Washington [541]
Bending to his uncle’s inexorable request, Bushrod Washington, a young man with a small, pale face and large, brooding eyes, consented to run. The handsome, intelligent Marshall, a man of iron willpower, balked at the idea. At the end of his stay, he rose early in the morning, hoping to slip away unobtrusively before Washington could renew his pressure. No stranger to early-morning escapes, Washington anticipated Marshall’s flight and blocked his path on the piazza as Marshall moved toward the stables. In coaxing Marshall to stand for Congress, Washington pointed out that he himself had agreed “to surrender the sweets of retirement and again to enter the most arduous and perilous station which an individual could fill,” Marshall recalled.75 Unable to withstand such an appeal, Marshall agreed to become a candidate for Congress.
With his wide streak of envy, John Adams found it difficult to be president in the aftermath of Washington. By late August, he believed that the time had come to assert his presidential prerogative over his predecessor. He told McHenry that he would gladly resign the presidency to Washington, if he could, “but I never said I would hold the office and be responsible for its exercise, while he should execute it.”76 Suspecting intrigue between his cabinet members and Washington, Adams was determined to resist it. McHenry reported to Washington, “The president is determined to place Hamilton last and Knox first.”77 Pickering added what was already obvious: that Adams had “an extreme aversion to Colo. Hamilton—a personal resentment,” and would never let him supersede Knox and Pinckney.78 It was a unique moment in American history: a political stalemate between a current and former president. As if to spite his predecessor, Adams decided, without consulting Washington, to name his feckless son-in-law, Colonel William Smith, as a brigadier general. Washington grew enraged at the news. “What in the name of military prudence could have induced the appointment of [William Smith] as brigadier?” he tartly inquired of Timothy Pickering. “The latter never was celebrated for anything that ever came to my knowledge except the murder of Indians.”79 The Senate, agreeing with Washington, rejected Smith, but the incident further inflamed relations between Washington and Adams.
In high dudgeon, Washington sent Adams a stinging letter in which he did not bother to tone down his indignation. Intent upon showing who was still the more powerful figure, he reminded Adams that he had picked Washington to command the army “without any previous consultation of my sentiments.”80 If Adams had inquired first, he would have learned the conditions of his consent. Washington had stated plainly to McHenry that he would accept command only if he controlled his general staff. He reproached Adams for submitting the three names to the Senate in the order he suggested only to object to their ranking afterward: “But you have been pleased to order the last to be first, and the first to be last.”81 He also noted caustically that Adams had taken it upon himself to appoint his brigadier generals, including his own son-in-law.
Perhaps especially vexing to Adams was that Washington issued the most ringing endorsement of Hamilton he had ever uttered. He reviewed Hamilton’s history as his “principal and most confidential aide” during the war and later as treasury secretary. “By some he is considered as an ambitious man and therefore a dangerous one,” Washington wrote with genuine feeling. “That he is ambitious, I shall readily grant, but it is of that laudable kind which prompts