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There was a picket fence, painted white, on one side of the green slope, and Sergeant John Champe once hid his men behind it to carry off Arnold when he should take his nightly walk by the waterside, an attempt that failed through Arnold's changing his quarters on the selfsame day. When the Revolution was over, Freneau was again in New York, which slowly recovered from the ravages of war.
The political casuist of our time may wonder at the importance which attached to this Freneau affair. We are taught that "there were giants in those days," but we may also remember that in the modern science of "practical politics" they were as babes and sucklings. Madison was making good his place as a leader of the opposition hardly second to Jefferson himself.
This brought out an affidavit from Freneau, in which he exculpated Mr. Jefferson from all complicity in the establishment, the conduct, or the support of his paper. The feud between Hamilton and Jefferson gave Washington great concern and no little mortification. Both ministers discharged the duties of their respective offices to the entire satisfaction of the president.
Jefferson, of course, denied that he had anything to do with the writing in the newspaper, and Freneau made oath at the time that the Secretary wrote nothing; but in his old age he declared that Jefferson wrote or dictated all the most abusive articles, and he showed a file of the "Gazette" with these articles marked.
Freneau painted from his own experience the horrors of the British prison-ship, and celebrated, in cadences learned from Gray and Collins, the valor of the men who fell at Eutaw Springs.
The Poets: Freneau, Trumbull, Hopkinson, Barlow, Clifton, and Dwight. 3. Writers in other Departments: Bellamy, Hopkins, Dwight, and Bishop White. Rush, McClurg, Lindley Murray, Charles Brockden Brown. Ramsay, Graydon. Count Rumford, Wirt, Ledyard, Pinkney, and Pike.
In the years that followed the Revolution, Freneau spent much of his time in sea trips, but he was in the city again when George Washington took the oath of office as the first President of the United States at the Federal Hall in Wall Street; and was in the quaint St. Paul's Chapel, then quite a new structure, when Washington went there on the day of his inauguration.
In the same year, Freneau lived for a time in Wall Street, close by the house where Alexander Hamilton lived, who in those days was a figure in literary New York by reason of his writing of the Federalist papers.
In those days of wretched misery and suffering, within view of the city by day, in the noisome ship's hold by night, Freneau thought out his best-remembered poem, The British Prison-Ship and many another line which in the later days of the Revolution was to rouse American feeling; verse that was to be distributed to the American soldiers, to be read by them on the march and by the light of the camp-fires; lines that were to commemorate the victories and the heroism of the soldiers of the Revolution; lines ridiculing each separate act of the British.
There were Freneaus who fought with the Huguenots at La Rochelle, and there were Freneaus still living in that ancient city when the revocation of the Edict of Nantes forced so many to strange lands. The Freneau family, refugees from their native land, prospered in America, and a son born in the Frankfort Street house in this year 1752 gave historic interest to the name.
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