by Ron Chernow
Another portrait done around this time was a direct outgrowth of Washington’s northern trip. After giving him a tour of Philosophical Hall, with its display of scientific instruments, Harvard College president Joseph Willard asked Washington if the university could have a portrait of him, and he agreed to sit for Edward Savage. In late December and early January, Washington generously granted three sessions to Savage, who portrayed him in uniform with the badge of the Society of the Cincinnati pinned to his left lapel. That Washington twice wore the badge for portraits early in his presidency shows his desire to reassert his solidarity with the group despite his rocky relationship with it. Savage’s finished portrait shows a calm, powerful, but stolid Washington with a spreading paunch. There is no fire in the eyes or expression in the face—so unlike his smiling, expressive wartime portraits—again hinting at the extreme physical changes he underwent in his later years.
During this period Washington dedicated the most time to portraits by his former aide John Trumbull, perhaps because the artist situated him in historical settings. Washington wrote admiringly of Trumbull’s “masterly execution” and “capacious mind” and showed toward him none of the petulance or impatience he did toward Gilbert Stuart.31 In 1790 alone Washington granted Trumbull a dozen sessions and even went riding with him, so the painter could study him on horseback. While training with Benjamin West in London in the early 1780s, Trumbull had been imprisoned as a secret American agent, which could only have endeared him to Washington. Trumbull now did a towering portrait of Washington for New York’s City Hall, with British ships evacuating New York in 1783 in the background, as well as portraits celebrating the Battles of Trenton and Princeton. The Trenton picture showed Washington in all his earlier magnificence, standing trim, and erect, one gloved hand clasping his sword, his chin lifted in an elegant pose. For the Princeton portrait, Trumbull presented Washington on the eve of battle. “I told the President my object,” he later wrote; “he entered into it warmly, and, as the work advanced, we talked of the scene, its dangers, its almost desperation. He looked the scene again and I happily transferred to the canvas the lofty expression of his animated countenance, the high resolve to conquer or to perish.”32
Despite his presidential cares, Washington remained a devoted family man and doted on nobody more than Nelly. She was such a bright, vivacious girl that Martha described the ten-year-old in 1789 as “a wild little creature” with boundless curiosity. 33 She had a sharp eye for people’s foibles and later on loved to poke fun at the many young beaux who courted her. As she got older, she liked to sprinkle her letters playfully with French and Italian expressions.
Even as a girl, Nelly was smart and cultivated, if a trifle too dreamy for her grandparents. The Washingtons never penalized her because she was a girl, and they sent her to a boarding school in New York as a day student. They also made sure she acquired the necessary artistic graces. She studied painting with William Dunlap and turned out beautiful still lifes, often floral arrangements set against a black backdrop. Later on, in Philadelphia, a dancing master named James Robardet taught Nelly and Washy the fashionable steps required for polite society. Because she was so creative, the Washingtons also bought Nelly an English guitar and a harpsichord and gave her lessons with the Austrian composer Alexander Reinagle. In the musical realm, Martha was a martinet, forcing Nelly to practice the harpsichord for hours on end until tears sprang to her eyes. “The poor girl would play and cry, and cry and play, for long hours under the immediate eye of her grandmother, a rigid disciplinarian in all things,” said her brother.34 Nelly also told of how, against her grandmother’s warning, she wandered alone by moonlight in the Mount Vernon woods. When she came home, “the General was walking up and down with his hands behind him, as was his wont,” said Nelly, while Martha, “seated in her great armchair . . . opened a severe reproof.”35 Elsewhere Martha Washington is portrayed as overly indulgent with her grandchildren. After spending a day with the family in October 1789, Abigail Adams wrote that “Mrs. Washington is a most friendly, good lady, always pleasant and easy, dotingly fond of her grandchildren, to whom she is quite the grandmamma.”36 Several years later Nelly wrote to Washington of how she looked up to him “with grateful affection as a parent to myself and family.”37 Part of Nelly’s appeal for Washington was her lightness of being, which relieved the gloom that sometimes cloaked the careworn president.
According to Washy, Nelly observed how Washington’s grave presence inhibited children at play and that even grown-up relatives “feared to speak or laugh before him . . . not from his severity” but from “awe and respect . . . When he entered a room where we were all mirth and in high conversation, all were instantly mute.”38 When this happened, Washington would “retire, quite provoked and disappointed.”39 It is a powerful commentary on the way in which fame estranged Washington from the casual pleasures of everyday life, making it hard for him to get the social solace he needed. Yet here, too, there are contrary views. His nephew Howell Lewis wrote that when Washington was “in a lively mood, so full of pleasantry, so agreeable to all . . . I could hardly realize that he was the same Washington whose dignity awed all who approached him.”40 And in his memoirs, Washy reported how his sister charmed the president, stating that “the grave dignity which he usually wore did not prevent his keen enjoyment of a joke and that no one laughed more heartily than he did when she herself, a gay, laughing girl, gave one of her saucy descriptions of any scene in which she had taken part or any one of the merry pranks she then often played.”41
While Washington doted on Nelly, Martha took special pleasure in spoiling Washy. When he was away from home, Martha grew anxious, as she had with Jacky. On one occasion when Washy was gone and failed to write, Washington reminded him “how apt your grandmama is to suspect that you are sick, or some accident has happened to you, when you omit this.”42 Exasperated with the boy’s laxity, Washington criticized him in the terms he had once reserved for Washy’s father. In New York, Washington hired a private tutor to work with Washy, who made temporary progress in Latin but was hopeless in math and other subjects. In general, he was an indifferent and easily distracted pupil. Washington constantly coached Washy and advised him to mend his ways. The boy would make all the right noises, then completely ignore his advice, leading to tooth-gnashing frustration for Washington.
Like his father, Washy knew that he would inherit the Custis fortune, which made him lazy and unfocused. George was again afraid to cross Martha on the loaded subject of the children and the Custis money. In a fascinating letter written in 1791, Tobias Lear talked about this uneasy standoff between the Washingtons: “I clearly see that [Washy] is in the high road to ruin . . . The president sees it with pain, but, as he considers that Mrs. W’s happiness is bound up in the boy, he is unwilling to take such measures as might reclaim him, knowing that any rigidity towards him would perhaps be productive of serious effects on her.”43 This was one area where the most powerful man in the country tread cautiously. Where Washington did succeed was in introducing the two children to the theater. The boy was sufficiently imbued with the love of acting that he played Cassius in a performance of Julius Caesar, enacted at the presidential mansion, and later made an effort to become a playwright—a literary urge that resulted in a flowery memoir of his grandfather.
From the outset of the administration, the Washingtons did their best to cope with the inconveniences of the Cherry Street house. Though roomy by ordinary standards, it could not accommodate enough people for large formal dinners and receptions. In the fall of 1789, when Washington heard that the Count de Moustier was being recalled to France, he jumped at the chance to occupy his house at 39-41 Broadway, on the west side of the street south of Trinity Church (erected two years earlier by merchant Alexander Macomb). This second presidential mansion was four stories high, featured two high-ceilinged drawing rooms, and was much more stately than its predecessor. When one New Yorker toured the house and its two neighbors under construction i
n 1787, he was thrilled by their imposing dimensions, saying that “they are by far the grandest buildings I ever saw and are said to excel any on the continent.”44
On February 23, 1790, the Washingtons moved from their old cramped quarters to this airy, commodious new residence. Where they could seat only fourteen people at state dinners before, they now had room for more than two dozen. In the rear of the house, glass doors opened onto a balcony with unobstructed views of the Hudson River. Washington also built a stable nearby with handsome planked floors and twelve stalls for horses. With his eye for furnishings, he bought from Moustier everything from a dozen damask armchairs to huge gilt mirrors to a bidet. Eager to augment presidential dignity, he bought more than three hundred pieces of gilt-edged porcelain for dinner parties. Green was the omnipresent color of the house, which had green silk furniture and a green carpet spotted with white flowers. Washington’s love of greenery was further reflected in his purchase of ninety-three glass flowerpots scattered throughout the residence. It is curious that America’s first president chose a residence so thoroughly saturated with a French sensibility.
This executive mansion never had the dark, smoky atmosphere that we associate with an age of candlelight dinners. Attuned to the spirit of technical innovation, Washington bought fourteen lamps of a new variety patented by Aimé Argand, a Swiss chemist. They used whale oil and burned with a cleaner, brighter light than anything used before, chasing away evening shadows and affording up to twelve times the illumination of candlepower. Washington mounted these lamps in the drawing rooms, hallway, entries, and stairwells, banishing shadows from the residence. As he wrote excitedly, “These lamps, it is said, consume their own smoke, do no injury to furniture, give more light, and are cheaper than candles.”45 In this manner, Washington initiated America’s insatiable appetite for oil, provided theatrical lighting to burnish the splendid statecraft that he practiced, and introduced a welcome touch of modernity.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
The State of the President
A LITTLE AFTER NOON ON JANUARY 8, 1790, George Washington climbed into his cream-colored coach and rode off to Federal Hall behind a team of four snow-white horses. In its sparsely worded style, the Constitution mandated that the president, from time to time, should give Congress information about the state of the Union, but it was Washington who turned this amorphous injunction into a formal speech before both houses of Congress, establishing another precedent. Trailing him in his entourage were the chief justice and members of his cabinet, leading to yet another tradition: that the State of the Union speech (then called the annual address) would feature leading figures from all three branches of government.
Everything about the new government still had an improvised feel, and Washington’s advent occasioned some last-minute scurrying in the Senate chamber. Maclay referred to “nothing but bustle about the Senate Chamber in hauling chairs and removing tables” for his arrival.1 Once at Broad and Wall, Washington entered the hall—on later occasions, constables held back the crowd with long white rods—and mounted to the second-floor hall. Everyone clung nervously to protocol, and the president went through an awkward comedy of manners with the legislators. When he entered, they rose; when he was seated, they sat. Still dressed in shades of mourning for his mother, he was garbed in a suit of midnight blue, verging on black, that he had brought back from the Hartford factory.
In a hopeful speech, Washington anticipated Hamilton’s financial program by endorsing the need to establish public credit and promote manufacturing, agriculture, and commerce. He sounded a theme already resonant in his wartime letters: the need to ensure a strong national defense: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.”2 He also advocated the advancement of science, literature, and learning through the formation of a national university. The speech was composed in the didactic style of a wise parent, patiently lecturing his children, that characterized Washington’s public pronouncements and defined his political rhetoric. When it ended, the legislators stood, Washington bowed, and then he descended to the street. William Maclay did not fault Washington’s speaking style, but ever watchful for monarchical tendencies, he carped that Washington had fallen into “the British mode of business” by asking department heads to lay certain documents before Congress.3
When Washington delivered his speech, he had little sense that a furor was about to erupt over Hamilton’s funding system or that American politics would become fractious and nasty. Even before Hamilton took office, Congress had enacted legislation to create a string of lighthouses, beacons, and buoys along the eastern seaboard for the customs service, placing Hamilton in charge of a vast public works project. He also had enormous patronage powers, as he named customs inspectors and other revenue officials. During the colonial era, the evasion of customs duties had become a time-honored practice, and Hamilton had to seek Washington’s approval for constructing ten boats called revenue cutters to police the waterways and intercept smugglers, giving birth to what later became the Coast Guard. For political harmony, Washington and Hamilton distributed the construction work and skipper jobs to different parts of the country, but for a nation already wary of bureaucracy, the program represented a significant, and for some ominous, expansion of government power.
As the office handling money matters, the Treasury Department was bound to be a flash point for controversy. When Congress debated its shape in 1789, republican purists wanted it headed by a three-member board as a safeguard against concentrated power. When a single secretary was chosen instead, Congress tried to hem in his power by requiring that, unlike the other cabinet secretaries, he should file periodic reports directly with them. Instead of subordinating Hamilton to the legislature, however, this approach enmeshed him in its workings. The treasury secretary’s aggressive style guaranteed that the executive branch, not Congress, would oversee economic policy. As with foreign policy, executive primacy in economic matters ran counter to the view of many framers who had hoped that Congress would enjoy policy-making centrality, but this development promised greater efficiency and consistency than would otherwise have been the case.
On January 14, 1790, Hamilton delivered the Report on Public Credit that Congress had requested in the fall. With his nimble mind and encyclopedic store of knowledge, Hamilton served up a magnum opus that eclipsed anything the legislators had envisioned. No evidence exists that Hamilton consulted Washington before he completed it. Since the president was not well schooled in the arcana of public finance, Jefferson thought he had been hoodwinked: “Unversed in financial projects and calculations and budgets, his approbation of them was bottomed on confidence in the man [Hamilton].”4 Jefferson’s insinuation that Washington was a helpless dupe of Hamilton is highly misleading. Dating back to their wartime frustrations with Congress, Washington and Hamilton had shared a common worldview and an expansive faith in executive power. They had seen firsthand how Britain’s well-funded public debt had enabled it to prosecute the war with seemingly limitless resources. Late in the war Washington had blasted the fanciful notion that “the war can be carried on without money, or that money can be borrowed without permanent funds to pay the interest of it.”5
The federal government had fallen woefully in arrears in paying off the enormous debt—$54 million in national and $25 million in state obligations—amassed to fight the Revolutionary War. It would have been tempting for the young nation to repudiate this burden, but as a matter of policy and morality, Washington and Hamilton thought nations should honor their debts if they aspired to full membership in the community of nations. “With respect to the payment of British debts,” Washington had written before becoming president, “I would fain hope . . . that the good sense of this country will never suffer a violation of a public treaty, nor pass acts of injustice to individuals. Honesty in states, as well as in individuals, will ever be found the soundest policy.”6 If Washington gave Hamilton something close to carte blanche on fiscal matters, it was
because they essentially agreed on the steps needed to tame America’s staggering debt. But he had also set up a policy-making apparatus in which major decisions had to cross his desk for approval, so he was confident that he could control the sometimes-brash Hamilton.
Hamilton’s audacious report argued that, to restore fiscal sanity, the government did not have to retire the debt at once. All it had to do was devise a mechanism to convince people that, by setting aside revenues at predictable intervals, it would faithfully retire it in future years. Such a well-funded debt, Hamilton argued, would be a “national blessing” inasmuch as it would provide investment capital and an elastic national currency.7 The report foresaw a medley of taxes, from import duties to excise taxes on distilled spirits, to pay off existing debt and to service a new foreign loan. With its new taxes and its funded debt, Hamilton’s program was bound to dredge up unwelcome memories of the British ministry.
In his report, Hamilton championed several controversial measures. Some original holders of the wartime promissory notes, including many Continental Army veterans, had sold them after the war at a tiny fraction of their face value, believing that they would never be repaid in full. Hamilton planned to redeem them at face value and wanted current holders of the paper, even if they were speculators, to reap the rewards of the steep price appreciation that would follow enactment of his program. Only by doing this, he thought, could he establish the principle that owners of securities were entitled to all future profits and losses. Without such a policy, the United States could never establish thriving securities markets. Hamilton was also persuaded that, since the debt had been raised to finance a national war, the federal government should assume responsibility for the states’ debts as well. Such an act of “assumption” would have extraordinarily potent political effects, for holders of state debt would transfer their loyalty to the new central government, binding the country together. It would also reinforce the federal government’s claim to future tax revenues in any controversies with the states. Peerless in crafting policies embedded with a secret political agenda, Hamilton knew how to dovetail one program with another in a way that made them all difficult to undo.
