Washington [464]
At this point Washington sloughed off suspicions about Jefferson, as evidenced by two remarkable meetings they held in February 1792. At the first, Jefferson lobbied to make the postal service part of the State Department rather than Treasury, hoping that would choke the excessive growth of Hamilton’s department. In passing, Jefferson mentioned that if Washington ever retired, he would too. This comment reverberated in Washington’s mind overnight, and at breakfast the next morning, he launched into a frank discussion of his political future. He noted to Jefferson that he had agreed reluctantly to attend the Constitutional Convention and serve as first president. But now,
were he to continue longer, it might give room to say that, having tasted the sweets of office, he could not do without them; that he really felt himself growing old, his bodily health less firm, his memory, always bad, becoming worse; and perhaps the other faculties of his mind showing a decay to others of which he was insensible himself; that this apprehension particularly oppressed him; that he found moreover his activity lessened, business therefore more irksome, and tranquillity and retirement become an irresistible passion. That however he felt himself obliged for these reasons to retire from the government, yet he should consider it as unfortunate if that should bring on the retirement of the great officers of the government and that this might produce a shock on the public mind of dangerous consequence.28
This remarkable burst of candor, as recounted by Jefferson, showed that Washington still trusted the secretary of state. In a private memorandum on the talk, Jefferson disclosed that he himself was “heartily tired” of his job and stayed only from a sense that Hamilton would linger for several years.29 Later Jefferson wrote how much he had hated doing battle with Hamilton in the cabinet, descending “daily into the arena like a gladiator to suffer martyrdom in every conflict.”30 When Washington made plain that he could not contemplate retirement because of “symptoms of dissatisfaction” toward the administration, Jefferson made bold to say that there was only a single source of discontent, the Treasury Department, and “that a system had there been contrived for deluging the states with paper money instead of gold and silver, for withdrawing our citizens from the pursuits of commerce, manufactures, buildings, and other branches of useful industry to occupy themselves and their capitals in a species of gambling.”31 Throwing caution to the wind, Jefferson said Hamilton had suborned congressmen who “feathered their nests with [government] paper” and therefore voted for his system.32 Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures, Jefferson claimed, would destroy any pretense of limited government and enable the government to undertake any measure it liked. Washington must have been shocked as he fathomed the depth of animosity between his two most talented lieutenants. At the same time Madison was slashing away anonymously at Hamilton in the National Gazette, inveighing against “a government operated by corrupt influence, substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty.”33
What made the rising tide of criticism more troublesome for Washington was that much of it originated from Virginia, where he was increasingly regarded as an apostate. Edward Thornton, secretary to the British minister, observed in April 1792 that Washington “has very few who are on terms of intimate and unreserved friendship” with him and “what is worse, he is less beloved in his own state than in any part of the United States.”34 Three years later Washington