The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers by Thomas Fleming Page A

would absorb them for the next year. Should he accept a second term? The answer, they jointly decided, was an emphatic NO. The president asked James Madison to help him write a farewell address to the American people.
    XII
    The Washingtons were soon forced to change their minds. Frantic letters from Hamilton, Jefferson, and numerous other politicians warned the president that the country would come apart if he did not serve for another four years. Once more, Washington bowed to necessity. He knew Martha was deeply disappointed, but he also knew that she would remain at his side as his loyal partner. By this time they had settled into a comfortable mansion on Market Street in Philadelphia and were enjoying the numerous amenities of this sophisticated city. Close friends such as merchant Robert Morris added to their pleasures. But politics soon soured their lives in a tumultuous new way.
    The second term had scarcely begun when news arrived from Paris that King Louis XVI, the monarch who had supported America’s revolution, had been guillotined, along with his Austrian-born queen, Marie Antoinette. Within weeks came word that England had joined a coalition of European nations that were determined to crush France’s revolution. At first the Marquis de Lafayette, a man for whom Washington had deep, almost paternal affection, had been among the leaders. But the marquis had been forced to flee and was now in an Austrian prison. Radicals known as Jacobins had seized control of France and had launched a reignof terror that sent thousands of people to grisly deaths beneath the guillotine’s relentless blade.
    Theoretically, the treaty America had signed with France in 1778 obligated the United States to join the war on her side. But Washington decided that the murder of Louis XVI, the man who had signed the treaty, meant France was now a different country. He also knew that the United States could not fight a war without wrecking its fragile economy, which depended heavily on trade with Britain. A grim President Washington issued a Proclamation of Neutrality—and immediately became violently unpopular among the thousands of Americans who saw the French Revolution as a sacred cause in the ongoing struggle for worldwide liberty.
    These angry voters soon turned Washington’s second term into a nightmare. More than once, thousands of people jammed Market Street in front of the president’s house, shouting insults and waving pro-French slogans and banners. Newspapers castigated the president as a pro-English lackey who was betraying the American Revolution. At a public dinner in Virginia, journalist James Thomson Callender proposed a toast to “a speedy death to General Washington.” 17 Tom Paine published an open letter to the president in which he raged, “the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an imposter; whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any.” 18 Martha soon acquired an intense dislike for Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who was the leader of this new Republican party.
    At one point Washington exploded into a gigantic rage at a particularly obnoxious newspaper story written by Benjamin Franklin Bache, Ben’s fanatically pro-French grandson. In a rant that left no doubt he was Mary Ball Washington’s son, the president pounded his desk and shouted that he was sick of being treated like a “common pickpocket.” He swore he would rather be in his grave than put up with another day of this thankless job. For a half hour, he sat at his desk drained and dazed before he regained his equilibrium.
    The public never saw—or heard about—this explosion. Nor did Martha. It was witnessed by only a few anxious secretaries. The public saw only the serene, dignified leader, who never showed the slightest evidence that he took seriously the abuse that was showered on him. One day, Washington was sitting for a portrait by Gilbert Stuart. Martha wasnearby on a sofa,