Washington: A Life (113 page)

No sooner had she arrived in the capital than Martha learned that she would be a prop in an elaborate piece of political theater. One day after her arrival, she had to host a dinner for congressional leaders, and the day after that, all of New York society seemed to cram into the Cherry Street mansion for her first reception—a function for which she had not been consulted. She was plunged into a giddy whirl of activity. “I have not had one half hour to myself since the day of my arrival,” she told Fanny in early June.
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She narrated this abrupt transformation with a note of quiet wonder: the woman who had been dubious about this new life sounded positively breathless with amazement. She had been taken in hand by a professional hairdresser, a novel experience for her. “My hair is set and dressed every day and I have put on white muslin habits for the summer,” she wrote home in early June. “You would, I fear, think me a good deal in the fashion if you could but see me.”
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The town was enchanted with Martha Washington, whose conviviality offset her husband’s reserve. She won over the toughest critic: the wife of the vice president, who found her the perfect republican counterpart of her husband. “I took the earliest opportunity … to go and pay my respects to Mrs. Washington,” Abigail Adams informed her sister. “She received me with great ease and politeness. She is plain in her dress, but that plainness is the best of every article … Her hair is white, her teeth beautiful, her person rather short than otherwise.”
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The favorable impression grew upon second viewing: “Mrs. Washington is one of those unassuming characters which create love and esteem. A most becoming pleasantness sits upon her countenance and an unaffected deportment which renders her the object of veneration and respect.”
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A pragmatic woman, Martha Washington resigned herself to the duties of a presidential wife, but a distinct touch of discontent lingered. She was quietly rebellious, chafing at her restricted freedom. In late October she unburdened herself to Fanny: “I live a very dull life here and know nothing that passes in the town. I never go to the public place. Indeed, I think I am more like a state prisoner than anything else.” She complained of “certain bounds set for me which I must not depart from. And as I cannot do as I like, I am obstinate and stay at home a great deal.”
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Obviously there were limits to her acquiescence, and she adopted an increasingly satiric tone when talking about the fashionable people of New York. When she sent Fanny a watch, she described it as “of the newest fashion, if that has any influence on your taste.” Then she added tartly: “It will last as long as the fashion—and by that time you can get another of a fashionable kind.”
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At year’s end Martha Washington aired her frustrations to Mercy Otis Warren, pointing out that her grandchildren and Virginia family constituted the major source of her happiness: “I shall hardly be able to find any substitute that would indemnify me for the loss of a part of such endearing society.”
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She knew other women would gladly swap places with her: “With respect to myself, I sometimes think the arrangement is not quite as it ought to have been—that I, who had much rather be at home, should occupy a place with which a great many younger and gayer women would be prodigiously pleased.”
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But she would not rail against her destiny: “I am still determined to be cheerful and to be happy in whatever situation I may be, for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions and not upon our circumstances.”
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To the end of her life, Martha Washington would speak forlornly of the presidential years as her “lost days.”
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WHEN GEORGE WASHINGTON BECAME PRESIDENT, the executive departments had not yet been formed or their chieftains installed, so he placed unusual reliance on his personal secretaries, whom he dubbed “the gentlemen of the household.”
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He put a premium on efficiency, good manners, discretion, and graceful writing. The staff mainstay was Harvard-educated Tobias Lear, the agreeable young man brought up from Mount Vernon. In these early days Lear was a man for all seasons: dashing off private letters for Washington, cranking out dinner invitations, tending files, tutoring grandchildren, accompanying Washington on afternoon strolls or Martha on shopping sprees. So trusted was Lear that he kept the household accounts, and Washington turned to him for petty cash. His loyalty had no limits. “I have never found a single thing that could lessen my respect for him,” Lear remarked of Washington. “A complete knowledge of his honesty, uprightness, and candor in all his private transactions has sometimes led me to think him more than a man.”
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When Lear married Polly Long in April 1790—Martha called her “a pretty, sprightly woman”—the Washingtons invited the young couple to share their household, enriching their lives with an extended family as they had done at Mount Vernon.
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For a second secretary, Washington retained David Humphreys, with his agile pen. Now seasoned by diplomatic experience in Paris with Jefferson, Humphreys advised Washington on questions of etiquette and was anointed chamberlain, or master of ceremonies, for the administration. The third team member was Major William Jackson, an orphan from South Carolina who had won high marks as secretary of the Constitutional Convention, having taken notes of the deliberations while preserving their secrecy—a man of discretion after Washington’s own heart. The closest that Washington came to a security guard, Jackson remained a protective presence at his side, whether he was out walking, riding, or performing official duties. Rounding out the group were Thomas Nelson, Jr., son of the late Virginia governor, and Washington’s young nephew Robert Lewis, who had escorted his aunt Martha to New York.

Among members of Congress, James Madison stood in a class by himself in his advisory capacity to Washington. When he ran for Congress, Madison had consulted Washington about how to campaign without descending to crass electioneering. It is not surprising that Washington leaned on Madison early in his presidency, since nobody possessed a more nuanced grasp of the Constitution. In 1789 Congress had to shape both the executive and the judicial branches, which would act to enhance Madison’s prestige. Gradually, as the three branches of government assumed more separate characters and political differences between the two men surfaced, Madison shed his advisory role.

By the time Washington was sworn in, the federal government had already been set in motion; the first order of business was to generate money to guarantee the new government’s survival. Three weeks before the inauguration, Madison introduced in the House a schedule of duties on imported goods to provide revenues. Nothing better proclaimed the new government’s autonomy: the impotent Confederation Congress had never commanded an independent revenue stream.

Washington’s first days in office were dominated by seemingly trivial symbolic issues that spoke to larger questions about the character of the new government. “Many things which appear of little importance in themselves … at the beginning may have great and durable consequences, from their having been established at the commencement of a new general government,” Washington instructed Vice President Adams.
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Every action, he knew, would be subjected to exhaustive scrutiny: “My political conduct … must be exceedingly circumspect and proof against just criticism, for the eyes of Argus [the hundred-eyed monster in Greek mythology] are upon me and no slip will pass unnoticed.”
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Washington had long felt those searching eyes trained upon him and would try hard as president to be a paragon.

Of the various government posts, it was the presidency that had the potential to slip into monarchy and subvert republican government, so every decision made about it aroused a firestorm of controversy. For many Americans, presidential etiquette seemed like the back door through which aristocratic corruption might infiltrate the system. On April 23 the Senate appointed a committee to devise suitable titles for addressing the president. Vice President Adams favored highfalutin ones. “A royal, or at least a princely, title, will be found indispensably necessary to maintain the reputation, authority, and dignity of the president,” he insisted.
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The final Senate recommendation was absurdly pretentious: “His Highness, the President of the United States of America, and Protector of their Liberties.”
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Sensitive to criticism that high-flown titles were reminiscent of monarchy, Washington gladly accepted the simpler form adopted by the House: “The President of the United States.” An approving Madison later noted that Washington had been irritated by efforts to “bedizen him with a superb but spurious title.”
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The controversy served notice on Washington that such matters had powerful resonance as the new republic tried to find dignified forms that didn’t smack of European decadence. “Nothing could equal the ferment and disquietude occasioned by the proposition respecting titles,” David Stuart wrote from Virginia. “As it is believed to have originated from Mr. Adams and [Richard Henry] Lee, they are not only unpopular to an extreme, but highly odious.
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For Washington, the etiquette issue was also related to how he would preserve his privacy and sanity as president. From the time he occupied the Cherry Street mansion, he found himself hounded by legislators, office seekers, veterans, and well-wishers. Before long, he felt himself under siege, unable to accomplish any work. After making inquiries, he learned that presidents of the Confederation Congress had been “considered in no better light than as a maitre d’hotel … for their table was considered as a public one.”
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As in everything else, Washington operated in uncharted waters. “I was unable to attend to any business whatsoever,” he told Stuart, “for 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.”
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With his days cluttered with ceremonial visits, Washington complained, “I had no leisure to read or answer the dispatches which were pouring in from all quarters.”
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As he tried to barricade himself from strangers, he wondered how he could avoid the extremes of either rebuffing visitors in a “mimickry of royalty” or becoming so secluded that he would shut out important communications. In short, how to find the “discriminating medium”?
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As he had always done, Washington solicited written opinions from several advisers, including Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, and Robert R. Livingston, from which he would distill his preferred policy. The hallmark of his administration would be an openness to conflicting ideas. In wartime Washington had urged officers to find a happy medium between being too close to and too remote from their men. Now, in remarkably similar language, he told Madison that he wanted to avoid the “charge of superciliousness” if he held himself too aloof, as well as the diminished presidential dignity that might arise from “too free an intercourse and too much familiarity.”
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In many ways, Washington’s solution borrowed from two worlds, adapting kingly traditions to a republican ethos. Presidential conduct would be true to revolutionary principles but imbued with the forms of polite society that Washington had known his entire life.

To strike a proper balance, Hamilton suggested that Washington hold weekly levees—the term was borrowed from royal receptions—in which visitors could chat with him. The president would enter, remain half an hour, make small talk with guests, then disappear. A man of congenital formality, who kept an impenetrable zone of privacy around himself, Washington did not enjoy socializing with strangers, so Hamilton’s scenario held an obvious appeal. The latter also suggested dinners with small groups of legislators, especially senators who shared with the president constitutional responsibilities, such as concluding foreign treaties and approving major appointments. “This makes them, in a degree, his constitutional counselors,” Hamilton noted.
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He also recommended that Washington refuse invitations to dine elsewhere, lest it impair presidential authority. Washington sympathized with any proposal that curtailed his social obligations. “I have no relish for formal and ceremonious engagements,” he explained to James McHenry, “and only give in to them when they cannot be avoided.”
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To handle the stampede of people wishing to see him, Washington decided to hold his levees every Tuesday afternoon at three P.M. The newspapers let it be known that, on other days, visits would “not be agreeable” to the president.
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Guests would need introductions from suitable personages. Ordinarily Washington’s secretaries would assist them from their carriages, but the president was capable of performing this courtesy when ladies and old comrades came calling. When the widows of Nathanael Greene and Richard Montgomery appeared, for instance, Washington went outside to help them down from their carriages.

The president was a punctual man, and, precisely at three, the folding doors of his dining room were flung open to guests; at three-fifteen, they were shut to further visitors. By the time guests arrived, Washington had struck a stately pose by the fireplace, encased in rigid protocol. The room was largely empty, most of the furniture having been cleared to make space. Since Washington’s hearing was failing, David Humphreys announced him and his visitors in a raised voice. At the first levee Humphreys announced Washington in such a loud, pompous voice that, according to Madison, Washington shot him a reproachful look.

In a well-directed sequence, visitors came in and bowed to Washington, who then bowed in return before they took their place in a standing circle. With an excellent memory for names, Washington seldom required a second introduction. In a manner that reminded some of European kings, Washington never shook hands, holding on to a sword or a hat to avoid direct contact with people. Slowly he made the round of standing visitors, chatting briefly with each, then resuming his original position by the fireplace. Then the guests, moving like so many marionettes, came up to him one by one, bowed, and went their way. The reception concluded promptly at the stroke of four. Like a stage actor leaving nothing to chance, Washington reproduced this ritual exactly each week. Small wonder that John Adams said that if Washington “was not the greatest president, he was the best actor of the presidency we have ever had.”
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