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Updated: May 12, 2025
Freneau's Gazette supported the Secretary of State with the desperation of an expiring cause; in this great final battle, were Jefferson driven from the Cabinet, his faithful organ must scurry to the limbo of its kind. It assailed the Administration for ingratitude and meanness, then turned its attention almost exclusively to the Secretary of the Treasury.
To correspondents, too, Washington showed how keenly he felt the attacks upon him, writing that "the publications in Freneau's and Bache's papers are outrages on common decency; and they progress in that style in proportion as their pieces are treated with contempt, and are passed by in silence, by those at whom they are aimed," and asked "in what will this abuse terminate?
Jefferson had elevated both hands. "I call Heaven to witness," he cried, "this black aspersion upon my character is, has been, entirely a production of the imagination of my enemies. I have never written nor inspired a line in Mr. Freneau's paper." Hamilton laughed and returned to his notes. "You do not believe me, sir?" demanded Jefferson, the blood boiling slowly to his large face.
Professor Pattee, Freneau's editor, quotes these words to illustrate the "common sense" atmosphere of the age which proved fatal to Freneau's development. Yet the sturdy young New Yorker, of Huguenot descent, is a charming figure, and his later malevolence was shown only to his political foes.
Freneau himself suffered, throughout his long career, from the depressing indifference of his public to the true spirit of poetry. "An old college mate of mine," said James Madison who was by tradition Freneau's roommate at Princeton in the class of 1771 "a poet and man of literary and refined tastes, knowing nothing of the world."
And on the night of the British entry a great fire had started in the lower part of the city, swept away the house where Bradford's press had been, leaped across Broadway and laid Trinity Church a mass of ruins scattered over the churchyard where Freneau's father lay buried.
The arrows of malevolence, therefore, however barbed and well pointed, never can reach the most vulnerable part of me; though, whilst I am up as a mark, they will be continually aimed. The publications in Freneau's and Bache's papers are outrages in that style in proportion as their pieces are treated with contempt and are passed by in silence by those at whom they are aimed.
Take care, however, to get it back and preserve it, as it is one of Freneau's. I send you also three of Freneau's papers, which, with that sent this morning, are all he has published. I wish them to be preserved. If you find them amusing, you may command them regularly. Adieu. Philadelphia, 14th November, 1791. I am to-day in much better heart than at any time since I left New-York.
We might compare M. Fouquet's account of Poland with Neumann's account of Kosciusko, or Freneau's of Washington, but will content ourselves with referring the reader to better European sources of knowledge, as the Breslau Zeitung, Ost Deutsche Zeitung, Czas, Wiek, La Pologne, etc.
Quite within the throw of a stone of Frankfort Street, and in the very year of Philip Freneau's birth, was born Eliza Schuyler, who with the passing of years was to marry and bear the name of Eliza Bleecker and the title of the first poetess of New York.
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