In a notorious lapse of judgment, Mazzei printed this private letter in a Florentine newspaper. It was then translated and published in a French and then an English journal, finally cropping up in Noah Webster’s Minerva in New York in May 1797. Pretty soon the letter appeared everywhere, and Thomas Jefferson was startled when he read it on May 9. Usually unflappable, he was completely nonplussed. “Think for me on this occasion,” he pleaded with Madison, “and advise me what to do.”30 In private, Jefferson insisted that the translation had misrepresented his original communication and that the Samsons and Solomons referred to were the Society of the Cincinnati. As someone who liked to duck uncomfortable public clashes, Jefferson beat a hasty retreat into diplomatic silence. He told Madison that he could offer no public explanations of the letter because it would create “a personal difference between Gen[era]l Washington and myself ” and entangle him “with all those with whom his character is still popular, that is to say, nine-tenths of the people of the U.S.”31 The letter gave the world a peek into a very different Thomas Jefferson: not the political savant but the crafty, partisan operative marked by unrelenting zeal. While Washington refused to dignify the episode with a response, it is widely believed that the Mazzei letter ended all further communication between him and Jefferson. “I never saw him afterwards or these malignant insinuations should have been dissipated before his just judgment, as mist before the sun,” Jefferson later said.32 Whatever the case, both Jefferson and Madison had disappeared from Washington’s life with stunning finality. When Washington alluded to Jefferson in a letter the following year, he referred to him with patent disdain as “that man.”33

Hamilton took an even greater pounding in the Republican press. Back in 1792 James Monroe and other Republican legislators had gotten wind of a possible scandal involving Hamilton, who had made secret payments to a man named James Reynolds. Monroe and two other legislators had then confronted the treasury secretary and demanded to know whether he had colluded with Reynolds to profit from surreptitious trading in government securities. While admitting to the payments, Hamilton explained that they represented hush money to cover up an affair with Reynolds’s beautiful young wife, Maria. There the matter temporarily ended. Then in June 1797 James T. Callender, a scandal-mongering journalist in the Republican camp, published a pamphlet that accurately described the payments but mistakenly charged Hamilton with insider trading. To vindicate his integrity as a public official, Hamilton confessed to the adulterous affair in a ninety-five-page pamphlet; even his closest friends thought a delicately worded paragraph or two might have done the trick nicely.

Opinion differed among Federalists as to whether Hamilton’s political career would survive these damaging revelations. “Hamilton is fallen for the present,” David Cobb, a former aide to Washington, conceded to Henry Knox, “but if he fornicates with every female in the cities of New York and Philadelphia, he will rise again.”34 Many other Federalists and a gleeful majority of Republicans thought Hamilton’s self-inflicted wound would prove mortal. Although Washington could easily have avoided the incident with polite silence, Hamilton had stood loyally by him through many crises, and he must have felt that the time had come to reciprocate.

Washington forwarded to Hamilton one of the silver-plated wine coolers that Gouverneur Morris had sent to him from Europe early in his presidency. The accompanying note was potent in its simplicity. “My dear Sir,” it began. “Not for any intrinsic value the thing possesses, but as a token of my sincere regard and friendship for you and as a remembrancer of me, I pray you to accept a wine cooler for four bottles . . . I pray you to present my best wishes, in which Mrs. Washington joins me, to Mrs. Hamilton and the family, and that you would be persuaded that with every sentiment of the highest regard, I remain your sincere friend and affectionate h[onora]ble servant Go: Washington.”35 This succinct note is a marvelous example of Washington’s social finesse. He expressed solidarity with Hamilton without ever mentioning the scandal or referring to Hamilton’s misbehavior. Although Hamilton’s career survived, albeit in a diminished state, he began a long, tragic descent. He had achieved his most stellar feats under Washington’s benign auspices and seemed to lose his moral compass when he no longer operated under his direct guidance. For all his brilliance, Hamilton’s judgment was as erratic as Washington’s seemed unerring.

In terms of politics, Washington’s life would have anything but a placid final stage. In a rather grisly joke, Philip Freneau kept sending him issues of his new publication, the Time Piece, until Washington, annoyed, asked to have it discontinued. In the privacy of Mount Vernon, he no longer felt muzzled in expressing scorching political opinions. He was appalled by the French Directory’s treatment of three American commissioners sent to negotiate peace and by French depredations against American shipping. Fiercely opinionated, even strident, Washington was now avowedly partisan in private, fulminating against the Republicans as pawns of the French in their attempt to manipulate American politics. As he told Thomas Pinckney, time would show the difference between those “who are true Americans” and “those who are stimulating a foreign nation to unfriendly acts, repugnant to our rights and dignity.”36

For Washington, the one bright spot in an otherwise dark political picture was the release from prison that September of Lafayette, with the expectation that he would proceed to Holland or even America. At once Lafayette lavished Washington with high-flown prose reminiscent of old times: “With what eagerness and pleasure I would hasten to fly to Mount Vernon, there to pour out all the sentiments of affection, respect and gratitude . . . to you.”37 Now plump and hearty, his ebullient self restored, Lafayette had a touching vision of landing in Chesapeake Bay, rushing to see Washington at Mount Vernon, and buying a farm nearby.

With tensions running high over French policy, Washington had to send his protégé deflating news that he would not be well received in America. To counter French moves, Congress had already authorized a military expansion and the construction of more frigates. Lafayette, as a Frenchman, would be snubbed by Federalists and/or embraced by Republicans, and either way the situation would prove untenable. However ardently Lafayette defended the French Directory as having peaceful intentions toward the United States, Washington was having none of it, replying heatedly that the United States would not “suffer any nation under the sun . . . to trample upon their rights with impunity.”38 With his wife still ailing, Lafayette deferred his trip to America, spending the winter in Denmark. He was a man marooned by history, a tragic figure freed from prison only to emerge into a world in which he could find no fitting place. No longer accepted in his own country, he could not flee to America either and had to content himself with rehashing anecdotes about the American Revolution.

Even without the persistent tensions with France, Washington’s mood would have been morose. His crops had been damaged by drenching autumn rains; then a winter of unusual severity froze nearby creeks and left the Potomac congested with ice floes. If business was bad, politics was even worse. In Paris Talleyrand waited five months to meet with the three American commissioners and, when he did, complained about anti-French innuendos that, he claimed, had pervaded Washington’s farewell address. For a long time the American public was kept ignorant about the fate of this diplomatic mission. “Are our commissioners guillotined,” Washington wondered aloud to James McHenry, “or what else is the occasion of their silence?”39 In early March 1798 one of the commissioners, John Marshall, alerted Washington to the scandalous news that the French had tried to extort money from the American diplomats, in what would be billed as the XYZ Affair, named for the three nameless agents employed by Talleyrand to extract the payments.