In defying House Republicans, Washington delivered a stern lecture on the legal issues involved, reminding lawmakers that the Constitution restricted treaty-making powers to the president and the Senate, confining deliberations to a handful of people to ensure secrecy. He had already shared the relevant papers with the Senate. He lectured the legislators, “To admit then a right in the House of Representatives to demand . . . all the papers respecting a negotiation with a foreign power would be to establish a dangerous precedent.”3 Only in case of impeachment was the president duty-bound to disclose such papers to the House. In private, Washington insisted that House Republicans tried “at every hazard to render the treaty-making power a nullity without their consent; nay worse, to make it an absolute absurdity.”4 He even expounded the Constitution to its chief architect, James Madison, whom he saw as reversing views he had expressed at Philadelphia in 1787. The debate had evolved into a colossal clash of personalities over a mighty principle. So bloody was the clash and so ferocious its rhetoric that Washington believed the public mind agitated “in a higher degree than it has been at any period since the Revolution.”5

During this bruising dispute, House Republicans, for the first time, held a caucus, giving a new institutional reality to the party split between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians. After Washington won the debate over the Jay Treaty papers, House Republicans launched a prolonged campaign to starve the treaty by refusing to appropriate money for it. For Republicans, the treaty controversy was a stalking horse for a deeper political aim, defined by John Beckley, clerk of the House and a key strategist, as opening the way for “a Republican president to succeed Mr. Washington.” 6 At first Madison imagined that the Jay Treaty would be the Achilles’ heel of the administration, but as the debate dragged on and it gained new adherents, an outflanked Madison admitted to Jefferson that “our majority has melted” thanks to the machinations of “Tories” and “monarchists.”7 Either from concern over the constitutional implications or because of a groundswell of treaty support from constituents, Republican congressmen slowly backed down and defected to Washington’s side. John Adams took comfort that Madison, having staked so much on the outcome, was being ground down by the struggle: “Mr. Madison looks worried to death. Pale, withered, haggard.”8 Madison himself conceded that it was “the most worrying and vexatious” political battle of his career, and it was to prove a losing one.9

When it came down to a vote on April 30, 1796, the Federalists got the House to approve money for the Jay Treaty by a wafer-thin margin of 51 to 48. Madison, shocked by the outcome, thought of retiring to his plantation. The crisis that was supposed to strengthen the Republican cause had instead “left it in a very crippled condition,” he informed Jefferson.10 Washington, who believed that Madison and his followers had “brought the Constitution to the brink of a precipice,” felt immense relief, intermingled with thinly veiled anger.11 After this wounding debate, an indignant Washington cut off further contact with Madison and never again invited him to Mount Vernon. Many Federalists predicted, prematurely as it happened, that James Madison had ruined his career. William Cobbett, a Federalist gadfly, was among those who wrote an early obituary for him. “As a politician, he is no more. He is absolutely deceased, cold, stiff, and buried in oblivion for ever and ever.”12

Jefferson’s relationship with Washington also suffered from the momentous events of that spring. Where Jefferson had wanted Washington to stay on as president for a second term, he now dismissed him as the unwitting tool by which corrupt, elitist Federalists duped the common people. As he told Monroe, the Federalists “see nothing can support them but the colossus of the president’s merits with the people, and the moment he retires, . . . his successor, if a monocrat, will be overborne by the republican sense of his constituents.”13 As far as Jefferson was concerned, Washington stood forth as an unmovable obstacle to reform. He preached patience to his followers: “Republicanism must lie on its oars, resign the vessel to its pilot,” and wait for Washington to exit the scene.14 Since Jefferson’s political philosophy was based on faith in the common people, Washington’s persisting popularity thrust him into the uncomfortable position of being at odds with the people’s apparent choice.

Now convinced that the two-faced Jefferson had plotted against him in the shadows, Washington no longer labored under any illusions about him. His ire surfaced that summer when Jefferson wrote to deny being the source of confidential information published in the Aurora. He also disclaimed making malicious remarks about Washington, as reported by an unnamed person—apparently Henry Lee. In responding on July 6, 1796, Washington dispensed with the fine points of diplomacy. As the dam burst, his stifled bitterness poured forth, and he confronted Jefferson more openly than ever before. Stating that he had previously had “no conception that parties” could go to such lengths, he claimed he had been vilified in “indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pick-pocket.”15 Even though he had done his utmost “to preserve this country from the horrors of a desolating war,” he was still charged with “being the enemy of one nation [France] and subject to the influence of another [Great Britain].”16 He noted that he had long defended Jefferson against charges of duplicity, invariably replying that he had “never discovered anything in the conduct of Mr. Jefferson to raise suspicions in my mind of his insincerity.”17 Now, he said starkly, “it would not be frank, candid, or friendly to conceal that your conduct has been represented as derogatory from that opinion I had conceived you entertained of me. That to your particular friends and connections you have described . . . me as a person under a dangerous influence; and that if I would listen more to some other opinions, all would be well.”18 Washington seldom resorted to such frankness or so pointedly dressed down an ex-colleague, confirming that their relationship now lay beyond redemption. He ended by saying that he had “already gone farther in the expression of my feelings than I intended” and changed the subject to more gentlemanly topics, such as clover, wheat, and peas.19

In the aftermath of the Jay Treaty, the diatribes against Washington reached a new pitch of savagery as his foes were emboldened to disparage his presidency and blacken his wartime reputation. In the Aurora, Benjamin Franklin Bache dredged up moldy British forgeries from the war, purporting to show that Washington had pocketed bribes from the enemy and was a double agent for the Crown. Washington was not the only family member crestfallen over these vicious attacks. The British minister’s wife noted that Abigail Adams “has spirit enough to laugh at [Bache’s] abuse of her husband, which poor Mrs. Washington could not.”20 Such was the bitter discord that many Republicans stopped drinking toasts to the president’s health after dinner.

With the Jay Treaty, Washington had made good on his solemn oath to maintain peace and prosperity during his presidency. British evacuation of the northwestern posts triggered new settlements in the Ohio Country, including Cleveland, Day-ton, and Youngstown. The skies darkened considerably on the diplomatic front, however, as rumors filtered back to Washington that the French government, incensed over the treaty, contemplated sending a fleet to American waters to seize ships bound for Great Britain. In time France would make good on the threats, launching the Quasi-War against the United States during the presidency of John Adams. Washington would privately castigate Republicans for instigating France, which was “endeavoring with all her arts to lead” the United States into war on her side.21 To Hamilton, Washington issued a ringing manifesto of his foreign policy creed: “We will not be dictated to by the politics of any nation under heaven farther than treaties require of us . . . If we are to be told by a foreign power . . . what we shall do, and what we shall not do, we have independence yet to seek.”22