Washington: A Life

Perhaps the most subtly persuasive pleas emanated from Hamilton, who could easily picture himself holding a significant place in a Washington administration. He stalked Washington for the presidency with all the cu

As their exchanges continued, Hamilton upped the stakes, telling Washington he had no choice but to assume the presidency. Now older and more self-confident than the wartime aide-de-camp, Hamilton addressed Washington as a peer. The success of the new government was hardly self-evident, and only Washington, he argued, could put the new Constitution to a fair test. If the first government failed, “the framers of it will have to encounter the disrepute of having brought about a revolution in government, without substituting anything that was worthy of the effort.” 43 Hamilton contended that Washington’s refusal to become president would “throw everything into confusion.”44 This was what Washington yearned to hear: that overwhelming necessity demanded that he make the supreme sacrifice and serve as president.

Washington believed that the new government needed a fair trial and an auspicious start. He always credited the power of first impressions and now imagined that “the first transactions of a nation, like those of an individual upon his first entrance into life, make the deepest impression.”45 With Madison, he employed a powerful metaphor: “To be shipwrecked in sight of the port would be the severest of all possible aggravations to our misery.”46

Beyond the image projected by the first government, also important was the fact that the first president, in conjunction with Congress, would shape its institutional structure. In Madison’s words, the first two years would “produce all the great arrangements under the new system and . . . may fix its tone for a long time to come.”47 Washington knew this, but the prospect of such crushing responsibilities only intensified his dilemma. Having sat through the Constitutional Convention, he knew the sketchy nature of Article II, which dealt with the presidency: “I should consider myself as entering upon an unexplored field, enveloped on every side with clouds and darkness.”48 He also knew the presidency would convert him into a partisan figure, threatening his chaste reputation as the personification of America. In this vein, the Federal Gazette of Philadelphia worried that his wartime reputation would be blotted as he shifted from the “fields of military glory” into “the thorn-covered paths of political administration.”49

The public clamor for Washington to become president arose from his heroism, his disinterested patriotism, and his willingness to surrender his wartime command. Another, if minor, factor was his apparent sterility and lack of children, which made it seem that he had been divinely preserved in an immaculate state to become the Father of His Country. In March 1788, in listing the arguments for electing Washington, the Massachusetts Centinel included this one: “As having no son—and therefore not exposing us to the danger of an hereditary successor.”50 This was a plausible fear at a time when monarchs routinely made dynastic marriages and when people worried that European powers would subvert the new republican government. John Adams expressed to Jefferson his relief that Washington would be a childless president: “If General Washington had a daughter, I firmly believe she would be demanded in marriage by one of the royal families of France or England, perhaps by both; or, if he had a son, he would be invited to come a courting to Europe.” 51 To sway Washington to run, Gouverneur Morris slyly alluded to his childless state: “You will become the father to more than three millions of children.”52

Assailed by doubts, Washington decided to serve only if convinced that “very disagreeable consequences” would result from his refusal.53 As the election drew near, he made it plain that accepting the presidency would be his life’s most painful decision. “Be assured, my dear sir,” he told Lafayette, “I shall assume the task with the most unfeigned reluctance and with a real diffidence, for which I shall probably receive no credit from the world.”54 One way Washington reconciled himself to the job was to regard it as a temporary post that he would occupy only until the new government was established on a firm footing. In early October 1788 he confided to Hamilton that, if he became president, it would be with the hope “that at a convenient and an early period my services might be dispensed with and that I might be permitted once more to retire.”55 In fact, Washington later admitted to Jefferson that he had not pla

The thing that, at a stroke, ended Washington’s vacillation was the timetable set up by Congress for the election: presidential electors would be chosen in January 1789 and then vote in February. With his rather formal personality, Washington was lucky that he didn’t need to engage in electioneering, for he lacked the requisite skills for such campaigning. Had he been forced to make speeches or debate on the stump, he would not have fared very well. Tailor-made for this transitional moment between the patrician style of the colonial past and the rowdy populism of the Jacksonian era, Washington could remain incommunicado as the electors voted.

In late January he was heartened by signs of a resounding victory for federalists in the first congressional elections, showing broad-gauged support for the Constitution. “I ca