Washington [389]
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 cannon or pointed musket,” said Senator William Maclay in sniggering tones. “He trembled and several times could scarce make out to read, though it must be supposed he had often read it before.”52 Washington’s agitation might have arisen from a developing neurological disorder or might simply have been a bad case of nerves. The new president had long been famous for his physical grace, but the sole gesture he used for emphasis in his speech seemed clumsy—“a flourish with his right hand,” said Maclay, “which left rather an ungainly impression.”53 For the next few years Maclay would be a close, unsparing observer of the new president’s quirks and tics.
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