Washington [529]
Like Washington, Adams viewed himself as an incorruptible figure rising above the bane of parties. And like Washington, his political enemies insisted on tagging him as a Federalist. In this rancorous atmosphere, he was denied the political honeymoon usually reserved for new presidents and felt stranded between two extremes. “All the Federalists seem to be afraid to approve anybody but Washington,” he complained to Abigail. “The Jacobin papers damn with faint praise and undermine with misrepresentation and insinuation.”23
There was no moratorium on criticism of the outgoing president; the Aurora unleashed a frontal attack on Washington, condemning him for having “cankered the principles of republicanism in an enlightened people.”24 In desperation, Benjamin Franklin Bache dredged up the earliest controversy that had shadowed Washington’s life: the 1754 Jumonville incident in which, Bache charged, Washington had “fired on a flag of truce; killed the officer in the act of reading a summons under the sanction of such a flag”; then “signed a capitulation in which the killing of that officer and his men was acknowledged as an act of assassination.”25 Responding to this abuse, the Gazette of the United States decried the “hellish pleasure” that Bache took in defaming Washington.26 “That a man who was born in America and is part of the great family of the United States should thus basely aim his poisoned dagger at the FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY,” scolded the Gazette, “is sorely to be lamented.”27
Though Washington preferred having Adams rather than Jefferson as his successor, their relationship had never been close and was further marred by haggling over the presidential furnishings. John and Abigail Adams claimed to be appalled by the slovenly state of the executive mansion, and Abigail in particular derided the house as a pigsty, having “been the scene of the most scandalous drinking and disorder among the servants that I ever heard of.”28 Washington magnanimously offered the furnishings of two large drawing rooms at reduced prices and didn’t “cull the best and offer him the rest.”29 The Adamses, however, would not touch the stuff, and in a fit of petty sniping, Adams groused that Washington had even tried to palm off two old horses on him for $2,000.
Rebuffed, Washington gave away many household items of historic value. He sold his private writing desk at cost to his dear friend Elizabeth Powel and, as a lagniappe, threw in a free pair of mirrors and lamps. A week later she sent him a teasing letter, claiming that she was shocked to unearth incriminating love letters stuffed in a drawer of the desk: “Suppose I should prove incontestably that you have without design put into my possession the love letters of a lady addressed to you under the most solemn sanction.”30 After more banter, she admitted that the letters in question were “a large bundle of letters from Mrs. Washington, bound up and labeled with your usual accuracy.”31 Washington’s reply was exceptionally revealing about his marriage. After thanking Powel for handling the matter delicately, he said that he knew that no such illicit love letters existed and that even had the letters in question fallen into “more inquisitive hands, the correspondence would, I am persuaded, have been found to be more fraught with expressions of friendship than of enamored love.”Anyone looking for “passion . . . of the Romantic order,” he contended, would have chosen to commit them to the flames.32 The letter confirms that by this point Washington’s relationship with Martha had settled into one of deep friendship, devoid of carnal desire or lusty romance.
On March 9 the former