First of Men

by Ferling, John;

  The secretary’s Report ignited a firestorm in Federal Hall, but not because his adversaries found the plan’s elitism to be repugnant. As historian John C. Miller pointed out, this was “a quarrel within the house of capitalism,” one that would pit section against section, not class against class. Most of the opposition rolled up from the planter-dominated South. With over four-fifths of the national debt owed to inhabitants of northern states, with the majority of southern states already out from under their former indebtedness, and with Hamilton’s plan certain to strengthen northern businessmen at the expense of southern agrarians, disapproval of the plan chiefly came from among congressmen hailing from below the Mason and Dixon Line. Added to these ranks were others who balked at the prospect of payment at face value to the present holders of the national securities. To Hamilton’s astonishment, James Madison, his old colleague from the ratification fight days, took the lead in organizing the resistance. It was a battle that would consume the three quarters of 1790.32

  Madison responded in mid-February with an alternative plan. On the certificate question his scheme was to pay the full value of the securities only to those original holders who never had sold their notes; otherwise, speculators would receive an amount equal to the highest market rate (plus interest) attained by the securities between acquisition and January 1790, while the difference between face value and the compensation received by the speculator would be paid to each original holder who had sold his note. As for the assumption of state debts, the young Virginian proposed that the national government merely take on the debts that had existed as of the end of the war in 1783.33

  His was hardly a radical alternative to Hamilton’s schemes. Madison had not recommended that the debt be scuttled, as it still was to be paid. Nor had he complained of the size of the federal outlay, for, in fact, his plan would have required an even greater national expenditure. His contrivance did seem more fair in many ways. Soldiers, some of whom had been drafted and others who had volunteered for lengthy service, finally would be paid more or less what their government had promised them when they were enticed—or coerced—into making a sacrifice for their nation. Moreover, those states which had been sufficiently responsible to meet their obligations, would not now have to bear an extreme burden to help out their more feckless neighbors. But moderate and fair as were his views, Madison’s notions about the domestic debt faced absolutely no prospect of enactment by a Congress composed largely of capitalist businessmen and investors who were disinclined to set such a precedent when it came to financial speculation. The problem of the state debts was a different matter altogether, however, and as the first signs of triumphed over New York’s winter, and even when June’s warmer days arrived, the battle still dragged on, leaving Congress prostrate in its wake.

  President Washington did not play a direct role in this protracted battle, although no one doubted that he supported the position taken by his treasury secretary. He was content to leave the issue to the legislators, for his task, as he saw it, was to make recommendations, then to execute whatever Congress decided. During the first weeks of the congressional fray he occupied himself with the never-ending chore of filling the ubiquitous new offices of the new government. He also seems to have devoted almost as much time and attention to acquiring a new residence, the Macomb House on Broadway, for which he paid nearly $100 a month in rent. New and expensive, the squarish four-story dwelling was described by a visitor as the “grandest” house in the city, perhaps in America. That, in fact, seemed to be the principal reason for Washington’s sudden interest in abandoning his Cherry Street quarters. Once he secured this mansion, the president immediately spent more than $3000 of his salary on new furniture and wallpaper for the place; still not satisfied, he spent another $400 to construct stables and a wash house in the rear of the house, and a few weeks later, at an additional expense of $75, he had a small dairy in operation behind the presidential mansion. On his fifty-eighth birthday he and Martha and the grandchildren began the move into their new dwelling.34

  Washington’s move into such a high-rent district seemed to put an end to his continual complaints of financial hardship. There can be little doubt that his lack of liquid assets did present a problem, and, in fact, he was compelled to borrow a large sum at 6 percent per annum—an excessive rate of interest, he charged—before leaving Virginia for New York. But he had no sooner taken the oath of office before Congress voted him a generous salary. Actually, Washington had proposed that he be compensated only for his expenses, a tactic that had actually served him quite well financially during the inflationary surge that accompanied the war. But the legislators refused the proposal this time, instead providing him with a salary of $25,000 per year, five times the amount it voted for the vice president, about one hundred times what a skilled artisan in New York City might earn in 1789. From that amount, however, Washington was expected to meet both his private needs and his public responsibilities, including the entertainment, labor, and even the travel expenses occasioned by his office. The salary was ample to permit a comfortable, almost regal, style of living, although one could not live in a princely manner and expect to save any of the earnings.35

  Given his taste for elegance, President Washington probably lived in a more sumptuous manner than have any of his successors. Certainly he demonstrated that he could outspend his salary. During 1790 Hamilton’s treasury granted him nearly $7000 more than he was due, although in the previous year he had been underpaid by about $4000, and in his last year in office he would receive approximately $3000 less than his stipulated salary. Washington spent much of his salary on the kinds of things that any ordinary middle- or upper-class citizen would have indulged in. He had to purchase his own firewood (eight cords in September, an additional twenty in December, at a cost of about $4.00 per cord). Schooling for ten-year-old Nelly and “Little Washington” had to be paid for. Washington’s doctors charged $210 to treat his illness in 1789 and $200 to attend him the following year. Washington’s ever-recurring dental work resulted in another outlay, this time for the purchase of a set of teeth made of hippopotamus ivory. Both President Washington and the First Lady—as well as the grandchildren, who usually went with Lear—frequently attended the theater, tickets running about $3.00 per person. On the other hand, some of his expenditures were more due to the nature of his office. He faced a staggering liquor bill, expending 7 percent of his salary on spirits, chiefly wine. Early in 1790 he purchased over $450 worth of the beverage, and twelve months later he spent more than $1000 in acquiring two pipes of wine. The Washingtons also sought out the best cook they could find, hiring a chef for $15 per month. But it is difficult to determine the dividing line between the requirements of the office and Washington’s expensive tastes. For instance, his service staff—he referred to it as his “family”—was huge. He brought seven slaves along from Mount Vernon, all body servants and house slaves, and to their number he added fourteen white servants. In addition, he kept twelve to sixteen horses in his new stables at an expense of more than a thousand dollars annually; when he rode about in public, moreover, he sat on a gaudy new saddle, while his horses only appeared after they were draped in specially purchased showy leopardskin housings. For that matter, the President and Mrs. Washington often wore fur coats, for which he had paid more than $100. Indeed, Martha had her indulgences, spending $50 a year at the hairdresser’s and $150 in 1790 on jewelry. All in all, it cost about $115 a week—a year’s income for an unskilled laborer—to run the president’s house, and for his first term Washington’s expenses exceeded $100,000.36

  Throughout March and April, while the wrangle over Hamilton’s Report continued, the president was not overly taxed with work. To be sure there were frequent meetings with his advisors, but there also was ample time for exercising and sightseeing, and even for sitting to artist John Trumbull. Certainly no physical problems—save for a brief but painful toothache in January—had plagued Washington. He long since had recovered from his protrac
ted disability of the previous year, and the rheumatic discomforts that had bedeviled him in 1786 and 1787 appear to have vanished by the early years of his presidency. By May 1790, well free of the supposed dangers of winter, Washington was in fine fettle. Suddenly, however, he was struck down by another serious illness. Influenza, perhaps the same strain that had swept Boston the previous autumn, descended on New York that spring. Either that malady or pneumonia—his physician thought it the latter—felled him on May 9. Once again his life was despaired of, and even his principal doctor characterized his condition as so serious that he feared for the worst. For six days Washington seemed to linger on the edge of death, each day his breathing growing more labored, more shallow. One shaman after another was summoned to the Macomb House until finally, and surprisingly, late on the afternoon of May 16, just as suddenly as when the disease first had struck, an abrupt, dramatic reversal set in. Washington broke into a heavy sweat, his breathing and pulse rate seemed to improve; some hope began to spread through the mansion, though four more anxious days passed before the doctors pronounced him out of danger. For a week and a half he had lain near death, more desperately ill than he had been in nearly thirty years. A full month of recuperation awaited him before he possessed the strength to once again appear in public. In an age that believed each serious ailment stole away some of the patient’s fighting reserve, Washington presumed that another such forbidding sickness probably would be his last, putting “me to sleep with my fathers.” Perhaps he was correct. At any rate, many of his friends believed that he never again displayed the vigor that he had before this terrible illness.37

  During Washington’s recovery period word arrived that Rhode Island at last had ratified the Constitution. All thirteen states now were under its canopy. Equally cheering news reached the president a month later. He learned that some movement toward resolving the deadlock over Hamilton’s fiscal plan at last had begun.

  By June, six months after its introduction, Hamilton’s assumption scheme still languished in Congress. In February Madison’s plan to discriminate between the original and current holders of securities had been soundly defeated, while Hamilton’s expedient likewise had failed in April. The secretary’s plan had been defeated narrowly, however, raising the prospect of some sort of compromise solution, something that was being discussed openly throughout the spring. The issue to which assumption most often was linked was the enduring debate over the site of the national capital. By 1790 the residence issue had kicked around the halls of Congress for seven years, with Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Annapolis, Williamsburg, even Nottingham, New Jersey, and Kingston, New York, in addition to various sites on the Susquehanna, the Scioto, and the Potomac having been mentioned as desirable locations. Agrarians wanted their legislators removed from the influence of big city financial moguls; southerners worried about keeping their slaves in a nonslave state; and everybody also saw the ultimate site in terms of a potential economic bonanza that they would just as soon have within their reach. During that first month of summer in 1790 renewed stirrings toward a resolution of the two issues seemed to crystallize, arising perhaps from Hamilton’s threats to resign if Congress rejected his program, or perhaps from the fact that some order had begun to take shape within the “leaderless herd” that had been the Congress. Jefferson’s recent arrival in New York may have been important too, as perhaps was the sixth sense of legislators who finally determined that at last the time to deal had arrived.38

  Four days before President Washington took his first halting ride following his recent illness, Jefferson brought Hamilton and Madison together for dinner at his house. By then the two Virginians knew they had the votes in the House to pass a bill that would move the capital temporarily to Philadelphia while a permanent seat was under construction at a site on the Potomac. They did not have the votes to get the bill through the Senate, however, and that was where Hamilton came in. If the treasury secretary would use his influence to block any attempt by northeastern senators to permanently base the capital in Pennsylvania or New York, Jefferson and Madison proposed, they would seek to change enough votes within the Virginia and Maryland delegations to enact Hamilton’s economic program.

  How successful these three bargainers were has been the subject of considerable recent debate among scholars. Yet it is clear that while a majority of southern legislators continued to resist Hamilton’s assumption bill, four representatives—two from Virginia and two from Maryland, all four from districts on the Potomac—made an about-face between the April roll call and the final vote in July. Moreover, Massachusetts’s senators suddenly opted not to endeavor to undermine the Philadelphia-Potomac residence proposition. Hamilton also apparently facilitated matters by making some adjustments on the details of his economic package, compromising on the rate of interest carried by the new debt and conceding to some states an increase in the amount of their credit. Virginia and Maryland also offered enticements to facilitate the deal. Each state promised grants of land and cash if Congress voted to locate the new capital on the Potomac. Even Washington, who had remained in the background thus far, pitched in. It is clear that he brought considerable pressure on Robert Morris to accept the bargain, and he probably subtly courted other congressmen.

  The dark, labyrinthian ways of legislators make it impossible to recapture all the dickering and dragooning that must have occurred that June and July, but by midsummer funding and assumption were the law of the land. It also had been agreed to transfer the seat of government to Philadelphia for ten years, then, in 1800, to move it to the banks of the Potomac. Congress directed that the federal district be located somewhere between the eastern branch of the Potomac (now called the Anacostia) and the Conogocheague Creek far to the west, a stream that enters the Potomac above present-day Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.39

  A few days after these historic votes Congress adjourned. It would next assemble in Philadelphia. President Washington also was packing, planning to say goodbye, probably forever, to New York City, a city so remote in so many ways from his rural Virginia, but a place where he had spent nearly 5 percent of his adult life. First, however, he crossed Long Island Sound by packet to pay a state visit to Rhode Island, a place omitted from his itinerary during the past autumn because it had not then ratified the Constitution. The round trip was brief, taking less than a week. Upon his return to Manhattan his stay at the Macomb House was almost as short. For weeks, at least since his spring illness, Washington had planned an excursion to Mount Vernon, his first journey home in almost a year and a half. He felt good again, and he was buoyant at the prospects of the new government. Sixteen months into his presidency he still could report that “public sentiment runs with us, and all things hitherto seem to succeed according to our wishes.”40

  The same day in all likelihood that he penned those thoughts a little box bearing a Paris postmark arrived at the Macomb House. It was from Lafayette. Always impatient to hear from his dear young friend, Washington must have eagerly torn open the parcel. Inside, of all things, he discovered a key and a picture. The one was the jailor’s key to the Bastille, the other a likeness of the prison being dismantled by a Parisian mob. The one symbolized the despotism of the Ancient Regime, the other, the etching, captured the notion that a great European power had commenced its own “leap into the dark.”41

  Based on what little information he could get from the Continent, Washington knew that the sweeping revolution at Versailles and Paris was likely to be “stupendous in its consequences.”42 As he and his family rode to the New Jersey ferry on August 30, President Washington must have wondered what those consequences would mean for his own nation.

  16

  The End of the First Term

  “Internal dissensions. . . tearing our vitals”

  The president deliberately kept his travel plans secret. He hoped to avoid the “fatiguing and oftentimes painful” ceremonies that each village along his route felt compelled to conduct in his honor. Mostl
y, though, he just hoped to save time, to hasten his journey to Mount Vernon and perhaps to get in a couple additional days of relaxation. His strategy worked, although the authorities of Philadelphia could not resist sending out its trainband honor guard to greet him, pealing the city’s bells, and proclaiming a “Day of Joy” upon his arrival.1

  The newly ordained temporary capital held Washington for four days. That was pretty much as he had planned. Philadelphia’s authorities had rented Robert Morris’s town villa on Market Street for the president, and he wished to inspect it closely, perhaps with an eye to recommending some alterations to suit his needs. This was the same house General Howe had utilized during his occupation of the city, the same dwelling in which Washington had resided during the Constitutional Convention. It was a three-story brick structure, though two dormers facing the street announced the presence of a capacious fourth-floor attic. The house set only a few feet from its neighbor on the east, while to the other side a generous garden lay hidden behind a five-foot-high brick wall. Washington remembered it as “the best single House in the City,” but upon seeing it now he found it inadequate to the commodious accommodation of my family.” He wished to have a small building constructed in the rear to serve as an abode for some of his servants, while the others would be crammed into quarters above the wash house and the stable or beneath the kitchen, and some unfortunate would be put up in the smoke house. Inside the main residence, he proposed the ingenious use of partitions to carve out a private study and a dressing room for himself and two new “public Rooms” for entertaining. Washington summoned Lear to superintend the repairs, and on September 6, 1790, a day or two later than he had hoped, the First Family resumed its journey back to Virginia.2