The Reluctant President: Reelecting George Washington

George Washington did not want to be reelected in 1792, but he was anyway.

Support my work on Patreon at   / premodernist  

0:00 Washington's decision to retire after one term
4:18 Hamilton's proposals: Funding
7:01 Hamilton's proposals: Assumption
7:57 Centralization vs. state autonomy
9:53 Hamilton's proposals: A national bank
11:21 The underlying cultural divide
14:10 The rise of political factions
19:15 Naming the factions
23:23 Loyal Americans vs. enemies of the Republic
25:57 Jefferson's conspiracy theory
29:58 George Washington was a Federalist
31:29 Philip Freneau and the National Gazette
36:02 Washington refrains from retiring
36:47 The battle for the vice presidency
43:25 Choosing the presidential electors
46:22 Election results
47:39 The legacy of 1792

FOOTNOTES

[1] Madison's account of the conversation is in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, 4 vols., (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1865), 1:554–59. It has also been published more recently in The Papers of James Madison (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia), Congressional Series, vol. 14. The meeting is discussed in Stuart Leibiger, Founding Friendship: George Washington, James Madison, and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 158–61.

[2] Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, 7 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948–57), 6:358.

[3] Freeman, George Washington, 6:148–51; John R. Alden, George Washington: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 234.

[4] Freeman, George Washington, 6:357–60. Donald E. Heidenreich, “Conspiracy Politics in the Election of 1796,” New York History 92, no. 3 (2011), 153–55.

[5] Hamilton’s first Report on the Public Credit (January 9, 1790) is published in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (PAH), ed. Harold C. Syrett, 27 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–87), 6:65–168, but the main text is on 6:65–110. It is summarized in Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004), 297–301. The Report on a National Bank (December 13, 1790) is in PAH, 7:305–42. The Report on Manufactures (December 5, 1791) is in PAH, 10:230–340.

[6] Noah Feldman, The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President (New York: Random House, 2017), 338–39.

[7] John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 302–04. He soon put them away to fit in better: Ferling, John Adams, 318.

[8] Jefferson told Washington to serve one more year and then resign: Jefferson to Washington, 23 May 1792, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, 12 vols., (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904–05), 6:494. Jefferson’s statement to Washington that it’s all the Hamiltonians’ fault and everything will be fine once they’re out of office: Conversation on 29 February 1792, in The Anas, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 1:196–98, and Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York: Random House, 2012), 262.

[9] Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 318–20.

[10] A. F. Gilman, “The Origin of the Republican Party,” 1914, 4–5. Wisconsin Historical Society Library Pamphlet Collection, https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/....

[11] Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 263–270; James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 10, 42–43, 276–277.

[12] Jefferson to Washington, 23 May 1792, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 6:488–493; Meacham, Thomas Jefferson, 263–64.

[13] Jefferson, “Conversations with the President,” 10 July 1792, The Anas, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 1:229; Freeman, George Washington, 6:360; Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 289–90.

[14] Alden, George Washington, 250. Freeman, George Washington, 6:355–356.

[15] Alden, George Washington, 297; Don Higgenbotham, “Virginia’s Trinity of Immortals: Washington, Jefferson, and Henry, and the Story of Their Fractured Relationships,” Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 4 (Winter 2003), 534–39.

[16] Jefferson to Madison, 1 October 1792, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 7:154.

[17] Freeman, George Washington, 6:378–79.

[18] For the New York gubernatorial election of 1792 and its disputed results, see Alfred F. Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York: The Origins, 1763–1797 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), chapters 13 and 14, and John P. Kaminski, George Clinton: Yeoman Politician of the New Republic (Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1993), chapters 35 and 36.

[19] Kaminski, George Clinton, chapter 37.

[20] Kaminski, George Clinton, 230–32.

[21] Kaminski, George Clinton, 232–33.

[22] Election Law of 1792: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United...