Though Washington preferred having Adams rather than Jefferson as his successor, their relationship had never been close and was further marred by haggling over the presidential furnishings. John and Abigail Adams claimed to be appalled by the slovenly state of the executive mansion, and Abigail in particular derided the house as a pigsty, having “been the scene of the most scandalous drinking and disorder among the servants that I ever heard of.”28 Washington magnanimously offered the furnishings of two large drawing rooms at reduced prices and didn’t “cull the best and offer him the rest.”29 The Adamses, however, would not touch the stuff, and in a fit of petty sniping, Adams groused that Washington had even tried to palm off two old horses on him for $2,000.

Rebuffed, Washington gave away many household items of historic value. He sold his private writing desk at cost to his dear friend Elizabeth Powel and, as a lagniappe, threw in a free pair of mirrors and lamps. A week later she sent him a teasing letter, claiming that she was shocked to unearth incriminating love letters stuffed in a drawer of the desk: “Suppose I should prove incontestably that you have without design put into my possession the love letters of a lady addressed to you under the most solemn sanction.”30 After more banter, she admitted that the letters in question were “a large bundle of letters from Mrs. Washington, bound up and labeled with your usual accuracy.”31 Washington’s reply was exceptionally revealing about his marriage. After thanking Powel for handling the matter delicately, he said that he knew that no such illicit love letters existed and that even had the letters in question fallen into “more inquisitive hands, the correspondence would, I am persuaded, have been found to be more fraught with expressions of friendship than of enamored love.”Anyone looking for “passion . . . of the Romantic order,” he contended, would have chosen to commit them to the flames.32 The letter confirms that by this point Washington’s relationship with Martha had settled into one of deep friendship, devoid of carnal desire or lusty romance.

On March 9 the former president gathered up his wife, who was nagged by a bad cold and a cough, the family dog, his granddaughter Nelly and her parrot, and George Washington Lafayette and his tutor and commenced the six-day journey to Mount Vernon. “On one side, I am called upon to remember the parrot, on the other to remember the dog,” he related whimsically to Tobias Lear. “For my own part, I should not pine much if both were forgot.”33 Although the wagons were encumbered with heaps of bags, they represented only a tiny fraction of the mementos accumulated over many years, and it would take ninety-seven boxes, fourteen trunks, and forty-three casks to ship home the remaining belongings and souvenirs.

In those days of poor transportation, farewells left an especially melancholy aftertaste, since many friendships were ended irrevocably by sheer distance. “How many friends I have left behind,” Martha Washington wrote wistfully to Lucy Knox. “They fill my memory with sweet thoughts. Shall I ever see them again? Not likely, unless they shall come to me here, for the twilight is gathering around our lives.”34 En route to Mount Vernon, Washington tried, as usual, to curtail the time devoted to townsfolk who wanted to smother him with adulation. Although enormous crowds received him in Baltimore, he contrived to skip festivities planned in Alexandria, expressing satisfaction that he “avoided in every instance, where [he] had any previous knowledge of the intention . . . all parades or escorts.”35 The one detour he surely savored was the ride by, to the thunderous welcome of a sixteen-gun salute, the new President’s House under construction in Washington, D.C.

The presidential legacy he left behind in Philadelphia was a towering one. As Gordon Wood has observed, “The presidency is the powerful office it is in large part because of Washington’s initial behavior.”36 Washington had forged the executive branch of the federal government, appointed outstanding department heads, and set a benchmark for fairness, efficiency, and integrity that future administrations would aspire to match. “A new government, constructed on free principles, is always weak and must stand in need of the props of a firm and good administration till time shall have rendered its authority venerable and fortified it by habits of obedience,” Hamilton wrote.37 Washington had endowed the country with exactly such a firm and good administration, guaranteeing the survival of the Constitution. He had taken the new national charter and converted it into a viable, elastic document. In a wide variety of areas, from inaugural addresses to presidential protocol to executive privilege, he had set a host of precedents that endured because of the high quality and honesty of his decisions.

Washington’s catalog of accomplishments was simply breathtaking. He had restored American credit and assumed state debt; created a bank, a mint, a coast guard, a customs service, and a diplomatic corps; introduced the first accounting, tax, and budgetary procedures; maintained peace at home and abroad; inaugurated a navy, bolstered the army, and shored up coastal defenses and infrastructure; proved that the country could regulate commerce and negotiate binding treaties; protected frontier settlers, subdued Indian uprisings, and established law and order amid rebellion, scrupulously adhering all the while to the letter of the Constitution. During his successful presidency, exports had soared, shipping had boomed, and state taxes had declined dramatically. Washington had also opened the Mississippi to commerce, negotiated treaties with the Barbary states, and forced the British to evacuate their northwestern forts. Most of all he had shown a disbelieving world that republican government could prosper without being spineless or disorderly or reverting to authoritarian rule. In surrendering the presidency after two terms and overseeing a smooth transition of power, Washington had demonstrated that the president was merely the servant of the people.

Whatever their mandarin style and elitist tendencies, the Federalists had an abiding faith in executive power and crafted the federal government with a clarity and conviction that would have been problematic for the Republicans, who preferred small government and legislative predominance. Washington had established the presidency instead of Congress as the driving force behind domestic and foreign policy and established sharp boundaries between those two branches of government. He was the perfect figure to reconcile Americans to a vigorous executive and to conquer deeply rooted fears that a president would behave in the tyrannical manner of a monarch. He also provided a conservative counterweight to some of the more unruly impulses of the American Revolution, ensuring incremental progress and averting the bloody excesses associated with the French Revolution.

Washington never achieved the national unity he desired and, by the end, presided over a deeply riven country. John Adams made a telling point when he later noted that Washington, an apostle of unity, “had unanimous votes as president, but the two houses of Congress and the great body of the people were more equally divided under him than they ever have been since.”38 This may have been unavoidable as the new government implemented the new Constitution, which provoked deep splits over its meaning and the country’s future direction. But whatever his chagrin about the partisan strife, Washington never sought to suppress debate or clamp down on his shrill opponents in the press who had hounded him mercilessly. To his everlasting credit, he showed that the American political system could manage tensions without abridging civil liberties. His most flagrant failings remained those of the country as a whole—the inability to deal forthrightly with the injustice of slavery or to figure out an equitable solution in the ongoing clashes with Native Americans.