The Return of George Washington

by Edward Larson

  Placing his hand on the large, red Bible fetched for the occasion from Livingston’s Masonic Lodge, Washington repeated the oath of office administered by the chancellor. Most spectators heard none of it, however, until the end, when Livingston proclaimed in a loud voice, “Long live George Washington, President of the United States!”105 Then the audience erupted again, cannons fired, and church bells rang.

  President Washington, after bowing to the people, went back into the Senate chamber to address Congress and invited guests—perhaps a hundred persons in all. The audience for this speech, however, was much larger than Congress. Newspapers across America printed it and foreign ministers in attendance reported on it to Europe. By substituting the short, general inaugural address crafted by Madison for the long, specific one prepared with Humphreys, Washington chose to reveal little about his policy objectives or incoming administration. Historian Joseph Ellis has described the speech as “deliberately elliptical.”106 It gave no hint of the nation-building efforts that Washington’s administration would pursue, particularly after Hamilton replaced Madison as the President’s closest advisor, even though that basic course of action flowed logically from much that Washington had expressed in private and in public since his circular letter of 1783. It did not even disclose much about Washington beyond his faith in divine providence.

  While Washington had “the Gift of Silence,” as Adams once put it, and could command an audience with a bow or stare, he was not a natural orator and never owned this speech.107 Still, delivered in a low voice that people strained to hear, the address had a quiet dignity. The Spanish minister called it “eloquent and appropriate” even if the presentation struck some as “ungainly.”108

  Six paragraphs long, the speech began with the President noting his “incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me.” Then, after expressing his trust in God and Congress to carry the government forward, Washington reminded Americans of their national purpose. “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty,” he stated, “and the destiny of the republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally, staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” Turning to the widely discussed issue of amending the Constitution, after urging Congress to “avoid every alternation which might endanger the benefits of untied government,” Washington endorsed additions that might “more impregnably fortif[y]” the “rights of freemen.” By this turn of phrase, he backed a bill of rights for some while artfully dodging both the already pressing subject of slavery and the then more far-off topic of women’s rights. Looking heavenward, he closed his address by asking divine blessing for “the enlarged views, the temperate consultations, and the wise measures, on which the success of this Government must depend.”109

  Reading with some hesitation from pages that he shifted awkwardly from hand to hand, Washington took twenty minutes to deliver the fourteen-hundred-word address. From his entrance to his exit, the ceremony at Federal Hall ran under an hour. Thousands waited outside for the resumption of the inaugural parade, which the whole Congress now joined. Led by the same troops and assembled in a similar order as during the procession to Federal Hall, the augmented official party now walked several blocks up Broadway to St. Paul’s Chapel, which it entered for divine services. More than five years earlier, Washington and his troops had paraded down this same wide avenue after liberating New York at the end of the American Revolution. With most of its war-ravaged buildings restored or replaced, the city now looked fresh and vibrant. Even though its population had increased dramatically since the war, many of the individuals now hailing Washington on this late April afternoon had done so in November 1783. Despite all that had happened to him and them in the intervening five years, Washington still embodied their hope for better times ahead.

  The church service did not last long. Episcopal bishop Samuel Provoost, who also served as the Senate’s chaplain, led prayers and sang praises but did not deliver a sermon. After the service, Washington rode by coach to his residence in time for a private dinner with Humphreys and Lear before going out at dusk to watch fireworks from Livingston’s house overlooking the harbor.110 These fireworks likely reminded Washington of those that he had watched from a similar viewpoint on the evening after liberating New York in 1783. Many of the same types were used—spirals, fire-trees, serpents, fountains, and flights of thirteen rockets—and the display again ran more than an hour.

  So many people packed the streets of lower Manhattan during and after the fireworks that coaches could not pass. Washington walked home. That night, he had much to see. At the urging of civic leaders, New Yorkers celebrated the inauguration by illuminating the city with arrays of candles and lanterns in street-facing windows, front doors, open spaces, and public buildings. The most elaborate displays added transparencies that cast images fit for the occasion. In some, Washington could see himself, his victories, or his virtues; in others, he saw America’s shape or symbols. By overlaying transparencies, a few of the images appeared to move or to re-create a recognizable scene in three dimensions.

  After walking north for nearly a mile through thinning crowds and darkening neighborhoods, Washington reached the presidential residence on Cherry Street after 10 P.M. and retired for the night. “It was a day which will stand immutable and indelebale in the Annals of America,” Lear wrote in a letter to Mount Vernon urging Martha Washington to come soon.111 “Good government, the best of blessings, now commences under favorable auspices,” the next day’s newspaper announced. “We beg to congratulate our readers on the great event.”112 Those readers and all Americans arose that morning, May 1, 1789, to the first full day of the first federal administration. Neither they nor their President would ever be the same.

  Image of George Washington from his private study at Mount Vernon.

  Epilogue

  WASHINGTON’S PRESIDENCY LIVED UP to the immense popular expectations. Paired with his service as commander in chief during the Revolutionary War, it became a second pinnacle in a career that has no parallel in American history. Each of these two periods covered roughly eight years of a remarkably rich life that would span nearly seven decades. Modern rankings of presidents, whether conducted by historians, political scientists, or a wider sample, generally place Washington first and Abraham Lincoln second. For his part, among presidents, Lincoln esteemed Washington most. There was much to admire.

  To head the various executive departments and to form a cabinet of advisors, Washington tapped prominent leaders from a broad spectrum of Americans who had supported the Constitution’s ratification. For the critical domestic post of secretary of the Treasury, after first offering it to former superintendent of finance Robert Morris, Washington turned to the brilliant and energetic nationalist Alexander Hamilton, an enthusiast for all things British. State—the former office of Foreign Affairs—went to America’s Francophile ambassador in Paris, Madison’s close friend Thomas Jefferson, a fellow Virginian whose support for ratification had been more qualified than Washington suspected. Another Virginian, the on-and-off supporter of the Constitution Edmund Randolph, became attorney general. Washington named his loyal second in command during the Revolutionary War and successor as army chief, Henry Knox, an ardent federalist, as secretary of war.

  In dealing with Congress, Washington at first relied most heavily on Representative Madison but retained close ties with many others in the Senate and House, particularly Robert Morris. Half of the twenty-two initial senators and eight of the new representatives had served with Washington at the Constitutional Convention. Because he viewed the vice presidency as a legislative position, Washington excluded John Adams from his administration’s inner counsels. He probably could not have suffered that officious New Englander’s harangues, which he had more than enough of when Adams headed Congress’s Board of War during the American Revolution. To launch the judicial branch, Washington nominated John Jay as chief justice and three friends f
rom the Convention, James Wilson, John Rutledge, and John Blair, as associate justices. The final open nomination to the five-member Supreme Court went to Massachusetts chief justice William Cushing, who had worked to keep local courts open during Shays’s Rebellion and served as vice president of his state’s critical ratifying convention.

  The results transformed America. Working almost as a team under Washington, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches began the process of forging a continental republic from an assortment of states. The principal policies for doing so came from Hamilton, who emerged as Washington’s most influential advisor: a veritable prime minister within the administration, much to the dismay of the more states’-rights-minded Jefferson and the despair of antifederalists. Jefferson, though, made his contributions to the emerging order, such as by devising a broad regime of federally protected intellectual property rights. With Knox, he also backed Washington’s efforts to open the Ohio country for settlement, leading to prolonged warfare with the Western Confederacy of native tribes until its capitulation in 1795. And with surprisingly little dissent after all the opposition the idea had generated at the Convention, Congress authorized a network of lower federal courts that projected central authority into every state. True to his campaign promises, Madison took on the task of pushing a bill of rights through an indifferent, federalist-dominated Congress. Though the final amendments were less protective of states’ rights than antifederalists wanted, they passed Congress by the end of its historic first session and Washington forwarded them to the states for ratification.

  Hamilton’s nationalizing policies were founded on funding the full debt run up by Congress and the states during the Revolutionary War. He viewed this as a means to align the interests of wealthy Americans with the central government, displace the states as independent economic actors, and enhance the country’s credit. To pay for it, Hamilton pushed a tariff on imported goods, which would have the side effect of sheltering American industry, and an excise tax on some domestic items such as whiskey, which he saw as a means to exert authority over frontier distillers. Jefferson reluctantly endorsed Hamilton’s idea of assuming state debts in return for northern support for moving the seat of government to the banks of the Potomac River near Mount Vernon, a dream of all Virginians, including Washington.

  As a capstone for his economic program, Hamilton wanted a quasi-independent central bank for the United States, co-owned by private investors, which would in effect regulate fiscal policy and provide a stable national currency. Here Jefferson and Madison drew the line, claiming the Constitution did not authorize Congress to charter a bank. Madison even cited his notes from the Convention, which he had vowed to keep confidential for a generation, to argue that the delegates had rejected such an idea.

  Invited by Washington to reply, Hamilton countered that the Necessary and Proper Clause, already reviled by antifederalists, authorized Congress to do virtually anything that advanced its express powers to lay taxes and regulate interstate commerce. Washington sided with Hamilton, and the bank was chartered in 1791. By this point, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Vermont had joined the union, with Kentucky coming in a year later—all fertile grounds for anti-national sentiment. Two distinct factions had emerged, with the leaders of each—Hamilton and Jefferson—in Washington’s cabinet.

  Endorsed by both camps and encouraged to run as the only one able to bridge the growing partisan divide, Washington was unanimously elected to a second four-year term in 1792. Under the façade of unity, however, two political parties were forming. It showed in the contest for Vice President, in which Clinton now finished a close second to Adams, and in a growing tendency for congressional candidates to identify with one of the factions. Jefferson’s partisans began calling themselves Republicans while Hamilton’s supporters increasingly formalized their designation as Federalists. On both sides, the outlines of party organizations emerged in the rise of partisan newspapers, the coordination of voting by factions in Congress, and party endorsements for political candidates. Members aligned with Jefferson even gained a slight edge in the House of Representatives following the elections of 1792, and held it through the remainder of Washington’s tenure.

  Events pushed partisanship during Washington’s second term. Frustrated by Hamilton’s domination over the administration, Jefferson left the cabinet in 1793. A year later, Republicans denounced the government for suppressing resistance to the whiskey tax in western Pennsylvania with a thirteen-thousand-soldier army personally led by Washington. Then convulsions caused by the French Revolution and ensuing war between republican France and aristocratic England engulfed domestic politics. Washington’s decision to proclaim neutrality without consulting Congress outraged Republicans, who viewed the United States as bound to support its Revolutionary War ally, France. When the British navy nevertheless seized hundreds of American merchant ships bound for French ports in the West Indies, and impressed American sailors into service to boot, many Republicans demanded a second war with England. Instead, in 1794, Washington sent Jay to resolve differences between the United States and its former colonial master. Bargaining from a weak position, Jay’s treaty did little more than accept British limits on American trade with France in exchange for seemingly meaningless concessions. For the first time, Washington’s popularity sagged. He was excoriated in the Republican press. The settlement with Britain, however, paved the way for a widely applauded treaty with Spain opening the Mississippi River for American navigation.

  In 1796, at age sixty-four, Washington announced that he would not accept a third term as President. He wanted to retire, again, to Mount Vernon. His Farewell Address, printed in newspapers as a letter to the people rather than delivered as a speech to Congress, denounced partisanship, embraced economic nationalism, and discouraged permanent foreign alliances. Speaking to all Americans, Washington wrote, “The unity of Government which constitutes you one people, is also now dear to you. It is justly so; for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; and of that very Liberty which you so highly prize.”1 This address joined his circular letter of 1783 as one of Washington’s two most significant public writings: a legacy to the American people.

  By this point, Washington’s reputation as President was secure. His initiatives and reforms had created lasting national institutions, restored American credit, opened the Ohio country for settlement and the Mississippi River for commerce, fostered economic expansion, and established the presidency as a powerful office of overarching significance. Perhaps most important of all, he had kept the United States at peace with Europe during a period of widening transatlantic war. In the election of 1796, Adams, Washington’s preferred candidate, narrowly beat Jefferson in America’s first contested balloting for President. By coming in second, however, Jefferson became Vice President, and the partisan split only deepened. Washington tried to stay out but inevitably was drawn in on the Federalist side, most notably in 1798 by accepting formal command of American forces during Adams’s quasi-war with France.

  Back at his beloved Mount Vernon beginning in March 1797, Washington threw himself into farming and even became a whiskey distiller. No product ever netted him a larger return on his investment than this potent, rye-based intoxicant that he sold without aging it. His distillery became the largest in the United States by 1799. On December 12 of that year, however, a heavy snow started falling during Washington’s daily ride around his plantation’s five farms. He returned home wet and cold. The accumulated snow and his physical condition kept him from riding on the thirteenth, a Friday. “He had taken cold (undoubtedly from being so much exposed the day before) and complained of having a sore throat,” wrote Tobias Lear, Washington’s secretary since 1784.2

  The sore throat grew into something much worse by the next morning. Washington struggled for breath and could scarcely speak. To counter the inflammation that strangled him, he
asked for a bleeding by the overseer who generally treated Mount Vernon’s slaves. When they arrived, Washington’s doctors repeated the procedure three more times and administered two laxatives. Nothing helped. In all likelihood Washington had contracted epiglottis, which no available medical treatment could cure. He accepted his fate. After reviewing his two wills, Washington confirmed the one that would free his slaves upon his wife’s death and waited for his own to come. It did not take long. “Doctor, I die hard, but am not afraid to go,” he said at dusk. The end came later that night. His final words were, “’Tis well.”3

  News of the unexpected death touched off an outpouring of grief unprecedented in the country’s history. “Every paper we received from towns which have heard of Washington’s death, are enveloped in mourning,” one journalist reported near the year’s end. “Every city, town, village and hamlet has exhibited spontaneous tokens of poignant sorrow.”4

  Although Washington’s body was entombed after four days at Mount Vernon, President Adams ordered all military stations to observe funeral honors for the fallen leader, which the army interpreted to mean military processions, gun salutes, solemn music, a riderless horse, spoken eulogies, and sometimes a flag-draped coffin on a horse-drawn caisson. Communities across America followed suit with funerary processions and public eulogies of their own, which allowed countless citizens to mourn Washington’s passing in a collective manner. The largest ceremony occurred in Philadelphia, which then served as the seat of government pending its final move to the District of Columbia.