In the address, Washington started by mentioning the earlier farewell letter and his hope that he could have retired sooner. The “increasing weight of years” had now made withdrawal from office necessary.¹⁶ After talking of the vicissitudes of his presidency, he evoked America’s grand future, sounding the oracular strain he had patented.¹⁷ In a paean to unity, he warned that national identity must trump local attachments: “The name of AMERICAN, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.”¹⁸ This continental perspective had informed his work ever since the Revolution. Washington stressed the need to safeguard western territories from foreign encroachments, and without mentioning the Whiskey Rebellion by name, he enunciated the need for law and order: “The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.”¹⁹ Instead of flattering the people, Washington challenged them to improve their performance as citizens. Most of all he appealed to Americans to cling to the Union, with the federal government as the true guarantor of liberty and independence. As Joseph Ellis has written, “In the Farewell Address, Washington reiterated his conviction that the centralizing impulses of the American Revolution were not violations but fulfillments of its original ethos.”²⁰

As the address proceeded, it grew increasingly evident that Washington and Hamilton directed their shafts at the Republicans in coded language. Their denunciations of “combinations and associations” that sought to counteract the constituted authorities recalled their earlier strictures against the Democratic-Republican Societies. While such groups “may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people.”²¹ It was still hard for Washington to conceive of parties that were not disloyal cabals against duly elected government. A party spirit exists in all types of government, Washington observed, “but in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.”²² For Washington, parties weren’t so much expressions of popular politics as their negation, denying the true will of the people as expressed through their chosen representatives.

Although he said that debt should be used sparingly and paid down in times of peace, Washington endorsed the Hamiltonian program. He warned against an unreasonable aversion to taxes, without which the debt could not be retired—a jab at those Jeffersonians who loudly took issue with the funded debt, then opposed the whiskey tax and other measures designed to whittle it down. By asserting executive vigor, his disclaimers notwithstanding, the farewell address placed Washington decidedly in the Federalist camp.

The genius of the farewell address was that it could be read in strictly neutral terms or as disguised pokes at the Jeffersonians. This was especially true when Washington laid out his sweeping views on foreign policy, recycling many ideas advanced in promoting the Jay Treaty. Tacitly railing against Republican support for France, he expounded a foreign policy based on practical interests instead of political passions: “The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave.”²³ Sympathy with a foreign nation for purely ideological reasons, he said, could lead America into “the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.”²⁴ He clearly had Jefferson and Madison in mind as he took issue with “ambitious, corrupted or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation)” and “sacrifice the interests of their own country.”²⁵ Restating his neutrality policy, he underlined the desirability of commercial rather than political ties with other nations: “ ’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”²⁶ It was Jefferson, not Washington, who warned against “entangling alliances,” although the concept was clearly present in Washington’s message.

For all the swipes at the opposition, Hamilton infused a placid tone into the address, replacing the bitter scold with the caring father. At the end Washington sounded a little like Shakespeare’s Prospero, stepping off the stage of history. Whatever errors he had committed, he hoped that “my country will never cease to view them with indulgence and that, after forty-five years of my life dedicated to its service, with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.”²⁷ It was fitting that Washington closed by conflating the end of his life with the termination of his public service.

In general, Americans applauded the farewell address. Washington had seen himself as rising above partisanship, but some Republicans detected the barbs aimed at their party, and the effect was perhaps more divisive than Washington hoped. One visiting Frenchman resented its “marked antipathy to France and a predilection for England,” while an opposition paper characterized Washington’s words as “the loathings of a sick mind.”²⁸ There was no mourning for Washington’s departure in the editorial office of the Aurora, which had this to say about his retirement: “Every heart in unison . . . ought to beat high with exultation that the name of Washington from this day ceases to give a currency to political iniquity and to legalized corruption.”²⁹ Well aware of the anti-Republican subtext of the address, Madison voiced his displeasure to Monroe about Washington’s “suspicion of all who are thought to sympathize with [the French] revolution and who support the policy of extending our commerce” with France.³⁰

An active guessing game arose as to who had composed the farewell address, which remained a well-kept secret for many years. In 1805 Dr. Benjamin Rush inquired of John Adams, “Did you ever hear who wrote General W.’s farewell address to the citizens of the United States? Major [Pierce] Butler says it was Mr. Jay. It is a masterly performance.”³¹ Jay had reviewed Hamilton’s draft and made suggestions but in no way qualified as a coauthor. Eager to boost Washington’s standing, Hamilton and other intimates kept their lips tightly sealed on the question of authorship. One day as Hamilton and his wife ambled down Broadway in New York, they encountered an old soldier hawking copies of the address. Buying a copy, Hamilton said amusedly to his wife, “That man does not know he has asked me to purchase my own work.”³²

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.