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https://www.americanheritage.com/verdicts-history-iv-scandalous-malicious-and-seditious-libel
In 1803 the infant American Republic was running a high political fever. The ferocity of the verbal warfare raging between the Federalists, the party created by Alexander Hamilton, and the Democratic-Republicans, led by President Jefferson, has rarely been matched in American politics, even by the diatribes of today’s New Left and Ultra Right.
The first fusillades had been fired during Washington’s Presidency. The Jeffersonians, with not a little help from the Sage of Monticello himself, had set up journalists such as Philip Freneau and Benjamin Franklin Bache with one mission, to deflate and discredit an administration that was, in Jefferson’s view, “galloping fast into monarchy.” They soon had the Father of His Country in a state of near apoplexy. “That rascal Freneau,” as Washington called him, insisted on sending his scurrilous National Gazette, published in Philadelphia, to the President’s house even after he had cancelled his subscription. Freneau spent most of his abuse on Hamilton. Baclic preferred Washington as a target, calling him “treacherous,” “mischievous,” “inefficient,” and sneering at his “farce of disinterestedness” and his “stately joumeyings through the American continent in search of personal incense.”
These verbal guerrillas soon had imitators. Among the more savage was William Duane, Bache’s successor as editor of the Philadelphia Aurora. Washington, he wrote, had “discharged the loathings of a sick mind.” Even this was topped by an English newcomer, James T. Callender. In the Richmond Examiner he declared that “Mr. Washington has been twice a traitor.”