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By Root 25791 0

stood in a league of his own, his stature inimitable. Like other founders, he regarded any open interest in power as unbecoming to a gentleman. As a result, he preferred to be drawn reluctantly from private life by the irresistible summons of public service. He eschewed the word president, as if merely saying it might connote an unsavory desire on his part. As with attending the Constitutional Convention, he again worried that people would think he had yielded to the allure of worldly pomp and had cynically broken his pledge not to return to public life. His usual besetting fears of failure also reemerged. Years later, chatting confidentially with Madison, Washington recalled that “he had from the beginning found himself deficient in many of the essential qualifications [for president], owing to his inexperience in the forms of public business, his unfitness to judge of legal questions and questions arising out of the constitution.”32 Once again he was preoccupied with presumed taunts and criticisms, the inner voice of his own unspoken fears.

For both political and psychological reasons, Washington needed to undergo a protracted period of indecision about the presidency. Part of him felt genuinely burdened by public life, especially since he experienced “the increasing infirmities of nature,” as he told Lafayette.33 He was torn, as always, by unacknowledged ambition mingled with self-doubt. During his October visit to Mount Vernon, Alexander Donald felt that Washington’s pro forma denial of interest in the presidency masked his true feelings. “As the eyes of all America are turned towards this truly great and good man for the first president, I took the liberty of sounding him upon it,” Donald told Jefferson. “He appears to be greatly against going into public life again, pleads in excuse for himself his love of retirement and his advanced age. But, notwithstanding of these, I am fully of opinion he may be induced to appear once more on the public stage of life.”34

Having been lionized for renouncing power at the war’s end, Washington found it hard to concede normal human ambition. In the Columbian Magazine of November 1787, a poet calling himself “Cinna” wrote rapturous verses that cast him in superhuman terms. Evoking the universal fraud and avarice of a corrupt age, “Cinna” held forth Washington as the rare exception, the man “Whom boundless trust ne’er tempted to betray, / Nor power impelled to arbitrary sway.”35 Such idolatry made it difficult for Washington to be truthful about his feelings. He also had to reckon with heightened paranoia after the convention, a widespread apprehension that the new president might transform himself into a king. The only way he could proceed, it seemed, was to show extreme reluctance to become president, then be swept along by others.

As his name was bruited about for president, Washington was caught in an excruciating predicament. Merely to broach the topic, even in strict confidence with friends, might seem to betray some secret craving on his part. As he later confessed to Hamilton, he dared not seek advice: “For situated as I am, I could hardly bring the question into the slightest discussion, or ask an opinion, even in the most confidential manner, without betraying, in my judgment, some impropriety of conduct.”36 For this reason he must have been grateful to friends who talked to him forthrightly about the presidency. A month after Washington left Philadelphia, Gouverneur Morris told him that among the “thirteen horses now about to be coupled together, there are some of every race and character. They will listen to your voice and submit to your control. You therefore must, I say, must mount this seat.”37 From abroad, Lafayette cheerfully added his voice to the chorus: “I beg you, my dear general, do not refuse the responsibility of the presidency during the first few years. You alone can make this political machine operate successfully.”38 This was a powerful argument for Washington, who had gone to Philadelphia feeling that the war would be incomplete without a new Constitution;