Washington [468]
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