A History of the American People

of State, and Edmund Randolph (1753-1813), also from Virginia, who were both states' rights
men. Those were the six men who met to decide government policy. These gatherings were
called Cabinet meetings, as in England, though, as in England, they had no legal or constitutional
standing. They took place at Washington's house, 39 Broadway, just round the corner from Wall
Street. It would be hard to overemphasize the informality and small scale of this first
administration. Washington had to create it from scratch. That did not worry him, because he had
had to do exactly the same thing with the army in 1776. The scale of the job was nothing: until
the second half of the I790s he employed more people on his Mount Vernon estate than in the
whole of the central executive of his government.
We think of Washington as old when he became President but in fact he was only fifty-seven.
He was a bit of an actor, however, and liked to play the Old Man card when convenient. Thus,
with an awkward Cabinet meeting he would pretend to fumble for his glasses and say: I have already grown grey in the service of my country-now I am growing blind.’ He would also pretend to lose his temper. He wastremendous in his wrath,' wrote Jefferson, who was taken in.
When his integrity was impugned at a Cabinet meeting he would by God them, sayinghe had
rather be on his farm than to be made Emperor of the World, by God! etc.' Jefferson said: His heart was warm in its affections, but he exactly calculated every man's value and gave him a solid esteem proportional to it.' He wrotebetter than he spoke' being unready.' Jefferson thought Washington pessimistic-he would give the Constitution a fair trial but was so distrustful of men and the use they would make of their liberty that he believed America would end up with something like the British Constitution. Jefferson argued that Washington's distrust of the people led him to erect ceremonial barriers between himself and the public-'his adoption of the ceremonies of levees, birthdays, pompous meetings with Congress [was] calculated to prepare us gradually to a change he believed possible.' That strikes the historian as nonsense, especially if he compares it with the fantastically elaborate preparations Bonaparte was to make a decade later for precisely that end. Washington did not have an elaborate household-only fourteen in all. His secretariat was tiny. He had to borrow money to set the whole thing up, as it was. It is true he bowed instead of shaking hands. But that was his nature-he had always done it. Jefferson later accused Washington, at a public ball, of sitting on a sofa placed on a dais, almost like a throne. But he had this only on hearsay and it was probably untrue. It is true also that, as President, he gave grand, dull dinners, of many courses. The sharp-tongued Senator Maclay recorded:No cheering ray of convivial sunshine
broke through the cloudy gloom of settled seriousness. At every interval of eating or drinking, he
played on the table with a knife and fork, like drumsticks. But then Maclay had a nasty word
about everyone-Adams was a monkey just put into breeches,' Gouverneur Morris was 'half- envoy, half-pimp,' Madison (only five feet four inches) wasHis Littleness.'
And, finally, it is true that when traveling as President-he made two extensive progresses, to
the North and to the South-Washington cut an unusual figure by American standards. His white
coach was secondhand but had been recently rebuilt by Clarke Brothers of Philadelphia for $950,
his coachman was a tall, well-built Hessian called John Fagan, who sat on a leopard skin-covered
box, and he traveled with Major Jackson, his ADC, his valet, two footmen, a mounted postillion
riding behind, plus a light baggage waggon and five saddle-horses, including his favorite
charger, Prescott, a magnificent white mount of sixteen hands who had been with the President
on many a bloody and dangerous occasion. This equipage arrived in localities and towns at a
cracking pace with many a trumpet blast, to the delight of the locals, for whom it was their only
glimpse of a president in the whole of their lives. Jefferson seems, in retrospect, more of a New