conclusions and plans in an abstruse and ponderous forty-thousand-word Report Relative to a Provision for the Support of Public Credit. Almost hidden within the recondite language of the secretary’s account was a disclosure of the Federalist’s first step toward a planned revolution to save the Revolution.
The full debt easily could have been retired through a revenue tariff and public land sales. Hamilton, however, had far more on his mind. Inspired by Great Britain’s financial practices during the past half century, the secretary proposed not just to adopt the methods of the former parent state, but through those means to see that republican America was recast as nearly as was possible along the lines that had existed in the pre-Revolutionary, pre-republican days of the colonial era. As such the British political system would be recapitulated in an American guise. The new Constitution already had done much of the work. It afforded the government a means of “vigorous execution,” something that many in 1776 had believed was incompatible with a republican system. Moreover, the new charter made centralized governance in America a real possibility for the first time since the colonials had taken to the streets in 1765 to resist such a notion. Hamilton’s plan was to bring both concepts into full play, in the process establishing the powerful and sovereign national government of which he and Washington had dreamed since the time when they had looked out on cold, hungry, unpaid, and potentially unwilling soldiers in Revolutionary cantonments. But there was another ingredient too. Hamilton sought a safeguard against what he had referred to at the Constitutional Convention as the “caprice and contumacy” of America’s inhabitants. The Constitution he had helped to write and ratify already had made a start, for it had isolated the election of the president from popular stridency, it had denied the electorate a direct vote in the selection of senators to their lengthy terms, and it had erected myriad checks to forestall the House should it act in too democratic a manner. All that remained was to elevate Ameri
ca’s lords of commerce and manufacturing, its financial barons and landed nabobs, to a peerage standing; while that certainly was impossible, the propertied elite could be firmly attached to the new government, its unswerving allegiance a guarantee of stability and an assurance that the refractory among the privileged would be kept in its proper place.
Hamilton proposed that the full indebtedness, principal and interest, on the foreign, national, and state debts be paid, and that this be accomplished by the federal government’s funding the entire obligation. In a nutshell, his plan was that the old chits be liquidated through a brand new indebtedness. A new loan would be issued by the United States, subscribers to the new securities generally realizing about 5 to 6 percent interest (and in some instances western land as well), depending on which of several plans they bought into. With this revenue the old indebtedness would be retired. By this process Hamilton hoped to do two things. Assuming naturally that almost all the “stockholders” in the new national government would be drawn from among the most privileged class of the citizenry, his plan would bond that important element, with its power and prestige, to the new government, for redemption of their investment would hinge on the very survival of that government. Moreover, not only would the state creditors be brought under the aegis of the national government, but the states, left with no reason to raise taxes, and, in fact, almost stripped by the United States Constitution of access to the best sources of taxable wealth, would simply atrophy, becoming little more than unnecessary appendages to the body politic. As in England, where the national government had only counties with which to contend, the new United States government would be truly sovereign and unimpeded, in theory guided by the general will of the people, but in actuality drawing its sustenance from the “better kind of people,” as Washington had labeled the privileged class on the eve of the Constitutional Convention.31
First of Men Page 61