Nothing required Washington to leave office—the Twenty-second Amendment, limiting a president to two terms, was not ratified until 1951—but he had always planned to remain as president only until the new Constitution had taken root, never dreaming it would take a full two terms to reach that point. Despondent over the Jay Treaty attacks, Washington had now firmly resolved to leave office. Most Federalists hoped he would stay in office indefinitely; John Jay exhorted him to “remain with us at least while the storm lasts and until you can retire like the sun in a calm, unclouded evening.”3 In reply, Washington alluded darkly to all the “trouble and perplexities” he had endured, aggravated by the infirmities of age, and said only a national emergency would postpone his retirement.4

Where Washington had asked Madison to draft a farewell address in 1792 and then stashed it in a drawer, he now turned to Hamilton as his preferred wordsmith for a valedictory message. On May 15 he sent the latter Madison’s address, along with additions he himself had recently made to reflect the “considerable changes” wrought by the intervening years.5 He dangled before Hamilton two options: either edit and update Madison’s version or start afresh and “throw the whole into a different form.”6 It was not in Hamilton’s headstrong nature to bow to another scribe, and while he would offer Washington a revised version of Madison’s 1792 address, he also forged a magisterial new version of his own.

As always, Washington fretted over possible misinterpretations of his motives, speculating that people might whisper he was leaving office because of his “fallen popularity and despair of being re-elected.” In his farewell statement, he wanted Hamilton to refer to the earlier farewell address as irrefutable proof that, far from hiding megalomaniacal ambitions, he had longed to return home. While the words of this second farewell belonged to Hamilton, Washington defined its overarching themes and lent it his distinctive sound. He wanted the message written in a plain, unadorned style, presenting a timeless quality and avoiding references to specific personalities and events that had given rise to many observations.

In the past, Washington had been the circumspect personality and Hamilton the hotheaded one. Now Hamilton became the man of impeccable judgment. Washington’s additions to Madison’s draft had been laced with bitterness, wallowing in partisan squabbles. He had scribbled ill-advised lines about newspapers that “teemed with all the invective that disappointment, ignorance of facts, and malicious falsehoods could invent to misrepresent my politics.”7 Noting his financial sacrifices, Washington had remarked petulantly that “if my country has derived no benefit from my services, my fortune, in a pecuniary point of view, has received no augmentation from my country.”8 Hamilton rescued Washington from such petty gripes and made the address coolly statesmanlike, the words of a self-assured man speaking to posterity. It was the lofty Washington, not the wounded man smarting with secret hurts, that Hamilton set out to capture.

Washington displayed tremendous anxiety about the timing of his farewell address. In late June, he told Hamilton that he regretted not having published it as soon as Congress adjourned. Its postponement until the fall might lead people to surmise “that I delayed it long enough to see that the current was turned against me before I declared my intention to decline.”9 Hamilton pointed out the wisdom of waiting until the fall in case a national emergency, especially a military clash with France, forced him to reconsider a third term. “If a storm gathers,” Hamilton wondered, “how can you retreat?”10 To avoid interfering with the fall elections, Washington set a deadline of no later than October for publishing his farewell address.

At Mount Vernon that summer, Washington still licked his wounds over the rabid commentary in the Aurora. “That Mr. Bache will continue his attacks on the government, there can be no doubt,” he told Treasury Secretary Wolcott, “but that they will make no impression on the public mind is not so certain, for drops of water will impress (in time) the hardest marble.”11 Because of Washington’s public silence about his future plans, the presidential campaign played out in the shadows. It was assumed that, if Washington retired, Vice President Adams would emerge as the Federalist candidate for president, with Thomas Pinckney as his running mate. Political propriety demanded that they await official word from Washington before engaging in overt campaigning. By July it was also apparent that the Republicans would run Jefferson for president, joined by Aaron Burr as vice president.

Hamilton toiled over the farewell address in deep secrecy. Instead of sending his reactions through the mail, Washington, who thought his letters were being opened, conveyed them to New York via personal couriers. When Washington received the two versions of the farewell address in early August, he immediately discarded Madison’s revised draft and opted for Hamilton’s new version. As a literary stylist, Hamilton’s abiding sin had always been prolixity. Since the farewell address was meant to be read in newspapers, not delivered as a speech, Washington objected to its length and asked Hamilton to trim it down. “All the columns of a large gazette would scarcely, I conceive, contain the present draft,” he protested.12 Always honest and self-critical, Washington saw that Hamilton had purged the address of his own personal whining; he conceded that it was “more dignified on the whole and with less egotism” than the earlier version.13

Washington succeeded in keeping his farewell message a closely held secret. On the morning of September 16, 1796, Tobias Lear appeared unexpectedly at the office of David Claypoole, who published a Philadelphia newspaper. In mysterious fashion, he told Claypoole that the president wanted to see him and promptly whisked him off to the executive mansion, where he huddled alone with Washington in a drawing room. There Washington disclosed the dramatic news that he was leaving the presidency and wished his farewell address to appear in Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser. The two men agreed that the publisher would “usher it to the world and suffer it to work its way afterwards” on Monday, September 19.14 That weekend Washington corrected the proofs himself, right down to the punctuation marks, and he graciously allowed Claypoole to retain the invaluable manuscript. Even though Washington had given him exclusive rights to the address, it was widely disseminated at lightning speed. That same afternoon three Philadelphia papers jumped to print it, followed by a New York newspaper the next day, so that Washington achieved something close to a synchronized, universal publication. The address also appeared in pamphlet form.

An old hand at farewells, Washington, by design, rolled out of Philadelphia in his coach and headed for Mount Vernon, just as local citizens began to consume his address. He wished the words to speak for themselves, without any elaboration on his part. Washington never identified the document as his “farewell address,” a label pinned on it by others. It appeared under the rubric “To the PEOPLE of the UNITED STATES,” and began with the words “Friends and Fellow Citizens.”15 It was the perfect touch, echoing the opening of the Constitution, “We the People of the United States.” While Washington could have informed Congress of his resignation, he went instead to the source of all sovereignty, the people, just as the Constitutional Convention had bypassed state legislatures and asked the people to approve the document directly through ratifying conventions.