“The like may be expected from Richmond, a meeting having been had there also, at which Mr. Wythe, it is said, was seated as moderator; by chance more than design, it is added.  A queer chance this for the chancellor of the state.

“All these things do not shake my determination with respect to the proposed ratifications, nor will they, unless something more imperious and unknown to me should, in the judgment of yourself and the gentlemen with you, make it advisable for me to pause.”

A few days later Washington was recalled by a letter from Randolph, and also by a private note from Pickering, which said, mysteriously, that there was a “special reason” for his immediate return.  He had been expecting to be recalled at any moment, and he now hastened to Philadelphia, reaching there on August 11.  He little dreamed, however, of what had led his two secretaries, one ignorantly and the other wittingly, to hasten his return.  On the very day when he dated his letter to the selectmen of Boston as from the United States, the British minister placed in the hands of Mr. Wolcott, the Secretary of the Treasury, an intercepted letter from Fauchet, the French minister, to his own government.  This dispatch, bearing the number 10, had come into the possession of Mr. Hammond by a series of accidents; but the British government and its representatives were quick to perceive that the chances of the sea had thrown into their hands a prize of much more value than many French merchantmen.  The dispatch thus rescued from the water, where its bearer had cast it, was filled with a long and somewhat imaginative dissertation on political parties in the United States, and with an account of the whiskey rebellion.  It also gave the substance of some conversations held by the writer with the Secretary of State.  This is not the place, nor would space serve, to examine the details of this famous dispatch, with reference to the American statesman whom it incriminated.  On its face it showed that Randolph had held conversations with the French minister which no American Secretary of State ought to have held with any representative of a foreign government, and it appeared further that the most obvious interpretation of certain sentences, in view of the readiness of man to think ill of his neighbor, was that Randolph had suggested corrupt practices.  Such was the document, implicating in a most serious way the character of his chief cabinet officer, which Pickering and Wolcott placed in Washington’s hands on his arrival in Philadelphia.

Mr. Conway, in his biography of Randolph, devotes many pages to explaining what now followed.  His explanations show, certainly, a most refined ingenuity, and form the most elaborate discussion of this incident that has ever appeared.  All this effort and ingenuity are needless, however, unless the object be to prove that Randolph was wholly without fault, which is an impossible task.  There was nothing complicated about the affair, and nothing strange about the President’s course, if we confine ourselves to the plain facts and the order of their occurrence.