The successor of Bache as editor of these two journals, William Duane, came to the office with an equal hatred of Washington, having already written a savage pamphlet against him.  In this the President was charged with “treacherous mazes of passion,” and with having “discharged the loathings of a sick mind.”  Furthermore it asserted “that had you obtained promotion ... after Braddock’s defeat, your sword would have been drawn against your country,” that Washington “retained the barbarous usages of the feudal system and kept men in Livery,” and that “posterity will in vain search for the monuments of wisdom in your administration;” the purpose of the pamphlet, by the author’s own statement, being “to expose the Personal Idolatry into which we have been heedlessly running,” and to show the people the “fallibility of the most favored of men.”

A fourth in this quartet of editors was the notorious James Thomson Callender, whose publications were numerous, as were also his impeachments against Washington.  By his own account, this writer maintained, “Mr. Washington has been twice a traitor,” has “authorized the robbery and ruin of the remnants of his own army,” has “broke the constitution,” and Callender fumes over “the vileness of the adulation which has been paid” to him, claiming that “the extravagant popularity possessed by this citizen reflects the utmost ridicule on the discernment of America.”

The bitterest attack, however, was penned by Thomas Paine.  For many years there was good feeling between the two, and in 1782, when Paine was in financial distress, Washington used his influence to secure him a position “out of friendship for me,” as Paine acknowledged.  Furthermore, Washington tried to get the Virginia Legislature to pension Paine or give him a grant of land, an endeavor for which the latter was “exceedingly obliged.”  When Paine published his “Rights of Man” he dedicated it to Washington, with an inscription dwelling on his “exemplary virtue” and his “benevolence;” while in the body of the work he asserted that no monarch of Europe had a character to compare with Washington’s, which was such as to “put all those men called kings to shame.”  Shortly after this, however, Washington refused to appoint him Postmaster-General; and still later, when Paine had involved himself with the French, the President, after consideration, decided that governmental interference was not proper.  Enraged by these two acts, Paine published a pamphlet in which he charged Washington with “encouraging and swallowing the greatest adulation,” with being “the patron of fraud,” with a “mean and servile submission to the insults of one nation, treachery and ingratitude to another,” with “falsehood,” “ingratitude,” and “pusillanimity;” and finally, after alleging that the General had not “served America with more disinterestedness or greater zeal, than myself, and I know not if with better effect,” Paine closed his attack by the assertion, “and as to you, sir, treacherous in private friendship, and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide, whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any?”