While at Mount Vernon, Washington absorbed southern grumbling about his policies. Meanwhile he asked Tobias Lear, then traveling in New England, to canvass sentiment there about whether he should serve a second term. Lear reported strong sentiment in favor of a second term in order to give the still-new federal government a fair chance to establish itself. The people said that “most of the important things hitherto done under this government . . . had not yet been long enough in operation to give satisfactory proof whether they are beneficial or not” and they would not have a fair experiment under any administration other than Washington’s. 51 People were so convinced that Washington needed to remain in power, Lear asserted, “that no other person seems ever to have been contemplated for that office.” 52 Attorney General Randolph also issued a dramatic plea for Washington to stay, saying that “The public deliberations need stability.”53

On July 25 the feud between Hamilton and Jefferson acquired new ferocity when Hamilton, for the first time, published an anonymous essay rebuking Jefferson. Writing in Fenno’s Gazette of the United States, he posed a simple question about Freneau and his State Department stipend: “Whether this salary is paid him for translations or for publications, the design of which is to vilify those to whom the voice of the people has committed the administration of our public affairs . . . ?”54 The attack, one paragraph in length, showed that Hamilton had thrown down a gauntlet to Jefferson and was prepared to take his case to the public.

Washington would now have to stop the sparring between his two cabinet members; their feud was far more vitriolic than he had dreamed possible. On July 29, in a confidential letter, he told Hamilton that he had sought the views of people en route to Mount Vernon and at home and found that they viewed the country as “prosperous and happy” but were alarmed at certain policies and interpretations of the Constitution.55 He enumerated twenty-one complaints that touched on Hamilton’s policy initiatives, including accusations that he had created excessive public debt, imposed onerous excise taxes on the people, promoted financial speculation, and corrupted the legislature. Although Washington cited George Mason as the source of these complaints, the language was drawn verbatim from Jefferson, and Hamilton could scarcely have missed the allusion. One can only assume that Washington, sensitive to nuance, wanted Hamilton to hear echoes of Jefferson’s phraseology. The most damning charge was the final one: that the real object of Hamilton’s policies was “to prepare the way for a change from the present republican form of government to that of a monarchy, of which the British Constitution is to be the model.”56 Disquieted by the political backlash against his programs in the South, he asked Hamilton to respond to his letter as soon as possible.

Even before receiving Washington’s complaints, Hamilton had implored him to soldier on as president for another year or two. The failure to do so, he stressed, would be “deplored as the greatest evil that could befall the country at the present juncture.”57 Reading Washington’s psychology astutely, Hamilton emphasized the damage that would be done to Washington’s character if he retired. By now Hamilton had declared all-out warfare against Jefferson and Madison. In the Gazette of the United States that August, he took off the velvet gloves and showed the clenched fist of steel, charging that the National Gazette had been set up as a vehicle to publicize Jefferson’s views and that Madison had been the intermediary for bringing Freneau to his State Department sinecure.

On August 18 the frustrated Hamilton sent Washington a fourteen-thousand-word letter, listing his own accomplishments in office and defending his policies. What troubled him was less the criticisms of specific programs than the character assassination practiced by his opponents: “I trust that I shall always be able to bear, as I ought, imputations of errors of judgment, but I acknowledge that I cannot be entirely patient under charges which impeach the integrity of my public motives or conduct. I feel that I merit them in no degree and expressions of indignation sometimes escape me in spite of every effort to suppress them.”58

At this point Washington could no longer stand aside while Hamilton and Jefferson tore each other to ribbons. He warned Edmund Randolph that if press diatribes against his cabinet members continued, “it will be impossible . . . for any man living to manage the helm or to keep the machine together.”59 His vision of a unified government now seemed hopelessly utopian. In late August he exhorted Hamilton to end his bloody clash with Jefferson. Asking for civility, he hoped that “wounding suspicions and irritating charges” would give way to “mutual forbearances and temporizing yieldings on all sides. Without these, I do not see how . . . the union of the states can be much longer preserved.”60 Searching for common ground, Washington hinted that Hamilton and Jefferson had “the same general objects in view and the same upright intentions to prosecute them.”61 To underline his support for Hamilton, Washington invited him to Mount Vernon and ended by saying that Hamilton could rest assured of his “sincere and affectionate regard.”62 Aiming to be impartial, Washington also admonished Jefferson to end the squabbling, noting that attacks on his administration—attacks Jefferson himself had orchestrated—had “for a long time past filled me with painful sensations.”63

On September 9 Hamilton wrote to Washington that he was the injured party to the dispute and that the day would soon come “when the public goodwill will require substitutes for the differing members of your administration.”64 For the first time, Hamilton singled out Jefferson as his adversary and accused him of starting the National Gazette to sabotage his fiscal program: “I know that I have been an object of uniform opposition from Mr. Jefferson from the first moment of his coming to the city of New York to enter upon his present office.”65 Although Hamilton and Jefferson were often on their best behavior when dealing with Washington, they were now like two rowdy, boisterous students, brawling in the schoolyard whenever the headmaster turned his back. Far from desisting in his broadsides against Jefferson, Hamilton, under the pen name “Catullus,” commenced a new series of newspaper essays, disputing that the Federalists were plotting to abolish the republic. Turning the tables, Hamilton said it was the Republicans, led by Jefferson, who were engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the government. He even made veiled references to Jefferson’s being a closet libertine, perhaps hinting at secret knowledge of his relations with his slave concubine, Sally Hemings.

The same day that Hamilton wrote to Washington to defend his conduct, Jefferson at Monticello did likewise. In an unusually long and heated letter, Jefferson charged that Hamilton had duped him into supporting his schemes and had trespassed on State Department matters by meeting with French and British ministers. He admitted hiring Freneau but made it seem as if Freneau had initiated the contact, and he swore that he had no influence over the National Gazette. This may have been technically true, since Jefferson turned to surrogates, especially Madison, for his political dirty work. The supreme populist of early American history then slandered Hamilton, the self-made immigrant, with the hauteur of a born aristocrat chastising a pushy upstart: “I will not suffer my retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has not only received and given him bread, but heaped its honors on his head.”66 Clearly, Washington’s efforts to arbitrate a truce between his warring cabinet chieftains had failed, but he never wavered in his effort to terminate the intrigue.