> The venerable Charles Thompson now above 80 years of Age, now and then calls to see me. I once suggested to him to write secret Memoirs of the American Revolution. “No—No said he I will not.—I could not tell the truth without giving great offence. Let the World admire our patriots and heroes. Their supposed talents and Virtues (where they were <[. . .])> so) <will> by commanding invitation will serve the Cause of patriotism, and of Our Country.” I concur in this Sentiment, and therefore I earnestly request that you will destroy this letter [largely about Washington's failings] as soon as you read it. I do not even wish it to be known that General W: was deficient in that Mark of true Greatness which so preeminently characterized Julius Cæsar, Henry the 4th: of France, and Frederick the 2nd: of Prussia,—the talent to forgive.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-5755
I think this is true of a lot of history, really - anything "important" we've assumed a mythologized view of, mediated by schools and Hollywood. Myth is more powerful than reality, so I think until you bury yourself in primary and contemporary sources, it can come across as almost conspiratorial. And of course, I am not saying that Rush, or the antifederalists, were correct in all their criticisms or all they said: only that Washington's comments must be understood contextually, and that's almost always missing when people refer to the Farewell Address, or at best they have a very simplified view of the situation that preserves the mythologization of Washington.
If you read the letters I linked, I think you’ll find that my comment was fairly apropos - as in the Rush letter, you’re leveraging an idea of Washington they deliberately falsified. And of course a lot of the controversy was over the Constitution! (see the Paine letter I linked in the thread). Washington was a nakedly political animal and anyone that disagreed with him got labeled a factionalist, and anti federalist, etc. complaining about political parties was just his dressed up language for complaining about dissent.
This would be a stronger argument if you had letters or direct quotes by him making statements like this. Meanwhile, Adams was shilling for Washington to be addressed as "His Majesty", not the kind of argument you make for someone you're not strongly backing.
> Fun fact, without it, we lose to the Axis powers!
This is a bizarre argument, as if the justification for the federalist side is a war happening one hundred years later, and which the US had no particular national-interest reason to involve itself in. (The Japanese would have not attacked Pearl Harbor without American interventionism in the Asian-Pacific.) It's impossible to say what US politics would have looked like if the antifederalists had won sooner (the federalist party totally collapsed after Jefferson was elected) so I have no idea what the basis for this counterfactual is anyway.
Thomas Paine to George Washington: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-20-02-...
Another good source would be the newspapers from the time: the Philadelphia Aurora had a good for the circulation of the time, was a "respected" paper (as far as that went then), and has lots of very nasty things to say about Washington during his presidency. It (and a selection of other papers) will give you a vastly better idea of the political climate than just about anything else you can get.
You can see a wide swath of people who knew Washington thought very poorly of him, especially militarily.
> I've read the biographies of most of the founding fathers, and in none of them does anyone strike out against the great man himself.
Reading biographies is better than nothing, but they usually have an agenda. Not that say, Paine or Rush didn't, but we're talking about how Washington was view among his contemporaries and how the speech was received and understood at the time. Later works are going to be clouded with different agendas, particularly the mythologization I mentioned.
It was actually fairly widely held among his contemporaries that he was a poor military leader.
In the words of Thomas Paine: > Being now once more abroad in the world I began to find that I was not the only one who had conceived an unfavourable opinion of Mr. Washington. It was evident that his character was on the decline as well among Americans as among foreigners of different nations. From being the chief of a government, he had made himself the chief of a party; and his integrity was questioned, for his politics had a doubtful appearance.
This culminated in his federalist allies later criminalizing free speech and deporting dissidents under the Alien and Sedition Acts.
The farewell address was an explicitly political speech and you should read it in its historical context. You wouldn’t read Bush, Obama, or Trump speeches and take them at face value. Don’t read past ones at face value.