Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (15 page)

Hamilton thought that most people were “prepared for a pretty high tone in the demeanour of the Executive,” but they probably would not accept as high a tone as was desirable. “Notions of equality,” he said, were “yet . . . too general and too strong” for the president to be properly distanced from the other branches of the government. Note his widely held presumption—“yet”—that American society, following the progressive stages of development, would eventually become more unequal and hierarchic like the societies of Europe. In the meantime, Hamilton suggested, the president ought to follow the practice of “European Courts” as closely as he could. Only department heads, high-ranking diplomats, and senators—and not mere congressmen—should have access to the president. “Your Excellency,” as Hamilton and many others continued to call Washington, might hold a half-hour levee (the English term for the king’s receptions) no more than once a week, and then only for invited guests. He could give up to four formal entertainments a year, but in order to maintain the president’s dignity he must never accept any invitations or call on anyone.
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Adams for his part urged Washington to make a show of “splendor and majesty” for his office. The president needed an entourage
of chamberlains, aides-de-camp, and masters of ceremonies to conduct the formalities of his office.

As uncomfortable as he often was with ceremony, Washington knew that he had to make the presidency “respectable,” and when he became president he spared few expenses in doing so. Although he was compelled to accept his $25,000 presidential salary—an enormous sum for the age—he spent nearly $2,000 of it on liquor and wine for entertaining. In his public appearances he dressed the part, in a dignified dark suit with a ceremonial sword and hat. Usually he rode in an elaborately ornamented cream-colored coach drawn by four and sometimes six white horses, attended by four servants in orange-and-white livery, followed by his official family in other coaches.
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Although he tried to offset this show of regal elegance by taking a walk each afternoon at two o’clock just like any other citizen, he remained an awesome character. He was, as Senator Maclay described him, “a cold formal Man,” who seldom laughed in public.
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When Washington appeared in public, bands sometimes played “God Save the King.” In his public pronouncements the president referred to himself in the third person. His dozens of state portraits were all modeled on those of European monarchs. Indeed, much of the iconography of the new nation, including its civic processions, was copied from monarchical symbolism. The fact that the capital, New York, was more aristocratic than any other city in the new Republic added to the monarchical atmosphere. Mrs. John Jay, the wife of the acting secretary of state and the future chief justice, and someone familiar with foreign courts, turned her home into the center of fashionable society and welcomed Lady Kitty Duer, Lady Mary Watts, Lady Christiana Griffin, and other American women who refused to accept simple republican forms of address. When Jefferson arrived in the spring of 1790 to assume his duties as secretary of state, he thought he was the only real republican in the capital.
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Concerned as he was with “the style proper for the Chief Magistrate,” Washington conceded that a certain monarchical tone had to be made part of the government; and since he had always thought of himself as being on stage, he was willing, up to a point, to play the part of a republican
king. He was, as John Adams later caustically remarked, “the best actor of the presidency we have ever had.”
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Washington was nearly as much of an aristocrat as America ever produced—in his acceptance of social hierarchy and in his belief that some were born to command and some to obey. Although he trusted the good sense of the people in the long run, he believed that they could easily be misled by demagogues. His great strength was his realism. He always sought, as he put it at the outset of the struggle against Britain, to “make the best of Mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish.” Ultimately, his view of human nature was much closer to Hamilton’s than to Jefferson’s. “The motives which predominate most human affairs,” he wrote, are “self-love and self-interest.”
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With these assumptions, he realized only too acutely the fragility of the new nation. As president he spent much of his time devising schemes for creating a stronger sense of nationhood. He understood the power of symbols, and his willingness to sit for long hours to have his many portraits painted was not to honor himself but to inspire the country’s national spirit. Indeed, popular celebrations of Washington became a means of cultivating patriotism. It is not too much to say that for many Americans he stood for the Union.

He promoted roads and canals, a national university, and the post office—anything and everything that would bind the different states and sections together. Washington never took the unity of the country for granted but remained preoccupied throughout his presidency with creating the sinews of nationhood. Even in the social life of the “republican court” at the capital in New York and then after 1790 in Philadelphia, he and his wife, Martha, acted as matchmakers in bringing together couples from different parts of the United States. With their own marriage and those of other Virginia families as examples, the Washingtons tended to think of marriage in dynastic terms, as a means of consolidating a ruling aristocracy for the sprawling extent of America. During his presidency he and Martha arranged sixteen marriages, including that of James Madison and Dolley Payne.
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He undertook his two long royal-like tours through the Northern and Southern states in 1789–1791 in order to bring a semblance of the
government to the farthest reaches of the land and reinforce the loyalty of people who had never seen him. Everywhere he was welcomed by triumphal arches, ceremonies, and acclaim befitting a king.
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His entourage included eleven horses, one of which was his white parade steed, Prescott. He had Prescott’s hooves painted and polished before mounting him at the edge of every town in order to make a more dramatic entrance. In each town he exchanged elaborate ceremonial addresses with the local officials, addresses that some critics thought “favored too much of Monarchy to be used by Republicans, or to be received with pleasure by a president of a Commonwealth.”
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Because of his concern for the Union, Washington was especially interested in the size and character of the White House and of the capital city that was to be named after him. The huge scale and imperial grandeur of the Federal City, as Washington modestly called it, owe much to his vision and his backing of the French-born engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant as architect.
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L’Enfant had migrated from France in 1777 as one of the many foreign recruits to the Continental Army. In 1779 he became a captain of engineers and attracted the attention of Washington for his ability to stage festivals and design medals, including that of the Society of the Cincinnati. In 1782 he organized the elaborate celebration in Philadelphia marking the birth of the French dauphin, and in 1788 he designed the conversion of New York’s City Hall into Federal Hall. Thus it was natural for L’Enfant to write Washington in 1789 outlining his plans for “the Capital of this vast Empire.” L’Enfant proposed a capital that would “give an idea of the greatness of the empire as well as . . . engrave in every mind that sense of respect that is due to a place which is the seat of a supreme sovereignty.”
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His plan for the Federal City, he said, “should be drawn on such a Scale as to leave room for that aggrandizement & embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the Nation will permit it to pursue at any period however remote.”
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Washington knew the site of the national capital had to be larger than that of any state capital. “Philadelphia,” the president pointed out, “stood
upon an area of three by two miles. . . . If the metropolis of
one State
occupied so much ground, what ought that of the United States to occupy?”
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He wanted the Federal City to become a great commercial metropolis in the life of the nation and a place that would eventually rival any city in Europe. The new national capital, he hoped, would become the energizing and centralizing force that would dominate local and sectional interests and unify the disparate states.

L’Enfant designed the capital, as he said, in order to fulfill “
the President’s intentions
.” The Frenchman conceived of a system of grand radial avenues imposed on a grid of streets with great public squares and circles and with the public buildings—the “grand edifices” of the “Congress House” and the “President’s Palace”—placed so as to take best advantage of the vistas across the Potomac. Some of the early plans for the rotunda of the Capitol even included a monumental tomb that was designed eventually to hold the first president’s body—a proposal that made Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson very uneasy.
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Although the final plans for the capital were less impressive than what Washington originally envisioned, they were still grander than those others had in mind. If Jefferson had had his way, L’Enfant would never have kept his job as long as he did, and the capital would have been smaller and less magnificent—perhaps something on the order of a college campus, like Jefferson’s later University of Virginia. Opposed as he was to anything that smacked of monarchical Europe, Jefferson thought that fifteen hundred acres would be enough for the Federal City.
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Obsessed with the new government’s weakness, other Federalists were even more eager than Washington to bolster its dignity and respectability. Most believed that this could be best done by adopting some of the ceremony and majesty of monarchy—by making, for example, the celebration of Washington’s birthday, even while he was alive, rival that of the Fourth of July. Like the king of England speaking to Parliament from the throne, the president delivered his inaugural address personally to the Congress, and like the two houses of Parliament, both houses of Congress formally responded and then waited upon the president at his residence. The English monarchy was the model for the new republican government in other
respects as well. The Senate, the body in the American government that most closely resembled the House of Lords, voted that writs of the federal government ought to be issued in the name of the president—just as writs in England were issued in the name of the king—to reinforce the idea that he was the source of all judicial power in the nation and that prosecutions ought to be carried out in his name. Although the House refused to go along, the Supreme Court used the Senate’s form for its writs.

The Federalists made many such attempts to surround the new government with some of the attributes and trappings of monarchy. They drew up elaborate rules of etiquette at what critics soon denounced as the “American Court.”
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They established ceremonial levees for the president where, as critics said, Washington was “seen in public on Stated times like an Eastern Lama.”
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Although Washington was often relieved when some of these efforts at royalizing the presidency failed, he did believe that the weekly receptions, which were excruciatingly formal affairs where no one actually conversed, were a necessary compromise between meeting the public and maintaining the majesty of the presidency. They were “meant,” he said, “to preserve the dignity & respect which was due the first magistrate.”
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Critics like Senator Maclay thought that the “empty Ceremony” of the levees smacked of European court life and had no place in republican America.
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Others went so far as to criticize the awkwardness of Washington’s bows, which were described as being “more distant and stiff” than those of a king. It was not long before the administration was being denounced for its “monarchical practices.”
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Even the fact that the servants attending the receptions had their hair powdered seemed to portend monarchy.
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But many Federalist leaders believed that a strong measure of monarchy was just what republican America needed.

Indeed, John Adams was probably the person in the new government most concerned with matters of ceremony and ritual. “Neither Dignity nor Authority,” he wrote, “can be Supported in human Minds, collected into nations or any great numbers without a Splendor and Majesty, in Some degree, proportioned to them.”
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He rode to the Senate each day
in an elaborate carriage attended by a driver in livery. He presided over the Senate in a powdered wig and small sword. More perhaps than anything else in his career, Adams’s infatuation with titles has made him appear more than a little ridiculous in the eyes of later generations. Of course, he appeared ridiculous even to some of his contemporaries, who mocked him as “the Duke of Braintree” and “His Rotundity.”
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But Adams was not alone in his interest in royal rituals. Many Federalists believed that titles and a hierarchy of distinctions were essential to the well-being of any mature stable society. If the American people were not as well suited for republican government, not as virtuous as Adams and other old Revolutionaries had once hoped, then the resort to titles, as one of the least objectionable of monarchical forms, made a great deal of sense. Americans could have a portion of monarchy without fundamentally subverting their republicanism. America was a young society, Adams said, and it should prepare for its maturity “at no very distant period of time” when hereditary institutions might be more applicable. Adams said that he did “not consider hereditary monarchy or aristocracy as ‘rebellion against nature’; on the contrary I esteem them both institutions of admirable wisdom and exemplary virtue in a certain stage of society in a great nation.” When America did come to resemble the European nations, then hereditary institutions would become “the hope of our posterity.” “Our country is not ripe for it in many respects and it is not yet necessary,” said Adams, “but our ship must ultimately land on that shore or be cast away.”
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