m.
Wayne was then in the prime of life, being forty-seven years of age; and
Washington, believing that an energetic campaign would retrieve the
losses of St. Clair and produce a decisive and salutary effect upon the
Indians, counted much upon the prowess and executive force of that
officer. Nor was he disappointed.

Additional revenue was required to support the increased army; and upon
a motion being made in Congress to call upon the secretary of the
treasury to report the ways and means of raising it, the first decided
opposition to that officer and the measures of the administration, in
complicity with Jefferson's personal dislike of Hamilton, appeared in
the national legislature. Such report was called for, however; and the
discussions that ensued upon this and other topics were sometimes very
acrimonious, and caused Washington much painful apprehension. The press,
at the same time, was fostering party spirit with the most pernicious
aliment. In the previous autumn, a paper in the interest of the
republican party and in opposition to Fenno's _United States Gazette_,
called the _National Gazette_, was established. Philip Freneau, a warm
whig of the Revolution and a poet of considerable local eminence, who
had been editor of a New York paper, and who was called to Philadelphia
at that time by Mr. Jefferson to fill the post of translating clerk in
the state department, was installed as editor of the new opposition
paper. Jefferson patronized it for the avowed purpose of presenting to
the president and the American people correct European intelligence,
derived from the _Leyden Gazette_ instead of through the alleged
polluted channel of English newspapers. But it soon became the vehicle
of bitter attacks upon all measures of the administration which did not
originate with, or were approved by, Mr. Jefferson; and the character of
the secretary became thereby seriously compromised before the American
people. He was charged, with great plausibility, with being the author
of many anonymous political articles in Freneau's paper; but he solemnly
declared the accusation to be untrue.

Congress adjourned on the eighth of May. During the session, Washington
had for the first time exercised the veto power intrusted to the
president by the constitution. The occasion was the passage of an
apportionment bill based upon the census of the population of the United
States, lately taken, which in its provisions appeared to conflict with