Washington [477]
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