Washington [518]
In the past, Washington had been the circumspect personality and Hamilton the hotheaded one. Now Hamilton became the man of impeccable judgment. Washington’s additions to Madison’s draft had been laced with bitterness, wallowing in partisan squabbles. He had scribbled ill-advised lines about newspapers that “teemed with all the invective that disappointment, ignorance of facts, and malicious falsehoods could invent to misrepresent my politics.”7 Noting his financial sacrifices, Washington had remarked petulantly that “if my country has derived no benefit from my services, my fortune, in a pecuniary point of view, has received no augmentation from my country.”8 Hamilton rescued Washington from such petty gripes and made the address coolly statesmanlike, the words of a self-assured man speaking to posterity. It was the lofty Washington, not the wounded man smarting with secret hurts, that Hamilton set out to capture.
Washington displayed tremendous anxiety about the timing of his farewell address. In late June, he told Hamilton that he regretted not having published it as soon as Congress adjourned. Its postponement until the fall might lead people to surmise “that I delayed it long enough to see that the current was turned against me before I declared my intention to decline.”9 Hamilton pointed out the wisdom of waiting until the fall in case a national emergency, especially a military clash with France, forced him to reconsider a third term. “If a storm gathers,” Hamilton wondered, “how can you retreat?”10 To avoid interfering with the fall elections, Washington set a deadline of no later than October for publishing his farewell address.
At Mount Vernon that summer, Washington still licked his wounds over the rabid commentary in the Aurora. “That Mr. Bache will continue his attacks on the government, there can be no doubt,” he told Treasury Secretary Wolcott, “but that they will make no impression on the public mind is not so certain, for drops of water will impress (in time) the hardest marble.”11 Because of Washington’s public silence about his future plans, the presidential campaign played out in the shadows. It was assumed that, if Washington retired, Vice President Adams would emerge as the Federalist candidate for president, with Thomas Pinckney as his running mate. Political propriety demanded that they await official word from Washington before engaging in overt campaigning. By July it was also apparent that the Republicans would run Jefferson for president, joined by Aaron Burr as vice president.
Hamilton toiled over the farewell address in deep secrecy. Instead of sending his reactions through the mail, Washington, who thought his letters were being opened, conveyed them to New York via personal couriers. When Washington received the two versions of the farewell address in early August, he immediately discarded Madison’s revised draft and opted for Hamilton’s new version. As a literary stylist, Hamilton’s abiding sin had always been prolixity. Since the farewell address was meant to be read in newspapers, not delivered as a speech, Washington objected to its length and asked Hamilton to trim it down. “All the columns of a large gazette would scarcely, I conceive, contain the present draft,” he protested.12 Always honest and self-critical, Washington saw that Hamilton had purged the address of his own personal whining; he conceded that it was “more dignified on the whole and with less egotism” than the earlier version.13
Washington succeeded in keeping his farewell message a closely held secret. On the morning of September 16, 1796, Tobias Lear appeared unexpectedly at the office of David Claypoole, who published a Philadelphia newspaper. In mysterious fashion, he told Claypoole that the president wanted to see him and promptly whisked him off to the executive mansion, where he huddled alone with Washington in a drawing room. There Washington disclosed the dramatic news that he was leaving the presidency and wished his farewell address to appear in Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser. The two men agreed that