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Washington made this comment in response to public outcry against the Jay’s Treaty of 1795, which settled issues between America and Britain that had been unresolved since the War of Independence.

Like Washington, he saw Jay’s Treaty as a shrewd if bittersweet bargain designed to postpone war with England for perhaps a generation.

But then Hamilton had been guilty of similar indiscretions with pro-English advocates during the Jay’s Treaty negotiations.

Although some semblance of the routinized mechanisms for political parties had begun to congeal during the debate over Jay's Treaty, nothing remotely resembling the organized campaign structure of modern political parties yet existed.

Within the revolutionary generation, several competing examples of fortuitous cooperation and collaboration had helped to make history happen: Washington and Hamilton during the war, and then again during Washington’s second term; Hamilton and Madison on The Federalist Papers; Madison and Jefferson in orchestrating the Republican opposition to Hamilton’s financial program and then Jay’s Treaty.