by Ron Chernow
The president having withstood two grave illnesses, the capital was rife with copious opinions as to how best to preserve his precious health. A chorus of friends and physicians alike urged him to dedicate more time to exercise and lessen the strain of public business. Even in mid-June Washington could not quite get rid of the remnants of his chest pains, coughing, and shortness of breath and acknowledged the dreadful toll that dinners, meetings, and receptions had taken on his constitution. “Within the last twelve months,” he told David Stuart, “I have undergone more and severer sickness than thirty preceding years afflicted me with, put it altogether.”44 The next bout of illness, he predicted, would “put me to sleep with my fathers.”45 By nature a conscientious, hardworking man, Washington confessed to Lafayette that he could not stop doing all the things necessary “to accomplish whatever I have undertaken (though reluctantly) to the best of my abilities.”46
Washington heeded the doctors’ stark warning that he should get more outdoor activity. On June 6 he accompanied Jefferson and Hamilton on a fishing trip off Sandy Hook. It was a fine spring day, and the newspapers hoped the president felt reinvigorated by the sea air. “We are told he has had excellent sport,” one paper commented, “having himself caught a great number of sea bass and blackfish.”47 After resuming his diary, Washington jotted down many instances of riding in his coach or on horseback as he tried to pry himself away from his sedentary life. For health reasons, Washington also contemplated the purchase of a farm outside Philadelphia, which never happened.
Washington’s back-to-back illnesses in 1789 and 1790 contributed to the sudden aging of a man who had long been associated with graceful virility. The two episodes would have greatly deepened his sense that he was sacrificing his life for his country and that he would likely have little or no retirement beyond the presidency. Washington had grown more haggard during these medical emergencies. Fanny Bassett Washington wrote the following year, “The president looks better than I expected to see him, but still there be traces in his countenance of his two last severe illnesses, which I fear will never wear off.”48 The crises also left Martha Washington in a reflective, despondent mood. She told Mercy Otis Warren, “But for the ties of affection which attract me so strongly to my near connection and worthy friends, I should feel myself indeed much weaned from all enjoyments of this transitory life.”49
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Capital Matters
AFTER MOST OF THE STATES had ratified the Constitution by the summer of 1788, James Madison had broached to George Washington a topic that engaged both their emotional loyalties and their financial interests: the location of the future capital. Aware that New York and Philadelphia would emerge as serious candidates, Madison hoped the banks of the Potomac River might ultimately house the federal government. As flourishing population growth on the western frontier enhanced the prospects for a southern capital, Madison believed that time was on the South’s side. Washington’s red-hot enthusiasm for the Potomac had scarcely cooled, and he still embraced the river as the ideal portal to the interior and hence the optimal site for the capital. The Potomac was the natural “center of the union,” he had explained to Arthur Young. “It is between the extremes of heat and cold . . . and must from its extensive course through a rich and populous country become in time the grand emporium of North America.”1
Since it would exert far-reaching influence, the choice of venue for the capital was fraught with controversy. Most obviously, it would mean a commercial windfall for nearby property owners; Madison and Henry Lee scooped up land along the Potomac to profit from any future capital. The political leanings of the surrounding region would affect legislators isolated from constituents back home. Jefferson and other agrarians also wanted a capital remote from the noxious impact of large cities and northern manufacturing. Finally, many southern legislators preferred a southern city where they could transport their slaves without being harassed by abolitionists. So vexed was the capital question that Madison almost despaired of a satisfactory solution. “The business of the seat of government is become a labyrinth for which the votes printed furnish no clue,” he lamented in June 1790.2
The deadlock over the issue coincided with a stalemate over Hamilton’s plan to have the federal government assume state debts. Washington noted that the two debates had ensnared Congress in ceaseless rancor, telling David Stuart that June that “the questions of assumption, residence, and other matters have been agitated with warmth and intemperance, with prolixity and threats.”3 Washington’s fantasy of nonpartisan civility in politics was being rapidly eroded by growing polarization along north-south lines. Still recuperating from illness, he found it easy to stay aloof from the debates on assumption and the capital, but he clearly supported Hamilton’s objectives, echoing his treasury secretary’s belief that the “cause in which the expenses of the war was incurred was a common cause” and should be borne by the federal government.4 It was also universally known that he favored a Potomac capital. “It is in fact the interest of the President of the United States that pushes the Potomac,” William Maclay protested in his diary. “He by means of Jefferson, Madison . . . and others urges this business.”5
In early June 1790 the House enacted Hamilton’s funding bill but omitted his contentious plan to assume state debt. Maclay, among others, spied a political agenda lodged deep in the proposal, which would give the federal government a “pretext for seizing every resource of government and subject of taxation in the Union.”6 Madison was enraged that states that had mostly paid their debts—Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia—would subsidize profligate states that had not. Complicating matters was the incipient feud between Hamilton and Jefferson. Now detecting signs of monarchy sprouting everywhere, Jefferson associated a funded debt with the British Empire and, despite his presence in the cabinet, secretly joined forces with Madison against Hamilton. He was chagrined by Hamilton’s decision to reward speculators in government debt, whom he saw as “fraudulent purchasers of this paper . . . filched from the poor and ignorant.”7
The twin debates over assumption and the capital grew so venomous that it seemed the Union might dissolve in acrimony. It was against this backdrop that, on June 19, Jefferson ran into Hamilton before Washington’s residence on Broadway. Usually Hamilton cut a dapper figure, but Jefferson found him strangely transformed by the hubbub surrounding him. “His look was somber, haggard, and dejected . . . Even his dress uncouth and neglected,” Jefferson wrote.8 For half an hour the two men paced before Washington’s door as Hamilton expatiated on the dangerous disunity in Congress, the urgent need for cabinet solidarity, and the malaise threatening the new government. The upshot was that, the next day, Jefferson hosted a dinner for Hamilton and Madison at his lodgings at 57 Maiden Lane. During this famous meal, in an apartment adorned with engravings of Washington, a grand deal was brokered. Jefferson and Madison agreed to aid passage of the assumption bill, while Hamilton promised to lobby the Pennsylvania delegation to endorse Philadelphia as the temporary capital and the Potomac as its final destination. For Hamilton, who favored New York as the capital, it was a bitter pill to swallow, but he viewed the assumption of state debt as the crux of federal power. Only belatedly did Jefferson, a states’ rights advocate, realize his colossal strategic error, grumbling to Washington that he had been royally “duped by Hamilton” and saying that “of all the errors of my political life, this has occasioned me the deepest regret.”9 He believed that Hamilton, to consolidate federal power and promote a northern financial cabal, wanted to make the federal debt so gigantic that it would never be extinguished.
In July Congress approved the Residence Act, naming Philadelphia as the temporary capital for ten years, followed by a permanent move to a ten-mile-square federal district on the Potomac by December 1, 1800. There is no firm evidence that Washington was consulted about the dinner deal hatched by Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison. Nevertheless everybody knew that he had large landholdings along the river, was involved in i
ts improvement, and would benefit immensely from the decision. In his diary, Maclay fumed that Washington stood behind the dinner deal: “The President of the U.S. has (in my opinion) had great influence in this business.”10 He saw Washington as a tool manipulated by the dexterous Hamilton, saying that “the president has become in the hands of Hamilton the dishclout [dishcloth] of every dirty speculation, as his name goes to wipe away blame and silence all murmuring.”11
The Residence Act had not selected the precise spot on the Potomac for the capital, merely specifying a sixty-five-mile stretch of the river and granting Washington the power to choose the site. He would officially supervise the federal district, appointing and overseeing three commissioners charged with surveying and constructing the new city, and he was to exert an incalculable influence on its development. In a proclamation that January that shocked nobody, he announced the choice of a site just north of Mount Vernon. There was muted grumbling about Washington’s conflict of interest here. Long after Washington died, John Adams stated baldly that Washington had profited “from the federal city, by which he raised the value of his property and that of his family a thousand percent at an expense to the public of more than his whole fortune.”12 Washington was also accused of high-handed behavior in arrogating the right to pick the spot instead of yielding to his three commissioners. Maclay seemed overwrought: “I really am surprised at the conduct of the president . . . To take on him to fix the spot by his own authority, when he might have placed the three commissioners in the post of responsibility, was a thoughtless act.”13 The controversy shattered some magic spell that had spared Washington from criticism, and people no longer felt muzzled about challenging him directly.
Whatever his bias in choosing a southern capital, Washington still took to heart his position as president of all Americans. So long as Rhode Island had refused to ratify the Constitution, it had been ostracized as a renegade state, and Washington had boycotted it during his northern tour. As soon as the state joined the Union in May 1790, however, Washington was eager to remedy that omission. A few days after Congress adjourned on August 12, Washington set out for Rhode Island, accompanied by Jefferson and New York governor George Clinton, sailing out through Long Island Sound. The first stop was Newport, where a Jewish merchant and fellow Mason, Moses Seixas, greeted the president on behalf of Congregation Yeshuat Israel, assuring him that the Lord had “shielded your head in the day of battle” and protected him as “chief magistrate in these states.”14 As if seeking words of reassurance, Seixas noted that the Jewish congregation had formerly been deprived of “the invaluable rights of free citizens.”15 This elicited from Washington a letter to the Hebrew Congregation that ranks as his most beautifully enduring statement on religious toleration, showing that he had no notion of foisting a Christian state on the nation:All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens . . . May the children of the stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants.16
Three months earlier Washington had shown similarly affectionate respect for the Jews in writing to a congregation in Savannah, Georgia. With deft artistry, he identified both American Christians and ancient Jews as recipients of God’s mercy in their days of bondage: “May the same wonder-working deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors, planted them in the Promised Land—whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation—still continue to water them with the dews of heaven.”17 As patriarch of the nation, Washington naturally fell into biblical phraseology that encompassed elevated language from both the Old and New Testaments.
The next day, having arrived in Providence in time for a private dinner, Washington was on the verge of turning in for the night when he was informed that students had lit up the windows of Rhode Island College (later Brown University) in his honor. As one host recalled of Washington’s exceedingly courteous response, the students said they “would be highly flattered at the president’s going to see it, which he politely agreed to do, though he never goes out at night and it then rained a little and was a disagreeable night. We now made a nocturnal procession to the college, which indeed was worth seeing, being very splendidly illuminated.”18 The next day was unseasonably raw and cold, but Washington still had bountiful energy to see the city. He walked for hours, toured the college, inspected a merchant ship in drydock, drank wine and punch, and sat patiently through numberless speeches before a town hall dinner.
On August 22 he returned to New York for what would prove a brief final interval for the temporary capital. Under the Residence Act, the government was set to transfer to Philadelphia by early December, yet the exodus had begun in earnest in midsummer once Congress concluded its work on August 12. Washington craved the tranquillity of Mount Vernon, where he could rest and recover fully from his recent illness, and decided to make an extended stay there before the transition to Philadelphia.
When he left New York on August 30, 1790, Washington again indulged the impossible daydream of avoiding any pageantry to mark his official farewell. At dawn he gathered his wife, two grandchildren, two aides, four servants, and four slaves for a last glimpse of the Broadway house, when he suddenly heard the strains of a band outside striking up a tune called “Washington’s March.” A glum Washington saw no surcease from the cloying adulation. Outside Governor Clinton, Chief Justice Jay, and a mass of excited citizens had shown up to tender their last respects and send him off on a barge, climaxed by a thirteen-gun salute from the Battery.
As the boat drifted off into the Hudson River, Washington stood erect in the stern, then swung around toward the Manhattan shore and waved his hat in farewell, provoking a responsive roar from the spectators. When the barge had floated halfway across the Hudson, he picked up the sprightly peal of trumpets from the Jersey shore at Paulus Hook (now Jersey City), where Governor Richard Howell and the cavalry waited to escort him on the first leg of his journey. As he traversed the route south from Newark to Trenton, across which a ragged Continental Army had retreated in defeat in 1776, Washington was cheered at every hamlet along the way.
When he reached Philadelphia, Washington beheld the new capital in the grip of unabashed Washington mania. Ascending his white charger, he trailed the cavalry as it sliced an opening through pedestrian-packed streets. At the City Tavern his burly, outgoing friend Robert Morris awaited him with an outstretched hand. The city of Philadelphia had rented Morris’s house at 190 High Street (later Market Street) near the corner of Sixth as the new presidential mansion. Surrounded by stately brick walls that afforded privacy both to the building and to a well-shaded garden, the house was a substantial, four-story brick structure with tall, handsome windows. During his short stay Washington traipsed through its rooms and cast a discerning, but also critical, glance at its appointments. “It is, I believe, the best single house in the city,” Washington told Tobias Lear, who lingered in Manhattan with Billy Lee. “Yet, without additions, it is inadequate to the commodious accommodation of my family.”19 Although Washington and his entourage headed toward Mount Vernon on September 6, the president, with his strong visual powers and grasp of detail, never stopped dwelling on the decoration of the house. Throughout the fall he peppered Tobias Lear with nine long letters, spelling out the changes he wanted, right down to the color of the curtains, once the Morrises had vacated the premises and relocated to another house down the block.
In corresponding with Lear, Washington was intent on turning the house into a showpiece for visiting dignitaries. On the first floor, which would have two reception rooms, he had
the south wall demolished and installed bow windows to afford visitors a view of the clock tower atop Independence Hall. This room, with its curved windows, is thought by some historians to have been the prototype of the Oval Office that would later grace the White House. Lear tried frantically to ready the house for the Washingtons, carting in fifty-eight loads of new furniture. Because so many Philadelphia buildings were being renovated at once for the new government, a drastic labor shortage made it difficult to hire workers, even at extortionate wages. “House rent has risen here to an exorbitant pitch and many other things are following very fast,” Lear complained.20
The return to Mount Vernon, instead of offering a respite, only reminded Washington of the parlous state of his personal finances. In July he had corresponded with Clement Biddle about buying a farm the latter owned outside Philadelphia, hoping to trade it for some properties he owned in western Pennsylvania. The president admitted he was flat broke. “I shall candidly declare that to pay money is out of the question with me—I have none and would not, if it was to be had, run in debt to borrow.”21
Planning to bring a full complement of servants to Philadelphia, Washington scribbled detailed notes about their distribution in their sleeping quarters. Before returning north in late November, he also wanted to ensure that his slaves were suitably attired. Capable of paying microscopic attention to their clothing—his account books brim with notations for shirts, stockings, hats, ruffles, and other fancy articles he bought for his slaves—he advised Lear on the fashionable hats he wanted for Giles and Paris, his coachman and postilion, and for Hercules, whom he was bringing along as the new household chef. “Upon examining the caps of Giles and Paris,” he wrote, “I find they (especially Paris’s) are much worn and will be unfit to appear in with decency after the journey from hence is performed. I therefore request that you will have two handsome ones made, with fuller and richer tassels at top than the old ones have.”22 There is something sad about George Washington’s decking out his slaves in this gaily elegant clothing as part of the presidential retinue.
