s, especially the rise of the Republican
or Democratic party, as it was subsequently called, in opposition to
the Federalist party, then led by Hamilton, Jay, and Morris. At this
juncture, on the return of Jefferson from the French mission, and after
a visit to his home in Virginia, Washington offered him the post of
Secretary of State, which he accepted, and entered upon the duties
of that office in New York in March, 1791. His chief colleague in
the Cabinet, soon now to become his political opponent, was Alexander
Hamilton, who had charge of the finances, as head of the Treasury
department. Between these two men, as chiefs of the principal
departments of government, President Washington had an anxious time of
it in keeping the peace, for each was insistently arrayed against the
other, not only in their respective attitudes toward England and in the
policy of the administration in the then threatening war with France,
but also as to the powers the National Government should be entrusted
with in relation to the legislatures of the separate states. What
Jefferson specially feared, with his firmly held views as to the
independence of public opinion, and especially his hatred of monarchy
and all its ways, was that the conservative and aristocratic influences
of the environment of New York, hardly as yet escaped from the era
of royal and Tory dominion and submission to the English Crown, might
fashion the newly federated nation upon English models and give it a
complexion far removed, socially as well as politically, from Republican
simplicity, coupled with a disposition to aggress upon and dictate to
the individual states of the Union, to their nullification and practical
effacement.

For this apparent tendency, Jefferson specially blamed Hamilton, since
his tastes as well as his sympathies were known to be aristocratic, as
indeed were Washington's, in his fondness for courtly dignity and the
trappings and ceremonies of high office. But his antagonism to Hamilton
was specially called forth by the latter's creation of a National Bank,
with its tendency to aggrandize power and coerce or control votes at
the expense of the separate States. He further was opposed to the great
financier and aristocrat for his leanings toward England and against
France, in the war that had then broken out between these nations, and
for his sharp criticism of the draft of the message to Congress on the
relations of France and England, which Jeff