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By Root 31904 0

Washington finally shifted the prickly Timothy Pickering from war to state. Instead of warming to this plum assignment, Pickering accepted it to spare Washington any further embarrassment. Devoted to Hamilton, Pickering adhered to that true-blue wing of the Federalists known as High Federalists. To plug the resulting vacancy at the War Department, Washington was again reduced to the unseemly position of peddling a cabinet post and was stymied three times before James McHenry accepted. A doctor by training, McHenry had served as a wartime aide to Washington, a member of the Confederation Congress, and a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Fond of McHenry, Washington had sung his praises as a young man of “great integrity . . . an amiable temper, very obliging, and of polished manners.”35 Whatever his merits, McHenry’s talents did not measure up to the post, as Washington soon learned. “I early discovered after he entered upon the duties of his office that his talents were unequal to great exertions or deep resources,” Washington later admitted to Hamilton. “In truth, they were not unexpected for the fact is, it was a Hobson’s choice.”36 With a second-string cabinet of Wolcott, Pickering, and McHenry, Washington had purged it of apostasy but had also exchanged creative ferment for mediocrity; the numerous rejections had given him little choice. With this cabinet overhaul, Republicans regarded the Federalist triumph as complete, and a forlorn Madison asked Jefferson rhetorically, “Through what official interstice can a ray of republican truths now penetrate to the P[resident]?”37

A few days after Washington’s confrontation with Randolph, Attorney General William Bradford died, saddling Washington with yet another appointment. Eager to restore a geographic mix to his cabinet, he turned to John Marshall, the tall, handsome Virginian destined to stand out as the foremost legal mind of the age. “When future generations pursue the history of America,” Washington once said, “they will find the name of Marshall on its sacred page as one of the brightest ornaments of the age in which he lived.”38 In approaching Marshall, Washington appealed to self-interest as well as loftier goals, noting that in Philadelphia Marshall could supplement his income with “a lucrative practice.”39 Marshall still declined. When Washington then considered Colonel Harry Innes for the job, he said that Innes’s reputation for extreme laziness did not disqualify him, since “the office of attorney general of the U[nited] States does not require constant labor or attention.” 40 Washington ended up choosing Charles Lee as attorney general (not to be confused with the wartime general with whom Washington feuded). Even though Washington had emphasized the job’s part-time nature, Lee left Philadelphia so often that Washington warned him that “unpleasant remarks” were made about his continual absences as well as charges that he had made “a sinecure of the office.”41

Even the choice of a new chief justice to replace John Jay became the source of endless wrangling. Neither busy nor prestigious, the Supreme Court did not yet attract top legal minds. Perhaps for that reason, Hamilton turned down Washington’s invitation to become the new chief justice. Washington then proposed John Rutledge of South Carolina, who served briefly as chief justice through a recess appointment but whose nomination was ultimately defeated by partisan sniping in the Senate. Washington then named William Cushing of Massachusetts, already an associate justice on the Court. Cushing was confirmed by the Senate but considered himself too old and infirm for the job and surrendered it a week later. In the end Washington selected Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, who, as a senator, had been the main architect of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which shaped the federal court system. A former judge of the Connecticut Superior Court, Ellsworth was confirmed on March 4, 1796, and, to Washington’s vast relief, remained in place past the end of his second term.

IN SEPTEMBER 1795, at an inopportune