by Ron Chernow
By September 1789, under Madison’s guidance, Congress had approved the amendments and ordered Washington to send copies to the eleven state governors, as well as to the chief executives of North Carolina and Rhode Island. Even though the amendments were not approved by the states and formally adopted until December 15, 1791, North Carolina entered the Union in November 1789 and Rhode Island in May 1790, completing the reunification of the original thirteen states. In mid-October 1789 Washington wrote to Gouverneur Morris in a well-merited spirit of triumph, “It may not, however, be unpleasing to you to hear . . . that the national government is organized, and, as far as my information goes, to the satisfaction of all parties—that opposition to it is either no more, or hides its head.”66
CHAPTER FIFTY
The Traveling Presidency
IN THE EARLIEST DAYS OF HIS ADMINISTRATION, Washington decided to visit every state in the Union and permit people to view him firsthand. His impulse was profoundly republican: he wanted to monitor public opinion. As a southern president, he thought it politic to tour the northern states first. After consulting with Hamilton, Knox, and Jay, he mapped out a monthlong tour of New England, once Congress had recessed in late September 1789. He wanted to educate himself about the “principal character and internal circumstances” of each section of the country and meet “well-informed persons, who might give him useful informations and advices on political subjects.”1 He was especially eager to discover whether citizens had embraced their new experiment in republican government. This all formed part of his concerted effort to break out of the airtight bubble that can seal any fledgling president in a suffocating vacuum.
Washington had other cogent reasons for making the trip. To refute stories about his supposedly regal style, he decided to travel with only Tobias Lear, David Humphreys, and William Jackson, in addition to six servants. Since he was traveling to Massachusetts, Washington thought it proper to invite along Vice President Adams, who committed a major faux pas by snubbing his invitation. The trip would also enable Washington, after his recent prolonged illness, to indulge in fresh air, exercise, and relaxation. To rebuild his shattered health, he now rode for two hours each morning and strolled for an hour in the late afternoon, but he still led a confined existence in New York and must have eagerly anticipated the freedom of the open road.
When he set out in mid-October, the business of government did not grind to a halt. Congress had instructed Alexander Hamilton to draw up a report on public debt and to devise an all-encompassing plan to fund it. It was a huge and punishing task—Congress wanted it in hand when it reconvened in early January—but Hamilton, a dynamo who thrived on hard work, gloried in his ability to produce outstanding results on short notice. Prior to leaving New York, Washington also signed a proclamation for the first Thanksgiving on November 26, declaring that “Almighty God” should be thanked for the abundant blessings bestowed on the American people, including victory in the war against England, creation of the Constitution, establishment of the new government, and the “tranquillity, union, and plenty” that the country now enjoyed.2
To execute a sweeping tour of the northern states, Washington knew, he would encounter many problems that had bothered him before. He had no flair for impromptu public speaking or small talk and could not divert audiences with a casual joke or anecdote. “In public, when called on for a sudden opinion, he was unready, short, and embarrassed,” Jefferson recalled, noting that Washington “had neither copiousness of ideas, nor fluency of words.”3 He also had to worry about a more humiliating possibility: his dentures popping out unexpectedly. Opening his mouth relaxed the pressure on the curved metal springs connecting the upper and lower dentures, which might cause them to slip out. That Washington risked such embarrassment in order to make direct contact with the people shows his self-sacrificing nature. Perhaps afraid he would be held captive to the hospitality of various families and eager to salvage some privacy, he laid down a rule that he would not stay in private residences during the trip.
By now Washington well understood the machinery of fame. Usually he rode through the countryside in an open carriage, attended by servants in livery and jockey caps. Behind him a baggage wagon rumbled along, and one of his slaves, either Paris or Giles, supervised his white charger in the rear. As they entered a town, Washington would dismount from his carriage, mount the white steed, then enter with magnificent solemnity. He clung to the hope that he might avoid fanfare and enter cities unobtrusively, and at his first stop in New Haven, Connecticut, he deliberately bypassed the welcoming committee. “By taking the lower road,” he admitted in his diary, “we missed a committee of the assembly who had been appointed to wait upon and escort me into town.”4 Typically, as word leaked out about his imminent arrival, a volunteer cavalry corps rushed to greet him before he could outwit them. Doomed to his own celebrity, he tried to submit with the best possible grace.
Aside from scouting places for future canals, roads, and other internal improvements, Washington kept a weather eye out for innovations in manufacturing and agriculture. The country already stood in the early throes of the Industrial Revolution, and unlike Jefferson, Washington did not recoil from the mills that had begun to dot the landscape. He stopped by the Hartford Woolen Manufactory and examined its textile business. While he did not find their broadcloths to be first-rate, he ordered a suit for himself and material for breeches for his servants. Engaging in a bit of amateur sociology, he observed the greater income equality of the northern states. Soon after crossing into Massachusetts, he wrote, “There is a great equality in the people of this state. Few or no opulent men and no poor—great similitude in their buildings . . . The farms . . . are small, not averaging more than 100 acres.”5 His comment provides yet another example of Washington’s growing appreciation of the northern states and his shedding of a purely Virginia identity.
Boston loomed as the first major city on the itinerary; plans for a full-dress military parade as he entered the city only stoked Washington’s anxiety. A committee of Boston dignitaries traveled to meet him in Spencer, west of Worcester, and, just as he feared, they presented their celebratory plans. Not for the last time during the trip, Washington fell on his sword: “Finding this ceremony was not to be avoided, though I had made every effort to do it, I named the hour of ten to pass the militia of the above county at Cambridge and the hour of 12 for my entrance into Boston.”6
Boston had never properly thanked Washington for its liberation from the British, and it now intended to seize the opportunity. Knowing this would be a tribute to his wartime prowess, Washington departed from his usual practice and decked himself out in his Continental Army uniform, topped by rich gold epaulettes. If he had been resistant at first to the adulation of the Boston populace, he entered wholly into the spirit of the occasion. The morning of his arrival was cold and overcast, and his cavalcade was halted at Cambridge by a dispute as to whether state or local authorities would receive him. The president grew irritated with the maddening delay. “Is there no other avenue into the town?” he demanded.7 The stern reproof had an immediate effect: he would be greeted by municipal officials.
As he entered Boston, church bells chimed, and a French fleet in the harbor erupted with bursts of artillery fire. In a symbolic gesture, cannon roared from Dorchester Heights, recalling the triumph Washington had engineered there during the Boston siege. People crammed the streets, bent on seeing him as he trotted by on his white steed. “He did not bow to the spectators as he passed,” said one observer, “but sat on his horse with a calm, dignified air.”8 At the State House he passed beneath an enormous arch emblazoned with the words “To the man who unites all hearts,” surmounted by a laurel wreath with the inscription “Boston relieved March 17th. 1776.”9 When Washington appeared on a balcony of the building and set eyes on the vast multitude below, there arose a tremendous roar. George Washington was always more emotional than people realized, and by the time he emerged from the State House and heard a choi
r crooning an ode to him, he could no longer contain himself, giving way to tears. One startled eyewitness described how “every muscle of his face appeared agitated, and he was frequently observed to pass . . . his handkerchief across his eyes.”10
Washington’s visit to Boston embroiled him in a delicate diplomatic impasse with Governor John Hancock, who invited him to stay in his richly decorated Beacon Hill home. Hancock was something of a strutting peacock, wearing fancy clothes and riding about in a radiant coach. In replying to this invitation, Washington explained his decision to stay in prearranged lodgings, although he accepted an invitation to dine informally with Hancock. Always scrupulously attentive to form, Washington assumed that Hancock would obey protocol and call on him at his lodgings before he went to this dinner. Pleading gout, Hancock failed to do so. To Hancock’s emissaries, Washington expressed his displeasure. He knew that Hancock was trying to establish that he outranked the president in Massachusetts. Behind the dispute over etiquette lay an unspoken struggle between state and federal power. “I informed them in explicit terms that I should not see the Gov[erno] r unless it was at my own lodgings,” Washington wrote in his diary.11 Perhaps he remembered Hancock’s peevish reaction when Washington had been appointed commander in chief instead of him. Hancock quickly got the message. Writing grandly about himself in the third person, he told Washington that “the Governor will do himself the honor to pay his respects in half an hour. This would have been done much sooner had his health in any degree permitted.”12 To flaunt his martyrdom, Hancock wrapped himself up in red flannel bandages and had his servants carry him into Washington’s lodging.
By this point Washington had come down with a cold and an eye inflammation. Even before he left New York, he had received reports of an “epidemical cold” gripping the New England states.13 On the day he entered Boston, so many local citizens were wheezing with heavy coughs and chest colds that the illness was dubbed “the President’s Cough” or “Washington’s influenza.”14 Now it seemed that Washington himself had succumbed. Nonetheless he toured the Harvard College library and museum and went aboard the flagship of the French fleet, receiving maritime honors accorded only to kings. Bemused, he noted, “The officers took off their shoes and the crew all appeared with their legs bared.”15 Still the heartthrob of American females, Washington agreed to a request from the ladies at an elegant dinner to sit for a portrait that would grace Faneuil Hall. The smitten ladies, all aflutter, explained that “his benign countenance made such an impression on their hearts as they wish to recognize in his portrait in future.”16 From this portrait, copies were made that would hang in many Boston households.
On his trip Washington followed his ecumenical practice of praying in churches of various denominations, including Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational. In Boston he attended a concert in King’s Chapel (Stone Chapel), where a young Danish artist named Christian Güllager, seated in a pew behind the pulpit, drew a rapid, unauthorized sketch of him. A week later, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Washington granted Güllager a two-and-a-half-hour sitting that produced a remarkably fresh and candid portrait of Washington that was perhaps influenced by the painter’s first glimpse of him in Boston. Leaning back in his chair, Washington seems to turn and suddenly catch the artist’s eye. His face is broad and open, his torso massive and powerful in a dark coat, and his aura commanding.
On October 28, as he toured the Boston Sailcloth Manufactory, Washington’s attention was distracted from the wonders of American manufactures by the wonders of American women. One observer spied Washington’s frisson of delight, saying that he “made himself merry on this occasion, telling the overseer he believed he collected the prettiest girls in Boston.”17 When feted that evening, Washington was again encircled by adoring women and recorded happily in his diary that “there were upwards of 100 ladies. Their appearance was elegant and many of them were very handsome.”18 So began a habit of counting the fashionable women as he basked in their attention. “He is much more open and free in his behavior . . . in the company of ladies . . . than when solely with men,” someone later noticed.19 Washington can be forgiven his wandering eye, for others noted the way pretty women gathered around him. One observer wrote that while Washington sat in state on a crimson velvet settee, “the ladies were very handsomely dressed and every one strove here, as everywhere else, who should pay the most respect.”20 It says much about Washington’s declining health that this once-celebrated dancer seemed not to take the floor at these functions. According to Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, after the war, Washington “would always choose a partner and walk through the figures correctly, but he never danced. His favorite was the minuet, a graceful dance, suited to his dignity and gravity.”21
After leaving Boston, Washington proceeded north along the coast, accompanied by four hundred cavalry, as the towns grew much less glamorous. In the fishing port of Marblehead, no fashionable women swooned over his presence. “The houses are old,” Washington wrote, “the streets dirty, and the common people not very clean.”22 Washington seemed to grow heartily tired of all the festive barges, honor guards, thirteen-gun salutes, and commemorative arches thrown in his path. In Salem one citizen saw how oppressed Washington was by all the pomp: “His appearance as he passed thro[ugh] Court Street in Salem was far from gay or making anyone else so. He looked oppressed by the attention that was paid him, and as he cast his eye around, I thought it seemed to sink at the notice he attracted. When he had got to the Court House and had patiently listened to the ditty they sung at him and heard the shouts of the multitudes, he bowed very low and, as if he could bear no more, turned hastily around and went into the house.”23
Desperate for some relief in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Washington went deep-sea fishing with some local fishermen. The outing turned into a fiasco: he caught not a single fish, and when one local fisherman hooked a cod, he handed the rod to the disappointed president so he could reel it in. Doubtless feeling a little foolish, Washington gave the man a silver dollar. He was much happier attending a sumptuous dinner in Portsmouth, where he resumed his head count of the ladies and showed himself a connoisseur of female coiffure. At this assembly, he wrote, “there were about 75 well dressed and many of them very handsome ladies. Among whom (as was also the case at the Salem and Boston assemblies) were a greater proportion with much blacker hair than are usually seen in the southern states.”24
As he circled back to New York, Washington stopped at Lexington and “viewed the spot on which the first blood was spilt in the dispute with Great Britain on the 19th of April 1775.” 25 After treading this hallowed ground, Washington proceeded south along crooked back roads to Waltham. Incredible as it seems, the presidential party had to ask directions of bystanders, who often gave Washington misleading information to the point that he complained of “blind and ignorant” advice.26 In his diary, he sounded the universal lament of travelers, grousing about room reservations that suddenly vanished, forcing the party to move on to another town for the night, or the atrocious entertainment at many taverns. The trip had been a colossal undertaking for Washington, especially after his recent malady. In the space of a month, he had toured or passed through almost sixty cities and villages. The journey had been an undisputed triumph, however, consolidating Washington’s popularity and giving citizens a sense of belonging to a single nation. For all its rigors, the journey had also revived Washington’s health. John Trumbull said he returned to the capital “all fragrant with the odor of incense.”27 With what must have been indescribable relief, he arrived back at his Cherry Street mansion at three P.M. on November 13, 1789, “where I found Mrs. Washington and the rest of the family all well.”28 There would be no rest for the weary: having reappeared on a Friday, he had to mingle with visitors at Martha’s weekly reception that evening.
ANOTHER EFFECTIVE WAY that Washington transmitted his image to the country and sought national unity was by sitting for portrait artists, an activity for which he set aside a huge am
ount of time. In early October he devoted two hours to an Irish artist, John Ramage, who daubed a miniature on ivory of him at Martha’s behest. Ramage depicted a notably dour Washington dressed in a uniform adorned by the badge of the Society of the Cincinnati. In this unflattering portrait, Washington’s nose looks too long and too hooked, his chin too sharp, and his expression morose, perhaps reflecting his fatigue before the northern trip reinvigorated him.
Around the same time, Washington posed for the Marquise de Bréhan, who was variously described as either the sister or the sister-in-law of the Count de Moustier, the French minister, with whom she lived in a scandalous liaison. A friend of Jefferson, the marquise had imagined that she was coming to an American Arcadia and been sorely disappointed. The count, a bright but tactless eccentric, dressed in the red-heeled shoes of French nobility and wore earrings. Both the count and the marquise were frowned upon by most New Yorkers, who had small tolerance for European decadence. “Appearances . . . have created and diffused an opinion that an improper connection subsists between [Moustier] and the marchioness,” Jay informed Jefferson. “You can easily conceive the influence of such an opinion on the minds and feelings of such a people as ours.”29 One local resident ridiculed the pair thus: the count was “distant, haughty, penurious, and entirely governed by the caprices of a little singular, whimsical, hysterical old woman, whose delight is in playing with a negro child and caressing a monkey.”30 Perhaps reluctant to offend the French minister, Washington flouted convention and allowed himself to be painted by the marquise, who completed a cameo miniature of Washington in neoclassical style, his head bound by a laurel wreath. In this profile, Washington has the massive head and thick neck of a Roman emperor, a clear brow, a straight nose, and a steady, godlike gaze as he stares straight ahead.
