BY 1799 George Washington must have realized that the only respite he would ever get from politics resided in a peaceful afterlife. That June Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., reminding him of the pending presidential election, expressed the hope that if Washington’s name were brought forward, “you will not disappoint the hopes and desires of the wise and good . . . by refusing to come forward once more to the relief . . . of your injured country.”²² Trumbull spoke for many Federalists who worried that Adams was a weak candidate and were terrified that the Francophile Jefferson might emerge as the next president. In response, Washington talked like an unabashed Federalist, sarcastically deriding Republican sophistry: “Let that party set up a broomstick and call it a true son of liberty . . . and it will command their votes in toto!”²³ His passionate words mocked the Jeffersonian myth that his mental powers were impaired, and he satirized the scuttlebutt that he had lapsed into “dotage and imbecility.”²⁴ He declined Trumbull’s request on political grounds, claiming that he could not draw a single new vote from the opposition. His personal reasons were far more cogent. Citing declining health, he said it would be “criminal therefore in me, although it should be the wish of my countrymen . . . to accept an office under this conviction.”²⁵ Dismayed that, since mid-March, President Adams had absented himself from the capital, staying at his home in Quincy, Washington said that Federalists were aggrieved at his behavior while Republicans “chuckle at and set it down as a favorable omen for themselves.”²⁶ With his usual sense of courtesy, Washington thought it would be unbecoming for him to advise the president: “It has been suggested to me to make this communication, but I have declined it, conceiving that it would be better received from a private character—m[ore] in the habits of social intercourse and friendship.”²⁷

At the end of August Washington tossed cold water on Trumbull’s entreaties a second time. He now sounded even more categorical that “no eye, no tongue, no thought may be turned towards me for the purpose alluded to therein.”²⁸ If he ran, he would only be battered with charges of “inconsistency, concealed ambition, dotage.”²⁹ Having experienced more than enough venom for one lifetime, he did not care to expose himself further: “A mind that has been constantly on the stretch since the year 1753, with but short intervals and little relaxation, requires rest and composure. And I believe that nothing short of a serious invasion of our country . . . will ever draw me from my present retirement.”³⁰

Thanks to the astute, if mercurial, diplomacy of John Adams, such an invasion never happened. When the president sent two envoys to France that October, without consulting his cabinet first, Washington was beset by serious doubts. “I was surprised at the measure, how much more so at the manner of it?” he told Hamilton. “This business seems to have been commenced in an evil hour and under unfavorable auspices.”³¹ But Washington proved wrong, and because of the administration’s successful diplomacy in resolving differences with France, he never had to take the field with the new army.

On November 10, 1799, McHenry warned Washington of burgeoning Republican strength in the upcoming campaign. For many Federalists, it foreshadowed a threat to the Constitution and the still-fragile strength of the federal government. “I confess, I see more danger to the cause of order and good government at this moment than has at any time heretofore threatened the country,” McHenry concluded.³² If Republicans saw the Federalists as threatening republican government, the Federalists saw themselves as upright custodians of the constitutional order. Previously unaware of the opposition’s strength, Washington claimed to be “stricken dumb” by McHenry’s letter and replied that political trends seemed “to be moving by hasty strides to some awful crisis, but in what they will result that Being, who sees, foresees, and directs all things, alone can tell.”³³ So only weeks before his death, Washington, for all his long-term faith in America’s future, viewed its short-term prospects as fairly dismal.

On December 9 Gouverneur Morris added his voice to the Federalist chorus and made a last plea to lure Washington from retirement. The next president, he pointed out, would hold office in Washington, D.C. “Will you not, when the seat of government is in your neighborhood, enjoy more retirement as President of the United States than as General of the Army?”³⁴ Making a shrewd pitch, Morris reviewed the way that each time Washington had returned reluctantly to the public stage, he had been catapulted to higher levels of glory: “If General Washington had not become [a] member of the [constitutional] convention, he would have been considered only as the defender and not as the legislator of his country. And if the president of the convention had not become president of the United States, he would not have added the character of a statesman to those of a patriot and a hero.”³⁵ This clever, eloquent appeal went unanswered.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

Freedom

IT MAY SAY SOMETHING about the American blind spot toward slavery that some of the most affecting vignettes of slaves at Mount Vernon emanated from foreign visitors, while American visitors selectively edited them from the scene. In April 1797 Louis-Philippe, a young French aristocrat who would become the so-called citizen king of France, toured Mount Vernon and showed commendable curiosity about the slaves’ condition. They were well aware, he learned, of abolitionist clubs in Alexandria and Georgetown and the violent slave uprising in St. Domingue, making them hopeful that “they would no longer be slaves in ten years.”¹ No less fascinating was the Frenchman’s observation that many house servants were mulattoes and that some looked strikingly white. Because Washington was often away from Mount Vernon and seemingly could not have children of his own, suspicion has never settled on him as having sired biracial children, except for the questionable case of West Ford mentioned earlier.

When Julian Niemcewicz visited Virginia in June 1798, he played billiards with Washington and enjoyed conversing with Martha, who “loves to talk and talks very well about times past.”² He rated Washington as a relatively benevolent slave master: “G[enera]l Washington treats his slaves far more humanely than do his fellow citizens of Virginia. Most of these gentlemen give to their blacks only bread, water, and blows.”³ In some respects, Niemcewicz left an absurdly rosy picture of slave existence: “Either from habit, or from natural humor disposed to gaiety, I have never seen the blacks sad.”⁴ One recurring theme he overheard was far more accurate: that slavery was not only cruel but unprofitable. Estate manager James Anderson estimated that only one hundred of the more than three hundred slaves actually worked, while Washington hypothesized that, from a purely economic standpoint, his farms held twice as many slaves as needed. The growing number of slave children and elderly slaves meant more mouths to feed and fewer able-bodied hands. Dr. David Stuart, the husband of Jacky Custis’s widow, flatly asserted that it simply did not pay to own slaves: “Their support costs a great deal; their work is worth little if they are not whipped; the [overseer] costs a great deal and steals into the bargain. We would all agree to free these people, but how to do it with such a great number?”⁵

As it happened, George Washington, closeted in his study, was devoting considerable time to answering this most insoluble of questions. He saw, with some clairvoyance, that slavery threatened the American union to which he had so nobly consecrated his life. “I can clearly foresee,” he predicted to an English visitor, “that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.”⁶ Beyond moral objections to slavery, he had wearied of its immense practical difficulties. In September 1798 he regretted that his slaves were “growing more and more insolent and difficult to govern,” and he seemed to want to be free of the sheer unpleasantness of keeping so many human beings in bondage.⁷