It is in the nature of precaution that the more successful it is the less necessary it appears to have been, and thus the complete success of Hamilton’s management furnished his enemies with a new argument against him of which they afterwards made great use.  The costly military expedition that had no fighting to do was continually held up to public ridicule.  That the expense was trifling in comparison with the objects achieved must deeply impress any one who examines the records of the times.  A mistake might have been fatal to the existence of the Government.  It has become so powerful and massive since that time, that we can hardly realize what a rickety structure it then was, and how readily, in less capable hands, it might have collapsed.

Randolph, then Secretary of State, seems to have been in a panic.  Fauchet, the French minister at that time, reported to his government that Randolph called upon him and with a grief-stricken countenance declared, “It is all over; a civil war is about to ravage our unhappy country.”  He represented to Fauchet that there were four men whose talents, influence, and energy might save it.  “But debtors of English merchants, they will be deprived of their liberty if they take the smallest step.”  He wanted to know whether Fauchet could lend “funds sufficient to shelter them from English persecution.”  Fauchet’s letter was captured by the British and made public.  Randolph’s explanations did not clear up the obscurity that surrounds the affair.  His version was that the four men were flour merchants who were being pressed by their creditors “and that the money was wanted only for the purpose of paying them what was actually due to them in virtue of existing contracts.”  Even on his own showing it was a shady transaction, and he retired from Washington’s Cabinet under a cloud.

Washington always had difficulty about the composition of his Cabinet.  A capable man had been found to succeed Randolph as Attorney-General in the person of William Bradford, an able Pennsylvania lawyer, but he died in 1795, and was succeeded by Charles Lee of Virginia.  When Knox resigned in 1794, the vacancy was filled by transferring to the War Department Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, who had previously served as Postmaster-General.  When Hamilton retired, January, 1795, he was succeeded by Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut, who had been Comptroller of the Treasury.  After Randolph had been discredited by the Fauchet letter, the office of Secretary of State went a-begging.  It was offered to William Paterson of New Jersey, to Thomas Johnson of Maryland, to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, but all these men declined.  Washington got word that Patrick Henry, the old antagonist of the Constitution, was showing Federalist leanings in opposition to Jefferson and Madison, and Henry was then tendered the appointment, but he too declined.  Others were approached but all refused, and meanwhile Pickering, though Secretary of War, also attended to the work of the State Department.  The matter was finally settled by permanently attaching Pickering to the State Department, while the vacancy thus created at the head of the War Department was filled by James McHenry, an appointment which Washington himself described as “Hobson’s choice.”