Founding Gardeners

by Andrea Wulf

  Adams, having learned his lesson and now completely preoccupied with the threat of war, subsequently left all decisions to the commissioners, who dealt with the problems—dwindling funds, brickmakers who were digging holes and removing earth from Pennsylvania Avenue to make bricks, and agricultural squatters on public land. Washington also remained involved, monitoring the city’s development with interest and employing Thornton to build some private houses for him in the new capital. In November 1799, the sixty-seven-year-old rode the sixteen miles from Mount Vernon to inspect Thornton’s work. Satisfied that all was going to plan, and no doubt relieved that Adams had resumed his passive role, he returned home. Yet Washington would never see Congress move into the Capitol or attend a banquet in the White House, for this would be his final visit to the city he had long dreamed of building.

  A week after his return to Mount Vernon, on 14 December, as a torrent of hail, rain and snow staged an icy spectacle, Washington inspected his farms for hours. The next day he woke feeling ill, but was determined to go out again to mark some trees on his back lawn “to be cut down in the improvement of that spot.” That night he woke his wife, Martha, shivering and hardly able to speak, gasping that he was unwell. Doctors were hastily called and after they had finished their torturous cutting, bleeding (half a pint of blood at a time), purging and blistering, the hero of the American Revolution knew he did not have much time left. “Have me decently buried,” he said with his last breath, “and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.”

  During the last days of his life he had two things on his mind: the new capital and his grounds at Mount Vernon. His last correspondence was a nineteen-page report to his estate manager, instructing once again on crop rotation and manures, and letters to the commissioners of Washington, D.C., and to Thornton.

  AS WASHINGTON’S DEATH WAS MOURNED across the country, Adams suddenly turned his attention to the capital. As long as Washington had been alive, the capital had remained his project, but now Adams must have felt for the first time that he could take charge. If the government was really to move to the new city within the following year, the building work needed to be stepped up a gear. But the first thing on Adams’s mind was not streets or buildings—it was a garden. He told Benjamin Stoddert, the secretary of the navy, that he would move into the White House after all, even though he would have only a few months remaining of his term by the time of the move. Trees should be planted immediately, he told Stoddert, “so as to make it an agreeable place to walk.” The president, Stoddert then instructed Thornton, who was not only the site architect but a passionate gardener himself, wanted a garden because that “large, naked, ugly looking building will be a very inconvenient residence for a family” without it.

  What Adams envisaged was something like the Bingham garden, the most opulent garden in Philadelphia. A few years previously Adams had briefly rented rooms opposite Bingham’s Mansion House on Third Street. Enclosed within a high fence, the grounds were laid out like an English garden, in irregular clumps of trees. The garden at the executive mansion seemed more important to Adams than the interior—probably because it was among plants that he was most relaxed, pruning his trees or picking insects off his roses. In the previous winter Abigail had even sent a small greenhouse to Philadelphia, so that he would not miss out on his horticultural joys in the cold months of the year. Gardening and working in his meadows was so important to Adams while he dealt with the pressures of government that he compared it to “Medicine.”

  Thornton was enthusiastic about the idea of planting trees and promised to do everything in his power to help in advance of Adams’s arrival. He sketched rows of erect Lombardy poplars to extend like wings from the White House toward the Treasury and the War Office—similar to the lines of poplars that surrounded the Bingham house. But when he and his wife, Anna, inspected the site, they found the ground “in great confusion”—brick kilns, water pits for the bricklayers and all kinds of other refuse. The creation of a garden would not be helped, Thornton’s wife commented, by the fact that funds were at an all-time low. Thornton could see that if he did not personally undertake to implement Adams’s plan, “it will not be done at all,” though he warned Stoddert that the “garden will be a work of much more difficulty and expense than was at first apprehended.” They would not be able to do anything more than “levelling some of the ground,” he wrote.

  William Thornton’s sketch of the White House with rows of trees as “arboreal wings,” terminating in the War Office to the left and the Treasury to the right (Illustration credit 6.2)

  The commissioners were also being obstructive, protesting that everything was on “too extravagant a scale.” There were more pressing issues than planting a few trees, they complained, because it wasn’t until late February 1800 that they had the funds to begin to make the mansion habitable for the president’s arrival from Philadelphia in a few months’ time. They reported to Stoddert, who had to explain to an increasingly impatient Adams why so little had been achieved. Problems continued to mount: the carpenters had been forced to lay down their tools because not enough timber had been delivered, the roof was leaking, and the plastering took much longer than originally estimated.

  With a stream of reports listing one disaster after another, Adams began to doubt that he’d be able to move to Washington in the winter. Abigail was also “discouraged” by the lack of progress and wanted him to find other accommodation because she feared it would be his death to move into such an unfinished building. In June, Adams visited the new capital for the first time, writing to Abigail that he liked it “very well,” and four and a half months later, on 1 November 1800, he became the first president to move to Washington. Abigail had remained reluctant to join her husband because she doubted they would remain there beyond the end of Adams’s presidential term, but soon followed her husband to their new home.

  The first weeks in the White House were some of the hardest in Abigail and John Adams’s lives as everything seemed to disintegrate around them. They lived in a damp and leaking palace with hardly any furniture. They couldn’t afford the small army of servants that was needed to run what Abigail called the “Huge Castle” and in any case there were no bells to call them (the bell hanger had died suddenly). The main audience room—today’s East Room—was undecorated and empty, except for the laundry lines that Abigail strung across to dry their clothes. Despite being surrounded by forests, it was impossible to get any firewood to heat the house, Abigail complained, “because people cannot be found to cut and cart it!” The lack of money and time, combined with the commissioners’ reluctance, had made it impossible for Thornton to create a garden for the president—funds were so low that there was not even a vegetable plot or small flowerbed. Problems continued and only a week after Adams’s arrival the temporary War Office burned down, destroying most of the records from the Revolutionary War. Then a month later, Abigail and John Adams heard that their alcoholic son Charles had died in New York.

  Worst of all was the vicious political atmosphere that surrounded the presidential election of 1800—the first and only one in American history that was fought between the sitting president and his vice president. Newspapers were filled with malicious slander, and even Adams’s own party, the Federalists, were split. Not only was Adams attacked by the opposition but, to the Republicans’ delight, Alexander Hamilton published a pamphlet that was more injurious to the Federalists and Adams than anything they could have written themselves. In “Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams,” Hamilton accused the president of “disgusting egotism,” “eccentric tendencies” and an “ungovernable temper.” It was clear, Adams said, that even his fellow Federalist Hamilton “would prefer Mr. J. [Jefferson] to me.” Abigail heard so many smears and lies, she said, “that I am disgusted with the world.”

  The campaigning became even more venomous than the previous election, when a hack journalist (to whom Jefferson had provided
some financial support) portrayed Adams as both mad and a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force nor firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Accused of being pro-monarchy, Adams was now also blamed for the grand designs of the capital, even though he had had nothing to do with them. Madison’s old friend Philip Freneau, the Republican poet and former proprietor of the National Gazette, wrote:

  An infant city grows apace

  Intended for a ruling race,

  Here capitols of awful height—

  Already burst upon the sight,

  And buildings, meant for embryo kings,

  Display their fronts and spread their wings.

  The first electoral colleges were called on 3 December, but the voting and counting of the results took several weeks. By the third week of December, Adams knew that he had lost his presidency, but because of a tie between the two Republican candidates, it would take until mid-February to confirm that Jefferson was president-elect.9 “The only Question remaining with me is what I shall do with myself?,” a defeated and dispirited Adams quietly pondered, but the answer was simple: “farmer John” would feed his cattle, “potter in my garden among the fruit Trees and Cucumbers, and plant a Potatoe Yard with my own hand.”

  The election campaign destroyed the last vestiges of friendship between Adams and Jefferson. The election had been fought with dirty tricks, Abigail railed in her last letter to Jefferson, accusing him of “the blackest calumny, and foulest falsehoods.” Jefferson, she wrote, had masterminded a smear campaign of “the lowest and vilest Slander”—attacks that had suggested that her husband had not only tried to crown himself as king of America but that he was mentally deranged.10

  ADAMS LEFT THE CITY by stagecoach at four o’clock in the morning on 4 March 1801, quietly absenting himself from Jefferson’s inauguration. The swearing in of the third president of the United States was a plain affair but as carefully planned as Washington’s elaborate parades. At noon Jefferson walked from the tavern where he had stayed the night to the Capitol to take his oath of office and to read his Inaugural Address in the Senate chamber. Dressed as a “plain citizen” without a dress sword, after giving his speech he returned to the tavern by foot. It was the first of many gestures that expressed his return to what he believed to be true republicanism—simple, virtuous and agrarian. His government, Jefferson wrote, would return to “the original simplicity of its form” and its “republican principles.” The Inaugural Address made clear to all who heard and read it that Jefferson would make his government as invisible as possible, and many were expecting an extensive pruning of federal powers. During his presidency he would reduce the national debt and, he wrote to the Speaker of the House of Representatives in May, slice expenditures for the army, the navy (which he hated for its association with mercantilism), American diplomats in Europe, taxes, the bureaucracy and even his fellow government officials.

  Republicans worried that Washington, D.C., had been conceived “upon a plan much too magnificent,” but as it stood in 1801 it was, in a sense, the perfect republican capital, because it was no city at all. Nothing much had changed since Adams had moved into the White House four months earlier—anyone who had feared that power was coalescing at the heart of the federal government would have been heartened to watch the politicians gingerly sinking in the mud between the building sites. This was not how Washington had imagined the capital of the United States, but Jefferson was not going to change it.

  Washington had tried to turn the capital into an expression of his beliefs, and Jefferson would now do the same by ostentatiously doing nothing much at all. The most pertinent symbol for this approach was the garden at the White House—or, to be more precise, the nonexistent garden. Instead of admiring L’Enfant’s fountains, visitors now had to be careful not to “fall into a pit, or stumble over a heap of rubbish.” Everywhere were pools in which there were “numerous dead carcasses left to putrified,” Albert Gallatin, the secretary of the treasury, said. The grounds were divided from the surrounding fields only by a broken post and rail fence, which Jefferson’s washerwoman—in full view of everybody—used to dry the presidential stockings and shirts. It’s almost certain that Jefferson did not plant a single tree or shrub in the White House garden, for it was unlikely that the man who made lists of everything would have failed to record it.11

  It might seem strange that this horticultural connoisseur, who his entire adult life had been deeply curious about all things botanical and passionate about gardens, did not create one at the most important house in the United States. The man who had said that “there is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me,” and that gardens “added wonderfully to my happiness” did not care that the grounds around the White House did not remotely resemble a garden. By deciding to leave the landscape as he found it, Jefferson’s “presidential garden” would exude neither grandeur nor power—and that was exactly what he wanted.

  One of the reasons for ignoring the grounds was the house itself, which, though much reduced from what L’Enfant had envisaged, was still far too palatial to Jefferson’s mind. With his wife long dead and his two daughters married, the only other person in this cavernous palace was the president’s secretary. Jefferson inhabited, one visitor remarked, “but a corner of the mansion,” leaving the rest “to a state of uncleanly desolation.” The mess was not disturbing him, for he had never minded living in the midst of a building site—five years previously he had demolished and begun to rebuild his house at Monticello, living that summer “under the tent of heaven.”

  There was nothing he could do about the size of the White House itself, or indeed the grand master plan of the surrounding city, but he could certainly create a different setting, and a radically more republican atmosphere, than Washington and L’Enfant had envisaged. If Jefferson’s government was to be one that was neither seen nor felt, the grounds of the White House would need to be “designed” accordingly. He would not have a garden that was reminiscent of Versailles and Louis XIV. “Avoid palaces and the gardens of palaces,” the site architect had already warned Washington during the early years of planning, “if you build a palace I will find you a king.” Ten years previously Jefferson had fought and failed to reduce L’Enfant’s “Palace” to a modest country house, but now he would make sure that any palatial associations would vanish from the landscape. And so his garden legacy at the White House would be the reduction of the grounds from L’Enfant’s sixty acres to a modest five, turning the remaining land over to the public.

  Slashing government expenditures and shrinking the presidential grounds were not the only expressions of the new president’s republican ethos, Jefferson also used the presidency itself. From the day of his inauguration Jefferson began to demystify the office of president, disposing of strict social protocols and casting himself as a simple farmer. Where Washington had been the glorified hero of the nation, Jefferson became the president of the people. As president, the towering Washington had exuded an air of formality and grandeur, riding on a white stallion with a gold-trimmed saddle or stiffly addressing the people at balls and levees with his hand on his dress sword (and never shaking hands). By contrast, Jefferson eliminated any vestiges of pomp and monarchical rituals. The “Palace” was used like a modest country seat and he stopped all public performances. “Levees are done away,” he told the Speaker of the House of Representatives—instead intimate dinner parties for a few but rarely more than twelve people were introduced (three times a week for members of Congress). Seated at a round table to avoid any hierarchical order, Jefferson also eschewed political topics, instead favoring subjects such as gardening and agriculture.

  In this studied simplicity everything was done for a purpose: Adams’s Levee Room (today’s State Dining Room) was changed into Jefferson’s private study and he signed his invitations simply “Th: Jefferson” instead of “The President of the United States” as Washington and Adams had done. As diplomats bowed to t
he formalized etiquette at courts in Europe, patiently maneuvering along the gilded ladder of status, Jefferson made the White House distinctly American. “When brought together in society,” Jefferson laid out in a memorandum, “all are perfectly equal, whether foreign or domestic, titled or untitled, in or out of office.”

  The man who had worn elegant lace, ruffles and luxurious silk waistcoats during his diplomatic posting in Paris now deliberately dressed down to impress. Jefferson often used his attire to make a point—when reviewing the local militia, for example, he was asked why as chief of the military forces he was not wearing a uniform, to which he reputedly answered that it was to “show … that the civil is superior to the military power.” As president he made a point of being “without any tincture of pomp.” Rembrandt Peale’s famous presidential portrait shows Jefferson as a country gentleman with ruddy red cheeks and unpowdered hair—in stark contrast to Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington dressed elegantly and with his dress sword, conveying an almost royal aura.

  Many commented on Jefferson’s new style. His hair, the British diplomat Augustus John Foster remarked, was “neglected,” while a Federalist senator called it “dissheiveled.” They mentioned his slippers “down at the heel” and “with his toes out,” the coat “thread bare” and the linen “much soiled.” In short, he looked, Foster said, like “a tall large-boned farmer”—exactly the image that Jefferson was trying to convey.

  Jefferson used the White House as a gentleman farmer would treat a rural retreat, and life in the capital only served to bolster this vision. Most of L’Enfant’s city was still invisible except on paper, few houses had been built and there was the constant bang of rifle fire outside the Capitol as people shot quails and other birds. Washington, D.C., was reminiscent more of a country estate than a national capital. On the marshy land next to Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill, one English diplomat observed, there was “Excellent snipe shooting.” Ducks were caught on the Potomac and the shoals of perch were so thick that in order to fish, people aimlessly shot into the water to “get a good dish full.” The area of today’s Mall was wetlands covered with reeds and swaths of American lotus that obscured the water surface—inhabitants caught many fish there.