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was appalled at British insensitivity and protested to resident minister George Hammond. Washington felt sufficiently jittery about signing the treaty that he privately asked Hamilton, now returned to legal practice in Manhattan, to aid him with a high-level crib sheet. Evidently Washington and Hamilton had not been in touch, since Washington admitted that he did not know how Hamilton had been occupied of late. “My wishes,” Washington explained, “are to have the favorable and unfavorable side of each article stated and compared together, that I may see the bearing and tendency of them and, ultimately, on which side the balance is to be found.”3 That Washington turned to Hamilton for guidance reflects his lack of confidence in his newly installed cabinet and his continuing reliance on Hamilton as his economic tutor. When Hamilton was treasury secretary, Washington had had to keep him at arm’s length, juggling him against Jefferson, but he had no such inhibitions with Hamilton out of office. Despite reservations about the Jay Treaty, Hamilton provided Washington with a generally laudatory fifty-three-page analysis, urging him to sign the highly imperfect document. Amazed at the breadth of this sparkling dissection, Washington in his reply sounded sheepish about having inadvertently taken up so much of Hamilton’s time.

Before he put his signature on the treaty, Washington was preparing to publish it when the Aurora printed a précis on June 29 that left the public so aghast that Madison said the treaty “flew with an electric velocity to every part of the union.”4 On July 1 the paper issued the complete text, and an official version ran in the Federalist Gazette of the United States. The uproar was overwhelming, tagging Jay as the chief monster in the Republicans’ bestiary. In the treaty, Republicans saw a blatant partiality for England and equally barefaced hostility toward France. Critics gave way to full-blown paranoid fantasies that Jay, in the pay of British gold, had suborned other politicians to introduce a monarchical cabal. Some protests bordered on the obscene, especially a bawdy poem in the Republican press about Jay’s servility to the British king: “May it please your highness, I John Jay / Have traveled all this mighty way, / To inquire if you, good Lord, will please, / to suffer me while on my knees, / to show all others I surpass / In love, by kissing of your———.” 5 By the July Fourth celebrations, Jay had been burned in effigy in so many towns that he declared he could have traversed the entire country by the glare of his own flaming figure.

The targets of the protest went far beyond Jay. At a rally in New York, when Hamilton rose to defend the treaty, protesters hurled stones at him, while in Philadelphia a menacing mob descended on George Hammond’s residence, smashed the windows, and “burned the treaty with huzzahs and acclamations.”6 Treaty opponents had no compunctions about besieging the presidential mansion, and John Adams remembered it “surrounded by an innumerable multitude from day to day, buzzing, demanding war against England, cursing Washington, and crying success to the French patriots and virtuous Republicans.”7 From across the country, inflammatory resolutions against the treaty piled up on Washington’s desk, many of them too obnoxious to warrant replies. “No answer given. The address too rude to merit one,” Washington scrawled atop a New Jersey petition, while he chided another from Virginia thus: “Tenor indecent. No answer returned.” On still another from Kentucky, he scribbled: “The ignorance and indecency of these proceedings forbade an answer.”8 Though tepid in his enthusiasm for the treaty, Washington was not prepared to go to war with England and thought the treaty would prevent a harmful deterioration in Anglo-American trade.

In mid-July Washington left sultry Philadelphia for a breathing spell at Mount Vernon, enduring a debilitating six-day journey in “hot and disagreeable” weather.9 If he hoped to escape the brouhaha over the Jay Treaty, he was disabused when Secretary of State Randolph