With his wide streak of envy, John Adams found it difficult to be president in the aftermath of Washington. By late August, he believed that the time had come to assert his presidential prerogative over his predecessor. He told McHenry that he would gladly resign the presidency to Washington, if he could, “but I never said I would hold the office and be responsible for its exercise, while he should execute it.”76 Suspecting intrigue between his cabinet members and Washington, Adams was determined to resist it. McHenry reported to Washington, “The president is determined to place Hamilton last and Knox first.”77 Pickering added what was already obvious: that Adams had “an extreme aversion to Colo. Hamilton—a personal resentment,” and would never let him supersede Knox and Pinckney.78 It was a unique moment in American history: a political stalemate between a current and former president. As if to spite his predecessor, Adams decided, without consulting Washington, to name his feckless son-in-law, Colonel William Smith, as a brigadier general. Washington grew enraged at the news. “What in the name of military prudence could have induced the appointment of [William Smith] as brigadier?” he tartly inquired of Timothy Pickering. “The latter never was celebrated for anything that ever came to my knowledge except the murder of Indians.”79 The Senate, agreeing with Washington, rejected Smith, but the incident further inflamed relations between Washington and Adams.

In high dudgeon, Washington sent Adams a stinging letter in which he did not bother to tone down his indignation. Intent upon showing who was still the more powerful figure, he reminded Adams that he had picked Washington to command the army “without any previous consultation of my sentiments.”80 If Adams had inquired first, he would have learned the conditions of his consent. Washington had stated plainly to McHenry that he would accept command only if he controlled his general staff. He reproached Adams for submitting the three names to the Senate in the order he suggested only to object to their ranking afterward: “But you have been pleased to order the last to be first, and the first to be last.”81 He also noted caustically that Adams had taken it upon himself to appoint his brigadier generals, including his own son-in-law.

Perhaps especially vexing to Adams was that Washington issued the most ringing endorsement of Hamilton he had ever uttered. He reviewed Hamilton’s history as his “principal and most confidential aide” during the war and later as treasury secretary. “By some he is considered as an ambitious man and therefore a dangerous one,” Washington wrote with genuine feeling. “That he is ambitious, I shall readily grant, but it is of that laudable kind which prompts a man to excel in whatever he takes in hand. He is enterprising, quick in his perceptions, and his judgment intuitively great: qualities essential to a great military character and therefore I repeat that his loss will be irreparable.”82 As for Knox, Washington said there was no man “for whom I have had a greater friendship. But esteem, love, and friendship can have no influence in my mind when . . . possibly our all is at stake.”83 Washington ended this brutally candid letter by asking Adams point-blank “whether your determination to reverse the order of the three major generals is final.”84

Washington felt so strongly on the subject that he was prepared to publish his grievances if Adams didn’t back down. The one flaw in his thinking was that he had assumed that McHenry had given Adams an honest account of their meeting at Mount Vernon, with the preconditions he had laid down for service. On the other hand, it was shockingly naive of Adams to imagine that he could woo George Washington as commander in chief, coax him from retirement, then dictate his general officers.

On October 9 President Adams sent Washington a conciliatory letter from his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. However furious he was inside, he wrote a nuanced message in which he was careful to affirm the president’s right to determine officer ranks but also promised that he would not override Washington’s judgment. Placated by this generosity, Washington emphasized to McHenry that he did not want knowledge of his confrontation with Adams to leak out, lest it injure the president. In replying to Adams, Washington, with consummate tact, made no mention of the controversy over the major generals and simply inquired after Abigail’s failing health. George Washington was always the maestro of eloquent silences.

Still grieved by his festering feud with Henry Knox, Washington sent him a lovely personal note, describing the “sincere pleasure” he would derive from having Knox as one of his major generals. He asked him to “share in the glory of defending your country” and pleaded with him to “display a mind superior to embarrassing punctilios,” such as disputes over rank.85 Not to be appeased, Knox informed Washington that all his friends had warned him against accepting any demotion. It still rankled that Washington tried to minimize the significance of the dispute over rank, which “precludes decisively my having the satisfaction proposed of sharing your fate in the field. I will not detain you one moment longer than to say, in the presence of Almighty God, that there is not a creature upon the face of the globe who was, is, and will remain more your friend than H. Knox.”86 While Washington had been uncharacteristically clumsy in the whole affair, Knox ended their exchange on a particularly bleak, bitter note.

Notwithstanding his pledge to stir no more than twenty-five miles from Mount Vernon in retirement, Washington spent five weeks in Philadelphia in November and December, conferring with Hamilton and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney about the new army. He traveled to the capital in relative simplicity: four servants and six or seven horses. Starting with the usual festivities in Alexandria, he again underwent the trial of public adulation and entered Philadelphia to clanging church bells, streets lined with cavalry, and an ovation from thousands of spectators.

In working sessions on the army, Washington seemed something of a figurehead. The vigorous Hamilton exercised the true authority, having beavered away at the task from a small office in lower Manhattan. The generals labored five hours daily, and Washington found the job of selecting officers for twelve new regiments an onerous task “of infinite more difficulty than I had any conception of.”87 In appraising candidates, Washington’s criteria had changed little from French and Indian days, and he was still glad to find “so many gentlemen of family, fortune, and high expectations.”88 Once again he stressed the need for handsome officer uniforms of blue and buff and took amazing pains to design his own uniform, including “a blue coat, with yellow buttons and gold epaulettes” and a white hat plume meant to add “a further distinction.”89 All the while Washington’s enthusiasm for the new army quietly began to wane.

While in Philadelphia, Washington delighted in joining Elizabeth Willing Powel for a number of teas and breakfasts that he conspicuously failed to enter into his diaries. We know of these encounters only from notes they exchanged. That Washington made efforts to conceal these meetings again raises the question of whether he was perhaps more attracted to Eliza Powel than he cared to admit. At the very least, there was a special emotional and intellectual rapport between them. Although Powel was careful to buy gifts for Nelly Custis and Martha Washington, one wonders whether this was a ploy to mask her true feelings for Washington. On the eve of his departure, she sent him a letter that suggests the deep bond between them: “My heart is so sincerely afflicted and my ideas so confused that I can only express my predominant wish—that God may take you into his holy keeping and preserve you safe both in traveling and under all circumstances and that you may be happy here and hereafter.”90 Perhaps Eliza Powel simply had a premonition that she would never again set eyes on her dear friend. As if wishing to lessen expectations and protect himself from prying eyes, Washington sent a more formal reply: “For your kind and affectionate wishes, I feel a grateful sensibility and reciprocate them with all the cordiality you could wish, being my dear madam your most obed[ien]t and obliged h[onora]ble servant Go: Washington.”91