As soon as he arrived in Philadelphia he demanded of Hamilton the arrears of the French debt, which the Secretary had refused to pay until there was a stable government in France to receive it.  Hamilton laughed, locked the doors of the Treasury, and put the key in his pocket.  To Genet’s excited volubility and pertinacity he paid as little attention as to Jefferson’s arguments.  Moreover, he reversed all Citizen Genet’s performances in the South; and in course of time, even the captured British ships, to the wrath and disgust of Jefferson, were returned to their owners.

Freneau’s Gazette supported the Secretary of State with the desperation of an expiring cause; in this great final battle, were Jefferson driven from the Cabinet, his faithful organ must scurry to the limbo of its kind.  It assailed the Administration for ingratitude and meanness, then turned its attention almost exclusively to the Secretary of the Treasury.  It accused him of abstracting the moneys due to France, of plundering the industrious farmer with the Excise Law, destroying the morals of the people by Custom House duties; resurrected the old discrimination cry and asserted vehemently that he, and he alone, had robbed the poor soldiers.  It raked every accusation, past and present, from its pigeon holes.  Jefferson, on the other hand, was held up as a model of the disinterested statesman, combining virtues before which those falsely attributed to Washington paled and expired; and as the only man fit to fill the Executive Chair.  Genet accepted all this as gospel, fortunately, perhaps, for the country; for his own excesses and impudence, his final threat to appeal from the President to the people, ruined him with the cooling heads of the Republican party, and finally lost him even the support of Jefferson.

Meanwhile, after stormy meetings of the Cabinet, Hamilton, in the peace of his library, with Angelica sorting his pages,—­until she went to the North,—­had written a series of papers defending the proclamation.  They were so able and convincing, so demonstrable of the treasonable efforts of the enemy to undermine the influence of the Administration, so cool and so brilliant an exposition of the rights and powers of the Executive, that on July 7th Jefferson wrote to Madison:  “For God’s sake, my dear sir, take up your pen.  Select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public.”

Madison hastened to obey his chief in a series of papers which tickled the literary nerve, but failed to convince.  That the laurels were to Hamilton was another bitter pill which Jefferson was forced to swallow.  Nevertheless, Hamilton, despite his victories, felt anything but amiable.  He was so exhausted that he was on the verge of a collapse, and triumphs were drab under the daily harassment of Jefferson, Genet, and Freneau.  Matters came to a climax one day in August, shortly before the outbreak of yellow fever.