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I N F A N T E M P I R E

IN JULY 1784, Washington received a long letter from an anonymous admirer which took the form of a sermon in the jeremiad mode. It described the early days of the American Revolution as a magic moment when virtuous values flourished, patriots rallied to the cause, private interests were surrendered to public ideals, and Washington himself stepped forward to embody the self- sacrificing “spirit of 76.” But since those heady times, the writer lamented, the Revolution had followed a precipitous downhill course much like the corruption of the Garden of Eden after the Fall. “Extortioners, speculators, Hucksters & Practising Lawyers” had transformed the glorious cause into a degenerate exercise in profiteering and fraud. The money changers, in effect, had taken over the temple, and only the second coming of the Messiah could redeem the Revolution by recovering its original character and course. There was no doubt in the writer's mind who the American messiah was: “I am therefore, from a Conviction that the Present is a Critical moment for America, irresistibly impelled to address you Great Sir, not only as the fittest, but I fear the only Person on Earth, that together with the inclination, possesses the Probity and Abilities sufficient to avert the impending ruin.”40

Just as he required no instruction from Robert Pleasants about the evil of slavery, Washington did not need to hear a sermon on the decline of American virtue from some anonymous stranger. He had, in fact, lived that story as commander in chief of the chronically undermanned, under fed, under supplied Continental army. But the lamentation about virtue, or the lack thereof, presumed that the answer to the problem was moral reformation (or perhaps an extensive series of frontal lobotomies). During the war Washington had learned, the hard way, that depending upon a virtuous citizenry was futile, for it asked more than human nature was capable of delivering. Rather than pray for moral reform, he preferred to lobby for political reform. “No Man in the United States,” he told Hamilton at the end of the war, “is, or can be more deeply impressed with the necessity of reform in our present confederation than myself.” Making voluntary sacrifice the operative principle of republican government had proved to be a romantic delusion. Both individual citizens and sovereign states often required coercion to behave responsibly, which meant that the federal

government required expanded powers of taxation and ultimate control over fiscal policy. Lacking those powers, Washington believed that “the Confederation appears to be little more than an empty sound, and Congress a nugatory body which, in their current weak condition could only give the final stab to public credit, and must sink into contempt in the eyes of Europe.” During the initial years of his retirement, Washington made no secret of his contempt for the Confederation Congress, which he described as “wretchedly managed,” or his conviction that the Articles of Confederation were “fatally flawed.”41

However unexceptional these opinions might appear to us today, at the time they were distinctive. For a central impulse of the American Revolution, and the core meaning of the “spirit of ‘76” in most minds, was an instinctive aversion to coercive political power of any sort, most actually centralized power emanating from any distant location beyond the surveillance of the citizens it affected. These fears haunted all conversations about the proper shape of republican government in the revolutionary era, making the very weakness of the federal government under the articles of confederation the ideal expression of revolutionary intentions. In a sense, these same fears have haunted all scholarly conversations about “the critical decade” of the 1780s ever since, as historians have argued endlessly about the motives, whether sinister more sensible, of those demanding radical reforms of the Articles of Confederation. The terms historians have imposed on the two sides of the debate—liberals vs. conservatives, Democrats vs. aristocrats—have all proved anachronistic and misleading. And efforts to align the different constituencies according to wealth or discernible patterns of economic interest have also proved futile. In Washington’s case, however, the reasons for regarding the confederation government as wholly inadequate were elemental and clear, and they cast a shaft of light onto a piece of historical terrain that has sometimes been rendered darker (and bloodier) than necessary.42

Washington regarded the American Revolution as a movement to establish both American independence and American nationhood; indeed, he did not believe you could have one without the other. Most of the officers in the Continental army shared this view because they had also experienced

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the frustrations of trying to fight and win a war without a federal government empowered to provide resources in the reliable fashion of the British ministry. The fear that haunted Washington was not one of excessive federal power reminiscent of Parliament's arbitrary and imperial policies, but rather that of a weak confederation reminiscent of the Continental Congress’s woefully inadequate performance during the war. He expressed his convictions on this score to an up-and-coming Virginia statesman, James Madison, in 1785: “We are either a United people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all manners of general concern act as a nation; which have national objects to promote, and a National character to support—If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it.” In effect, Washington believed that America's hard-won independence would be short-lived unless the “United States” became a singular rather than a plural term, because a mere confederation of states would become, as he put it, the dupes of some [foreign] powers and, most assuredly, the contempt of all.”43

There was one additional, and quite distinctive, ingredient in his thinking, which had its roots in the earlier war he also knew so well. The French and Indian War was a competition among three imperial powers— Great Britain, France, and the Six Nations—for dominance of North America east of the Mississippi. Washington saw the American Revolution as a continuation of that contest, in which the newly independent America displaced Britain as the dominant imperial power on the continent. “However unimportant America may be considered at present,” he predicted to Lafayette, “there will assuredly come a day when this country will have some weight in the scale of Empires,” adding that it was already an infant- empire. The strategic stakes were huge, stretching geographically across the continent and chronologically across the next century, and they could only be achieved by a federal government fully empowered to harness and manage the enormous energies and resources entailed in such a large-scale imperial project. From this perspective, to dither about the danger of consolidated political power was like arguing about a few pieces of cordwood when a boundless forest lay visibly on the horizon.44

While he was sure what the American future required, he was equally sure that any movement to reform the Articles of Confederation was not

imminent, and if and when it occurred he would not be around to see it, much less be the messiah to lead it. The first indication that he might need to rethink those assurances arrived at Mount Vernon in March 1786 in the form of a letter from John Jay, who was overseeing foreign policy for the confederation government. Jay informed him of behind-the-scenes conversations in which “an opinion begins to prevail that a general convention for revising the articles of Confederation would be expedient.” Jay acknowledged that “we are in a delicate Situation,” and a premature effort at reform that failed would be worse than no effort at all. But if events did move in that direction, Jay observed, “I am persuaded you cannot view them with the Eye of an unconcerned Spectator.” Washington concurred that the situation was indeed delicate but doubted that the time was ripe for a convention. The fiscal problems needed to fester and deepen, some unforeseeable crisis needed to galvanize public opinion in favor of reform. As for his own role, “having happily assisted in bringing the ship into port & having been fairly discharged; it is not my business to embark again on the sea of troubles.”45

And so on this dismissive note began a year-long negotiation that eventually ended with Washington attending, and of course sharing, the Constitutional Convention, then becoming the inevitable and unanimous selection as the first president of the United states. But what has the look, at least in retrospect, of a foregone conclusion happened in a genuinely grudging and truly tortured fashion. A cynic might be tempted to argue that Washington played the role of an elusive coquette, rejecting all suitors while knowing full well that she is headed for the altar. The cynic would be wrong, however, because Washington's personal correspondence reveals a thoroughly retired hero who felt less like a young coquette than an old soldier past his prime. He was also the American Cincinnatus, who relished his retirement as the final testament to his heroic status, the immortal whose fame derived more from his surrender than his exercise of power. What we see clearly as a glorious capstone to his career appeared initially to Washington more like a highly problematic sequel.

Almost on cue, the galvanizing crisis that he had half hoped for occurred in western Massachusetts. In the fall of 1786, Daniel Shays, a veteran of

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Bunker Hill and Saratoga, mobilized two thousand indebted farmers to protest mortgage foreclosures and higher taxes by threatening to capture the federal Armory at Springfield in western Massachusetts. Initial reports to Washington of what was called Shays’s Rebellion were hyperbolic and alarmist, describing “a body of 12 or 15,000 desperate and unprincipled men” about to transform all New England into a bloodbath. Actually the most alarming feature of the “little rebellion,” as Jefferson called it, was the set of principles the rebels declared, which were eerily similar to the revolutionary principles of 1776, thereby suggesting that the grievances hurled at British rulers could also be used to undermine elected officials in Massachusetts and beyond. Eventually Washington received more detached assessments of the uprising from Benjamin Lincoln, a former colleague in the Continental army who led the Massachusetts militia units that suppressed the rebellion. Nevertheless, Washington insisted on seeing the crisis as a harbinger of prospective anarchy, which seemed to confirm what British and other European observers had been predicting all along: that the infant American Republic was destined to die in the cradle:

The picture which you have drawn, & the accounts which are published, of the commotions . . . in the Eastern States, are equally to be lamented and deprecated. They exhibit a melancholy proof of what our trans Atlantic foes have predicted; And of another thing perhaps, which is still more to be regretted, and is yet more unaccountable; that mankind left to themselves are unfit for their own government. I am mortified beyond expression whenever I view the clouds which have spread over the brightest morn that ever dawned upon my Country. . . . For it is hardly to be imagined that the great body of the people . . . can be so enveloped in darkness, or short sighted as not to see the rays of the distant sun through all of this mist of intoxication and folly.46

Shays’s rebellion was less a cause for calling the Constitutional Convention than a trigger, the justification to implement those behind-the- scenes conversations that Jay had described to Washington the previous spring. As those conversations developed in the form of plans to gather state delegates in Philadelphia in May 1787, arguments formed in his mind that allowed him to resist the mounting pressure to lead the Virginia delegation. Up until the last possible minute, Washington performed a political minuet

that let him dance away from all invitations and overtures to resume his public career.

The first line of defense was the Society of the Cincinnati. In keeping with his decision to maintain a discreet distance from the aristocratic aura surrounding the society, Washington had declined the invitation to attend the annual meeting, which just happened to be scheduled for Philadelphia in May. He could not possibly attend a political convention at the same time and place without giving offence to the former officers of the Continental army, he explained, though the Virginia delegation had his heartfelt support.47

The second line of defense was that very Virginia delegation, for he had noted that his name did not head the list of delegates. This was a rather lame and hollow excuse, since Washington had not been elected to the delegation as head only because the Virginia legislature had presumed that he would decline to serve. Once he tried this line of defense, Edmund Randolph used his power as governor to breach it by requesting and receiving a unanimous vote from the legislature on behalf of the one man “who began, carried on & consummated the revolution.” Though tactically outmaneuvered on this front, Washington insisted that the endorsement by the Virginia legislature, while edifying, made no difference, since rheumatism and a host of other ailments made a trip to Philadelphia impossible.48

One sense is that these official excuses were convenient covers for deeper reasons that could not be aired so publicly and that lay within him into overlapping pools of reticence. The first was the conviction that, once he had assumed the role of American Cincinnatus, he could not change the script. In 1783 he had promised to leave public life forever, so attending the Constitutional Convention would, as he put it to a friend, “be considered as inconsistent with my public declaration, delivered in a solemn manner at an interesting era of my life, never more to meddle in public matters”; this was a declaration that “not only stands in the files of Congress, but I believe registered in almost all the gazette's and magazines that are published.” Cincinnatus, in effect, could never come back.49

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A second private reservation flowed directly out of the first, though in a slightly more strategic direction; namely, he could not risk his reputation in adventure that might not succeed. Henry Knox, his old wartime colleague, warned him that the different state delegations were likely to be divided into three factions: moderates, who wished only modest changes in the Articles; conservatives, who wished no change at all; and radicals, who wished a major transformation and an energetic national government. Only if one could be assured that the latter group would triumph was the gamble of Washington's prestige worth the risk. Knox preferred military metaphors, comparing the decision to attend the convention to the decision to engage the enemy in battle, which should only occur when the outcome was likely and conclusive. Washington observed that the current government was more “like a house on fire.” If one could be assured the delegates intended to extinguish the blaze, he could join the effort. But if not, perhaps the best course was to let the house burned down and hope that others would build a new one later period why risk his reputation, especially when “gliding down the stream of life in tranquil retirement is so much the wish of my soul, that nothing on this side of Elysium can be placed in comparison with it?”50

But the reputation argument, the more Washington thought about it, was double-edged. On the one hand, his singular status—what he referred to as “the peculiar circumstances of my case”—cut toward caution, since his legacy as America's greatest revolutionary hero was already secure, so investing this priceless asset in an uncertain cause appeared imprudent. On the other hand, suppose the convention succeeded in producing a viable political framework that secured the Revolution? Knox acknowledged that such an outcome would also secure the Washington legacy, which would be diminished if, in his terms, the house was permitted to burn down: “But were an energetic, and judicious system to be proposed with your Signature, it would be a circumstance highly honorable to your fame , in the judgment of the present and future ages; And doubly entitle you to the glorious republican epithet—The Father of Your Country.” Washington had already begun to gauge the consequences for his reputation if he stayed away from Philadelphia, wondering “whether my non-attendance in this Convention will not be considered as a dereliction to republicanism—nay more—

whether other motives may not (however injuriously) be ascribed to me for not exerting myself on this occasion in support of it.”51

These crisscrossing thoughts began to move in a discernibly positive direction in mid-March 1787, largely as a result of Madison's influence. No one was more adept then the precocious Madison at assessing the nettlesome details that spelled the difference between success and failure in a political contest. He informed Washington that his canvas of the roster of state delegations revealed an impressive array of talent heavily weighted in favor of much more than a tinkering, indeed disposed to a thorough transformation of the existent political system. This piece of intelligence tipped the balance. Though he retained his reservations about “again appearing on a public theater after a public declaration to the contrary,” and though he cringed at the realization that his participation in the convention “will have a tendency to sweep me back into the tide of public affairs,” Madison's report altered his sense of the odds. Once convinced that the convention would address the fundamental problem, that it would “adopt no temporizing expedient, but probe the defects of the Constitution to the bottom, and provide radical cures, whether they are agreed to or not,” Washington decided to cast his lot, and his reputation, with Madison and the Virginia delegation.52

Once on board, an informal council of advisors quickly formed around him that included some of the sharpest political minds in the country. For his part, Washington knew what he knew, essentially that the Articles must be replaced rather than revised, and that the new government needed to possess expanded powers sufficient to make laws for the nation as a whole. Beyond that—more specifically, what the shape of the political architecture constructed on the new foundation might look like—he acknowledged his need for education. Since it was a foregone conclusion that he would be chosen to preside over the convention, Jay and Madison volunteered there are services to give him a tutorial in republican theory.

Washington was accustomed to leading by listening. During the Revolution he had chaired countless councils of war in which junior officers presented options to the commander in chief. Before the war George Mason had helped him understand the constitutional arguments against parliamentary taxation. In 1787, as in these previous instances, he already

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possessed a firm grasp of the elemental forces at work and a clear set of convictions about the strategic direction in which to lead those forces. Where he needed assistance—and he was completely comfortable requesting and receiving it—was in the mastering the theoretical vocabulary that more formally educated colleagues possessed, learning the intellectual road map to reach the destination he had already decided upon.53

In a remarkably prescient letter, Jay described the preferred conclusion in Philadelphia as a federal government comprised of three separate branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. The executive branch should stop short of monarchy, but only slightly. The national government should have a veto over all state laws, much like the British King's veto over colonial legislation. The knotty question of sovereignty—did it reside in the states or the federal government?—might be ingeniously resolved by locating it in the fountainhead of all authority, “The People.”54

Madison was equally thoughtful in anticipating the major controversies likely to dominate the debates in Philadelphia. He predicted that the big fight would center on the question of representation in the legislative, whether by state or population. If the former option prevailed, it meant that the new constitution would fail, since only a Congress that accurately reflected the population as a whole could claim to be a national institution. Like Jay, Madison also wanted a federal veto over state laws. And on the sovereignty problem, he had begun to entertain an unprecedented solution, which was to dispense with the assumption that sovereignty must be clear and indivisible: I have sought for some middle ground, which may at once support a do supremacy of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities whenever they can be subordinately useful. Here was the core principle of what became federalism, mutual and shared sovereignty between the state and federal governments.55

No one could have received a better briefing on the arguments that would shape the political agenda for the constitutional convention. It was, to be sure, a briefing from the nationalist side of the argument. But Washington, who as the presiding presence at the convention would have to project otherworldly detachment—one of his best and favorite roles—was in fact a charter member of the nationalist camp. Soon after arriving in

Philadelphia he conveyed his personal convictions to Jefferson, who was watching from Paris: “Much is expected by some—but little by others—and nothing by a few. That something is necessary, all will agree; for the situation of the General Government (if it can be called a government) is shaken to its foundation. . . . In a word, it is at an end, and unless a remedy is soon applied, anarchy & confusion will inevitably ensue.” Whether the situation in the spring of 1787 was as desperate as the situation in the spring of 1775 was a debatable question. They were, however, linked together in Washington's mind as two critical chapters in the same ongoing story called the American Revolution. His very presence in Philadelphia certified the connection between two founding moments, the first to win independence and the second to secure it. He was stepping forward again to play his accustomed and indispensable role. The first time his life had been at stake. This time it was his legacy.56

V O T E S A N D V O I C E S

WASHINGTON WAS simultaneously the most important person at the constitutional convention and the least involved in the debate that shaped the document that emerged. His importance was a function of his presence, which lent an air of legitimacy to the proceedings that otherwise might have been criticized as extralegal, if not a coup d’état. (The convention was legally empowered to revise the articles of confederation, not replace them.) His silence during the debates was partially a function of his congenital reticence, but mostly the result of his role as president, whose job was to gavel the sessions to order, then listen as others spoke. The role suited him, for it allowed him to remain above the fray in the transcendent location that he preferred and that almost everyone accorded him. He entered the debate on only one occasion, the last day of the convention, when he endorsed a revision of the final draft that reduced the number of representatives constituting a Congressional District from 40,000 to 30,000, a gesture probably designed to assure that he was on record as a participant as well as

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a signer. Otherwise he enjoyed the best seat from which to hear the most consequential political debate in American history.

What was he thinking? To the extent that his diary entries and correspondence during the summer of 1787 are guides, his mind was elsewhere: on the oppressive heat and humidity; on the renovations of his prized chariot; on the opportunity Philadelphia accorded to purchase rare items like a gold watch chain and two velvet jockey caps; and on Mount Vernon, where his nephew and new manager, George Augustine Washington, needed instruction about where to plant the pumpkins and peas, when to harvest the potatoes, and how to manage the mating of his reluctant jackass. On one occasion, June 4, a witness described the crowds that gathered around him on Market Street when he was going to dinner , but Washington himself made no mention of his thoughts or feelings about experiencing public adulation after four years off the stage period of course his mind was not really blank or distracted as the written record suggests , for the record reflects the vow of confidentiality all delegates were under to avoid any disclosure of the deliberations while the convention was in session.58

There were two breaks in the code of silence which provide clues to his state of mind on the substantive issues before the delegates. On July 10, he wrote Hamilton, who had recently left the convention, pleading with him to return. Washington seemed to believe a crisis was at hand that required Hamilton's presence. In a word, he confessed, I almost despair of seeing a favorable issue to the proceedings of the Convention, and do therefore repent having had any agency in the business. Ironically, this remark occurred just after what most scholars have come to regard as the major breakthrough of the convention, the great compromise, which resolved the impasse over representation by making it proportional to population in the lower house and by state in the Senate. Washington initially interpreted the compromise as a defeat instead of a great victory, because it diluted the principle of federal supremacy over the states.59

Then, on Aug 19, when the delegates were engaged in a protracted debate about the powers of the executive and the mode of selecting him, Washington expressed his frustration with the timidity of some delegates

and the somewhat diluted character of the document likely to result. “I am fully persuaded it is the best that can be obtained at the present moment,” he told Knox, “under such diversity of ideas that prevail.” A letter he wrote to Lafayette the day after the convention adjourned repeated the same equivocal endorsement: “It is now a child of fortune, to be fostered by some and buffeted by others. What will the general opinion on, or reception of it, is not for me to decide, nor shall I say anything for or against it—if it be good I suppose it will work its way good—if bad it will recoil on the Framers.”60

Over the subsequent decades, and now centuries, the constitution has been most admired for its artful ambiguities, in effect for refusing to resolve the question of state versus federal sovereignty, for sketching rather faintly the powers of the executive and judicial branches, for establishing a framework in which constitutional arrangements could evolve over the years, rather than providing clear answers at that time period if this has proved to be the genius of the document, Washington thought it was its major weakness. He wanted the ambiguities clarified and the sketch is filled out, at least sufficiently so to assure the creation of a national government empowered to force the States and citizenry into a budding American empire.61

Chairing the convention provided him with an extended education in political realities that exposed his preference for coercive clarity as an impossibility. Four he witnessed a bewildering variety of regional interests and accents that could only be bundled together by compromises designed to leave the lines of authority blurred. In truth, there was as yet no such thing as an American nation that the constitution could consolidate. No matter what Washington thought about America's providential future, it remained a latent prospect still haunted by potent fears of centralized power that even the most thoughtful observers—though not Washington himself— considered the core of political legacy of the American Revolution. The debates in Philadelphia demonstrated, then, that a unified nation was still a work-in-progress. And in that sense the ambiguous document that emerged accurately reflected both the limitations and the implications of that unsettled condition.

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On the return trip to Mount Vernon there was a mishap at Head of Elk in which the bridge collapsed, seriously injuring Washington's horse. Luckily, or perhaps providentially, Washington had just dismounted before the accident, which led some observers to speculate that the old soldier was still Destiny's Child, obviously being preserved for one last chapter of public service. At some unspoken level Washington realized that his re-entry into public life at Philadelphia had forced a rewriting of the Cincinnatus script from which he could never turn back. Though he had purchased a four volume translation of Don Quixote before departing Philadelphia, Washington was temperamentally incapable of tilting at windmills or living by illusion, which meant that he knew full well that the ratification of the constitution would carry him inexorably into the presidency. If he harbored any doubts on that score, his former aide disabused him in the inimitably assertive Hamiltonian style: “I take it for granted, Sir, that 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 that you should lend yourself to the first operation—it is of little use to have introduced a system, if the weightiest influence is not given to its firm establishment, at the outset.”62

If history and the American electorate were determined to hustle him down the path to power again, Washington was determined to take it one step at a time. The ratification of the Constitution, after all, was hardly a foregone conclusion. Indeed, the debates in the state conventions were likely to provide a more robust picture of the ideological disagreements than those at the Constitutional Convention, because the most outspoken enemies of reform had stayed away from Philadelphia. Washington had vowed to play no public role in the ratification process, but he had not promised to remain a disinterested observer. As he told Hamilton, “I have read every performance which has been printed on one side and the other of the great question lately agitated.” He was most impressed with the series of essays by Publius, later entitled The Federalist Papers, which he correctly predicted would outlive the current crisis to become a classic: “When the transient circumstances and fugitive performances which attend the crisis shall have disappeared,” he apprised Hamilton, “that work will merit the notice of Posterity.” He was fully aware that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay

were the authors of the Publius series, for they also formed the entourage of talented advisers that again surrounded him, making Mount Vernon into the electoral headquarters for plotting strategy and tracking the state-by-state results as they rolled in throughout the Spring of 1788.63

Washington's ongoing assessment of the ratification process benefited from the peerless advice of Madison, who was proving himself the shrewdest political thinker in Virginia, perhaps in the nation. It also drew upon his own experience at winning a contest that, on the face of it, looked dubious at best. Like the War of Independence, he explained, the ratification struggle mobilized latent talents—he mentioned Publius—that would otherwise have remained dormant. And such desperate occasions as Shays’s Rebellion, much like the winter encampment at Valley Forge, actually created the conditions for ultimate victory. He expressed confidence that, despite formidable opposition in such key states as Virginia and New York, ratification enjoyed certain strategic advantages. Because only nine states were necessary for ratification, and because the most problematic debates in Virginia and New York occurred late in the convention cycle, enormous pressure to join the winning coalition would be exerted on opponents there. Washington paid particular attention to the debates in Virginia, where two old friends and former colleagues, Patrick Henry and George Mason, were leading the opposition. In an oblique reference to the burden of slavery being carried by Virginia's planter class, he noted that it was “a little strange that the men of large property in the South, should be more afraid that the Constitution should produce an Aristocracy or Monarchy, than the genuine democratical people of the east.” He also expressed the opinion that Virginia's most prominent Tidewater planters, many on the verge of bankruptcy, retained an unrealistic and inflated sense of their current prowess: “I am sorry to add in this place that Virginians entertain too high an opinion of the importance of their own country.” Instead of regarding itself as primus inter pares among the states, Virginia should recognize that “in point of strength, it is, comparatively weak” and in fact had more to gain than lose by joining the union.64

When ratification became official in the late summer of 1788, even though he had been plotting and cheerleading from the sidelines for nearly

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a year, Washington was still dancing his private minuet about what ratification meant for him. His correspondence is littered with tortured declarations of uncertainty and platitudinous statements about entering “a veil of tears” or “a field enveloped on every side with clouds & darkness.” By this time, however, he was dancing only with himself, since ratification had closed off any escape. Upon hearing that his former chief continued to mutter threats about rejecting the presidency , Hamilton sent a bracing rebuke, reminding Washington that by chairing the Constitutional Convention he had “pledged to take part in the execution of the government.” All his personal anguishing implied that he had some choice in the matter, which was a delusion. Washington thanked Hamilton for the 4th right message with its “manly tone” and stopped leaking threats about barricading himself at Mount Vernon. But he never completely ended his litany of lamentations, telling Knox on the very eve of his inauguration that “My movement to the Chair of Government will be accompanied by feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”65

Though he unquestionably meant what he said, his thinking was multilayered, like his earlier expressions of reticence about becoming commander in chief of the Continental army. Modern sensibilities make it difficult to comprehend Washington's psychological chemistry on this score and dispose us to interpret his routinized reticence as either a disingenuous ploy or a massive case of denial. But in Washington's world no prominent statesman regarded the forthright expression of political ambition as legitimate; And anyone who actively campaigned for national office was there by confessing he was unworthy of election. What makes then so different from now was the aristocratic assumption that any explicit projection of self-interest in the political arena betrayed a lack of control over one's own passions, which did not bode well for the public interest. Washington carried this ethos to an extreme, insisting that any mention of his willingness to serve as president prior to the election violated the code.

Of course he knew that he was a candidate; He also knew that Madison was counting the electoral votes for president as the different states tallied up the results in January 1789. But when a correspondent mentioned his foreordained presidency, he expressed outrage that the subject was raised or

“even obliquely focused upon my mind.” This was both a sincere statement and a scripted role. Indeed, at the time he wrote it, Washington was outlining his domestic and foreign policy priorities as president to Lafayette and consulting with David Humphreys about the contents of a seventy-three- page draft of his inaugural address. In effect, by denying his interest in the office, he demonstrated that he was in control of his ambitions; by privately preparing to serve, he began to assume control of his forthcoming responsibilities. Part of him did feel old, and longed to live out whatever years remained beneath his vines and fig trees. Another part realized that Hamilton was right, and that part was beginning to gird up for the next appointment with destiny. The public posture melded the two feelings: he did not seek this assignment, indeed had hoped to avoid it; but when called he would be ready, once again, to serve.66

As in 1775, when he was made commander in chief, the vote was unanimous. All sixty-nine electors voted for Washington, and enough of them, thirty-four, also voted for John Adams to make him vice president. On April 7 the Confederation Congress dispatched its secretary, Charles Thompson, to Mount Vernon in order to apprise Washington officially of the results. Just as Washington had sustained the fiction that he was unaware of his candidacy, Congress sustained the fiction that, until informed, Washington did not know he had one. Humphreys had already drafted an acceptance speech containing the customary platitudes about being called to an arduous task for which he was woefully unprepared. On April 14, surrounded by a small entourage of secretaries and servants, Washington at last ended his evasive dance, declaring officially to Thompson that the unanimous vote “scarcely leaves me the alternative the option.”67

The first presidential election had in fact been a plebiscite on who most embodied the values of the American Revolution. Although the debates in the Constitutional Convention and then in the state ratifying conventions had demonstrated that these values were bitterly contested, the unanimous vote for Washington demonstrated that one man provided a symbolic solution acceptable to all sides. There had been no campaign platform providing voters with his positions on the contested issues, because there had been no campaign. He was not chosen for what he thought, but for who he was. In

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the political vocabulary of the day, there was no word fit to describe his unique status, but the word that came closest was stigmatized by the very values he had been chosen to embody. “You are now a king, under a different name,” wrote one thrilled supporter, James McHenry from Maryland, “and, I am well satisfied that sovereign prerogatives have in no age or country than more honorably obtained; Or that, at any time they will be more prudently and wisely exercised.”68

This was dangerous talk, and Washington knew it. The ill-defined powers of the American presidency left considerable room for honest disagreement, but one point on which all sides could agree was that it was not an electoral version of monarchy and George Washington was not the second coming of George III. (Writing from Paris, Gouverneur Morris reported the delectable piece of gossip that George III's mounting insanity had produced a delusional fit in which he imagined himself to be the second coming of Washington.) In the lengthy first draft of his inaugural address— blessedly never delivered—Washington had seen fit to insert a defensive comment, observing that he had no direct heirs or “immediate offspring” and therefore “no family to build in greatness upon my Country’s ruin.” There could be no Washington monarchy because there could be no Washington dynasty. His decision to order several yards of superfine broadcloth from a Hartford manufacturer for his inaugural suit also suggested that he wanted to make a sartorial statement of republican simplicity that countered the royal image.69

But no matter what he said or what he wore at his inauguration— eventually he discarded the broadcloth outfit for a suit of black velvet— Washington was revered by the bulk of the American citizenry as a quasi- king whose special status had been earned rather than inherited. The public reverence accorded to royalty was put on display during Washington's weeklong trip from Mount Vernon to New York, which became one prolonged coronation ceremony. It began with crowds of more than ten thousand celebrants cheering him amidst cannon salutes and poetic tributes at Baltimore and Wilmington. Outside Philadelphia he was obliged to mount a white horse so that twenty thousand spectators could see him as he crossed the Schuylkill. Charles Wilson Peale had designed an arch of triumph over

the bridge, and his daughter Angelica lowered a laurel crown upon Washington's head as he passed under the arch. At Trenton a chorus of white-robed girls tossed flowers from their baskets in his path while singing a tribute to “The Defender of the Mothers, The Protector of the Daughters.” A congressional committee greeted him at Elizabethtown, where a fifty-foot barge manned by thirteen white-smocked sailors rowed him across the Hudson. A flotilla of decorated ships and sloops pulled alongside the barge as he approached New York harbor and a chorus aboard one of the sloops sang an ode composed for the occasion to the tune of “God Save the King”:

Thrice welcome to this shore, Our Leader now no more, But Ruler thou; Oh, truly good and great! Long live to glad our State, Where countless Honors Wait To deck the thy brow.70

And so the retirement which had begun in the expectation of solitude and the presumption of finality now ended with a plebiscite of unprecedented approval and the adoring voices of ordinary American citizens ringing in his ears. What was he thinking at this dramatic moment of transition back into the public arena? Reading Washington's famously and often purposefully enigmatic mind is always a tricky business, never more so than on emotionally complicated occasions like his acceptance of the presidency. When he delivered his brief and willfully innocuous inaugural address in the Senate chamber of Federal Hall on April 30 , one witness found his performance appropriately solemn and sure-handed. Another thought the speech uninspired and Washington's demeanor awkward, as if he wished to be somewhere else, and more nervous before the audience than he had ever been when facing British cannon and muskets.71

The inaugural address itself was deliberately elliptical, offering little indication of his political agenda for the new government. His fullest statement on that score had been made in a private letter to Lafayette the previous summer. It seemed to suggest that his twin priorities were the

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restoration of fiscal responsibility and the creation of political credibility for the nascent national government:

When the people shall find themselves secure under an energetic government, when foreign Nations shall be disposed to give us equal advantages in commerce from dread of retaliation, when the burdens of war shall be in a manner done away by the sale of western lands, when the seeds of happiness which are sown here shall begin to expand themselves, and when everyone (under his own vine and fig-tree) shall begin to taste the fruits of freedom—then all these blessings (for all these blessings will come) will be referred to the fostering influence of the new government. . . . Indeed, I do not believe that Providence has done so much for nothing.72

In effect, he hoped to lend his prestige to the fledgling federal government, thereby helping it survive its most formative and fragile phase, providing the necessary credibility until this nation in the making began to feel comfortable behaving as a single people instead of a confederation of states.

The contradictory reactions to his inaugural address probably reflected his own conflicting emotions. His reservations were real, we know, because the Cincinnatus pose has always been more than a pose. Physically, we know, he felt past his prime, no longer oblivious to the fatigue and demanding regimen that accompany life at center stage in the public arena. Also on the negative side, his most intimate confidant, Martha, was not with him. She had elected to stay behind at Mount Vernon until the celebratory fireworks died down and accommodations in New York had been arranged. His personal servant, Billy Lee, who had accompanied him on all his previous campaigns, was also missing. He had tried to make the trip, but two crippling knee injuries had forced him to drop out of the procession in Philadelphia. Someone else would have to comb and tie Washington's hair and anticipate his daily needs.

But alongside his personal doubts about risking his hard won reputation, alongside reservations about his advancing age, and the absence of his accustomed support system, there were those crowds of cheering well- wishers stretching from Virginia to New York, expressing their bottomless

confidence that he was the indispensable man. If he were truly superhuman, as many of his admirers believed, he would have felt no surge of fresh energy listening to their cheers. But, of course, he was not. The protracted coronation procession served as the palpable companion of the unanimous electoral vote and probably combined to buoy him above his personal doubts—his silence and code of control precludes certainty here— propelling him forward toward the presidency. If this were not enough, the applause reinforced his lifelong experience of winning every wager against the odds, whether it was at the Monongahela, Princeton, or Yorktown. It seems likely that his remarks to Lafayette about American National destiny, namely that it was foreordained, also described his sense of his own fate. In any event, his inauguration now joined at the hip the two destinies, which boded well for both. If the doubts were real, the providential forces were more potent. When the mix of moods coalesced, he entered the presidency with a bittersweet sense that he had done everything humanly possible to avoid this outcome, but that he was, once again, the chosen instrument of history.

Ellis, Joseph J. His Excellency - George Washington.

New York, Vintage Books, 2004.