American Aurora
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What part did the Aurora play in Washington’s decision to leave the presidency? Dr. Benjamin Rush (a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a confidant of John Adams, and a highly respected Philadelphian) reports:
It is even said that [Bache’s] paper induced [Washington] to retire from the president’s chair of the United States.119
So, today, this 9th day of March in 1798, George Washington is in retirement “under his vine and fig tree” at Mount Vernon, though, even out of office, he claims “Mr. Bache … is no more than the Agent or tool of those who are endeavouring to destroy the confidence of the people in the officers of Government,”120 and, only a month ago, he described the Aurora as “cowardly, illiberal and assassin-like,” as offering “malignant falsehood,” and as attempting to “destroy all confidence in those who are entrusted with the Administration …”121
Despite it all, George Washington continues to read the Aurora, and, today as every day, he can find advertisements for works which disparage his administration. Others from today’s Aurora are:
THIS DAY IS PUBLISHED—BY SNOWDEN & McCorkle, N. 47, North Fourth-street—CALLENDER’s Sketches of the History of America. They have Likewise for Sale, a few Copies of the HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES FOR 1796—The SUBSCRIBERS to the latter Volume are informed that in a few days, they will be waited on with the former; which is not doubted will meet equally with their approbation.
With a bit of help from Thomas Jefferson,122 Aurora writer Jimmy Callender (the “renegade”) published last June his History of the United States for 1796123 and more recently his Sketches of the History of America, two works which completely shattered the image of Washington’s most important cabinet member, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton.
In his History of the United States for 1796, Jimmy revealed that, while Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton transferred sizable sums to a convicted securities swindler, James Reynolds, suggesting that Hamilton used Reynolds to speculate in the very treasury certificates that Hamilton was supposed to be regulating.124 The public outcry demanded an answer, so Hamilton gave two, first in July through John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States125 and then in August through his own pamphlet,126 admitting he had paid money to James Reynolds but claiming the money was not to speculate in treasury certificates but rather to pay James Reynolds’ blackmail demands for adultery Hamilton had committed with James Reynolds’ wife.
To the Federalists’ dismay, Hamilton’s confession of marital infidelity precluded their party leader from ever seeking high elective office, but what was even more distressing, the confession didn’t vindicate the former secretary. The wife in question, Maria Reynolds, insisted her honor was quite intact and that Hamilton’s confession merely reflected an ongoing conspiracy between Hamilton and her husband, James (whom she divorced). As Thomas Jefferson observed of Hamilton, “his willingness to plead guilty to adultery seems rather to have strengthened than weakened the suspicions that he was in truth guilty of the speculations.”127 As Jimmy Callender argued, “So much correspondence could not refer exclusively to wenching … No man of common sense will believe that it did. Hence it must have implicated some connection still more dishonourable, in Mr. Hamilton’s eyes, than that of incontinency … [I]t respected certificate speculations.”128
In all events, Jimmy would not go away. Last month, he published his Sketches of the History of America, including an analysis of Hamilton’s pamphlet and the infallible conclusion:
The whole proof in this pamphlet rests upon an illusion. “I am a rake, and for that reason I cannot be a swindler …” This is an edifying and convenient system of logic.129
So was Hamilton fooling with the wife or the money? Difficult to say. Hamilton would best have heeded Poor Richard’s advice:
Dally not with other Folks’ Women or Money.130
T. Paine to G. Washington. THIS DAY IS PUBLISHED, at the Office of the Aurora. Price 25 Cents. A LETTER from THOMAS PAINE to GEORGE WASHINGTON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, on affairs Public and Private. [Copy Right secured.] The usual allowance will be made to Book Sellers, and Political works of approved merit taken in exchange.
Benny Bache is Tom Paine’s publisher in America, including Tom Paine’s thirty-six-page Letter to George Washington. In this “letter,” the great pamphleteer of the American Revolution charges that George Washington was an incompetent commander in chief of the American Revolution and that America owes its independence to the intervention of France:
[H]ad it not been for the aid received from France in men, money and ships, your cold and unmilitary conduct, as I shall show in the course of this letter, would in all probability have lost America; at least she would not have been the independent nation she now is. You slept away your time in the field till the finances of the country were completely exhausted, and you have little share in the glory of the final event. It is time, sir, to speak the undisguised language of historical truth.131
Washington told John Adams that Paine’s “letter” was the most insulting letter he ever received. “He must have been insane to write so,” John Adams wrote his wife, Abigail.132
THIS DAY IS PUBLISHED,—At the Office of the Aurora, Price One dollar and a Half. MONROE’S VIEW of the CONDUCT OF THE EXECUTIVE. A very liberal allowance to those who buy to sell again.
Benny Bache also publishes former U.S. Minister to France James Monroe’s 407-page book, A View of the Conduct of the Executive …133 This book argues that once George Washington became President, he turned his back on America’s French ally by signing the infamous Jay Treaty of 1795, which gave Britain many privileges at the expense of France. As Washington’s Ambassador to France, James Monroe became so incensed with Washington’s anti-French behavior that he wrote some critical articles for Benny Bache to publish in the Philadelphia Aurora. Benny tried to mask Monroe’s authorship behind the anonymous heading “From a Gentlemen in Paris to His Friend in the City,”134 but Washington uncovered the truth and fired James Monroe.135 Monroe’s View of the Conduct of the Executive is a public response to George Washington. It is also a powerful retaliation.
THIS DAY IS PUBLISHED,—At the Office of the Aurora … Price 25 Cents. A letter to GEORGE WASHINGTON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: containing STRICTURES on his ADDRESS of the 17th Sept. 1796, notifying his relinquishment of the Presidential office. By JASPER DWIGHT of Vermont.
Another Benny Bache publication is A Letter to George Washington … by Jasper Dwight of Vermont.136 This forty-eight-page pamphlet argues that George Washington’s Farewell Address offered warnings against dissent (“faction”) and against foreign entanglements merely to forestall criticism of Washington’s treaty relations with Britain and France.
Washington’s Farewell Address suggested, “[T]he common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it in the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.” In it, Washington warned, “[B]e deaf to such as would sever you from your brethren and connect you with aliens.”
Jasper Dwight of Vermont answers, “[Y]ou pronounced an anathema against all combination and association because a few … dared to assert their own opinions in opposition to yours …” Dwight asks, “Are men to remain silent until called upon by their government agents? Who are they that the constitution appoints to restrain private deliberation and mark the line beyond which freedom becomes sedition? Where is the law that forbids the exercise of opinion and restrains the conscience from its honesty?”
Washington’s Farewell Address asks, “Why, by interweaving our destiny with any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest humor or caprice? ‘Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world …”
Jasper Dwight of Vermont answers that Washington himself executed the infamous Jay Treaty with England; “Whatever may have stimulated you to the execution of such a treaty, it is evident the advice you have here
offered to your fellow citizens, with regard to foreign connections, conveys a tacit condemnation of that measure … [A] short time prior to the agitation of the British Treaty [the Jay Treaty], it should not be forgotten that the British Cabinet ha[d] issued a secret order to their cruisers to seize all American vessels which they should meet bound for France, that some hundreds of them were actually seized … The British Treaty … was the price [America paid for] your fears … and the sacrifice of our relations with France was the return [quid pro quo] for the repeal of the British order … When we fought for our Freedom … France fought for us; we had her navy to protect us, her valorous generals to direct us … [W]e have derived the most signal advantages from the alliance of France … [T]hat obligation has never been repaid …”
A word about me …
Jasper Dwight and I are the same. That is, “Jasper Dwight” is a pen name for William Duane. “Of Vermont” is almost true, but Vermont was not a state when I was born there in 1760 and during the time I lived there (until I was five).
My father, John Duane, fled the miserable life of the Catholic in British-ruled Ireland in order to settle with my mother on the American frontier near Lake Champlain. This area later became part of Vermont.
My father was a farmer and a surveyor who came to America for a better life but found himself fighting the British monarch on the American frontier, defending French claims to land and trapping rights. That was the French and Indian War which ended in 1763.137
It was an “Indian” war because both sides stirred up the Indians, and, one day in 1765, some of those Indians ambushed and killed my father. Mother and I fled to New York and Philadelphia. Six years later, when I was eleven, we returned to Ireland.138
Two summers ago, at the age of thirty-six, now married with children, I returned to America with my wife, Catherine, our now fifteen-year-old son, William John, our daughter, Kate, and our youngest child, Patrick. I take work where I can get it, and I am writing part-time for Benny Bache and his Philadelphia Aurora. But it isn’t easy. No one forgets my Washington criticism, and Federalists denounce me as “Jasper Dwight.”
One more word about the French and Indian War and about the death of my father at the hands of the Indians … Just about a year ago, Benny Bache’s Philadelphia Aurora accused George Washington of a heinous crime back in 1754:
The accusation in question is no less than of having, while commanding a party of American troops, fired on a flag of truce; killed the officer in the act of reading a summons under the sanction of such a flag; of having attempted to vindicate the act, and yet of having signed a capitulation, in which the killing of that officer and his men was acknowledged as an act of assassination.139
Two decades before the American Revolution (in the spring of 1754), George Washington was a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel of Virginia militia, leading his men along the colony’s western frontier to protect Virginian land claims (including his own) from the encroachment of French Canadian trappers. Hearing some Frenchmen were in his vicinity and ignoring the fact that France and Britain were then at peace, young Colonel Washington led an early-morning ambush of what proved to be a peaceful ambassadorial delegation from the French governor of Quebec (to warn Americans off the disputed land). On that morning of May 28th, George Washington killed the Governor’s emissary, a lieutenant named Jumonville, as he was reading the governor’s message, and Washington allowed his Indian guides to scalp several Frenchmen who had accompanied the ambassador.
Young George Washington’s attack on this peaceable French delegation and his acquiescence to the butchering of French soldiers were atrocities that started America’s French and Indian War, drawing French and British soldiers to the American frontier and inflaming the Indians who ultimately killed my father.140
Not long after Lieutenant Jumonville’s murder, his half brother, Captain Coulon de Villiers, led French soldiers in an assault on Washington’s forces at Fort Necessity. The troops surrounded the fort and only agreed to release Washington after he signed a confession—for all the world to see—admitting to the “assassination” of the French governor’s peaceful emissary. This was “the Jumonville murder”!141
SATURDAY, MARCH 10, 1798
GENERAL * AURORA * ADVERTISER
In Thursday’s Gazette of the U. States, Mr. John Fenno applied the epithet of Renegade to one of the Correspondents [Jimmy Callender] in the Aurora whose name he inserted at full length and who is supposed to have recently bestowed upon him some decent drubbing in this paper. For this time, no personal retort shall be made on Mr. Fenno himself, unless in his editorial capacity where he is undoubtedly fair game. But we are determined to return blow for blow and to stick closely by his Gazette … [W]e beg leave to ask him this plain question: Whether one of his principal correspondents, if not the principal of his correspondents, is not an infamous, swindling jobber in lottery tickets, a wretch who has cheated every one who would trust him and who is equally divested of reputation and of probity.
Though Benny Bache won’t admit it, “renegade” is a good word for forty-year-old Jimmy Callender. A poet whose passions often end in anger, a family man with too much love for the bottle, this Scotsman is caught between political writing that doesn’t pay and a wife and four children he can no longer support.142 Yet there’s no denying the power of his pen.
Jimmy first used that pen in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the early 1790s, to rebuke British tax collectors for abusing Scottish brewers, but he crossed the line in 1792 (the year George III issued royal proclamations against seditious writings) with his eighty-page pamphlet Political Progress of Britain, condemning British rule in Scotland and lauding America for choosing to revolt.143 His words struck with a power only equaled by Tom Paine’s Rights of Man.
Two weeks after those royal proclamations, the British Lord Advocate and the Edinburgh deputy sheriff were fast on Jimmy’s trail, charging him with sedition and scheduling a trial that Jimmy failed to attend. The court then outlawed him, and, by April of 1793, Jimmy was aboard the ship Mary John, in full retreat toward the Delaware River.144
Today, Jimmy Callender writes for the Philadelphia Aurora, but the pay simply isn’t enough.145 Jimmy has moved his family onto Philadelphia’s docks,146 drinks too heavily, and asks friends for handouts.147 As Poor Richard said,
Kings have long Arms, but Misfortune longer;
Let none think themselves out of her Reach.148
MONDAY, MARCH 12, 1798
GENERAL * AURORA * ADVERTISER
We are convinced that … people begin to see their madness in preferring John Adams and a French war to Thomas Jefferson with a French peace.
Some family matters … Today, in the U.S. Senate, John Adams puts forth the nomination of his son, John Quincy Adams,
to be a commissioner with full powers to negotiate a treaty of amity and commerce with His Majesty the King of Sweden.149
Formerly U.S. Minister to The Hague (Netherlands), John Quincy Adams is currently U.S. Minister to Berlin (Prussia).
More family matters … Benny’s wife, Peggy,150 is pregnant. This will be their fourth. The first three are boys, Franklin, six, Richard, four, and Benjamin, two. Poor Richard said,
A Good Wife & Health is a Man’s best Wealth.151
In Peggy Bache, Benny has found his fortune.
Benny Bache first met Peggy Bache (née Markoe) in the spring of 1788, following his graduation (1787)152 from the University of the State of Pennsylvania. He was eighteen. She was seventeen. Peggy’s parents were Danes who had farmed a sugar plantation on the island of St. Croix in the West Indies. Her father died when she was a child, so her mother moved Peggy and one of her two brothers, Peter, to Philadelphia, where, in 1780, her mother married Adam Kuhn, a prominent Philadelphia physician.153
Benny and Peggy courted for almost two years when Peggy’s mother took ill and asked Peggy to return with her to St. Croix. The separation proved affecting.154 During it, Peggy attended her mother and Benny atte
nded his grandfather until their respective deaths. Peggy returned in June of 1790; Benny started the Aurora in October; and in November of the following year, they were married. At first they lived with Benny’s parents in Franklin Court, but, in 1792 when their first son, Franklin, was born, they moved above the Aurora’s offices at 112 High.155 At that time, Benny wrote a friend,
I am no longer little Benjamin, I am the large bearded Benjamin, and what is worse—married. Yes, at 22 … to my taste and to the taste of my friends, too. If you know her, you will like her very much …156
Peggy has endured difficult times with Benny Bache. She also has shared heroic moments. In July of 1795, when the Aurora published (in America’s first journalistic “scoop”) the text of the infamous Jay Treaty (which Washington and the Senate were trying to keep secret), Benny set out by stagecoach to spread copies of the treaty throughout the country. Like Paul Revere, Benny traveled from city to city, warning, in effect, that “the British are coming.” While Benny generated large anti-treaty rallies in each city he visited, Peggy Bache remained at home, publishing the Aurora herself, with the help of her brother, Peter.157
Things have intensified since then. After John Adams’ “miserable instruments of foreign influence” speech last May 16th, a friend wrote of Peggy Bache,
Poor woman, her old acquaintances have almost all deserted her. She is luckily of the opinion that her husband is quite in the right. She does not therefore suffer the pain of entertaining a mean opinion of him which I am sorry to say most people do.158