A Life

By Ron Chernow

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The thick family Bible at Mount Vernon records that George Washington was born around ten a.m. on February 11, 1732, at the family farm at Pope’s Creek in Westmoreland County, an area of bucolic beauty less than a mile from the Potomac River. The modest birthplace later went up in flames. The newborn boy was reputed to be a baby of unusual heft. His original birthday derived from the Julian, or Old Style, calendar, which remained in effect in Britain and its colonies until the mid-eighteenth century, when the new Gregorian calendar deferred it by eleven days to February 22. Until the end of his life, some of Washington’s admirers in Alexandria insisted upon celebrating his birthday on February 11. 

(Chernow 2010, 6)

If Mary Ball Washington comes across as an unbending, even shrewish, disciplinarian, one can only imagine the unspoken dread that she, too, experienced at being widowed at thirty-five. She had to manage Ferry Farm, tend five children ranging in age from six to eleven, and oversee dozens of slaves. Gus’s death forced Mary to eliminate any frills of family life, and her spartan style as businesswoman, frugal and demanding, had a discernible impact on her son. “In her dealings with servants, she was strict,” writes Douglas Southall Freeman. “They must follow a definite round of work. Her bidding must be their law.” With more than a touch of the martinet in her forbidding nature, Mary Washington displayed a powerful capacity to command, and one is tempted to say that the first formidable general George Washington ever encountered was his own mother. 

This trying woman inspired a healthy trepidation among George’s companions. “I was often there with George, his playmate, schoolmate, and young man’s companion,” said Lawrence Washington of Chotank, a distant relative. “Of the mother I was more afraid than of my own parents; she awed me in the midst of her kindness, for she was, indeed, truly kind.” There was nothing especially gentle about Mary Washington, little that savored of maternal warmth. Gus’s death removed any moderating influence between mother and eldest son, who clashed with their similarly willful personalities. Always a dutiful but seldom a loving son, George treated his mother with frigid deference, taking refuge in polite but empty forms. His letters to her would be addressed to “Honored Madam” and end with distant formality, “Your most Dutiful and Obedient Son, George Washington.” This studiously correct tone, likely laced with suppressed anger, only highlighted the absence of genuine filial affection. 

(Chernow 2010, 10-11)

As an adolescent, Washington dabbled in fiction, history, philosophy, and geography. An Avid reader of periodicals, he sampled The Spectator by the age of sixteen. With the novel flowering as a literary form, he was to purchase copies of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle in coming years, and he was especially drawn to military history. As he experienced the first stirrings of an abiding passion for theater, he read Joseph Addison’s Cato, a paean to republican virtues that he quoted repeatedly throughout his life. It is often said, with truth, that Washington absorbed his lessons from action, not books, yet he came to own a vast library and talked about books as if he were a serious reader, not a dilettante. When his adopted grandson entered college, Washington lectured him thus: “Light reading (by this, I mean books of little importance) may amuse for the moment, but leaves nothing solid behind.” 

Never an intellectual who relished ideas for their own sake, he mined books for practical wisdom and delighted in dredging up handy aphorisms. At seventeen, he possessed an English compendium of the principal Dialogues of Seneca the Younger and took to heart his stoic beliefs: “The contempt of death makes all the miseries of life easy to us.” Or: “He is the brave man … That can look death in the face without trouble or surprise.” As his life progressed, Washington would adhere to the stoic creed of governing one’s passions under the most adverse circumstances and facing the prospect of death with serenity. 

(Chernow 2010, 13)

Throughout his career, George Washington had the imposing face and virile form that suited a commanding leader. His most delicate feature was a complexion fair enough to sunburn easily; to shield him from sunlight in later years, he rode around Mount Vernon with an umbrella fastened to his saddle bow. The mild, deep-set eyes, of a pale grayish blue, seemed to glow with an inner fire whenever he grew excited. When Gilbert Stuart painted them a more brilliant blue, he explained that in a hundred years they would fade to the right color. 

Washington’s hair was reddish brown, and contrary to a common belief, he never wore a wid. The illusion that he did so derived from the powder that he sprinkled on his hair with a puffball in later life. He wore his long hair tied up in a black ribbon, knotted at the nape, in an arrangement called a queue. However formal it looks to modern eyes, the style was favored by military officers. Pulling the hair back also broadened the forehead and lent him an air of martial nobility. Once his hair was drawn into a queue (or sometimes a silk bag) behind him, the side hairs were fluffed out into twin projecting wings, furthering the appearance of a wig. 

It is commonly said that Washington stood six foot or three, an estimate that gained currency after a doctor measured his corpse at six feet three and a half inches. Even though dozens of contemporaries pegged his height at only six feet, there is no need for any guesswork. Before the Revolutionary War, Washington ordered his clothes from London each year and had to describe his measurements with great accuracy. In a 1791 letter, he informed his remote tailor that “my stature is six feet, otherwise rather slender than corpulent,” and he never deviated from that formula. Obviously, Washington couldn’t afford to tell a fib about his height to his tailor. One can only surmise that when the doctor measured his cadaver, his toes were pointing outward, padding his height by several inches compared with his everyday stature. 

(Chernow 2010, 29-30)

In the eighteenth century, the word neat differed subtly from its usage today. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, neat then meant “characterized by elegance of form without unnecessary embellishment of agreeable but simple appearance; nicely made or proportioned.”

In placing orders for goods from London, Washington often employed two objectives that nicely sum up his taste: neat and fashionable. In the eighteenth century, the word neat differed subtly from its usage today. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, neat then meant “characterized by elegance of form without unnecessary embellishment of agreeable but simple appearance; nicely made or proportioned.” In other words, Washington preferred things that were stylish but subdued, denoting his worldly status without showily advertising it. Although he never lived to see England (he told one correspondent in 1760 that he “ardently desired” to go), this young provincial yearned to resemble the better class of London people. In a typical order to his London agents, he wrote, “I have no doubt but you will choose a fashionable colored cloth as well as a good one and make it in the best taste.” The Virginia planter trusted blindly to the sartorial judgment of his London tailors. When he ordered “two pair of work[e]d ruffles at a guinea each pair,” he added that “if work[e]d ruffles should be out of fashion, send such as are not.” After years of a rough soldierly life, Washington ordered breeches of black silk and crimson velvet. He was careful, however, to warn against lace or embroidery or anything that might stereotype him as a fop. Many of his clothing orders stressed practicality. When ordering a blue hooded greatcoat, he requested that it be made “of such cloth as will turn [away] a good shower of rain.”

(Chernow 2010, 105)

Washington’s opposition to slavery took the form of a gradual awakening over many decades. He seldom uttered the word slavery, as if it grated on his conscience, preferring polite euphemisms such as “servants,” “Negroes,” “my people,” or “my family.” Like other slaveholders, the young Washington talked about slaves as simply another form of property. He was cold-blooded in specifying instructions for buying slaves, telling one buyer, as if he were purchasing a racehorse, that he wanted his slaves “to be straight-limbed and in every respect strong and likely, with good teeth and good countenances.” He favored adolescent females who could maximize the number of slave children, urging one planter who owed him money to sell some slaves in the fall “when they are fat and lusty and must soon fall of[f] unless well fed.” In this savage world, planters posted slaves as collateral for loans, and Washington upbraided one debtor for asking him to rely upon “such hazardous and perishable articles as Negroes, stock, and chattels.” With another debtor, he threatened that, without speedy payment, “your Negroes must be immediately exposed to sale for ready money after short notice.” In his diary, he often wrote of being “at home all day alone” when he was surrounded by slaves in the mansion and fields.

However horrifying it seems to later generations, abominable behavior toward dark-skinned people was considered an acceptable way of life. In 1767, when four slaves were executed in Fairfax County for supposedly colluding to poison their overseers, their decapitated heads were posted on chimneys at the local courthouse to act as a grim warning to others. Nobody protested this patent atrocity. At the same time, slave masters in the eighteenth century seldom rationalized or romanticized slavery as a divinely sanctioned system, as happened before the Civil War. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other Virginia planters acknowledged the immorality of slavery, while confessing perplexity as to how to abolish it without producing mayhem and financial ruin. When denouncing British behavior on the eve of the American Revolution, Washington made clear the degrading nature of the system when he said that, if the colonists tolerated abuses, the British “will make us as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”

“We have abundant reason to rejoice that, in this land, the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition. Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause.”

The black population at Mount Vernon grew apace after Washington’s marriage as he purchased slaves aggressively to keep pace with his widening economic activities. During the first year of his marriage, he acquired 13 slaves, then another 42 between 1761 and 1773. Since he paid taxes on slaves older than twelve years of age, we know that he personally owned 56 slaves of working age in 1761, 62 in 1762, 78 in 1765, and 87 in 1770. 

(Chernow 2010, 110-111)

One thing that hasn’t aroused dispute is the exemplary nature of Washington’s religious tolerance. He shuddered at the notion of exploiting religion for partisan purposes or showing favoritism for certain denominations. As president, when writing to Jewish, Baptist, Presbyterian, and other congregations – he officially saluted twenty-two major religious groups – he issued eloquent statements on religious tolerance. He was so devoid of spiritual bias that his tolerance even embraced atheism. When he needed to hire a carpenter and a bricklayer at Mount Vernon, he stated that “if they are good workmen,” they could be “Mahometans, Jews, or Christian of any sect, or they may be atheists.” He took pleasure in dropping by Sunday services of other denominations. In Bishop White’s words, “If there was no Episcopal Church in the town in which he happened to be, he would attend the services of any other denomination with equal cheerfulness.”

Washington loathed religious fanaticism, and on that subject he sounded like a true student of the Enlightenment. “We have abundant reason to rejoice that, in this land, the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition,” President Washington wrote to one Baltimore church. “Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause.” A convinced supporter of the separation of church and state, Washington declared that “no man’s sentiments are more opposed to any kind of restraint upon religious principles than mine are.”

However ecumenical in his approach to religion, Washington never doubted its signal importance in a republic, regarding it as the basis of morality and the foundation of any well-ordered polity. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” he declared in his farewell address. For Washington, morality was so central to Christianity’s message that “no man who is profligate in his morals or a bad member of the civil community can possibly be a true Christian.”

(Chernow 2010, 132-133)

The troops rejoiced upon hearing the document. “The Declaration was read at the head of each brigade,” wrote Samuel Blachley Webb, “and was received with three huzzas by the troops.” Washington was gratified by the “hearty assent” of his men and their “warmest approbation” of independence. News of the Declaration elicited snide rebukes from the British side, one officer saying that it served to highlight “the villainy and the madness of these deluded people.”

Reading of the document led to such uproarious enthusiasm that soldiers sprinted down Broadway afterward and committed an act of vandalism: they toppled the equestrian statue of George III at Bowling Green, decapitating it, then parading the head around town to the lilting beat of fifes and drums. The patriots made excellent use of the four thousand pounds of gilded lead in the statue, which were melted down to make 42,088 musket bullets. Washington was appalled by the disorder. Ever the strict parent, he told his men that while he understood their high spirits, their behavior had “so much the appearance of riot and want of order in the army” that he disapproved their actions and urged that in future they should be left to the “proper authority.” His reproach might have sounded priggish, but Washington wanted this revolution to be an orderly one, with due respect for property, and he refused to abide even the desecration of the king’s statue. He sounded rejuvenate by the Declaration, writing defiantly to Hancock on July 10 that should the British mount an attack, “they will have to wade through much blood and slaughter before they can carry any part of our works.”

(Chernow 2010, 237-238)

On December 28, amid thickening snow flurries, Washington ordered militia units in northern New Jersey to stymie the enemy and “harass their  flanks and rear.” Then on December 29 he set in motion the enormous gamble ratified by his generals, sending his men back across to Trenton. This second crossing, even more ambitious than the first, encompassed eight crossing points and twice as many cannon. A fresh sheet of ice impeded the boats and retarded the operation. Washington himself didn’t cross the Delaware until December 30, when he stationed his men on a secure slope behind Assunpink Creek, a narrow, fast-moving creek at the southern end of Trenton. This entrenched position posed more formidable risks than the swift hit-and-run raid launched on Christmas Night. 

The first Delaware crossing had afforded graphic proof of the advantages of speed and flexibility in improvising military operations. With many enlistments about to expire, General Greene had lobbied Congress to give Washington additional powers while “reserving to yourself the right of confirming or repealing the measures.” Greene insisted that Washington would never abuse a wide-ranging new grant of authority. “There never was a man that might be more safely trusted,” he asserted. On December 27 a once-carping, meddlesome Congress granted extraordinary powers to Washington for six months, allowing him to muster new troops by paying bounties, to commandeer provisions, and even to arrest vendors who didn’t accept Continental currency. These powers, breathtaking in scope, aroused fears of a despot in the making – fears that Washington quickly laid to rest. He understood that liberties should be affirmed even as they were being temporarily abridged, and he planned to set aside emergency powers the instant they were no longer needed. As he informed Congress, “I shall constantly bear in mind that, as the sword was the last resort for the preservation of our liberties, so it ought to be the first thing laid aside when those liberties are firmly established.” In this manner, Washington strengthened civilian authority over the military.

(Chernow 2010, 277-278)

Washington viewed the restoration of American credit as the country’s foremost political need, and he supported loans and heavy taxation to attain it. While fighting Great Britain, he pondered the source of its military power and found the answer in public credit, which gave the enemy inexhaustible resources. “In modern wars,” he told Joseph Reed, “the longest purse must chifley determine the event,” and he feared that England, with a well-funded debt, would triumph over America with its chaotic finances and depleted coffers. “Though the [British] government is deeply in debt and of course poor, the nation is rich and their riches afford a fund which will not be easily exhausted. Besides, their system of public credit is such that it is capable of greater exertions than that of any other nation.” This letter prefigures the Hamiltonian program that would distinguish Washington’s economic policy as president. It took courage for Washington, instead of simply demonizing Great Britain, to study the secrets of its strength. Throughout the war, he believed that an American victory would have been a foregone conclusion if the country had enjoyed a strong Congress, a sound currency, stable finances, and an enduring army. Not surprisingly, many other officers in the Continental Army became committed nationalists and adherents of a robust central government. One virtue of a war that dragged on for so many years was that it gave the patriots a long gestation period in which to work out the rudiments of a federal government, financial mechanisms, diplomatic alliances, and other elements of a modern nation-state. 

(Chernow 2010, 369)

While both Washington and Rochambeau labored to fashion a harmonious facade of Franco-American amity, perceptive observers detected subtle tensions. Their interpreter at Wethersfield, the Chevalier de Chastellux, a man of many parts – soldier, philosopher, member of the French Academy, intimate of Voltaire – was well placed to study their complex interaction. A handsome fellow with watchful eyes, he was gathering material for a book about the United States and was immensely taken with the forty-nine-year-old Washington, applauding him as “the greatest and the best of men.” He was chagrined by the treatment Washington received from his French counterpart. Rochambeau, he claimed, handled the Virginian with “all the ungraciousness and all the unpleasantness possible,” and he worried that Washington would be left with “a sad and disagreeable feeling in his heart.” Washington secretly carried this grief but exposed it to no one outside a small circle of advisers. 

(Chernow 2010, 403)

The next day Cornwallis made a courtesy call on Washington, and the two established a rapport based on mutual respect. They toured the Yorktown defenses on horseback to oversee the demolition of defeses that had been erected with meticulous care. The Yorktown victory netted more than eight thousand prisoners, who would be ordinary prisoners of war; their officers would be allowed to return to Europe or New York or any other port that Britain controlled. Washington dealt leniently with Tory sympathizers who had found sanctuary with Cornwallis and faced patriotic reprisals. He didn’t want to give them a formal reprieve, but neither did he wish to condone vigilante actions against them. He solved the dilemma with a subtle compromise: he allowed the British to send a ship to New York, which the Tories could clamber aboard as an escape route. 

Yorktown struck a stirring blow for American liberty with one exception: those slaves who had flocked to the British side to win their freedom were now restored to the thrall of their owners. Washington retrieved two young house slaves – twenty-year-old Lucy and eighteen-year-old Esther – who had been among the seventeen who had escaped aboard the British sloop Savage six months earlier, thinking their freedom assured. He was determined to recover the remaining fifteen slaves he had lost. 

(Chernow 2010, 419)

The French partnership, however useful to the French monarchy even as Americans fought against King George III. In the spring of 1782, when Louis XVI has a male heir, Washington was duty-bound to celebrate “the auspicious birth of a dauphin” and hope divine providence would “shed its chicest blessings upon the King of France and his royal consorts and favor them with a long, happy, and glorious reign.” Having fought for independence, Americans still had no idea what sort of government would emerge in the aftermath of a successful war. Thus far the new nation had no real executive branch, just a few departments; no independent judiciary; and only an ineffectual Congress. For most Americans, the idea of royalty was still anathema. On the other hand, at least a few Americans feared chaos and touted monarchy as a possible way to fill the dangerous vacuum of executive power. 

On May 22, 1782, Colonel Lewis Nicola of the Continental Army had the effrontery to suggest to Washington that he reign as America’s first monarch. He sent him a seven him a seven-page diatribe, citing “the weakness of republics” and the Continental Army’s privations at the hands of a feckless Congress, then conjured up a benevolent monarchy with Washington seated splendidly on the throne. “Some people have so connected the ideas of tyranny and monarchy as to find it very difficult to separate them … but if all other things are once adjusted, I believe strong arguments might be produced for admitting the title of king.”

(Chernow 2010, 427-428)

To maintain the fighting spirit of his army, Washington introduced a decoration that came to be known as the “Purple Heart.” in cases of “unusual gallantry” or “extraordinary fidelity and essential service,” soldiers would receive a purple heart-shaped cloth, to be worn over the left breast. Since it was to be conferred on noncommissioned officers and ordinary soldiers, the decoration supplied further proof of Washington’s growing egalitarian spirit during the war. (After a lapse in its use, the Purple Heart was revived by presidential order in 1932, and anyone in the U.S. Army became eligible for it.) At the time when Washington inaugurated the honor, fighting had largely ceased, and only isolated deaths remained in the war. One of the last victims was his sparkling young aide John Laurens, who had hoped to raise black troops in the South. “Poor Laurens is no more,” Washington wrote glumly to Lafayette that October. “He fell in a trifling skirmish in South Carolina, attempting to prevent the enemy from plundering the country of rice.”

(Chernow 2010, 429-430)

As Washington contemplated the postwar world and wondered how to make America happy, free, and powerful, he was uniquely well positioned to affect the outcome. Adams, Jay, and Franklin were off on diplomatic assignments in Europe, while Hamilton and Madison were too junior to assume leadership roles. Washington had eliminated or outlived his military rivals, leaving his stature unequaled. Since the Continental Army had suffered most from defective Articles of Confederation, Washington was a natural proponent of national unity and worried about anarchy and bloodshed erupting in the war’s aftermath. He saw that the states, to protect themselves against European interference, needed to band together in a more effective union and that Congress required an independent revenue source to service wartime debt.

(Chernow 2010, 442)

The figure hurrying back to his long-forgotten past had just accomplished something more extraordinary than any military feat during the war. At war’s end, he stood alone at the pinnacle of power, but he never became drunk with that influence, as had so many generals before him, and treated his commission as a public trust to be returned as soon as possible to the people’s representatives. Throughout history victorious generals had sought to parlay their fame into political power, whereas Washington had only a craving for privacy. Instead of glorying in his might, he feared its terrible weight and potential misuse. He had long lived in the shadow of the historical analogy to the Roman patriot Cincinnatus, and now, with his resignation at Annapolis, that analogy was complete. When John Trumbull later painted a series of portraits for the I.S. Capitol, he chose Washington’s resignation at Annapolis as one of the crowning moments of the founding era and the highest proof of Washington’s virtue. At the time of the resignation, Trumbull was in London and recorded European wonderment at the news, saying that it “excites the astonishment and admiration of this part of the world.” 

Washington had served as commander in chief for eight and a half years, the equivalent of two presidential terms. His military triumphs had been neither frequent nor epic in scale. He had lost more battles than he had won, had botched several through strategic blunders, and had won at Yorktown only with the indispensable aid of the French Army and fleet. But he was a different kind of general fighting  a different kind of war, and his military prowess cannot be judged by the usual scorecard of battles won and lost. His fortitude in keeping the impoverished Continental Army intact was a major  historic accomplishment. It always stood on the brink of dissolution, and Washington was the one figure who kept it together, the spiritual and managerial genius of the whole enterprise: he had been resilient in the face of every setback, courageous in the face of every danger. He was that rare general who was great between battles and not just during them. The constant turnover of his army meant that he continually had to start from scratch in training his men. He had to blend troops from different states into a functioning national force, despite deep ideological fears of a standing army. And before the French alliance, he had lacked the sea power that was all-important in defeating the British. 

(Chernow 2010, 457)

“I will frankly declare to you … that any memoirs of my life, distinct and unconnected with the general history of the war, would rather hurt my feelings than tickle my pride whilst I lived. I had rather glide gently down the stream of life, leaving it to posterity to think and say what they please of me, than by an act of mine to have vanity or ostentation imputed to me.” 

For all of Washington’s professions of modesty, the thought of his high destined niche in history was never far from his mine. Few historical figures have so lovingly tended their image. As we have seen, he had issued detailed instructions for preserving his wartime papers. When the wagon train loaded with these bulky papers set out for Mount Vernon in November 1783, he fussed over their transport, telling the lieutenant entrusted with the mission that he shouldn’t cross the Susquehanna or the Potomac by ferry if the winds were too high or any other dangers arose. As if the wagons were encrusted with precious jewels, he delivered this warning: “The wagons should never be without a sentinel over them; always locked and the keys in your possession.” He experienced vast relief when the papers showed up safely at his home. 

No sooner had these documents arrived than a would-be biographer, John Bowie, and a would-be historian of the Revolution, Dr. William Gordon, emerged from the woodwork. In an extraordinary tribute, Congress had given Washington access to its secret papers on the same terms as its members, enhancing the value of his cooperation to future historians. To maintain the tradition of military submission to civilian authority, Washington decided not to open his papers until Congress did likewise with its archives. Washington wasn’t reluctant to disclose the historical record; he just thought it might seem conceited and presumptuous to do so first and that a congressional decision would make it seem less self-aggrandizing. Of the two projects, Washington was more troubled by the biography, fearing his cooperation might smack of vanity. “I will frankly declare to you … that any memoirs of my life, distinct and unconnected with the general history of the war, would rather hurt my feelings than tickle my pride whilst I lived,” he told Dr. James Craik. “I had rather glide gently down the stream of life, leaving it to posterity to think and say what they please of me, than by an act of mine to have vanity or ostentation imputed to me.” 

(Chernow 2010, 471-472)

Many improvements that Washington had first projected in the early 1770s came to fruition only after the long hiatus of the war. Where visitors had once approached Mount Vernon by a straight path, they now rode along a symmetrical pair of serpentine drives that tantalized them with flickering glimpses of the distant mansion. At the end, right before they alighted, their carriages ran over rough gravel and curved around a bowling green and a small circular courtyard. Unable to tell a lie, Washington admitted in his diary that he had “cut down the two cherry trees in the courtyard.” The house was now attached to the outlying buildings by graceful covered walkways that, instead of shutting out nature, disclosed distant vistas of natural beauty. All in all, Mount Vernon contained fourteen of fifteen separate buildings, giving newcomers the impression that they had rolled into a small, bustling rural village. 

(Chernow 2010, 476)

The early postwar years witnessed a mad and often lawless scramble for western lands, and many settlers had little regard for eastern landlords who claimed their property. Throughout the Revolution Washington received reports of squatters occupying his land while legitimate tenants fell behind on payments. At first, inclining toward leniency, he said that those squatters who improved the land should be allowed to stay at reasonable rents. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, he said they might have inadvertently settled the land without realizing it was his. By the summer of 1784, however, he had lost all patience. Western rents had become his main source of revenue, and he decided to take matters into his own hands by personally dunning recalcitrant tenants. Less than a year after laying down his commission at Annapolis, the American Cincinnatus, badly strapped for cash, was reduced to a bill collector. 

(Chernow 2010, 479) 

Perhaps nothing better illustrated Washington’s pioneering farm work than his development of the American mule, a hardy animal representing a cross between a male donkey (also called a jack) and a female horse. Mules were less fragile than horses but more docile than donkeys and cheap to maintain. Before Washington championed these creatures, they had hardly existed in the country. He started breeding them when he received a gray jack from the king of Spain called Royal Gift and a black jack called Knight of Malta from Lafayette. Royal Gift was big and lumbering but lacking in animal spark, whereas Knight of Malta was small but lusty. Washington cunningly bred the two animals and ended up with a jack known as Compound that merged the size of Royal Gift with the feisty nature of Knight of Malta. After some early difficulties, the resulting donkeys settled down and performed their duties, producing fifty-seven mules at Mount Vernon by century’s end and enabling Washington to realize his hope to “secure a race of extraordinary goodness that will stock the country.” In addition to his better-known title of Father of His Country, Washington is also revered in certain circles as the Father of the American Mule. 

(Chernow 2010, 483-484)

“I hope it will not be conceived from these observations that it is my wish to hold the unhappy people who are the subject of this letter in slavery. I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it [slavery], but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, and that by legislative authority. And this, as far as my suffrage will go, shall never be wanting.”

The news of Lafayette’s feat came as Washington was being prodded to take a public stand on abolishing slavery. Before the war it had required an act of the royal governor and his council to free a slave. Then in 1782 a new law gave masters permission to free their own slaves, and hundred manumitted at least a few. Influenced by the Revolution, antislavery societies sprang up across Virginia. In 1785 the Virginia legislature debated whether freed slaves should be permitted to stay in the state – something that might give their enslaved brethren seditious ideas – and abolitionist petitions were introduced. Washington became the target of a subtle but persistent campaign by abolitionists to enlist him in their cause. When Elkanah Watson visited Mount Vernon in January 1785, he bore books on emancipation written by British abolitionist Granville Sharpe, founder of the African colony of Sierra Leone. And then there were people such as Robert Pleasants, a Virginia Quaker who liberated seventy-eight of his slaves and proclaimed the Washington’s failure to follow suit would leave an everlasting stain on his reputation. 

That May, Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury, two eminent Methodist ministers, brought to Mount Vernon an emancipation petition that they planned to introduce in the Virginia legislature. Although Washington refrained from signing it, he voiced “his opinion against slavery,” Asbury recorded in his diary, and promised to write a letter supporting the measure if it ever came to a vote. This typified Washington’s ambivalent approach to slavery in the 1780s: he privately made no secret of his disdain for the institution, but neither did he have the courage to broadcast his views or act on them publicly. After endorsing abolition, he shunted direct action onto other shoulders. Amis a blistering debate, the Coke-Asbury petition failed in the Virginia House of Delegates that November, with Madison reporting to Washington, “A motion was made to throw it under the table, which was treated with as much indignation on one side, as the petition itself was on the other.” Such fierce emotions must have given pause to Washington, if he harbored any unspoken thoughts about a future return to the political arena. 

Washington’s quandary over slavery was thrown into high relief by a visit on April 9, 1786, from a local slave owner, Philip Dalby, who had recently traveled to Philadelphia with his slave, a mulatto waiter named Frank. After Frank was spirited away by a team of Quaker abolitionists, Dalby filed suit in the Pennsylvania assembly and, to drum up support, placed a shrill ad in the Alexandria newspaper, warning planters about the “insidious” work of Philadelphia Quakers. Incensed over the incident, Washington dashed off a strongly worded letter to his Philadelphia friend Robert Morris that expressed no sympathy for the Quakers, decrying instead their “acts of tyranny and oppression.” Unless these practices ceased, he warned, “none of those whose misfortune it is to have slaves as attendants will visit the city if they can possibly avoid it, because by so doing they hazard their property or they must be at the expense … of providing servants of another description for the trip.” This wasn’t the only time Washington talked of slavery as a curse visited on him rather than a system of privilege enforced by him. 

At this point in the letter, Washington suddenly remembered that he opposed slavery and had to justify his righteous indignation about the Quaker actions: “I hope it will not be conceived from these observations that it is my wish to hold the unhappy people who are the subject of this letter in slavery. I can only say that there is not a man living who dishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it [slavery], but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, and that by legislative authority. And this, as far as my suffrage will go, shall never be wanting.” Of course, Washington lacked a vote in the state legislature and took refuge in a position that was largely symbolic. The idea that abolition could be deferred to some future date when it would be carried out by cleanly incremental legislative steps was a common fantasy among the founders, since it shifted the burden onto later generations. It was especially attractive to Washington, the country’s foremost apostle of unity, who knew that slavery was potentially the country’s most divisive issue. 

Historians often quote a September 1786 letter from Washington to John Francis Mercer as signaling a major forward stride in his thinking on slavery: “I ever mean (unless some particular circumstance should compel me to it) to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by the legislature by which slavery in this country may be abolished by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees.” But this noble statement then took a harsh turn. Washington mentioned being hard pressed by two debts – to retire one of which, “if there is no other resource, I must sell land or Negroes to discharge.” In other words, in a pinch, Washington would trade slaves to settle debts. Clearly, the abolition of slavery would have exacted too steep an economic price for Washington to contemplate serious action. A month later Washington made a comment that narrowed the scope of his possible action: “It is well known that the expensive mansion in which I am, as it were, involuntarily compelled to live will admit of no diminution of my income.” In other words, for all his rhetorical objections to slavery, Washington found it impossible to wean himself away from the income it produced. Habituated to profligate spending and baronial lifestyle, he was in no position to act forcefully on his principled opposition to slavery until the very end of his life. 

It has long been debated whether Washington’s growing aversion to slavery resulted from moral scruples of from a sense that slavery was a bad economic bargain, in which masters paid more for slaves’ upkeep than they reaped in profit from their labor. The latter problem weighed on him in the mid-1780s, when the failure of his corn crop, the principal food for his slaves, slashed the profitability of his operations. Though he probably never read it, Washington would have agreed with Adam Smith’s theory in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that slavery was a backward system because workers lacked economic incentives to improve performance. Slavery grew especially inefficient for Washington after he switched from labor-intensive tobacco cultivation to grain production, leaving him with surplus hands. In February 1786 he sat down in his study to tote up the number of slaves at his five farms and came up with a figure of 216. He must have been alarmed to discover that the number of slave children had risen to a startling 92, or nearly half the slaves, a figure that guaranteed that this slave population would burgeon from natural increase. 

(Chernow 2010, 489-491)

The son of a slave named Venus, West Ford was owned by Washington’s brother Jack and his wife, Hannah, and grew up on their plantation, Bushfield, in Westmoreland County. When Hannah died around 1801, she singled out West Ford as the only slave to receive his freedom when he reached twenty-one. Ford’s privileged status was further confirmed when Jack and Hannah’s son Bushrod, who would inherit Mount Vernon, gave him 160 acres adjoining the estate. Beyond such undeniable evidence of partiality, legend passed down through two branches of Ford descendants that Venus had identified George Washington as the little boy’s father and that he had attended church with Washington and even gone hunting and riding him. 

While historians have learned not to repudiate such stories with knee-jerk rigidity, George Washington’s paternity of West Ford seems highly doubtful. The notion that he might have met and impregnated Venus during a trip that her mistress, Hannah, made to Mount Vernon seems unlikely. (Washington didn’t visit Bushfield during the years in question.) Where the Sally Hemings affair was exposed during Jefferson’s lifetime and her son Madison later published a memoir about it, the West Ford story slumbered suspiciously for a century and a half. With Mount Vernon invaded by visitors after the Revolutionary War, Washington constantly regretted his lack of privacy, and he would not likely have gambled his vaunted, hard earned reputation by sleeping with a visiting slave. There is also the problem that Weashington was likely sterile, although the problem with having children may have come from Martha. Perhaps the most compelling evidence against Washington being West Ford’s father is that, in this abundantly documented life, not a single contemporary ever alluded to his having this mulatto child around him. Nor is there a single reference to Venus or West Frod in his voluminous papers. By contrast, one notes how frequently the ubiquitous Billy Lee pops up in Washington’s papers or in contemporary accounts. Had the decorous Washington fathered West Ford, he most certainly would not have flaunted this lapse by taking him to church or riding to hounds with him. It is also hard to believe that Washington’s malicious political enemies during his presidency would not have dredged up this damaging episode to discredit him. The most likely explanation of West Ford’s singular status is that he was sired by Jack Washington or one of his three sons, Bushrod, Corbin, or William Augustine. 

(Chernow 2010, 492-493)

Although he agreed to serve a three-year term as president, he later said that it was “much against my inclination,” a way to salve any wounded feelings among his fellow officers. His success in purging the society of its disputed features was only partial. He wanted the group to discard national meetings and limit assemblies to state chapters, which, among other things, would lower his own high-profile connection with it. Openly opposing him, delegates voted to retain the general gatherings, and several state chapters refused to accept the alterations adopted at the national meeting, leaving the hereditary feature intact. If Washington had shown political agility in tackling the group’s problems and juggling conflicting demands he had also seen that he couldn’t determine the final outcome and was reluctant to be party to something beyond his control. 

Having quieted the uproar temporarily, Washington knew that “the jealousies of the people are rather asleep than removed on this occasion.” Had it not been for his deep sense of solidarity with American and French officers and a respect for the group’s laudable work for widows and orphans, Washington probably would have severed his ties with the Cincinnati and proposed its abolition. The intransigence of state societies in contesting reforms only hardened his resolve to insulate himself from them. He devised a compromise whereby he remained a figurehead and signed official forms, while keeping a self-protective distance, planning all the while to step down as president before the next general meeting in 1787.

(Chernow 2010, 499-500)

“We are either a united people under one head … or we are thirteen independent sovereignties, eternally counteracting each other.”

Even as Houdon worked on his statue of Washington, which reflected a hopeful stance toward America’s future, the latter was heartsick at the country’s disarray and feared that peace would undo the valiant work accomplished by the Continental Army. His complaints about the Articles of Confederation were consistent with those voiced during the war. The government had no real executive branch, just an endless multiplicity of committees. The few executive departments were adjuncts of a chaotic, ramshackle Congress, which Washington condemned as “wretchedly managed.” This legislative body required a quorum of nine states to do business; operated on a one-state, one-vote basis; and could pass major laws only with a unanimous vote. The United States wasn’t a country but a confederation of thirteen autonomous states, loosely presided over by Congress. The states’ blatant selfishness frustrated any effort to run a sound national government, which had no real enforcement powers over them. As Washington phrased it in a letter, “We are either a united people under one head … or we are thirteen independent sovereignties, eternally counteracting each other.” Americans now defined themselves as the antithesis of everything English, even if that acted to their detriment. 

Thanks to congressional impotence, the government was unable to repay creditors who had financed the Revolution. The paper issued to them now traded at a tiny fraction of its face value, and Congress was powerless to redeem it. Still lacking an independent revenue source, Congress could request money from the states but not compel them to pay. Meanwhile America was fast becoming an irredeemably profligate nation. Despite his own checkered history with London creditors, Washington was adamant that Americans should pay their prewar debts to England, as stipulated in the pease treaty. The federal government also lacked the power to regulate trade among states or with foreign nations. Many states imposed duties on goods from neighboring states, and as Madison cynically interpreted it for Jefferson, “the predominant seaport states were fleecing their neighbors.” The resulting trade disputes led to scorching interstate battles. As England imposed restrictions on American trade in the West Indies, the federal government was helpless to retaliate. Without such power, Washington thought, the United States could never negotiate commercial treaties or bargain advantageously with other countries. If the stated tried individually to regulate trade, he warned, “an abortion or a many-headed monster would be the issue.”

Washington also perceived a pressing need for American military power. Still hemmed in by hostile foreign nations in North America, the country had a federal army of fewer than a thousand men. England refused to surrender a string of forts that stretched in a broad arc from the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley. Spain also figured as a threat. The peace treaty had granted the United States the territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi. This produced friction with Spain, which shut the lower Mississippi River to American commerce, threatening the livelihood of restive western farmers. There was a more distant threat to peace: in 1785 Barbary pirates from northern Africa began preying on American merchant vessels, which no longer enjoyed the protection of the British Navy. “Would to Heaven we had a navy to reform those enemies to mankind or crush them into non-existence,” Washington told Lafayette. There was no way to create a sizable army or navy without shoring up federal power. 

Perhaps most disturbing to Washington was the prospect that liberty would descend into anarchy. Some populist demagogue, he feared, might exploit the weakness of a feeble central government to establish a dictatorship. Where Jefferson and Madison dreaded a powerful national government as the primrose path to monarchy, Washington and Hamilton continued to view a strong central government as the best bulwark against that threat. “What stonishing changes a few years are capable of producing!” Washington exclaimed to John Jay in 1786. “I am told that even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror.”

(Chernow 2010, 513-515)

Washington was frankly baffled and, in his time-honored executive style, canvassed friends about how to revolve his dilemma, enlisting Madison, Humphreys, Knox, and Jay. Each exchange disclosed another layer of doubt on his part. To Humpphreys, Washington confessed his fear that the Constitutional Convention might fail, much as he had been haunted by fear of failure when named commander in chief in 1775. Failure “would be a disagreeable predicament for any of them [the delegates] to be in, but more particularly so for a person in my situation,” he wrote. Since he personified the country, he stood to lose the most from accusations of partisanship. On the other hand, this might be a last opportunity to salvage a deteriorating nation. Any failure, he said, could be construed “as an unequivocal proof that the states are not likely to agree in any general measure … and consequently that there is an end put to federal government.” In soliciting opinions, he again preferred to give a passive appearance to active decisions, making it seem that he was being reluctantly borne along by fate, friends, or historical necessity, when he was actually shaping as well as reacting to events. This technique allowed him to cast himself into the modest role of someone answering the summons of history. It also permitted him to wait until a consensus had emerged on his course of action. If Washington could never entirely resist the allure of fame, neither could he openly welcome it. 

Not all of Washington’s advisers thought he should attend. Humphreys reminded him of the potentially illegal nature of the gathering and, consequently, the huge reputational risk. “I concur fully in sentiment with you concerning the inexpediency of your attending the convention,” he wrote. Knox favored Washington’s going but felt obliged to point out that the Philadelphia convention might be “an irregular assembly,” even an illegal one, since it would operate outside the amendment process spelled out in the Articles of Confederation. It might even expose delegates to conspiracy charges. On the other hand, Washington’s presence would draw New England states that had boycotted the Annapolis conference, converting it into a truly national gathering. To pique Washington’s interest, Jay sent him a clairvoyant sketch of a new government divided into legislative, executive, and judicial branches. “Let Congress legislate,” he told Washington. “Let others execute. Let others judge.” The letter foreshadowed the exact shape of the future government. 

(Chernow 2010, 522)

Not long after Washington wrote so gloomily to Hamilton, the Constitutional Convention experienced a spectacular breakthrough. In mid-July it was agreed that the small states would be represented equally in the Senate, while the House would have proportional representation based on population. For Washington and other Virginia delegates, it was a bitter pill to swallow, threatening to weaken the federal government critically. Nonetheless, an eminently pragmatic man, Washington accepted the need for painful compromises to form a union, assuring Henry Knox that the government being shaped by the delegates was “the best that can be obtained at the present moment, under such diversity of ideas as prevail.”

Perhaps the most uncomfortable debate hinged on the slavery issue. The abolitionist movement had made considerable headway in New England but was losing ground in the South after a brief flurry of postwar interest. Slavery was the most vexing topic at the convention. As Pierce Butler of South Carolina commented, “The security the southern states want is that their negroes may not be taken from them, which some gentlemen within or without doors have a very good mind to do.” Employing thinly disguised blackmail, come southern delegates vowed to quit the convention if anyone interfered with their peculiar institution. “The true question at present is whether the southern states shall, or shall not, be parties to the union,” said John Rutledge of South Carolina.

The delegates agreed that slavery wouldn’t be mentioned by name in the Constitution, giving way to transparent euphemisms, such as “persons held to service or labor.” Slaveholders won some substantial concessions. Fo the purposes  of representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College, they would be able to count three-fifths of their slave population. This was no mean feat: slaves made up 40 percent of the population in Virginia, for instance, and 60 percent in South Carolina. The slave trade would also be shielded from any tampering for at least twenty years. Through a fugitive slave clause, masters would be able to reclaim runaway slaves in free states – a provision George Washington would be able to reclaim runaway slaves in free states – a provision George Washington would liberally employ in future years. Referring to these hard-fought victories for the southern states, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison would later castigate the Constitution as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” 

(Chernow 2010, 536-537)

“If General Washington had a daughter, I firmly believe she would be demanded in marriage by one of the royal families of France or England, perhaps by both; or, if he had a son, he would be invited to come a courting to Europe.”

The public clamor for Washington to become president arose from his heroism, his disinterested patriotism, and his willingness to surrender his wartime command. Another, if minor, factor was his apparent sterility and lack of children, which made it seem that he had been divinely preserved in an immaculate state to become the Father of His Country. In March 1788, in listing the arguments for electing Washington, the Massachusetts Centinel included this one: “As having no son – and therefore not exposing us to the danger of an hereditary successor.” This was a plausible fear at a time when monarchs routinely made dynastic marriages and when people worried that European powers would subvert the new republican government. John Adams expressed to Jefferson his relief that Washington would be a childless president: “If General Washington had a daughter, I firmly believe she would be demanded in marriage by one of the royal families of France or England, perhaps by both; or, if he had a son, he would be invited to come a courting to Europe.” To sway Washington to run, Gouverneur Morris slyly alluded to his childless state: “You will become the father to more than three millions of children.”

Assailed by doubts, Washington decided to serve only if convinced that “very disagreeable consequences” would result from his refusal. As the election drew near, he made it plain that accepting the presidency would be his life’s  most painful decision. “Be assured, my dear sit,” he told Lafayette, “I shall assume the task with the most unfeigned reluctance and with a real diffidence, for which I shall probably receive no credit from the world.” One way Washington reconciled himself to the job was to regard it as a temporary post that he would occupy only until the new government was established on a firm footing. In early October 1788 he confided to Hamilton that, if he became president, it would be with the hope “that at a convenient and an early period my services might be dispensed with and that I might be permitted once more to retire.” In fact, Washington later admitted to Jefferson that he had not planned to serve out a single term as president and had been “made to believe that in 2 years all would be well in motion and he might retire.” It seems safe to say that Washington never dreamed he would serve out even one full term as president, much less two. Had he realized that his decision would entangle him in eight more years of arduous service, he likely would never have agreed to be president. 

The thing that, at a stroke, ended Washington’s vacillation was the timetable set up by Congress for the election: presidential electors would be chosen in January 1789 and then vote in February. With his rather formal personality, Washington was lucky that he didn’t need to engage in electioneering, for he lacked the requisite skills for such campaigning. Had he been forced to make speeches or debate on the stump, he would not have fared very well. Tailor-made for this transitional moment between the patrician style of the colonial past and the the rowdy populism of the Jacksonian era, Washington could remain incommunicado as the electors voted. 

In late January he was heartened by signs of a resounding victory for federalists in the first congressional elections, showing broad-gauged support for the Constitution. “I cannot help flattering myself [that] the new Congress on account of the … various talents of its members will not be inferior to any assembly in the world,” he told Lafayette. This would only have enhanced the presidency’s attractions for Washington. If his election was predictable, it wasn’t foreordained that he would win unanimously. In mid-January Henry Lee foresaw that even antifederalist electors would feel obliged to vote for Washington. Casting their votes on February 4, 1789, they vindicated Lee’s prediction: all 69 electors voted for Washington, making him the only president in American history to win unanimously. 

(Chernow 2010, 549-551)

“I rejoice in a belief that intellectual light will spring up in the dark corners of the earth; that freedom of inquiry will produce liberality of conduct; that mankind will reverse the absurd position that the many were made for the few; and that they will not continue slaves in one part of the globe, when they can become freemen in another.”

Though the Constitution said nothing about an inaugural address, Washington, in an innovative spirit, contemplated such a speech as early as January 1789 and asked a “gentleman under his roof” – David Humphreys – to draft one. Washington had always been economical with words, but the collaboration with Humphreys produced a wordy document, seventy-three pages long, which survives only in tantalizing snippets. In this curious speech, Washington spent a ridiculous amount of time defending his decision to become president, as if he stood accused of some heinous crime. He denied that he had accepted the  presidency to enrich himself, even though nobody had accused him of greed: “In the first place, if I have formerly served the community without a wish for pecuniary compensation, it can hardly be suspected that I am at present influenced by avaricious schemes.” Addressing a topical concern, he disavowed any desire to found a dynasty, pleading his childless state. Closer in tone to future inaugural speeches was his ringing expression of faith in the American people. He devised a perfect formulation of popular sovereignty, writing that the Constitution had brought forth “a government of laws made and executed by the fair substitutes of the people alone.” Showing an Enlightenment spirit, he generalized the American Revolution into a movement blazing a path toward the universal triumph of freedom: “I rejoice in a belief that intellectual light will spring up in the dark corners of the earth; that freedom of inquiry will produce liberality of conduct; that mankind will reverse the absurd position that the many were made for the few; and that they will not continue slaves in one part of the globe, when they can become freemen in another.”

This ponderous speech never saw the light of day. Washington sent a copy to James Madison, who wisely vetoed it on two counts: it was much too long, and its lengthy legislative proposals would be interpreted as executive meddling with the legislature. Instead, Madison drafted for Washington a far more compact speech that avoided tortured introspection. A whirlwind of energy, Madison would seem omnipresent in the early days of Washington’s administration. He drafted not only the inaugural address but also the official response by Congress and then Washington’s response to Congress, completing the circle. This service established Madison, despite his major role in the House, as a preeminent adviser and confidant to the new president. Oddly enough, he was not troubled that his advisory relationship to Washington might be construed as violating the separation of powers. 

Washington knew that everything he did at the swearing-in would establish a tone for the future. “As the first of everything in our situation will serve to establish a precedent,” he reminded Madison, “it is devoutly wished on my part that these precedents may be fixed on true principles.” He would shape indelibly the institution of the presidency. Although he had earned his reputation in battle, he made a critical decision not to wear a uniform at the inauguration or beyond, banishing fears of a military coup. Instead, he would stand there aglitter with patriotic symbols. To spur American manufactures, he would wear a double-breasted brown suit made from broadcloth woven at the Woolen Manufactory of Hartford, Connecticut. The suit had gilt buttons with an eagle insignia on them; to complete his outfit, he would wear white hosiery, silver shoe buckles, and yellow gloves. Washington already sensed that Americans would emulate their presidents. “I hope it will not be a great while before it will be unfashionable for a gentleman to appear in any other dress,” he told Lafayette, referring to his American attire. “Indeed, we have already been too long subject to British prejudices.” To burnish his image further on inauguration day, Washington powdered his hair and wore a dress sword on his hip, sheathed in a steel scabbard. 

(Chernow 2010, 565-566)

The sole constitutional requirement for the swearing-in was that the president take the oath of office. That morning a congressional committee decided to add solemnity by having Washington place his hand on a Bible during the oath, leading to a frantic, last-minute scramble to find one. A Masonic lodge came to the rescue by providing a thick Bible, bound in deep brown leather and set on a crimson velvet cushion. By the time Washington appeared on the portico, the Bible rested on a table draped in red velvet. 

The crowd grew silent as New York chancellor Robert R. Livingston administered the oath to Washington, who was visibly moved. As he finished the oath, he bent forward, seized the Bible, and brought it to his lips. Washington felt this moment from the bottom of his soul: one observer noted the “devout fervency” with which he “took the oath and the reverential manner in which he bowed down and kissed the Bible.” Legend has it that he added “So help me God,” though this line was first reported sixty-five years later. Whether or not Washington actually said it, very few people would have heard him anyway, since his voice was soft and breathy. For the crowd below, the oath of office was enacted as a kind of dumbshow. Livingston had to lift his voice and inform the crowd, “It is done.” He then intoned: “Long Live George Washington, President of the United States.” The spectators responded with huzzas and chants of “God bless our Washington! Long live our beloved President!” They celebrated in the only way they knew, as if greeting a new monarch with the customary cry of “Long Live the King!”

(Chernow 2010, 568)

The Martha Washington who set out for New York was a more matronly woman than the doughy wife who showed up regularly at the Continental Army camp each winter. Like her husband, she now wore spectacles on occasion. Ever dutiful, she did her best to live up to her new station on the national scene. With political instincts to rival her husband’s, she had ordered green and brown wool from Hartford to make riding costumes for herself and was lauded in the press for being “clothed in the manufacture of our country.”

(Chernow 2010, 572)

No small part of the splendor of Washington’s establishment was his household contingent of twenty servants, seven of the slaves. All the servants, white and black, were buffed to a high gloss. A few slaves were bedecked in the same costumes as the white servants: a white livery with red trim on the cuffs and collars. Cocked hats, gloves, and well-polished shoes completed the glossy outfit. To posterity, it seems shocking that Washington imported slaves into the presidential mansion, but Jefferson would bring a dozen slaves from Monticello to the White House; the tradition of having slaves in the presidential household unfortunately lasted until the death in 1850 of Zachary Taylor, the last of the slaveholding presidents. 

(Chernow 2010, 584)

“I am not afraid to die and therefore can bear the worst. Whether tonight, or twenty years hence, makes no difference. I know that I am in the hands of a good Providence.”

For a man of such prodigious strength, Washington had been pestered by recurrent medical problems, and his presidency proved no exception. He had weathered more than eight years of war partly because as a planter he was accustomed to a rugged outdoor life. As president, he found it hard to adapt to a sedentary job in an urban setting, which may have weakened his health. In mid-June 1789 he ran a fever as a fast-growing tumor appeared on his left thigh. The area grew so tender and inflamed that it became excruciating for him to sit. Four years earlier Washington had watched his Mount Vernon overseer, John Alton, “reduced to a mere skeleton” from a fatal abscess on his thigh, and he must have been alarmed when he developed a comparable symptom.

The president summoned Dr. Samuel Bard, a prominent New York physician, who diagnosed the condition as the cutaneous form of anthrax. Petrified that Washington would expire, Bard refused to leave his bedside for several days. The situation must have shocked everyone around Washington: no sooner had the deferral government been formed than its president lay in mortal peril. In all likelihood, Washington had a carbuncle or soft tissue infection. As might be expected, he was the picture of stoic courage. “I am not afraid to die and therefore can bear the worst,” he told Bard evenly. “Whether tonight, or twenty years hence, makes no difference. I know that I am in the hands of a good Providence.” The public knew something was wrong, if only because Tobias Lear had servants cordon off Cherry Street, stopping traffic. The household staff also sprinkled straw outside the mansion to deaden passing footsteps. Still, the public had no notion of the gravity of the president’s illness.

(Chernow 2010, 586)

The menacing growth on his thigh and his mother’s death slowed Washington down only slightly as he forged the office of the presidency, which immediately involved him in a thicket of constitutional issues. Could the Supreme Court give advisory opinions to the legislative and executive branches? Would the executive branch supervise American foreign policy, subject to congressional approval, or vice versa? Numberless questions about the basic nature of the federal government would be decided during Washington’s presidency, often in the throes of heated controversy. Although Washington had not been an architect of the system of checks and balances or separation of powers, he gave sharp definition to them by helping to draw the boundaries of the three branches of government in a series of critical test cases. 

A central component of the Whig orthodoxy that had spurred the American Revolution was the supremacy of the legislative branch, viewed as a curb to the executive. By design, the framers of the Constitution devoted Article I to a lengthy description of legislative powers, giving Congress the ability to help shape the other two branches. Left deliberately vague was the office of the presidency, allowing its first occupant to fill in the blanks. The earnest Washington tried to adhere to the letter of the Constitution and hoped to enjoy harmonious relations with Congress. But he soon realized that the Constitution was less a precise blueprint for action than a set of general guidelines whose many ambiguities required practical clarification. If bemused by some congressional practices, he tried not to trespass on legislative prerogatives. For instance, he privately opposed the Senate’s closed-door policy, but he kept a discreet silence in public. For its part, Congress groped to define its relationship to the president. In June 1789 some congressmen wanted Washington to have to gain senatorial approval to fire as well as hire executive officers – the Constitution was silent on the subject; the House duly approved that crippling encroachment on executive authority. When the Senate vote ended in a tie, Vice President tAdams cast the deciding vote to degreeart the measure, thereby permitting the president to exert true leadership over his cabinet and, for better or worse, preventing the emergence of a parliamentary democracy. 

(Chernow 2010, 590)

A couple of days later Washington returned to the Senate, which approved the three commissioners to negotiate with the Creeks. It proved his farewell appearance in the Senate chamber. In a decision pregnant with lasting consequences, Washington decided that he would henceforth communicate with that body on paper rather than in person and trim “advise and consent” to the word consent. For instance, when Washington appointed David Humphreys as a diplomat to the Court of Portugal in February 1791, Maclay noted that the choice was sent to the Senate as a fait accompli: “The president sends first and asks for our advice and consent after.”

This decision may have done more to define the presidency and the conduct of American foreign policy than an entire bookshelf of Supreme Court decisions on the separation of powers. Where the Constitution had been sketchy about presidential powers in foreign affairs, Washington made the chief executive the principal actor, enabling him to initiate treaties and nominate appointees without first huddling with the Senate. It was an instinctive reaction from a man who had grown accustomed to command  during the war. If a touch imperious, it was a far more realistic approach to foreign policy than constant collaboration and horse-trading between the president and Senate. For one thing, the presidency was continuously in session, unlike Congress, and it was much easier for one man to take decisive action, especially in an emergency. Washington’s decision also widened the distance between president and Senate, enabling the latter to function as an independent, critical voice in foreign policy rather than as a subordinate advisory panel. 

(Chernow 2010, 592-593)

One wonders whether Jefferson’s hesitation reflected an equivocal attitude toward the new federal government itself, since he had been, at best, a lukewarm supporter of the Constitution. At first he had preferred tinkering with the Articles of Confederation and favored only “three or four new articles to be added to the good, old, and venerable fabric.” He was especially chagrined by the absence of a bill of rights and the “perpetual re-eligibility” of the president, which he feared would make the job “an office for life first and the hereditary.” Jefferson also retained a congenital distrust of politics, which he personally found a form of sweet torture, the source of both exquisite pain and deep satisfaction. He especially hated bureaucracy, whereas Hamilton had no such qualms.

(Chernow 2010, 599)

From the outset Jefferson was dismayed by the political atmosphere in New York. In his cultivated taste for fine wines, rare books, and costly furnishings, he was very much a Virginia aristocrat. One British diplomat noted his regal ways: “When he travels, it is in a very kingly style … I am informed that his secretaries are not admitted into his carriage but stand with their horses’ bridles in their hands, till he is seated, and then mount and ride before his carriage.” Nonetheless Jefferson was extremely vigilant about the possible advent of a pseudo-aristocracy in America. His years spent witnessing the extravagant court of Versailles had only confirmed his detestation of monarchy. As he made the rounds of New York dinner parties he was appalled to hear people voice their preference for “kingly over republican government.” Only Washington, he thought, could check this fatal drift toward royal government, although he finally harbored doubts as to whether he would do so. It also upset Jefferson that Hamilton seemed to be poaching on his turf, a problem partly of Washington’s own making. With departmental lines still blurry, Washington invited all department heads  to submit opinions on matters concerning only one of them, producing sharp collisions and intramural rivalries. On the other hand, this method gave the president a full spectrum of opinion, saving his administration from monolithic uniformity. 

(Chernow 2010, 601)

Perhaps no president has tried so persistently to set an example of good conduct. He grew agitated whenever people gave him gifts, lest it be thought he was accepting bribes. When David Humphreys sent him elegant shoe buckles, he protested: “Presents … to me are of all things the most painful; but when I am so well satisfied of the motives which dictated yours, my scruples are removed.” It would have been easy for him to turn into a demagogue. Instead he tried hard to float high above all partisan considerations. In September 1792 he grew incensed at reports that he had supported the candidacy of John Francis Mercer for a Virginia congressional seat. Washington sent Mercer an indignant letter, pointing out that his interference in congressional elections would be “highly improper, as the people ought to be entirely at liberty to choose whom they pleased to represent them in Congress.” In such incidents Washington showed that he was forever on guard against the abuse of his presidential powers.

(Chernow 2010, 606)

When he set out in mid-October, the business of government did not grind to a halt. Congress had instructed Alexander Hamilton to draw up a report on public debt and to devise an all-encompassing plan to fund it. It was a huge and punishing task – Congress wanted it in hand when it reconvened in early January – but Hamilton, a dynamo who thrived on hard work, gloried in his ability to produce outstanding results on short notice. Prior to leaving New York, Washington also signed a proclamation for the first Thanksgiving on November 26, declaring that “Almighty God” should be thanked for the abundant blessings bestowed on the American people, including victory in the war against England, creation of the Constitution, establishment of the new government, and the “tranquility, union, and plenty” that the country now enjoyed.

(Chernow 2010, 608-609)

This executive mansion never had the dark, smoky atmosphere that we associate with an age of candlelight dinners. Attuned to the spirit of technical innovation, Washington bought fourteen lamps of a new variety patented by Aime Argand, a Swiss chemist. They used whale oil and burned with a cleaner, brighter light than anything used before, chasing away evening shadows and affording up to twelve times the illumination of candlepower. Washington mounted these lamps in the drawing rooms, hallway, entries, and stairwells, banishing shadows from the residence. As he wrote excitedly, “These lamps, it is said, consume their own smoke, do no injury to furniture, give more light, and are cheaper than candles.” In this manner, Washington initiated America’s insatiable appetite for oil, provided theatrical lighting to burnish the splendid statecraft that he practiced, and introduced a welcome touch of modernity. 

(Chernow 2010, 617)

A little after noon on January 8, 1790, George Washington climbed into his cream-colored coach and rode off to Federal Hall behind a team of four snow-white horses. In its sparsely worded style, the Constitution mandated that the president, from time to time, should give Congress information about the stat of the Union, but it was Washington who turned this amorphous injunction into a formal speech before both houses of Congress, establishing another precedent. Trailing him in his entourage were the chief justice and members of his cabinet, leading to yet another tradition: that the State of the Union speech (then called the annual address) would feature leading figures from all three branches of government. 

(Chernow 2010, 618)

On January 14, 1790, Hamilton delivered the Report on Public Credit that Congress had requested in the fall. With his noble mind and encyclopedic store of knowledge, Hamilton served up a magnum opus that eclipsed anything the legislators had envisioned. No evidence exists that Hamilton consulted Washington before he completed it. Since the president was not well schooled in the arcana of public finance, Jefferson thought he had been hoodwinked: “Unversed in financial projects and calculations and budgets, his approbation of them was bottomed on confidence in the man [Hamilton].” Jefferson’s insinuation that Washington was a helpless dupe of Hamilton is highly misleading. Dating back to their wartime frustrations with Congress, Washington and Hamilton had shared a common worldview and an expansive faith in executive power. They had seen firsthand how Britain’s well-funded public debt had enabled it to prosecute the war with seemingly limitless resources. Late in the war Washington had blasted the fanciful notion that “the war can be carried on without money, or that money can be borrowed without permanent funds to pay the interest of it.”

The federal government had fallen woefully in arrears in paying off the enormous debt – $54 million in national and $25 million in state obligations – amassed to fight the Revolutionary War. If would have been tempting for the young nation to repudiate this burden, but as a matter of policy and morality, Washington and Hamilton thought nations should honor their debts if they aspired to full membership in the community of nations. “With respect to the payment of British debts,” Washington had written before becoming president, “I would fain hope … that the good sense of this country will never suffer a violation of a public treaty, not pass acts of injustice to individuals. Honesty in states, as well as in individuals, will ever be found the soundest policy.” If Washington gave Hamilton something close to carte blanche on fiscal matters, it was because they essentially agreed on the steps needed to tame America’s staggering debt. But he had also set up a policy-making apparatus in which major decisions had to cross his desk for approval, so he was confident that he could control the sometimes-brash Hamilton. 

Hamilton’s audacious report argued that, to restore fiscal sanity, the government did not have to retire the debt at once. All it had to do was devise a mechanism to convince people that, by setting aside revenues at predictable intervals, it would faithfully retire it in future years. Such a well-funded debt, Hamilton argued, would be a “national blessing” inasmuch as it would provide investment capital and an elastic national currency. The report foresaw a medley of taxes, from import duties to excise taxes on distilled spirits, to pay off existing debt and to service a new foreign loan. With its new taxes and its funded debt, Hamilton’s program was bound to dredge up unwelcome memories of the British ministry. 

(Chernow 2010, 619-620)

Once he decided to serve a second term, George Washington was reelected by a unanimous 132 votes in the Electoral College. If one counted his selection as commander in chief, president of the Constitutional Convention, and president in his first term, he had compiled a string of four straight unanimous victories. Again inaction had been his most potent form of action, silence his most effective form of expression. Still, it was a subdued triumph for the overburdened president, who confessed to Henry Lee that he “would have experienced chagrin if my re-election had not been by a pretty respectable vote. But to say I feel pleasure from the prospect of commencing another tour of duty would be a departure from truth.” 

(Chernow 2010, 684)

On September 21 France abolished the monarchy and declared itself a republic Two weeks later Madame Lafayette informed Washington of her husband’s dreadful plight and thwarted plans to defect to America: “His wish was that I should go with all our family to join him in England, that we might go and establish ourselves together in America and there enjoy the consoling sight of virtue worthy of liberty.” She pleaded with Washington to dispatch an envoy who might reclaim her husband in the name of the United States. However distraught he was about Lafayette, Washington was entangled in a political predicament. He could not afford to antagonize the new French republic, and Lafayette’s name was now amathema among the French revolutionaries. Gouverneur Morris, named minister to France in early 1792, warned Washington against undertaking any rash actions on Lafayette’s behalf. “His enemies here are as virulent as ever,” he cautioned. For the moment, the only permissible response was personal charity. Drawing on his own money Gouverney Morris extended 100,000 livres to Lafayette’s Wife, while Wahsington deposited 2,300 guilders from his own funds into an Amsterdam account for her use. He assured Madame Lafayette that he wasn’t indifferent to her husband’s plight, “nor contenting myself with inactive wishes for his liberation. My affection to his nation and to himself are unabated.”

Developments in France only aggravated the growing discord in American politics. Regarding the French revolutionaries as kindred spirits, Republicans rejoiced at the downfall of the Bourbon dynasty, while Federalists, dreading popular anarchy, dwelled on the grisly massacres. The fate of France was more than an academic question after it promulgated its Edict of Fraternity, promising fraternal support to revolutionary states around the globe. Amid this revolutionary camaraderie, in August 1792 the French conferred honorary citizenship upon Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Thomas Paine. For Jeffersonians, it fulfilled their fondest dream of a worldwide democratic revolution, while Federalists found the universal dream of a worldwide democratic revolution, while Federalists found the universal dream disturbing. Alexander Hamilton protested, “Every nation has a right to carve out its own happiness in its own way.” Among the imperial powers, the Edict of Fraternity generated widespread fear of subversion, sharpening tensions throughout Europe. 

On January 21, 1793, the former King Louis XVI, who had helped win American independence, was decapitated before a crowd of twenty thousand people intoxicated with a lust for revenge. After stuffing the king’s head between his legs, the executioner flying his remains into a rude cart piled with corpses, while bystanders dipped souvenirs into the royal blood pooled under the guillotine. Vendors soon hawked patches of the king’s clothing and locks of bloodstained hair, in a spectacle of sadistic glee that shocked many people inside and outside France. On February 1 France declared war on Great Britain and Holland.

(Chernow 2010, 688-689)

Disclaiming any special talents as an architect, Washington nonetheless endorsed a design for the new home of Congress sketched by Dr. William Thonton, a versatile doctor, inventor, and abolitionist. Thornton came up with a clever amalgam of classical architecture and modern American themes. Jefferson rejoiced in the building’s style as “Athenian” and, to emphasize the parallel with antiquity, changed its name from the plain-sounding Congress House to the far more grandiose Capitol. Washington was especially enamored of the dome, which he thought would lend “beauty and grandeur to the pile,” its visual effect enhanced by a magnificent colonnade. Washington’s approval also helped the Irish architect James Hoban win the commission for the President’s House, later known as the White House. “He has been engaged in some of the first buildings in Dublin,” Washington wrote admiringly of Hoban, “appears a master workman, and has a great many hands of his own.” The White House cornerstone was laid on October 13, 1792. As in all matters pertaining to the capital, Washington wanted an elastic design that would accommodate future growth. “It was always my idea … that the building should be so arranged that only a part of it should be erected at present,” he told the commissioners, “but upon such a plan as to make the part so erected an entire building, and to admit of an addition in future.” Curiously enough, the Supreme Court was then held in such low regard that it did not merit its own edifice and had to settle for a room in the Capitol. 

Washington’s strategy of building slowly and allowing for future expansion was an apt metaphor for his strategy for developing the entire country. And unintended metaphor perhaps cropped up in the composition of the downtrodden workforce laboring to complete the capital. Washington had favored importing indentured servants to do the building – he praised Germans for their steady work habits, Scots for their mechanical abilities – but there was no way that a southern capital could emerge without drawing heavily on slaves, given the local shortage of free labor. Hundreds of slaves pulled up stumps, leveled trees, made bricks, and cooped out trenches. Because Congress had authorized no money to acquire property and construct buildings, the project had to subsist on the proceeds of land auctions, and using slave labor helped cushion the budgetary stringency. By 1795 three hundred slaves were hard at work in the federal district, hurrying to finish public or private buildings. 

(Chernow 2010, 703-704)

A few days after Washington’s confrontation with Randolph, Attorney General William Bradford died, saddling Washington with yet another appointment. Eager to restore a geographic mix to his cabinet, he turned to John Marshall, the tall, handsome Virginian destined to stand out as the foremost legal mind of the age. “When future generations pursue the history of America,” Washington once said, “they will find the name of Marshall on its sacred page as one of the brightest ornaments of the age in which he lived.” In approaching Marshall, Washington appealed to self-interest as well as loftier goals, noting that in Philadelphia Marshall could supplement his income with “a lucrative practice.” Marshall still declined. When Washington then considered Colonel Harry Innes for the job, he said that Innes’s reputation for extreme laziness did not disqualify him, since “the office of attorney general of the U[nited] States does not require constant labor or attention.” Washington ended up choosing Charles Lee as attorney general (not to be confused with the wartime general with whom Washington feuded). Even though Washington had emphasized the job’s part-time nature, Lee left Philadelphia so often that Washington warned him that “unpleasant remarks” were made about his continual absences as well as charges that he had made “a sinecure of the office.” 

(Chernow 2010, 736)

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References

Chernow, Ron. 2010. Washington: A Life. N.p.: Penguin Publishing Group.

ISBN 978-1-59420-266-7