Washington: A Life

By June Washington had paid his outstanding taxes but still seemed cursed by biblical extremes of weather that descended on him with u

As Virginia and New York ratified the Constitution during the summer of 1788, Washington’s plight had only worsened. That August he told Dr. Craik that “with much truth, I can say I never felt the want of money so sensibly since I was a boy of 15 years old, as I have done for the last 12 months, and probably shall do for 12 months more to come.”68 In other words, Washington foresaw that, if he served as president, he would assume the job amid a full-blown financial crisis. The subsequent year must have been a strange interlude: his name was being bandied about for president as he struggled desperately with his debt load. The day after Christmas 1788 he informed his business agent that “I have never before felt the want of cash so severely as at present.”69 Finally, in early March 1789, after the Electoral College unanimously chose him as president, he took an unprecedented step to salvage his finances. He had suffered a treble blow: another year of poor crops, a continuing inability to collect debts except through long, tedious lawsuits, and the failure to sell land at decent prices. At this nadir of his business life, he sought a loan from a Captain Richard Conway of Alexandria. As he told Conway, “I am inclined to do what I never expected to be reduced to the necessity of doing—that is, to borrow money upon interest. Five hundred pounds would enable me to discharge what I owe in Alexandria . . . and to leave the state (if it shall not be permitted me to remain at home in retirement) without doing this, would be exceedingly disagreeable to me.”70

No sooner had Washington received the five hundred pounds from Conway at 6 percent interest than he had to request another hundred pounds two days later for “the expenses of my journey to New York, if I go thither.”71 It was an extraordinary admission: Washington needed money to attend his own inauguration as president. Even though he was shortly to receive a presidential salary, he would have to defray the expenses of the executive mansion, imposing yet another gargantuan tax upon his shrinking wealth. One can only imagine Washington’s humiliation in cadging money on the eve of his presidency. It would have been especially tough on the tender pride of a man who liked to emit an air of comfortable prosperity. That his second request for money apparently failed could only have aggravated matters.

On March 31, 1789, Washington drew up instructions for George Augustine Washington to guide his supervision of Mount Vernon in his absence. Washington had implicit faith in his nephew’s integrity and entrusted him with a general power of attorney. For the next eight years, however distracted he was by his country’s affairs, Washington would demand weekly reports down to the minute particulars of wind and weather, and he would send long weekly responses.

Washington’s money anxiety had often expressed itself in a sharp tone toward subordinates at Mount Vernon. His financial troubles now added to his recurring frustration with perso

A scalding letter that he wrote to his head carpenter, Thomas Green, on March 31, 1789—little more than two weeks before his departure for his inauguration—shows how insecure he felt about leaving his money-losing estate. Always on guard against alcohol abuse, which he branded “the ruin of half the workmen in this country,” Washington was exasperated by Green’s intractable drinking problem. He warned him that if George Augustine found him unfaithful to his engagements, “either from the love of liquor [or] from a disposition to be ru

PART FIVE

The President

President George Washington, painted by Gilbert Stuart, 1795-1796.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

The Place of Execution

THE CONGRESSIONAL DELAY in certifying Washington’s election as president only allowed more time for doubts to fester as he faced the herculean task ahead. He savored his wait as a welcome “reprieve,” he told Henry Knox, adding that his “movements to the chair of government will be accompanied with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”1 His “peaceful abode” at Mount Vernon, his fears that he lacked the requisite skills for the presidency, the “ocean of difficulties” facing the country—all gave him pause on the eve of his historic journey to New York.2 In a letter to Edward Rutledge, he made it seem as if the presidency were little short of a death sentence and that, in accepting it, he had given up “all expectations of private happiness in this world.”3 In many ways, the presidency had already come to Mount Vernon as Washington was besieged by obsequious letters from office seekers. “Scarcely a day passes in which applications of one kind or another do not arrive,” he told a correspondent.4 To simplify his life and set a high standard for future presidents, Washington refused to favor friends or relations in making appointments.

The day after Congress counted the electoral votes, declaring Washington the first president, it dispatched Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress, to bear the official a