“I have the honor to inform you that I have fixed upon the last of January next, as the day for my resignation of my office of secretary of the treasury. I make this communication now, that there may be time to mature such an arrangement as shall appear to you proper to meet the vacancy when it occurs.”
Mr. Hamilton resigned his office on the thirty-first of January. It was with deep regret, as in the case of Mr. Jefferson, that Washington found himself deprived of the services of so able an officer. “After so long an experience of your public services,” he said in a note to Hamilton on the second of February, “I am naturally led, at this moment of your departure from office (which it has always been my wish to prevent), to review them. In every relation which you have borne to me, I have found that my confidence in your talents, exertions, and integrity, has been well placed. I the more freely render this testimony of my approbation, because I speak from opportunities of information which can not deceive me, and which furnish satisfactory proof of your title to public regard.”
1795
To this Hamilton replied on the following day, saying, “My particular acknowledgments are due for your very kind letter of yesterday. As often as I may recall the vexations I have endured, your approbation will be a great and precious consolation. It was not without a struggle that I yielded to the very urgent motives which compelled me to relinquish a station in which I could hope to be, in any degree, instrumental in promoting the success of an administration under your direction; a struggle which would have been far greater had I supposed that the prospect of future usefulness was proportioned to the sacrifices made.”
Justice to a growing family was the chief cause of Hamilton's resignation. “The penurious provision made for those who filled the high executive departments in the American government,” says Marshall, “excluded from a long continuance in office all those whose fortunes were moderate, and whose professional talents placed a decent independence within their reach. While slandered as the accumulator of thousands by illicit means, Colonel Hamilton had wasted in the public service great part of the property acquired by his previous labors, and had found himself compelled to decide on retiring from his political station.”[73]
Oliver Wolcott, of Connecticut, who had been the federal comptroller under Hamilton for some time, was appointed to succeed that officer; and General Knox, who had offered his resignation as secretary of war at the close of the year, was succeeded by Timothy Pickering, who was at that time the postmaster-general. “After having served my country nearly twenty years,” wrote Knox in his letter tendering his resignation on the twenty-eighth of December, “the greatest portion of which under your immediate auspices, it is with extreme reluctance that I find myself constrained to withdraw from so honorable a station. But the natural and powerful claims of a numerous family will no longer permit me to neglect their essential interests. In whatever situation I shall be, I shall recollect your confidence and kindness with all the fervor and purity of affection of which a grateful heart is susceptible.”
Washington always loved Knox. His frankness and good nature, his eminent integrity and unswerving faithfulness in every period of his public career, endeared him to the president; and it was with sincere sorrow that he experienced the official separation. “The considerations which you have often suggested to me,” Washington wrote in reply to Knox, “and which are repeated in your letter as requiring your departure from your present office, are such as to preclude the possibility of my urging your continuance in it. This being the case, I can only wish it was otherwise. I can not suffer you, however, to close your public service without uniting with the satisfaction which must arise in your own mind from a conscious rectitude, my most perfect persuasion that you have deserved well of your country. My personal knowledge of your exertions, whilst it authorizes me to hold this language, justifies the sincere friendship which I have ever borne for you, and which will accompany you in every situation in life.”
The last session of the third Congress closed on the third of March, 1795. For a little while, Washington's mind was relieved in a degree from the pressure of political duties, and a matter of different but interesting nature occupied it at times. It will be remembered that the legislature of Virginia presented to Washington, as a testimony of their gratitude for his public services, fifty shares in the Potomac company, and one hundred shares in the James River company—corporations created for promoting internal navigation in Virginia—and that he accepted them with the understanding that he should not use them for his own private benefit, but apply them to some public purpose.
An opportunity for such application, that commended itself to Washington's judgment, had not occurred until this time, when a plan for the establishment of a university at the federal capital, on the Potomac, was talked of. “It has always been a source of serious reflection and sincere regret with me,” he said in a letter to the commissioners of the federal city on the twenty-eighth of January, “that the youth of the United States should be sent to foreign countries for the purpose of education. Although there are doubtless many, under these circumstances, who escape the danger of contracting principles unfavorable to republican government, yet we ought to deprecate the hazard attending ardent and susceptible minds from being too strongly and too early prepossessed in favor of other political systems, before they are capable of appreciating their own.
“For this reason, I have greatly wished to see a plan adopted, by which the arts, sciences, and belles-lettres, could be taught in their fullest extent, thereby embracing all the advantages of European tuition, with the means of acquiring the liberal knowledge which is necessary to qualify our citizens for the exigencies of public as well as private life; and (which with me is a consideration of great magnitude) by assembling the youths from the different parts of this republic, contributing, from their intercourse and interchange of information, to the removal of prejudices, which might, perhaps, sometimes arise from local circumstances.”