by Ron Chernow
The thing that, at a stroke, ended Washington’s vacillation was the timetable set up by Congress for the election: presidential electors would be chosen in January 1789 and then vote in February. With his rather formal personality, Washington was lucky that he didn’t need to engage in electioneering, for he lacked the requisite skills for such campaigning. Had he been forced to make speeches or debate on the stump, he would not have fared very well. Tailor-made for this transitional moment between the patrician style of the colonial past and the rowdy populism of the Jacksonian era, Washington could remain incommunicado as the electors voted.
In late January he was heartened by signs of a resounding victory for federalists in the first congressional elections, showing broad-gauged support for the Constitution. “I cannot help flattering myself [that] the new Congress on account of the . . . various talents of its members will not be inferior to any assembly in the world,” he told Lafayette.57 This would only have enhanced the presidency’s attractions for Washington. If his election was predictable, it wasn’t foreordained that he would win unanimously. In mid-January Henry Lee foresaw that even antifederalist electors would feel obliged to vote for Washington. Casting their votes on February 4, 1789, they vindicated Lee’s prediction: all 69 electors voted for Washington, making him the only president in American history to win unanimously.
Lee also forecast with accuracy that the vote for vice president would be far more competitive. Under electoral rules then in force, each elector cast two ballots, the victor becoming president and the runner-up vice president. About the vice president, Washington remained studiously neutral, saying only that he would probably come from the powerful state of Massachusetts—which boiled down to a competition between John Adams and John Hancock. By early January Washington had heard that Adams was the likely choice, and he let it be known that he was “entirely satisfied with the arrangement for filling the second office,” especially since it would forestall the election of an antifederalist.58
In retrospect, it seems certain that Washington would have outstripped Adams, but some were concerned that Adams might be popular enough in the northern states to edge out Washington as president. An unscrupulous campaign by antifederalists might sabotage Washington’s candidacy by withholding votes for him. To prevent such a fiasco, Hamilton suggested privately to a few electors that they withhold votes from Adams to ensure Washington’s victory. As it turned out, Hamilton’s fears were grossly exaggerated: Washington’s 69 votes far outpaced the 34 cast for Adams and 9 for John Jay. Vain and thin-skinned, Adams felt demeaned by receiving only half as many votes as Washington. Hamilton had not attempted to undercut Adams so much as to protect the presidency for Washington. Nonetheless, when Adams later learned of this covert campaign, he was outraged and faulted Hamilton for unconscionable duplicity, poisoning relations between the two men.
Supposed to assemble on March 4, the new Congress could not put together a quorum for another month. The reason for the delay spoke poorly for the country: the delegates had been hampered by the “extreme badness of the roads,” Henry Knox informed Washington.59 Confronted by many problems, the country could ill afford this anxious interregnum. It was a discouraging start, making America look like the backward nation of rude bumpkins derided by British Tories. Washington’s election remained unofficial until the new Congress mustered a quorum in early April. Since a landslide victory for him was widely assumed, Washington would have been entitled to travel to New York for the opening of Congress. But detained by a punctilious regard for form, he refused to budge until Congress officially counted the votes on April 6. Things had proceeded much as Washington had wished: instead of seeming to clutch at power, he had let it descend slowly upon his shoulders, as if deposited there by the gentle hand of fate.
Just as Washington had renounced his salary as commander in chief of the Continental Army, so he tried to waive his presidential salary, but Congress insisted adamantly that he accept it. It proved a handsome $25,000 per annum compared to $5,000 for the vice president and $3,500 for the secretaries of state and treasury. Washington’s desire to forgo a salary blended his past and present selves: he wanted to display his customary noblesse oblige and advertise his freedom from financial care, while also acting as the ideal public servant, devoid of mercenary motives. It was his way of emphasizing that he was less a professional politician than a gentleman graciously donating his time. In truth, Washington could not afford such magnanimity, and as he prepared for the presidency, he struggled to straighten out his disordered finances. He breathed not a word of his financial troubles to his political associates, who never knew of the handicaps he overcame.
From an economic standpoint, the period after Washington’s return to Mount Vernon in December 1783 had been complicated by numerous setbacks. The persistent failure of his corn and wheat crops, thanks in part to a severe chinch bug infestation, had slashed his income drastically. The elements conspired against him again when the drought of the summer of 1787 gave way to the chilly winter of 1787-88. All the while Washington’s expenses ballooned from entertaining guests and renovating Mount Vernon’s buildings. In a painful comedown, he had been forced repeatedly to dun delinquent debtors. Short of cash, he suffered the indignity of having to press an indebted widow for money from her husband’s estate, a task so ghoulish he felt obliged to apologize: “I beg leave to add that it is from the real want of [money] I make such frequent and pressing applications.”60
On the eve of the Constitutional Convention, Washington had thrown up his hands in despair, confessing to Lund Washington that he could not balance his books: “My estate for the last 11 years have not been able to make both ends meet . . . I mention this for no other purpose than to show that, however willing, I am not able to pay debts unless I could sell land—which I have publicly advertised, without finding bidders.”61 As the convention proceeded, Washington, at his wit’s end, told George Augustine that he knew no more “than the man in the moon where I am to get money to pay my taxes”—a shocking admission for a man universally touted as the first president.62 The failure of his corn crop obligated him to buy eight hundred barrels of corn to feed his army of slaves. Preoccupied with money, Washington hoped the ratification of the Constitution would reverse the country’s real estate deflation and alleviate his plight. The day before the Constitution was signed, Washington notified his land agent in western Pennsylvania that he now expected higher prices for his property: “I cannot consent to take two dollars an acre for the land in Washington County. If the government of this country gets well toned and property perfectly secured, I have no doubt of obtaining the price I have fixed on the land, and that in a short time.”63 This turned out to be wishful thinking. Forced to eliminate debt by selling land, he put up for sale a staggering 32,373 acres in the Ohio Country.
As the ratifying conventions progressed, Washington felt a direct financial stake in their outcome, hoping the Constitution would restore American credit. He told one business colleague that the loss of his corn crop and his inability to recoup money from debtors had “caused more perplexity and given me more uneasiness than I ever experienced before from the want of money.”64 Trapped in this predicament, he looked for salvation to the government paper he owned. These promissory notes, used to finance the Revolution, had shed most of their value because of collapsing confidence in the Confederation Congress. Washington had kept these notes, he said, “without having an idea that they would depreciate as they were drawn for interest . . . The injustice of this measure is too obvious and too glaring to pass unobserved.”65 Washington understood firsthand the need for Alexander Hamilton’s fiscal program as treasury secretary.
In the spring of 1788 Washington’s contemporaries would have been shocked to know that his western taxes for 1785, 1786, and 1787 stood in arrears and that he had posted his lands there for sale to pay them off. Hardly wishing to be a scofflaw at this juncture, Washington tried to pay his taxes promptly with tobacco notes and IOUs t
hat he had received early in the Revolution for supplying articles to the Fairfax County militia. When he learned that Greenbrier County, where the property was located, would not accept such forms of payment, he was enraged. The Father of His Country was being treated with barefaced contempt for financial stresses arising from his wartime sacrifice. “I have been called upon for taxes and threatened at the same time with a sale of the land after June, if the money is not paid before, by the sheriff of Greenbrier County,” he wrote. “As I have been suffering loss after loss for near[ly] ten years, while I was in the public service and have scarcely had time to breathe since . . . this procedure seems to me to be a little hasty.”66 In another sign of his eroding financial position, on three occasions he rebuffed the sheriff of Fairfax County when he came around to collect taxes due on Mount Vernon.
By June Washington had paid his outstanding taxes but still seemed cursed by biblical extremes of weather that descended on him with unnerving regularity. “The rains have been so frequent and abundant on my plantations that I am, in a manner, drowned,” he complained to David Stuart. “What will become of my corn is not easy, at this moment to decide. I am working it ankle deep in water and mud.”67 All of Washington’s hopes of becoming a model scientific farmer had been scuttled by bad weather.
As Virginia and New York ratified the Constitution during the summer of 1788, Washington’s plight had only worsened. That August he told Dr. Craik that “with much truth, I can say I never felt the want of money so sensibly since I was a boy of 15 years old, as I have done for the last 12 months, and probably shall do for 12 months more to come.”68 In other words, Washington foresaw that, if he served as president, he would assume the job amid a full-blown financial crisis. The subsequent year must have been a strange interlude: his name was being bandied about for president as he struggled desperately with his debt load. The day after Christmas 1788 he informed his business agent that “I have never before felt the want of cash so severely as at present.”69 Finally, in early March 1789, after the Electoral College unanimously chose him as president, he took an unprecedented step to salvage his finances. He had suffered a treble blow: another year of poor crops, a continuing inability to collect debts except through long, tedious lawsuits, and the failure to sell land at decent prices. At this nadir of his business life, he sought a loan from a Captain Richard Conway of Alexandria. As he told Conway, “I am inclined to do what I never expected to be reduced to the necessity of doing—that is, to borrow money upon interest. Five hundred pounds would enable me to discharge what I owe in Alexandria . . . and to leave the state (if it shall not be permitted me to remain at home in retirement) without doing this, would be exceedingly disagreeable to me.”70
No sooner had Washington received the five hundred pounds from Conway at 6 percent interest than he had to request another hundred pounds two days later for “the expenses of my journey to New York, if I go thither.”71 It was an extraordinary admission: Washington needed money to attend his own inauguration as president. Even though he was shortly to receive a presidential salary, he would have to defray the expenses of the executive mansion, imposing yet another gargantuan tax upon his shrinking wealth. One can only imagine Washington’s humiliation in cadging money on the eve of his presidency. It would have been especially tough on the tender pride of a man who liked to emit an air of comfortable prosperity. That his second request for money apparently failed could only have aggravated matters.
On March 31, 1789, Washington drew up instructions for George Augustine Washington to guide his supervision of Mount Vernon in his absence. Washington had implicit faith in his nephew’s integrity and entrusted him with a general power of attorney. For the next eight years, however distracted he was by his country’s affairs, Washington would demand weekly reports down to the minute particulars of wind and weather, and he would send long weekly responses.
Washington’s money anxiety had often expressed itself in a sharp tone toward subordinates at Mount Vernon. His financial troubles now added to his recurring frustration with personnel. As his funds dwindled in 1785, he had turned his wrath against his miller. “My miller (William Roberts) is now become such an intolerable sot, and when drunk so great a madman,” he complained, “that, however unwilling I am to part with an old servant (for he has been with me 15 years) I cannot with propriety or common justice to myself bear with him any longer.”72 With little confidence in his employees and a deeply rooted reluctance to delegate authority, Washington could not have relished the thought of being absent from Mount Vernon again during his presidency.
A scalding letter that he wrote to his head carpenter, Thomas Green, on March 31, 1789—little more than two weeks before his departure for his inauguration—shows how insecure he felt about leaving his money-losing estate. Always on guard against alcohol abuse, which he branded “the ruin of half the workmen in this country,” Washington was exasperated by Green’s intractable drinking problem. He warned him that if George Augustine found him unfaithful to his engagements, “either from the love of liquor [or] from a disposition to be running about—or from proneness to idle[ness] when at your work,” his nephew had full power “to discard you immediately and to remove your family from their present abode.”73 Not content to leave it at that, Washington grew hotter under the collar, reminding Green that drinking left “a body debilitated, renders him unfit . . . from the execution of [work]. An aching head and trembling limbs, which are the inevitable effects of drinking, disincline the hands from work. Hence begins sloth and that listlessness, which end in idleness.” Washington warned him sternly that for the same wages he paid him, he could hire “the best workmen in this country.”74 It was a curiously graceless letter for a man about to ascend to the highest office in the land. Clearly George Washington worried dreadfully about money and whether Mount Vernon would lapse back into the dilapidated state he had found it in more than five years earlier. Now he also had to wonder whether his depleted wealth would support the enhanced celebrity he was about to enjoy as first president of the United States.
PART FIVE
The President
President George Washington, painted by Gilbert Stuart, 1795-1796.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The Place of Execution
THE CONGRESSIONAL DELAY in certifying Washington’s election as president only allowed more time for doubts to fester as he faced the herculean task ahead. He savored his wait as a welcome “reprieve,” he told Henry Knox, adding that his “movements to the chair of government will be accompanied with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”1 His “peaceful abode” at Mount Vernon, his fears that he lacked the requisite skills for the presidency, the “ocean of difficulties” facing the country—all gave him pause on the eve of his historic journey to New York.2 In a letter to Edward Rutledge, he made it seem as if the presidency were little short of a death sentence and that, in accepting it, he had given up “all expectations of private happiness in this world.”3 In many ways, the presidency had already come to Mount Vernon as Washington was besieged by obsequious letters from office seekers. “Scarcely a day passes in which applications of one kind or another do not arrive,” he told a correspondent.4 To simplify his life and set a high standard for future presidents, Washington refused to favor friends or relations in making appointments.
The day after Congress counted the electoral votes, declaring Washington the first president, it dispatched Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress, to bear the official announcement to Mount Vernon. The legislators had chosen a fine emissary. A well-rounded figure, known for his work in astronomy and mathematics, the Irish-born Thomson was a tall, austere man of inborn dignity with a narrow face and keenly penetrating eyes. He couldn’t have relished the trip to Virginia, which was “much impeded by tempestuous weather, bad roads, and the many large rivers I had to cross.”5 Yet he rejoiced that the new president would be Washington, whom he revered as singled out by providence to
be “the savior and father” of the country.6 Having known Thomson since the Continental Congress, Washington esteemed him as a faithful public servant and exemplary patriot.
Around noon on April 14, 1789, Washington flung open the door at Mount Vernon and greeted his visitor with a cordial embrace. Once in the privacy of the mansion, he and Thomson conducted a stiff verbal minuet, each man reading from a prepared text. Thomson began by declaring, “I am honored with the commands of the Senate to wait upon your Excellency with the information of your being elected to the office of the President of the United States of America” by a unanimous vote.7 He read aloud a letter from Senator John Langdon of New Hampshire, the president pro tempore: “Suffer me, sir, to indulge the hope that so auspicious a mark of public confidence will meet your approbation and be considered as a sure sign of the affection and support you are to expect from a free and enlightened people.”8 There was something deferential, even slightly servile, in Langdon’s tone, as if he feared that Washington might renege on his pledge and refuse to take the job. Thus was greatness once again thrust upon George Washington.
Any student of Washington’s life might have predicted that he would acknowledge his election in a short, self-effacing speech, loaded with disclaimers. “While I realize the arduous nature of the task which is conferred on me and feel my inability to perform it,” he replied to Thomson, “I wish there may not be reason for regretting the choice. All I can promise is only that which can be accomplished by an honest zeal.”9 This sentiment of modesty jibed so perfectly with Washington’s private letters that it could not have been feigned: he wondered whether he was fit for the post, so unlike anything he had ever done. The hopes for republican government, he knew, rested in his hands. As commander in chief, he been able to wrap himself in a self-protective silence, but the presidency would leave him with no place to hide and would expose him to public censure as nothing before.
