Although each member of the cabinet now was a Federalist, Washington continued to deny the obviously partisan leanings of his administration. A “hundred and an hundred times you have heard me lament” factionalism, he exclaimed. Few were convinced by his disavowal. The Republican press, in fact, turned its guns on Washington and directed a campaign of open invective against him, subjecting him to a litany of vitriolic comments such as he never had previously encountered. Not only was his talent for statesmanship called into question, his style of leadership was mocked, especially his august and stately bearing, a manner best suited, it was said, for monarchy. Strangely, however, Washington’s most esteemed critic, and the foe with perhaps the strongest case to make against him, aroused little support, failing even to induce the Republicans to take up his case against the embroiled chief executive. That was Edmund Randolph, who just before Christmas 1795 launched an open assault on his former friend.23
Before going public Randolph had communicated his bitterness to the president in several private missives. He was aggrieved that Washington had not consulted him privately before confronting him in the presence of the cabinet; and, he went on, for Washington to have permitted his colleagues on the cabinet to cross-examine him was unconscionable. The case against him, he added, was the outcropping of partisan politics, and Washington should have seen what the Federalist conspirators were about. As Randolph stewed and simmered throughout the autumn, his tone grew more strident, more sarcastic. Late in October his letters—in Washington’s estimation—had grown so “full of innuendoes” that the president refused any longer to respond. But that hardly ended matters. During the holiday season the public was let in on what had been occurring in private. Randolph published his version of the affair for all the world to see. He accused Washington of having prejudiced his case, and, more damning, he maintained that beneath Washington’s “exterior of cool and slow deliberation” lurked a narrow mind, one that “rapidly catches a prejudice and with difficulty abandons it. . . .”24
Randolph’s case was strong. The original evidence against his alleged misconduct was worse than feeble. It was based on Pickering’s amateurish and error-strewn translation of Fauchet’s letters. In addition, Randolph not only had secured from Fauchet a certificate in which the French envoy declared that the former secretary of state had never sought or received bribes from the government of France, but the minister also denied that Randolph ever had communicated state secrets to the French legation. Furthermore, Randolph had secured from Citizen Pierre Adet, Fauchet’s successor in Philadelphia, the release of hitherto secret French documents, state papers that revealed a few indiscreet statements by the secretary, yet which seemed to confirm his innocence. Washington might have obtained these same documents before moving against Randolph. Unfortunately, he never made the attempt.25
The Randolph episode once again unmasked an unattractive side of Washington’s personality, one glimpsed earlier in his fevered behavior toward Generals Lee and Gates. Randolph was the latest to discover the ease with which Washington could be swayed by his “patrons,” as he put it. Moreover, it now was his turn to learn that rather than acknowledge an error Washington would “shut [his] mind” and steel himself with an “invincible repugnance to retract” any misjudment.26
In addition, Randolph learned something else. Washington was invulnerable. “I wish he were dead,” said former Pennsylvania senator Maclay that fall, an old foe who long before had learned of the president’s invincibility. Washington, he believed, could succeed with anything he touched. Now Randolph concurred. The president’s touch was magical. Even his most “unpalatable” acts were sanctioned, the former secretary moaned.27
On the day that Washington named Oliver Ellsworth to be chief justice, he received welcome news. From Spain came word of the Treaty of San Lorenzo, the fruits of the Pinckney mission to Madrid. The pact secured far more than anyone in Philadelphia had dared to expect.
Pinckney had been fortunate. Fearing that the secret Jay Treaty was but a prelude to a joint Anglo-American assault on Spain’s North American empire, Madrid quickly came to terms. The treaty granted the United States the privilege—not the right—to navigation of the Mississippi River and to deposit at New Orleans, and in the accord Spain recognized the thirty-first parallel as the southern boundary of the United States.28
For a president troubled lately by little but bad news, the treaty of San Lorenzo had to provide exhilarating reading. The long anxious years of perturbation over the Mississippi, a nagging issue that had helped to pry apart the sections and to weaken support for the Articles of Confederation, seemed at last to have been resolved. Indeed, the only major difference with Spain not addressed in the treaty concerned American commerce with the Spanish West Indies, an omission that led Jefferson to denounce the accord. No one listened. Washington submitted the pact to the Senate on February 26, 1796. Five days later Pinckney’s Treaty was unanimously approved.29 Washington’s diplomacy had achieved a coup. Through the treaties negotiated by Jay and Pinckney, each of the three sections—North, South, and West—attained something that it long had sought. Better yet, the life-and-death interests of no section had been compromised in the process.
Nevertheless, while the Senate bubbled with exuberance over Pinckney’s handiwork, the House of Representatives was in a less amicable mood. The day before the upper house voted on the Treaty of San Lorenzo influential Republicans in the lower chamber launched a campaign to compel the president to deliver copies of the instructions that John Jay had carried to London. Their motives were numerous, but for many this clearly amounted to an attempt to prevent the funding required by the pact. For others this was a ploy to energize the Jay Treaty question for the elections of 1796.
Not surprisingly Washington turned first to Hamilton for counsel. In a typically long-winded reply the former secretary advised against compliance with the wishes of the Republican majority in the House. That chamber had no constitutional right to play a role in the treaty-making process, he said, and for Washington to comply with its request would set a dangerous precedent. Besides, he added, Washington was dealing from strength, for “the house of representatives have no moral power to refuse the execution of a treaty.” Three of the four members of the cabinet proffered similar advice. Only Charles Lee, the new attorney general, advised Washington to heed the call of the House, but he, too, acknowledged that the legislators had no authority to make such a demand. The president followed the recommendation of his principal Federalist friends and aides. It proved to be a safe course. At the end of April the House voted by a margin of three votes to fund the Jay Treaty, a reversal occasioned by the turnabout of several Republican representatives from the middle states. Washington did nothing to induce the about-face. In fact, he believed that public pressure from the urban Northeast—the result of a propaganda blitz by Federalist moguls, including Hamilton—accounted for the apostasy within the opposition’s ranks. More likely, greater pressure came from the West, from Republican-leaning frontiersmen who feared that if the House refused to fund the Jay Treaty the British army never would leave American soil. Scotch the treaty, it was rumored in Republican circles, and disunion might result. No one wished to countenance that possibility.30
That bitter fight barely was resolved before partisanship helped devour still another Republican. James Monroe was the latest victim. A month after Washington announced Jay’s mission to London, he named Monroe, a United States senator from Virginia, as Gouverneur Morris’s replacement in Paris. The reason for the appointment was unmistakable. Word of Jay’s negotiation with Britain was certain to arouse suspicions in France; while the Federalists did not expect a crisis with republican France, Monroe, a high-ranking Republican who never had sought to hide his Francophile leanings, was to be a placatory instrument, smoothing all ruffled feathers in Paris. He was to “keep the French Republic in good humor with us,” as Secretary Randolph instructed him in the autumn of 1794, making it clear that the United States wished to be reall
y neutral toward the European powers; he also was to seek to convince them that Jay was authorized only to procure the removal of British troops from the western posts and to urge compensation for the depradations committed against American shipping.
Monroe had crossed on the Cincinnatus, ecstatic at his appointment, confident of success. It was not a very realistic appraisal. Arriving in the aftermath of the contretemps surrounding the improvident Genêt mission, stepping ashore at a time when French suspicion of the United States had been aroused to a white-hot pitch by the Jay-Grenville negotiations, Monroe found relations between the two allies at their lowest ebb in fifteen years. Still he remained confident. To reestablish amity he believed he must openly display his admiration for France; France also would be impressed, he additionally seemed to think, if he openly divulged his partisan loyalties in America’s party warfare. In public and in private he reiterated his government’s friendship for France, underscoring the fraternal bond between Frenchmen and Americans by openly embracing the president of the National Convention, the French congress, and by presenting the flag of the United States to that body. Soon, too, he helped spring Thomas Paine, now a French citizen who had backed the wrong revolutionary government, from a Gallic cell. Indeed, whereas Morris, his Federalist predecessor, had seen fit to permit Paine to languish for months in prison, Monroe vouchsafed the writer, a symbol of the two great revolutions of the eighteenth century, an invitation to lodge with his family. The doors to his residence also were thrown open to a legion of Jefferson’s old friends, all staunch revolutionaries. If nothing that he did was wrong, much of it was indiscreet. And when he aired his views in American newspapers, especially his hostile judgment of the Jay mission, he was downright foolish. The administration tolerated his conduct until the Jay Treaty was safely approved and funded, and until the Directory, the new French government, began to seize American shipping in retaliation for Jay’s accord with Great Britain. Then it moved to recall him.31
The arch-Federalists in Washington’s cabinet long had hoped to be done with such an avowedly Republican envoy. Initially, however, they sought to discredit him in Washington’s eyes. Tattle about Monroe’s supposed misconduct, including accusations of financial peculation, were leaked to the press. Washington must have believed some of the accusations. He came to think that Monroe was responsible for releasing to the French government private administrative documents, materials that caused the president to appear in a bad light. Incredibly, he also blamed Monroe for France’s negative reaction to the Jay Treaty, an unfounded suspicion making the rounds in Federalist circles and predicated on the idea that French hostility could be translated into Republican victories at the polls that autumn. The notion that Monroe was to blame was silly, but it was easier to believe that than to acknowledge that one’s own policies had angered America’s oldest ally.32
Still Washington did not move until it was apparent that Monroe no longer was effective, and, then, in a last-ditch effort to refurbish ties with Paris, the president considered the same remedy he earlier had utilized to normalize relations with Britain and Spain. He prepared to send a special envoy to France, a gesture that in one fell swoop might convince Paris of America’s friendship while, at the same moment, removing Monroe. In the end Washington simply recalled Monroe, replacing him with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a South Carolina Federalist and the brother of the diplomat who had negotiated the Treaty of San Lorenzo. The president’s action was a mixture of statesmanship and partisanship. The minister’s indiscreet behavior and his managerial shortcomings (he could not even compose a letter properly, Washington complained) partly accounted for Monroe’s fall, but the president also wished to have a “faithful organ” in the French capital, someone who could “explain [the administration’s] real views.” By implication, the recall of Monroe was an attempt to impose upon the Republicans the blame for the sudden worsening in Franco-American relations.33
Sometime in the spring of 1796 Washington decided to resign at the conclusion of his second term. This time he was intransigent. The last four years had been a difficult period, especially those months after he signed the Jay Treaty. Week after week he had watched as his name was villified in the Republican press, causing him to remark that he was pilloried in a manner that would not have been “applied to a Nero; a notorious defaulter; or even to a common pick-pocket.” He was depicted as the dupe of Hamilton and his other Federalist “satellites.” The president and his “British faction” in the cabinet had thrust the nation into a “gulph of despair,” it was said. Even his generalship in the late war was questioned. Some organs depicted Washington as senile. The Old Fellow “must seasonably, and occasionally be rouzed” to an awareness of reality, reported one journal. That was far from the truth, but Washington indeed was getting on in years. Even Jefferson had noticed as early as four years before that Washington’s “memory was . . . sensibly impaired by age”; the secretary had added that Washington occasionally displayed such “listlessness of labor” that he was willing “to let others act and even think for him.” Washington might have disputed Jefferson’s observations, but he knew full well that he would be nearly seventy before a third term concluded—if he lived to see the end of still another four years in the President’s House. In fact, to continue to live, he now thought, it was “indispensably necessary” that he escape the “serious anxiety . . . trouble and perplexities” of office. He must retire.34
When Hamilton appeared in Philadelphia in February to argue a case before the Supreme Court, Washington told him of his decision, and a bit later he asked him to scrutinize a draft of a valedictory address that he had prepared. Actually, what Washington sent to Hamilton essentially was the address that Madison had prepared for him in 1792; the president merely had deleted a couple paragraphs and appended a few brief remarks, alterations designed to bring the document up to date. However, Washington’s accompanying letter made it clear that he wished to give Hamilton a free hand to alter the document as he saw fit. His only stipulation was that the document was to take the high road, addressing ideas, avoiding personalities; he also stressed that he wished it to be brief and in such a “plain state . . . and . . . simple garb” that the public easily could comprehend it.35
Working in his spare moments during the next ten weeks, Hamilton produced two documents. First, he sent to the president a draft of his own handiwork, a paper that incorporated some of the Madison-Washington version, but which also contained a long middle section that he had composed. Ten days later he forwarded an edited copy of the Madison-Washington draft. Not surprisingly, the president preferred Hamilton’s original version to the Madison document. It was “more dignified . . . and [contained] less egotism,” said Washington, and he added that he thought it would read better in Europe. The president made only a few stylistic modifications, then he returned the document to New York with just two further requests of Hamilton. He desired the addition of a section dealing with the importance of education, and he wished Hamilton to reread and polish the address, inasmuch as it had been “out of sight for sometime.” Within three weeks the New Yorker’s final revision had been returned to the president. Once again Washington made a few stylistic changes, and he deleted a self-vindicatory passage lest it strike some as a case of “affected modesty.” At the end of the summer he submitted the document to his cabinet, where the Federalist membership quickly rubber-stamped Hamilton’s and Washington’s production. On September 19, 1796, Washington’s Farewell Address was published in both Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser and in Fenno’s Gazette.36
The address began with the sort of lengthy passage that characterized many of Washington’s public pronouncements. He had not sought office, he had been called to the presidency, he reminded his readers, and he hoped that his resignation would not be viewed as a dereliction of duty. Then he turned to more cogent matters. Only the continuance of the Union could insure your “real independence,” he argued. The broad national government is the “main P
illar ... of your tranquility at home; your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very Liberty which you so highly prize.” He appealed to his fellow citizens to forego sectionalism, to think in more national terms. While regional differences existed, he went on, presaging remarks that Abraham Lincoln would offer in his First Inaugural Address, he reminded his audience of the citizenry’s homogeneity in religious, cultural, and ideological matters. If there were economic differences, he went on, each section offered something to the others, ultimately pulling all together into “an indissoluble community of Interest as one Nation.”
George Washington, The Landsdowne Portrait, by Gilbert Stuart (1797). Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. On indefinite loan to the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, from the Earl of Rosebery.
The Washington Family, by Edward Savage (c. 1796). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W. Mellon Collection. George Washington Parke Custis (“Wash”) is standing next to the president, Eleanor Parke Custis (“Nellie”) is next to Mrs. Washington. A slave stands in the background.
Aside from the dangers posed by sectionalism, Washington looked upon political parties as the greatest threat to the Union. With a daring seldom equaled in American political history, Washington, in a passage written by the leader of the Federalist party, denounced party leaders as “designing men” who sought to create differences where none existed, and he portrayed parties as the tools of “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled” persons who had succeeded in mobilizing an “artful and enterprizing minority of the Community.” In a monarchical society, the president continued, parties were useful weapons for restraining government’s impetus toward tyranny, but in a republic parties themselves become despotic, inasmuch as factional rivalry “sharpened ... the spirit of revenge,” provoking retribution and misery until the populace cried out for the strong ruler who could restore order.
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