Washington [463]
After bank shares attained giddy levels in January 1792, they began to slide, creating a crisis for Duer, who had borrowed scandalously large amounts from New York creditors. “Widows, orphans, merchants, mechanics, etc. are all concerned in the notes,” Hamilton’s friend Robert Troup informed him.20 By March 9, with bank shares plunging, Duer stopped payment to creditors, with catastrophic repercussions. Two dozen financiers went bankrupt the next day, and Duer was packed off to debtors’ prison, as much to protect him from angry mobs as to punish him. Feeling grimly vindicated, Jefferson gloated over the mayhem, writing that “the credit and fate of the nation seem to hang on the desperate throws and plunges of gambling scoundrels.”21 Hamilton again restored order to the market by purchasing government securities, but the damage to his reputation had been done, especially when it surfaced that William Duer had raided the SEUM coffers for speculative funds. In the National Gazette Freneau seized this chance to revile the Hamiltonian system, which he blamed for “scenes of speculation calculated to aggrandize the few and the wealthy, while oppressing the great body of the people.”22 In this situation, neutrality was not an option for Washington, who would be forced to choose sides between Hamilton and Jefferson.
ALTHOUGH WASHINGTON had originally planned to resign during his first term, many Americans could not imagine another president and automatically assumed he would stay in office indefinitely. Whatever their quibbles about his policies, citizens still honored his exalted character and place in history. As Lund Washington wrote from Virginia, “No person has an idea but that you must remain at the head of the government so long as you live.”23 It wasn’t the first time Washington became the captive of a position from which he could not extricate himself. Once again, as the indispensable man in a crisis, he was held hostage to events. Further signs of aging were visible in the craggy face, the whitening hair, the slightly stooped gait.
On February 21, 1792, the eve of his sixtieth birthday, Philadelphians toasted him with an exuberant celebration, throwing a fancy ball in his honor and draping huge transparencies over buildings inscribed with the words “Vive Le Président.” Amid the growing strife in American politics, the public was gripped by a pervasive fear that Washington might serve only one term. Tobias Lear articulated the widespread sentiment: “I fear more from the election of another president, whenever our present great and good one quits his political or natural career, than from any other event.”24 Protective of her husband and well aware of the grave medical problems that punctuated his first term, Martha Washington hoped he would decline a second.
In this increasingly dark, conspiratorial atmosphere, Washington received three malicious letters, warning him anonymously of the secret presidential ambitions of Jefferson and of Madison’s treachery: “When you ask the opinion of the S[ecretary] of S [tate], he affects great humility and says he is not a judge of military matters. Behind your back, he reviles with the greatest asperity your military measures and ridicules the idea of employing any regular troops . . . His doctrines are strongly supported by his cunning little friend Madison.”25 In another letter, the poison-pen artist made sure Washington