by Flora Fraser
During the months Washington spent in Philadelphia, when not required in the State House, he was unusually sociable. In town he dined frequently in company with the Morrises. Morris’s business partner Thomas Willing, Willing’s sister Elizabeth and her husband, Samuel Powel, and Gouverneur Morris were other hosts. Washington attended numerous parties of pleasure at these friends’ country villas. Martha, occupied with her grandchildren, was far away, but he enjoyed the company of his friends’ wives. With Elizabeth Willing Powel, in particular, a spirited woman ten years his junior, Washington, at fifty-five, was on excellent terms. He took her in his carriage, on two occasions, to drink tea after dinner at Lansdowne, John Penn’s home. He wrote to her on July 30, regretting that he could not form one of a party for a production of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal that evening. About to depart on a fishing expedition with Gouverneur Morris, the grave Washington was for once playful: “The Genl can but regret that matters have turned out so unluckily, after waiting so long to receive a lesson in the School for Scandal.”
Mrs. Powel, in turn, sent him, in early September, an economical new device, a “reflecting Lamp” for his hall. “I well know your Delicacy on the Subject of accepting the smallest Present even from your best Friend,” she wrote. She hoped, nevertheless, on the score of patriotism, that he would accept it. “Your Example will, I flatter myself, be always sufficient to recommend & establish the Use of any Articles in America.…The One sent is not of the ornamental Kind, but simple & neat; but, with your Temperance & Aversion to Ostentation, that will be no objection.” She signed herself, “with great Sincerity, dear Sir, Your affectionate Friend and very humble Servt, Eliza. Powel.” Washington replied the same day, “Neat simplicity, is among the most desirable properties of the one you have sent me, but that which stamps the highest value thereon, is the hand from which it comes.”
Such flirtatious friendships between the sexes within the bounds of marriage to others were not uncommon in Philadelphia. Mrs. Powel was on civil terms with Martha. But this correspondence with Washington suggests a different order of intimacy.
On September 17, the Constitution was adopted by the Convention. On the point of setting out for home the following day, Washington enclosed a copy of the document in a letter to Lafayette, naming it “the production of four months’ deliberation. It is now a Child of fortune, to be fostered by some and buffeted by others.” Article VII provided for further ratifying conventions to meet in each state. If nine or more of those conventions voted aye, they would be bound by “this constitution.” Washington continued: “what will be the General opinion on, or the reception of it, is not for me to decide, nor shall I say any thing for or against it—if it be good, I suppose it will work its way good—if bad, it will recoil on the Framers.”
Washington, on his return home, was soon once again the farmer: “Friday 28th. Rid to the Plantns. at the Ferry—French’s, Dogue run & Muddy hole—engaged in the same work at each.” But for how long would he be permitted to remain at his plow? His name was widely canvassed as that of the only candidate of sufficient experience and standing to assume the executive office, once the Constitution was ratified and elections were held. Gouverneur Morris wrote to him on October 30: “I have observed that your Name to the new Constitution has been of infinite Service. Indeed I am convinced that if you had not attended the Convention, and the same Paper had been handed out to the World, it would have met with a colder Reception.…As it is, should the Idea prevail that you would not accept of the Presidency it would prove fatal in many Parts.” He argued: “your great and decided Superiority leads Men willingly to put you in a Place which will not add to your personal Dignity, nor raise you higher than you already stand.”
The Samuel Powels visited Mount Vernon in the autumn, and Mrs. Powel took some trouble thereafter to secure some “collars” that her hostess wanted for the Parke Custis girls, to improve their posture. In her letter of thanks, Martha, on January 18, 1788, begged the Powels to return: “though we are not as gay as you are at Philadelphia, yet in this peaceful retreat you will find friendship and cordiality which, to one who does not go fully into all the gaieties of the city, will, I flatter myself, be quite as agreeable.” Martha set her face resolutely against both urban pleasures and current affairs. In February she wrote to Fanny, who was lying in for her second child at Eltham, “we have not a single article of news but politics which I do not concern myself about.” David Humphreys, a former aide of her husband’s, she wrote, was at Mount Vernon, intent on writing a life of the general. Bad weather had foiled a journey the two were to make on Potomac Company business. The colonel, she wrote, “thought himself quite as well by the fire side at Mount Vernon as he should be at the Shenandoah.”
For all Martha’s concentration on the pleasure of home and hearth, elsewhere five ratifying conventions in five states had met and voted aye to the Constitution. Soon news would come that Massachusetts had made a sixth in favor. Following ratification by Maryland and South Carolina in the spring, Washington read anxiously every dispatch from David Stuart, a delegate to the ratifying convention that met in Richmond in June. News came of victory in the Virginia capital, capped by news of ratification in New Hampshire four days earlier, on June 21. The new Constitution now bound all these states, and New York, which shortly afterward voted aye.
Friends and admirers of Washington’s continued to beg him to serve as president or “Chief Magistrate” of the United States, should he be elected. The latter term was used by many, in allusion to the range of powers the head of the executive branch of government would enjoy. “I take it for granted, Sir,” wrote Hamilton in August, “you have concluded to comply with what will no doubt be the general call of your country in relation to the new government. You will permit me to say that it is indispensable you should lend yourself to its first operations—It is to little purpose to have introduced a system, if the weightiest influence is not given to its firm establishment.”
Washington responded, “I can say nothing.” He explained that “the event”—his election as president—might never occur. If it did, he continued, “it would be a point of prudence to defer forming one’s ultimate and irrevocable decision, so long as new data might be afforded for one to act with the greater wisdom & propriety.” He wrote, as ever, of his “great and sole desire to live and die, in peace and retirement, on my own farm.”
A Congress of Confederation, in the autumn, made final arrangements for the new government. A bicameral legislature, with an upper house, to be known as the Senate, and a lower house, formally the House of Representatives—informally, “the House”—was created. Washington had admitted to Hamilton in August that it might become at some point “indispensable” to accept high office. At the same time he shared his fear that, in that case, “the world and Posterity might probably accuse me of inconsistency and ambition.”
The new year of 1789 brought elections for senators and repre-
sentatives—and a date for the election of president and vice president. There was at last an end to Washington’s havering. He asked Madison in early January, “Is there any safe, and tolerably expeditious mode by which letters from the Post Office in Fredericksburg are conveyed to you? I want to write a private & confidential letter to you, shortly, but am not inclined to trust to an uncertain conveyance, so as to hazard the loss or inspection of it.”
The document that the general conveyed to this trusted political ally in February was a draft of the inaugural address he meant to give as president. He had at last, and well in advance of the actual election, made his peace with the doubts that had so long beset him. On January 7 he noted in his diary: “Went up to the Election of an Elector (for this district).” Dr. Stuart was the successful candidate, one of twelve Virginia electors who would cast a vote on the fourth for presidential and vice presidential candidates the following month. The new Senate would count the votes of all the states’ electors. “Dined with a large company on venison at Page�
�s Tavern and came home in the evening.”
Washington could have been forgiven for considering the venison in some measure funerary meat. He wrote to Knox on April 1: “my movements to the chair of Government will be accompanied with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution: so unwilling am I, in the evening of a life nearly consumed in public cares, to quit a peaceful abode for an Ocean of difficulties, without that competency of political skill—abilities & inclination which is necessary to manage the helm.”
On the fourteenth of that month, however, he was prepared and ready to depart when Charles Thomson, secretary of Congress, arrived to inform him of his election as president of the United States. John Adams had been elected vice president. The new president, elected, like his vice president, for a four-year term, was to be inaugurated in New York on the thirtieth. There was no time to be lost, and Washington, with Thomson, left Mount Vernon on the sixteenth.
Martha was not shy with her opinion of these proceedings. Four days after her husband’s departure, she wrote to her nephew John Dandridge, “I am truly sorry to tell that the General is gone to New York.” That city was the—temporary—home of government. Three Cherry Street, a town house, had been selected by Congress as a suitable presidential residence and was leased for an initial year at $845.1
Martha continued: “When, or whether he will ever come home again God only knows. I think it was much too late for him to go into public life again, but it was not to be avoided.” She added tersely, “Our family will be deranged, as I must soon follow him.”
* * *
1 Congress, in August 1785, had authorized the issuance of a new official and decimal currency, the United States dollar. As no mint was yet established, the currencies of different states and specie continued to circulate, and sums were quoted sometimes in dollars and sometimes in their equivalent in current money, denominated in pounds, shillings, and pence.
25
New York Houses, 1789–1790
“The President to accept no invitations…”
ON APRIL 30, 1789, large crowds gathered in Wall Street. High above them, on the balcony of Federal Hall, Washington took the oath of office on a Bible loaned from a local Masonic lodge: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Immediately afterward, indoors, the new president delivered to members of both houses an inaugural address, which he had struggled to make concise.
His first words were of the home from which he had been called to office—“a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years.” He gave “homage to the Great Author of every public and private good,” expressing his long-held conviction: “No People can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States. Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.” Though he had quit the “asylum” of Mount Vernon, Washington did not wish to gain by it: “I must decline as inapplicable to myself, any share in the personal emoluments, which may be indispensably included in a permanent provision for the Executive Department.” He would, as when he had commanded the army, submit to Congress his expenses only.
During his first days at Cherry Street, Washington found it difficult to give sufficient attention to official business. Tobias Lear, who fulfilled in New York the duties of private secretary to the president, described the house as being in a “state of the greatest confusion—pulling down—putting up—making better & making worse.” While alterations were being completed, Washington later recalled, “Gentlemen, consulting their own convenience rather than mine, were calling from the time I rose from breakfast—often before—until I sat down to dinner.”
It was resolved that afternoon gatherings, lasting an hour, on Tuesdays and Fridays would accommodate those gentlemen wishing to pay their respects to the president. The Gazette of the United States, the New York newspaper, announced, on May 2: “visits of compliment on other days, and particularly on Sunday, will not be agreeable to him.” Lear elaborated to George Augustine at Mount Vernon next day: “this regulation is a very necessary & a very good one—it answers two valuable ends—it allows a sufficient time for dispatching the business of the office—and it gives a dignity to the President by not obliging him to expose himself every day to impertinent or curious intruders.”
The secretary was anxious to know how these arrangements were thought of, “particularly among those who have not been friendly to the Government.” What said those “of this description” who lived “in your neighbourhood”—George Mason was a strong anti-Federalist—“& also of other matters respecting the Govt & its Administration?” Lear told George Augustine: “Your time…I know, is too much employed for you to investigate or to inform of these matters, and as the Ladies are very expert at this business—suppose Mrs. Washington should do it?”
Lear’s assessment of Martha’s powers of persuasion is of some interest: “I know of no person better qualified. Her very serious & benevolent countenance would not suffer a person to hide a thing from her, which would be kept from another, whose countenance did not say so much in their favour.” He added: “Now I would give a great deal to be present when you inform Mrs Washington of this—or read it to her. If she ever put on a frown, it would be on this occasion—What does he mean! she will exclaim! Does he wish to make a spy of me? Who knows, if I should engage in this business, but that I might be brought before a high tribunal and accused of treason—and, Lord have mercy upon me! be executed.” Lear, George Augustine, and others in the Washington circle had the utmost respect for the new president. With Martha, however, they could indulge—in private—in nonsense.
The secretary told George Augustine that the house on Cherry Street was now in order. Two footmen and a porter were engaged and in livery; there was a maid to make the beds. In short, the “family” was as well settled as if they had been there twelve months. “We have engaged Black Sam Fraunces as Steward & superintendent of the Kitchen,” the secretary announced, “and a very excellent fellow he is in the latter department.” The innkeeper, come out of retirement, “tosses up such a number of fine dishes that we are distracted in our choice when we set down to table, and obliged to hold a long consultation upon the subject before we can determine what to attack.” He added, “Oysters & Lobsters make a very conspicuous figure upon the table, and never go off untouched. Tell Madam Washington this.” He hoped this report would “have some effect (as she is remarkably fond of these fish)” and hasten her journey to New York: “we are extremely desirous of seeing her here.”
Washington wrote to Adams on the tenth: “Many things which appear of little importance in themselves and at the beginning, may have great and durable consequences from their having been established at the commencement of a new general Government.” Heated debates in Congress about the title or titles by which Washington should be known had earlier ensued. Adams had considered a “royal or princely title” necessary to uphold the president’s authority. “His Highness” and “Excellency” were suggestions. The anti-Federalist senator William Maclay fulminated: “a Court, our House seems determined on, and to run into all the fooleries, fopperies, fineries, and pomp of royal etiquette; and all this for Mr Adams.” Ultimately the House of Representatives prevailed. It decreed, on May 14, that Washington should bear the title of “the President,” tout simple.
Washington canvassed numerous members of those who would form the federal cabinet for their opinions on “the etiquette proper to be observed by the President.” Hamilton was firm on May 5: “The President to have a levée day once a week for receiving visits.…The President to accept no invitations: and to give formal entertainments only twic
e or four times a year on the anniversaries of important events in the revolution.…The President on the levée days either by himself or some Gentleman of his household to give informal invitations to family dinners on the days of invitation.” It was a proscribed existence that Hamilton advocated: “The President to accept no invitations.”
Washington, having digested Hamilton’s answers, asked Adams if his appearance—“rarely”—at tea parties might be permissible. Perhaps he contemplated Martha’s reaction to come to the confined life sketched out. Ostensibly Adams’s opinion, given on May 17, allowed the president some latitude: “There can be no impropriety, in the President’s, making or receiving informal Visits, among his Friends or Acquaintances at his Pleasure. Undress [informal attire], and few Attendants will Sufficiently Shew, that Such Visits, are made as a Man and a Citizen, a Friend or Acquaintance.” Adams, who had no taste for frivolities himself, continued: “The President’s pleasure Should absolutely decide, concerning his Attendance at Tea Parties, in a private Character.…The President’s private Life, Should be at his own discretion, and the World Should respectfully acquiesce.” What followed undercut the above: “as the President he Should have no intercourse with society, but upon public Business, or at his Levees.”
The term levée had, to say the least, unfortunate connotations. It derived from French court ritual and denoted a formal reception following the king’s rising from his bed. When courtiers, government ministers, and foreign dignitaries spoke or wrote of attending “the levée” in England or in France, the king’s levée was always meant, and his presence implied. In colonial America, George III’s portrait hung on the wall of the different gubernatorial residences, the governor’s palace in Williamsburg included. The king’s representatives had confined their entertainments to assemblies and balls. Allusions to levées, whether in colonial days or in revolutionary America, had always been satirical. And now the levée had come to New York.
