Washington [521]
Just as Washington feared, some observers attributed his departure to his dread of a poor showing in the fall election. “He knew there was to be an opposition to him at the next election and he feared he should not come in unanimously,” John Adams remarked years later. “Besides, my popularity was growing too splendid, and the millions of addresses to me from all quarters piqued his jealousy.”33 In a still more paranoid vein, Adams surmised that Washington had retired because a malign Hamilton wielded veto power over his appointees: “And this necessity was, in my opinion, the real cause of his retirement from office. For you may depend upon it, that retirement was not voluntary.”34 Somewhat more objectively, Adams noted how spent the sixty-four-year-old Washington was after his prodigious labors: “The times were critical, the labor fatiguing, many circumstances disgusting, and he felt weary and longed for retirement.”35 This was much closer to the portrait that emerges from Washington’s own letters.
To less envious eyes, Washington’s resignation represented another milestone in republican government. Just as he had proved at the end of the war that he did not lust for power, so his departure from the presidency elevated his moral standing in the world. One encomium came from an unexpected quarter. By giving up first military and now political power, he stood out as “the greatest character of the age,” according to George III, who had belatedly learned to appreciate his erstwhile enemy. 36 Though it was not his main intention, Washington inaugurated a custom of presidents serving only two terms, a precedent honored until the time of Franklin Roosevelt. For opponents who had spent eight years harping on Washington’s supposed monarchical obsessions, his decision to step down could only have left them in a dazed state of speechless confusion.
THE MOST FLAGRANT OMISSION in Washington’s farewell statement was the subject most likely to subvert its unifying spirit: slavery. Whatever his private reservations about slavery, President Washington had acted in accordance with the wishes of southern slaveholders. In February 1793 he signed the Fugitive Slave Act, enabling masters to cross state lines to recapture runaway slaves. He remained zealous in tracking down his own fugitive slaves, although like Jefferson, he didn’t care to call attention to such activities. When a slave named Paul ran away in March 1795, Washington, while approving measures to apprehend him, advised William Pearce that “I would not have my name appear in any advertisement, or other measure, leading to it.”37 He was especially worried about his name surfacing in northern papers. Even in Philadelphia, Washington monitored the status of runaway slaves at Mount Vernon. “I see by the last week’s report that Caesar has been absent six days,” he asked Pearce in early 1796. “Is he a runaway? If so, it is probable he will escape altogether, as he can read, if not write.”38
Beyond moral scruples, Washington found slave ownership a political embarrassment. During his second term, the Aurora taunted him by declaring that, twenty years after independence, Washington still possessed “FIVE HUNDRED of the HUMAN SPECIES IN SLAVERY.”39 On another occasion it mocked him as a hypocritical emblem of liberty, arguing that it “must appear a little incongruous then that Liberty’s Apostle should be seen with chains in his hands, holding men in bondage.”40 This was a dangerous game for Bache to play, since it could easily backfire on Jefferson and Madison, two sizable slaveholders who figured as his populist champions. In later correspondence with John Adams, Benjamin Rush served up this tidbit about Washington: “Mr. Jefferson told me he once saw [Washington] throw the Aurora hastily upon the floor with a ‘damn’ of the author, who had charged him with the crime of being a slaveholder.”41 Federalist polemicists also