In early June Washington contracted a fever, and the press volleys fired against him only worsened his health. Beneath the tough surface, Washington was easily wounded. Having long bathed in adulation, he was unaccustomed to such blistering criticism. “Little lingering fevers have been hanging about him, and affected his looks most remarkably,” Jefferson commented to Madison. He blamed the president’s poor health on the press onslaught: “He is extremely affected by the attacks made . . . on him in the public papers. I think he feels these things more than any person I have ever met with. I am sincerely sorry to see them.”44 It was a strange remark to pass between the two men whose sponsorship had launched the National Gazette. Jefferson’s self-described sympathy did not prevent him from presiding over further attacks against Washington, and he condemned the president as isolated, used to “unlimited applause,” and unable to “brook contradiction or even advice offered unasked.”45

The press slander could only have stiffened Washington’s resolve to step down after two years, but the hubbub over relations with France kept deferring that day. As Gouverneur Morris wrote from France, “It will be time enough for you to have a successor when it shall please God to call you from this world’s theater.”46 Oddly enough, both Hamilton and Jefferson also yearned to retire from the public stage. As he admitted to Madison, Jefferson felt worn down by the political backstabbing: “The motion of my blood no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world.”47 In February, when Washington asked him if he would serve as minister to France, Jefferson declined, citing his wish to retire to Monticello. In response, an irritable Washington grumbled that he himself had refused to retire.

One inescapable issue created by Genet was what to do about British ships brought into American ports as “prizes” captured by French privateers. In early May the French ship Embuscade docked in Philadelphia with two British merchant ships in tow. According to Jefferson, thousands of jubilant Philadelphians rent the air with “peals of exultation” when they set eyes on the captured vessels. Except for Jefferson, Washington and his cabinet members were appalled by Genet’s action in outfitting privateers in American ports. On June 5 Jefferson warned Genet to desist from this practice and stop luring Americans into such service. Still intoxicated from the cheering crowds, the deluded Genet ignored the warning and turned one captured British merchant ship, the Little Sarah, into an armed French privateer christened La Petite Démocrate. The high-handed Frenchman then informed Jefferson that France had the right to outfit such ships in American ports. Echoing the Jeffersonian press, he dared to imply that Washington was “subservient to a Federalist party . . . whose only aim is to establish Monocracy in this country.”48 Hamilton, bristling, termed this letter “the most offensive paper perhaps that ever was offered by a foreign minister to a friendly power with which he resided.”49 Citizen Genet, oblivious of his blunder, informed his superiors at home of his triumph over Washington: “Everything has succeeded beyond my hopes: the true Republicans triumph, but old Washington, le vieux Washington, a man very different from the character emblazoned in history, cannot forgive me for my successes and the eagerness with which the whole city rushed to my house, while a mere handful of English merchants rushed to congratulate him on his proclamation.”50

The National Gazette parroted Genet’s charges. In a July 4 column signed “A Citizen,” the author noted that only three hundred people had come to applaud Washington’s neutrality declaration while thousands cheered Genet in Charleston. Still more seriously, the author lectured Washington that, on this birthday of independence, he had relinquished his heroic standing from Revolutionary days: “There was a time when your name occupied an elevated position in the minds of your countrymen and your character was beloved by every genuine son of America . . . But alas! What an astonishing revolution has a few years of peace produced in the sentiments of your countrymen?”51

As if he didn’t have troubles enough, Washington had to make a sudden return to Mount Vernon to cope with the death of Anthony Whitting, who had replaced George Augustine as manager of Mount Vernon. The president, at his wit’s end, complained that “my concerns at Mount Vernon are left as a body without a head.”52

On July 8, while Washington was at Mount Vernon, the cabinet discussed what to do about La Petite Démocrate, anchored in the Delaware River. Hamilton and Knox wanted to fortify Mud Island, farther down the Delaware, to intercept the ship if it tried to sail—advice rejected by Jefferson. Two days later Jefferson took up the matter with Genet, who assured him that the renegade ship would stay put until Washington returned. Swollen with power, Genet also threatened, in a grave violation of diplomatic protocol, to appeal over Washington’s head to the American people to overturn the neutrality policy. Washington was incensed over Genet’s conduct, which brought to the surface his bottled-up rage against Jefferson. He flatly asked his secretary of state: “Is the minister of the French Republic to set the acts of this government at defiance—with impunity and then threaten the executive with an appeal to the people?”53 Struggling with a fever, Jefferson relayed to Washington Genet’s assurance that the ship would stay put until Washington determined its fate. Within a day or two Genet violated his promise as La Petite Démocrate slipped past Mud Island and fled out to sea, in a flagrant breach of American neutrality. The beleaguered president, weary of the tussle between the French and British ministers, told Henry Lee that since his return to Philadelphia “I have been more than ever overwhelmed with their complaints. In a word, the trouble they give is hardly to be described.”54

In the absence of a Justice Department, Washington intermittently turned to Chief Justice Jay for legal advice. In July the cabinet sent Jay twenty-nine queries to clarify the meaning of neutrality and rule on American jurisdiction over the French seizure of ships in American waters. On August 8, replying on behalf of the Supreme Court, Jay declined to render an advisory opinion. The Constitution, he said, had set up three independent branches of government, and it would be improper for “judges of a court in the last resort” to issue an opinion that could be accepted or rejected by the president.55 This decision set a major precedent, placing a protective barrier between the presidency and an independent judiciary and sharply defining lines that had hitherto been indistinct. In lieu of the Court’s opinion, Washington’s cabinet issued a set of rules governing the conduct of belligerents, prohibiting them from arming privateers or bringing prizes captured in American waters into American ports.

Genet’s conduct stirred up a tempest in Philadelphia, and howling mobs of his supporters marched on the presidential mansion. “The town is one continuous scene of riot,” the British consul reported. “French seamen range the streets night and day with cutlasses and commit the most daring outrages. Genet seems ready to raise the tricolor and proclaim himself proconsul.”56 This British hyperbole was corroborated by John Adams, years later, in a letter to Jefferson: “You certainly never felt the terrorism excited by Genet in 1793 when ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the government or compel it to declare war in favor of the French Revolution and against England.”57