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 government with broad powers to deport foreign-born residents deemed a threat to the peace; brand as enemy aliens any citizens of a country at war with America; and prosecute those who published “false, scandalous, or malicious” writings against the U.S. government or Congress, with the intent of bringing them “into contempt or disrepute.”¹ This last act posed a special menace to civil liberties, since a largely Federalist judiciary would be pursuing Republican journalists.

The Alien and Sedition Acts reflected a prevalent Federalist assumption, shared by Washington, that American “Jacobins” colluded with France in treasonous fashion. While these acts were enacted on Adams’s watch, Washington lent them his quiet sympathy. Writing to a relative, he at first declined to comment on them, then observed that resident aliens had entered the country “for the express purpose of poisoning the minds of our people,” thereby estranging “their affections from the government of their choice” and “endeavoring to dissolve the Union.”² On another occasion, he endorsed a Sedition Act prosecution of William Duane of the Aurora, who had accused the Adams administration of being corrupted by the British government. Given the sheer number of lies that he thought were being peddled in the service of propaganda, Washington’s dismay was understandable. At the same time, his support for censorship is disappointing given his exemplary record as president in tolerating even irresponsible press tirades against his administration. Washington often seemed blind to the perils of the Alien and Sedition Acts, arguing that Republican criticism was just another partisan maneuver to discredit the government and “disturb the public mind with their unfounded and ill-favored forebodings.”³

Even as many Federalists hankered for war with France, President Adams, with typically feisty resolution, decided in early 1799 to essay diplomacy, sending William Vans Murray to negotiate peace with France and causing howls of outrage in his own party. Although Washington thought Talleyrand was merely toying with Adams, he sensed a political shift in the air. With his sound instincts, he suspected the Murray mission would undercut public support for military preparations, tempering his enthusiasm for the new army. With Hamilton hell-bent on raising that army, Washington told him what he didn’t want to hear: that the political moment for its creation had passed. Had it been mustered right after the XYZ uproar, he speculated, the timing would have been auspicious. But now “unless a material change takes place, our military theater affords but a gloomy prospect to those who are to perform the principal parts in the drama.”⁴ That spring, as Hamilton began recruiting for the new army in New England, he acknowledged to Washington that he had, at best, tepid support from President Adams. In the meantime he secretly meditated the use of the new army to suppress what he saw as traitorous Republican elements in the South. By May 1800 the new army would be disbanded, having long outlived its usefulness.

In his final year George Washington inhabited a world dramatically different from the more halcyon visions he had foreseen for the country. The storybook ending might call for an elderly Washington to bask in the serene glow of wisdom. Instead he took to the warpath against the Jeffersonians with a vengeance. The nonpartisan dream enunciated in the farewell address had expired as the last vestiges of political civility disappeared. With Washington now a rabid booster of Federalist candidates, he applauded the election to Congress that spring of Henry Lee and John Marshall. He had wanted his lean, pale nephew Bushrod to run for Congress, but instead Adams appointed him to the Supreme Court. Washington’s letters reverberated with partisan rhetoric as he admonished Bushrod against “any relaxation on the part of the Federalists. We are sure there will be none on that of the Republicans, as they have very erroneously called themselves.”⁵

One area where his foresight had been infallible was in the creation of the federal district. The Residence Act had mandated that the city and its public buildings should be ready for occupancy no later than December 1800, but the project had been plagued by excessive costs, recurrent delays, and inept management. Washington feared further mishaps would scuttle the whole plan. In his last months as president, he had ordered the commissioners to suspend work on the President’s House to focus their energies on the Capitol, the city’s premier symbol. “The public mind is in a state of doubt, if not in despair, of having the principal building in readiness for Congress,” he told the commissioners.⁶

During the summer of 1797 he had toured the fledgling city and thrilled to the sight of its rising buildings. The President’s House and one wing of the Capitol stood ready to receive their roofs, while an “elegant bridge” had been thrown across the Potomac. ⁷ Where construction of the new capital had appealed to Washington’s imagination, President Adams groaned under the unwanted burden. “The whole of this business is new to me,” he complained, telling one commissioner that he would not “make himself a slave to the Federal City; that he would do what his official duty required of him and no more.”⁸ Washington gladly stepped into the vacuum and even submitted his views on architectural details, as when he advised that the Senate chamber should feature Ionic columns. With a clear vision of how the city should function, he insisted that executive departments should be situated near the President’s House to facilitate daily contact between department heads and the president.