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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 running about—or from proneness to idle[ness] when at your work,” his nephew had full power “to discard you immediately and to remove your family from their present abode.”73 Not content to leave it at that, Washington grew hotter under the collar, reminding Green that drinking left “a body debilitated, renders him unfit . . . from the execution of [work]. An aching head and trembling limbs, which are the inevitable effects of drinking, disincline the hands from work. Hence begins sloth and that listlessness, which end in idleness.” Washington warned him sternly that for the same wages he paid him, he could hire “the best workmen in this country.”74 It was a curiously graceless letter for a man about to ascend to the highest office in the land. Clearly George Washington worried dreadfully about money and whether Mount Vernon would lapse back into the dilapidated state he had found it in more than five years earlier. Now he also had to wonder whether his depleted wealth would support the enhanced celebrity he was about to enjoy as first president of the United States.

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 announcement to Mount Vernon. The legislators had chosen a fine emissary. A well-rounded figure, known for his work in astronomy and mathematics, the Irish-born Thomson was a tall, austere man of inborn dignity with a narrow face and keenly penetrating eyes. He couldn’t have relished the trip to Virginia, which was “much impeded by tempestuous weather, bad roads, and the many large rivers I had to cross.”5 Yet he rejoiced that the new president would be Washington, whom he revered as singled out by providence to be “the savior and father” of the country.6 Having known Thomson since the Continental Congress, Washington esteemed him as a faithful public servant and exemplary patriot.

Around noon on April 14, 1789, Washington flung open the door at Mount Vernon and greeted his visitor with a cordial embrace. Once in the privacy of the mansion, he and Thomson conducted a stiff verbal minuet, each man reading from a prepared text. Thomson began by declaring, “I am honored with the commands of the Senate to wait upon your Excellency with the information of your being elected to the office of the President of the United States of America