Washington [543]
While in Philadelphia, Washington delighted in joining Elizabeth Willing Powel for a number of teas and breakfasts that he conspicuously failed to enter into his diaries. We know of these encounters only from notes they exchanged. That Washington made efforts to conceal these meetings again raises the question of whether he was perhaps more attracted to Eliza Powel than he cared to admit. At the very least, there was a special emotional and intellectual rapport between them. Although Powel was careful to buy gifts for Nelly Custis and Martha Washington, one wonders whether this was a ploy to mask her true feelings for Washington. On the eve of his departure, she sent him a letter that suggests the deep bond between them: “My heart is so sincerely afflicted and my ideas so confused that I can only express my predominant wish—that God may take you into his holy keeping and preserve you safe both in traveling and under all circumstances and that you may be happy here and hereafter.”90 Perhaps Eliza Powel simply had a premonition that she would never again set eyes on her dear friend. As if wishing to lessen expectations and protect himself from prying eyes, Washington sent a more formal reply: “For your kind and affectionate wishes, I feel a grateful sensibility and reciprocate them with all the cordiality you could wish, being my dear madam your most obed[ien]t and obliged h[onora]ble servant Go: Washington.”91
Surely the most haunting reunion of Washington’s stay in Philadelphia was with his bluff, genial companion Robert Morris. Once so rich and powerful that a creditor crowned him the “Hannibal” of finance, Morris had become overextended in buying millions of acres of land and could not pay taxes or interest on his loans. In desperation, the financial wizard of the American Revolution auctioned off the plate and furnishings of his opulent home—all in vain. “I can never do things in the small,” he once said prophetically. “I must be either a man or a mouse.”92 Now Washington dined with Robert Morris in a milieu far distant from the sumptuous settings of past meetings: debtors’ prison. When Morris saw Washington, he grasped his hand in silence, tears welling up in his eyes. Morris wasted away in prison for three years.
While in Philadelphia, Washington made time to dine with President Adams and attempted to mend fences, but Adams still reacted to Washington in a manner tinged with paranoia. He had come to feel that his cabinet officers were “puppets danced upon the wires of two jugglers behind the scene and these jugglers were Hamilton and Washington.”93 One day in February 1799 Senator Theodore Sedgwick, a convinced Federalist, happened to ask Adams whether Washington would carry the title of General in the new army. The mere question kindled an explosive retort from the president. “What, are you going to appoint him general over the president?” Adams sputtered, his voice throbbing. “I have not been so blind but I have seen a combined effect among those who call themselves the friends of government to annihilate the essential powers given by the president.”94 The relationship between the first and second presidents never improved.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
A Mind on the Stretch
BY 1798 the Federalist party had grown haughty by being too long in power. “When a party grows strong and feels its power, it becomes intoxicated, grows presumptuous and extravagant, and breaks to pieces,” Johns Adams later wrote, having presided over just such a situation as president. As the political atmosphere became ever more combative, Federalist overreaching arrived at its apex with passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which tried to squelch criticism of war measures that President Adams and his congressional allies had undertaken during the undeclared Quasi-War with France. Among other things, these repressive measures endowed the