THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1798
Today, Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, enforcer of John Adams’ Sedition Act, writes,
Bache the printer is dead and his principal clerk, an able man, is also finished, as, I am informed, is much of the matter his mischievous paper contained.627
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1798
Today, only four days after the death of his nemesis, Benny Bache, and only ten days after the death of his beloved wife, Polly, publisher John Fenno of the Gazette of the United States dies of the malignant yellow fever.628 John Fenno’s twenty-year-old son, John (“Jack”) Ward Fenno, will succeed to his father’s post as publisher of the Gazette of the United States.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1798
Tonight, in the Porcupine’s Gazette, William Cobbett writes,
“AN ELEGY ON BACHE” cannot appear in my paper. A Briton scorns to mangle the carcass which he himself has slain, and much more, one that has been slain by the ALMIGHTY.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1798
Today, George Washington writes U.S. Secretary of War James McHenry:
I have lately received information … that the brawlers against Governmental measures … have, all of a sudden become silent; and, it is added, are very desirous of obtaining Commissions in the Army, about to be raised … [A]s there will be characters enough of an opposite description, who are ready to receive appointments, circumspection is necessary; for my opinion is of the first that you could as soon scrub the blackamore [Negro] white as to change the principles of a profest Democrat and that he will leave nothing unattempted to overturn the Government of this Country.629
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1798
Today, Vice President Thomas Jefferson writes U.S. Senator Stevens Thomson Mason (Republican, Virginia),
[The Alien and Sedition Acts are] merely an experiment on the American mind to see how far it will bear an avowed violation of the constitution. If this goes down, we shall immediately see attempted another act of Congress, declaring that the President shall continue in office during life, reserving to another occasion the transfer of the succession to his heirs, and the establishment of the Senate for life.630
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1798
Tonight, in the Gazette of the United States, twenty-year-old Jack Fenno writes:
Notwithstanding a few local triumphs of the French faction, their cause may with truth be pronounced in the wane. The star of jacobinism must soon cease to shed its malign influence; for shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it.
Benjamin [Bache] … in his Aurora … became of course one of the most malicious Libellers of me. But the Yellow Fever arrested him in his detestable Career and sent him to his grandfather from whom he inherited a dirty, envious, jealous, and revengefull Spight against me for no other cause under heaven than because I was too honest a Man to favour or connive at his selfish schemes of ambition and Avarice.
JOHN ADAMS,
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1797–1801.631
Gen. George Washington (1776) by Charles Willson Peale (oil painting).632
Dr. Benjamin Franklin (1790) by Benjamin Franklin Bache (notebook sketch).633