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The third Congress assembled at Philadelphia on the second of December. In the senate, many of the leading members of former sessions remained, having their places either by holding over or by re-election. Many of the old members of the house of representatives had also been re-chosen, and yet there were a great many changes in that body. The elements of party strife were active among them all, and it was evident to every man that a great struggle was impending. The aggressions of the British and the intrigues of Genet continued to inflame the zeal of the republicans, and they carried their partiality to France to a degree of absolute fanaticism. To many minds, open war between England and the United States appeared inevitable.

Washington's annual message, delivered at the opening of Congress, was calculated to still the turbulent waves of faction, had reason and judgment, and not passion and fanaticism, swayed the opinions of men. He expressed his sense of the continued confidence of the people in re-electing him to the high office of chief-magistrate of the nation; and then, in firm, explicit, and dignified terms, spoke of existing public affairs, especially the measures he had taken, in consequence of the war in Europe, to preserve peace at home and to protect the rights and interests of the United States. He pressed upon Congress the necessity of placing the country in a condition of complete defence, and of exacting from other governments the fulfilment of their duties toward his own.

“The United States ought not,” he said, “to indulge a persuasion that, contrary to the order of human events, they will for ever keep at a distance those painful appeals to arms with which the history of every other nation abounds. There is a rank due to the United States among nations which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it. If we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.” With such suggestions, he urged them to adopt measures for increasing the amount of arms and ammunition in the arsenals, and to improve the militia establishment. He assured them that every reasonable effort had been made to adjust the causes of dissention with the Indians north of the Ohio, and yet war with them continued. He alluded to the political connection of the United States with Europe, and promised to give them, in a subsequent communication, a statement of occurrences which related to it, that had passed under the knowledge of the executive.

The president urged the house of representatives to adopt measures for the “regular redemption and discharge of the public debt,” as a matter of the first importance; and announced the necessity of an augmentation of the public revenue to meet all proper demands upon the treasury. He concluded by saying, “Permit me to bring to your remembrance the magnitude of your task. Without an unprejudiced coolness, the welfare of the government may be hazarded; without harmony, as far as consists with freedom of sentiment, its dignity may be lost. But, as the legislative proceedings of the United States will never, I trust, be reproached for the want of temper or of candor, so shall not the public happiness languish for the want of my strenuous and warmest co-operation.”

On the fifth of December, according to promise, Washington laid before Congress the documents relating, not only to Genet and his mission, but to negotiations with England and other European governments. In his message accompanying these documents, after alluding to the general feeling of friendship for the United States exhibited by the representative and executive bodies of France, the president spoke as follows of the insolent Genet:—

“It is with extreme concern I have to inform you, that the proceedings of the person whom they have unfortunately appointed their minister plenipotentiary here have breathed nothing of the friendly spirit of the nation which sent him. Their tendency, on the contrary, has been to involve us in war abroad, and discord and anarchy at home. So far as his acts, or those of his agents, have threatened our immediate commitment in the war, or flagrant insult to the authority of the laws, their effect has been counteracted by the ordinary cognizance of the laws, and by an exertion of the powers confided to me. Where their danger was not imminent, they have been borne with from sentiments of regard to his nation, from a sense of their friendship toward us, from a conviction that they would not suffer us to long remain exposed to the action of a person who has so little respected our mutual dispositions, and from a reliance on the firmness of my fellow-citizens in their principles of peace and order.” He then alluded to the spoliations which had been committed upon the commerce of the United States by the cruisers of the belligerent powers, and the restrictions upon American commerce attempted to be enforced by the commanders of British vessels pursuant to instructions of their government. He also called attention to the inexecution of the treaty of 1783, and the relations of the United States and Spain.

“The message,” says Hildreth, “as originally drafted by Jefferson, contained a contrast between the conduct of France and England, especially in relation to commercial facilities, highly favorable to the former. This had been objected to by Hamilton, who considered the disposition of the people toward France a serious calamity, and that the executive ought not, by echoing her praises, to nourish that disposition. In his opinion, the balance of commercial favors was decidedly with the British; the commercial offers made by France were the offspring of the moment, growing out of circumstances that could not last. To evade Hamilton's objections, Jefferson consented to some modifications of the message. Hamilton then insisted that the papers relating to the non-execution of the treaty of peace, and to the stopping of the corn-ships, ought not to be communicated, unless in a secret message, as the matters therein discussed were still unsettled, and the tendency of the communication was to inflame the public mind against Great Britain. Jefferson was a good deal alarmed at this threatened suppression of his diplomatic labors; but Washington decided that all the papers should be communicated without any restrictions of secrecy, even those respecting the corn-ships, which all the cabinet except Jefferson had advised to withhold.”

In a letter to his wife, written on the nineteenth of December, John Adams, referring to the sentence in Washington's special message in relation to the French minister, said, “The president has considered the conduct of Genet very nearly in the same light with Columbus, and has given him a bolt of thunder. We shall see how this is supported by both houses. We shall soon see whether we have any government or not in this country.” Doubting whether Washington would be sustained by Congress, Adams continued: “But, although he stands at present as high in the admiration and confidence of the people as ever he did, I expect he will find many bitter and desperate enemies arise in consequence of his just judgment against Genet.”

In this, Adams was mistaken. The house, where the opposition was most rampant, determined, and unscrupulous, responded most affectionately to the president's message, and tacitly rebuked the demagogues for their personal abuse of Washington. They expressed their satisfaction at his re-election, and their confidence in the purity and patriotism of his motives, in all his acts, especially in again consenting, at the call of his country, to fill the presidential chair. “It is to virtues which have commanded long and universal reverence, and services from which have flowed great and lasting benefits, that the tribute of praise may be paid, without the reproach of flattery; and it is from the same sources that the fairest anticipations may be derived in favor of the public happiness.”

Both houses, likewise, in the face of the popular excitement in favor of France, approved of the president's course in regard to that country and its representative; and while the lower house was guarded in its terms of approval of the proclamation of neutrality that had been so loudly condemned by the partisan press, the senate pronounced it “a measure well-timed and wise, manifesting a watchful solicitude for the welfare of the nation and calculated to promote it.”

Jefferson's official connection with Washington was now drawing to a close. He had consented to remain in the cabinet until the end of the current year. With the completion and submission of some able state papers he finished his career as secretary of state. One of them was an elaborate report called for by a resolution of Congress adopted in February, 1791, on the state of trade of the United States with different countries; the nature and extent of exports and imports, and the amount of tonnage of American shipping. It also specified the various restrictions and prohibitions by which American commerce was embarrassed and greatly injured, and recommended the adoption of discriminating duties, as against Great Britain, to compel her to put the United States on a more equal footing, she having thus far persistently declined to enter into any treaty stipulations on the subject.

Jefferson's last official act was the administration of a deserved rebuke to Genet. That meddling functionary had sent to him translations of the instructions given him by the executive council of France, desiring the president to lay them officially before both houses of Congress, and proposing to transmit, from time to time, other papers to be laid before them in like manner. “I have it in charge to observe,” said Jefferson to Genet in a letter on the thirty-first of December, “that your functions as the minister of a foreign nation here are confined to the transactions of the affairs of your nation with the executive of the United States; that the communications which are to pass between the executive and legislative branches can not be a subject for your interference; and that the president must be left to judge for himself what matters his duty, or the public good, may require him to propose to the deliberations of Congress. I have, therefore, the honor of returning you the copies sent for distribution, and of being, with great respect, sir, your most obedient and most humble servant.” Even this did not keep Genet quiet.

Throughout all the storm that had agitated his cabinet, and the hostility of Jefferson and his party to the measures of the administration, Washington never withheld from the secretary of state his confidence in his wisdom and patriotism; and the latter left office with the happy consciousness that he carried with him into retirement the friendship of one, of whom he said in after years, “His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known; no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was indeed, in every sense of the word, a wise, and good, and great man"[62]

On the last day of the year, Mr. Jefferson offered his resignation in the following letter to the president: “Having had the honor of communicating to you, in my letter of the last of July, my purpose of retiring from the office of secretary of state at the end of the month of September, you were pleased, for particular reasons, to wish its postponement to the close of the year. That time being now arrived, and my propensities to retirement daily more and more irresistible, I now take the liberty of resigning the office into your hands. Be pleased to accept with it my sincere thanks for all the indulgences which you have been so good as to exercise toward me in the discharge of its duties. Conscious that my need of them have been great, I have still ever found them greater, without any other claim on my part than a firm pursuit of what has appeared to me to be right, and a thorough disdain of all means which were not as open and honorable as their object was pure. I carry into my retirement a lively sense of your goodness, and shall continue gratefully to remember it.“With very sincere prayers for your life, health, and tranquillity, I pray you to accept the homage of great and constant respect and attachment.”

To this Washington replied the next day as follows: “I yesterday received, with sincere regret, your resignation of the office of secretary of state. Since it has been impossible to prevail upon you to forego any longer the indulgence of your desire for private life, the event, however anxious I am to avert it, must be submitted to.

“But I can not suffer you to leave your station without assuring you that the opinion which I had formed of your integrity and talents, and which dictated your original nomination, has been confirmed by the fullest experience, and that both have been eminently displayed in the discharge of your duty.

“Let a conviction of my most earnest prayers for your happiness accompany you in your retirement; and while I accept, with the warmest thanks, your solicitude for my welfare, I beg you to believe that I always am, dear sir, &c.”

Edmund Randolph, the attorney-general, took Jefferson's place in the cabinet, and his own was filled by William Bradford, of Pennsylvania. Mr. Jefferson left the seat of government as soon as possible after withdrawing from public life; and a fortnight after his resignation he arrived at Monticello, his beautiful home in the interior of Virginia, in full view of the Blue Ridge along a continuous line of almost sixty miles. He was then fifty years of age. His whole family, with all his servants, were at his home to receive him; and so delightful was this, his first experience of private life for many long years, that he resolved to abandon himself to it entirely.

He boasted, almost a month after he left Philadelphia, that he had not seen a newspaper since his flight from the cares of government, and he declared that he thought of never taking one again. “I think it is Montaigne,” he wrote to Edmund Randolph on the third of February, “who has said that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head. I am sure it is true, as to anything political, and shall endeavor to estrange myself to everything of that character.” But his hatred of Hamilton, and his persistence in regarding the political friends of that gentleman as necessarily corrupt, would not allow party feud to sleep in his mind, and he added, in the next sentence, “I indulge myself on one political topic only; that is, in declaring to my countrymen the shameless corruption of a portion of the representatives to the first and second Congress, and their implicit devotion to the treasury.”

Meanwhile, the report of Jefferson on commercial affairs was eliciting warm debates in Congress. In that report he had suggested two methods for modifying or removing commercial restrictions: first, by amicable arrangements with foreign powers; and, secondly, by counteracting acts of the legislature. With the design, as we have seen, of distressing France by cutting off her supplies, two orders in council were issued by the British government, one in June and the other in November, which bore heavily upon the commercial prosperity of the United States. By the first order, British cruisers were instructed to stop all ships laden with corn, flour, or meal (corn-ships already alluded to), bound to any French port, and send them to any convenient port, home or continental, where the cargoes might be purchased in behalf of the British government. By the second, British ships-of-war and privateers were required to detain all vessels laden with goods produced in any colony belonging to France, or with provisions for any such colony, and bring them to adjudication before British courts of admiralty. These were such flagrant outrages upon the rights of neutrals, that the United States government strongly remonstrated against them as unjust in principle and injurious in their practical effects. It was to these orders in council and their effects that the president pointed in his annual message, when urging the necessity of placing the country in a state of defense, and in a position to assert its just rights.[63]

Mr. Jefferson's report gave rise to a series of resolutions offered, by Mr. Madison on the third of January, 1794, the leading idea of which was that of opposing commercial resistance to commercial injury, and to enforce a perfect equality by retaliating impositions on the assumption that the commercial system of Great Britain was hostile to that of the United States. This scheme embodied the idea of a proposition made by Madison in the first Congress. His resolutions now took wider range, however, than did his proposition then. It was now proposed to impose restrictions and additional duties on the manufactures and navigation of nations which had no commercial treaties with the United States, and a reduction of duties on the tonnage of vessels belonging to nations with which such treaties existed.