From the outset of the administration, the Washingtons did their best to cope with the inconveniences of the Cherry Street house. Though roomy by ordinary standards, it could not accommodate enough people for large formal dinners and receptions. In the fall of 1789, when Washington heard that the Count de Moustier was being recalled to France, he jumped at the chance to occupy his house at 39-41 Broadway, on the west side of the street south of Trinity Church (erected two years earlier by merchant Alexander Macomb). This second presidential mansion was four stories high, featured two high-ceilinged drawing rooms, and was much more stately than its predecessor. When one New Yorker toured the house and its two neighbors under construction in 1787, he was thrilled by their imposing dimensions, saying that “they are by far the grandest buildings I ever saw and are said to excel any on the continent.”⁴⁴

On February 23, 1790, the Washingtons moved from their old cramped quarters to this airy, commodious new residence. Where they could seat only fourteen people at state dinners before, they now had room for more than two dozen. In the rear of the house, glass doors opened onto a balcony with unobstructed views of the Hudson River. Washington also built a stable nearby with handsome planked floors and twelve stalls for horses. With his eye for furnishings, he bought from Moustier everything from a dozen damask armchairs to huge gilt mirrors to a bidet. Eager to augment presidential dignity, he bought more than three hundred pieces of gilt-edged porcelain for dinner parties. Green was the omnipresent color of the house, which had green silk furniture and a green carpet spotted with white flowers. Washington’s love of greenery was further reflected in his purchase of ninety-three glass flowerpots scattered throughout the residence. It is curious that America’s first president chose a residence so thoroughly saturated with a French sensibility.

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 Aimé 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.”⁴⁵ 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.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

The State of the President

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 state 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.

Everything about the new government still had an improvised feel, and Washington’s advent occasioned some last-minute scurrying in the Senate chamber. Maclay referred to “nothing but bustle about the Senate Chamber in hauling chairs and removing tables” for his arrival.¹ Once at Broad and Wall, Washington entered the hall—on later occasions, constables held back the crowd with long white rods—and mounted to the second-floor hall. Everyone clung nervously to protocol, and the president went through an awkward comedy of manners with the legislators. When he entered, they rose; when he was seated, they sat. Still dressed in shades of mourning for his mother, he was garbed in a suit of midnight blue, verging on black, that he had brought back from the Hartford factory.

In a hopeful speech, Washington anticipated Hamilton’s financial program by endorsing the need to establish public credit and promote manufacturing, agriculture, and commerce. He sounded a theme already resonant in his wartime letters: the need to ensure a strong national defense: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.”² He also advocated the advancement of science, literature, and learning through the formation of a national university. The speech was composed in the didactic style of a wise parent, patiently lecturing his children, that characterized Washington’s public pronouncements and defined his political rhetoric. When it ended, the legislators stood, Washington bowed, and then he descended to the street. William Maclay did not fault Washington’s speaking style, but ever watchful for monarchical tendencies, he carped that Washington had fallen into “the British mode of business” by asking department heads to lay certain documents before Congress.³

When Washington delivered his speech, he had little sense that a furor was about to erupt over Hamilton’s funding system or that American politics would become fractious and nasty. Even before Hamilton took office, Congress had enacted legislation to create a string of lighthouses, beacons, and buoys along the eastern seaboard for the customs service, placing Hamilton in charge of a vast public works project. He also had enormous patronage powers, as he named customs inspectors and other revenue officials. During the colonial era, the evasion of customs duties had become a time-honored practice, and Hamilton had to seek Washington’s approval for constructing ten boats called revenue cutters to police the waterways and intercept smugglers, giving birth to what later became the Coast Guard. For political harmony, Washington and Hamilton distributed the construction work and skipper jobs to different parts of the country, but for a nation already wary of bureaucracy, the program represented a significant, and for some ominous, expansion of government power.

As the office handling money matters, the Treasury Department was bound to be a flash point for controversy. When Congress debated its shape in 1789, republican purists wanted it headed by a three-member board as a safeguard against concentrated power. When a single secretary was chosen instead, Congress tried to hem in his power by requiring that, unlike the other cabinet secretaries, he should file periodic reports directly with them. Instead of subordinating Hamilton to the legislature, however, this approach enmeshed him in its workings. The treasury secretary’s aggressive style guaranteed that the executive branch, not Congress, would oversee economic policy. As with foreign policy, executive primacy in economic matters ran counter to the view of many framers who had hoped that Congress would enjoy policy-making centrality, but this development promised greater efficiency and consistency than would otherwise have been the case.

On January 14, 1790, Hamilton delivered the Report on Public Credit that Congress had requested in the fall. With his nimble 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].”⁴ 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.”⁵