His Excellency: George Washington (32 page)

CHAPTER SIX

First in Peace

L
OOKING BACK
over two hundred years of the American presidency, it seems safe to say that no one entered the office with more personal prestige than Washington, and only two presidents—Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt—faced comparable crises. The Civil War and the Great Depression, though distant in time, remain more recent and raw in our collective memory than the American founding, so we find it easier to appreciate the impressive achievements of Lincoln and Roosevelt in negotiating the nation through these latter-day challenges. Washington’s achievement must be recovered before it can be appreciated, which means that we must recognize that there was no such thing as a viable American nation when he took office as president, that the opening words of the Constitution (“We the people of the United States”) expressed a fervent but fragile hope rather than a social reality. The roughly four million settlers spread along the coastline and streaming over the Alleghenies felt their primary allegiance, to the extent they felt any allegiance at all, to local, state, and regional authorities. No republican government had ever before exercised control over a population this diffuse or a land mass this large, and the prevailing assumption among the most informed European observers was that, to paraphrase Lincoln’s later formulation, a nation so conceived and so dedicated could not endure.

Washington’s core achievement as president, much as it had been as commander in chief of the Continental army, was to transform the improbable into the inevitable. The point was put nicely by a French nobleman visiting Mount Vernon in 1791 before setting out on a quest for the elusive (in fact, nonexistent) water route across the North American continent: “But it is less difficult to discover the North-West Passage,” he explained, “than to create a people, as you have done.”
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Assessments of Washington’s presidency tend to be forward-looking, understandably concerned with the constitutional precedents he set for the executive branch in such specific areas as the cabinet system, control over foreign policy, the veto, executive appointments, and setting the legislative agenda. But, once again, any comprehensive appraisal of Washington’s legacy must also be backward-looking, which means recovering the highly problematical attitude toward executive power that pervaded the political culture when he assumed office.
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When he observed that “I walk on untrodden ground,” Washington obviously meant that, as the first American president, everything he did set a precedent. Less obviously, his privileged perch at the Constitutional Convention allowed him to recognize that the ground surrounding the American presidency was not just untrodden; the air around it was filled with menacing memories of George III. There was an unspoken reason why the final draft of the Constitution devoted more space to the rules for electing or removing the president than to delineating the powers of the office itself. Much like the reluctance to mention slavery explicitly, the reticence about the scope of presidential authority reflected a widespread apprehension that any direct discussion of the subject subverted the core principles of republicanism itself.

If slavery was the proverbial “ghost at the banquet” at the Constitutional Convention, monarchy was its spectral accomplice. When Patrick Henry claimed that the Constitution “squints toward monarchy,” he spoke for a potent collection of skeptics who regarded any projection of executive power as a betrayal of the “spirit of ’76.” Although Washington did not share Henry’s conspiratorial suspicions, he did understand that accepting the presidency meant living the central paradox of the early American republic: that is, what was politically essential for a viable American nation was ideologically at odds with what it claimed to stand for.
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The specter of monarchy haunted Washington’s entire presidency, especially during his second term, when the monarchical murmurs became full-fledged attacks on both his policies and character; they wounded him more deeply than any criticism he received as commander in chief during the war. The personal criticism also stunned him because he was both intellectually and emotionally ill-equipped to comprehend the shrill partisanship that came to define the political culture of the 1790s and that shredded any and all efforts to stand above the fray. He found himself in the ironic position of being the indispensable man in a political world that regarded all leaders as disposable. Without him to center it, the political experiment in republicanism might very well have failed. With him, and in great part because of him, it succeeded; but in so doing it rendered the nonpartisan values he embodied anachronistic.

Another specter that hovered over the Washington presidency was age. From the time that Governor Dinwiddie had dispatched him into the western wilderness as a youthful emissary, Washington’s physical prowess had been his most elemental asset. At the Monongahela, then in the battles at Trenton, Princeton, and Yorktown during the War of Independence, bullets and shrapnel seemed to veer away from his body as if he were surrounded by an electromagnetic field of invulnerability. Like a natural athlete who takes his superb body for granted, Washington was accustomed to commanding any room or scene visually and physically. As we have seen, chinks in his armor began to appear in the 1780s, when the inevitable ravages of age started to soften him. And these symptoms of physical deterioration gave palpable shape to his increasingly fatalistic recognition that Washington men were genetically programmed to wear out early and die relatively young.

Two events early in his presidency reinforced these intimations of mortality. In June 1789 a large tumor appeared on his left thigh which eventually required surgery to remove. For a few days his condition was critical, and the street in front of the presidential mansion was roped off to prevent passing carriages from disturbing his recovery. Then in May 1790 he collapsed with influenza and lingered near death for three days with pulmonary complications. During his lengthy recuperation visitors reported that his eyes were permanently teary, his hearing was almost completely blocked, and his famously robust constitution seemed to have aged overnight. Washington himself acknowledged that recovery from the two illnesses had drained all his recuperative resources, so that another serious sickness, as he put it, would “put me to sleep with my fathers.” Jefferson’s gloss on Washington’s physical decline, as we shall see, is not to be fully trusted, but he suggested the assaults on the president’s body also had mental consequences: “The firm tone of his mind, for which he had been remarkable, was beginning to relax; a listlessness of labor, a desire for tranquility had crept on him, and a willingness to let others act, or even think, for him.”
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Washington was not creeping toward senility, as Jefferson implied, nor was he too dazed to manage the duties of his presidency, as Jefferson claimed. But he was no longer the same vigorous man who had spent nearly eight years in the field leading the Continental army. Throughout his presidency he felt the sand in his personal hourglass running out, the relentless burdens of the office squeezing out the last remaining months, weeks, days, and hours of private serenity allotted him. Martha spoke for both of them when, soon after joining him in New York in May 1789, she exclaimed that she “felt more like a prisoner than anything else.” Washington’s constant refrain about retiring to bucolic splendor beneath his vines and fig trees was, true enough, a formulaic refrain within the leadership class of the revolutionary generation, especially the Virginia dynasty. And his previous declarations of reticence when called to command the Continental army or chair the Constitutional Convention were classical lines in a Ciceronian motif designed to conceal his ambitions from the world, and even, perhaps, from himself. But now the role of Cincinnatus had become his truly preferred destination. No president in American history wished to avoid the office more than Washington.
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All of which helps explain one of the chief curiosities of his presidential correspondence. The longest letters, and more of them than he devoted to any official topic, deal with the management of his farms at Mount Vernon. Even when immersed in crucial diplomatic negotiations with France or controversial deliberations about Hamilton’s fiscal policy, Washington found time to compose meticulous instructions to his managers about plowing, weeding, worming, or grubbing schedules, about when to stock the ice house, about the personalities and work habits of different overseers or slave laborers, about proper food and rum rations at harvest time. One can read these letters as a continuance of his obsessive urge to remain the strenuous squire, the honest inclinations of a man who felt more genuine excitement discussing the merits of a new threshing machine than the intricacies of the Jay Treaty. Or one could, more speculatively, argue that the Mount Vernon correspondence allowed him to retain a zone of personal control amidst an increasingly discordant political world that seemed to defy control altogether. But, in the end, the most compelling explanation is that Washington’s soul, or at least the last sliver of his private personality, never made the trip to New York (and then Philadelphia) but remained ensconced at Mount Vernon.
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One of the shrewdest of Washington’s biographers has suggested his private self had been effectively obliterated by the time he reached the presidency; that the man, if you will, had become the monument. While this was probably true for the way most of Washington’s contemporaries viewed him, it was not the way Washington viewed himself. And this personal perspective must stand as the final context for understanding his presidency. If the constitutional context looks forward to the landmark precedents for the executive branch, and if the historical context looks backward to the specter of monarchy haunting all energetic projections of executive power, the personal context looks southward toward Mount Vernon, the only place where he could shed his public role and be himself.
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PRESIDING PRESIDENCY

N
OT MUCH HAPPENED
at the executive level during the first year of Washington’s presidency, which was exactly the way he wanted it. His official correspondence was dominated by job applications from veterans of the war, former friends, and total strangers, most of whom pleaded for patronage in the highly deferential style that Washington himself had employed toward his British betters during the French and Indian War. They all received the same republican response: merit rather than favoritism must determine all federal appointments. As for the president himself, it was not clear whether he was taking the helm or merely occupying the bridge. Rumors began to circulate that he regarded his role as primarily ceremonial and symbolic, that after two years he intended to step down, having launched the American ship of state and contributed his personal prestige as ballast on its maiden voyage. There was talk of a brief and wholly presiding presidency.
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As it turned out, even ceremonial occasions raised troubling questions, because no one knew how the symbolic centerpiece of a republic should behave, or even what to call him. Vice President Adams, trying to be helpful, ignited a fiery debate in the Senate by suggesting such regal titles as “His Elective Majesty” or “His Mightiness,” which provoked a lethal combination of shock and laughter, as well as the observation that Adams himself should be called “His Rotundity.” Eventually the Senate resolved on the most innocuous option available: the president of the United States should be called exactly that, no more and no less. Matters of social etiquette—how should the president interact with the public? Where should he be accessible and where insulated?—prompted multiple memoranda on the importance of what Hamilton called “a pretty high tone” that stopped short of secluding the president “like an Eastern Lama.” The solution was a weekly open house called the levee, part imperial court ceremony replete with choreographed bows and curtsies, part drop-in parlor social. The levees struck the proper middle note between courtly formality and republican simplicity, though at the expense of becoming notoriously boring and wholly scripted occasions only periodically enlivened by impromptu acts of spontaneity, as when Washington once bent over to kiss the widow of Nathanael Greene on the cheek.
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The very awkwardness of the levees fit Washington’s temperament nicely, since he possessed a nearly preternatural ability to remain silent while everyone around him was squirming under the social pressure to fill the silence with chatty conversation. (Adams later claimed that this “gift of silence” was Washington’s greatest political asset, which Adams himself so envied because he lacked the gift altogether.) Washington also possessed distancing mechanisms that deflected intrusions into the space around his body much as they had deflected bullets on the battlefield. The formal etiquette of the levees combined with Washington’s natural dignity (or was it aloofness?) to create a political atmosphere unimaginable in any modern-day national capital. Namely, in a year when the French Revolution broke out in violent spasms destined to reshape the entire political landscape of Europe, and the Congress, under Madison’s deft guidance, ratified a Bill of Rights that codified the most sweeping guarantee of individual rights ever enacted, no one at the levees discussed these major events or expected Washington to comment on them.