Washington: A Life

The sole constitutional requirement for the swearing-in was that the president take the oath of office. That morning a congressional committee decided to add solemnity by having Washington place his hand on a Bible during the oath, leading to a frantic, last-minute scramble to find one. A Masonic lodge came to the rescue by providing a thick Bible, bound in deep brown leather and set on a crimson velvet cushion. By the time Washington appeared on the portico, the Bible rested on a table draped in red velvet.

The crowd grew silent as New York chancellor Robert R. Livingston administered the oath to Washington, who was visibly moved. As he finished the oath, he bent forward, seized the Bible, and brought it to his lips. Washington felt this moment from the bottom of his soul: one observer noted the “devout fervency” with which he “took the oath and the reverential ma

When the balcony ceremony was concluded, Washington returned to the Senate chamber to deliver his inaugural address. In an important piece of symbolism, Congress rose as he entered, then sat down after Washington bowed in response. In England, the House of Commons stood during the king’s speeches, so that the seated Congress immediately established a sturdy equality between the legislative and executive branches.

As Washington began his speech, he seemed flustered and thrust his left hand into his pocket while turning the pages with a trembling right hand. His weak voice was barely audible. Fisher Ames evoked him thus: “His aspect grave, almost to sadness; his modesty, actually shaking; his voice deep, a little tremulous, and so low as to call for close attention.”51 Those present attributed Washington’s low voice and fumbling hands to anxiety. “This great man was agitated and embarrassed more than ever he was by the leveled ca

In the first line of his inaugural address, Washington expressed anxiety about his fitness for the presidency, saying that “no event could have filled me with greater anxieties” than the news brought to him by Charles Thomson.54 He had grown despondent, he said candidly, as he considered his own “inferior endowments from nature” and his lack of practice in civil government.55 He drew comfort, however, from the fact that the “Almighty Being” had overseen America’s birth: “No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the affairs of men, more than the people of the United States.”56 Perhaps referring obliquely to the fact that he suddenly seemed older, he called Mount Vernon “a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary, as well as more dear to me, by the addition of habit to inclination and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time.”57 In the earlier inaugural address drafted with David Humphreys, Washington had included a disclaimer about his health, telling how he had “prematurely grown old in the service of my country.”58

Setting the pattern for future inaugural speeches, Washington did not delve into minute policy matters but outlined the big themes that would govern his administration, the foremost being the triumph of national unity over “local prejudices or attachments” that might subvert the country or even tear it apart.59 National policy needed to be rooted in private morality, which relied on the “eternal rules of order and right” ordained by heaven itself.60 On the other hand, Washington refrained from endorsing any particular form of religion. Knowing how much was riding on this attempt at republican government, he said that “the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”61

After this speech, Washington led a broad procession of delegates up Broadway, along streets flanked by armed militia, to an Episcopal prayer service at St. Paul’s Chapel, where he was given his own canopied pew. After these devotions ended, Washington had his first chance to relax until the evening festivities. That night lower Manhattan was converted into a shimmering fairyland of lights. From the residences of Chancellor Livingston and General Knox, Washington observed the fireworks at Bowling Green, a pyrotechnic display that flashed in the sky for two hours. Washington’s image was displayed in transparencies hung in many windows, throwing glowing images into the night. Such a celebration, ironically, would have been familiar to Washington from the days when new royal governors arrived in Williamsburg and were greeted by bonfires, fireworks, and illuminations in every window.

All of New York was astir with the evening festivities, and Washington had trouble returning to Cherry Street with Tobias Lear and David Humphreys. “We returned home at ten on foot,” wrote Lear, “the throng of people being so great as not to permit a carriage to pass through it.”62 The comment shows how closely people pressed against Washington in the thickly peopled streets. By the time he went to bed, he had initiated many enduring customs for presidential inaugurations, including the procession to the swearing-in venue, taking the oath of office en plein air, delivering an inaugural speech, and holding a gigantic celebration that evening. Because Martha was still absent, the inaugural ball was deferred until May.

The odyssey of George Washington from insecure young colonel in the French and Indian War, through his tenure as commander in chief of the Continental Army, and now to president of the new government, must have seemed an almost dream-like progression to him. Perhaps nothing underlined this improbable turn of events more than the extraordinary fact that while Washington had debated whether to become president that winter, on the other side of the ocean King George III had descended into madness. In late January Samuel Powel conveyed this startling piece of news to Washington: “I do not recollect any topic which, at present, occupies the conversation of men so much as the insanity of the king of Great Britain. I am told . . . that Dr. Franklin’s observation upon hearing the report was that he had long been of opinion that the King of Great Britain was insane, tho[ugh] it had not been declared to the world till now.”63

There was nothing vindictive in Washington’s nature, no itching for retribution, and he reacted with sympathy to news of the king’s malady. “Be the cause of the British king’s insanity what it may,” he told Powel, “his situation . . . merits commiseration.”64 The strangely contrasting fates of the two Georges grew stranger still in late February, when Gouverneur Morris reported from Paris an unlikely development in the king’s madness. “By the bye,” he wrote to Washington, “in the melancholy situation to which the poor King of England has been reduced, there were, I am told, in relation to you, some whimsical circumstances.” In a deranged fit, wrote Morris, the king had “conceived himself to be no less a personage than George Washington at the head of the American Army. This shows that you have done something or other which sticks most terribly in his stomach.”65 The delusion proved fleeting. On April 23, 1789, exactly one week before George Washington was sworn in to cheering crowds, George III recovered so miraculously from his delusional state that a thanksgiving service was conducted at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. It is hypothesized by some that he had suffered from a rare hereditary disorder called porphyria, a condition not properly diagnosed until the twentieth century. Restored to his senses, he had to contemplate the sobering reality that the upstart George Washington, who had once scrounged for advancement in his royal army, now served as president of an independent American republic.