“Your conduct has been represented as derogating,” Washington wrote on July 6, 1796, his patience depleted. Jefferson, or at the very least his cohorts, had made him out to be Hamilton’s puppet, “a person under a dangerous influence.”5 He sent his last letter to Jefferson the next month; it was an obligatory note, no more than five sentences long, appended to some papers he’d promised to forward.6 They never spoke again.
