Washington [377]
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 cunning at his disposal, piling up every good, unselfish reason for running. In mid-August 1788 he wrote to Washington and introduced the forbidden subject but never used the word president . He presented the first presidency as the logical, nay inevitable, sequel to the Constitutional Convention for Washington: “You will permit me to say that it is indispensable you should lend yourself to [the new government’s] first operations. It is to little purpose to have introduced a system, if the weightiest influence is not given to its firm establishment in the outset.”39 Washington had to undergo this ritual of spurning the proffered crown. “On the delicate subject with which you conclude your letter, I can say nothing,” Washington replied. “For you know me well enough, my good Sir, to be persuaded that I am not guilty of affectation when I tell you, it is my great and sole desire to live and die, in peace and retirement, on my own farm . . . while you and some others who are acquainted with my heart would acquit, the world and posterity might probably accuse me of inconsistency and ambition .”40 So among those whose opinion Washington considered was posterity. He portrayed himself as paralyzed by indecision and referred to the “dreaded dilemma of being forced to accept or refuse” the presidency.41 Whenever he mused about the problem, he told Hamilton, he “felt a kind of gloom upon my mind.”42
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