Presently, for personal and party reasons, certain of the papers began to attack him, and Jefferson wrote to Madison that the President was “extremely affected by the attacks made and kept up on him in the public papers.  I think he feels these things more than any person I ever met with.”  Later the Secretary of State noted that at an interview Washington “adverted to a piece in Freneau’s paper of yesterday, he said that he despised all their attacks on him personally, but that there never had been an act of government ... that paper had not abused ...  He was evidently sore and warm.”  At a cabinet meeting, too, according to the same writer, “the Presidt was much inflamed, got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself, ran on much on the personal abuse which had been bestowed on him, defied any man on earth to produce a single act of his since he had been in the govmt which was not done on the purest motives, that he had never repented but once the having slipped the moment of resigning his office, & that was every moment since, that by god he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation.  That he had rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world and yet that they were charging him with wanting to be a king.  That that rascal Freneau sent him 3 of his papers every day, as if he thought he would become the distributor of his papers, that he could see in this nothing but an impudent design to insult him.  He ended in this high tone.  There was a pause.”

To correspondents, too, Washington showed how keenly he felt the attacks upon him, writing that “the publications in Freneau’s and Bache’s papers are outrages on common decency; and they progress in that style in proportion as their pieces are treated with contempt, and are passed by in silence, by those at whom they are aimed,” and asked “in what will this abuse terminate?  The result, as it respects myself, I care not; for I have consolation within, that no earthly efforts can deprive me of, and that is, that neither ambitious nor interested motives have influenced my conduct.  The arrows of malevolence, therefore however barbed and well pointed, never can reach the most vulnerable part of me; though, whilst I am up as a mark, they will be continually aimed.”

On another occasion he said, “I am beginning to receive, what I had made my mind up for on this occasion, the abuse of Mr. Bache, and his correspondents.”  He wrote a friend, “if you read the Aurora of this city, or those gazettes, which are under the same influence, you cannot but have perceived with what malignant industry and persevering falsehoods I am assailed, in order to weaken if not destroy the confidence of the public.”