Such was Washington's greeting from a great body of his fellow citizens when he resumed his private station among them after almost twenty years of labor for them in both war and peace. Here rational imagination must supply what record does not reveal. What must Marshall have thought? Was this the fruit of such sacrifice for the people's welfare as no other man in America and few in any land throughout all history had ever made—this rebuke of Washington—Washington, who had been the soul as well as the sword of the Revolution; Washington, who alone had saved the land from anarchy; Washington, whose level sense, far-seeing vision, and mighty character had so guided the newborn Government that the American people had taken their place as a separate and independent Nation? Could any but this question have been asked by Marshall?
He was not the only man to whom such reflections came. Patrick Henry thus expressed his feelings: "I see with concern our old commander-in-chief most abusively treated—nor are his long and great services remembered.... If he, whose character as our leader during the whole war, was above all praise, is so roughly handled in his old age, what may be expected by men of the common standard of character?"[454]
And Jefferson! Had he not become the voice of the majority?
Great as he was, restrained as he had arduously schooled himself to be, Washington personally resented the brutal assaults upon his character with something of the fury of his unbridled youth: "I had no conception that parties would or even could go to the length I have been witness to; nor did I believe, until lately, that it was within the bounds of probability—hardly within those of possibility—that ... every act of my administration would be tortured and the grossest and most insidious misrepresentations of them be made ... and that too in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero—a notorious defaulter—or even to a common pickpocket."[455]
Here, then, once more, we clearly trace the development of that antipathy between Marshall and Jefferson, the seeds of which were sown in those desolating years from 1776 to 1780, and in the not less trying period from the close of the Revolution to the end of Washington's Administration. Thus does circumstance mould opinion and career far more than abstract thinking; and emotion quite as much as reason shape systems of government. The personal feud between Marshall and Jefferson, growing through the years and nourished by events, gave force and speed to their progress along highways which, starting at the same point, gradually diverged and finally ran in opposite directions.
FOOTNOTES:
[351] When Jefferson resigned, Randolph succeeded him as Secretary of State, and continued in that office until driven out of public life by the famous Fauchet disclosure. William Bradford of Pennsylvania succeeded Randolph as Attorney-General.
[352] Washington to Marshall, Aug. 26, 1795; Washington MSS., Lib. Cong.
[353] Act of 1789, Annals, 1st Cong., 1st Sess., Appendix, 2238.
[354] For Randolph's pathetic account of his struggles to subsist as Attorney-General, see Conway, chap. xv.