During a Philadelphia winter so frigid that residents skated on an ice-encrusted Delaware River, Washington ended up pioneering in one last area: how to behave as a lame duck president. Like later presidents, he endured an excruciating round of farewell parties, balls, dinners, and receptions. Though harassed by the final duties of public office, he seemed rejuvenated as the albatross was slowly lifted from his shoulders. Sick of party rancor, homesick for Mount Vernon, he craved a little privacy before he died. Martha too looked forward to the retirement that had always been her fond but forlorn dream.

Washington’s last birthday in office, his sixty-fifth, was crammed with festivities, including an “elegant entertainment” at Ricketts’ Amphitheater, followed by a dinner and ball “which for splendor, taste, and elegance was perhaps never excelled by any similar entertainment in the United States,” judged Claypoole’s newspaper.10 The vast gathering of twelve hundred guests took place in the cavernous circus hall, floored over for dancing. Like the couple atop a wedding cake, George and Martha Washington sat on a raised couch beneath a canopy and periodically descended to mill about with guests. Washington indulged in one last bout of gallantry with the ladies when he rose to present his toast: “May the members thereof [the dancing assembly] and the Fair who honor it with their presence long continue the enjoyment of an amusement so innocent and agreeable.”11 Showing her esteem for the outgoing president, Elizabeth Powel emerged from extended mourning for her husband and appeared radiant in a black velvet dress. There was no question that George and Martha, overcome by emotion, felt that an epic saga was ending. “Mrs. Washington was moved even to tears with the mingled emotions of gratitude for such strong proofs of public regard and the new prospect of uninterrupted enjoyment of domestic life,” a Judge Airedale reported to his wife. “ . . . I never saw the president look better or in finer spirits, but his emotions were too powerful to be concealed. He could sometimes scarcely speak.”12

On March 2, in one of his last acts in office, Washington wrote a condolence note to Henry Knox for his loss of three children. Perhaps moved by his old friend’s pitiable plight, he sought to repair the unfortunate damage inflicted on their long friendship by the Whiskey Rebellion. When he returned to Mount Vernon, Washington planned to travel no more than twenty miles from home again, which would sever him forever from old friends. This led him to say to Knox, “I am not without my regrets at parting with (perhaps never more to meet) the few intimates whom I love, among these, be assured, you are one.”13

The next day, his last in office, Washington toiled under fierce pressure to sign legislation dumped on his desk at the last minute. The Constitution gave the president ten days to sign bills, and Washington resented that legislators had allowed him “scarcely an hour to revolve the most important” ones, as he protested to Jonathan Trumbull. “But as the scene is closing with me, it is of little avail now to let it be with murmurs.”14 At the end he struck a note of serenity, a faith that the American experiment, if sometimes threatened, would prevail. While fearful of machinations, he told Trumbull, “I trust . . . that the good sense of our countrymen will guard the public weal against this and every other innovation and that, altho[ugh] we may be a little wrong now and then, we shall return to the right path with more avidity.” 15 It was an accurate forecast of American history, both its tragic lapses and its miraculous redemptions.

On March 4, inauguration day, Washington did not even bother to mention the event in his diary, preferring to jot down the temperature. “Much such a day as yesterday in all respects. Mercury at 41,” says the entry in its entirety.16 Shortly before noon, dressed in a suit of solemn black, he marched alone to Congress Hall. As he approached the building and entered the House chamber, the cheers and applause of an immense multitude showered down on him. Jefferson next appeared in a blue frock coat and sauntered down the aisle in his loose-limbed style. President-elect Adams then disembarked from a splendid new coach operated by servants in livery. As he made his way into the chamber and up to the dais, he wore a pearl-colored suit with wrist ruffles and a powdered wig and toted a cockaded hat. Looking sleepless, harried, and a little overwhelmed, he glanced over at Washington, who seemed to be shedding his wordly cares. “A solemn scene it was indeed,” Adams wrote, “and it was made affecting to me by the presence of the General, whose countenance was as serene and unclouded as the day. He seemed to me to enjoy a triumph over me. Methought I heard him say, ‘Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be happiest!’”17 From the outset, Adams confronted a tough assignment: any president who followed Washington was doomed to seem illegitimate for a time, a mere pretender to the throne.

After introducing Adams, Washington read a short farewell message, filling the silent hall with an overwhelming sense of sadness. The country was losing someone who had been its constant patriarch from the beginning. Adams said that the weeping in the galleries surpassed the sobbing of any audience at a tragic play. “But whether it was from grief or joy,” he wondered aloud to Abigail, “whether from the loss of their beloved president or . . . from the novelty of the thing . . . I know not.”18 A woman named Susan R. Echard captured the scene’s emotional intensity: “Every now and then there was a suppressed sob. I cannot describe Washington’s appearance as I felt it—perfectly composed and self-possessed till the close of his address. Then, when strong nervous sobs broke loose, when tears covered the faces, then the great man was shaken. I never took my eyes from his face. Large drops came from his eyes.”19 It was one last proof, if any were now needed, of just how emotional the man of marble was beneath the surface. After taking the oath of office, administered by Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, President Adams talked of Washington as someone who had “secured immortality with posterity.”20 Doubtless relieved that he was no longer the protagonist of the American drama, Washington ended the inauguration ceremony with an exquisite gesture: he insisted that President Adams and Vice President Jefferson exit the chamber before him, a perfect symbol that the nation’s most powerful man had now reverted to the humble status of a private citizen.

Afterward Washington walked from the executive mansion to the Francis Hotel, where President Adams was temporarily staying, and he became aware of a tremendous throng of people surging around him. “An immense company,” said one observer, had gone “as one man in total silence as escort all the way.”21 When Washington reached the hotel and turned around, the crowd saw that his face was again washed with tears. “No man ever saw him so moved,” said a second observer.22 In a very Washingtonian feat, he touched the crowd by simply staring at them in silence before disappearing into the hotel.

Like Washington, Adams viewed himself as an incorruptible figure rising above the bane of parties. And like Washington, his political enemies insisted on tagging him as a Federalist. In this rancorous atmosphere, he was denied the political honeymoon usually reserved for new presidents and felt stranded between two extremes. “All the Federalists seem to be afraid to approve anybody but Washington,” he complained to Abigail. “The Jacobin papers damn with faint praise and undermine with misrepresentation and insinuation.”23

There was no moratorium on criticism of the outgoing president; the Aurora unleashed a frontal attack on Washington, condemning him for having “cankered the principles of republicanism in an enlightened people.”24 In desperation, Benjamin Franklin Bache dredged up the earliest controversy that had shadowed Washington’s life: the 1754 Jumonville incident in which, Bache charged, Washington had “fired on a flag of truce; killed the officer in the act of reading a summons under the sanction of such a flag”; then “signed a capitulation in which the killing of that officer and his men was acknowledged as an act of assassination.”25 Responding to this abuse, the Gazette of the United States decried the “hellish pleasure” that Bache took in defaming Washington.26 “That a man who was born in America and is part of the great family of the United States should thus basely aim his poisoned dagger at the FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY,” scolded the Gazette, “is sorely to be lamented.”27