4

The Grand Experiment Begins

On April 30, 1789, Washington left his residence on Cherry Street in a grand coach drawn by four horses, preceded by troops and accompanied by carriages filled with officials. The procession, greeted by excited crowds lining the streets of New York City, moved west and then swung north toward Wall Street and along Broad Street, finally stopping at Federal Hall, an imposing building with massive Doric columns.1

John Adams, the new vice president, led the president-elect to a small, partly enclosed portico, overlooking Broad and Wall Streets. A great cheer broke out from below. “I never saw a human being that looked so great and noble as he does,” commented a young woman in the crowd. But Massachusetts politician Fisher Ames noticed that time had “made havoc” upon the general’s face.

Robert Livingston, chancellor of the state of New York, administered the oath of office; Washington, looking grave, repeated the words and then lifted the Bible to his lips. “Long live George Washington, President of the United States,” Livingston shouted. Above the roar of the crowd and the chorus of church bells came the thunder of salutes from the Battery and the harbor. Washington bowed, turned back into the Senate chamber, seated himself next to the vice president, and then rose to deliver his Inaugural Address. His voice trembled a bit, his words at times came slowly and indistinctly, but he sounded a note of profound eloquence. Ames confessed that he “sat entranced.” “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government,” the president told his listeners, were deeply and finally “staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

*   *   *

Washington was now president of the United States. But there was no presidency—just a brief, skeletal outline in the Constitution of executive responsibilities. There was only a man, and it would be up to him to breathe life into an empty shell, to give definition and meaning to the office. And simultaneously it would be largely up to him to breathe life into the idea of an American nation by giving citizens common beliefs, expectations, symbols, and heroes.

Preoccupied with drafting the outline of a government of rational laws and institutions, the Framers of the Constitution had given no thought to the ceremonial function of the executive branch of government. Perhaps if they had adopted the parliamentary model they had favored during most of the Constitutional Convention—that is, a president elected by Congress, similar to a prime minister—they might have felt the need for a titular head of state in addition to the political head of government. Or, as historian Glenn Phelps remarked, perhaps Congress, as the most representative of the three branches, might itself have laid claim to the role of national symbol.2

Washington intuitively grasped the multiple dimensions of his executive role, understanding that he would have to fulfill a symbolic as well as a political function, and that, in addition to immersing himself in the nation’s day-to-day practical politics, he would also have to stand above politics. It would fall to him to incarnate the values of American society, provide unifying emblematic leadership, and play day-to-day national politics. It would be a breathtaking high-wire act.

The young nation, Washington repeatedly explained, had a “character” to establish. The Constitution and its “wall of words” would not be strong enough, he was convinced, to defend the nation against the “sweeping torrent of boundless ambition” or the “sapping current of corrupted morals.” Only the sturdy shield of unshakable character could truly protect Americans. What was that precious American character if not Washington’s own? “I glory in the character of Washington because I know him to be an exemplification of the American character,” wrote John Adams in 1785.3

What constituted the character that the president would project onto his waiting, receptive country?

In addition to Washington’s well-known virtue, integrity, and courage, perhaps the most important element of his character was something stunningly modern: respect for human reason. He always believed that human rationality—tempered by practical experience—underlay the entire American political experiment. “Wisdom … aided by experience,” he wrote in 1792, would bring the new government “as near to perfection as any human institution ever approximated.” Washington possessed faith that his countrymen were “rational beings” who could shape their own social and political destiny. He saw Americans as virtually alone among peoples in their openness to new political ideas and willingness to graft those ideas onto their own experience in politics. “The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition,” he had written to the state governors in 1783, “but at an Epocha when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined than at any former period.” Progress had been made in the “science of government”; new horizons, he wrote, had been opened by Enlightenment research in “social happiness,” and the fruits of philosophers’ labor and wisdom could be “happily applied” to the creation of the new American nation.4

Reason and happiness: the two leitmotifs in Washington’s writings. Though constitutional government had been established primarily to guarantee order and security, Washington was convinced that his fellow citizens, armed with reason, could attain the far higher value of human happiness. Indeed, Americans, he wrote, had just presented the “Novel and astonishing Spectacle” of a people deliberating “calmly on what form of government will be most conducive to their happiness.”5

And even more than the happiness of Americans was at stake, for Washington believed that their experiment would “stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn.” An isolated, fledgling nation of only four million people, marginal to the great powers of Europe, would serve as a beacon to all peoples. And even this grand project of happiness for all humanity, he believed, was founded in reason. There was a “rational ground,” he remarked to a friend, “for believing that not only the happiness of my own countrymen, but that of mankind in general” would be advanced by good government in the United States. Happiness for all! Well, not quite all. “It behooves me to prevent the emancipation of [my slaves],” wrote Washington in 1791.6

The happiness that Washington envisioned was a dazzling departure from centuries of thought, for it was located in the social and political sphere, not in the afterlife. Happiness required no supernatural intervention. In the century of the Enlightenment, happiness was not a question of redemption, grace, or salvation; nor did it pose problems of guilt, sin, spiritual anguish, human frailty, or the tragedy of the human condition. If Washington personally experienced any disquiet, it stemmed only from a concern for his ability to do his duty, meet his formidable obligations, and protect his sterling reputation.

Happiness was of this world, and yet it did not signify the pursuit of pleasure or conspicuous consumption: Washington underscored that “happiness & splendour” had little in common. For him, happiness was two-pronged; on the one hand, it meant the collective satisfaction of citizens living in a well-ordered civil and political society, under the aegis of a well-administered government “where equal Laws and equal Rights prevail”; and on the other hand, it meant individual citizens enjoying improvements in their lives. For Washington, happiness was more than just a goal: it was the essential obligation of government. It was the glue and the promise of the social contract—a truly revolutionary project as well as a major political commitment.7

In his first Inaugural Address, Washington summed it all up, pointing to an “indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.” Here was Washington’s formula for happiness: virtuous and reasonable citizens and politicians, accepting and fulfilling their responsibilities to their nation and to others, understanding that the interests of their fellow citizens were inseparable from their own, able to balance their own “advantage” with the common good, would work together for the “solid” reward of prosperity and felicity. Virtue was not its own reward: the reward was happiness.

Nor was the quest for happiness an arduous enterprise. “I think I see a path, as clear and direct as a ray of light,” Washington wrote to Lafayette in 1789. “Nothing but harmony, honesty, industry and frugality are necessary to make us a great and happy people.” The young nation was a land of freedom, agriculture, and commerce, and no other country, he remarked, could be more favorable for the happiness of people of moderate capital or, he added, even for “the happiness of the lowest class of people.”8

The belief in reason that buttressed Washington’s deep commitment to happiness did not, however, turn him into a doctrinaire man. Rather, his respect for rationality made him aware of the limitations of reason: he was moderate in expressing his own opinions and open to the ideas of others. Thus for Washington the corollary of reason was not intellectual intransigence but rather tolerance. Should he “set up [his] judgment as the standard of perfection?” he asked rhetorically in his draft notes for his first inaugural speech, perhaps recalling the maxims he had copied out as a boy. “And shall I arrogantly pronounce that whosoever differs from me, must discern the subject through a distorting medium, or be influenced by some nefarious design?” He knew better. “Infallibility not being the attribute of Man,” he would later write, “we ought to be cautious in censuring the opinions and conduct of one another.”9

Washington’s tolerance for the opinions of others extended naturally to his commitment to liberty of conscience in matters of religion. He cared not if men were “Mahometans, Jews, or Christians of any sect, or Atheists.” Indeed, he went beyond “tolerance,” for he explained that tolerance implied merely “the indulgence of one class of people” in permitting others to exercise what were in fact their inherent rights to freedom of religion and conscience. And what of Washington’s own religious beliefs? In his writings, he never mentioned Jesus Christ but rather alluded to the “Great Author,” the “invisible hand,” and “an intelligent and accountable Being,” expressions typical of Enlightenment deism. His religious detachment and, as historian Paul Boller remarked, his deist indifference to sectarian quarrels contributed to his respect for freedom of conscience. The paramount value of religion, he would write in his Farewell Address, was its “indispensable” contribution to morality and hence to “political prosperity.”10

*   *   *

Who better than this rational, tolerant man, who identified with the happiness of Americans, to embody the American “character” on the national and world stage? Theatrical metaphors abounded in Washington’s writings; he continually referred to the “theatre of action,” the “public theatre” and the “stage.” He saw Americans as “actors on a most conspicuous theatre” where would be displayed “human greatness and felicity.” And yet he alone would occupy center stage; he alone was the consummate leader and political actor. No one else possessed such mastery and self-mastery. Washington himself remarked that his aloofness was the result of a “studied reserve.” “He could, at the dictate of reason, control his will and command himself to act,” Gouverneur Morris would similarly recall.11

As the public emblem of American character, how would Washington stage his appearances? Understanding that the frail and vulnerable new government needed to be respectable and dignified, and realizing, too, that all of his actions would have “durable consequences,” he asked Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay for their “candid and undisguised Opinions.” What style of residence was proper for the chief magistrate to live in? How sociable should he be? Should he invite members of Congress to dine with him? Was one day a week sufficient for receiving unofficial visitors? Should he hold several large “entertainments” each year? Would it be appropriate for him to call on others? For his part, Hamilton looked to European courts for wisdom in protocol, recommending that Washington establish the “dignity of the office” and a “pretty high tone in the demeanour of the Executive.” Still, aware that “notions of equality” were deeply rooted in American society, Hamilton counseled against “too immense an inequality,” suggesting that “frankness and simplicity” might sometimes be the safest route.12

Social events in the presidential residence were meticulously choreographed. At his Tuesday afternoon levees, visitors—any men in proper attire who wished to meet the president—were introduced by Washington’s secretary, Tobias Lear, to the president. Dressed in black velvet, wearing yellow gloves and a long, polished sword, Washington stood in front of the fireplace and bowed to the guests as they arrived. The visitors then formed a circle around the room. Beginning on his right, the president toured the circle, speaking a few words to each man. He then resumed his position in front of the fireplace; each guest in turn approached him, made his final bow, and left.

These were excruciatingly stiff and formal occasions, some people complained. Washington, too, disliked them and admitted to impatience with “the frivolities of ceremony.” Still, he conceived such events as a way to separate his symbolic role from his political role and protect his time for public business. “I could not get relieved from the ceremony of one visit before I had to attend to another,” Washington had complained. “In a word, I had no leisure to read or to answer the dispatches that were pouring in upon me from all quarters.” His plan to devote a fraction of his week to purely ceremonial duties was self-protective and rational, not pretentious.13

Even so, other royal-like flourishes were not lacking: Washington’s lordly offer—refused by Congress—to be compensated only for his expenses; in New York, a splendid new house on Broadway—where the president lived and worked—staffed by seven slaves and fourteen white servants; then, when the capital moved to Philadelphia in late 1790, the loan of Robert Morris’s mansion, which Washington called “the best single House in the City”; the large and elaborate dinners he and Martha gave, with powdered servants standing by; the prodigious amount of champagne and claret the president ordered; the carriage emblazoned with his crest, drawn by six cream-colored horses, in which he augustly traveled alone in formal processions, followed by carriages transporting the chief justice of the Supreme Court and cabinet members; his white horse adorned with fancy saddle and leopard-skin housings; and the grand designs he approved by the French architect and engineer Pierre-Charles L’Enfant for a majestic new capital city on the Potomac, a city of imposing edifices and avenues that, like St. Petersburg, the eighteenth-century capital of Russia, would be constructed by unfree labor.

Was Washington then a closet republican king—or czar? Unlikely. When Colonel Lewis Nicola, during the War of Independence, suggested to Washington that he assume monarchical powers, the general had exploded in anger, replying that no occurrence in the course of the entire war had given him “more painful sensations.” He viewed the idea of royal power with “abhorrence” and confessed that he was “at a loss to conceive what part of my conduct could have given encouragement” to such a mischievous plan. But royalism apparently did not disappear with the Constitution. Upon his return to the United States from Paris in 1789, Jefferson was stunned to hear people at dinner parties openly expressing a preference for “kingly, over republican, government.” At such social events, Jefferson claimed to have found himself the only committed republican. All that kept these fans of royalism in check, he wrote, was their respect for Washington. It was the president’s moderation and virtue, Jefferson believed, that prevented the American Revolution from ultimately subverting the very liberty that it was intended to establish. Historian James Flexner agreed: Washington’s “most revolutionary act,” he wrote, was his outright refusal even to consider the possibility of joining the ranks of monarchs.14

Washington’s deep commitment to republican institutions—despite his elegant tastes—did not diminish the enthusiasm of some people for monarchy or silence the criticism of others who derided him as a proto-king. The New York Daily Advertiser denounced his “royal pomp and parade.” His birthday celebration was a “monarchical farce,” proclaimed one paper, while another criticized his “supercilious distance.” “He holds levees like a King,” sneered the New York Argus, “shuts himself up like a King, shuts up other people like a King, takes advice of his counselors or follows his own opinion like a King.” It was understandable that men who had just liberated themselves from the chains of European monarchy feared finding themselves shackled again, indeed more understandable than the nostalgia of other Americans for royal rule. Years later, in 1814, an elderly Jefferson would state categorically that Washington was “no monarchist,” yet he wondered if the president, with his inclination to “gloomy apprehensions,” might have adopted levees and other pompous ceremonies in order to prepare Americans for a possible change to monarchy, should the American experiment fail.15

Accusations that he harbored monarchical ambitions surprised Washington all the more since he saw himself and his wife leading restrained if not utterly boring lives. All day he toiled in his modest ground-floor office in his New York residence—and later in his third-floor office in his home in Philadelphia. He even decided that his coach should be “plain and elegant” rather than “rich and elegant.” He and his wife shunned “the follies of luxury and ostentation,” he wrote to a friend, adding that even their “simplicity of dress” was designed to “support propriety of character.” For her part, Martha confessed that she preferred staying at home to the protocol of public appearances. Washington, too, complained about a sense of isolation. So strongly had he emphasized the inappropriateness of his accepting invitations to dinner in private homes, he wrote, that he had not received a single one!16

Some of his friends defended the president against charges of royal ostentation. One noted that Washington could be seen occasionally walking alone in the streets of New York, while the vice president, Adams, “is never seen but in his carriage and six.” Though John Adams had in 1785 complained that deference to Washington had transformed the Virginian into the object of a cult that dispensed with people’s rational faculties, now Adams changed his tune. “Sir, you have given yourselves a king, under the title of president,” the prince of Orange had said to Adams in 1788. “It is true,” Adams commented, “and I rejoice in it.”17

Now Adams insisted that Washington be called “His Most Benign Highness,” because, he reasoned, a man could be “president” of any little organization. Washington was annoyed at the attempts “to bedizen him with a superb but spurious title,” Madison later recalled. Not Washington but rather others with “vitiated political taste,” Madison wrote, favored such “unrepublican formalities.” But the voice of republican reason won the debate on presidential titles in the House of Representatives: Washington would be called the “president.” “The more simple, the more republican we are in our manners,” stated Madison during that debate, “the more rational dignity we acquire.”18

Washington would not have disagreed with Madison, for the adulation of the crowds weighed upon him. “He looked oppressed by the attention that was paid him,” commented one observer in the joyful crowd that greeted the president in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1789. “As he cast his eye around, I thought it seemed to sink at the notice he attracted.” When the songs and cheering stopped, he commented, “he bowed very low, and as if he could bear no more turned hastily around and went into the house.”19

While the admiring crowds reacted to him as if he were a charismatic leader, Washington himself would have coldly dismissed the notion of charismatic leadership. The authority and prestige of a charismatic leader reside not in institutions and laws, but in his magnetic personality as it operates upon the emotions of his followers; his virtually magical power is, by definition, not transferable. But Washington believed in rotation in office, in stable, well-managed government responsible to an enlightened citizenry. And the symbols, gestures, and rituals that he adopted to buttress his staging of American character as well as his staging of the office of the presidency would also be founded in reason.

Unlike the autocratic Napoleon whom artists portrayed dripping in furs, velvet, and jewels, so many emblems of power, the symbols in the most famous portraits of Washington were strikingly restrained. In Edward Savage’s 1796 canvas of the Washington family at home, the figures of George, Martha, and two grandchildren, relaxed but serious, are arranged around a table on which lies a map of the new federal city. Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of the same year has Washington standing erect, his right arm outstretched in greeting. Though wearing a sword, he is dressed plainly in black. At his right is a writing table on which are pen and ink, books about his military past, the Constitution, The Federalist, and the Journal of Congress. A glowing rainbow surrounds not the man but rather the republican chair of government. “As a political philosopher,” commented historian Garry Wills about this image of Washington, “he engages in a dialogue, not a lone act of creation. Others will sit in his chair and do what he has done. The same authority will be wielded, the same limits observed.” Even so, it was not easy for the artist to humanize the president. “Now, sir, you must let me forget that you are General Washington and that I am Stuart, the painter,” Stuart said as he tried to put the president at ease. Mr. Stuart, Washington coolly responded, need not forget “who he is, or who General Washington is.”20

Also staged were Washington’s tours of the New England states in the fall of 1789 and of the South in the spring of 1791. As the nation’s political leader he wanted to meet with influential citizens while seeing with his own eyes the conditions in the country and gauging the mood of the people. And as the ceremonial leader of the nation, he would make himself visible to citizens as the emblem of national unity and identity. His paramount goal was a national government that would not be remote or abstract but would take on life through him. By presenting himself to the people in controlled, celebratory public events, he hoped that citizens would—through him—transcend their local loyalties and develop an attachment to the concept of their federal government and to the idea of a unified American people. “The subordination of a group under a single person,” wrote sociologist Georg Simmel, “results, above all, in a very decisive unification of the group.” Still, it was not mass emotion that Washington sought to excite. His voyage around the states would be his own rational brand of public theater.

In the fall of 1789, accompanied by two secretaries and six servants, Washington visited all the New England states except Vermont and Rhode Island, which were not yet members of the union. He dutifully dined with the notables, watched parades, listened to songs and odes, received accolades, and strolled in the countryside. But what interested him most was seeing firsthand how the country was functioning and how work was performed.

In Boston he toured a sail manufactory, noticing the twenty-eight water-powered looms at work and the fourteen girls spinning. “They are the daughters of decayed families,” he wrote, “and are girls of Character—none others are admitted.” At another factory in Boston, he saw that each spinner had a “small girl” to turn the wheel. Though he remarked that the girls worked from eight o’clock in the morning until six o’clock in the evening, he did not comment on the broader social issues of women’s and children’s labor. In Beverly, Massachusetts, he stopped at a cotton manufactory and admired the new carding and spinning machines, especially one, operated by a single person, that could spin eighty-four threads at a time. In Marblehead, he viewed a fleet of a hundred shipping vessels but wrote that the houses were old, the streets dirty, “and the common people not very clean.” Portsmouth had stagnated after the war, but, Washington happily reported, “it is beginning now to revive again.” In Springfield, he examined arms and ammunitions depots. In Hartford, he visited Colonel Wadsworth’s woolen manufactory and ordered a suit of broadcloth to be sent to him in New York. “There is a great equality in the People of this State,” he jotted down in his diary while visiting Connecticut. “Few or no opulent Men and no poor—great similitude in their buildings.”21

Factories, bridges and roads, crops and fish, gristmills and sawmills, harbors and ships—everything that moved, grew, and made the country work captured his attention—except working people in their singularity. Unlike Jefferson, whose idea of a tour of France was to “ferret the people out of their hovels … look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll on their beds under pretence of resting yourself,” Washington’s diary of his journey is impersonal: he describes no characters, relates no anecdotes, recalls no memorable individuals, displays little interest in the lives and bread of ordinary Americans.

Touring the southern states a year and a half later, he saw that the South was not as industrialized and prosperous as the North, yet the crops had been good for the past few years, and people seemed in good humor and generally satisfied with their lives and their government. He also felt more at home there, commenting on prosperous people’s homes, paying a visit to the widow of his friend General Nathanael Greene. In Charleston, he found people wealthy, gay, hospitable, and happy. As his journey approached its end, he wrote to a friend that the South

appears to be in a very improving state, and industry and frugality are becoming much more fashionable than they have hitherto been there. Tranquillity reigns among the people, with that disposition towards the general government which is likely to preserve it. They begin to feel the good effects of equal laws and equal protection. The farmer finds a ready market for his produce, and the merchant calculates with more certainty on his payments. Manufacturers have as yet made but little progress in that part of the country, and it will probably be a long time before they are brought to that state to which they have already arrived in the middle and eastern parts of the Union.22

While Washington studied the country, the country studied—and applauded—him. That applause served a purpose. Tributes to the first president, commented the British minister to the United States, “tend to elevate the spirit of the people, and contribute to the formation of a national character.” Americans were the gainers, he concluded, from the recital of the feats of the Revolutionary War and their praise of Washington. As for the president himself, he was pleased with “the marks of respect shewn to my official Character.” He had accomplished his goal. He had fashioned himself into the ideal unifying emblem of the nation. No one else could have played the role as well. While future presidents would be respected because of the office they held, in Washington’s case, the office would become respected because of the man.23

But would the president be as successful in his political role—in setting up the well-managed government that, he had so often said, would be the guarantee of American felicity?