But Washington did not abandon his sound position as a neutral between the two.

He requested Jefferson and Edmund Randolph to draw up objections to some of Hamilton's schemes, so that he had in writing the arguments of very strong opponents.
Meanwhile the French Revolution had broken all bounds, and Jefferson, as the sponsor of the French over here, was kept busy in explaining and defending the Gallic horrors.

The Americans were in a large sense law-abiding, but in another sense they were lawless.

Nevertheless, they heard with horror of the atrocities of the French Revolutionists--of the drownings, of the guillotining, of the imprisonment and execution of the King and Queen--and they had a healthy distrust of the Jacobin Party, which boasted that these things were natural accompaniments of Liberty with which they planned to conquer the world.

Events in France inevitably drove that country into war with England.