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 Paine and Condorcet's writings and corresponded with Paine briefly in 1795–96, there is little direct evidence in his writing that they influenced his political concepts.20 In fact, a careful examination of Remarks shows that Bache borrowed considerably from Adams's political writings.Bache's Remarks demonstrated his eclectic and wide-ranging ideas. His essay merged the idioms of the Aristotelian Classical Republican and the egalitarian democrat. Bache adopted Adams's preference for a bicameral legislature and a strong executive, although he did not follow him slavishly: he proposed to modify these institutions in a democratic and, espousing a plural executive, anomalous direction. Also, worried about popular support for the Federalists and their aristocratic pretensions and the Jay Treaty that violated the alliance the United States had made in 1778 with France, Bache believed that checks and balances needed to be added to the people's direct voice. Here, too, Bache agreed with Adams, whose political theory historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick characterized as “the dogma of balance.” “To control the passions and encourage virtue” in a nation required “balancing each of the powers of government against the others.”21 In many ways his republican ideology, most thoroughly elucidated in Remarks, combined elements of Adams's thought with classical Republican ideas as well as strains of Jeffersonian Republicanism. In examining Bache's work more closely, we may increase our understanding of the nuances and ambiguities of Republican (and republican) ideology as political parties emerged in the 1790s.22The only substantive book attributed to Bache, Remarks Occasioned by the Late Conduct of Mr. Washington as President of the United States: MDCCXCVI, an eighty-five-page tract, combined a moderately anti-Washington philippic with proposals for institutional reform. Bache received a copyright for the book on June 23, 1797, and he published it a few weeks later, on July 7, at the low price of thirty-one cents on “coarse paper; 37 cents, vellum paper,” suggesting that Bache hoped the laboring classes might purchase it.23 Around a month later, another Republican newspaper, Thomas Greenleaf's New York Journal and Patriotic Register, advertised the book for sale: “Just Received From Philadelphia, and for sale at Greenleaf's Book Store, Price 2s/6 coarse, or 3s fine. REMARKS Occasioned by the Late conduct of Mr. WASHINGTON as President of the United states. The work is just from the press, & we have no doubt but it will excite the curiosity of [every] citizen.”24 Jefferson himself owned a copy of Bache's Remarks; at least at the time of his death Adams did not.25The four theorists that Bache cites most favorably in Remarks—Francis Bacon, James Harrington, Baron Charles Montesquieu, and John Adams—adhered to the viewpoint that a “natural aristocracy” of property, virtue, and ability should have a powerful voice in government. (Harrington and Montesquieu were also particular favorites of Adams.) They also believed that the passion for fame was a crucial consideration in the responsible exercise of leadership, and that the people, assisted by an impartial, independent executive, needed a separate branch of government to represent their interests against potentially refractory elites. Bache explicitly subscribed to Adams's view, propounded in Defence of the Constitutions, that a bicameral legislature was a better medium for the expression of the people's will than the unicameral system Benjamin Franklin favored.26Bache had read Adams's Defence carefully and made copious notes on it. In undated memoranda, perhaps written during his college years or after the election of 1796, he outlined and indexed the main themes of Defence, especially its third volume's “Marchamont Nedham” chapters, which discussed the comparative merits of bicameral and unicameral legislatures at length. Among Bache's notes, several reveal his concentration on Adams's view of the executive power and the pitfalls of direct democracy, for example: “No man safe when gov. in People alone (221),” and “independent executive to hold the balance (240).”Again, he wrote, summarizing Adams's ideas and quoting several passages without criticizing him: “limited monarchy a republic (22). ‘If the people wish more than to introduce a democratical branch in monarchies of Europe, they wish too much.’” He also abstracted Adams's injunctions against a hereditary presidency: “Because property equal executive in America should not be hereditary—Could not be & therefore should not be attempted (71).”27Bache not only read Adams, but widely in the classical, Renaissance, and Enlightenment political theory. He had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in November 1787 and was also a member of the Library Company of Philadelphia, having inherited his grandfather's share in Franklin's will. Bache thereby gained access to a collection that held numerous editions of the works of Bacon, Harrington, Adams, and Montesquieu. Remarks also cited the works of Scipio, Plutarch, and Voltaire.28Bache drew heavily on Bacon and Harrington. Bacon was known for his devotion to empiricism, epitomized by his comment that “true knowledge is useful knowledge,” and for his witty essays. Mentioning him and the great classical republican James Harrington (whose most famous aphorism was that “power naturally and necessarily follows property”) in the same footnote, Bache observes, “Lord Bacon makes great account of the power arising from knowledge, as Harrington does of that arising from property; and numbers are of the essence of a democracy.” The context of this statement was Bache's attack on Washington for allegedly surreptitiously plotting with his councilors to make himself king. The “cloud” of deceit with which they obscured their devious acts would eventually burst and expose Washington's “counterfeit character.” As founders of the world's first republican government, the American people would reject a revival of “monarchy and hereditary aristocracy,” especially when Europeans were overthrowing their rulers and emulating the U.S. example. Bache angrily insisted, “It [the U.S.] will not see Europe abrogating its monarchies and aristocracies, one after another, and then lap up the offals [sic] as the dog turns to its vomit” (3–4). He summoned Bacon and Harrington to delineate his concept of democracy in opposition to Washington's monarchical ambitions; since “the weight of property, of numbers, and even of knowledge, is on the side of the American democracy” (4). Bache mentions Harrington more specifically (and pedantically) when he emphasizes rotation in office as an inherent aspect of representative democracy, although he relegates him to a footnote: “Rotatory is a favorite word with Harrington. It means moving round like a wheel. It corresponds with the word circulatory or circulating; or with the word renewable” (39n).John Adams was Bache's guide in determining the proper role for the executive. Both men thought that he should typify a patriot president. Adams emphasized the chief executive's indispensable role in protecting the poor from the “avarice and ambition” of the rich in the legislative upper house, going so far as to dub a popularly chosen executive “the natural friend of the people, and the only defence which they or their representatives can have against the avarice and ambition of the rich and distinguished citizens.” Unconventionally for his time, Adams lamented that the people, contrary to their self-interest, tended to side with the legislature in its conflicts with the executive, especially when that body was unicameral. Nevertheless, he insisted that the executive was intrinsically the “independent mediator” between the representatives of the rich in the upper house and the poor in the lower.29While adhering to Adams's view of the executive power's importance, Bache also perceived its darker side, warning that a president lacking political uprightness—“virtue”—would manipulate or override constitutional protections of popular rights. Charging that the “mask” of “Washingtonian credit” won the Federalists victory, Bache deprecated inordinate “confidence in individuals” like Washington or his cabinet, whose propensity to “intrigue and corrupt” and invidiously influence him undermined the presidency's integrity. He feared that the Founders had unduly strengthened the executive office without sufficiently contemplating the danger of tyranny, and “whether vigor, secrecy, celerity, and the other fine things talked of by monarchists cannot be had otherwise than through a monocratic president.” Bache differed from Adams, and almost everyone else in the new republic, by touting the idea of a plural presidency. He ingenuously praised France's Directory, which, he claimed, exemplified “a chief executive power which is both representative and composite” (34, 36, 38–39).Bache groped for a means to assuage the partisan, social, and sectional conflicts that plagued the young republic and threatened its survival. Undoubtedly, he would have welcomed Adams's paradigmatic nonpartisan, stalwart “patriot president,” capable of uniting the country. Although for many Washington embodied this type of leader, in Bache's view he had joined with the aristocratic Senate to defeat the public interest. Confuting Adams's writings, Washington's single executive had failed to protect the people against the upper classes. Therefore, Bache concluded, a more numerous, directly elected executive body was more likely to safeguard the people's liberties. With this exception, Bache's prescription for republican renewal adhered closely to Adams's recommendations in Defence of the Constitutions, Discourses on Davila, and other writings.Bache utilized Adams's ideas on the legislative and executive branches as a point of departure for elaborating his views on the presidency and the relationship between the executive, the legislature, and the people. Immediately before citing Adams, Bache referred to Montesquieu in the context of discussing the debate in the United States over an upper house. “The name of Senate likewise brought to mind what the ancients, and their follower Montesquieu had said of a certain permanency in the office of Senator as favouring the preservation not only of a constitution but of manners,” he wrote. “The effect upon the American federal Senate,” he continued, “is in direct opposition to this theory” (39).Espousing an ideological position that both his radical Republican comrades and present-day historians might consider anomalous, Bache upheld Adams's view that a bicameral legislature and a veto-wielding executive were more likely to protect the people than a one-house legislature. First, he first pointed out that the conduct of the U.S. Senate, which represented special interests and (he believed) preferred monarchy to republicanism, refuted Montesquieu's alleged guarantee that long-termed “senates” would preserve the “constitution” and republican “manners.” (Montesquieu was probably referring to Britain's hereditary House of Lords.) Nonetheless, Bache endorsed Adams's “theoretical” contention that a bicameral legislature was better equipped than a unicameral body to protect public liberty. In this instance, he had chosen Adams's position over that of his grandfather and the radical, unicameral Constitutionalists who controlled Pennsylvania politics during the 1780s. He considered Adams's theories on “mixed” and balanced government compatible with democracy. He specifically argued that the “interesting [i.e., important] work of Mr. (John) Adams” lent “theoretical” support to the idea that governments consisting of several “branches”—his term for legislative powers—might rest on a “popular,” “representative,” “plural and rotatory basis” (39). In a footnote, Bache observed that the idea of rotation in office and term limits was British Commonwealthman James Harrington's “favorite” concept. Bache attempted to give it a mechanistic, Newtonian turn: “Rotatory is a favorite word with Harrington: It means moving round like a wheel. It corresponds in sense with the word circulatory or circulating or with the word renewable” (39n).30Reconciling Adams's adherence to balanced government with the Revolutionary ideology of representative democracy and direct elections, to which Adams also subscribed, albeit with qualifications, Bache asserted: In proving that a government should consist of several branches, it is by no means proved that it ought not to be popular; (by a popular government meaning one which is representative, and of which the parts are in their c