by Ron Chernow
In this increasingly dark, conspiratorial atmosphere, Washington received three malicious letters, warning him anonymously of the secret presidential ambitions of Jefferson and of Madison’s treachery: “When you ask the opinion of the S[ecretary] of S [tate], he affects great humility and says he is not a judge of military matters. Behind your back, he reviles with the greatest asperity your military measures and ridicules the idea of employing any regular troops . . . His doctrines are strongly supported by his cunning little friend Madison.”25 In another letter, the poison-pen artist made sure Washington knew of the intrigue behind Freneau’s hiring at the State Department: “I do not believe you know that the National Gazette was established under the immediate patronage of Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison, and that Mr. Freneau, the printer of it, is a clerk in the Secretary of State’s office with a salary as interpreter.”26 The object of these men, the author averred, was to make Washington “odious” and “destroy Mr. Hamilton.”27
At this point Washington sloughed off suspicions about Jefferson, as evidenced by two remarkable meetings they held in February 1792. At the first, Jefferson lobbied to make the postal service part of the State Department rather than Treasury, hoping that would choke the excessive growth of Hamilton’s department. In passing, Jefferson mentioned that if Washington ever retired, he would too. This comment reverberated in Washington’s mind overnight, and at breakfast the next morning, he launched into a frank discussion of his political future. He noted to Jefferson that he had agreed reluctantly to attend the Constitutional Convention and serve as first president. But now,were he to continue longer, it might give room to say that, having tasted the sweets of office, he could not do without them; that he really felt himself growing old, his bodily health less firm, his memory, always bad, becoming worse; and perhaps the other faculties of his mind showing a decay to others of which he was insensible himself; that this apprehension particularly oppressed him; that he found moreover his activity lessened, business therefore more irksome, and tranquillity and retirement become an irresistible passion. That however he felt himself obliged for these reasons to retire from the government, yet he should consider it as unfortunate if that should bring on the retirement of the great officers of the government and that this might produce a shock on the public mind of dangerous consequence.28
This remarkable burst of candor, as recounted by Jefferson, showed that Washington still trusted the secretary of state. In a private memorandum on the talk, Jefferson disclosed that he himself was “heartily tired” of his job and stayed only from a sense that Hamilton would linger for several years.29 Later Jefferson wrote how much he had hated doing battle with Hamilton in the cabinet, descending “daily into the arena like a gladiator to suffer martyrdom in every conflict.”30 When Washington made plain that he could not contemplate retirement because of “symptoms of dissatisfaction” toward the administration, Jefferson made bold to say that there was only a single source of discontent, the Treasury Department, and “that a system had there been contrived for deluging the states with paper money instead of gold and silver, for withdrawing our citizens from the pursuits of commerce, manufactures, buildings, and other branches of useful industry to occupy themselves and their capitals in a species of gambling.”31 Throwing caution to the wind, Jefferson said Hamilton had suborned congressmen who “feathered their nests with [government] paper” and therefore voted for his system.32 Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures, Jefferson claimed, would destroy any pretense of limited government and enable the government to undertake any measure it liked. Washington must have been shocked as he fathomed the depth of animosity between his two most talented lieutenants. At the same time Madison was slashing away anonymously at Hamilton in the National Gazette, inveighing against “a government operated by corrupt influence, substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty.”33
What made the rising tide of criticism more troublesome for Washington was that much of it originated from Virginia, where he was increasingly regarded as an apostate. Edward Thornton, secretary to the British minister, observed in April 1792 that Washington “has very few who are on terms of intimate and unreserved friendship” with him and “what is worse, he is less beloved in his own state than in any part of the United States.”34 Three years later Washington told Edmund Randolph that, if the Union were to break up into North and South, “he had made up his mind to remove and be of the northern.”35 That Washington now identified with northern finance, commerce, and even abolitionism would have major consequences for American history. Had he sided with Jefferson and Madison, it might have deepened irrevocably the cleavage between North and South and opened an unbridgeable chasm seventy years before the Civil War.
Washington was expert at keeping his woes to himself and not showing the stress of office. While he now knew the extent of Jefferson’s antipathy toward Hamilton, he did not believe the wilder charges swirling around his secretary of state. When Eliza Powel sent him a pamphlet accusing Jefferson of pro-French policies, he replied that the writer should investigate the facts more closely. “Had he done this,” wrote Washington, quoting Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “he would . . . have found many of his charges as unsupported as the ‘baseless fabric of a vision.’”36
Starting in November 1791 and running for more than a year, James Madison published eighteen essays excoriating the administration in the National Gazette. Nevertheless, on May 5, 1792, apparently unaware of his authorship, Washington unburdened himself to Madison about his political plans. The recent financial panic in New York had added to the uproar over the administration’s policies. Washington said that he had already made known to Madison his intention to retire at the end of his first term and asked for Madison’s opinion “on the mode and time most proper for making known that intention.”37 He further said that he had apprised Hamilton, Knox, and Jefferson and that all had argued strenuously against his retirement. Washington had the modesty to state that he was not “arrogantly presuming on his re-election in case he should not withdraw himself,” though that was a foregone conclusion.38 Madison buttressed the consensus that it would be perilous for Washington to withdraw and that he alone could reconcile the warring parties. Another four years under Washington, Madison maintained, would “give such a tone and firmness to the government as would secure it against danger” from enemies on either side.39
At this point Washington discarded his impenetrable reserve and poured out his inmost thoughts, humbly confessing to feelings of inadequacy and saying that he could not conceive of himself as necessary to the “successful administration of the government; that, on the contrary, he had from the beginning found himself deficient in many of the essential qualifications . . . that others more conversant in such matters would be better able to execute the trust; that he found himself also in the decline of life, his health becoming sensibly more infirm and perhaps his faculties also; that the fatigues and disagreeableness of his situation were, in fact, scarcely tolerable to him.”40
That Washington dwelled on his inability to arbitrate constitutional disputes showed the heavy toll taken by the cabinet debate over the Bank of the United States. The president also complained of memory lapses, poor vision, and growing deafness—all socially confining conditions. Despite Washington’s fears, his letters show no evidence of his mental powers’ fading, and they were often amazingly vigorous. That Jefferson and Madison took such a decline seriously perhaps reflects their wish to portray Washington as softheaded and easily manipulated by Hamilton.
In chatting with Madison, Washington also deplored the press onslaught against his administration, little knowing that the man from whom he was seeking commiseration was a secret author of some of those assaults. The episode showed Madison’s capacity for duplicity—that he could act as Washington’s confidant even as he betrayed him. Although Jefferson and Madison wanted to elect a Republican vice president instead of John Adams, they had no desire to replace Washington, doubtless afraid that an
unfettered Hamilton would succeed him.
As with all major decisions, Washington pondered long and hard whether to remain in office. On May 20 he told Madison that he had mulled over his arguments for a second term but remained unconvinced and wanted to end his days “in ease and tranquillity.”41 He also thought that stepping down and letting someone else serve as president would be “more congenial” with ideas of liberty.42 Despite worries that it might be interpreted as a ploy to prod the American public to urge him to stay in office, Washington asked Madison to draft a valedictory address. He outlined the main themes, including the need for national unity and civility in public life. At this point Washington sounded pretty definite in his decision. Madison composed a farewell address, even though he told Washington that he hoped he would make “one more sacrifice . . . to the desire and interests of your country.”43 Even while drafting Washington’s plea for unity and mutual respect, Madison was writing surreptitiously for the National Gazette, and that summer he and Jefferson took the precaution of exchanging letters in code.
As Federalists and Republicans envisioned life without Washington, both feared they would be left to the tender mercies of each other. About the only thing Hamilton and Jefferson agreed upon was the absolute need to keep Washington as president. On May 23 Jefferson urged Washington to remain in office and dropped his circumspection about Hamilton. In a full-throated diatribe, he warned that Hamilton’s bank, funded debt, and excise taxes were intended “to prepare the way for a change from the present republican form of government to that of a monarchy, of which the English constitution is to be the model.”44 With the South filled with debtors and the North creditors, Jefferson feared the country would break apart along sectional lines. Jefferson underscored Washington’s special status: “North and south will hang together if they have you to hang on.”45 If an honest Congress was elected in the fall, Jefferson predicted, Washington could step down in safety before completing his second term, knowing the government had been saved.
No less than Jefferson, Hamilton was convinced that the opposition party was engaged in a secret plot to subvert the government. In a furious letter to Edward Carrington of Virginia, he claimed to be certain of the following: “That Mr. Madison, cooperating with Mr. Jefferson, is at the head of a faction decidedly hostile to me and my administration and actuated by views, in my judgment, subversive of the principles of good government and dangerous to the union, peace and happiness of the country.”46 Despite the venomous split in his cabinet, Washington worked mightily to defuse the controversy and appease Hamilton and Jefferson. He was not intimidated by these men of exceptional intelligence. Neither Hamilton nor Jefferson liked being subordinate to anyone, and both must have found it hard to submit to Washington, which only made his feat of controlling them the more remarkable.
On June 20 Madison sent Washington a draft of the farewell address, which he suggested should be published in mid-September. “You will readily observe that in executing it, I have aimed at that plainness and modesty of language which you had in view.”47 From the letter’s diffident tone, Washington would never have suspected Madison’s brazen role in pounding his administration in the National Gazette. On July 4 Freneau published a front-page polemic listing the “rules for changing a limited republican government into an unlimited hereditary one,” and he singled out Hamilton’s policies as the surest way to accomplish it.48 Rubbing salt into the wounds, Freneau had three copies of his paper delivered daily to Washington’s doorstep.
On July 10 Washington sat down at Mount Vernon for another candid chat with Jefferson about whether he should remain as president. He clearly felt trapped in office. He pointed out that he had intended to serve only two years, then was induced to stay for a third because of the country’s unsettled state; now he was again being told it was dangerous for him to depart. He grew indignant at Freneau’s charge that he headed a monarchical party. While a few might wish for a monarchy “in the higher walks of life, particularly in the great cities . . . the main body of the people in the eastern states were steadily for republicanism as in the southern.” 49 He protested the insinuation that he was a dim-witted tool in Hamilton’s hands and took dead aim at those who flattered him while seeking to discredit him indirectly by attacking Hamilton. Jefferson recorded Washington as saying that “in condemning the administration of the gov[ern]ment, they condemned him, for if they thought there were measures pursued contrary to his sentiment, they must conceive him too careless to attend to them or too stupid to understand them.”50 In this statement, Washington exploded the myth that he was a puppet jerked about by an all-powerful Hamilton or a ceremonial caretaker of his own administration.
While at Mount Vernon, Washington absorbed southern grumbling about his policies. Meanwhile he asked Tobias Lear, then traveling in New England, to canvass sentiment there about whether he should serve a second term. Lear reported strong sentiment in favor of a second term in order to give the still-new federal government a fair chance to establish itself. The people said that “most of the important things hitherto done under this government . . . had not yet been long enough in operation to give satisfactory proof whether they are beneficial or not” and they would not have a fair experiment under any administration other than Washington’s. 51 People were so convinced that Washington needed to remain in power, Lear asserted, “that no other person seems ever to have been contemplated for that office.” 52 Attorney General Randolph also issued a dramatic plea for Washington to stay, saying that “The public deliberations need stability.”53
On July 25 the feud between Hamilton and Jefferson acquired new ferocity when Hamilton, for the first time, published an anonymous essay rebuking Jefferson. Writing in Fenno’s Gazette of the United States, he posed a simple question about Freneau and his State Department stipend: “Whether this salary is paid him for translations or for publications, the design of which is to vilify those to whom the voice of the people has committed the administration of our public affairs . . . ?”54 The attack, one paragraph in length, showed that Hamilton had thrown down a gauntlet to Jefferson and was prepared to take his case to the public.
Washington would now have to stop the sparring between his two cabinet members; their feud was far more vitriolic than he had dreamed possible. On July 29, in a confidential letter, he told Hamilton that he had sought the views of people en route to Mount Vernon and at home and found that they viewed the country as “prosperous and happy” but were alarmed at certain policies and interpretations of the Constitution.55 He enumerated twenty-one complaints that touched on Hamilton’s policy initiatives, including accusations that he had created excessive public debt, imposed onerous excise taxes on the people, promoted financial speculation, and corrupted the legislature. Although Washington cited George Mason as the source of these complaints, the language was drawn verbatim from Jefferson, and Hamilton could scarcely have missed the allusion. One can only assume that Washington, sensitive to nuance, wanted Hamilton to hear echoes of Jefferson’s phraseology. The most damning charge was the final one: that the real object of Hamilton’s policies was “to prepare the way for a change from the present republican form of government to that of a monarchy, of which the British Constitution is to be the model.”56 Disquieted by the political backlash against his programs in the South, he asked Hamilton to respond to his letter as soon as possible.
Even before receiving Washington’s complaints, Hamilton had implored him to soldier on as president for another year or two. The failure to do so, he stressed, would be “deplored as the greatest evil that could befall the country at the present juncture.”57 Reading Washington’s psychology astutely, Hamilton emphasized the damage that would be done to Washington’s character if he retired. By now Hamilton had declared all-out warfare against Jefferson and Madison. In the Gazette of the United States that August, he took off the velvet gloves and showed the clenched fist of steel, charging that the National Gazette had been set up as a vehicle to publicize Jefferson�
�s views and that Madison had been the intermediary for bringing Freneau to his State Department sinecure.
On August 18 the frustrated Hamilton sent Washington a fourteen-thousand-word letter, listing his own accomplishments in office and defending his policies. What troubled him was less the criticisms of specific programs than the character assassination practiced by his opponents: “I trust that I shall always be able to bear, as I ought, imputations of errors of judgment, but I acknowledge that I cannot be entirely patient under charges which impeach the integrity of my public motives or conduct. I feel that I merit them in no degree and expressions of indignation sometimes escape me in spite of every effort to suppress them.”58
At this point Washington could no longer stand aside while Hamilton and Jefferson tore each other to ribbons. He warned Edmund Randolph that if press diatribes against his cabinet members continued, “it will be impossible . . . for any man living to manage the helm or to keep the machine together.”59 His vision of a unified government now seemed hopelessly utopian. In late August he exhorted Hamilton to end his bloody clash with Jefferson. Asking for civility, he hoped that “wounding suspicions and irritating charges” would give way to “mutual forbearances and temporizing yieldings on all sides. Without these, I do not see how . . . the union of the states can be much longer preserved.”60 Searching for common ground, Washington hinted that Hamilton and Jefferson had “the same general objects in view and the same upright intentions to prosecute them.”61 To underline his support for Hamilton, Washington invited him to Mount Vernon and ended by saying that Hamilton could rest assured of his “sincere and affectionate regard.”62 Aiming to be impartial, Washington also admonished Jefferson to end the squabbling, noting that attacks on his administration—attacks Jefferson himself had orchestrated—had “for a long time past filled me with painful sensations.”63
