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long and hard whether to remain in office. On May 20 he told Madison that he had mulled over his arguments for a second term but remained unconvinced and wanted to end his days “in ease and tranquillity.”41 He also thought that stepping down and letting someone else serve as president would be “more congenial” with ideas of liberty.42 Despite worries that it might be interpreted as a ploy to prod the American public to urge him to stay in office, Washington asked Madison to draft a valedictory address. He outlined the main themes, including the need for national unity and civility in public life. At this point Washington sounded pretty definite in his decision. Madison composed a farewell address, even though he told Washington that he hoped he would make “one more sacrifice . . . to the desire and interests of your country.”43 Even while drafting Washington’s plea for unity and mutual respect, Madison was writing surreptitiously for the National Gazette, and that summer he and Jefferson took the precaution of exchanging letters in code.

As Federalists and Republicans envisioned life without Washington, both feared they would be left to the tender mercies of each other. About the only thing Hamilton and Jefferson agreed upon was the absolute need to keep Washington as president. On May 23 Jefferson urged Washington to remain in office and dropped his circumspection about Hamilton. In a full-throated diatribe, he warned that Hamilton’s bank, funded debt, and excise taxes were intended “to prepare the way for a change from the present republican form of government to that of a monarchy, of which the English constitution is to be the model.”44 With the South filled with debtors and the North creditors, Jefferson feared the country would break apart along sectional lines. Jefferson underscored Washington’s special status: “North and south will hang together if they have you to hang on.”45 If an honest Congress was elected in the fall, Jefferson predicted, Washington could step down in safety before completing his second term, knowing the government had been saved.

No less than Jefferson, Hamilton was convinced that the opposition party was engaged in a secret plot to subvert the government. In a furious letter to Edward Carrington of Virginia, he claimed to be certain of the following: “That Mr. Madison, cooperating with Mr. Jefferson, is at the head of a faction decidedly hostile to me and my administration and actuated by views, in my judgment, subversive of the principles of good government and dangerous to the union, peace and happiness of the country.”46 Despite the venomous split in his cabinet, Washington worked mightily to defuse the controversy and appease Hamilton and Jefferson. He was not intimidated by these men of exceptional intelligence. Neither Hamilton nor Jefferson liked being subordinate to anyone, and both must have found it hard to submit to Washington, which only made his feat of controlling them the more remarkable.

On June 20 Madison sent Washington a draft of the farewell address, which he suggested should be published in mid-September. “You will readily observe that in executing it, I have aimed at that plainness and modesty of language which you had in view.”47 From the letter’s diffident tone, Washington would never have suspected Madison’s brazen role in pounding his administration in the National Gazette. On July 4 Freneau published a front-page polemic listing the “rules for changing a limited republican government into an unlimited hereditary one,” and he singled out Hamilton’s policies as the surest way to accomplish it.48 Rubbing salt into the wounds, Freneau had three copies of his paper delivered daily to Washington’s doorstep.

On July 10 Washington sat down at Mount Vernon for another candid chat with Jefferson about whether he should remain as president. He clearly felt trapped in office. He pointed out that he had intended to serve only two years, then was induced to stay for a third because of the country’s unsettled state; now he was again being told it was dangerous for him to depart.