At year’s end Martha Washington aired her frustrations to Mercy Otis Warren, pointing out that her grandchildren and Virginia family constituted the major source of her happiness: “I shall hardly be able to find any substitute that would indemnify me for the loss of a part of such endearing society.”⁸⁰ She knew other women would gladly swap places with her: “With respect to myself, I sometimes think the arrangement is not quite as it ought to have been—that I, who had much rather be at home, should occupy a place with which a great many younger and gayer women would be prodigiously pleased.”⁸¹ But she would not rail against her destiny: “I am still determined to be cheerful and to be happy in whatever situation I may be, for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions and not upon our circumstances.”⁸² To the end of her life, Martha Washington would speak forlornly of the presidential years as her “lost days.”⁸³

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Acting the Presidency

WHEN GEORGE WASHINGTON BECAME PRESIDENT, the executive departments had not yet been formed or their chieftains installed, so he placed unusual reliance on his personal secretaries, whom he dubbed “the gentlemen of the household.” ¹ He put a premium on efficiency, good manners, discretion, and graceful writing. The staff mainstay was Harvard-educated Tobias Lear, the agreeable young man brought up from Mount Vernon. In these early days Lear was a man for all seasons: dashing off private letters for Washington, cranking out dinner invitations, tending files, tutoring grandchildren, accompanying Washington on afternoon strolls or Martha on shopping sprees. So trusted was Lear that he kept the household accounts, and Washington turned to him for petty cash. His loyalty had no limits. “I have never found a single thing that could lessen my respect for him,” Lear remarked of Washington. “A complete knowledge of his honesty, uprightness, and candor in all his private transactions has sometimes led me to think him more than a man.”² When Lear married Polly Long in April 1790—Martha called her “a pretty, sprightly woman”—the Washingtons invited the young couple to share their household, enriching their lives with an extended family as they had done at Mount Vernon.³

For a second secretary, Washington retained David Humphreys, with his agile pen. Now seasoned by diplomatic experience in Paris with Jefferson, Humphreys advised Washington on questions of etiquette and was anointed chamberlain, or master of ceremonies, for the administration. The third team member was Major William Jackson, an orphan from South Carolina who had won high marks as secretary of the Constitutional Convention, having taken notes of the deliberations while preserving their secrecy—a man of discretion after Washington’s own heart. The closest that Washington came to a security guard, Jackson remained a protective presence at his side, whether he was out walking, riding, or performing official duties. Rounding out the group were Thomas Nelson, Jr., son of the late Virginia governor, and Washington’s young nephew Robert Lewis, who had escorted his aunt Martha to New York.

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

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

Washington’s first days in office were dominated by seemingly trivial symbolic issues that spoke to larger questions about the character of the new government. “Many things which appear of little importance in themselves . . . at the beginning may have great and durable consequences, from their having been established at the commencement of a new general government,” Washington instructed Vice President Adams.⁴ Every action, he knew, would be subjected to exhaustive scrutiny: “My political conduct . . . must be exceedingly circumspect and proof against just criticism, for the eyes of Argus [the hundred-eyed monster in Greek mythology] are upon me and no slip will pass unnoticed.”⁵ Washington had long felt those searching eyes trained upon him and would try hard as president to be a paragon.

Of the various government posts, it was the presidency that had the potential to slip into monarchy and subvert republican government, so every decision made about it aroused a firestorm of controversy. For many Americans, presidential etiquette seemed like the back door through which aristocratic corruption might infiltrate the system. On April 23 the Senate appointed a committee to devise suitable titles for addressing the president. Vice President Adams favored highfalutin ones. “A royal, or at least a princely, title, will be found indispensably necessary to maintain the reputation, authority, and dignity of the president,” he insisted.⁶ The final Senate recommendation was absurdly pretentious: “His Highness, the President of the United States of America, and Protector of their Liberties.”⁷ Sensitive to criticism that high-flown titles were reminiscent of monarchy, Washington gladly accepted the simpler form adopted by the House: “The President of the United States.” An approving Madison later noted that Washington had been irritated by efforts to “bedizen him with a superb but spurious title.”⁸ The controversy served notice on Washington that such matters had powerful resonance as the new republic tried to find dignified forms that didn’t smack of European decadence. “Nothing could equal the ferment and disquietude occasioned by the proposition respecting titles,” David Stuart wrote from Virginia. “As it is believed to have originated from Mr. Adams and [Richard Henry] Lee, they are not only unpopular to an extreme, but highly odious.⁹

For Washington, the etiquette issue was also related to how he would preserve his privacy and sanity as president. From the time he occupied the Cherry Street mansion, he found himself hounded by legislators, office seekers, veterans, and well-wishers. Before long, he felt himself under siege, unable to accomplish any work. After making inquiries, he learned that presidents of the Confederation Congress had been “considered in no better light than as a maitre d’hotel . . . for their table was considered as a public one.”¹⁰ As in everything else, Washington operated in uncharted waters. “I was unable to attend to any business whatsoever,” he told Stuart, “for gentlemen, consulting their own convenience rather than mine, were calling from the time I rose from breakfast—often before—until I sat down to dinner.” ¹¹ With his days cluttered with ceremonial visits, Washington complained, “I had no leisure to read or answer the dispatches which were pouring in from all quarters.”¹² As he tried to barricade himself from strangers, he wondered how he could avoid the extremes of either rebuffing visitors in a “mimickry of royalty” or becoming so secluded that he would shut out important communications. In short, how to find the “discriminating medium”?¹³