George Washington was perhaps in a more petulant mood than usual when he wrote of Benjamin Franklin Bache, Benjamin Franklin's grandson, in 1797: “This man has celebrity in a certain way, for his calumnies are to be exceeded only by his impudence, and both stand unrivalled.” The ordinarily reserved ex-president had similarly commented four years earlier that the “publications” in Philip Freneau's National Gazette and Bache's daily newspaper, the Philadelphia General Advertiser, founded in 1790, which added the noun Aurora to its title on November 8, 1794, were “outrages on common decency.” The new nation's second First Lady, Abigail Adams, was hardly friendlier, denouncing Bache's newspaper columns as a “specimen of Gall.” Her husband, President John Adams, likewise considered Bache's anti-Federalist diatribes and abuse of Washington “diabolical.” Both seemed to have forgotten the bygone, cordial days in Paris during the American Revolution, when their son John Quincy, two years Bache's senior, attended the Le Coeur boarding school with “Benny” (family members also called him “Little Kingbird”). But the ordinarily dour John Quincy remembered. Offended that the Aurora had denounced his father's choosing him U.S. minister to Prussia as nepotism, he murmured that Bache had betrayed their “ancient friendship.”1Bache's Aurora, which became the most influential Jeffersonian Republican journal after Philip Freneau's National Gazette closed its doors in November 1793, angered most “friends of order.” They despised “Lightning Rod, Jr.,” as English expatriate radical-turned-conservative William Cobbett called him, alluding to Bache's famous grandfather. Bache's foes deplored his support of Jefferson, “friend to the Rights of the People,” for the presidency in 1796 against the “monarchist” Adams. They despised him as an intemperate, fanatical democrat, co-conspirator of Jefferson and the French revolutionists. They labeled him an opportunist who printed scurrilous diatribes against the Washington administration, especially its unpopular Jay Treaty, to garner increased circulation and party patronage. Rachel Bradford, sister-in-law of the prominent New Jersey Federalist congressman Elisha Boudinot, vividly expressed the party's view. Demonstrating literary flair and knowledge of classical mythology, in 1795 Bradford acerbically compared Bache to the ferocious dog that guarded the gates of Hades: The Cerberus of Democracy, Bache barks more furiously than ever, and snaps so much that its fangs will loose [sic] their power of wounding by continual gnashing—unless it makes a speedy exit by madness for I think the symptoms of that disease increase in it daily. The President is the continual mark of his abuse, to which no bound is set; it is to be hoped, that like some other party papers have done here before Bache's will destroy itself and its insolent publisher, be sent into the contempt he deserves.2Federalist pundits dreaded the Aurora's invective, especially when zealots like James T. Callender and Dr. James Reynolds filled its columns. Experts on the history of the press during the 1790s agree with Donald H. Stewart, author of a massive study of Jeffersonian journalism, that after Freneau's National Gazette collapsed, the Aurora became “the most influential newssheet in the country.” At its heyday in 1797 the Aurora was the Republican paper of greatest circulation, boasting some 1,700 subscribers, while the average daily drew only about 500. The Aurora carried the most reliable transcriptions of congressional debates, often copied by Bache's competitors. Free copies circulated extensively in taverns and via the postal frank of Republican congressmen.3Yet Bache's opposition to Washington and the Federalists came late. The above criticisms all date from 1795 onward, after Bache first leaked and then vigorously opposed the Jay Treaty. Indeed, among those from whom he requested advice and assistance in setting up a Philadelphia newspaper was the Federalist elder statesman Robert Morris. As superintendent of finance during the American Revolution, Morris championed a stronger central government and worked closely with Bache's grandfather, Benjamin Franklin, to obtain vital grants and loans from France. Morris told Bache he would be glad to help him obtain a share of the public printing, except that Secretary of State Jefferson, who was in charge of printing the laws, had already employed other printers, among them John Fenno, who would soon become one of Jefferson's most bitter enemies. “Some of your friends here are rather sorry for your intention of printing a newspaper,” Morris paternalistically advised. “There are already too many of them published in Philadelphia and in these days of scurrility it is difficult for a press of such reputation as you would choose yours to be to maintain the character of freedom and impartiality connected with purity.”4Following the advice of Morris and Benjamin Franklin, who during the colonial period had run his newspaper in an impartial manner so as to gain advertising revenue and public printing, and not alienate would-be subscribers, at the outset Bache instructed correspondents to “deliver their sentiments with temper and decency,” to advance the “public good.”5 But in large measure, his paper at first embraced Federalist views. The General Advertiser endorsed Hamilton's fiscal policies, including the funding of the public debt, the Bank of the United States, and Hamilton's famous Report on Manufactures (December 1791), neutrality during the French Revolution, and suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion. In fact, the most recent scholarly study of Bache depicts him as a thoroughgoing Hamiltonian in the early 1790s, who joined his “fellow nationalist,” the diehard Federalist Fenno, editor of the Gazette of the United States, in praising Washington's administration. Indeed, the General Advertiser denounced the radical National Gazette and its editor, Philip Freneau, as a partisan, anit-administration nuisance that wagged “the tongue of prejudice and error” against the government. “Can it possibly be considered a criterion of patriotism to excite jealousies and suggest aspersions respecting the general government?” Bache lectured Freneau. During the first years of his newspaper Bache reprinted many articles and editorials, both informational and opinionated, from Fenno's paper, engaging in what Marcus Leonard Daniel inelegantly calls “literary cannibalism,” while seldom printing criticisms of Hamiltonian finance.6 Appalled by Bache's refusal to print a smaller, cheaper, weekly “country paper” for circulation in rural areas, as well as by the preponderance of pro-Hamilton essays in the General Advertiser, Jefferson mournfully concluded, “Freneau's two [semi-weekly] papers contain more good matter than Bache's six.”7Only twenty-one when he started the newspaper, young Bache devoted himself to defending popular government. He sought fame and public regard rather than financial advancement. In 1789, confessing that his ambition was not to accumulate wealth but to secure public esteem and fame, he confided his zeal for civic virtue and the public good to his journal, “Mélanges.” “Ambition is I think my strongest passion,” he wrote.To be great truly great by being virtuous, I want sufficient money to show these virtues in their very brilliant appearance, & a Wife who may by partaking increase the bliss I expect by their exercise. I shall aim at being a public character to shew how I could choose the good of my Country in opposition to my private interest, which is a rare thing nowadays…. My principal object shall be to be esteemed virtuous, reputed learned, & to be useful thro' these means to my Country & Mankind. He was also wary of the corrupting effects that power might have on his good intentions, should he ever acquire power. “If I was elevated in any eminent Station I should, I fear have a new, a contrary set of Ideas.” He began his newspaper career with an avowedly nonpartisan view. He supported the Constitution, and, contrary to the statements of his later political opponents, opposed the Anti-Federalists.8On a more personal note, young Bache, who had a reputation for sociability, organized celebrations of Washington's Birthday as manager of the Philadelphia City Dancing Assembly as late as 1795, although his newspaper had begun criticizing Washington's “aristocratic” habits. Earlier, in 1792, when Bache, then still in Washington's camp, conducted a birthday ball for the president by the populist New City Dancing Assembly, the General Advertiser praised Washington for attending his celebration as well as the older, socially elitist City Dancing Assembly's more elaborate fête, commenting that he showed himself a truly “republican magistrate.” The Aurora's opposition to Washington grew unrelenting only after the violent debate over the Jay Treaty in 1795.9Even after the Jay Treaty, the Aurora did not become a purely Republican organ. After the election of 1796 Bache began a campaign to rally the Republicans in a nonpartisan union with President John Adams, who “brought to his presidency … a detestation of political parties—Federalist and Republican alike.”10 Previously, the General Advertiser mentioned Adams with respect. Supporting his vice-presidential candidacy on the eve of the election of 1792, it decried what it called “Antifederalist abuse” of him in the newspapers. Bache also reprinted editorials from the Federalist Gazette of the United States in 1792, on education and public schools, which favorably cited Adams's well-known, multivolume Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States (1787–88), a somewhat conservative endorsement of bicameral legislatures.11Surprisingly enthusiastic in their response to the peaceful transfer of power from Washington to Adams, in early 1797 Bache and other Republican editors affirmed their trust in the new president to revive the patriotic ideals of the Revolution, in which Adams had played an indispensable role. Thomas Greenleaf's New York Journal, for example, hoped that the incoming administration would be “propitious to the spirit and intention of our late revolution.” Bache's own Aurora evoked Adams's outstanding career as a Revolutionary statesman and signer of the Declaration of Independence as omens that “the cause of Republicanism will acquire important vigor” under his leadership. A “Communication” from an enthusiastic Wilmington Democratic-Republican claimed that, had Washington's “particularly great character” not been pro-Federalist, and had the voters directly chosen the electors in all the states, Jefferson would have won easily. Still, he optimistically predicted that Adams would “disappoint the British faction, act like a genuine Republican, and not prove himself an apostate to the Liberty and Independence of his country, by disgracing his conduct during our late glorious revolution.” A “Correspondent” argued that, unlike Washington, Adams would reject the humiliating stance of a “tool” or “head of a party” mindlessly obeying Hamilton, and instead pursue an independent position more respectful of the U.S. alliance with France. “Mr. Adams is not an automaton for Hamilton,” another “Correspondent” asserted. “He is too much the friend of virtue and his country to be under such influence.” Professing confidence in Adams's impartiality, the Aurora derided “the royal British faction's” miserable failure to convert the new president into their puppet or automaton. Adams “has a will and understanding of his own,” Bache's newspaper observed, and “he is by no means disposed to become the pupil of Mr. [Alexander] Hamilton.”12Bache and his contributors cautiously hoped that Adams would fill the role of James Harrington's prototypical “natural aristocrat,” and work to revive the “sleeping” republican virtue of the people. One among many writers in the Democratic-Republican press who voiced Jeffersonian approval of the conciliatory, pro-republican tone of Adams's inaugural address, “A Correspondent” declared, “[Adams] avows himself the friend of equal rights, the protector of our constitution, the friend of peace, and the enemy of party. And can acknowledgments and sentiments like these pass unapproved by any friend to his country and the principles of a free government?” “His Rotundity,” as Republicans earlier derisively called Adams, thus briefly emerged as an unlikely Republican hero.13Although scholars have much discussed Bache's role as a Republican supporter beginning in 1795, they have neglected his reluctance to engage in full-scale partisanship and the Aurora's brief conciliatory honeymoon with Adams after his election.14 Bache was not alone. Other Republicans, including Jefferson, directed their hostility against Washington and Hamilton, for Adams as vice president had played a relatively minor role in the administration. As historian Lance Banning wrote, they “saw cause to hope that anger over Hamilton's attempt to slip Thomas Pinckney into the presidency would combine with Adams's undeniable independence of mind to make his administration less subservient to Britain than Washington's had been.”15Adams and his family had long been regular readers of Bache's paper. As one might expect, John Adams's opinion of it depended on whether it agreed with him. At the outset, Adams was disturbed by Bache's occasional “ill tempered” denunciation of Washington's ostentatious levees, which made the General Advertiser “nearly as bad as Freneau's” paper, although he was relieved to be no longer the sole object of Republican calumny (“I have held the office of Libellee General long enough,” he drolly wrote Abigail). Applauding the Aurora's denunciation of the Democratic societies during the Whiskey Rebellion, he observed, “Bache's Paper tells Us it is The Spirit of the Times to Support the constituted Authorities against self created, usurping rival Pretensions.” When on the anniversary of the Franco-American alliance of 1778 a Philadelphia militia company proposed a toast to the “unwearied exertions” of Jay, whose Treaty's invidious terms were yet unknown, at the same time praising victorious French generals, Adams said, “I Admire the French Wit & Ingenuity of a Toast this Morning in Bache's paper.” In June 1795 John Quincy Adams's brother Charles alluded to “your friend Bache” when informing him of the Aurora's opposition to Jay's Treaty.16Although Bache was a Jeffersonian Republican, he was personally friendly with Vice-President Adams before 1797. The Bache and Adams families were on familiar terms rooted in the childhood friendship between John Quincy Adams and Benny in Paris. In 1792 young Bache offered the Adamses the rental of Grandfather Benjamin's house on Franklin Court, which Franklin had left to his son-in-law, Benny's father, Richard Bache, and Benny had temporarily occupied. Adams's son, Thomas Boylston Adams, a Philadelphia resident, reported Bache's offer to his mother: “His Father [Richard Bache] directed him to give you the first offer, and until he gets an answer, will not feel himself at liberty to look farther.”17 In July 1795, on the road from Philadelphia to Boston, Bache encountered the Adams family on their way to Quincy for summer vacation. He was selling copies of Jay's Treaty, which he had printed up a few days before, first publishing a detailed summary of its contents in the Aurora, one of the first newspaper “scoops.” They were unaware that Bache had obtained the Treaty and published it even before the State Department released its contents. “At Worcester, a very pretty town of Massachusetts, I overtook the Vice President & breakfasted with him & Mrs. [Abigail] Adams,” Bache playfully informed his wife. “He [Adams] asked me whether the treaty had leaked out in Philadelphia. I told him a little. He assured me the generality of the people would like it very well after a trial of a few months.”18 There was no animus in the encounter, despite the Aurora's occasional criticism of Adams.Bache was more than appreciative of Adams's political successes: he admired his political thought. In the summer of 1797 he published a lengthy essay historians have generally overlooked: Remarks Occasioned by the Late Conduct of Mr. Washington as President of the United States: MDCCXCVI. Although Bache composed the polemic during the summer of 1796, anticipating that Washington would run for a third term and hesitant about directly attacking him, he postponed its publication until a year later. In this pamphlet Bache expounded more clearly and in greater detail than elsewhere his views on presidential power, its potential for helping or hindering American republicanism and the American people, and Washington's purported misuse of it. Bache's biographers have generally ignored Remarks and credit him with adherence to “enlightenment egalitarianism” and a “radical ideology” derived from the ferment of “immediate, abstract, skeptical, and revolutionary Enlightenment” thought. They assume that Bache was primarily influenced by such radical thinkers as Thomas Paine, the marquis de Condorcet, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.19 Although Bache published and and with briefly in is in his that they influenced his political In fact, a of Remarks that Bache from Adams's political Remarks his and essay the of the Republican and the Bache Adams's for a bicameral and a although he did not him he proposed to these in a and, a about popular support for the Federalists and their and the Jay Treaty that the alliance the United States had made in 1778 with Bache that and to be added to the Bache agreed with Adams, whose political historians and as “the of the and in a of the of government against the In many his republican most in of Adams's with classical Republican as well as of Jeffersonian In Bache's work more may increase our understanding of the and of Republican as political emerged in the only to Bache, Remarks Occasioned by the Late Conduct of Mr. Washington as President of the United States: an a with for Bache a for the on June and he published it a few on July at the of on that Bache hoped the might a another Republican newspaper, Thomas Greenleaf's New York and the for and for at Greenleaf's or Occasioned by the Late conduct of Mr. as President of the United The work is from the & have no but it will excite the of Jefferson himself a of Bache's at at the time of his Adams did four that Bache most favorably in James Charles and John to the that a “natural of and should have a in government. and were also of They also that the for fame was a in the of and that the people, by an independent a of government to their against Bache to Adams's in Defence of the that a bicameral was a for the of the will than the Benjamin Franklin had Adams's Defence and made on it. In perhaps during his years or after the election of 1796, he and the of especially its third which discussed the of bicameral and at Bache's his on Adams's of the power and the of for man when in and to the he wrote, Adams's and criticizing a the people more than to a in of they too He also Adams's against a equal in should not be not be & should not be not only Adams, but in the and political He had from the of in November and was also a of the of his share in Franklin's Bache to a that held of the of Adams, and Remarks also cited the of and drew on and was for his to by his that knowledge is useful and for his him and the great classical republican James most famous was that and in the same Bache makes great of the power from as of that from and are of the of a The of this was Bache's on Washington for with his to make himself The of with which they their would and Washington's As of the first republican the American people would reject a of and especially when were their and the U.S. Bache will not its and one after and then up the [sic] as the dog to its He and to his of in opposition to Washington's “the of of and even of is on the of the American Bache more when he in office as an of although he him to a is a with means like a with the or or with the Adams was Bache's in the role for the Both that he should a Adams the indispensable role in the from the and of the in the so as to a chosen “the friend of the people, and the only which they or their can have against the and ambition of the and for his Adams that the people, contrary to their to with the in its with the especially when that was he that the was the between the of the in the house and the in the to Adams's of the Bache also its that a president political or of popular that the of won the Federalists Bache in like Washington or his whose to and and him the He that the had the office the of and and the other of by be had than a Bache from Adams, and in the new by the of a He praised he power which is both and for a means to the partisan, and that the young and its he would have Adams's of the Although for many Washington this of in Bache's he had joined with the to the public Adams's Washington's had to the people against the Bache concluded, a more directly was more to the this Bache's for republican closely to Adams's in Defence of the on and other Adams's on the and as a of for his views on the presidency and the between the the and the people. before Adams, Bache to in the of the debate in the United States over an of likewise to mind what the and their had of a certain in the office of as the not only of a but of he the American he in opposition to this an position that both his radical Republican and historians might Bache Adams's that a bicameral and a were more to the people than a he first out that the conduct of the U.S. which and to that would the and republican was to of Bache endorsed Adams's that a bicameral was than a to public In this he had chosen Adams's position over that of his and the who during the He considered Adams's on and government with He argued that the work of Mr. support to the that of term for on a and In a Bache that the of in office and term was British James Harrington's Bache to give it a is a with means like a in with the or or with the Adams's adherence to government with the Revolutionary of and to which Adams also with Bache In that a government should of it is by no means that it not to be a popular government one which is and of which the are in their
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