Washington was expert at keeping his woes to himself and not showing the stress of office. While he now knew the extent of Jefferson’s antipathy toward Hamilton, he did not believe the wilder charges swirling around his secretary of state. When Eliza Powel sent him a pamphlet accusing Jefferson of pro-French policies, he replied that the writer should investigate the facts more closely. “Had he done this,” wrote Washington, quoting Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “he would . . . have found many of his charges as unsupported as the ‘baseless fabric of a vision.’”36

Starting in November 1791 and running for more than a year, James Madison published eighteen essays excoriating the administration in the National Gazette. Nevertheless, on May 5, 1792, apparently unaware of his authorship, Washington unburdened himself to Madison about his political plans. The recent financial panic in New York had added to the uproar over the administration’s policies. Washington said that he had already made known to Madison his intention to retire at the end of his first term and asked for Madison’s opinion “on the mode and time most proper for making known that intention.”37 He further said that he had apprised Hamilton, Knox, and Jefferson and that all had argued strenuously against his retirement. Washington had the modesty to state that he was not “arrogantly presuming on his re-election in case he should not withdraw himself,” though that was a foregone conclusion.38 Madison buttressed the consensus that it would be perilous for Washington to withdraw and that he alone could reconcile the warring parties. Another four years under Washington, Madison maintained, would “give such a tone and firmness to the government as would secure it against danger” from enemies on either side.39

At this point Washington discarded his impenetrable reserve and poured out his inmost thoughts, humbly confessing to feelings of inadequacy and saying that he could not conceive of himself as necessary to the “successful administration of the government; that, on the contrary, he had from the beginning found himself deficient in many of the essential qualifications . . . that others more conversant in such matters would be better able to execute the trust; that he found himself also in the decline of life, his health becoming sensibly more infirm and perhaps his faculties also; that the fatigues and disagreeableness of his situation were, in fact, scarcely tolerable to him.”40

That Washington dwelled on his inability to arbitrate constitutional disputes showed the heavy toll taken by the cabinet debate over the Bank of the United States. The president also complained of memory lapses, poor vision, and growing deafness—all socially confining conditions. Despite Washington’s fears, his letters show no evidence of his mental powers’ fading, and they were often amazingly vigorous. That Jefferson and Madison took such a decline seriously perhaps reflects their wish to portray Washington as softheaded and easily manipulated by Hamilton.

In chatting with Madison, Washington also deplored the press onslaught against his administration, little knowing that the man from whom he was seeking commiseration was a secret author of some of those assaults. The episode showed Madison’s capacity for duplicity—that he could act as Washington’s confidant even as he betrayed him. Although Jefferson and Madison wanted to elect a Republican vice president instead of John Adams, they had no desire to replace Washington, doubtless afraid that an unfettered Hamilton would succeed him.

As with all major decisions, Washington pondered long and hard whether to remain in office. On May 20 he told Madison that he had mulled over his arguments for a second term but remained unconvinced and wanted to end his days “in ease and tranquillity.”41 He also thought that stepping down and letting someone else serve as president would be “more congenial” with ideas of liberty.42 Despite worries that it might be interpreted as a ploy to prod the American public to urge him to stay in office, Washington asked Madison to draft a valedictory address. He outlined the main themes, including the need for national unity and civility in public life. At this point Washington sounded pretty definite in his decision. Madison composed a farewell address, even though he told Washington that he hoped he would make “one more sacrifice . . . to the desire and interests of your country.”43 Even while drafting Washington’s plea for unity and mutual respect, Madison was writing surreptitiously for the National Gazette, and that summer he and Jefferson took the precaution of exchanging letters in code.

As Federalists and Republicans envisioned life without Washington, both feared they would be left to the tender mercies of each other. About the only thing Hamilton and Jefferson agreed upon was the absolute need to keep Washington as president. On May 23 Jefferson urged Washington to remain in office and dropped his circumspection about Hamilton. In a full-throated diatribe, he warned that Hamilton’s bank, funded debt, and excise taxes were intended “to prepare the way for a change from the present republican form of government to that of a monarchy, of which the English constitution is to be the model.”44 With the South filled with debtors and the North creditors, Jefferson feared the country would break apart along sectional lines. Jefferson underscored Washington’s special status: “North and south will hang together if they have you to hang on.”45 If an honest Congress was elected in the fall, Jefferson predicted, Washington could step down in safety before completing his second term, knowing the government had been saved.

No less than Jefferson, Hamilton was convinced that the opposition party was engaged in a secret plot to subvert the government. In a furious letter to Edward Carrington of Virginia, he claimed to be certain of the following: “That Mr. Madison, cooperating with Mr. Jefferson, is at the head of a faction decidedly hostile to me and my administration and actuated by views, in my judgment, subversive of the principles of good government and dangerous to the union, peace and happiness of the country.”46 Despite the venomous split in his cabinet, Washington worked mightily to defuse the controversy and appease Hamilton and Jefferson. He was not intimidated by these men of exceptional intelligence. Neither Hamilton nor Jefferson liked being subordinate to anyone, and both must have found it hard to submit to Washington, which only made his feat of controlling them the more remarkable.

On June 20 Madison sent Washington a draft of the farewell address, which he suggested should be published in mid-September. “You will readily observe that in executing it, I have aimed at that plainness and modesty of language which you had in view.”47 From the letter’s diffident tone, Washington would never have suspected Madison’s brazen role in pounding his administration in the National Gazette. On July 4 Freneau published a front-page polemic listing the “rules for changing a limited republican government into an unlimited hereditary one,” and he singled out Hamilton’s policies as the surest way to accomplish it.48 Rubbing salt into the wounds, Freneau had three copies of his paper delivered daily to Washington’s doorstep.

On July 10 Washington sat down at Mount Vernon for another candid chat with Jefferson about whether he should remain as president. He clearly felt trapped in office. He pointed out that he had intended to serve only two years, then was induced to stay for a third because of the country’s unsettled state; now he was again being told it was dangerous for him to depart. He grew indignant at Freneau’s charge that he headed a monarchical party. While a few might wish for a monarchy “in the higher walks of life, particularly in the great cities . . . the main body of the people in the eastern states were steadily for republicanism as in the southern.” 49 He protested the insinuation that he was a dim-witted tool in Hamilton’s hands and took dead aim at those who flattered him while seeking to discredit him indirectly by attacking Hamilton. Jefferson recorded Washington as saying that “in condemning the administration of the gov[ern]ment, they condemned him, for if they thought there were measures pursued contrary to his sentiment, they must conceive him too careless to attend to them or too stupid to understand them.”50 In this statement, Washington exploded the myth that he was a puppet jerked about by an all-powerful Hamilton or a ceremonial caretaker of his own administration.