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and accusing him of base motives, when he had spent a lifetime defending himself against charges, both real and imaginary, of being motivated by thinly disguised ambition. Pilloried by an increasingly vituperative press, Washington did not respond publicly to criticism at first, having once said that “to persevere in one’s duty and be silent is the best answer to calumny.”12 By the summer of 1793, however, he feared that falsehoods circulating in the press would take root and had to be rebutted aggressively. “The publications in Freneau’s and Bache’s papers are outrages on common decency,” he complained to Henry Lee, noting that their allegations only grew more flagrant when treated with silence.13

The vendetta against Washington’s administration took a bold new turn in January 1793, when Congressman William Branch Giles of Virginia launched an investigation of the Treasury Department and sought to oust Hamilton for official misconduct. Giles was an intimate of Jefferson, who secretly helped to draft the congressional resolutions condemning his fellow cabinet officer. Although Giles accused Hamilton of shuffling money dishonestly from one government account to another, the subsequent congressional investigation thoroughly vindicated the secretary. On March 1, 1793, all nine of Giles’s resolutions against Hamilton were resoundingly defeated.

That winter, Washington’s gloom deepened with the death of George Augustine Washington on February 5, leaving his widow, Fanny, with three small children. Penning a tender note to Fanny, the president invited her to live at Mount Vernon: “You can go no place where you will be more welcome, nor to any where you can live at less expense or trouble.”14 Though Fanny declined, the gesture typified Washington’s exceptional generosity in family matters. Among his many duties, Washington became executor of his nephew’s estate. As he brooded about the decaying state of his farms, he would never again have someone he trusted so totally with his affairs as George Augustine. The death also dealt a terrible blow at a moment when he worried about the future of his business. To David Humphreys, he confessed that “the love of retirement grows every day more and more powerful, and the death of my nephew . . . will, I apprehend, cause my private concerns to suffer very much.”15

As Washington approached his second inaugural on March 4, the National Gazette stepped up attacks on what it derided as presidential pretension. The sneering Freneau served up heaps of abuse about Washington’s birthday celebration—widely honored in Philadelphia—branding it a “monarchical farce” that exhibited “every species of royal pomp and parade.”16 This tirade may explain the extreme simplicity of Washington’s second inauguration. With no precedent for swearing in an incumbent president, Washington asked his cabinet for guidance, and they suggested a public oath at noon in the Senate Chamber, administered by Associate Justice William Cushing, whose circuit encompassed Pennsylvania. The cabinet also advised that “the President go without form, attended by such gentlemen as he may choose, and return without form, except that he be preceded by the marshal.” 17 Perhaps to advertise his lack of ostentation, Washington went alone in his carriage to Congress Hall, strode into the Senate Chamber with minimal fanfare, and delivered the shortest inaugural speech on record—a compact 135 words—in a ceremony intended as the antithesis of monarchical extravagance. As the Pennsylvania Gazette reported, after taking the oath, the president retired “as he had come, without pomp or ceremony. But on his departure from [Congress Hall], the people could no longer refrain [from] obeying the genuine dictates of their hearts, and they saluted him with three cheers.”18

WASHINGTON’S SECOND TERM, a period of domestic strife, was dominated by the French Revolution and its profound reverberations in American politics. In March 1792, during a short-lived burst of optimism, Lafayette had reassured Washington that the anarchy in France was transitory: