Washington: A Life (114 page)

One guest, describing the president’s magnificent presence, recalled

From the description, one can see how meticulously Washington fashioned the image that he broadcast to the world. Walter Buchanan, a New York physician, left a revealing tale of a visit to the Cherry Street mansion during the president’s first Fourth of July in office. When told that a small delegation from the Society of the Cincinnati had appeared on his doorstep, Washington disappeared upstairs, donned his black velvet suit and dress sword, then invited the veterans in for cakes and wine. “On their departure,” noted Buchanan, “the general again retired and came down to dinner in his usual costume of pepper-and-salt colored clothes.”
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The Tuesday-afternoon levees, wooden and boring, were excruciating affairs, unrelieved by spontaneity. Washington’s heroic stature, an essential part of his strength, was turned into a plaster cast that imprisoned him. During these scripted functions, people found it impossible to engage in substantive discussions with him, and perhaps that was the point. The taciturn Washington could see people without worrying that they would solicit him for jobs or pump him for political opinions. In searching for the happy medium between “much state” and “too great familiarity,” Washington largely succeeded in finding it.
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Despite the benign look in his eye, he managed to preserve a certain official distance. “He is polite with dignity,” Abigail Adams attested that spring, “affable without formality, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity, modest, wise, and good.”
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Since Washington’s Tuesday levees were limited to men, he and Martha decided that she would entertain female visitors every Friday evening from seven to ten, serving tea, coffee, ice cream, and lemonade. The plump little Martha, seated on a sofa as guests entered, enjoyed sampling the desserts. She dressed well but avoided jewelry as inappropriate for the new republic and was addressed by the democratic nomenclature of “Mrs. Washington.” Never a sparkling talker, she was invariably a capable one, falling easily into conversation with people and making even complete strangers feel welcome. Usually seated at her right elbow was Abigail Adams, who noted how Washington chided anyone who violated protocol: “The president never fails of seeing that [the seat] is relinquished for me, and having removed ladies several times, they have now learnt to rise and give it to me.”
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Dispensing with hat and sword, Washington made a minor concession to informality by wearing a brown coat on Friday evenings. More relaxed than at his own levees, he circulated and chatted amiably with guests, displaying “a grace, dignity, and ease that leaves Royal George far behind him,” Abigail Adams reported.
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Washington delighted in the company of pretty women, who found his appeal only heightened by the presidency. “The young ladies used to throng around him and engage him in conversation,” said one visitor. “There were some of the well-remembered
belles
of that day, who imagined themselves to be favorites with him. As these were the only opportunities which they had of conversing with him, they were disposed to use them.”
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Another observer noted that Washington seemed less austere at his wife’s teas, where he “talks more familiarly with those he knows and sometimes with the ladies.”
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Washington never engaged in flirtatious looks, but he unquestionably paid special attention to women in attendance. “The company this evening was thin, especially of ladies,” he complained in his diary after one Friday soirée.
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Because the Washingtons rose early, Martha often terminated the gatherings before the allotted ten o’clock deadline, saying that she and the president had to go to bed.

Even as the Washingtons sought an optimal balance between presidential splendor and republican austerity, an opposition press emerged that accused them of trying to foist a monarchy on the country. For anyone who had seen the opulence of Versailles or Windsor Castle, such accusations would have seemed wildly overblown. But every revolution breeds fears of counterrevolution, and worries about a reversion to monarchism were perhaps predictable after a war against royal absolutism. Each morning as he read the gazettes, Washington was stung by commentary on his receptions. Berating his dinners, the
Daily Advertiser
warned readers that “in a few years we shall have all the paraphernalia yet wanting to give the superb finish to the grandeur of our AMERICAN COURT! The purity of republican principle seems to be daily losing ground … We are on the eve of another revolution.”
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Even Martha’s rather wholesome Friday-night gatherings were depicted darkly in some quarters as “court-like levees” and “queenly drawing rooms.”
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When Washington’s birthday was celebrated in February 1790 as a national holiday, purists disparaged it as yet another showy monarchical exercise.

Among the leading critics of Washingtonian excess was William Maclay, the caustic senator from Pennsylvania with a thin, bony face. The son of Scotch-Irish Presbyterian immigrants, Maclay had a pronounced populist streak that predisposed him to spot signs of incipient monarchy. In June 1789 he recorded his private fears that fancy people around town had seduced the president: “Indeed, I entertain not a doubt but many people are aiming, with all their force, to establish a splendid court with all the pomp of majesty. Alas, poor Washington, if you are taken in this snare, how will the gold become dim?”
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In copious diary entries, written with the satirical eye of a gadfly, Maclay left vivid impressions of President Washington in social situations during his first term. An eager purveyor of gossip, Maclay was scarcely objective, taking a mordant, often jaundiced, view of people. Sometimes his tattle was downright mean-spirited, as when Robert Morris’s wife told him of a presidential dinner at which she bit into a dessert only to find it full of rancid cream. When informed of it, the president “changed his plate immediately. But, she added with a titter, Mrs. Washington ate a whole heap of it.”
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His observations could be laced with patent envy: “No Virginian can talk on any subject but the perfections of Gen[era]l Washington.”
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Nonetheless, Maclay left some priceless glimpses into the social world of George and Martha Washington, whom he satirized as boors and bumpkins, overshadowed by more elegant couples they were trying to impress. He reported Washington’s misery in social settings, picking up little fidgety habits that showed him enduring these occasions rather than enjoying them. He did not realize how much Washington hated dealing with so many strangers. In trying to impart dignity to presidential protocol, Washington sometimes became frozen in this studied role, eliminating the levity and conversational flow that enlivened at least some dinners at Mount Vernon or with his military family during the war.

Every other Thursday the Washingtons held an official dinner at four P.M. The president, seeking geographic diversity, often tried to balance northern and southern legislators on his guest list. If guests were even five minutes late by the hall clock, they found the president and his company already seated. Washington would then explain curtly that the cook was governed by the clock and not by the company. In his diary, Maclay described a dinner on August 27, 1789, in which George and Martha Washington sat in the middle of the table, facing each other, while Tobias Lear and Robert Lewis sat on either end. John Adams, John Jay, and George Clinton were among the assembled guests. Maclay described a table bursting with a rich assortment of dishes—roasted fish, boiled meat, bacon, and poultry for the main course, followed by ice cream, jellies, pies, puddings, and melons for dessert. Washington usually downed a pint of beer and two or three glasses of wine, and his demeanor grew livelier once he had consumed them.

Maclay painted a deadly portrait of Washington at one dinner as a veteran bore, devoid of conversation except platitudes, and very jittery: “The president kept a fork in his hand when the cloth was taken away—I thought for the purpose of picking nuts. He ate no nuts, but played with the fork, striking on the edge of the table with it.”
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Washington could neither relax nor converse spontaneously, leading Maclay to conclude that “it was the most solemn dinner ever I ate at … The ladies sat a good while and the bottles passed about, but there was a dead silence almost.”
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On March 4, 1790, Maclay wrote an account of another stifling dinner and again portrayed a consistently somber Washington: “The president seemed to bear in his countenance a settled aspect of melancholy. No cheering ray of convivial sunshine broke thro[ugh] the cloudy gloom of settled seriousness. At every interval of eating or drinking, he played on the table with a fork or knife, like a drumstick.”
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Sitting at Washington’s right side, John Adams fared no better at the hands of Maclay, who derided the vice president as “mantling his visage with the most unmeaning simper that ever dimpled the face of folly.”
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Senator Samuel Johnston of North Carolina, who attended the same dinner, was entranced by it: “I have just left the president’s, where I had the pleasure of dining with almost every member of the Senate. We had some excellent champagne and after it, I had the honor of drinking coffee with his lady, a most amiable woman. If I live much longer, I believe that I shall at last be reconciled to the company of old women for her sake.”
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Two months later, finding Washington in better spirits, Maclay provided a possible clue to the awkward silences of earlier gatherings: “Went to dine with the president, agreeable to invitation. He seemed more in good humor than ever I saw him, tho[ugh] he was so deaf that I believe he heard little of the conversation.”
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That Washington’s hearing had deteriorated—not surprising after eight years of roaring cannon—may explain the gruesome conversational gaps that Maclay so freely mocked. Deafness can be an isolating experience, especially for a president. People would naturally have waited for him to respond to statements before proceeding with the conversation; to conceal his deafness, a self-conscious Washington may well have feigned hearing what they said and sat there in silence. It was yet another sign of the aging process that had transformed the once dashing, athletic Washington.

On January 20, 1791, Maclay, a lame duck senator, attended a last dinner with the president. Though Maclay had developed into a sharp political opponent, the president still treated him with instinctive decorum, not the royal hauteur of his imaginings. Maclay took a final measure of the man, and his description shows how dramatically time had altered Washington: “Let me take a review of him as he really is. In stature about six feet, with an unexceptionable make, but lax appearance. His frame would seem to want filling up. His motions rather slow than lively, tho[ugh] he showed no signs of having suffered either by gout or rheumatism. His complexion pale, nay, almost cadaverous. His voice hollow and indistinct owing, as I believe, to artificial teeth before in his upper jaw.”
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Washington had clearly undergone a startling change. Described as “lusty” by Robert Hunter in 1785, he was now slow and shuffling. Instead of being ruddy with buoyant health, he was gaunt and “cadaverous.” Where earlier observers had commented on his well-padded muscles, Washington’s frame now wanted “filling up.” And the voice was again described as thin and whispery. An unaccustomed stiffness had overtaken his movements, he knew. When one Virginian criticized his clumsy bows at receptions, he said they were “the best I was master of” and remarked plaintively to David Stuart, “Would it not have been better to have thrown the veil of charity over them, ascribing their stiffness to the effects of age … than to pride and dignity of office, which, God knows, has no charms for me?”
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According to Jefferson, Washington told him that “nobody disliked more the ceremonies of his office and he had not the least taste or gratification in the execution of its function; that he was happy at home alone.”
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Suffering from the stultifying etiquette imposed by his office, he later railed against those who had prescribed such formality. He was especially upset that, having tried to strike a balance between pomp and austerity, he had been roundly criticized and misunderstood. As Jefferson wrote after a 1793 conversation, Washington “expressed the extreme wretchedness of his existence while in office and went lengthily into the late attacks on him for levees etc., and explained to me how he had been led into them by the persons he consulted at New York and that, if he could but know what the sense of the public was, he would most cheerfully conform to it.”
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Washington found it hard to live frugally, and the chief steward he hired to supervise the kitchen made economy that much more difficult. Sam Fraunces had formerly owned the tavern at which Washington had enacted his lachrymose farewell to his officers at the war’s end.
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In the mid-1780s Fraunces had run into serious debt and even appealed to Washington for financial aid. By the time Washington hired him to manage his household, Fraunces had opened another tavern on Cortlandt Street.

A shrewd operator with a flamboyant manner, Fraunces seemed ubiquitous at Washington’s dinner parties, “resplendently dressed in wig and small-clothes,” according to one historian.
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A skillful cook, he knew how to dress a table, supervise waiters, prepare desserts, and bring forth a sumptuous meal. Somewhat to Washington’s chagrin, Fraunces preened himself on the “bountiful and elegant” dinners he presented.
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Tobias Lear stared agog at the heaps of lobster, oysters, and other dishes, saying Fraunces “tossed up such a number of fine dishes that we are distracted in our choice when we sit down to table and obliged to hold a long consultation upon the subject, before we can determine what to attack.”
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In time Washington began to reprimand his steward for unconscionable extravagance. However fond he was of lavish living, he minded his pennies and personally reviewed household bills.