His Excellency: George Washington (33 page)

Washington’s urge to keep himself and his presidency hovering above the political fray received assistance from the only other unequivocal occupant of America’s pantheon. In April 1790 his sole rival as the premier American hero, Benjamin Franklin, finally went to his maker. In his will Franklin bequeathed his crabtree walking stick to Washington, explaining that “if it were a sceptre, he has merited it, and would become it.” (The notion of a crabtree scepter had the perfect Franklin touch, a seamless blend of the ordinary and the elevated.) A month earlier the first medal minted in the United States bearing Washington’s image on one side and his accomplishments on the other appeared in Philadelphia. And a month before then, in February 1790, the practice of celebrating Washington’s birthday as a national holiday became a tradition. It all contributed to the impression that Washington was not directing the government so much as floating above the infant republic as a sagacious and beloved guardian.
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Even the matters of etiquette and symbolism, however, could have constitutional consequences, as Washington learned in August 1789. The treaty-making power of the president required that he seek “the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” He initially interpreted the phrase to require his personal appearance in the Senate and the solicitation of senatorial opinion on specific treaty provisions in the mode of a large advisory council. But when he brought his proposals for treaties with several southern Indian tribes to the Senate, the debate became a prolonged shouting match over questions of procedure. The longer the debate went on the more irritated Washington became, eventually declaring, “This defeats every purpose of my coming here.” He abruptly stalked out of the session, as one witness reported, “with a discontented Air . . . of sullen dignity.” From that time onward, the phrase “advise and consent” meant something less than direct executive solicitation of senatorial opinion, and the role of the Senate as an equal partner in the crafting of treaties came to be regarded as a violation of the separation of powers principle.
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Though he never revisited the Senate, he did honor his pledge to visit all the states in the union. In the fall of 1789 he launched a month-long tour of New England that carried him through sixty towns and hamlets. Everywhere he went the residents turned out in droves to glimpse America’s greatest hero parading past. And everywhere he went New Englanders became Americans, at least for the duration of his visit. The only sour note was a patch of bad weather at the end, which produced an epidemic of respiratory infections among the throngs of well-wishers who had waited for hours in the cold rain to see him in the flesh. (In an ironic tribute, newspapers named the epidemic after him.) Since Rhode Island had not yet ratified the Constitution, he skipped it, then made a separate trip the following summer to welcome the proudly independent latecomer into the new nation. During a visit to the Jewish synagogue in Newport he published an address on religious freedom that turned out to be the most uncompromising endorsement of the principle he ever made. (One must say “made” rather than “wrote,” because there is considerable evidence that Jefferson wrote it.) Whatever sectional suspicions New Englanders might harbor toward that faraway thing called the federal government, when it appeared in their local neighborhoods in the majestic form of George Washington, they saluted, cheered, toasted, and embraced it as their own.
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The southern tour was a more grueling affair, covering nearly two thousand miles during the spring of 1791. Instead of regarding it as a threat to his health, however, Washington described it as a tonic; the real risk, he believed, was the sedentary life of a desk-bound president. The entourage of eleven horses included his white parade steed, Prescott, whom he mounted at the edge of each town in order to make an entrance that accorded with the heroic mythology surrounding his military career. Prescott’s hooves were painted and polished before each appearance, and Washington usually brought along his favorite greyhound, mischievously named Cornwallis, to add to the dramatic effect. Much like a modern political candidate on the campaign trail, Washington’s speeches at each stop repeated the same platitudinous themes, linking the glory of the War of Independence with the latent glory of the newly established United States. (The linkage came naturally at places like Charleston, Camden, and Guilford Court House, former battlefields in the southern campaign that Washington was seeing for the first time.) The ladies of Charleston fluttered alongside their fans when Washington took the dance floor; Prescott and the four carriage horses held up despite the nearly impassable and often nonexistent roads; Cornwallis, however, wore out and was buried on the banks of the Savannah River in a brick vault with a marble tombstone that local residents maintained for decades as a memorial to his master’s historic visit. In the end all the states south of the Potomac could say they had seen the palpable version of the flag, which was Washington himself.
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During the southern tour, one of the earliest editorial critiques of Washington’s rather conspicuous embodiment of authority appeared in the press. He was being treated at each stop like a canonized American saint, the editorial lamented, or perhaps like a demigod “perfumed by the incense of addresses.” But the chief complaint harked back to the primordial fear haunting all republics: “However highly we may consider the character of the Chief Magistrate of the Union, yet we cannot but think the fashionable mode of expressing our attachment . . . favors too much of Monarchy to be used by Republicans, or to be received with pleasure by the President of a Commonwealth.”
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Such criticisms were rarely uttered publicly during the initial years of Washington’s presidency. But they lurked in the background, exposing how double-edged the political imperatives of the American Revolution had become. To secure the revolutionary legacy on the national level required a “singular character” who embodied national authority more visibly than any collective body like Congress could convey. Washington had committed himself to playing that role by accepting the presidency; indeed, he regarded his symbolic role as the core function of his presidency. But at the center of the revolutionary legacy lay a virulent suspicion of any potent projection of political power by a “singular figure.” And since the very idea of a republican chief executive was a novelty, there was no available vocabulary to characterize such a creature except the verbal traditions surrounding European courts and kings. By playing the role that he believed history required, Washington made himself vulnerable to the most potent set of apprehensions about monarchical power that recent American history could muster.

He could justifiably claim to be the one and only “singular character” who could credibly insist that he had earned the right to be trusted with power. He could also argue, as he did to several friends throughout his first term, that no man was more poised for retirement, that he sincerely resented the obligations of his office as a lengthening shadow of public responsibility that kept spreading over his dwindling days on earth. If critics wished to whisper behind his back that he looked too regal riding a white stallion with a leopard-skin cloth and gold-rimmed saddle, so be it. He himself knew that he longed for a crabtree walking stick more than a scepter. In the meantime he would play his assigned role as America’s presiding presence; or, as the multiple toasts in his honor put it, “the man who unites all hearts.”

THE GREAT DELEGATOR

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XERCISING EXECUTIVE
authority called for a completely different set of leadership skills than symbolizing it. Washington’s administrative style had evolved through decades of experience as master of Mount Vernon and commander of the Continental army. (In fact, he had fewer subordinates to supervise as president than he did in those earlier incarnations.) The cabinet system he installed represented a civilian adaptation of his military staff, with executive sessions of the cabinet resembling councils of war designed to provide collective wisdom in a crisis. As Jefferson later described the arrangement, Washington made himself “the hub of the wheel” with routine business delegated to the department heads at the rim. It was a system that maximized executive control while also creating the essential distance from details. Its successful operation depended upon two acquired skills Washington had developed over his lengthy career: first, identifying and recruiting talented and ambitious young men, usually possessing superior formal education to his own, then trusting them with considerable responsibility and treating them as surrogate sons in his official family; second, knowing when to remain the hedgehog who keeps his distance and when to become the fox who dives into the details.

On the first score, as a judge of talent, Washington surrounded himself with the most intellectually sophisticated collection of statesmen in American presidential history. His first recruit, James Madison, became his most trusted consultant on judicial and executive appointments and his unofficial liaison with Congress. The Virginian was then at the peak of his powers, having just completed a remarkable string of triumphs as the dominant force behind the nationalist agenda at the Constitutional Convention and the Virginia ratifying convention, as well as coauthor of
The Federalist Papers.
From his position in the House of Representatives he drafted the address welcoming Washington to the presidency, then drafted Washington’s response to it, making him a one-man shadow government. Madison’s unique combination of abilities as a profound student of politics and a brilliant political tactician had captured Washington’s attention even before the debates in Philadelphia, when he had helped to prepare Washington for his chairman’s role in the convention. Soon after the inaugural ceremony Madison showed Washington his draft of twelve amendments to the Constitution, subsequently reduced to ten and immortalized as the Bill of Rights. Washington approved the historic proposal without changing a word, and trusted Madison to usher it through Congress with his customary proficiency.
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One of Madison’s early assignments was to persuade his reluctant friend from Monticello to serve as secretary of state. Thomas Jefferson combined nearly spotless revolutionary credentials with five years of diplomatic experience in Paris, all buoyed by a lyrical way with words and ideas most famously displayed in his draft of the Declaration of Independence. Though ironic in retrospect, Jefferson’s acceptance letter set a deferential tone and expressed a willingness to harness his vaunted powers to Washington’s foreign policy agenda: “My chief comfort,” he promised, “will be to work under your eye, & the wisdom of measures to be dictated by you, & implicitly executed by me.”
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Alexander Hamilton was the third member of this talented trinity, in terms of sheer brainpower probably the brightest of the lot. While Madison and Jefferson had come up through the Virginia school of politics, which put a premium on an understated style that emphasized indirection and stealth, Hamilton had come out of nowhere (actually impoverished origins in the Caribbean), which produced a dashing, out-of-my-way style that imposed itself ostentatiously, much in the manner of the bayonet charge he had led at Yorktown. As Washington’s aide-de-camp during the war, Hamilton had occasionally shown himself to be a somewhat feisty and headstrong surrogate son, always searching for an independent command beyond Washington’s shadow. But his loyalty to his mentor was unquestioned, and his affinity for the way Washington thought was unequaled. Moreover, throughout the 1780s Hamilton had made himself the chief advocate for fiscal reform as the essential prerequisite for an energetic national government, making him the obvious choice as secretary of treasury once Robert Morris declined.

The inner circle was rounded out with three appointments of lesser luster. Henry Knox had served alongside Washington from the Boston siege to Yorktown and had long ago learned to subsume his own personality so thoroughly within his chief’s that disagreements became virtually impossible. More than a cipher, as some critics of Washington’s policies later claimed, Knox joined Vice President Adams as a seasoned New England voice within the councils of power. Indeed, his role as secretary of war continued the duties he had performed in the old confederation government. John Jay added New York’s most distinguished legal and political mind to the mix, and also brought extensive foreign policy experience to the ongoing conversation. As the first attorney general, Edmund Randolph lacked the gravitas of Jay and the experience of Knox, but his reputation for endless vacillations was offset by solid political connections within the Tidewater elite, reinforced by impeccable bloodlines. Washington’s judgment of the assembled team was unequivocal: “I feel myself supported by able co-adjutors,” he observed in June 1790, “who harmonize extremely well together.”
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In three significant areas of domestic policy, each loaded with explosive political and constitutional implications, Washington chose to delegate nearly complete control to his “co-adjutors.” His reasons for maintaining a discreet distance differed in each case, but taken together, they reflected his recognition that executive power still lived under a monarchical cloud of suspicion and could only be exercised selectively. Much like his Fabian role during the war, choosing when to avoid conflict struck him as the essence of effective executive leadership, especially when he enjoyed capable surrogates brimming over with energy and ambition.

The first battle he evaded focused on the shape and powers of the federal courts. The Constitution offered even less guidance on the judiciary than it did on the executive branch. And once again the studied ambiguity reflected the widespread apprehension toward any menacing projection of federal power that upset the compromise between state and federal sovereignty. Washington personally preferred a unified body of national law, regarding it as a crucial step in the creation of what the Constitution had described as “a more perfect union.” When nominating Jay to head the Supreme Court he argued that the federal judiciary “must be considered as the Key-Stone of our political fabric,” since a coherent court system that tied the states and regions together with the ligaments of law would achieve more in the way of national unity than any other possible reform.
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