The new secretary of state rented a small house in Maiden Lane and went to work. His entire staff consisted of two chief clerks, two assistant clerks, and a translator. The new, three-branch federal government was already established and hard at work restructuring the nation.

Congress was no longer the dawdling, one-chamber body Jefferson knew before he left for France. There were dozens of senators and representatives to deal with, along with a host of leftover items that didn’t fit into the other three executive departments. Indian affairs, weights and measures, lighthouses, patents, internal improvements, and other odd matters came under Jefferson’s purview. Much of his first months in office was spent toiling over a report on weights and measures, which, had Congress adopted it, would have placed the United States on the metric system.

More long hours were spent pondering a policy for the Patent Office, which Jefferson’s inventive mind considered supremely important. Nor did he neglect the international aspects of his job. Among his first concerns was the re-establishment of communication with his friends in France. Jefferson wrote a significant letter to Lafayette, who was at the height of his power and prestige. “Behold me, my dear friend, dubbed Secretary of State instead of returning to the far more agreeable position which places me in the daily participation of your friendship. I have been here ten days harnessed in my new gear. Wherever I am, or ever shall be, I shall be sincere in my friendship to you and to your nation. I think, with others, that nations are to be governed according to their own interests: but I am convinced that it is their interest, in the long run, to be grateful, faithful to their engagements even in the worst of circumstances, and honorable and generous always. If I had not known that the head of our government was in these sentiments, and that his national and private ethics were the same, I would never have been where I am.”

Washington’s health was less “than it used to be,” he added, but if the president could be “preserved a few years till habits of authority and obedience can be established generally, we have nothing to fear.”

In the next few weeks, Jefferson slowly changed his opinion. In New York he discovered a strong group in society and the government that disliked the idea of democracy and feared the power of the people. Their hero was the thirty-five-year-old New Yorker whom Washington had made his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton.

Jefferson soon met the young man at a dinner Washington gave for his newly arrived secretary of state. By that time, Jefferson had also met the other cabinet members, including 300-pound Henry Knox. But it was Hamilton who dominated discussions at cabinet meetings. His bold eyes and jutting jaw exuded command and determination. Washington showed him a deference that Jefferson found a little surprising.

In comparison to this new leader, Jefferson seemed a poor second. His long, lanky frame, his habit of sitting sideways on one hip with one leg slung carelessly over his knee, his shyness in large gatherings all hindered a positive first impression. One crusty Pennsylvania senator complained about Jefferson’s “loose shackling air” and “laxity of manner,” which was not “the firm collected deportment” expected from a cabinet minister.

Even in the matter of fashion, Hamilton outshone Jefferson. Born in the West Indies, the illegitimate Hamilton was wretchedly poor as a boy. Now married to the daughter of the immensely wealthy Philip Schuyler, he compensated for those early years of deprivation with the finest and most expensive laces and ruffles of the day. Jefferson, on the other hand, felt peacock finery was out of place in a Republican government. He might preen in France because American prestige was at stake, but at home he wore old clothes that seemed, according to that same critical senator, “too small for him.”

Hamilton frankly regarded himself as Washington’s prime minister, responsible for setting government policy in all departments. He summed up his political credo in a quote from Demosthenes, which he wrote in his artillery company account book during the Revolutionary War: “As a general marches at the head of his troops, so ought wise politicians if I dare use the expression, march at the head of affairs.”

Lacking Jefferson’s legislative experience, Hamilton had no concept of a loyal opposition and had little interest in retaining the friendship of people who differed with him. Instead, his military frame of mind inclined him to dark, treacherous thoughts.

As representative from Virginia, James Madison opposed Hamilton’s financial program. In Madison’s opinion, it favored northerners and wealthy businessmen at the expense of the poor and the farmer. Nevertheless, Congress passed Hamilton’s plan, which included a variety of taxes to pay off the Revolutionary War debt and created a Bank of the United States to provide financial stability.

Washington was hesitant to sign the bill because James Madison questioned its constitutionality, so he asked Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Randolph to submit their opinions in writing. Hamilton’s opinion carried the day, and Washington signed the bill into law.

In this ideological clash, Hamilton slyly added a personal note. Jefferson’s opinion on the bank bill was, he said, “marked by ill humor and asperity toward me.” When Madison and his southern followers in Congress began calling for investigations of the treasury department, Hamilton again thought he saw Jefferson’s hostile hand.

No doubt Jefferson encouraged Madison, and through him, other southern congressmen to oppose Hamilton’s program. In his view, they were speaking for the majority of Americans. It requires an historical imagination to appreciate Jefferson’s position. Today, our mighty business-industrial complex is often hailed as a tribute to Alexander Hamilton’s vision, whose admirers tend to see him as the knowing realist and Jefferson as the doctrinaire theoretician, undermining America’s potential greatness with his quibbles.

But in 1791, there was no business-industrial complex. More than 90 percent of Americans were farmers. Jefferson’s opposition to transferring a huge amount of power to a comparatively tiny circle of wealthy and commercial-minded men flowed from the instinctive fear of radical change, especially when that change concentrated too much power in the hands of so few. In 1791, Hamilton was the theorist boldly staking out claims for an America that did not yet exist. Jefferson was the realist who knew from experience that the average farmer had his hands full fighting his annual battle with nature, who could not cope with high taxes to keep capital flowing. Already Hamilton’s levy on whisky had caused severe unrest in western Pennsylvania, where converting grain into spirits was the only way people could earn a little cash from their crops. Jefferson feared that farmers, staggering under such taxes, would mortgage their lands, then lose them, ending up little better than rebellious serfs paying rents to Hamilton’s financial barons.

Jefferson’s intellectual hostility toward Hamilton soon broadened into personal dislike. He became infuriated by Hamilton’s interference in the affairs of the state department. Adding insult to injury, the British, alarmed at Jefferson’s skill as secretary of state, hastily dispatched one of their best young diplomats - red-faced George Hammond, the personification of John Bull himself - to fill the post of ambassador after contemptuously leaving the post vacant since the treaty of peace. Hamilton immediately sought Hammond out and began talking foreign policy with him as if the United States did not have a secretary of state.

In the extensive notes he kept on cabinet meetings, Jefferson bitterly observed: “Whenever, at any of our consultations, anything was proposed as to Great Britain, Hamilton had constantly ready something which Mr. Hammond had communicated to him, which suited the subject and proved the intimacy of their communication; insomuch, that I believe he communicated to Hammond all our views and knew from him in return the views of the British Court.”

Historians searching British state papers have confirmed Jefferson’s suspicion. Hamilton was pro-British and for good reason: He believed that trade with England was vital to America’s economy. At the time, Jefferson could do nothing except battle Hamilton on every point. When fighting face-to-face across the cabinet table, Jefferson was at a severe disadvantage. He lacked Hamilton’s rapid-fire eloquence and ready logic, and he hated personal acrimony. He also lacked Hamilton’s powerful political organization.

At first glance, Hamilton and his friends seemed irresistible. He controlled the country’s most influential paper, The Gazette of the United States, and its editor, Massachusetts-born John Fenno, was fond of declaring his contempt for democracy. “Take away thrones and crowns from among men and there will soon be an end of dominion and justice,” he intoned. Hamilton did everything but set Fenno’s type for him, urging his numerous wealthy friends to subscribe to the paper, even paying the editor’s personal bills. The secretary of the treasury was rewarded with effusive praise, the kind court poets repaid royal patrons. To Fenno, Hamilton was “the highest jewel in Columbia’s crown.”

Even Jefferson’s old friend John Adams wrote for Fenno’s publication, severely criticizing those who would give too much power to the people. In Congress, senators and representatives by the dozens were getting wealthy speculating in the wake of Hamilton’s debt funding and bank bills, and their votes tended to reflect their profits. In the cabinet, Henry Knox, the secretary of war, was little more than a Hamiltonian echo. Attorney General Edmund Randolph seemed to waver toward Hamilton whenever he thought Washington was leaning in that direction. Jefferson eventually became so infuriated that he called Randolph “the poorest chameleon I have ever seen.”

Such harsh judgment was unfair to the attorney general. He was deeply devoted to Washington, who was trying to govern above party politics, and Randolph was merely following his chief’s idealistic leadership. Jefferson could see that anyone lacking Washington’s overwhelming prestige would find it hard to govern. Hamilton was forming a political party, and there was simply no alternative, short of defeat, but to play his same rough game.

Analyzing the vote against the bank bill in the House of Representatives, Jefferson noted the sectional quality of the division. It did not take a mathematician to determine that southern states alone could not make any headway against a Hamiltonian phalanx that included both New England and the middle states. With studied innocence, Jefferson, the man who repeatedly and passionately pronounced every day he spent away from his family and his beloved Monticello worse than a sojourn in purgatory, departed on an extensive tour of New York with James Madison. They piously proclaimed the trip to be a combination sightseeing and scientific expedition. An insect known as the Hessian fly was raging in the state, and the American Philosophical Society, of which Jefferson had recently been elected a vice president, was studying the pest. There were also “botanical objects” and historic military sights and scenes, such as Saratoga, Crown Point, and Ticonderoga.

The trip took one month and two days and covered 910 miles. The Virginians sailed up Lake George into Lake Champlain and returned to New York City via Vermont and Connecticut. Jefferson did, indeed, note numerous trees and plants foreign to his beloved Virginia. He wrote long letters home to Maria and Martha, praising the beauty of Lake George and other parts of the Empire State. But he and Madison also managed to spend more than a little time talking to some of New York’s most powerful politicians.

Another man Madison and Jefferson conferred with was Philip Freneau, Madison’s classmate at Princeton and a gifted poet and staunch friend of Republican principles. Jefferson offered Freneau a clerkship for foreign languages in his department, admitting that the annual salary, $250, was paltry and assuring him that the work was likewise. The money would at least keep the poet alive in Philadelphia until he could launch a newspaper that would compete with the Gazette of the United States. After much dickering, Freneau agreed, with one major stipulation: “In the conduct and title of the paper it will be altogether (my) own.”

Hamilton, of course, was watching Jefferson closely, and his resentment increased sharply when he realized that the Virginian was building an opposition party. By this time, the national capital had been moved to Philadelphia, and political tension grew steadily, thanks in large part to Philip Freneau.

For the first nine months of his paper’s life, Freneau played it cool, confining his criticism to indirect hints and articles by Madison and others that were more educational than political. But on April 2, 1791, he published a blast by Madison asking: “Who are the real friends of the Union?” Not public officials who encouraged financial speculation and tried to pervert the Constitution, Madison said. No, the Union’s true friends were those who supported Republican policies and resolutely opposed “a spirit of usurpation and monarchy.”

Throughout the spring of 1792, Freneau steadily escalated his criticism of Hamilton, until on July 4, he published a highly satiric set of rules for transforming the United States into a monarchy. They included:

Get rid of Constitutional shackles.

Persevere and indoctrinate the people with the notion of titles.

Interest legislators in speculation and speculators in legislation.

Establish a bank of enrichment of those who are to inherit the kingdom.

Arrogate all political power to the federal government under the slogan of “national welfare.”

Secure a rich manufacturing class by making laws in its interest.

There was no possibility of mistaking Freneau’s target, and Hamilton seethed with rage. Nothing was going well with him. His department was still under fire in Congress, with James Madison in command of the sharpshooters. Reports from distant sections of the country made it clear that the fall elections were running heavily against his followers, who were already being called Federalists for their devotion to a strong executive. It was easy enough to connect Freneau, Madison, and a certain tall, thin, third party who remained in the background, his politeness masking his hostility. Brooding over his woes, Hamilton decided that he sniffed a plot to destroy him, and he considered it synonymous to undermining the government.

True to his military instincts, Hamilton decided that the best defense was a good offense. If his mouthpiece Fenno could not answer Freneau, except to splutter expletives such as “crash brain” and “grumbletonian,” the secretary of the treasury would do the job himself - and he would not stop with annihilating the Republican mouthpiece. He would simultaneously confound and put down the man who was “continually machinating against the public happiness - Thomas Jefferson.”

Early in August 1792, Hamilton let loose heavy rhetorical artillery in the Gazette of the United States under the signature “An American.” He accused the secretary of state of hiring Freneau to publish a paper aimed at subverting the government and wrecking the Constitution. These charges were the opening round in an all-out newspaper war. Freneau and other Republicans, including Attorney General Edmund Randolph, replied to Hamilton behind pseudonyms such as “Aristides.” Hamilton blasted back under the signatures of “Catullus” and “Scourge.”

Before the verbal smoke cleared, Jefferson had been called “the most intriguing man in the United States,” “an intellectual voluptuary,” “the inspiring turbulent competitor,” “a man of profound ambition and violent passions, and “a revolutionary” wearing the mask of a modest, retiring philosopher.

While this acrimony filled the air in Philadelphia, Jefferson vacationed at Monticello, playing hobbyhorse with his granddaughter, Anne Cary Randolph, and enjoying the company of his two daughters and his son-in-law. Without so much as lifting a finger on his own behalf or writing a line, he was becoming the foremost leader of the anti-Federalist party.

George Washington was acutely distressed by this newspaper war. He sent letters to both Jefferson and Hamilton, asking for explanations. From both men he got lengthy, vehement defenses of their respective positions. Jefferson made it clear that his distance from the verbal fusillades did not make Hamilton’s accusations any easier to bear. He slashed back, wielding his pen like a rapier: “I have never inquired what number of sons, relatives and friends of Senators, Representatives, printers or other useful partisans Colonel Hamilton has provided for among the hundreds of clerks of his department, the thousand excise men (tax collectors) at his nod spread over the union. That Hamilton would make an affair of state out of this appointing a poet as translating clerk at a salary of $250 a year was simply astonishing. John Fenno was the official printer of the U.S. Senate and of the Bank of the United States, government contracts worth $2,500 a year.”

It was true, Jefferson admitted, that he had encouraged Freneau to publish a paper. But he could “safely declare” that his expectations from that paper looked only to “the chastisement of the aristocratic and monarchial writers and not to any criticisms on the proceedings of the government.” He was ready to swear an oath before heaven “that I never did by myself or any other, directly or indirectly, write, dictate or procure any one sentence or sentiment to be inserted in his or any other gazette to which my name was not affixed or that of my office.”

Jefferson contrasted his policy with Hamilton’s. There was no doubt of the identity of the gentleman who signed himself “An American.” “Is not the dignity and even the decency of the government committed when one of its principal ministers enlists himself as an anonymous writer?”

Summing up, Jefferson stated one of his deepest convictions: “No government ought to be without censure; and where the press is free, no one ever will. If virtuous, it need not fear the fair operations of attack and defense. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting out the truth.” The government, he said, should neither “know nor notice” its supporters or its censors because it would be “undignified and criminal to pamper the former and persecute the latter.”

As far as his personal reputation was concerned, Hamilton’s abuse was intolerable. It was precisely the sort of thing he had dreaded when he accepted Washington’s offer to become secretary of state. It confirmed his decision to retire at the end of Washington’s first term, which had only six months to run. He would make no attempt to reply to Hamilton’s attacks in the meantime. “A regard for your quiet,” he told the president, “will be a sufficient motive for my deferring it till I become merely a private citizen when the propriety or impropriety of what I may say or do may fall on myself alone.”

Washington soon changed Jefferson’s mind. The president pointed out that he agreed to serve a second term as president against his inclinations, because he was told the nation needed him. He called on Jefferson to show the same spirit. Other close friends of Jefferson – including James Madison and James Monroe - told him that if he bowed out of the government while Hamilton was on the attack, his reputation as a public man would be lost forever. Reluctantly, Jefferson agreed to stay. It was an historic decision. Within two months, news came from Europe that England and revolutionary France were at war.

Americans immediately took sides. Predictably, Hamilton’s friends favored the English, Jefferson’s followers the French. Philip Freneau, writing in his National Gazette, was near frenzied in his support of the French Revolution. He publicly gloried in the name “Jacobin,” the extremist party in the French National Assembly, and he wrote resounding poetry in praise of France. He savagely attacked the heavily Federalist U.S. Senate for permitting portraits of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette to remain on the walls of its chamber. A few months later, he began attacking President Washington himself for issuing a proclamation of neutrality.

Many people saw the proclamation as a victory for Hamilton. Actually, Jefferson completely agreed with the president’s stand. He knew that a war would wreck America’s fragile economy. But instead of giving away America’s neutrality, the shrewd diplomat intended to bargain with the English to force them to evacuate the forts in the Northwest Territory that they still held in violation of the peace treaty signed with America at the end of the Revolutionary War.

Behind the scenes, Jefferson fought and won a far more important battle with Hamilton. The treasury secretary wanted to snub the new French ambassador, Edmond Genet. Jefferson insisted that such treatment would be tantamount to a declaration of war with the new French Republic. After days of furious arguing, and another round of cabinet opinions submitted in writing, Washington agreed with Jefferson’s stance that the ambassador should be received without hesitation.

Unfortunately, Citizen Genet, as he called himself, turned out to be the worst possible ambassador France could have sent. He commissioned privateers to sail out of American ports to attack British commerce, recklessly involved himself in the political conflict between the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians, and generally acted like an imperial legate to a conquered colony. He even warned Jefferson, in writing, that the government better respond to the call of the people whose “fraternal voice has resounded from every quarter around me.” Jefferson had to submit this and similar letters to President Washington and the cabinet. Hamilton found it easy to convert them into anti-French ammunition.

Finally, Genet went too far. He brazenly said he was going to appeal to the people over Washington’s head. Hamilton opportunely leaked his words to the newspapers. From Boston to Charleston, a chorus of American indignation buried Genet and the few hapless Jeffersonians foolish enough to try to defend him. “Is the president a consecrated character, that an appeal from his decision must be considered criminal?” squawked Freneau, one of the diehards. The obvious answer, when the president was George Washington, was a resounding “yes.”

A more stubborn political leader might have tried to rally his followers in a desperate do-or-die stand behind Genet, but the day before the leak, Jefferson wrote a long, confidential letter to Madison recommending that the Republicans withdraw immediately from the disastrous ambassador. Genet was “absolutely incorrigible,” and there was no choice but “quitting a wreck which could not but sink all that would cling to it.” The party should “approve unequivocally of a state of neutrality to abandon Genet entirely, with expressions of strong friendship and adherence to his nation and confidence that he has acted against their sense.”

To this shrewd practical advice, Jefferson added one of his finest political aphorisms: “In this way we shall keep the people on our side by keeping ourselves in the right.”

Once more Hamilton and Jefferson clashed over Genet. Hamilton wanted him recalled in “peremptory terms” - harsh, insulting language that might cause the touchy French to declare war. Jefferson suggested that the president let him send Genet’s insulting letters to his superiors in Paris with “friendly observations.” If the French government had any sense at all, they would quietly recall Genet. George Washington agreed with this approach, allowing Jefferson to draw up one of the most skillful diplomatic papers in American history. He demolished Genet simply by quoting from the erratic ambassador’s own letters.

Instead of the “peremptory” tone demanded by Hamilton, Jefferson smoothly added, “We draw a veil over the sensations which these expressions excite. No words can render them; but they will not escape the sensibility of a friendly and magnanimous nation, who will do us justice. We see in them neither the portrait of ourselves, nor the pencil of our friends; but an attempt to embroil both; to add still another nation to the enemies of his country, and to draw on both a reproach, which it is hoped will never stain the history of either.”

Jefferson’s tactic worked. The French promptly recalled Genet, but he decided not to go, fearing that the punishment for his poor performance would be the loss of his head. Washington generously allowed him to stay in America. Jefferson, satisfied that American neutrality was safe, resigned as secretary of state and rode home to Monticello, leaving James Madison in charge of defending their political cause in Philadelphia.

Wearing of arguing and bickering with Hamilton and his followers, Jefferson vowed he was through with politics. He was soon to learn that the cause of freedom, to which he had committed himself and America in the Declaration of Independence, was still very much in need of his time and talents.