Washington: A Life (151 page)

The next day, his last in office, Washington toiled under fierce pressure to sign legislation dumped on his desk at the last minute. The Constitution gave the president ten days to sign bills, and Washington resented that legislators had allowed him “scarcely an hour to revolve the most important” ones, as he protested to Jonathan Trumbull. “But as the scene is closing with me, it is of little avail
now
to let it be with murmurs.”
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At the end he struck a note of serenity, a faith that the American experiment, if sometimes threatened, would prevail. While fearful of machinations, he told Trumbull, “I trust … that the good sense of our countrymen will guard the public weal against this and every other innovation and that, altho[ugh] we may be a little wrong now and then, we shall return to the right path with more avidity.”
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It was an accurate forecast of American history, both its tragic lapses and its miraculous redemptions.

On March 4, inauguration day, Washington did not even bother to mention the event in his diary, preferring to jot down the temperature. “Much such a day as yesterday in all respects. Mercury at 41,” says the entry in its entirety.
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Shortly before noon, dressed in a suit of solemn black, he marched alone to Congress Hall. As he approached the building and entered the House chamber, the cheers and applause of an immense multitude showered down on him. Jefferson next appeared in a blue frock coat and sauntered down the aisle in his loose-limbed style. President-elect Adams then disembarked from a splendid new coach operated by servants in livery. As he made his way into the chamber and up to the dais, he wore a pearl-colored suit with wrist ruffles and a powdered wig and toted a cockaded hat. Looking sleepless, harried, and a little overwhelmed, he glanced over at Washington, who seemed to be shedding his wordly cares. “A solemn scene it was indeed,” Adams wrote, “and it was made affecting to me by the presence of the General, whose countenance was as serene and unclouded as the day. He seemed to me to enjoy a triumph over me. Methought I heard him say, ‘Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be happiest!’”
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From the outset, Adams confronted a tough assignment: any president who followed Washington was doomed to seem illegitimate for a time, a mere pretender to the throne.

After introducing Adams, Washington read a short farewell message, filling the silent hall with an overwhelming sense of sadness. The country was losing someone who had been its constant patriarch from the beginning. Adams said that the weeping in the galleries surpassed the sobbing of any audience at a tragic play. “But whether it was from grief or joy,” he wondered aloud to Abigail, “whether from the loss of their beloved president or … from the novelty of the thing … I know not.”
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A woman named Susan R. Echard captured the scene’s emotional intensity: “Every now and then there was a suppressed sob. I cannot describe Washington’s appearance as I felt it—perfectly composed and self-possessed till the close of his address. Then, when strong nervous sobs broke loose, when tears covered the faces, then the great man was shaken. I never took my eyes from his face. Large drops came from his eyes.”
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It was one last proof, if any were now needed, of just how emotional the man of marble was beneath the surface. After taking the oath of office, administered by Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, President Adams talked of Washington as someone who had “secured immortality with posterity.”
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Doubtless relieved that he was no longer the protagonist of the American drama, Washington ended the inauguration ceremony with an exquisite gesture: he insisted that President Adams and Vice President Jefferson exit the chamber before him, a perfect symbol that the nation’s most powerful man had now reverted to the humble status of a private citizen.

Afterward Washington walked from the executive mansion to the Francis Hotel, where President Adams was temporarily staying, and he became aware of a tremendous throng of people surging around him. “An immense company,” said one observer, had gone “as one man in total silence as escort all the way.”
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When Washington reached the hotel and turned around, the crowd saw that his face was again washed with tears. “No man ever saw him so moved,” said a second observer.
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In a very Washingtonian feat, he touched the crowd by simply staring at them in silence before disappearing into the hotel.

Like Washington, Adams viewed himself as an incorruptible figure rising above the bane of parties. And like Washington, his political enemies insisted on tagging him as a Federalist. In this rancorous atmosphere, he was denied the political honeymoon usually reserved for new presidents and felt stranded between two extremes. “All the Federalists seem to be afraid to approve anybody but Washington,” he complained to Abigail. “The Jacobin papers damn with faint praise and undermine with misrepresentation and insinuation.”
²³

There was no moratorium on criticism of the outgoing president; the
Aurora
unleashed a frontal attack on Washington, condemning him for having “cankered the principles of republicanism in an enlightened people.”
²⁴
In desperation, Benjamin Franklin Bache dredged up the earliest controversy that had shadowed Washington’s life: the 1754 Jumonville incident in which, Bache charged, Washington had “fired on a flag of truce; killed the officer in the act of reading a summons under the sanction of such a flag”; then “signed a capitulation in which the killing of that officer and his men was acknowledged as an act of
assassination
.”
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Responding to this abuse, the
Gazette of the United States
decried the “hellish pleasure” that Bache took in defaming Washington.
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“That a man who was born in America and is part of the great family of the United States should thus basely aim his poisoned dagger at the FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY,” scolded the
Gazette,
“is sorely to be lamented.”
²⁷

Though Washington preferred having Adams rather than Jefferson as his successor, their relationship had never been close and was further marred by haggling over the presidential furnishings. John and Abigail Adams claimed to be appalled by the slovenly state of the executive mansion, and Abigail in particular derided the house as a pigsty, having “been the scene of the most scandalous drinking and disorder among the servants that I ever heard of.”
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Washington magnanimously offered the furnishings of two large drawing rooms at reduced prices and didn’t “cull the best and offer him the rest.”
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The Adamses, however, would not touch the stuff, and in a fit of petty sniping, Adams groused that Washington had even tried to palm off two old horses on him for $2,000.

Rebuffed, Washington gave away many household items of historic value. He sold his private writing desk at cost to his dear friend Elizabeth Powel and, as a lagniappe, threw in a free pair of mirrors and lamps. A week later she sent him a teasing letter, claiming that she was shocked to unearth incriminating love letters stuffed in a drawer of the desk: “Suppose I should prove incontestably that you have without design put into my possession the love letters of a lady addressed to you under the most solemn sanction.”
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After more banter, she admitted that the letters in question were “a large bundle of letters from Mrs. Washington, bound up and labeled with your usual accuracy.”
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Washington’s reply was exceptionally revealing about his marriage. After thanking Powel for handling the matter delicately, he said that he knew that no such illicit love letters existed and that even had the letters in question fallen into “more inquisitive hands, the correspondence would, I am persuaded, have been found to be more fraught with expressions of friendship than of
enamored
love.”Anyone looking for “passion … of the
Romantic order,
” he contended, would have chosen to commit them to the flames.
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The letter confirms that by this point Washington’s relationship with Martha had settled into one of deep friendship, devoid of carnal desire or lusty romance.

On March 9 the former president gathered up his wife, who was nagged by a bad cold and a cough, the family dog, his granddaughter Nelly and her parrot, and George Washington Lafayette and his tutor and commenced the six-day journey to Mount Vernon. “On one side, I am called upon to remember the parrot, on the other to remember the dog,” he related whimsically to Tobias Lear. “For my own part, I should not pine much if both were forgot.”
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Although the wagons were encumbered with heaps of bags, they represented only a tiny fraction of the mementos accumulated over many years, and it would take ninety-seven boxes, fourteen trunks, and forty-three casks to ship home the remaining belongings and souvenirs.

In those days of poor transportation, farewells left an especially melancholy aftertaste, since many friendships were ended irrevocably by sheer distance. “How many friends I have left behind,” Martha Washington wrote wistfully to Lucy Knox. “They fill my memory with sweet thoughts. Shall I ever see them again? Not likely, unless they shall come to me here, for the twilight is gathering around our lives.”
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En route to Mount Vernon, Washington tried, as usual, to curtail the time devoted to townsfolk who wanted to smother him with adulation. Although enormous crowds received him in Baltimore, he contrived to skip festivities planned in Alexandria, expressing satisfaction that he “avoided in every instance, where [he] had any previous knowledge of the intention … all parades or escorts.”
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The one detour he surely savored was the ride by, to the thunderous welcome of a sixteen-gun salute, the new President’s House under construction in Washington, D.C.

The presidential legacy he left behind in Philadelphia was a towering one. As Gordon Wood has observed, “The presidency is the powerful office it is in large part because of Washington’s initial behavior.”
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Washington had forged the executive branch of the federal government, appointed outstanding department heads, and set a benchmark for fairness, efficiency, and integrity that future administrations would aspire to match. “A new government, constructed on free principles, is always weak and must stand in need of the props of a firm and good administration till time shall have rendered its authority venerable and fortified it by habits of obedience,” Hamilton wrote.
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Washington had endowed the country with exactly such a firm and good administration, guaranteeing the survival of the Constitution. He had taken the new national charter and converted it into a viable, elastic document. In a wide variety of areas, from inaugural addresses to presidential protocol to executive privilege, he had set a host of precedents that endured because of the high quality and honesty of his decisions.

Washington’s catalog of accomplishments was simply breathtaking. He had restored American credit and assumed state debt; created a bank, a mint, a coast guard, a customs service, and a diplomatic corps; introduced the first accounting, tax, and budgetary procedures; maintained peace at home and abroad; inaugurated a navy, bolstered the army, and shored up coastal defenses and infrastructure; proved that the country could regulate commerce and negotiate binding treaties; protected frontier settlers, subdued Indian uprisings, and established law and order amid rebellion, scrupulously adhering all the while to the letter of the Constitution. During his successful presidency, exports had soared, shipping had boomed, and state taxes had declined dramatically. Washington had also opened the Mississippi to commerce, negotiated treaties with the Barbary states, and forced the British to evacuate their northwestern forts. Most of all he had shown a disbelieving world that republican government could prosper without being spineless or disorderly or reverting to authoritarian rule. In surrendering the presidency after two terms and overseeing a smooth transition of power, Washington had demonstrated that the president was merely the servant of the people.

Whatever their mandarin style and elitist tendencies, the Federalists had an abiding faith in executive power and crafted the federal government with a clarity and conviction that would have been problematic for the Republicans, who preferred small government and legislative predominance. Washington had established the presidency instead of Congress as the driving force behind domestic and foreign policy and established sharp boundaries between those two branches of government. He was the perfect figure to reconcile Americans to a vigorous executive and to conquer deeply rooted fears that a president would behave in the tyrannical manner of a monarch. He also provided a conservative counterweight to some of the more unruly impulses of the American Revolution, ensuring incremental progress and averting the bloody excesses associated with the French Revolution.

Washington never achieved the national unity he desired and, by the end, presided over a deeply riven country. John Adams made a telling point when he later noted that Washington, an apostle of unity, “had unanimous votes as president, but the two houses of Congress and the great body of the people were more equally divided under him than they ever have been since.”
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This may have been unavoidable as the new government implemented the new Constitution, which provoked deep splits over its meaning and the country’s future direction. But whatever his chagrin about the partisan strife, Washington never sought to suppress debate or clamp down on his shrill opponents in the press who had hounded him mercilessly. To his everlasting credit, he showed that the American political system could manage tensions without abridging civil liberties. His most flagrant failings remained those of the country as a whole—the inability to deal forthrightly with the injustice of slavery or to figure out an equitable solution in the ongoing clashes with Native Americans.