CHAPTER FOUR

The Farewell

THROUGHOUT THE first half of the 1790s, the closest approximation to a self-evident truth in American politics was George Washington. A legend in his own time, Americans had been describing Washington as “the Father of the Country” since 1776—which is to say, before there was even a country. By the time he assumed the presidency in 1789—no other candidate was even thinkable—the mythology surrounding Washington’s reputation had grown like ivy over a statue, effectively covering the man with an aura of omnipotence, rendering the distinction between his human qualities and his heroic achievements impossible to delineate.¹

Some of the most incredible stories also happened to be true. During Gen. Edward Braddock’s ill-fated expedition against the French outside Pittsburgh in 1755, a young Washington had joined with Daniel Boone to rally the survivors, despite having two horses shot out from under him and multiple bullet holes piercing his coat and creasing his pants. At Yorktown in 1781, he had insisted on standing atop a parapet for a full fifteen minutes during an artillery attack, bullets and shrapnel flying all about him, defying aides who tried to pull him down before he had properly surveyed the field of action. When Washington spoke of destiny, people listened.²

If there was a Mount Olympus in the new American republic, all the lesser gods were gathered farther down the slope. The only serious contender for primacy was Benjamin Franklin, but just before his death in 1790, Franklin himself acknowledged Washington’s supremacy. In a characteristically Franklinesque gesture, he bequeathed to Washington his crab-tree walking stick, presumably to assist the general in his stroll toward immortality. “If it were a sceptre,” Franklin remarked, “he has merited it and would become it.”³

In the America of the 1790s, Washington’s image was everywhere, in paintings, prints, lockets; on coins, silverware, plates, and household bric-a-brac. And his familiarity seemed forever. His commanding presence had been the central feature in every major event of the revolutionary era: the linchpin of the Continental Army throughout eight long years of desperate fighting from 1775 to 1783; the presiding officer at the Constitutional Convention in 1787; the first and only chief executive of the fledgling federal government since 1789. He was the palpable reality that clothed the revolutionary rhapsodies in flesh and blood, America’s one and only indispensable character. Washington was the core of gravity that prevented the American Revolution from flying off into random orbits, the stable center around which the revolutionary energies formed. As one popular toast of the day put it, he was “the man who unites all hearts.” He was the American Zeus, Moses, and Cincinnatus all rolled into one.⁴

Then, all of a sudden, on September 19, 1796, an article addressed to “the PEOPLE of the United States” appeared on the inside pages of the American Daily Advertiser, Philadelphia’s major newspaper. The conspicuous austerity of the announcement was matched by its calculated simplicity. It began: “Friends, and Fellow Citizens: The period for a new election of a Citizen, to Administer the Executive government of the United States, being not far distant … it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolutions I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those, out of whom a choice is to be made.” It ended, again in a gesture of ostentatious moderation, with the unadorned signature: “G. Washington, United States.”⁵

Every major newspaper in the country reprinted the article over the ensuing weeks, though only one, the Courier of New Hampshire, gave it the title that would echo through the ages—“Washington’s Farewell Address.” Contemporaries began to debate its contents almost immediately, and a lively (and ultimately silly) argument soon ensued about whether Washington or Hamilton actually wrote it. Over a longer stretch of time, the Farewell Address achieved transcendental status, ranking alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address as a seminal statement of America’s abiding principles. Its Olympian tone made it a perennial touchstone at those political occasions requiring platitudinous wisdom. And in the late nineteenth century the Congress made its reading a mandatory ritual on Washington’s birthday. Meanwhile, several generations of historians, led by students of American diplomacy, have made the interpretation of the Farewell Address into a cottage industry of its own, building up a veritable mountain of commentary around its implications for an isolationist foreign policy and a bipartisan brand of American statecraft.⁶

But in the crucible of the moment, none of these subsequent affectations or interpretations mattered much, if at all. What did matter, indeed struck most readers as the only thing that truly mattered, was that George Washington was retiring. The constitutional significance of the decision, of course, struck home immediately, signaling as it did Washington’s voluntary surrender of the presidency after two terms, thereby setting the precedent that held firm until 1940, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke it. (It was reaffirmed in 1951 with passage of the Twenty-second Amendment.) But even that landmark precedent, so crucial in establishing the republican principle of rotation in office, paled in comparison to an even more elemental political and psychological realization.

For twenty years, over the entire life span of the revolutionary war and the experiment with republican government, Washington had stood at the helm of the ship of state. Now he was sailing off into the sunset. The precedent he was setting may have seemed uplifting in retrospect, but at the time the glaring and painful reality was that the United States without Washington was itself unprecedented. The Farewell Address, as several commentators have noted, was an oddity in that it was not really an address; it was never delivered as a speech. It should, by all rights, be called the Farewell Letter, for it was in form and tone an open letter to the American people, telling them they were now on their own.⁷

INSIDERS HAD suspected that this was coming for about six months. In February of 1796, Washington had first approached Alexander Hamilton about drafting some kind of valedictory statement. Shortly thereafter, the gossip network inside the government had picked up the scent. By the end of the month, James Madison was writing James Monroe in Paris: “It is pretty certain that the President will not serve beyond his present term.” On the eve of the Farewell Address, the Federalist leader from Massachusetts, Fisher Ames, predicted that Washington’s looming announcement would constitute “a signal, like dropping a hat, for the party races to start,” but in fact they had been going on unofficially throughout the preceding spring and summer. In May, for example, Madison had speculated—correctly, it turned out—that in the first contested election for president in American history, “Jefferson would probably be the object on one side [and] Adams apparently on the other.” By midsummer, Washington himself was apprising friends of his earnest desire to leave the government when his term was up, “after which no consideration under heaven that I can foresee shall again with draw me from the walks of private life.” He had been dropping hints, in truth, throughout his second term, describing himself as “on the advanced side of the grand climacteric” and too old for the rigors of the job, repeating his familiar refrain about the welcome solace of splendid isolation beneath his “vine and fig tree” at Mount Vernon.⁸

But did he mean it? Lamentations about the tribulations of public life, followed by celebrations of the bucolic splendor of retirement to rural solitude, had become a familiar, even formulaic, posture within the leadership class of the revolutionary generation, especially within the Virginia dynasty. Everyone knew the classical models of latter-day seclusion represented by Cincinnatus and described by Cicero and Virgil. Declarations of principled withdrawal from the hurly-burly of politics to the natural rhythms of one’s fields or farms had become rhetorical rituals. If Washington’s retirement hymn featured the “vine and fig tree,” Jefferson’s idolized “my family, my farm, and my books.” The motif had become so commonplace that John Adams, an aspiring Cicero himself, claimed that the Virginians had worn out the entire Ciceronian syndrome: “It seems the Mode of becoming great is to retire,” he wrote Abigail in 1796. “It is marvellous how political Plants grow in the shade.” Washington had been threatening to retire even before he was inaugurated as president in 1789, and he had repeated the threat in 1792 prior to his reelection. While utterly sincere on all occasions, his preference for a virtuous retirement had always been trumped by a more public version of virtue, itself reinforced by the unanimous judgment of his political advisers that he and he alone was indispensable. Why expect a different conclusion in 1796?⁹

The short answer: age. Throughout most of his life, Washington’s physical vigor had been one of his most priceless assets. A notch below six feet four and slightly above two hundred pounds, he was a full head taller than his male contemporaries. (John Adams claimed that the reason Washington was invariably selected to lead every national effort was that he was always the tallest man in the room.) A detached description of his physical features would have made him sound like an ugly, misshapen oaf: pockmarked face, decayed teeth, oversized eye sockets, massive nose, heavy in the hips, gargantuan hands and feet. But somehow, when put together and set in motion, the full package conveyed sheer majesty. As one of his biographers put it, his body did not just occupy space; it seemed to organize the space around it. He dominated a room not just with his size, but with an almost electric presence. “He has so much martial dignity in his deportment,” observed Benjamin Rush, “that there is not a king in Europe but would look like a valet de chambre by his side.”¹⁰

Not only did bullets and shrapnel seem to veer away from his body in battle, not only did he once throw a stone over the Natural Bridge in the Shenandoah Valley, which was 215 feet high, not only was he generally regarded as the finest horseman in Virginia, the rider who led the pack in most fox hunts, he also possessed for most of his life a physical constitution that seemed immune to disease or injury. Other soldiers came down with frostbite after swimming ice-choked rivers. Other statesmen fell by the wayside, lacking the stamina to handle the relentless political pressure. Washington suffered none of these ailments. Adams said that Washington had “the gift of taciturnity,” meaning he had an instinct for the eloquent silence. This same principle held true on the physical front. His medical record was eloquently empty.¹¹

The inevitable chinks in his cast-iron constitution began to appear with age. He fell ill just before the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and almost missed that major moment. Then in 1790, soon after assuming the presidency, he came down with influenza, then raging in New York, and nearly died from pulmonary complications. Jefferson’s statements about Washington were notoriously contradictory and unreliable, as we shall see, but he dated Washington’s physical decline from this moment: “The firm tone of his mind, for which he had been remarkable, was beginning to relax; a listlessness of labor, a desire for tranquillity had crept on him, and a willingness to let others act, or even think, for him.” In 1794, while touring the terrain around the new national capital that would bear his name, he badly wrenched his back while riding. After a career of galloping to hounds, and a historic reputation as America’s premier man on horseback, he was never able to hold his seat in the saddle with the same confidence. As he moved into his mid-sixties, the muscular padding around his torso softened and sagged, his erect bearing started to tilt forward, as if he were always leaning into the wind, and his energy flagged by the end of each long day. Hostile newspaper editorials spoke elliptically of encroaching senility. Even his own vice president, John Adams, conceded that Washington seemed dazed and wholly scripted at certain public ceremonies, like an actor reading his lines or an aging athlete going through the motions.¹²

Perhaps age alone would have been sufficient to propel Washington down the road from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon one last time. Surely if anyone deserved to spend his remaining years relaxing under his “vine and fig tree,” it was Washington. Perhaps, in that eerily instinctive way in which he always grasped the difference between the essential and the peripheral, he literally felt in his bones that another term as president meant that he would die in office. By retiring when he did, he avoided that fate, which would have established a precedent that smacked of monarchical longevity by permitting biology to set the terminus of his tenure. Our obsession with the two-term precedent obscures the more elemental principle established by Washington’s voluntary retirement—namely, that the office would routinely outlive the occupant, that the American presidency was fundamentally different from a European monarchy, that presidents, no matter how indispensable, were inherently disposable.

But advancing age and sheer physical fatigue were only part of the answer. Perhaps the most succinct way to put it is that Washington was leaving office not just because he was hearing whispers of mortality, but also because he was wounded. What no British bullet could do in the revolutionary war, the opposition press had managed to do in the political battles during his second term. In the wake of his Farewell Address, for example, an open letter appeared in Benjamin Franklin Bache’s Aurora, in which the old firebrand Tom Paine celebrated Washington’s departure, actually prayed for his imminent death, then predicted that “the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor, whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.”¹³

Some of the articles were utterly preposterous, like the charge, also made in the Aurora, that recently obtained British documents from the wartime years revealed that Washington was secretly a traitor who had fully intended to sell out the American cause until Benedict Arnold beat him to the punch. His critics, it should also be noted, were a decided minority, vastly outnumbered by his countless legions of supporters. The rebuttals to Paine’s open letter, for example, appeared immediately, describing Paine as “that noted sot and infidel,” whose efforts to despoil Washington’s reputation “resembled the futile efforts of a reptile infusing its venom into the Atlantic or ejecting its filthy saliva towards the Sun.” Paine’s already-questionable reputation, in fact, never recovered from this episode. Taking on Washington was the fastest way to commit political suicide in the revolutionary era.¹⁴

Nevertheless, the attacks had been a persistent feature of his second term, and despite his customarily impenetrable front, Washington was deeply hurt by them: “But these attacks, unjust and unpleasant as they are, will occasion no change in my conduct; nor will they work any other effect in my mind,” he postured. Although Washington was not, like Adams or Jefferson, a prodigious reader of books, he was an obsessive reader of newspapers. (He subscribed to ten papers at Mount Vernon.) His pose of utter disregard was just that, a pose: “Malignity therefore may dart her shafts,” he explained, “but no earthly power can deprive me of the consolation of knowing that I have not … been guilty of willful error, however numerous they may have been from other causes.” This outwardly aloof but blatantly defensive tone seemed to acknowledge, in its backhanded way, that his critics had struck a nerve.¹⁵

The main charge levied against Washington was that he had made himself into a quasi king: “We have given him the powers and prerogatives of a King,” claimed one New York editorial. “He holds levees like a King, receives congratulations on his birthday like a King, employs his old enemies like a King, shuts himself up like a King, shuts up other people like a King, takes advice of his counsellors or follows his own opinions like a King.” Several of these charges were patently false. The grain of truth in them, on the other hand, involved Washington’s quite conspicuous embodiment of authority. He had no compunction about driving around Philadelphia in an ornate carriage drawn by six cream-colored horses; or, when on horseback, riding a white stallion with a leopard cloth and gold-trimmed saddle; or accepting laurel crowns at public celebrations that resembled coronations. It also did not help that when searching for a substitute for the toppled statue of George III in New York City, citizens chose a wooden replica of Washington, encouraging some critics to refer to him as George IV.¹⁶

In a sense, it was a problem of language. Since there had never been a republican chief executive, there was no readily available vocabulary to characterize such a creature, except the verbal traditions that had built up around European courts and kings. In another sense, it was a problem of personality. Washington was an inherently stiff and formal man who cultivated aloofness and possessed distancing mechanisms second to none. This contributed to his sense of majesty, true enough, but pushed an increment further, the majestic man became His Majesty.

Beyond questions of appearance or language or personal style, the larger problem was imbedded within the political culture of postrevolutionary America itself. The requirements of the American Revolution, in effect, cut both ways at once. To secure the Revolution and stabilize its legacy on a national level required a dominant leader who focused the energies of the national government in one “singular character.” Washington had committed himself to that cause, and in so doing, he had become the beneficiary of its political imperatives, effectively being cast in the role of a “republican king” who embodied national authority more potently and more visibly than any collective body like Congress could possibly convey.¹⁷

At the very core of the revolutionary legacy, however, was a virulent hatred of monarchy and an inveterate suspicion of any consolidated version of political authority. A major tenet of the American Revolution—Jefferson had given it lyrical expression in the Declaration of Independence—was that all kings, and not just George III, were inherently evil. The very notion of a republican king was a repudiation of the spirit of ’76 and a contradiction in terms. Washington’s presidency had become trapped within that contradiction. He was living the great paradox of the early American republic: What was politically essential for the survival of the infant nation was ideologically at odds with what it claimed to stand for. He fulfilled his obligations as a “singular character” so capably that he seemed to defy the republican tradition itself. He had come to embody national authority so successfully that every attack on the government’s policies seemed to be an attack on him.

This is the essential context for grasping Washington’s motives for leaving public office in 1796. By resigning voluntarily, he was declaring that his deepest allegiances, like those of his critics, were thoroughly republican. He was answering them, not with words, but with one decisive, unanswerable action. And this is also the proper starting point for understanding the words he left as his final valedictory, the Farewell Address. Washington was making his ultimate statement as America’s first and last benevolent monarch. Whatever the Farewell Address has come to mean over the subsequent two centuries of its interpretive history, Washington intended it as advice to his countrymen about how to sustain national unity and purpose, not just without him, but without a king.

THE MAIN themes of the Farewell Address are just as easy to state succinctly as they are difficult to appreciate fully. After declaring his irreversible intention to retire, Washington devoted several paragraphs to the need for national unity. He denounced excessive partisanship, most especially when it took the form of political parties pursuing a vested ideological agenda or sectional interest groups oblivious to the advantages of cooperation. The rest of the Farewell Address was then devoted to foreign policy, calling for strict American neutrality and diplomatic independence from the tangled affairs of Europe. He did not use the phrase “entangling alliances” so often attributed to him—Jefferson actually coined it in his First Inaugural Address (1801)—but Washington’s message of diplomatic independence from Europe preceded Jefferson’s words to the same effect. Taken together, his overlapping themes lend themselves to easy summary: unity at home and independence abroad. It was that simple.

The disarming simplicity of the statement, combined with its quasi-Delphic character, has made the Farewell Address a perennial candidate for historical commentary. Throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, the bulk of attention focused on the foreign policy section, advocates of American isolationism citing it as the classic statement of their cause, others arguing that strict isolation was never Washington’s intention, or that America’s emergence as a world power has rendered Washington’s wisdom irrelevant. More recently, the early section of the Farewell Address has been rediscovered, its plea for a politics of consensus serving as a warning against single-issue political movements, or against the separation of America into racial, ethnic, or gender-based constituencies. Like the classic it has become, the Farewell Address has demonstrated the capacity to assume different shapes in different eras, to change color, if you will, in varying shades of light.¹⁸

Although Washington’s own eyes never changed color and were set very much on the future, he had no way of knowing (much less influencing) the multiple meanings that future generations would discover in his words. The beginning of all true wisdom concerning the Farewell Address is that Washington’s core insights were firmly grounded in the lessons he had learned as America’s premier military and civilian leader during the revolutionary era. Unless one believes that ideas are like migratory birds that can fly unchanged from one century to the next, the only way to grasp the authentic meaning of his message is to recover the context out of which it emerged. Washington was not claiming to offer novel prescriptions based on his original reading of philosophical treatises or books; quite the opposite, he was reminding his countrymen of the venerable principles he had acquired from personal experience, principles so obvious and elemental that they were at risk of being overlooked by his contemporaries; and so thoroughly grounded in the American Revolution that they are virtually invisible to a more distant posterity.

First, it is crucial to recognize that Washington’s extraordinary reputation rested less on his prudent exercise of power than on his dramatic flair at surrendering it. He was, in fact, a veritable virtuoso of exits. Almost everyone regarded his retirement of 1796 as a repeat performance of his resignation as commander of the Continental Army in 1783. Back then, faced with a restive and unpaid remnant of the victorious army quartered in Newburgh, New York, he had suddenly appeared at a meeting of officers who were contemplating insurrection; the murky plot involved marching on the Congress and then seizing a tract of land for themselves in the West, all presumably with Washington as their leader.¹⁹

He summarily rejected their offer to become the American Caesar and denounced the entire scheme as treason to the cause for which they had fought. Then, in a melodramatic gesture that immediately became famous, he pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket: “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles,” he declared rhetorically, “for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country.” Upon learning that Washington intended to reject the mantle of emperor, no less an authority than George III allegedly observed, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” True to his word, on December 22, 1783, Washington surrendered his commission to the Congress, then meeting in Annapolis: “Having now finished the work assigned me,” he announced, “I now retire from the great theater of action.” In so doing, he became the supreme example of the leader who could be trusted with power because he was so ready to give it up.²⁰

Second, when Washington spoke about the need for national unity in 1796, his message resonated with all the still-fresh memories of his conduct during the revolutionary war. Although he actually lost more battles than he won, and although he spent the first two years of the war making costly tactical mistakes that nearly lost the American Revolution at its very start, by 1778 he had reached an elemental understanding of his military strategy; namely, that captured ground—what he termed “a war of posts”—was virtually meaningless. The strategic key was the Continental Army. If it remained intact as an effective fighting force, the American Revolution remained alive. The British army could occupy Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and it did. The British navy could blockade and bombard American seaports
with impunity, and it did. The Continental Congress could be driven from one location to another like a covey of pigeons, and it was. But as long as Washington held the Continental Army together, the British could not win the war, which in turn meant that they would eventually lose it.²¹

Like all of Washington’s elemental insights, this one seems patently obvious only in retrospect. A score of genuinely brilliant military leaders who also confronted a superior enemy force—Hannibal, Robert E. Lee, and Napoléon come to mind—were eventually defeated because they presumed that victory meant winning battles. Washington realized it meant sustaining the national purpose as embodied in the Continental Army. Space and time were on his side if he could keep the army united until the British will collapsed. And that is precisely what happened.

Third, when Washington talked about independence from foreign nations, his understanding of what American independence entailed cut much deeper than the patriotic veneer customarily suggested by the term. Once again, the war years shaped and hardened his convictions on this score, though the basic attitudes on which they rested were in place long before he assumed command of the Continental Army. Simply put, Washington had developed a view of both personal and national independence that was completely immune to sentimental attachments or fleeting ideological enthusiasms. He was a rock-ribbed realist, who instinctively mistrusted all visionary schemes dependent on seductive ideals that floated dreamily in men’s minds, unmoored to the more prosaic but palpable realities that invariably spelled the difference between victory and defeat. At its psychological nub, Washington’s inveterate realism was rooted in his commitment to control, over himself and over any and all events with the power to determine his fate. At its intellectual core, it meant he was the mirror image of Jefferson, for whom ideals were the supreme reality and whose inspirational prowess derived from his confidence that the world would eventually come around to fit the pictures he had in his head. Washington, however, regarded all such pictures as dangerous dreams.

In 1778, for example, at a time when patriotic propagandists were churning out tributes to the superior virtue of the American cause, Washington confided to a friend that, though virtue was both a wonderful and necessary item, it was hardly sufficient to win the war: “Men may speculate as they will,” he wrote, “they may draw examples from ancient story, of great achievements performed by its influence; but whoever builds upon it, as a sufficient basis for conducting a long and bloody War, will find themselves deceived in the end.… For a time it may, of itself, be enough to push Men to Action; to bear much, to encounter difficulties; but it will not endure unassisted by Interest.”²²

Another example: In 1780 Maj. John André was captured while attempting to serve as a British spy in league with Benedict Arnold to produce a major strategic debacle on the Hudson River at West Point. By all accounts, André was a model British officer with impeccable manners, who had the misfortune to be caught doing his duty. Several members of Washington’s staff, including Hamilton, pleaded that André’s life be spared because of his exceptional character. Washington dismissed the requests as sentimental, pointing out that if André had succeeded in his mission, it might very well have turned the tide of the war. The staff then supported André’s gallant request that he be shot like an officer rather than hanged as a spy. Washington also rejected this request, explaining that André, regardless of his personal attractiveness, was no more and no less than a spy. He was hanged the next day.²³

A final example: Shortly after the French entry into the war in 1778, several members of the Continental Congress began to lobby for a French invasion of Canada, arguing that the likelihood of French military success was greater because Canada was populated mainly by Frenchmen. Washington opposed the scheme on several grounds, but confided his deepest reasons to Henry Laurens, president of the Continental Congress. He feared “the introduction of a large body of French troops into Canada, and putting them in possession of the capital of that Province, attached to them by all the ties of blood, habits, manners, religion and former connexions of government.” The French were America’s providential allies, to be sure, but once they were ensconced in Canada, it would be foolish to expect them to withdraw: “I fear this would be too great a temptation to be resisted by any power actuated by the common maxims of national policy.” He went on to offer his advice to the Congress in one of his clearest statements about the motives governing nations: “Men are very apt to run into extremes,” he explained, “hatred to England may carry some into an excess of Confidence in France.… I am heartily disposed to entertain the most favourable sentiments of our new ally and to cherish them in others to a reasonable degree; but it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it.” There was no such thing as a permanent international alliance, only permanent national interests.²⁴

The clearest statement Washington ever made on America’s national interest came in his Circular Letter of 1783, the last of his annual letters to the state governments as commander in chief. He projected a panoramic and fully continental vision of an American empire and he expressed his vision in language that, at least for one moment, soared beyond the usually prosaic boundaries of his subdued style: “The Citizens of America, placed in the most enviable condition, as the sole Lords and Proprietors of a vast Tract of Continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of the World, and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life, are now by the late satisfactory pacification, acknowledged to be possessed of absolute freedom and Independency; They are, from this period, to be considered as Actors on a most conspicuous Theatre, which seems to be peculiarly designated by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.”²⁵

The breathtaking sweep of this vision is remarkable. Washington had spent his young manhood fighting with the British to expel the French from North America. With the victory in the American Revolution, the English had then been expelled. The entire continent was now a vast American manor, within which the people could expand unrestricted by foreign opposition. (Presumably the Native Americans would be assimilated or conquered; and the Spanish west of the Mississippi, Spain being Spain, would serve as a mere holding company until the American population swept over them.) Within the leadership of the revolutionary generation, Washington was, if not unique, at least unusual, for never having traveled or lived in Europe. (His only foreign excursion was to Barbados as a young man.) His angle of vision for the new American nation was decidedly western. The chief task facing the next several generations was to consolidate control of the North American continent. Anything that impaired or deflected that central mission was to be avoided at all costs.

In the same Circular Letter, he laid down the obligations and opportunities implicit in his national vision, again in some of the most poetic language he ever wrote: “The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Suspicion, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.” He then went on to specify the treasure trove of human knowledge that had accumulated over the past two centuries—it was about to be called the Enlightenment—and which constituted a kind of intellectual or philosophical equivalent of the nearly boundless natural resources waiting to be developed in the West. It was the fortuitous conjunction of these two vast reservoirs of philosophical and physical wealth that defined America’s national interest and made it so special. “At this auspicious period,” he wrote, “the United States came into existence as a Nation, and if their Citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be intirely their own.”²⁶

The modern British philosopher Isaiah Berlin once described the different perspectives that political leaders bring to the management of world affairs as the difference between the hedgehog and the fox: The hedgehog knows one big thing and the fox knows many little things. Washington was an archetypal hedgehog. And the one big thing he knew was that America’s future as a nation lay to the West, in its development over the next century of a continental empire. One of the reasons he devoted so much time and energy to planning the construction of canals, and shared in the misguided belief of his fellow Virginians that the Potomac constituted a direct link to the river system of the interior, was that he knew in his bones that the energy of the American people must flow in that direction. Europe might contain all the cultural capitals and current world powers, but in terms of America’s national interest, it was a mere sideshow and distraction. The future lay in those forests he had explored as a young man. All this he understood intuitively by the time of his first retirement in 1783.²⁷

GRAND VISIONS, even ones that prove as prescient as Washington’s, must nevertheless negotiate the damnable particularities that history in the short run tosses up before history in the long run arrives to validate the vision. In Washington’s case, the most obvious corollary to his view of American national interest was the avoidance of a major war during the gestative phase of national development. It so happened, however, that England and France were engaged in a century-old struggle for dominance of Europe and international supremacy, a struggle in which both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution were merely peripheral sideshows, and which would only end with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. Washington’s understanding of the proper American response to this global conflict was crystal clear: “I trust that we shall have too just a sense of our own interest to originate any cause that may involve us in it,” he wrote in 1794, “and I ardently wish we may not be forced into it by the conduct of other nations. If we are permitted to improve without interruption, the great advantages which nature and circumstances have placed within our reach, many years will not revolve before we may be ranked not only among the most respectable, but among the happiest people on earth.”²⁸

The linchpin of his foreign policy as president, it followed naturally, was the Proclamation of Neutrality (1793), which declared America an impartial witness to the ongoing European conflict. His constant refrain throughout his presidency emphasized the same point, even offering an estimate of the likely duration of America’s self-imposed alienation from global politics: “Every true friend to this Country must see and feel that the policy of it is not to embroil ourselves with any nation whatsoever; but to avoid their disputes and politics; and if they will harass one another, to avail ourselves of the neutral conduct we have adopted. Twenty years peace with such an increase of population and resources as we have a right to expect; added to our remote situation from the jarring powers, will in all probability enable us in a just cause to bid defiance to any power on earth.” In a sense, it was a fresh application of the same strategic lesson he had learned as head of the Continental Army—namely, to avoid engagement with a superior force until the passage of time made victory possible, what we might call “the strategy of enlightened procrastination.” In retrospect, and with all the advantages of hindsight, Washington’s strategic insights as president were every bit as foresighted as his strategic insights as commander in chief during the American Revolution, right down to his timing estimate of “twenty years,” which pretty much predicted the outbreak of the War of 1812.²⁹

Since Washington’s seminal insight was also the core piece of foreign policy wisdom offered in the Farewell Address, and since every major American statesman of the era also embraced the principle of neutrality as an obvious maxim, the meaning of the Farewell Address would seem to be incontrovertible, its message beyond controversy. But that was not at all how the message was heard at the time; in part because there was a deep division within the revolutionary generation that Washington was trying to straddle over just what a policy of American neutrality should look like; and in part because there was an alternative vision of the national interest circulating in the higher reaches of the political leadership, another opinion about where history was headed that could also make potent claims on the legacy of the American Revolution. All this had come to a head in Washington’s second term in the debate over Jay’s Treaty, creating the greatest crisis of Washington’s presidency, the most virulent criticism of his monarchical tendencies, and the immediate context for every word he wrote in the Farewell Address.³⁰

Jay’s Treaty was a landmark in the shaping of American foreign policy. In 1794, Washington had sent Chief Justice John Jay to London to negotiate a realistic bargain that avoided a war with England at a time when the United States was ill prepared to fight one. Jay returned in 1795 with a treaty that accepted the fact of English naval and commercial supremacy and implicitly endorsed a pro-English version of American neutrality. It recognized England’s right to retain tariffs on American exports while granting English imports most-favored status in the United States; it implicitly accepted English impressment of American sailors. It also committed the United States to compensate English creditors for outstanding pre-revolutionary debts, most of which were owed by Virginia’s planters. In return for these concessions, the English agreed to submit claims by American merchants for confiscated cargoes to arbitration and to abide by the promise made in the Treaty of Paris (1783) to evacuate its troops from their posts on the western frontiers. In effect, Jay’s Treaty was a repudiation of the Franco-American alliance of 1778, which had been so instrumental in gaining French military assistance for the winning of the American Revolution.³¹

While the specific terms of the treaty were decidedly one-sided in England’s favor, the consensus reached by most historians who have studied the subject is that Jay’s Treaty was a shrewd bargain for the United States. It bet, in effect, on England rather than France as the hegemonic European power of the future, which proved prophetic. It recognized the massive dependence of the American economy on trade with England. In a sense, it was a precocious preview of the Monroe Doctrine (1823), for it linked American security and economic development to the British fleet, which provided a protective shield of incalculable value throughout the nineteenth century. Mostly, it postponed war with England until America was economically and politically more capable of fighting one.

The long-term advantages of Jay’s Treaty, however, were wholly invisible to most Americans in the crucible of the moment. Sensing the unpopularity of the pact, Washington attempted to keep its terms secret until the Senate had voted. But word leaked out in the summer of 1795 and then spread, as Madison put it, “like an electric velocity to every part of the Union.” Jay later claimed that the entire eastern seaboard was illuminated each evening by protesters burning him in effigy. In New York Hamilton was struck in the head by a rock while attempting to defend the treaty to a crowd. John Adams recalled that Washington’s house in Philadelphia was “surrounded by an innumerable multitude, from day to day buzzing, demanding war against England, cursing Washington, and crying success to the French patriots and virtuous Republicans.” Any concession to British economic and military power, no matter how strategically astute, seemed a betrayal of the very independence won in the Revolution. Washington predicted that after a few months of contemplation, “when passion shall have yielded to sober reason, the current may possibly turn,” but in the meantime “this government, in relation to France and England, may be compared to a ship between the rocks of Sylla and Charybdis.”³²

To make matters worse, the debate over the treaty prompted a constitutional crisis. Perhaps the most graphic illustration of the singular status that Washington enjoyed was the decision of the Constitutional Convention to deposit the minutes of its secret deliberations with him for safekeeping. He therefore had exclusive access to the official record of the convention and used it to argue that the clear intent of the framers was to vest the treaty-making power with the executive branch, subject to the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate. Madison, however, had kept his own extensive “Notes on the Debates at the Constitutional Convention” and carried them down to share with Jefferson, who was in retirement at Monticello.

Although a careful reading of Madison’s “Notes on the Debates” revealed that Washington was correct, and indeed that Madison himself had been one of the staunchest opponents of infringements on executive power over foreign policy at the Convention, Jefferson managed to conclude that the House was intended to be an equal partner in approving all treaties, going so far as to claim that that body was the sovereign branch of the government empowered to veto any treaty it wished, thereby “annihilating the whole treaty making power” of the executive branch. “I trust the popular branch of our legislature will disapprove of it,” Jefferson wrote from Monticello, “and thus rid us of this infamous act, which is really nothing more than a treaty of alliance between England and the Anglomen of this country against the legislatures and people of the United States.”³³

The actual debate in the House in the fall and winter of 1795 proceeded under Madison’s more cautious leadership and narrower interpretation of the Constitution. (Jefferson’s position would have re-created the hapless and hamstrung conditions that he himself had decried while serving as minister to France under the Articles of Confederation, essentially holding American foreign policy hostage to congressional gridlock and the divisive forces of domestic politics.) Madison instead argued that the implementation of Jay’s Treaty required the approval of the House for all provisions dependent on funding. This achieved the desired result, blocking the treaty, while avoiding a frontal assault on executive power.³⁴

Madison served as the floor leader of the opposition in the House during the debate that raged throughout the winter and spring of 1796. At the start, he enjoyed an overwhelming majority and regarded his position as impregnable. But as the weeks rolled on, he experienced firsthand the cardinal principle of American politics in the 1790s: whoever went face-to-face against Washington was destined to lose. The majority started to melt away in March. John Adams observed bemusedly that “Mr. Madison looks worried to death. Pale, withered, haggard.” When the decisive vote came in April, Madison attributed his defeat to “the exertions and influence of Aristocracy, Anglicism, and mercantilism” led by “the Banks, the British Merchts., the insurance Comps.” Jefferson was more candid. Jay’s Treaty had passed, he concluded, because of the gigantic prestige of Washington, “the one man who outweighs them all in influence over the people.” Jefferson’s sense of frustration had reached its breaking point a few weeks earlier when, writing to Madison, he quoted a famous line from Washington’s favorite play, Joseph Addison’s Cato, and applied it to Washington himself: “a curse on his virtues, they’ve undone his country.”³⁵

WHAT COULD Jefferson’s extreme reaction possibly mean? After all, from our modern perspective Washington’s executive leadership throughout the debate over Jay’s Treaty was nothing less than we would expect from a strong president, whose authority to shape foreign policy is taken for granted. We also know the course he was attempting to steer, a middle passage between England and France that required tacking back and forth to preserve American neutrality and avoid war, turned out to be the correct policy. But in this instance, hindsight does not make us clairvoyant so much as blind to the ghosts and goblins that floated above the political landscape in the 1790s. What we might describe as admirably strong executive leadership struck Jefferson and his Republican followers as the arbitrary maneuverings of a monarch. And what appears in retrospect like a prudent and farsighted vision of the national interest looked to Jefferson like a betrayal of the American Revolution.

For Jefferson also had a national vision and a firm conviction about where American history was headed, or at least where it ought to be headed. The future he felt in his bones told him that the true spirit of ’76, most eloquently expressed in the language he had drafted for the Declaration of Independence, was a radical break with the past and with all previous versions of political authority. Like Voltaire, Jefferson longed for the day when the last king would be strangled with the entrails of the last priest. The political landscape he saw in his mind’s eye was littered with the dead bodies of despots and corrupt courtiers, a horizon swept clean of all institutions capable of coercing American citizens from pursuing their happiness as they saw fit. Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man(1791) captured the essence of his vision more fully than any other book of the age, depicting as it did a radical transformation of society once the last vestiges of feudalism were destroyed, and the emergence of a utopian world in which the essential discipline of government was internalized within the citizenry. The only legitimate form of government, in the end, was self-government.³⁶

Shortly after his return to the United States in 1790, Jefferson began to harbor the foreboding sense that the American Revolution, as he understood it, had been captured by alien forces. As we have seen, the chief villain and core counterrevolutionary character in the Jeffersonian drama was Alexander Hamilton, and the most worrisome feature on the political landscape was Hamilton’s financial scheme, with its presumption of a consolidated federal government possessing many of the powers over the states that Parliament had exercised over the colonies. Under Hamilton’s diabolical leadership, the United States seemed to be re-creating the very political and economic institutions—the national bank became the most visible symbol of the accumulating corruption—that the Revolution had been designed to destroy. Jefferson developed a full-blooded conspiracy theory in which bankers, speculators, federal officeholders, and a small but powerful congregation of closet Tories permanently alienated from the agrarian majority (“They all live in cities,” he wrote) had captured the meaning of the Revolution and were now proceeding to strangle it to death behind the closed doors of investment houses and within the faraway corridors of the Federalist government in New York and Philadelphia.³⁷

Exactly where Washington fit in this horrific picture is difficult to determine. After all, he presumably knew something about the meaning and purpose of the Revolution, having done more than any man to assure its success. (As Jefferson’s critics were quick to observe, the man ensconced at Monticello had never fired a shot in anger throughout the war.) Initially, Jefferson simply refused to assign Washington any culpability for the Federalist conspiracy, somehow suggesting that the person at the very center of the government was wholly oblivious to the schemes swirling around him. At some unspoken level of understanding Jefferson recognized that Washington was the American untouchable, and that any effort to include him in the indictment immediately placed his entire case against the Federalists on the permanent defensive.

Jefferson’s posture toward Washington shifted perceptibly in 1794. The catalyst for the change was the Whiskey Rebellion, a popular insurgency in four counties of western Pennsylvania protesting an excise tax on whiskey. Washington viewed the uprising as a direct threat to the authority of the federal government and called out the militia, a massive thirteen-thousand-man army, to squelch the uprising. Jefferson regarded the entire affair as a shameful repetition of the Shays’s Rebellion fiasco nearly a decade earlier, in which a healthy and essentially harmless expression of popular discontent by American farmers, so he thought, had prompted an excessive and unnecessary military response. While his first instinct was to blame Hamilton for the whole sorry mess, Washington’s speech justifying the action could not be so easily dismissed.³⁸

Jefferson denounced Washington’s speech as “shreds of stuff from Aesop’s fables and Tom Thumb.” In Jefferson’s new version of the Federalist conspiracy, Washington was an unknowing and somewhat pathetic accomplice, like an overaged “captain in his cabin” who was sound asleep while “a rogue of a pilot [presumably Hamilton] has run them into an enemy’s port.” Washington was certainly the grand old man of the American Revolution, but his grandeur had now been eclipsed by his age, providing the Hamiltonians with “the sanction of a name which has done too much good not to be sufficient to cover harm also.” Washington simply did not have control of the government and was inadvertently lending credibility to the treacheries being hatched all around him. Washington, in effect, was senile.³⁹

While hardly true, this explanation had the demonstrable advantage of permitting Jefferson’s vision of a Federalist conspiracy to congeal in a plausible pattern that formed around Washington without touching him directly. Jefferson was also careful never to utter any of his criticisms of Washington in public. But in his private correspondence with trusted Republicans, he developed the image of an old soldier past his prime, reading speeches he did not write and could not comprehend, lingering precariously in the misty edges of incompetence, a hollow hulk of his former greatness. The most famous letter in this mode—famous because it eventually found its way into the newspapers against Jefferson’s will—was prompted by the passage of Jay’s Treaty. “It would give you a fever,” Jefferson wrote to his Italian friend Phillip Mazzei, “were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot of England.” Since there was only one person who could possibly merit the mantle of America’s Samson and Solomon, Jefferson’s customary sense of discretion allowed him to make his point without mentioning the name. But everybody knew.⁴⁰

One final and all-important piece of the Jeffersonian vision transcended the troubling particularities of domestic politics altogether. As Jefferson saw it, the American Revolution had been merely the opening shot in a global struggle against tyranny that was destined to sweep over the world. “This ball of liberty, I believe most piously,” he predicted, “is now so well in motion that it will roll around the globe.” Whereas Washington regarded the national interest as a discrete product of political and economic circumstances shaping the policies of each nation-state at a specific moment in history, Jefferson envisioned a much larger global pattern of ideological conflict in which all nations were aligned for or against the principles that America had announced to the world in 1776. The same moralistic dichotomy that Jefferson saw inside the United States between discernible heroes and villains, he also projected into the international arena. For Jefferson, all specific decisions about American foreign policy occurred within the context of this overarching, indeed almost cosmic, pattern.⁴¹

Therefore, while Jefferson could talk with genuine conviction about American neutrality and the need to remain free of European entanglements, thereby sounding much like Washington, his version of American neutrality was decidedly different. He did not view the clash between England and France for supremacy in Europe as a distant struggle far removed from America’s long-term national interest. Instead, he saw the French Revolution as the European continuation of the spirit of ’76. He acknowledged that the random violence and careening course of the French Revolution were lamentable developments, but he insisted they were merely a passing chapter in the larger story of triumphant global revolution. “I am convinced they [the French] will triumph completely,” he wrote in 1794, “& the consequent disgrace of the invading tyrants is destined, in the order of events, to kindle the wrath of the people of Europe against those who have dared to embroil them in such wickedness, and to bring at length, kings, nobles & priests to the scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with blood.” In one moment of revolutionary euphoria, he dismissed all critics of mass executions in France as blind to the historic issues at stake: “The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of that contest,” he observed in 1793, “and was ever such a prize won with so little blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed I would rather have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it is now.”⁴²

If France was the revolutionary hero in this international drama, England was the counterrevolutionary villain. Jefferson’s highly moralistic language castigating George III and the English government in the Declaration of Independence was not just propaganda, at least for Jefferson. It reflected his genuine conviction that England was an inherently corrupt society, the bastion of monarchical power, aristocratic privilege, and courtly intrigue. Since Washington had spent eight years sending American soldiers to their death in battle against Great Britain, one might expect that he harbored even more hostile opinions toward his former adversary. But he did not. Jefferson’s Anglophobia was more virulent in part because it was more theoretical, a moral conclusion that followed naturally from the moralistic categories he carried around in his head. (If he wanted to stigmatize a political opponent, the worst name he could call him was “Angloman.”) For Jefferson, France represented the brightest future prospects; England represented “the dead hand of the past.” At the nub of his opposition to Jay’s Treaty, then, was his utter certainty that it threw the weight of the United States onto the wrong side of history. “The Anglomen have in the end got their treaty through,” he observed from his mountaintop in 1796, “and so far have triumphed over the cause of republicanism.” But their victory, painful as it was to witness, had also exposed their vulnerability. For it was now quite obvious “that nothing can support them but the Colossus of the President’s merits with the people, and the moment he retires, that his successor, if a Monocrat, will be overborne by the republican sense.… In the meantime, patience.”⁴³

Just a few weeks before he wrote these words, Jefferson had felt the urge to assure Washington that, contrary to the gossip circulating in the corridors and byways of Philadelphia, he was not responsible for the various rumors describing the president as a quasi-senile front man for the Federalist conspiracy against the vast majority of the American people. The historical record makes it perfectly clear, to be sure, that Jefferson was orchestrating the campaign of vilification, which had its chief base of operations in Virginia and its headquarters at Monticello. But Jefferson was the kind of man who could have passed a lie-detector test confirming his integrity, believing as he did that the supreme significance of his larger cause rendered conventional distinctions between truth and falsehood superfluous.

Washington’s response was designed to let Jefferson know that his professed innocence itself sounded like the defensive comments of a guilty man, and that Washington already knew a good deal more than Jefferson realized about who was whispering what behind his back. “If I had entertained any suspicious before,” wrote Washington, “the assurances you have given me of the contrary would have removed them; but the truth is, I harboured none.” (Translation: Your protests confirm my suspicions.) Then Washington parted the curtain covering his soul just enough to show Jefferson a glimpse of what he truly felt: “As you have mentioned the subject yourself, it would not be frank, candid or friendly to conceal that your conduct has been represented as derogatory from the opinion I had conceived you entertained to me.” (Translation: I am onto your game.) “That to your particular friends and connexions you have described, and they have described me, as a person under a dangerous influence.” (Translation: My sources are impeccable.) “My answer has invariably been that I had never discovered any thing in the conduct of Mr. Jefferson to raise suspicions in my mind of his insincerity.” (Translation: I have not done unto others what they have been doing unto me.)

Washington concluded with an impassioned defense of his support for Jay’s Treaty: “I was using my utmost exertions to establish a national character of our own, independent, as far as our obligations and justice would permit, of every nation of the earth.” But somehow he had “been accused of being the enemy of one Nation [France], and subject to the influence of another [England]; and to prove it, that every act of my administration should be tortured, and the most insidious mis-representations of them be made (by giving one side only of a subject, and that too in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter; or even to a common pick-pocket.) But enough of this; I have already gone farther in the expression of my feelings than I intended.” (Translation: Even this mere glimpse into my soul is more than you deserve, my former friend.)

For the next year, Jefferson attempted to sustain at least the veneer of a friendship with Washington by writing him letters in the Virginia gentleman mode, avoiding politics and foreign policy altogether, focusing instead on his crop-rotation scheme at Monticello, the vagaries of the weather, his vetch and wheat crop, and—a rather potent metaphor—the best way to spread manure. Washington responded in kind—that is, until the newspapers printed Jefferson’s old letter to Phillip Mazzei (the one about America’s degenerate Samson and Solomon). Then all communication from Mount Vernon to Monticello ceased forever.⁴⁴

Beyond the purely personal dimensions of their estrangement, beyond Washington’s sense of betrayal and Jefferson’s artful minuet with duplicity, this episode provides an invaluable clue to the larger and more impersonal political concerns that were on Washington’s mind when he sat down to compose the Farewell Address. They went far past the loss of Jefferson’s friendship, important though it was, because Jefferson’s behavior was symptomatic of more than a betrayal of trust; it accurately reflected a fundamental division within the revolutionary generation over the meaning of the Revolution and the different versions of America’s abiding national interest that followed naturally from that disagreement. The words that were used at the time, or the words employed by historians later to capture the essence of the argument, are mere labels: Federalists versus Republicans; pro-English versus pro-French versions of American neutrality. Underlying the debate that surfaced in full-blown fashion over Jay’s Treaty lurked a classic confrontation between those who wished America’s revolutionary energies to be harnessed to the larger purposes of nation-building and those who interpreted that very process as a betrayal of the Revolution itself.

From Washington’s perspective, the republic established by the Constitution created a government of laws that must be obeyed once the duly elected representatives had reached a decision. That was why he had acted so decisively to put down the Whiskey Rebellion and why he expected compliance with Jay’s Treaty once its terms were approved by the Congress. From Jefferson’s perspective, on the other hand, all laws and treaties that reined in the liberating impulses of the Revolution were illegitimate. That was why he regarded the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion as reprehensible. Were not these Pennsylvania farmers protesting taxes to which they did not consent? As for Jay’s Treaty, who in his right mind would countenance the acceptance of neocolonial status within the hated British Empire? Not obeying, but rather violating such unjust laws and treaties was the obligation of every citizen. Was this not the higher law that Americans should follow, arm in arm again with their trusted French brethren? In this formulation, political behavior that was, strictly speaking, traitorous and treasonable was, in fact, the only course that enjoyed the sanction of America’s most hallowed revolutionary principles.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this Republican mentality in action was James Monroe, a zealous Jefferson protégé currently serving as the minister to France. Though not in Jefferson’s league as a thinker or political strategist, Monroe more than made up for these deficiencies by embracing the core articles of the Republican faith with near-total abandon. He assured his French hosts that Jay’s Treaty would never be approved by the Congress, that the vast majority of the American people were eager to join France in war with England, that the U.S. government stood ready to advance France a $5 million loan to subsidize its military expenses and that, when none of these wild predictions materialized, the French government should patiently but firmly disregard all messages from the American president, since he obviously spoke for the aristocratic Anglomen and would soon be hurled from office by the people. In the meantime, the French should feel perfectly free to retaliate against American ships on the high seas. When they began to do so in the spring of 1796 and the first prize confiscated was a ship named the Mount Vernon,Monroe thought it was a providential version of poetic justice. And by the way, he hoped that Benjamin Franklin Bache at the Aurora would see fit to publish, under a pseudonym of course, some of his confidential communiqués from Paris protesting the most outrageous provisions of Jay’s Treaty. All this from America’s official emissary to the French government.⁴⁵

A slightly less extreme but infinitely more befuddled example of the same mentality had surfaced inside Washington’s cabinet at the very moment he was making the decision to send Jay’s Treaty to the Senate in August of 1795. The successor to Jefferson as secretary of state was Edmund Randolph, like Monroe a second-tier member of the Virginia dynasty, whose principal recommendation for the job was an unblinking loyalty to Washington, but whose chief political habit was to blink incessantly at any decision that demanded clear convictions of his own. Poor Randolph, an otherwise-decent man who was clearly in over his head, had granted an interview with the outgoing French minister to the United States, Joseph Fauchet, who had then transcribed the high points of the conversation in a dispatch that was subsequently intercepted at sea by a British cruiser. The British were only too willing to forward the dispatch to the American government. The day after Washington read it out loud to the full cabinet, Randolph submitted his resignation.⁴⁶

What the Fauchet dispatch claimed and what we know on the basis of subsequent scholarship are not synonymous. According to Fauchet, Randolph requested a bribe as part of some mysterious scheme in support of the Whiskey Rebellion. Although Randolph was almost certainly innocent of this charge, the whole tenor and tone of Fauchet’s account revealed Randolph confiding his personal opposition to the entire domestic and foreign policy of the Washington administration, lamenting the ascendance of a “financiering class” that aimed at the restitution of monarchy, decrying the enslavement of American trade to “the audacity of England,” depicting Randolph himself as the sole voice of “the patriotic party” within the government and the last hope for bringing a sadly dazed and thoroughly confused President Washington to his senses. Randolph’s unfortunate utterances were not truly treasonable, as he spent the remainder of his life trying vainly and in his foggy style to explain. In truth, he had simply allowed himself to get caught engaging in the same talk that Jefferson was conveying to friends and Monroe was sputtering out loud to anyone in Paris who would listen. The notion that a diabolical conspiracy of moneymen and monarchists had seized control of the federal government under Washington’s very nose was so widespread within Virginia’s political elite that they had lost all perspective on how conspiratorial their own words sounded to those denied the vision.⁴⁷

And so when Washington sat down to draft his Farewell Address, three salient features rose up out of the immediate political terrain to command his attention: First, he needed to demonstrate that, while poised for retirement, he was still very much in charge, that those rumors of creeping senility and routinized ineptitude were demonstrably wrong; second, he wanted to carve out a middle course, and do so in a moderate tone, that together pushed his most ardent critics to the fringes of the ongoing debate, where their shrill accusations, loaded language, and throbbing moral certainty could languish in the obscurity they deserved; third, the all-time master of exits wanted to make his final departure from the public stage the occasion for explaining his own version of what the American Revolution meant. Above all, it meant hanging together as a united people, much as the Continental Army had hung together once before, so that those who were making foreign policy into a divisive device in domestic politics, all in the name of America’s revolutionary principles, were themselves inadvertently subverting the very cause they claimed to champion. He was stepping forward into the battle one final time, planting his standard squarely in the center of the field, inviting the troops to rally around him rather than wander off in romantic cavalry charges at the periphery, assuring them by his example that, if they could only hold the position he defined, they would again prevail.

THE MANNER in which the Farewell Address was actually composed, as it turned out, served as a nearly perfect illustration of its central message—the need to subordinate narrow interests to the larger cause. Much ink has been spilled by several generations of scholars in an effort to determine who wrote the bulk of the words that eventually found their way into print and then into the history books. Like a false scent, the authorship question has propelled historians down labyrinthine trails of evidence in quest of the real and true author. Meanwhile, the object of the hunt sits squarely in the middle of the evidentiary trail, so obvious that it is ignored. Namely, the creation of the Farewell Address was an inherently collaborative process. Some of the words were Madison’s; most of the words were Hamilton’s; all the ideas were Washington’s. The drafting and editing of the Farewell Address in effect became a metaphor for the kind of collective effort Washington was urging on the American people as a whole.⁴⁸

The story had its start four years earlier, in May of 1792, when Washington approached Madison to help him compose a valedictory address. At the time fully convinced that he would step down after one term, Washington had chosen Madison because his two most trusted cabinet members, Hamilton and Jefferson, were too closely associated with the party disputes he wanted to condemn. Madison made extensive notes on the basis of three conversations with Washington, then drafted a document that employed the president’s own language for many key passages: “a spirit of party in the Government was becoming a fresh source of difficulty”; “we are all Children of the same Country”; the nation’s “essential interests are the same … its diversities arising from climate and from soil will naturally form a mutual relation of parts” and serve as the formulation for “an affectionate and permanent Union.” It was Madison who first proposed that the Farewell Address not be delivered as a speech to Congress, but that it be printed in the newspapers as “a direct address to the people who are your only constituents.” After Washington listened to the unanimous advice of all his cabinet officers and reluctantly agreed to serve a second term, he tucked away Madison’s draft for another day.⁴⁹

That day arrived exactly four years later. On May 15, 1796, Washington sent Hamilton the “first draft” of a retirement address—no amount of persuasion could change his mind this time—that would announce his departure from public life. The first section of this document reproduced Madison’s draft of 1792, which was highly ironic, because Madison had become the primary leader of the Republican opposition to Washington’s policies in the Congress and was therefore a rather dramatic example of the party spirit that his former words had warned against. (The Federalists referred to Madison as “the general” of the opposition, calling Jefferson, his mentor secluded at Monticello, “the generalissimo.”) Washington included the earlier Madison draft for two reasons: First, it expressed in clear and forceful language a major point he still wanted to make about subordinating sectional and ideological differences to larger national purposes, all the more resonant because drafted by someone who seemed to have forgotten the lesson; and second, its inclusion publicized the fact that he had wanted to retire four years ago, so his current decision was really the culmination of a long-standing preference.⁵⁰

This latter point was extremely important to Washington. His most virulent critics were currently claiming that his support for the unpopular Jay’s Treaty made him unelectable in 1796, so his decision to retire was not truly a voluntary act, but a forced recognition of the political realities. Hamilton tried to reassure him that his sensitivities on this score were excessive, that if he did choose to run for a third term, he would win in a walk. (And Hamilton was surely correct.) But Washington wanted not a shred of doubt to remain that his decision to step aside was wholly voluntary. This was both a matter of personal pride and a crucial political precedent. By including the Madison draft of 1792, he advertised his reluctance to serve even his second term, thereby enhancing the credibility of his voluntary rejection of a third. As Washington put it, “it may contribute to blunt, if it does not turn aside, some of the shafts … among which—conviction of fallen popularity, and despair of being re-elected, [which] will be levelled at me with dexterity & keenness.”⁵¹

The second section of this first draft that Washington sent to Hamilton focused on the foreign policy issues that had dominated his second term. He was fully aware that Hamilton had supported Jay’s Treaty. (He had even recommended that Hamilton consult Jay before putting pen to paper.) But he also wanted Hamilton to know that none of his or Jay’s pro-English prejudices should seep into his draft of the document; it should emphasize American neutrality and “promote the true and permanent interests of the country.” Washington’s views, not Hamilton’s, must prevail. Hamilton would be the draftsman, but Washington must be the author. “I am anxious, always, to compare the opinions of those in whom I confide with one another,” Washington explained, “and these again (without being bound by them) with my own, that I may extract all the good I can.” Hamilton required no elaborate instructions on the procedure. It was the same process Washington had developed with his staff as commander in chief of the Continental Army, then implemented with his cabinet as president. Hamilton had played the same role in both contexts. All major decisions were collective occasions, in which advisers, like spokes on a wheel, made contributions, usually in written form. But in the end the final decision, to include the final choice of words, came together at the center, which was always Washington.⁵²

Hamilton also realized that he was being asked to write for posterity as much as the present. “It has been my object to render this act importantly and lastingly useful,” he confided to Washington, “and avoid all just cause of present exception, to embrace such reflections and sentiments as will wear well, progress in approbation with time & redound to future reputation.” He devoted a full two months to revising Washington’s draft, amplifying Madison’s earlier account of the need to rise above party differences and rally behind the elected representatives of the national government.⁵³

On July 30, he sent the fruits of his labors to Washington, who found the Hamilton draft “exceedingly just, & just such as ought to be inculcated.” His only reservation related to length: “All the columns of a large Gazette would scarcely, I conceive, contain the present draft,” Washington noted, adding at the end, “I may be mistaken.” (He was.) Hamilton was less sure he had done the best job possible and immediately began work on a wholly new draft, which he submitted to Washington two weeks later. But Washington liked the earlier draft better.⁵⁴

Over the next month, edited versions of that draft passed back and forth several times, with Washington pressing Hamilton for clarifications, deleting certain passages, adding others: “I shall expunge all that is marked in the paper as unimportant,” he wrote on August 25, “and as you perceive some marginal notes, written with a pencil, I pray you to give the sentiments mature consideration.” If Hamilton saw fit to make additional revisions on his own, he should “let them be so clearly interlined-erased-or referred to in the margins that no mistake may happen.” Washington wanted no last-minute changes smuggled in without his approval. Even when the final draft was ready for the printer in September, he made changes in 174 out of 1,086 lines in his own hand and reviewed the punctuation throughout—a final scan, so the printer observed firsthand, “in which he was very minute.” It seems fair to conclude that what we call “Washington’s Farewell Address” is not misnamed.⁵⁵

What was Hamilton’s contribution? Chiefly to assure that the elaboration of Washington’s ideas occurred within a rhetorical framework that maintained a stately and dignified tone throughout, and to sustain a palpable cogency and sense of proportion in developing Washington’s argument, which itself embodied the self-assurance so central to his major theme about the nation itself. Hamilton had nearly perfect pitch for Washington’s language, having begun his public career drafting letters and memoranda for Washington’s signature as a staff officer during the war. He was therefore well practiced in subordinating his own inclinations and style to Washington’s larger purposes. In the Farewell Address, the result is nearly seamless. When combined with the collaborative character of the drafting process, it becomes virtually impossible to tell where one voice ends and another begins.

But Hamilton was also such a virtuoso performer in his own right, unmatched within the revolutionary generation for his capacity to deliver powerful prose on a tight deadline, that there are moments in the Farewell Address when his own distinctive voice breaks through. For example, while Washington agreed with Hamilton’s version of what the constitutional settlement of 1787–1788 meant, only Hamilton could have put it this way:

This government, the offspring of our own choice uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the distribution of its powers, uniting security with energy, and containing within itself a provision for its own amendment, has a just claim to your confidence and support.… The very idea of the power and right of the People to establish Government presupposes the duty of every Individual to obey the established Government.⁵⁶

Or on the question of America’s national interest and the foreign policy it dictated, again the idea is pure Washington, but expressed in language that flowed in Hamiltonian cadences:

The Great role of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible.… Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns.… ’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign world.… ’Tis folly for one Nation to look for disinterested favors from another.… There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate upon real favours from Nation to Nation. ’Tis an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.⁵⁷

When Hamilton showed a late draft of this passage to John Jay for his commentary, Jay expressed admiration for the style but slight discomfort with the argument. “It occurs to me,” he wrote to Washington, “that it may not be perfectly prudent to say that we can never expect Favors from a nation, for that assertion seems to imply that nations always are, or always ought to be moved only by interested motives.” Jay’s suggestion came too late—the Farewell Address was already in the hands of the printer—but would have made no difference. Washington meant exactly what Hamilton had said. Jay’s views of prospective English beneficence, like Jefferson’s views of French solidarity with America, were only seductive pieces of sentimentality, juvenile illusions in the real world of international relations.⁵⁸

Beyond the tight cogency and felicitous cadences, Hamilton’s major contribution was to save Washington from his own personal sentiments. In his May draft, Washington had included the following paragraph near the start:

I did not seek the office with which you have honored me … [and now possess] the grey hairs of a man who has, excepting the interval between the close of the Revolutionary War, and the organization of the new government—either in a civil, or military character, spent five and forty years—All the prime of his life—in serving his country; [may he] be suffered to pass quietly to the grave—and that his errors, however numerous; if they are not criminal, may be consigned to the Tomb of oblivion, as he himself will soon be to the Mansion of Retirement.⁵⁹

Hamilton eliminated the references to “grey hairs,” “prime of his life,” and “errors, however numerous”; he also altered the wounded tone of the passage by placing it at the end rather than at the beginning of the Farewell Address, where it seemed less like a somewhat pathetic cri de coeur than a dignified personal testimonial. Washington recognized the improvement, congratulating Hamilton for rendering him “with less egotism,” meaning the Hamilton draft covered the wounds, or at least prevented the president from displaying them too conspicuously.⁶⁰

HAMILTON’S exquisite sense of affinity for Washington’s mentality failed him only once, though the failure, and therefore what is in effect the missing section of the Farewell Address, opens a more expansive window into the national vision that Washington was trying to project. During the drafting process in the summer of 1796, Washington kept urging Hamilton to insert a separate section on the creation of a national university in the capital city now being constructed on the Potomac. Hamilton resisted the recommendation, arguing quite plausibly that such a specific proposal was inappropriate for an address designed to operate at a higher altitude. It was, he suggested, the kind of proposal better made in the final message to Congress in the fall. But Washington kept insisting that he wanted the idea to be a featured element in the Farewell Address: “But to be candid,” he explained, “I much question whether a recommendation of this measure to the Legislature will have a better effect now than formerly—It may skew indeed my sense of its importance, and that it is a sufficient inducement with me to bring the matter before the public in some shape or another, at the closing Scenes of my political exit … to set the People ruminating on the importance of the measure.”⁶¹

Hamilton eventually relented, though only grudgingly. At the last moment, he inserted a brief two-sentence paragraph rather awkwardly near the middle of the Farewell Address, calling for “Institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge” and urging quite harmlessly that “public opinion should be enlightened.” Washington was not satisfied with the result but decided to let the matter drop. In so doing, however, he let Hamilton know that something was being lost, that his hopes for a national university linked up to something larger: “In the general Juvenal period of life, when friendships are formed, & habits established that will stick by one,” he explained, “the Youth, or young men from different parts of the United States would be assembled together, & would by degrees discover that there was not just cause for those jealousies & prejudices which one part of the Union had imbibed against another part.… What, but the mixing of people from different parts of the United States during the War rubbed off these impressions? A Century in the ordinary intercourse, would not have accomplished what the Seven years association in Arms did.”⁶²

Here was a characteristically Washingtonian insight—rooted in his experience during the war years; simultaneously simple but essential; projecting developments into the future on the basis of patterns that were still congealing and that only now, in retrospect, seem so obvious. Like his misguided obsession with those Potomac canals, his campaign for a national university in the capital city never bore fruit. But both failed projects were also visionary projections linked to larger expectations. In the case of the national university, it was the recognition that the United States was still very much a nation in the making because its population was still a people in the making. Time, indeed a considerable stretch of time, would be required to allow the bonding together of this large, widely dispersed, and diverse population. But institutions devoted to focusing the national purposes, again like the Continental Army during the war, could accelerate time and move America past that vulnerable and problematic phase of its development when fragmentation, perhaps civil war, was still a distinct possibility.

Throughout the Farewell Address Washington had been exhorting Americans to think of themselves as a collective unit with a common destiny. To our ears, it sounds so obvious because we occupy the future location that Washington envisioned. But his exhortations toward national unity were less descriptions than anticipations, less reminders of the way we were than predictions of what we could become. Indeed, the act of exhorting was designed to enhance the prospect by talking about it as if it were a foregone conclusion, which Washington most assuredly knew it was not. In the end, the Farewell Address was primarily a great prophecy, accompanied by advice about how to make it come true.

It was also, at least implicitly, a justification for the strong executive leadership Washington had provided in the 1790s and that his critics had stigmatized as a monarchy. Without a republican king at the start, he was saying, the new quasi nation called the United States would never have enjoyed the opportunity to achieve its long-run destiny; it would have expired in the short run. In a sense, Washington was defending his presidency as an essential exception to full-blooded republican principles. Down the road, when the common experience of conquering the continent and the sheer passage of time had bound the American people together into a more cohesive whole, the more voluntaristic habits at the core of republican mentality could express themselves fully. For now, however, the center needed to hold. That meant a vigorous federal government with sufficient powers to coerce the citizenry to pay taxes and obey the laws. Veterans of the Continental Army, like Hamilton and John Marshall, fully understood this essential point. Intriguingly, the two chieftains of the Republican opposition, Jefferson and Madison, had never served in the army. They obviously did not understand.

How could this emerging nation manage its way through this first post-Washington phase of its development? In the Farewell Address Washington offered his general answer: Think of yourself as a single nation; subordinate your regional and political differences to your common identity as Americans; regard the federal government that represents your collective interest as an ally rather than an enemy (as “us,” if you will, rather than “them”). In his eighth and final message to Congress, delivered the following December, Washington provided a more specific directive. His Republican critics had described Jay’s Treaty as a pact with the devil that was certain to produce domestic and diplomatic catastrophe. Upon scanning the horizon for the last time, however, Washington saw serenity setting in: Treaties with the hostile Indian tribes on the southern and western frontiers were being negotiated; the British were removing their troops from posts in the West in accord with Jay’s Treaty; thanks primarily to the resumption of trade with Great Britain, the American economy was humming along quite nicely, with revenues from the increased trade reducing the national debt faster than had been anticipated. The only dark spot on the political horizon was France, whose cruisers were intercepting American shipping in the West Indies. Washington counseled patience with what would soon be called this “quasi war” with the French Republic, predicting (correctly, as it turned out) that “a spirit of justice, candour and friendship … will eventually insure success.” Confidence, he seemed to be saying, is a self-fulfilling prophecy, all the more so when the confidence was justified.⁶³

Even more specifically, Washington suggested that his departure from the national scene would require the enlargement, not the diminution, of the powers of the federal government in order to compensate for his absence. He recommended that Congress undertake a whole new wave of federal initiatives: a new program to encourage domestic manufactures; a similar program to subsidize agricultural improvements; the creation of a national university (his old hobbyhorse) and a national military academy; an expanded navy to protect American shipping in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean; increased compensation for federal officials in order to ensure that public service was not dependent on private wealth. It was the most expansive presidential program for enlarged federal power until John Quincy Adams proposed a similar vision in his inaugural address of 1825. It was the tradition that the Whig party of Henry Clay and the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln sustained in the nineteenth century and that the Democratic party of Andrew Jackson rejected. In the more immediate context of 1796, Washington seemed to be saying that the departure of America’s only republican king necessitated the creation of centering forces institutionalized at the federal level to maintain the focusing functions he had performed personally.⁶⁴

Finally, who were these American people being bonded together? If Washington wished the national government to be regarded as “us” rather than “them,” how did he define the “us”? He addressed his remarks in the Farewell Address to his “Friends, and Fellow Citizens.” While he undoubtedly thought this description cast a wide and inclusive net that pulled in residents from all the regions or sections of the United States, it did not include all inhabitants. The core of the audience he saw in his mind’s eye consisted of those adult white males who owned sufficient property to qualify for the vote. Strictly speaking, such men were the only citizens. He told Hamilton that his Farewell Address was aimed especially at “the Yeomanry of the country,” which meant ordinary farmers working small plots of land and living in households. This brought women and children into the picture, not as full-blooded citizens, to be sure, but as part of the American people whose political identity was subsumed within the family and conveyed by the male heads of household. They were secondary citizens, but unquestionably Americans. Landless rural residents and impoverished city dwellers lay outside the picture, though they—more likely, their descendants—could work their way into the American citizenry over time. If only potentially and prospectively, they were included.⁶⁵

The largest unmentioned and presumably excluded constituency was the black population, about 90 percent of which was enslaved. Washington said nothing whatsoever about slavery in his Farewell Address, sustaining the silence that the Congress had adopted as its official posture early in his presidency. Silence, of course, can speak volumes, and in Washington’s case, the unspoken message was that a moratorium had been declared on this most controversial topic, which more than any other issue possessed the potential to destroy the fragile union that he saw as his life’s work and chief political legacy. Since the primary purpose of the Farewell Address was to affirm that legacy and foster the promotion of his national vision, the last thing Washington wanted to mention was the one subject that presented the most palpable threat to the entire enterprise. Like Madison in 1790, he wanted slavery off the American political agenda. Unlike Madison, however, and unlike most of his fellow Virginians, there is a reason to believe that he thought the moratorium on slavery as a political problem should lapse in 1808, when the Constitution permitted the slave trade to end.

His silence on the slavery question was strategic, believing as he did that slavery was a cancer on the body politic of America that could not at present be removed without killing the patient. The intriguing question is whether Washington could project an American future after slavery that included the African-American population as prospective members of the American citizenry. For almost all the leading members of the Virginia dynasty, the answer was clear and negative. Even those, like Jefferson and Madison, who looked forward to the eventual end of slavery, also presumed that all freed blacks must be transported elsewhere. Washington never endorsed that conclusion. Nor did he ever embrace the racial arguments for black inferiority that Jefferson advanced in Notes on the State of Virginia. He tended to regard the condition of the black population as a product of nurture rather than nature—that is, he saw slavery as the culprit, preventing the development of diligence and responsibility that would emerge gradually and naturally after emancipation.⁶⁶

By 1796, he had begun to draft his last will and testament, in which he eventually made elaborate provisions to assure that all his slaves would be freed upon the death of his wife. He also made even more elaborate provisions to guarantee that Mount Vernon would be sold off in pieces, part of the proceeds used to support his freed slaves and their children for several decades into the future. His action on this score, as usual, spoke louder than his words, for they suggested an obligation beyond the grave to assist his former slaves in the transition to freedom within the borders of the United States. Whether he could conjure up a vision of blacks and whites living together in harmony at some unspecified time in the future remains unclear. But he was truly rare within the political elite of Virginia in leaving this question open.

He could and did imagine the inclusion of Native Americans. Late in August of 1796, at the same time he was making final revisions on his Farewell Address, Washington wrote his “Address to the Cherokee Nation.” From a strictly legal point of view, each of the various Indian tribes east of the Mississippi was already a nation, or an indigenous quasi-nation within the expanding borders of the United States. Therein, of course, lay the chief problem and the makings for an apparently inevitable tragedy. For in Washington’s projection, the westward flow of the American population would prove relentless and unstoppable: “I also have thought much on this subject,” Washington declared to the Cherokees, “and anxiously wished that the various Indian tribes, as well as their neighbours, the White people, might enjoy in abundance all the good things which make life comfortable and happy. I have considered how this could be done; and have discovered but one path that would lead them to that desirable solution. In this path I wish all the Indian nations to walk.”⁶⁷

The “one path” Washington identified required the Indians to
recognize that contesting the expansion of the white population was suicidal. The only realistic solution required the Indians to accept the inevitable, abandon their hunter-gatherer economies, which required huge tracts of land to work effectively, embrace farming as their preferred mode of life, and gradually over several generations allow themselves to be assimilated into the larger American nation. Washington acknowledged that he was asking a lot, that “this path may seem a little difficult to enter” because it meant subduing their understandable urge to resist and sacrificing many of their most distinctive and cherished tribal values. As he prepared for his own retirement, in effect he was encouraging the Indian tribes to retire from their way of life as Indians: “What I have recommended to you,” he wrote somewhat plaintively, “I am myself going to do. After a few moons are passed I shall leave the great town and retire to my farm. There I shall attend to the means of increasing my cattle, sheep and other useful animals.” If the Indians would follow his example, the peaceful coexistence of Indians and whites could follow naturally, and their gradual merger into a single American people would occur within the arc of the next century. Whatever moral deficiencies and cultural condescensions a modern-day American audience might find in Washington’s advice, two salient points are clear: First, it was in keeping with his relentless realism about the limited choices that history offered; and second, it projected Indians into the mix of peoples called Americans.⁶⁸

REACTIONS TO the Farewell Address fell into the familiar grooves. The overwhelming public response was tearfully exuberant, regretting the departure of America’s political centerpiece for the last quarter century, but embracing his message, as one member of the cabinet put it, “as a transcript of the general expression of the people of the United States.” Meanwhile, the Republican press denounced his warnings against political divisions at home and diplomatic involvement abroad as “the loathings of a sick mind.” In theAurora, Benjamin Franklin Bache reprinted the old charge that Washington had been a traitor who conspired with the English government during the war. “This man has a celebrity in a certain way,” Washington remarked concerning Bache, “for his calumnies are to be exceeded only by his impudence, and both stand unrivaled.” One of his last acts as president was to place on file in the State Department his rejoinder to Bache’s accusations, which historians have long since discovered were based on forged English documents. He left office in March of 1797 with the resounding cheers of his huge army of supporters and the howls of that much smaller pack of critics echoing in his ears.⁶⁹

Passing through Alexandria on his way to Mount Vernon, he stopped to deliver a speech in which he reiterated his allegiance to the principles articulated in the Farewell Address. “Clouds may and doubtless often will in the vicissitudes of events, hover over our political concerns,” he announced, “but a steady adherence to these principles will not only dispel but render our prospects the brighter by such temporary obscurities.” He remained supremely confident that he was right to the very end, though the “temporary obscurities” being spewed out by the Republican press—France was America’s international ally and the national government its domestic enemy—produced fits of private despair and periodic flare-ups of the famous Washington temper. (Even ensconced under his “vine and fig tree” in retirement, he continued to subscribe to ten newspapers.) More than any great leader in American history before or since, he was accustomed to getting his way, and equally accustomed to having history prove him right. But his final two and a half years at Mount Vernon were beclouded by the incessant apprehension that his final advice to the country would be ignored, and his legacy, and with it his own place in history, abandoned.⁷⁰

Part of his problem was a function of location. Mount Vernon, of course, lay within the borders of Virginia, and Virginia had become the homeland of the Republican opposition, which was dedicated to overturning the foreign policy and the entire edifice of national sovereignty that Washington stood for. In effect, Mount Vernon became an enclave within enemy territory, surrounded by neighbors committed to a Virginia-writ-large version of the American republic. Washington, once the supreme Virginian, had in their eyes gone over to the other side. Once the all-purpose solution, Washington was now the still-potent problem, a kind of Trojan horse planted squarely in the Virginia fortress. The fact that he devoted so much of his remaining time and energy to overseeing the construction of the new capital city on the Potomac—it was a foregone conclusion that it would be named after him—only confirmed their worst fears. For that city, and the name it was destined to carry, symbolized the conspiracy that threatened, so Jefferson and his followers thought, all that Virginia stood for. Washington, for his part, obliged his Virginia critics by urging his stepgrandson to attend Harvard in order to escape the provincial versions of learning currently ascendant in the Old Dominion. Increasingly, he seemed to think of his home state in the same vein as the Indian tribes in his letter to the Cherokees. The destiny of the American nation was pointing one way, and if the tribal chieftains of Virginia chose to oppose that direction, so be it; but they were aligning themselves on the wrong side of history.⁷¹

The end came on December 14, 1799. The previous day, when it became clear that the combination of pneumonia and the bleeding and blistering remedies of his physicians could produce but one conclusion, Washington ordered the doctors to cease their barbarisms and permit him to die in peace: “I am just going,” he apprised those around his bed. “Have me decently buried, and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.… Do you understand me?” Though he had no illusions of his own immortality, he apparently feared being buried alive, perhaps believing that was really what had happened with Jesus. His last words were “ ’Tis well.” Self-sufficient as always, his last act was to feel his own pulse at the moment he expired.⁷²