WHAT WASHINGTON THOUGHT OF A THIRD TERM. 331 limits of this paper restrain me from quoting largely from his letters and expressions to this effect. But it seems that he had, as early as this date, put in writing the very grounds upon which, in a farewell address taking final leave of public life, he proposed to rest his retirement, and these he had submitted to Madison with a request that they be put in better form, and he had received them back again from Madison’s hands. When, after being induced against his inclination to accept a second term,— after his serious attack of illness,— [in the first months of his administration he had been attacked with a dangerous malady which prostrated him for twelve weeks and from which he never fully recovered] —after the death in February, 1793, of George Augustine Washington, the nephew to whom he had confided the charge of his estates, —and after four more years of the tedious routine which had no further charms or honors in store for him, and for which he felt sure there were other and younger men as well fitted as himself,—when, after all these experiences, he had once more resolved upon retirement at the close of a second term, in 1797, and had begun the preparation of the address which was to declare his unalterable purpose, he naturally looked up, on his files, the original paper submitted to Madison in 1792, and as naturally sent it for rehabilitation to Col. Hamilton, May 15, 1796. From this original draft of 1792 it appears that, either prompted by Madison who favored rotation on principle, or on his own motion, Washington had inserted a clause which seems to show that he supposed the popular feeling at that time to be against a plurality of terms. This is the only allusion I find in Washington’s words, at any period of his life, upon which a claim of hostility on his part to repeated re-election could possibly be made to rest. It is in plain words, and falls far short of indicating an objection on principle to a second term. It is a statement not of a view of his own,but of one he supposed to beheld by the people. On the twentieth of May, 1792, (Hamilton’s History of the United States Republic, vol. vi, chap, cxxxi, pp. 493-5) Washington gave to Madison suggestions for an address and these were returned, cast in a tentative form, one month later. After enumerating
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