Washington [535]
With the country irrevocably divided into two hostile camps, Washington expected to have no further dealings with Jefferson, whose followers had so vilified him. Then an incident occurred that ensured that there would be no rapprochement between the two Virginians. Jefferson had befriended a Florentine named Philip Mazzei, who sold wine in London before moving to Virginia, where he hoped to introduce vineyards. After Mazzei returned to Europe, he exchanged letters with Jefferson, who tended to express himself much more colorfully on paper than in person. In April 1796 Jefferson sent Mazzei a scathing letter about the Washington administration: “The aspect of our politics has wonderfully changed since you left us. In place of that noble love of liberty and republican government which carried us triumphantly thro[ugh] the war,” a monarchical party had “sprung up whose avowed object is to draw over us the substance, as they have already done the forms, of the British government . . . It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their head shaved by the harlot England.”29 Though Washington was not mentioned by name, he surely qualified as the Samson, if not the Solomon, in question.
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