However trying he often found the press, Washington understood its importance in a democracy and voraciously devoured gazettes. Before becoming president, he had lauded newspapers and magazines as “easy vehicles of knowledge, more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty . . . and meliorate the morals of an enlightened and free people.”5 In his unused first inaugural address, he had gone so far as to advocate free postal service for periodicals. As press criticism mounted, however, Washington struggled to retain his faith in an independent press. In October 1792 he told Gouverneur Morris that he regretted that newspapers exaggerated political discontent in the country, but added that “this kind of representation is an evil w[hi]ch must be placed in opposition to the infinite benefits resulting from a free press.”6 A month later, in a more somber mood, he warned Jefferson that Freneau’s invective would yield pernicious results: “These articles tend to produce a separation of the Union, the most dreadful of calamities; and whatever tends to produce anarchy, tends, of course, to produce a resort to monarchical government.”7

To an unusual extent, early American politics was played out in print—one reason the founding generation of politicians was so literate. Publications were avowedly partisan and made no pretense of objectivity. It was a golden age for wielding words as rapier-sharp political weapons. The penchant for writing essays under Roman pseudonyms, designed to underscore the writer’s republican virtues, lent a special savagery to journalism, freeing authors from any obligation to tone down their rhetoric.

For all his years in public service, Washington never developed a thick rind for the cut-and-thrust of politics, and Freneau’s barbed comments stung him to the core. As Jefferson wrote after one talk with Washington that February, the president had bemoaned the “extreme wretchedness of his existence while in office and went lengthily into the late attacks on him for levees &c.”8 One wonders whether Washington was implicitly blaming Jefferson for Freneau’s bruising critiques. Another newspaper tormenting the embattled president in his second term was the General Advertiser, later the Aurora, published by Benjamin Franklin Bache, whose scurrilous attacks on Washington earned him the nickname of “Lightning Rod, Jr.”9 Like Freneau, Bache made the modest presidential levees sound like lavish scenes of decadence from Versailles. Shameless in maligning Washington, Bache even accused him of incompetence during the Revolutionary War and, in the ultimate outrage, doubted that he had supported American independence. “I ask you, sir,” he confronted Washington in an open letter, “to point out ONE SINGLE ACT which unequivocally proves you a FRIEND to the INDEPENDENCE OF AMERICA.”10 Washington dismissed Bache as an “agent or tool” of those out to destroy confidence in the government.11

A president who carefully tended his image found it hard to see it falsely defined by his enemies. And a man who prided himself on his honesty and integrity found it painful to stare down a rising tide of falsehoods, misrepresentations, and distortions about his record. His opponents struck where he was most sensitive—questioning his sense of honor and accusing him of base motives, when he had spent a lifetime defending himself against charges, both real and imaginary, of being motivated by thinly disguised ambition. Pilloried by an increasingly vituperative press, Washington did not respond publicly to criticism at first, having once said that “to persevere in one’s duty and be silent is the best answer to calumny.”12 By the summer of 1793, however, he feared that falsehoods circulating in the press would take root and had to be rebutted aggressively. “The publications in Freneau’s and Bache’s papers are outrages on common decency,” he complained to Henry Lee, noting that their allegations only grew more flagrant when treated with silence.13

The vendetta against Washington’s administration took a bold new turn in January 1793, when Congressman William Branch Giles of Virginia launched an investigation of the Treasury Department and sought to oust Hamilton for official misconduct. Giles was an intimate of Jefferson, who secretly helped to draft the congressional resolutions condemning his fellow cabinet officer. Although Giles accused Hamilton of shuffling money dishonestly from one government account to another, the subsequent congressional investigation thoroughly vindicated the secretary. On March 1, 1793, all nine of Giles’s resolutions against Hamilton were resoundingly defeated.

That winter, Washington’s gloom deepened with the death of George Augustine Washington on February 5, leaving his widow, Fanny, with three small children. Penning a tender note to Fanny, the president invited her to live at Mount Vernon: “You can go no place where you will be more welcome, nor to any where you can live at less expense or trouble.”14 Though Fanny declined, the gesture typified Washington’s exceptional generosity in family matters. Among his many duties, Washington became executor of his nephew’s estate. As he brooded about the decaying state of his farms, he would never again have someone he trusted so totally with his affairs as George Augustine. The death also dealt a terrible blow at a moment when he worried about the future of his business. To David Humphreys, he confessed that “the love of retirement grows every day more and more powerful, and the death of my nephew . . . will, I apprehend, cause my private concerns to suffer very much.”15

As Washington approached his second inaugural on March 4, the National Gazette stepped up attacks on what it derided as presidential pretension. The sneering Freneau served up heaps of abuse about Washington’s birthday celebration—widely honored in Philadelphia—branding it a “monarchical farce” that exhibited “every species of royal pomp and parade.”16 This tirade may explain the extreme simplicity of Washington’s second inauguration. With no precedent for swearing in an incumbent president, Washington asked his cabinet for guidance, and they suggested a public oath at noon in the Senate Chamber, administered by Associate Justice William Cushing, whose circuit encompassed Pennsylvania. The cabinet also advised that “the President go without form, attended by such gentlemen as he may choose, and return without form, except that he be preceded by the marshal.” 17 Perhaps to advertise his lack of ostentation, Washington went alone in his carriage to Congress Hall, strode into the Senate Chamber with minimal fanfare, and delivered the shortest inaugural speech on record—a compact 135 words—in a ceremony intended as the antithesis of monarchical extravagance. As the Pennsylvania Gazette reported, after taking the oath, the president retired “as he had come, without pomp or ceremony. But on his departure from [Congress Hall], the people could no longer refrain [from] obeying the genuine dictates of their hearts, and they saluted him with three cheers.”18

WASHINGTON’S SECOND TERM, a period of domestic strife, was dominated by the French Revolution and its profound reverberations in American politics. In March 1792, during a short-lived burst of optimism, Lafayette had reassured Washington that the anarchy in France was transitory: “Do not believe . . . my dear General, the exaggerated accounts you may receive, particularly from England.”19 That spring Austria and Prussia, bent upon snuffing out the revolutionary upstarts in Paris, invited England, Holland, and Russia to participate in an alliance of imperial states. Then in late April, France declared war against Austria and Prussia; they returned the favor by invading France a few months later. In the resulting atmosphere of fear and suspicion, the radical Jacobins declared a state of emergency. With formidable courage, Lafayette denounced the Jacobins to the National Assembly: “Organized like a separate empire in the city . . . this sect has formed a separate nation amidst the French people, usurping their powers and subjugating their representatives . . . I denounce them . . . They would overturn our laws.”20