It assailed the Administration for ingratitude and
meanness, then turned its attention almost exclusively to the Secretary
of the Treasury. It accused him of abstracting the moneys due to France,
of plundering the industrious farmer with the Excise Law, destroying the
morals of the people by Custom House duties; resurrected the old
discrimination cry and asserted vehemently that he, and he alone, had
robbed the poor soldiers. It raked every accusation, past and present,
from its pigeon holes. Jefferson, on the other hand, was held up as a
model of the disinterested statesman, combining virtues before which
those falsely attributed to Washington paled and expired; and as the
only man fit to fill the Executive Chair. Genet accepted all this as
gospel, fortunately, perhaps, for the country; for his own excesses and
impudence, his final threat to appeal from the President to the people,
ruined him with the cooling heads of the Republican party, and finally
lost him even the support of Jefferson.
Meanwhile, after stormy meetings of the Cabinet, Hamilton, in the peace
of his library, with Angelica sorting his pages,--until she went to the
North,--had written a series of papers defending the proclamation.
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