Joseph J. Ellis (26 page)

This latter point was extremely important to Washington. His most virulent critics were currently claiming that his support for the unpopular Jay’s Treaty made him unelectable in 1796, so his decision to retire was not truly a voluntary act, but a forced recognition of the political realities. Hamilton tried to reassure him that his sensitivities on this score were excessive, that if he did choose to run for a third term, he would win in a walk. (And Hamilton was surely correct.) But Washington wanted not a shred of doubt to remain that his decision to step aside was wholly voluntary. This was both a matter of personal pride and a crucial political precedent. By including the Madison draft
of 1792, he advertised his reluctance to serve even his second term, thereby enhancing the credibility of his voluntary rejection of a third. As Washington put it, “it may contribute to blunt, if it does not turn aside, some of the shafts … among which—conviction of fallen popularity, and despair of being re-elected, [which] will be levelled at me with dexterity & keenness.”
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The second section of this first draft that Washington sent to Hamilton focused on the foreign policy issues that had dominated his second term. He was fully aware that Hamilton had supported Jay’s Treaty. (He had even recommended that Hamilton consult Jay before putting pen to paper.) But he also wanted Hamilton to know that none of his or Jay’s pro-English prejudices should seep into his draft of the document; it should emphasize American neutrality and “promote the true and permanent interests of the country.” Washington’s views, not Hamilton’s, must prevail. Hamilton would be the draftsman, but Washington must be the author. “I am anxious, always, to compare the opinions of those in whom I confide with one another,” Washington explained, “and these again (without being bound by them) with my own, that I may extract all the good I can.” Hamilton required no elaborate instructions on the procedure. It was the same process Washington had developed with his staff as commander in chief of the Continental Army, then implemented with his cabinet as president. Hamilton had played the same role in both contexts. All major decisions were collective occasions, in which advisers, like spokes on a wheel, made contributions, usually in written form. But in the end the final decision, to include the final choice of words, came together at the center, which was always Washington.
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Hamilton also realized that he was being asked to write for posterity as much as the present. “It has been my object to render this act importantly and lastingly useful,” he confided to Washington, “and avoid all just cause of present exception, to embrace such reflections and sentiments as will wear well, progress in approbation with time & redound to future reputation.” He devoted a full two months to revising Washington’s draft, amplifying Madison’s earlier account of the need to rise above party differences and rally behind the elected representatives of the national government.
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On July 30, he sent the fruits of his labors to Washington, who found the Hamilton draft “exceedingly just, & just such as ought to be
inculcated.” His only reservation related to length: “All the columns of a large Gazette would scarcely, I conceive, contain the present draft,” Washington noted, adding at the end, “I may be mistaken.” (He was.) Hamilton was less sure he had done the best job possible and immediately began work on a wholly new draft, which he submitted to Washington two weeks later. But Washington liked the earlier draft better.
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Over the next month, edited versions of that draft passed back and forth several times, with Washington pressing Hamilton for clarifications, deleting certain passages, adding others: “I shall expunge all that is marked in the paper as unimportant,” he wrote on August 25, “and as you perceive some marginal notes, written with a pencil, I pray you to give the sentiments mature consideration.” If Hamilton saw fit to make additional revisions on his own, he should “let them be so clearly interlined-erased- or referred to in the margins that no mistake may happen.” Washington wanted no last-minute changes smuggled in without his approval. Even when the final draft was ready for the printer in September, he made changes in 174 out of 1,086 lines in his own hand and reviewed the punctuation throughout—a final scan, so the printer observed firsthand, “in which he was very minute.” It seems fair to conclude that what we call “Washington’s Farewell Address” is not misnamed.
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What was Hamilton’s contribution? Chiefly to assure that the elaboration of Washington’s ideas occurred within a rhetorical framework that maintained a stately and dignified tone throughout, and to sustain a palpable cogency and sense of proportion in developing Washington’s argument, which itself embodied the self-assurance so central to his major theme about the nation itself. Hamilton had nearly perfect pitch for Washington’s language, having begun his public career drafting letters and memoranda for Washington’s signature as a staff officer during the war. He was therefore well practiced in subordinating his own inclinations and style to Washington’s larger purposes. In the Farewell Address, the result is nearly seamless. When combined with the collaborative character of the drafting process, it becomes virtually impossible to tell where one voice ends and another begins.

But Hamilton was also such a virtuoso performer in his own right, unmatched within the revolutionary generation for his capacity to deliver powerful prose on a tight deadline, that there are moments in the Farewell Address when his own distinctive voice breaks through.
For example, while Washington agreed with Hamilton’s version of what the constitutional settlement of 1787–1788 meant, only Hamilton could have put it this way:

Or on the question of America’s national interest and the foreign policy it dictated, again the idea is pure Washington, but expressed in language that flowed in Hamiltonian cadences:

When Hamilton showed a late draft of this passage to John Jay for his commentary, Jay expressed admiration for the style but slight discomfort with the argument. “It occurs to me,” he wrote to Washington, “that it may not be perfectly prudent to say that we can never expect Favors from a nation, for that assertion seems to imply that nations always are, or always ought to be moved only by interested motives.” Jay’s suggestion came too late—the Farewell Address was already in the hands of the printer—but would have made no difference. Washington meant exactly what Hamilton had said. Jay’s views of prospective
English beneficence, like Jefferson’s views of French solidarity with America, were only seductive pieces of sentimentality, juvenile illusions in the real world of international relations.
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Beyond the tight cogency and felicitous cadences, Hamilton’s major contribution was to save Washington from his own personal sentiments. In his May draft, Washington had included the following paragraph near the start:

Hamilton eliminated the references to “grey hairs,” “prime of his life,” and “errors, however numerous”; he also altered the wounded tone of the passage by placing it at the end rather than at the beginning of the Farewell Address, where it seemed less like a somewhat pathetic
cri de coeur
than a dignified personal testimonial. Washington recognized the improvement, congratulating Hamilton for rendering him “with less egotism,” meaning the Hamilton draft covered the wounds, or at least prevented the president from displaying them too conspicuously.
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H
AMILTON’S
exquisite sense of affinity for Washington’s mentality failed him only once, though the failure, and therefore what is in effect the missing section of the Farewell Address, opens a more expansive window into the national vision that Washington was trying to project. During the drafting process in the summer of 1796, Washington kept urging Hamilton to insert a separate section on the creation of a national university in the capital city now being constructed on the Potomac. Hamilton resisted the recommendation, arguing quite plausibly that such a specific proposal was inappropriate for an address
designed to operate at a higher altitude. It was, he suggested, the kind of proposal better made in the final message to Congress in the fall. But Washington kept insisting that he wanted the idea to be a featured element in the Farewell Address: “But to be candid,” he explained, “I much question whether a recommendation of this measure to the Legislature will have a better effect now than formerly—It may skew indeed my sense of its importance, and that it is a sufficient inducement with me to bring the matter before the public in some shape or another, at the closing Scenes of my political exit … to set the People ruminating on the importance of the measure.”
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Hamilton eventually relented, though only grudgingly. At the last moment, he inserted a brief two-sentence paragraph rather awkwardly near the middle of the Farewell Address, calling for “Institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge” and urging quite harmlessly that “public opinion should be enlightened.” Washington was not satisfied with the result but decided to let the matter drop. In so doing, however, he let Hamilton know that something was being lost, that his hopes for a national university linked up to something larger: “In the general Juvenal period of life, when friendships are formed, & habits established that will stick by one,” he explained, “the Youth, or young men from different parts of the United States would be assembled together, & would by degrees discover that there was not just cause for those jealousies & prejudices which one part of the Union had imbibed against another part.… What, but the mixing of people from different parts of the United States during the War rubbed off these impressions? A Century in the ordinary intercourse, would not have accomplished what the Seven years association in Arms did.”
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Here was a characteristically Washingtonian insight—rooted in his experience during the war years; simultaneously simple but essential; projecting developments into the future on the basis of patterns that were still congealing and that only now, in retrospect, seem so obvious. Like his misguided obsession with those Potomac canals, his campaign for a national university in the capital city never bore fruit. But both failed projects were also visionary projections linked to larger expectations. In the case of the national university, it was the recognition that the United States was still very much a nation in the making because its population was still a people in the making. Time, indeed a considerable stretch of time, would be required to allow the bonding together
of this large, widely dispersed, and diverse population. But institutions devoted to focusing the national purposes, again like the Continental Army during the war, could accelerate time and move America past that vulnerable and problematic phase of its development when fragmentation, perhaps civil war, was still a distinct possibility.

Throughout the Farewell Address Washington had been exhorting Americans to think of themselves as a collective unit with a common destiny. To our ears, it sounds so obvious because we occupy the future location that Washington envisioned. But his exhortations toward national unity were less descriptions than anticipations, less reminders of the way we were than predictions of what we could become. Indeed, the act of exhorting was designed to enhance the prospect by talking about it as if it were a foregone conclusion, which Washington most assuredly knew it was not. In the end, the Farewell Address was primarily a great prophecy, accompanied by advice about how to make it come true.

It was also, at least implicitly, a justification for the strong executive leadership Washington had provided in the 1790s and that his critics had stigmatized as a monarchy. Without a republican king at the start, he was saying, the new quasi nation called the United States would never have enjoyed the opportunity to achieve its long-run destiny; it would have expired in the short run. In a sense, Washington was defending his presidency as an essential exception to full-blooded republican principles. Down the road, when the common experience of conquering the continent and the sheer passage of time had bound the American people together into a more cohesive whole, the more voluntaristic habits at the core of republican mentality could express themselves fully. For now, however, the center needed to hold. That meant a vigorous federal government with sufficient powers to coerce the citizenry to pay taxes and obey the laws. Veterans of the Continental Army, like Hamilton and John Marshall, fully understood this essential point. Intriguingly, the two chieftains of the Republican opposition, Jefferson and Madison, had never served in the army. They obviously did not understand.