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Updated: June 9, 2025
The boy was christened Philip, and came to be called the Poet of the Revolution. Philip Freneau struggled through babyhood in Frankfort Street, and just as he was able to walk was whisked away to a farm in New Jersey, where his father had built a house, calling it Mount Pleasant after the old homestead in La Rochelle.
Freneau has left a poem describing the horrors of his captivity in very strong language, and it is easy to conceive that his suffering must have been intense to have aroused such bitter feelings. We give a part of his poem, as it contains the best description of the indignities inflicted upon the prisoners, and their mental and physical sufferings that we have found in any work on the subject.
It was he who printed the poems of André; who after the war gave up a Tory paper and was strong for the cause of the new nation and was in consequence denounced by Freneau. Freneau smiled to see the signs of Gaine and Rivington changed to suit the views of the new republic and rivalling one another in their show of patriotism.
He noticed, with the cool precision of an experimental observer, the symptoms of pain and annoyance which Washington could not always conceal. Freneau was Jefferson's clerk; a word would have stopped him.
Again, some months later, the President, alluding to another article in Freneau's paper, that "rascal Freneau," as he called him, said "that he despised all their attacks on him personally, but there never had been an act of the government not meaning in the executive line only, but in any line which that paper had not abused.
Freneau was one of Jefferson's subordinates in the State Department, combining with his duties there the editorship of a newspaper engaged in spreading the calumny that the Administration was leaning toward monarchy through the influence of Hamilton and his friends, who despised republicanism, hated France, and loved England.
As early as October his watching eye caught the first flash in the sunlight of a new blade in the enemies' armoury. One Freneau had come to town. He had some reputation as a writer of squibs and verses, and Hamilton knew him to be a political hireling utterly without principle.
The latter became more and more personal in his attacks upon the administration; and Hamilton, who was held up by name as a monarchist at heart, believing that the assaults originated in the hostility of Jefferson, in whose office Freneau was employed, at length turned sharply upon his assailant.
Why cannot you tell the truth and say that you gloat in having discovered this wretched affair, a common enough episode in the lives of all of you, in having another tid-bit for Freneau? Why did you not take it to him at once? What do you mean by coming here personally to take me to task?" "I think there is some misapprehension, sir," said Muhlenberg.
Close by, in narrow Nassau Street, when Freneau lived in Wall, was the home of a man who had been his classmate in college. This was Aaron Burr.
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