The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  On September 17, 1787, the delegates signed the document, and, the Convention’s “business being thus closed, the Members adjourned to the City Tavern, dined together and took a cordial leave of each other,” Washington recorded.28 The outcome, which gave form to the energetic government he had long favored (and which largely followed the blueprint he and his fellow Virginia delegates had helped Madison sketch out just before the Convention opened, as Chapter Nine recounts), elated him. He sent Congress the document that same day, with a cover note invoking classical social-contract theory. Just as “[i]ndividuals entering into society, must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest,” he wrote, so the states agreed to cede some “rights of independent sovereignty to . . . provide for the interest and safety of all,” in a “spirit of . . . mutual deference and concession” that was indispensable—and that, in light of the states’ wide cultural and economic differences, he told Lafayette later, seemed to him “little short of a miracle.”29 The Constitution, he wrote an Irish baronet, “approached nearer to perfection than any government hitherto instituted among Men.”30

  He followed the ratification debates avidly. A “greater Drama is now acting on this Theatre than has heretofore been brought on the American Stage, or any other in the World,” he told his Dublin correspondent, inflating his favorite imagery to the hyperbole of a playhouse handbill—“the Novel and astonishing Spectacle of a whole People deliberating calmly on what form of government will be the most conducive to their happiness.”31 Thanking Hamilton for sending him The Federalist, he pronounced it an instant classic and boasted that he’d read everything on the ratification question. Much later, as president, he proudly asserted his expertise when he dismissed a congressional demand as unconstitutional. As a framer of the Constitution, he knew firsthand its animating principles, he said, and he also had at his fingertips the arguments of all the state ratifying conventions. Anybody who doubted him could consult “the plain letter of the Constitution itself,” along with “the Journals of the General Convention, which I have deposited in the office of the department of State,” he tartly concluded, with an uncharacteristic emphasis on the personal pronoun.32

  BUT WITH ALL his enthusiasm for the Constitution, Washington never saw it as a self-activating machine, sufficient on its own to ensure American freedom. Any constitution can be subverted, “if the spirit and letter of the expression is disregarded,” he knew.33 True, an unprecedented array of checks and balances made this one unlikely to degenerate into a despotism, “so long as there shall remain any virtue in the body of the People.” But in future ages, if that virtue should give way to “corruption of morals, profligacy of manners, and listlessness for the preservation of the natural and unalienable rights of mankind,” then tyranny that no lawgiver’s prudence can prevent might sweep away liberty, for no “mound of parchmt can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the one side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.”34

  In other words, the Constitution is the letter; its animating spirit is what we would call a culture of liberty, though Washington used the eighteenth-century language of morals and manners to mean the same thing. That’s what he had in mind when he noted that “the information and morals of our Citizens appear to be peculiarly favourable for the introduction of such a plan of government,” where “due energy will not be incompatible with the unalienable rights of freemen.”35 That’s why he insisted in his First Inaugural Address on the “indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage.”36 And it’s why, in his first annual message to Congress—the first State of the Union—he dwelt on the critical importance, for the “security of a free Constitution,” of “teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; . . . to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness,” and to unite “a speedy, but temperate vigilence against encroachments, with an inviolable respect to the laws.”37

  As clearly as such anti-federalists as George Mason, Washington knew from his own experience that, while some men will follow what they see as their rational self-interest and sell supplies to British occupiers rather than to Patriot insurgents, no free country can exist unless many of their brothers have what he called “the sacred fire of liberty” burning within, sufficient to resist tyranny—some even to the point of marching barefoot through the snow to attack its armies, their lives on the line.38

  Washington understood that not everyone would see the subtle distinction between the constitutional machinery and the particulars of the American culture that animated it. “I expect, that many blessings will be attributed to our new government, which are now taking their rise from that industry and frugality into the practice of which the people have been forced from necessity,” he wrote Lafayette as the Virginia Ratifying Convention met. But culture and Constitution would reinforce each other in a virtuous circle, he foresaw. “When the people shall find themselves secure under an energetic government, . . . when the seeds of happiness which are sown here shall begin to expand themselves, and when every one (under his own vine and fig-tree) shall begin to taste the fruits of freedom, then all these blessings (for all these blessings will come) will be referred to the fostering influence of the new government. Whereas many causes will have conspired to produce them.”39 Though Washington didn’t have the clunky term, he well understood how the character of the people and the spirit of the laws interact dialectically to shape a society.

  PERHAPS HE WAS so sensitive to the question of virtue because, as the Constitutional Convention neared—and especially as he saw, with “a kind of gloom upon my mind,” that he would have to serve as the nation’s president—his concern with appearances turned inward, and he scrutinized ever more self-consciously the content of his own character.40 This note first sounded in his letters early in 1785, when, at his prompting, the Virginia Assembly voted to charter canal companies on the Potomac and the James, and, as thanks for his conceiving the project, to award him some shares. Rarely can an intended honor have caused such consternation. He wanted to be “at liberty,” he wrote Governor Benjamin Harrison (the master of Berkeley Plantation and father of the ninth president), “to suggest what may occur to me, under the fullest conviction, that . . . there will be no suspicion that sinister motives had the smallest influence”—that “every individual who may hear that it was a favorite plan of mine, may know also that I had no other motive” than the public good and certainly no thought of personal gain.41 It took him seven months to agonize over what he saw as a dilemma, since “I am aware that my non-acceptance of these shares will have various motives ascribed to it, among which an ostentatious display of disinterestedness—perhaps the charge of disrespect or slight of the favors of my Country, may lead the van.” In the end, he came up with the Solomonic solution of accepting the gift but using it to endow two charity schools.42

  “An ostentatious display of disinterestedness”—can anyone ever have burrowed more anxiously into the convoluted strata of outer appearance and inner psychological reality than this? Driven by the love of fame, he had become the world’s most famous man, and now he sought something more. He sought sincerity; he sought virtue; he sought inner wholeness; but, since appearances still haunted him, he worried that people might think he counterfeited these qualities as one more way of winning fame. Paradoxically, as his countrymen were about to give him the highest honor the new nation could bestow, he felt riven. He could scarcely even speak of the prospect, “without betraying, in my Judgment, some impropriety of conduct, or without feeling an apprehension that a premature display of anxiety, might be construed into a vainglorious desire of pushing myself into notice as a Candidate,” he wrote Hamilton.43 To General Benjamin Lincoln, on the other hand, he confided with tortured ambivalence that he’d accept the job only from “a conviction that the par
tiality of my Countrymen had made my services absolutely necessary, joined to a fear that my refusal might induce a belief that I preferred the conservation of my own reputation & private ease to the good of my Country.”44

  As he jotted pages of notes for an Inaugural Address after his unanimous election on February 4, 1789, he all but turned himself inside out. “I solemnly assert and appeal to the searcher of hearts to witness the truth of it, that my leaving home to take upon myself the execution of this Office was the greatest personal sacrifice I have ever . . . been called upon to make,” he agonized in his orderly, businesslike study at Mount Vernon, with his large world globe beside him. “And, from the bottom of my Soul, I know, that my motives on no former occasion were more innocent than in the present instance.”45

  But realizing that the Constitution was just an abstract framework, inert until someone breathed the spirit of life into it and fleshed it out, he also recognized that it mattered who would do the job. He had asked Hamilton “whether there does not exist a probability that the government would be just as happily and effectually carried into execution, without my aid, as with it,” and he concluded that the answer was no.46 His fame, his moral authority, made him indispensable. “Whenever a government is to be instituted or changed by the Consent of the people,” he mused, “confidence in the person placed at the head of it, is, perhaps, more peculiarly necessary.”47 So he took the job out of “an absolute conviction of duty,” he wrote the celebrated English Whig historian Catharine Macaulay Graham (who had visited him at Mount Vernon), especially since the “establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment, for promoting human happiness, by reasonable compact, in civil Society.”48 Even so, he told Henry Knox a month before the inauguration, “my movements to the chair of Government will be accompanied by feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”49

  AFTER HE TOOK the oath of office in a trembling voice on the balcony of New York’s old city hall on April 30, 1789, his hand on a Bible hastily borrowed from a nearby Masonic lodge, he began his Inaugural Address by confessing his “anxieties” over “the magnitude and difficulty of the trust” he was assuming.50 This wasn’t just formulaic modesty. After all, as he explained to Graham a few months later, “Few . . . can realise the difficult and delicate part which a man in my situation had to act”—a part for which no one had written the script. There had never been such a thing as the president of the United States before, or a president of any modern republic. There was no State of the Union address, no “Hail to the Chief,” no cabinet, no White House, no chief of protocol. There was so much he had to make up as he went along, out of his own judgment, experience, and instinct, and he had to bring his audience along with him by force of character. “Much was to be done by prudence, much by conciliation, much by firmness,” he wrote Graham. “I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any action, whose motives may not be subject to double interpretation. There is scarcely any part of my conduct wch may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.”51

  So those precedents needed to be right. In all he did in inventing the presidency, he believed, he ought to “maintain the dignity of office, without subjecting himself to the imputation of superciliousness or unnecessary reserve” and “without partaking of the follies of luxury and ostentation.”52 A republican chief executive who symbolically embodied a nation of freemen had to navigate the tensions between superiority and equality inherent in his role; a president who valued a culture of freedom needed to set the right tone of republican manners, which would dramatize every day the new nation’s ideal of the relations between the people and their elected magistrate—and, more broadly, between citizen and citizen.

  Would it be acceptable for him to visit his friends privately, he anxiously asked Adams, or would such visits “be construed into visits from the President of the United States?” What kind of parties should he give? Could he have legislators to dinner in small groups, or must he invite them all at once?53 As for his title, he rejected Adams’s grandiloquent suggestion of “His Highness, the President of the United States of America, and Protector of their Liberties”—which the vice president suggested not because he wanted a king but rather because he sought, through titles, “parade,” and “ceremony,” to harness that “passion for distinction” or love of fame that, like Washington, he believed to be the strongest motive for virtuous behavior.54 Nevertheless, Washington modestly chose “the President of the United States.”

  Of course he was right to predict that the motives behind every choice would draw scrutiny and suspicion. At Hamilton’s suggestion, he held “levees”—a term with unfortunate royal connotations, as his enemies later objected—every Tuesday at 3 PM, stiff, men-only receptions, at which he struggled to exchange a few decorous words with each guest, bowing instead of shaking hands, to the great disgust of the more egalitarian dignitaries, who complained that his bow wasn’t even a very gracious bow. “Would it not have been better to have thrown the veil of charity over them, ascribing their stiffness to the effects of age” rather than to “pride”? the fifty-eight-year-old president, his hearing failing and his painful false teeth freezing his smile, plaintively wondered. He was only doing what he and those he consulted thought was right, he told Jefferson later, and if he “could but know what the sense of the public was,” he would “most cheerfully conform to it.”55

  “ALL SEE, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external trappings of elevated Office,” he told Graham. “To me, there is nothing in it, beyond the lustre which may be reflected from its connection with a power of promoting human felicity.”56 Yes and no: he hadn’t lost his taste for display, but he began to realize the toll that presidential pomp would take on his personal life. Soon after his inauguration, he was writing to Gouverneur Morris in France, asking him to buy a “neat and fashionable but not expensive” mirror-finish plateau for the center of his dinner table, which Morris found in Paris, and a set of wine coolers, which the faithful emissary had a London silversmith make in Sheffield plate—at Washington’s expense, on top of the £5,671 that Congress had already spent redecorating and finishing the dignified, neoclassical presidential mansion it had rented at 3 Cherry Street near the East River, just north of today’s Brooklyn Bridge. As Morris wrote him, it was the president’s task “to fix the Taste of our Country properly,” making sure everything was “substantially good and majestically plain; made to endure”—though Washington privately grumbled that the price of the wine buckets “far exceeds the utmost bounds of my calculation.” When the French Revolution broke out and Paris recalled its minister, Washington was happy to rent the diplomat’s bigger and grander house at 39-41 Broadway, and he used his own funds to buy much of the minister’s elegant French furniture before moving in February 1790.57

  Though land-rich but often cash-poor—he had had to borrow £500 to pay his Virginia taxes and travel to his own inauguration—Washington entertained lavishly out of duty, inclination, and the vow of Black Sam Fraunces, who had given up tavern keeping to run the chief executive’s household, that “while he is President of the United States and I have the honor to be his steward, his establishment shall be supplied with the very best of everything that the whole country can afford.” The heaps of oysters, lobsters, and other delicacies made visitors gape and made the $25,000 annual presidential salary dwindle relentlessly. Washington made up the difference out of his own pocket, and he paid as well for such luxurious gewgaws as the scarlet-trimmed white liveries of the presidential household’s twenty servants and slaves.58

  What the “external trappings of elevated Office” were to be first became clear as barges elaborate enough for Cleopatra, with thirteen white-clad sailors at the oars, rowed him across rivers as he traveled to New York for his inauguration, and choirs of white-robed virgins and matrons mellifluously hymned his praises as the defender of mothers and daughters, scattering petals before him as he rode, with tear-streaming eyes,
under triumphal arches of flowers.59 The petals and virgins became routine. When the first congressional session closed in late September 1789 after the Bill of Rights passed, and after the president had proclaimed the first Thanksgiving on November 26, Washington set off on a tour of New England—the first of several national peregrinations “to see with my own eyes the situation of the country” and take the people’s pulse. By then he could perform the role of hero like an old trouper. Just before reaching the next town, he would climb out of his gleaming white chariot with liveried coachman, footmen, and postilion, heave himself up in the stirrup of his huge white charger—who the night before had been rubbed with glistening white pomade, wrapped in clean sheets, and bedded in fresh straw, after having his hooves blackened and his teeth brushed—and settle onto his pigskin saddle atop a gold-trimmed leopard-skin saddle blanket, sometimes (one imagines) with a weary grunt, just before the local cavalry honor guard appeared in a cloud of dust to escort him to the hymning ladies, the bowers, the balls, the dinners, and the throngs of admiring citizens, who still sometimes brought tears to his eyes.60

  But by the time he made his 1,800-mile circuit of the South in the spring of 1791, his patience for going through the same performance over and over had begun to wear thin. Sometimes he would announce the wrong time for his intended departure and sneak off hours earlier, or leave in the rain, to skip the hoopla.61 No backslapping politician, but rather a commander and Virginia gentleman with studied reserve and self-restraint (beginning with his 1595 etiquette book), he lacked the gift of small talk and jollity with strangers, and the obligatory dinners and receptions could bore him as much as others. Chronically grumpy Pennsylvania senator William Maclay described the president drumming distractedly on the table with his fork at “the most solemn dinner ever I ate at,” where “dead silence” reigned, though at a later dinner the solon grasped that Washington’s deafness made him miss much of the conversation.62