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Updated: June 9, 2025
The rupture between Hamilton and Jefferson was now complete, and the violence of party spirit manifested by the Gazettes of Fenno and Freneau was greatly augmented.
The "Rights of Man" served to start the discussion; and the next step was to bring on from New York Philip Freneau, a verse-writer and journalist, and make him translating clerk in the State Department, and editor of an opposition newspaper known as the "National Gazette." The new journal proceeded to do its work after the fashion of the time.
Hamilton began by mathematically demonstrating that Freneau was the tool of Jefferson, imported and suborned for the purpose of depressing the national authority, and exposed the absurdity of the denials of both. When he had finished dealing with this proposition, its day for being a subject of animated debate was over.
I do not think that Jefferson could do this, or Hamilton either, and I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that Jefferson furnished Philip Freneau, who came from New York to Philadelphia to edit the anti-Washington newspaper, with much of his inspiration if not actual articles. The objective of the "Gazette" was, of course, the destruction of Hamilton and his policy of finance.
But in the wild banquet of their triumph, while still holding the sacred vessels, they were checked as of old was Belshazzer. Those scenes shall never pass, from my memory, with Freneau I can say "And long shall timorous fancy see, The painted chief, the pointed spear; And reason's self shall bow the knee, To shadows and delusions here"
Freneau sent him three copies of the Gazette daily, lest he miss something, and he had that morning left Betsey in tears. Fenno was fighting the Secretary's battles valiantly; but there was only one pen in America which could cope with Jefferson's, and that was Hamilton's own. But aside from his accumulating cares, it was a strife to which he did not care to descend.
Washington doubtless thought himself so hardened to abuse by the experience he had had of it during the Revolution that nothing which Freneau, Bache, and their kind could say or do, would affect him. But he was mistaken. And one cannot fail to see that they saddened and annoyed him. He felt so keenly the evil which must come from the deliberate sowing of dissensions.
When to your arms these fatal islands fall For first or last, they must be conquered, all, Americans! to rites sepulchral just With gentlest footstep press this kindred dust, And o'er the tombs, if tombs can then be found, Place the green turf, and plant the myrtle round This poem was written in 1780, the year that Freneau was captured.
He printed Freneau's satires against Great Britain as a Whig, and then as a Tory fell under the power of Freneau's pen, for Freneau hated inconstancy quite as much as he did Tory principles. Then there was close at hand the home of Rivington's New York Gazetteer.
Strict veracity was not the strongest characteristic of either Freneau or Jefferson, and it is really of but little consequence whether Freneau was lying in his old age or in the prime of life. The undoubted facts of the case are enough to fix the responsibility upon Jefferson, where it belongs.
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