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real independence, the support of your tranquility at home; your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very libertywhich you so highly prize.” It must be guarded with “jealous anxiety” to shatter “any attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.” Washington admitted that the South, the North, the East, and the West might have special interests or strengths. But they must be first of all American “by an indissoluble community of interest as one nation.” 4
    None of the other large topics Washington touched on came close to inspiring the emotional intensity he poured into the passages exhorting Americans to preserve this bedrock foundation of his hopes for America—and his vision of a nation united by “fraternal affection.”
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    Two years after Washington left the presidency, Thomas Jefferson challenged this principle of the primacy of the Union. President John Adams and the Federalist Party majority in Congress, enraged by the abuse Adams was receiving from the Jeffersonian press for his refusal to alter the policy of neutrality in the ongoing war between Great Britain and France, passed two laws that have become known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. One gave the federal government the power to deport any alien whom it deemed dangerous to the security of the republic. The second empowered the government to prosecute anyone who libeled the president and other officers of the government.
    Federalist-appointed judges soon had several Jeffersonian newspaper editors on trial. None of them could prove the insults and wild accusations they had flung at the president. The idea that a newspaper was supposed to tell the truth would not be accepted by most editors and reporters for another hundred years. The newspaper remained the “political engine” that President Adams had said it was twenty-five years earlier, on the eve of the Revolution.
    Jeffersonian-Republican outrage soon produced an excess to counter this Federalist assault on a free press. Jefferson persuaded James Madison to join him in writing letters to the legislatures of Virginia and the new state ofKentucky, urging them to protest this federal edict. Madison was temperate in his appeal. Jefferson was extreme. He assured the Kentucky legislature that a state could “nullify” any act of Congress, whenever it felt the law impinged on the rights or interests of its citizens.
    Washington was so appalled, he appealed to Patrick Henry to emerge from retirement and persuade Virginia to disavow her allegiance to this ruinous doctrine. Henry died before he could respond to the summons. While Washington sought another spokesman, the grim reaper began stalking him too. 5
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    In 1786, the Marquis de Lafayette had informed Washington that he had bought a plantation in the French South American colony of Cayenne (later French Guiana), where he planned to free a group of slaves and educate them to demonstrate to the world that blacks could live and work independently. He hoped Washington would join him in this enterprise. The older man wrote his adopted son a letter, praising “the benevolence of your heart,” and warmly approved the experiment. But he did not accept Lafayette’s invitation to become his partner. Instead, Washington sadly wished that “a like spirit would diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country but I despair of seeing it.” 6
    The cascade of violence and passion that the French Revolution unleashed in France soon claimed Lafayette as one of its victims. Parisian radicals—the infamous Jacobins—seized power and made him a candidate for the guillotine. The Marquis’s property was confiscated and his plantation