American Experiment (14 page)

Hamilton’s weapon was right at hand: by warning friends in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and elsewhere that Adams might actually beat out Washington for the presidency, and playing on fears that a thwarted Adams might become the pawn—or the head—of anti-Federalists, Hamilton persuaded a number of electors to withhold their second-choice votes from the Bostonian. Adams won the office, but his 34 votes fell far short of the unanimous 89 that Washington won. Belatedly he discovered that Hamilton had engineered the “dark and base intrigue.” Throwing away votes was a breach of honor, a perjury. He would get revenge. He would “drag out to public infamy both dupers and dupes” and “make those men repent of their rashness.” But Adams would have to wait.

Choosing the first Congress had also been conflict-ridden and a bit manipulative. State legislatures met for the double task of choosing senators and setting up districts for electing representatives. Once again the pros and cons of the Constitution were argued across the land, as anti-Federalists backed candidates who would seek to amend the Constitution, perhaps even convene a second constitutional convention.

Nowhere were the contests watched more closely than in Virginia. While Washington followed developments closely but silently from Mount Vernon, and Madison apprehensively from New York, Patrick Henry in Richmond rallied his followers, and dominated the selection of two senators and the rejection of Madison for the upper chamber. He engineered an appeal to Congress for an immediate second convention, and helped draw the lines for the new congressional districts in a manner that would put Madison in an anti-Federalist district. This “Henry-mander” antedated the famous “Gerrymander” in Massachusetts.

Though fearful of seeming too eager for election and afflicted with piles,
Madison returned home by stagecoach and two-wheeled chair. There he found himself pitted against a rising young politician, James Monroe. The two rivals were longtime friends, however, and agreed to tour the district together to debate the issues. Madison picked up votes by granting that additional safeguards to liberty, in a bill of rights, were necessary; and his firm backing for religious freedom helped him with the Baptist vote. His defeat of Monroe—their friendship continued unimpaired—helped Virginia send a majority of pro-Federalist representatives to New York.

Federalists won in most of the other states too, though in some cases only after a pitched battle. In Pennsylvania as elsewhere, continuing dispute over the Constitution closely affected the elections. Pennsylvanians demonstrated that they knew election artifice too; the pro-Constitution leaders put through an election law calling for the statewide rather than districtwide election of representatives, on the calculation that they would do better statewide. Both sides “ticketed” candidates and took stands on the Constitution at “conventions” or conferences before the final voting. And both sides appealed to the crucial German vote.

When the elections finally ended, it was clear that Washington would have a pro-Administration majority—though the general’s direct influence on the outcome was minimal, except perhaps in Virginia.

By April the new men were settling into their New York City houses and hostelries. Invited by Governor Clinton to stay at the Governor’s House, Washington had politely declined, adding that he would hire lodgings until a presidential house could be provided. To Madison he explained that he wished not to be placed
early
in a situation where he must entertain. In fact, Washington wanted a house and style befitting his station. Toward the end of May, Martha Washington arrived from Mount Vernon, after a trip that had turned out to be a kind of triumphal procession of its own. Soon she was cultivating close relationships with Administration wives, especially with Abigail Adams. The Adamses had taken a somewhat run-down but pleasant house on Richmond Hill, from which Abigail gazed with rapture at the “noble” Hudson, dotted with small boats bearing produce to Manhattan. Madison settled back into the Manhattan life he had known for years. Hamilton and Jay had homes convenient to Federal Hall, the temporary location of Congress.

Congress—the “first wheel of the government,” Washington called it—had got off to a dull start on March 4, 1789, after a long wait for newly elected senators and representatives to make their way to New York through the winter snow. Not until early April was a quorum finally mustered in the House. The Senate was enlivened by a dispute between its presiding officer, John Adams, and a Pennsylvania democrat, William
Maclay. Puffed up a little by his new status, “His Rotundity,” as some critics called Adams, seemed almost obsessed by questions of parliamentary practice and protocol, especially English practice and protocol. Maclay, a frontier lawyer, tall and broad and rustic, scoffed at his pretensions and punctilio and concluded that New Englanders were too parochial to get along with anyone save their close neighbors.

Matters came to a head when Adams wished to refer to the President’s Inaugural Address as “his most gracious speech.” Maclay rose. “Mr. President, we have lately had a hard struggle for our liberty against kingly authority. The minds of men are still heated: everything related to that species of government is odious to the people. The words prefixed to the President’s speech are the same that are usually placed before the speech of his Britannic Majesty. I know they will give offense.” He moved that they be struck out. Adams professed to be astonished: he was for a dignified and responsible government; if he had thought during the Revolution it would come to this, he never would have drawn his sword. A weeks-long quarrel then developed in the Senate over the President’s title—should he be referred to as “His Highness” or “His Elective Highness,” or the like? Good republicans claimed to be shocked by such monarchical instincts. Despite Adams’ admonition that a man could be “President” of
any
little organization, the final title would be simply “The President of the United States.”

The tripartite structure of the new federal government was completed in September 1789, when Congress passed the Judiciary Act establishing a Supreme Court to consist of a Chief Justice and five associates, three circuit courts, and thirteen district courts. Washington soon nominated John Jay, who was acting as Secretary of State until Jefferson’s arrival, as the first Chief Justice of the United States. An immensely experienced man as a legislator, former chief justice of New York, and diplomat, Jay was widely regarded as learned and judicious, but by the end of the 1780s he was seen by republicans as an arch-Federalist who believed in British precedents, centralized government, and presidential power. While Washington called the new judicial department the “key-stone of our political fabric,” Jay found major cases slow in coming and spent many months working with his fellow justices to set up circuits, designate judges to ride them, appoint clerks, and ensure that the new federal judges would be received in the states with proper respect.

President and Congress were engaged in the everyday business of government as well. They could hardly escape it; problems of taxes, imports, Indians, foreign relations engulfed them. Washington started out with only two assistants, David Humphreys and Tobias Lear, but soon he had
to recruit several other aides. Hamilton worked closely with him on political matters, Madison on legislative. Washington did not have to construct a federal executive from scratch. The Confederation had bequeathed him a Foreign Office run by John Jay and two clerks, a Treasury Board with no treasury, and a War Department with no war. A scattering of federal officers—lighthouse keepers, postmasters, tax collectors, troop commanders, diplomats—manned a long thin line of federal power. Washington’s major appointments were geographically balanced—Thomas Jefferson of Virginia (still in Paris) for Secretary of State, Alexander Hamilton of New York for Secretary of the Treasury, his old comrade-in-arms Henry Knox of Massachusetts for Secretary of War, another Virginian, Edmund Randolph, for Attorney General.

The middle and minor offices gave Washington, Adams, and the department heads the most trouble. Little had they anticipated the stream of job applicants and applications into New York. Washington had to fend off jobseekers months before the electors were even due to meet. The Administration leaders knew how to deal with place-warmers, but many job-seekers were overqualified, if anything, and some were personal friends and even family members. To Adams applied General Benjamin Lincoln, of Shays’s Rebellion fame, Samuel Otis, Robert Treat Paine, and his close friend and adopted “brother,” Richard Cranch. When his and Abigail’s good friend Mercy Warren wrote poignantly on behalf of her husband, Adams responded that he had no patronage and, if he had, neither her children nor his own could be sure of it. Similarly, President Washington wrote to his nephew Bushrod Washington, a young lawyer hankering to be appointed United States district attorney for Virginia, that he was too inexperienced for the post, that the President must stand on principle against nepotism, and that as a practical matter he could not be partial to friends and relations, “for the eyes of Argus are upon me.”

It was with relief as well as pride that the President of the United States could write to Gouverneur Morris, on October 13, 1789, that the “national government is organized.…

Two days later, the President left on a formal tour of the “Eastern” states—Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. He had “hope of perfectly reestablishing my health,” he wrote Jefferson, which a “series of indispositions”—mainly anthrax—“has much impaired.” How a trip into the New England states, in a carriage jolting over rocky roads and disgorging its passengers at every large river and quagmire, could restore haleness only a military man and plantation rider could understand.
Actually, Washington had other reasons for his journey: he wanted to make a show of federal authority and leadership among people who had not yet fully accepted the new Constitution; and he was curious about agriculture and manufacturing and the “face of the Country.” Accompanied by Hamilton, Knox, and Jay for some distance out of the city, he continued with his retinue of two secretaries and six servants.

It was rainy, that first day, and the road was rough and stony as the party proceeded through New Rochelle and Mamaroneck, but Washington was impressed by the droves of fine beef cattle and the flocks of sheep on the way to the New York market, the Indian corn and pumpkins lying yet ungathered in the fields, and widow Haviland’s “neat and decent Inn” in Rye, where they put up for the night. But next day, crossing over into Connecticut, he was even more taken by the superb landscapes on the road from Stamford to Norwalk and Fairfield, though saddened by “the Destructive evidences of British cruelty”—burned-out houses with gaunt-chimneys still standing. He noted that vessels of seventy-five tons or so could make their way up rivers to many of the towns through which he passed. The ports served mainly a coastal and West Indian trade, as local farmers bartered their grain and meat for imported articles.

Washington took the lower road into New Haven and hence missed the usual delegation braced to greet him with flowery speeches of welcome, but he found a bustling town with several Episcopalian and Congregational churches, a number of manufactories, and Yale College, then numbering 120 students. Among those welcoming him were members of the small elite who ran the town, merchants, clerics, and college faculty, but this Federalist political leadership was already beginning to meet opposition. At the bottom of the social ladder was a body of slaves—over four hundred in New Haven County—who worked mainly in fields and households but also helped in lumbering, whaling, and fishing. The slave trade, but not slavery, had been abolished in Connecticut. President Ezra Stiles of Yale would found an antislavery society the year after Washington’s visit.

Daily the Virginia planter noted the quality of the crops, the nature of the roads, the number of bushels of wheat or corn the farmers were getting from their acres, the gristmills and sawmills, the quality of the food and beds in the taverns. In Wallingford he was fascinated to “see the white Mulberry growing, raised from the seed, to feed the silkworm,” he wrote in his diary. “We also saw samples of lustring”—a glossy, heavy silk—“(exceeding good) which had been manufactured from the Cocoon raised in this Town, and silk thread very fine. This, except the weaving, is the
work of private families, without interference with other business, and is likely to turn out a beneficial amusement.”

Hartford had furnished Washington with his inaugural suit, and the President was eager to see Colonel Wadsworth’s “Woolen Manufactory.” Escorted by the colonel himself, he found a lively establishment that, after years of coping with untutored workers, inadequate machinery, and heavy mortgages, was now producing 5,000 yards of woolen goods a year at $5 a yard. Washington had been trying to encourage Americans to buy clothes made in the United States, but he had to admit that domestic “Broadcloths” were not of the best quality, though good enough, as were the “Cassimeres” and serges. Indeed, he purchased a suit of broadcloth to be sent to him in New York. Hartford also had cotton and paper mills, and a glass factory that had fallen on hard times and whose losses had to be made up through a lottery.

Hugging the western bank of the Connecticut River, and moving across the state border into Massachusetts, the President proceeded through more rain into Springfield, a town in many ways like Hartford. While dinner was being readied at the famous tavern of Zeno Parsons, Washington toured the federal arsenal—probably the same one that Shays’s men had attacked less than two years before. He found the brick powder magazine in good repair and the powder dry.

The next morning he headed along another rocky road, through forests of pine and oak, to Palmer and Spencer and Worcester. Isaac Jenks’s tavern in Spencer, which Washington noted down as a “pretty good Tavern,” was fairly typical of the inns in which Washington stayed; it charged 14p for tea, cider, punch, lodgings, and a dinner of roast beef, vegetables, and tankards of ale. Washington found the supper “only passable,” but “one could scarcely complain.”