no other common tie strong enough
at that moment to hold together a Union, the possible dissolution of
which was, both at the North and at the South, considered with calmness,
sometimes with complacency, and, when party passion was at a red heat,
even as a thing to be prayed for. At any rate, the President consented
to take the advice of the counselors whom he had consulted; but in
asking that advice he unwittingly aggravated the quarrel among them
which caused him so much uneasiness.

Jefferson, in the arguments he set forth both in conversation and by
letter to influence Washington's decision, dwelt upon the unhappy
condition of public affairs. It was a storm which he himself meant to
get out of by retiring to Monticello, though he thought it was
Washington's duty to remain at the helm and keep an eye to windward.
This unhappy condition of affairs, he said, had all come from the course
pursued by the secretary of the treasury, and was the natural
consequence of the acts of Congress in relation to the public debt, the
Bank, excise, currency, and other important measures passed in
accordance with the secretary's policy. Whether this policy was meant to
destroy the Union, subvert the republic, and establish a monarchy upon
its ruins, at any rate such must be the inevitable result of those
mischievous measures. He urged this view of the subject with such
pertinacity that Washington, either because he was impressed by so much
earnestness, or because he was curious to know how the assertions could
best be answered, sent them to Hamilton, with other objections of a
similar character from other persons, and asked for a reply. No names
were given, but it is not likely that Hamilton was at any loss in
guessing where such strictures upon his administration of affairs came
from. "I have not fortitude enough," he said in his answer, "always to
hear with calmness calumnies which necessarily include me as a principal
object in the measures censured, of the falsehood of which I have the
most unqualified consciousness.... I acknowledge that I cannot be
entirely patient under charges which impeach the integrity of my public
motives or conduct. I feel that I merit them in no degree, and
expressions of indignation sometimes escape me in spite of every effort
to suppress them." There were only two men in the country whom he could
have had in mind when he wrote such words as these. In all Washington's
career there is nowhere a stronger pr