by Ron Chernow
THE TWO-TERM PRESIDENCY had taxed Washington in many ways, not least in his personal finances. In March 1795, when his friend Charles Carter, Jr., approached him for a thousand-dollar loan, Washington, always touchy about borrowing, burst into a recitation of his financial stringency: “My friends entertain a very erroneous idea of my pecuniary resources . . . Such has been the management of my estate for many years past, especially since my absence from home, now six years, as barely to support itself.”58 He protested that his government allowance barely covered the extravagant costs of entertaining and that he had resorted to selling western lands to escape debt.
As he meditated on the end of his presidency, he mused about the prospect of “tranquillity with a certain income” and decided to pursue his earlier scheme of selling his western lands and leasing out the four Mount Vernon farms, while retreating to the fifth, the Mansion House, with Martha.59 On February 1, 1796, he posted advertisements for the sale of thirteen tracts along three western rivers—the Ohio, Great Kanawha, and Little Miami—amounting to a whopping 36,000 acres. These ads were posted in Philadelphia papers and well-frequented taverns in western Pennsylvania. The properties dated from the distant period when the young Anglophile officer had received bounty lands for service in the French and Indian War and had cornered aggressively the rights of fellow soldiers. In undertaking these sales, Washington harbored a secret agenda, hoping to use the proceeds to help emancipate his slaves.
In recruiting able farmers to rent the four outlying farms, the Father of His Country had so little faith in American farmers that he placed anonymous ads not only in eastern newspapers but as far afield as England, Scotland, and Ireland. “My wish is to get associations of farmers from the old countries, who know how . . . to keep the land in an improving state rather than the slovenly ones of this [country], who think (generally) of nothing else but to work a field as long as it will bear anything,” he told William Pearce, Mount Vernon’s estate manager.60 He now resolved to introduce the crop-rotation scheme that he had worked out on paper but that his hapless overseers had never been able to put into practice. Having long known that tobacco depleted the soil, he wanted to plant corn, wheat, clover, potatoes, and grass in a scientific sequence.
Conscious that he would someday free his slaves, Washington wanted to avoid doing anything that might interfere with that plan. His letters betray growing disgust with slavery, as when he told Pearce that “opulent” Virginians were made “imperious and dissipated from the habit of commanding slaves and living in a measure without control.”61 However benevolent his intentions were, he remained a largely absentee owner, able to exercise scant control over his overseers’ harsh practices, as shown in one 1795 letter to Pearce: “I am sorry to find by your last reports that there has been two deaths in the [slave] family since I left Mount Vernon, and one of them a young fellow. I hope every necessary care and attention was afforded him. I expect little of this from McCoy, or indeed from most of his class, for they seem to consider a Negro much in the same light as they do the brute beasts on the farms, and often treat them as inhumanly.”62 Washington mentally divided his slaves into productive ones who warranted favor and those unable or unwilling to work. When Pearce distributed linen to slaves, Washington instructed him to provide the good stuff “to the grown people and the most deserving, whilst the more indifferent sort is served to the younger ones and worthless.”63
Whatever his shortcomings as a master, Washington continued to refine his plan to free his slaves someday. So long as he was president, the subject was taboo; Washington told David Stuart that “reasons of a political, indeed of [an] imperious nature” forbade any such action.64 He wrote these words during the brouhaha over the Jay Treaty, when southern planters were especially upset over his policies and he could not afford to antagonize them further. Starting in 1795, Washington’s letters reflect a growing preoccupation with knowing who were his dower slaves, over whom he had no control, and those he owned outright and could free.
Washington’s plans to lease the four farms and simplify his future life came to naught. Adding to his nagging economic uncertainty was the regretted departure of William Pearce due to an “increasing rheumatic affection.”65 For the demanding Washington, the seasoned Pearce had been a godsend, a man of reliable industry and integrity. In October 1796 Washington replaced him with James Anderson, a native of Scotland well trained in agriculture, who would take the operations at Mount Vernon in some unexpected directions. The switch, which came as the president contemplated retirement, could only have exacerbated his worries about the situation that awaited him at home.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
The Master of Farewells
IN 1796 GEORGE WASHINGTON was often in a somber, pessimistic mood. One visitor who encountered him on his sixty-fourth birthday that February said “he seemed considerably older. The innumerable vexations he has met with in his different public capacities have very sensibly impaired the vigor of his constitution and given him an aged appearance.”1 He had long fathomed the peculiar dynamics of fame, the way fickle crowds respond first with adulation and then scorn to any form of hero worship. From partisan quarters, he was experiencing the rude comeuppance he had long known hovered in the background. Patrick Henry was shocked at his slanderous treatment: “If he whose character as our leader during the whole war . . . is so roughly handled in his old age, what may be expected of men of the common standard?”2
Nothing required Washington to leave office—the Twenty-second Amendment, limiting a president to two terms, was not ratified until 1951—but he had always planned to remain as president only until the new Constitution had taken root, never dreaming it would take a full two terms to reach that point. Despondent over the Jay Treaty attacks, Washington had now firmly resolved to leave office. Most Federalists hoped he would stay in office indefinitely; John Jay exhorted him to “remain with us at least while the storm lasts and until you can retire like the sun in a calm, unclouded evening.”3 In reply, Washington alluded darkly to all the “trouble and perplexities” he had endured, aggravated by the infirmities of age, and said only a national emergency would postpone his retirement.4
Where Washington had asked Madison to draft a farewell address in 1792 and then stashed it in a drawer, he now turned to Hamilton as his preferred wordsmith for a valedictory message. On May 15 he sent the latter Madison’s address, along with additions he himself had recently made to reflect the “considerable changes” wrought by the intervening years.5 He dangled before Hamilton two options: either edit and update Madison’s version or start afresh and “throw the whole into a different form.”6 It was not in Hamilton’s headstrong nature to bow to another scribe, and while he would offer Washington a revised version of Madison’s 1792 address, he also forged a magisterial new version of his own.
As always, Washington fretted over possible misinterpretations of his motives, speculating that people might whisper he was leaving office because of his “fallen popularity and despair of being re-elected.” In his farewell statement, he wanted Hamilton to refer to the earlier farewell address as irrefutable proof that, far from hiding megalomaniacal ambitions, he had longed to return home. While the words of this second farewell belonged to Hamilton, Washington defined its overarching themes and lent it his distinctive sound. He wanted the message written in a plain, unadorned style, presenting a timeless quality and avoiding references to specific personalities and events that had given rise to many observations.
In the past, Washington had been the circumspect personality and Hamilton the hotheaded one. Now Hamilton became the man of impeccable judgment. Washington’s additions to Madison’s draft had been laced with bitterness, wallowing in partisan squabbles. He had scribbled ill-advised lines about newspapers that “teemed with all the invective that disappointment, ignorance of facts, and malicious falsehoods could invent to misrepresent my politics.”7 Noting his financial sacrifices, Washington had remarked petulantly that “if my country has de
rived no benefit from my services, my fortune, in a pecuniary point of view, has received no augmentation from my country.”8 Hamilton rescued Washington from such petty gripes and made the address coolly statesmanlike, the words of a self-assured man speaking to posterity. It was the lofty Washington, not the wounded man smarting with secret hurts, that Hamilton set out to capture.
Washington displayed tremendous anxiety about the timing of his farewell address. In late June, he told Hamilton that he regretted not having published it as soon as Congress adjourned. Its postponement until the fall might lead people to surmise “that I delayed it long enough to see that the current was turned against me before I declared my intention to decline.”9 Hamilton pointed out the wisdom of waiting until the fall in case a national emergency, especially a military clash with France, forced him to reconsider a third term. “If a storm gathers,” Hamilton wondered, “how can you retreat?”10 To avoid interfering with the fall elections, Washington set a deadline of no later than October for publishing his farewell address.
At Mount Vernon that summer, Washington still licked his wounds over the rabid commentary in the Aurora. “That Mr. Bache will continue his attacks on the government, there can be no doubt,” he told Treasury Secretary Wolcott, “but that they will make no impression on the public mind is not so certain, for drops of water will impress (in time) the hardest marble.”11 Because of Washington’s public silence about his future plans, the presidential campaign played out in the shadows. It was assumed that, if Washington retired, Vice President Adams would emerge as the Federalist candidate for president, with Thomas Pinckney as his running mate. Political propriety demanded that they await official word from Washington before engaging in overt campaigning. By July it was also apparent that the Republicans would run Jefferson for president, joined by Aaron Burr as vice president.
Hamilton toiled over the farewell address in deep secrecy. Instead of sending his reactions through the mail, Washington, who thought his letters were being opened, conveyed them to New York via personal couriers. When Washington received the two versions of the farewell address in early August, he immediately discarded Madison’s revised draft and opted for Hamilton’s new version. As a literary stylist, Hamilton’s abiding sin had always been prolixity. Since the farewell address was meant to be read in newspapers, not delivered as a speech, Washington objected to its length and asked Hamilton to trim it down. “All the columns of a large gazette would scarcely, I conceive, contain the present draft,” he protested.12 Always honest and self-critical, Washington saw that Hamilton had purged the address of his own personal whining; he conceded that it was “more dignified on the whole and with less egotism” than the earlier version.13
Washington succeeded in keeping his farewell message a closely held secret. On the morning of September 16, 1796, Tobias Lear appeared unexpectedly at the office of David Claypoole, who published a Philadelphia newspaper. In mysterious fashion, he told Claypoole that the president wanted to see him and promptly whisked him off to the executive mansion, where he huddled alone with Washington in a drawing room. There Washington disclosed the dramatic news that he was leaving the presidency and wished his farewell address to appear in Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser. The two men agreed that the publisher would “usher it to the world and suffer it to work its way afterwards” on Monday, September 19.14 That weekend Washington corrected the proofs himself, right down to the punctuation marks, and he graciously allowed Claypoole to retain the invaluable manuscript. Even though Washington had given him exclusive rights to the address, it was widely disseminated at lightning speed. That same afternoon three Philadelphia papers jumped to print it, followed by a New York newspaper the next day, so that Washington achieved something close to a synchronized, universal publication. The address also appeared in pamphlet form.
An old hand at farewells, Washington, by design, rolled out of Philadelphia in his coach and headed for Mount Vernon, just as local citizens began to consume his address. He wished the words to speak for themselves, without any elaboration on his part. Washington never identified the document as his “farewell address,” a label pinned on it by others. It appeared under the rubric “To the PEOPLE of the UNITED STATES,” and began with the words “Friends and Fellow Citizens.”15 It was the perfect touch, echoing the opening of the Constitution, “We the People of the United States.” While Washington could have informed Congress of his resignation, he went instead to the source of all sovereignty, the people, just as the Constitutional Convention had bypassed state legislatures and asked the people to approve the document directly through ratifying conventions.
In the address, Washington started by mentioning the earlier farewell letter and his hope that he could have retired sooner. The “increasing weight of years” had now made withdrawal from office necessary.16 After talking of the vicissitudes of his presidency, he evoked America’s grand future, sounding the oracular strain he had patented.17 In a paean to unity, he warned that national identity must trump local attachments: “The name of AMERICAN, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.”18 This continental perspective had informed his work ever since the Revolution. Washington stressed the need to safeguard western territories from foreign encroachments, and without mentioning the Whiskey Rebellion by name, he enunciated the need for law and order: “The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.”19 Instead of flattering the people, Washington challenged them to improve their performance as citizens. Most of all he appealed to Americans to cling to the Union, with the federal government as the true guarantor of liberty and independence. As Joseph Ellis has written, “In the Farewell Address, Washington reiterated his conviction that the centralizing impulses of the American Revolution were not violations but fulfillments of its original ethos.”20
As the address proceeded, it grew increasingly evident that Washington and Hamilton directed their shafts at the Republicans in coded language. Their denunciations of “combinations and associations” that sought to counteract the constituted authorities recalled their earlier strictures against the Democratic-Republican Societies. While such groups “may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people.”21 It was still hard for Washington to conceive of parties that were not disloyal cabals against duly elected government. A party spirit exists in all types of government, Washington observed, “but in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.”22 For Washington, parties weren’t so much expressions of popular politics as their negation, denying the true will of the people as expressed through their chosen representatives.
Although he said that debt should be used sparingly and paid down in times of peace, Washington endorsed the Hamiltonian program. He warned against an unreasonable aversion to taxes, without which the debt could not be retired—a jab at those Jeffersonians who loudly took issue with the funded debt, then opposed the whiskey tax and other measures designed to whittle it down. By asserting executive vigor, his disclaimers notwithstanding, the farewell address placed Washington decidedly in the Federalist camp.
The genius of the farewell address was that it could be read in strictly neutral terms or as disguised pokes at the Jeffersonians. This was especially true when Washington laid out his sweeping views on foreign policy, recycling many ideas advanced in promoting the Jay Treaty. Tacitly railing against Republican support for France, he expounded a foreign policy based on practical interests instead of political passions: “The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave.”23 Sympathy with a foreign nation for purely ideological reasons, he said, could lead America
into “the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.”24 He clearly had Jefferson and Madison in mind as he took issue with “ambitious, corrupted or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation)” and “sacrifice the interests of their own country.”25 Restating his neutrality policy, he underlined the desirability of commercial rather than political ties with other nations: “ ’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”26 It was Jefferson, not Washington, who warned against “entangling alliances,” although the concept was clearly present in Washington’s message.
For all the swipes at the opposition, Hamilton infused a placid tone into the address, replacing the bitter scold with the caring father. At the end Washington sounded a little like Shakespeare’s Prospero, stepping off the stage of history. Whatever errors he had committed, he hoped that “my country will never cease to view them with indulgence and that, after forty-five years of my life dedicated to its service, with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.”27 It was fitting that Washington closed by conflating the end of his life with the termination of his public service.
In general, Americans applauded the farewell address. Washington had seen himself as rising above partisanship, but some Republicans detected the barbs aimed at their party, and the effect was perhaps more divisive than Washington hoped. One visiting Frenchman resented its “marked antipathy to France and a predilection for England,” while an opposition paper characterized Washington’s words as “the loathings of a sick mind.”28 There was no mourning for Washington’s departure in the editorial office of the Aurora, which had this to say about his retirement: “Every heart in unison . . . ought to beat high with exultation that the name of Washington from this day ceases to give a currency to political iniquity and to legalized corruption.”29 Well aware of the anti-Republican subtext of the address, Madison voiced his displeasure to Monroe about Washington’s “suspicion of all who are thought to sympathize with [the French] revolution and who support the policy of extending our commerce” with France.30
