According to Jefferson, Washington told him that “nobody disliked more the ceremonies of his office and he had not the least taste or gratification in the execution of its function; that he was happy at home alone.”41 Suffering from the stultifying etiquette imposed by his office, he later railed against those who had prescribed such formality. He was especially upset that, having tried to strike a balance between pomp and austerity, he had been roundly criticized and misunderstood. As Jefferson wrote after a 1793 conversation, Washington “expressed the extreme wretchedness of his existence while in office and went lengthily into the late attacks on him for levees etc., and explained to me how he had been led into them by the persons he consulted at New York and that, if he could but know what the sense of the public was, he would most cheerfully conform to it.”42

Washington found it hard to live frugally, and the chief steward he hired to supervise the kitchen made economy that much more difficult. Sam Fraunces had formerly owned the tavern at which Washington had enacted his lachrymose farewell to his officers at the war’s end.43 In the mid-1780s Fraunces had run into serious debt and even appealed to Washington for financial aid. By the time Washington hired him to manage his household, Fraunces had opened another tavern on Cortlandt Street.

A shrewd operator with a flamboyant manner, Fraunces seemed ubiquitous at Washington’s dinner parties, “resplendently dressed in wig and small-clothes,” according to one historian.44 A skillful cook, he knew how to dress a table, supervise waiters, prepare desserts, and bring forth a sumptuous meal. Somewhat to Washington’s chagrin, Fraunces preened himself on the “bountiful and elegant” dinners he presented.45 Tobias Lear stared agog at the heaps of lobster, oysters, and other dishes, saying Fraunces “tossed up such a number of fine dishes that we are distracted in our choice when we sit down to table and obliged to hold a long consultation upon the subject, before we can determine what to attack.”46 In time Washington began to reprimand his steward for unconscionable extravagance. However fond he was of lavish living, he minded his pennies and personally reviewed household bills.

Unfortunately, the feisty Fraunces wasn’t one to be deterred, not even by a sitting president. “Well he may discharge me,” Frances declared. “He may kill me if he will, but while he is President of the United States and I have the honor to be his steward, his establishment shall be supplied with the very best of everything that the whole country can afford.”47 Washington’s attempts to rein in Fraunces led to a running battle that raged until Fraunces quit in February 1790. To show there were no hard feelings, Washington bestowed on him a last bonus for his tavern.

Even before Washington occupied 3 Cherry Street, he had grumbled about the cost of renovating it. The handsome three-story building had a high stoop, balusters along the roof, and seven fireplaces inside. It stood on a boisterous thorough-fare crawling with traffic. The day before Washington arrived, Sally Robinson, niece of owner Samuel Osgood, inspected the premises and found “every room furnished in the most elegant manner,” she told a friend. “The best of furniture in every room and the greatest quantity of plate and china I ever saw. The whole of the first and second stories [are] papered and the floors covered with the richest kinds of Turkey and Wilton carpets . . . There is scarcely anything talked about now but General Washington and the Palace.”48 For all the fuss made over the house, it did not work well for the Washingtons. It had to house thirty people and was sufficiently cramped that three secretaries—Humphreys, Nelson, and Lewis—slept in a single room on the third floor. Humphreys, then writing a play, reportedly strode the hall after dark in his nightshirt, loudly declaiming verse from the epilogue. The house was located at an inconvenient spot near the East River, distant from the tony seats of government and society situated on Broadway.

The impresario of entertaining, Washington took personal charge of selecting the ornaments that defined the grandeur of his dining room. Far from shunting off decorating on his wife or subordinates, he trusted his detailed knowledge of the decorative arts. To create a tea service, he melted down some old silver and had the finished products engraved with his griffin crest. When he asked Gouverneur Morris, then resident in Europe, to purchase wine coolers for dinners, he showed a characteristic concern with orderly appearance. To keep the wine cool, the bottles would be placed in silver wire baskets partly immersed in ice. Washington issued precise instructions for their manufacture so that “whether full or empty, the bottles will always stand upright and never be at variance with each other.”49 With an educated eye for furnishings that might lend brilliance to state dinners, he also had Morris ship him decorative mirrors for the tabletop, so that silverware and candlesticks would emit shimmering reflections. As if part of his job were refining American taste, Washington oversaw the purchase of many objets d’art, including porcelain figures, silver spoons, and a china set embellished with the eagle of the Society of the Cincinnati.

No small part of the splendor of Washington’s establishment was his household contingent of twenty servants, seven of them slaves. All the servants, white and black, were buffed to a high gloss. A few slaves were bedecked in the same costumes as the white servants: a white livery with red trim on the cuffs and collars. Cocked hats, gloves, and well-polished shoes completed the glossy outfit. To posterity, it seems shocking that Washington imported slaves into the presidential mansion, but Jefferson would bring a dozen slaves from Monticello to the White House; the tradition of having slaves in the presidential household unfortunately lasted until the death in 1850 of Zachary Taylor, the last of the slaveholding presidents.

Washington extended the grandeur of his presidency to morning horseback rides. He kept a dozen horses in New York and made a daily a tour of his stables. Aware of how impressive he looked atop a white mount, he once instructed a friend to buy him a horse, specifying that he “would prefer a perfect white.”50 In the early days of his presidency, he rode a pair of spotless white parade horses, Prescott and Jackson. Perhaps he had a subliminal memory of Lord Botetourt riding to the palace in colonial Williamsburg behind a coach with shining white horses. So taken was Washington with his unblemished chargers that he had grooms rub them with white paste at night, bundle them in cloths, then bed them down on fresh straw. In the morning the hardened white paste gleamed, its paleness accentuated by black polish applied to the horses’ hooves. For command performances, the animals’ mouths were rinsed and their teeth scrubbed. In another fancy touch, Washington set his saddles in leopard skins edged with gold braiding.

On a fine spring day New York residents might glimpse the president and first lady out for a ride in their ornate, varnished coach, drawn by six well-matched bay horses. With four postilions attired in leather breeches and glazed leather hats, the coach made an exquisite impression as it rolled through the crowded streets. “When he travels,” a British diplomat later observed, “it is in a very kingly style.”51 Sometimes the Washingtons stared out the window and at other times drew the Venetian blinds or black leather curtains for privacy. In 1790 Washington adorned the coach with allegorical scenes of the four seasons, executed on the outside panels, affixing his personal crest to four small quarter panels.