Open 365 days a year, Mount Vernon is located just 15 miles south of Washington DC.
From the mansion to lush gardens and grounds, intriguing museum galleries, immersive programs, and the distillery and gristmill. Spend the day with us!
Discover what made Washington "first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen".
The Mount Vernon Ladies Association has been maintaining the Mount Vernon Estate since they acquired it from the Washington family in 1858.
Need primary and secondary sources, videos, or interactives? Explore our Education Pages!
The Washington Library is open to all researchers and scholars, by appointment only.
Peek inside the secret plot to push Washington into a third presidential term.
The letter from Connecticut would have looked unexceptional when it reached Mount Vernon on July 20, 1799, if not for bearing the four-week-old date, June 22. George Washington, then in his third year of retirement from the presidency, eyed the letter suspiciously as he wondered why it had taken so long to make its way through the mail.
The sender, Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., claimed to write not only for himself but also for other influential people who had reached a similar conclusion: The country needed Washington back in the presidency.
Since retiring to his farm in 1783 at the end of the Revolutionary War, Washington had received letters calling him out of retirement at other critical junctures. These missives had convinced Washington to attend the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and to accept the presidency first in 1789 and then again in 1793, as the United States began to split into political factions. Only Washington, went the argument, could hold the country together.
Washington came to lament accepting a second term, and as the 1796 election neared, no argument could have convinced him to accept a third. Federalists instead backed his vice president, John Adams, who defeated the Republican choice, former Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, by a mere three electoral votes.
This article originally appeared in Mount Vernon magazine, published three times a year by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association.
Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott, Jr., shared Trumbull's secret letter with Secretary of State Timothy Pickering before forwarding it to Mount Vernon. "Oliver Wolcott, Jr.," John Vanderlyn after Gilbert Stuart. Yale University Art Gallery.
That was the message Trumbull presented in his letter of June 22, 1799. He was not the first to conceive the idea, he wrote, just the first with the courage to broach it with Washington.
But before sending the letter to Mount Vernon, Trumbull did something even more audacious. He sent the letter to two of Adams’s Cabinet secretaries: Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott, Jr., and Secretary of State Timothy Pickering. “Let no one see my letter to the general, unless it be . . . Pickering,” Trumbull wrote Wolcott in a letter enclosing the one intended for Washington. “If you disapprove of the hint I have given, tell me so, if you please, and let me know your reasons.”
Wolcott and Pickering owed their offices to Washington, who had originally appointed them, and had little loyalty to Adams, who had merely retained them. Nevertheless, Treasury Secretary Wolcott could foresee the scandalous consequences of a sitting Cabinet secretary involving himself in a plot to replace the president. He put off responding.
“It will be improper for me while I hold an office to exert any influence on the delicate subject to which you have hinted,” Wolcott finally wrote on July 16. “In the present state of our affairs, a discussion of the question among any considerable number of friends may be hazardous.”
The only aid Wolcott would give was to share the letter with Pickering before sending it on to Washington, who received it nearly a month after Trumbull had written it.
Historian Ron Chernow discusses George Washington and his role in the Quasi War.
President John Adams. Official presidential portrait of John Adams, by John Trumbull (1756–1843). Wikicommons.
Washington had his own problem with the sitting president. He and Adams had feuded over the rank of the other general officers in the new army after Washington had made choosing these men a condition of his acceptance of command.
There were moments when it seemed that Washington imagined himself back in the presidency. Once, while relaxing on Mount Vernon’s piazza, a visitor heard Washington muse how he would conduct himself if in, as he put it, “[Adams’s] place.”
One decision Washington would not have made in Adams’s place was the formal announcement in February 1799 of a new peace mission to France. The news shocked not only Washington, but also members of Adams’s own Cabinet, including Secretary of State Pickering, who deemed the move ill-advised and insulting to the country’s honor.
“We were all thunderstruck when we heard of it,” Pickering informed Washington. “Confidence in the president is lost.”
This webpage was adapted from an article written by Jonathan Horn, an author and former White House speechwriter. His Robert E. Lee biography The Man Who Would Not Be Washington was a Washington Post bestseller. His book Washington’s End is about the forgotten final years of George Washington’s life.
