Our View: Political attacks are nothing new

The attacks Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and their respective (if not respectful) followers trow upon one another is enough to make a citizen fear for the Republic.

But in reality, these barrages are nothing new.

Time has a way of healing the wounds of personal destruction and so we are left believing that our founders were not only political geniuses but also politically genial.

But that’s just not the way it was.

Treacherous in private friendship and a hypocrite in public life were Thomas Paine’s assertions in a Letter to the Editor about our first president, George Washington.

Alexander Hamilton, whose fame is surging anew thanks to a Broadway musical, was the nation’s first federalist and his followers naturally butted heads with Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans, a tradition that is continuing today.

The Federalists, like today’s Democrats, favored a nation with a centralized government while the Republicans, as they still do, wanted political power reserved for the states. Fueling the temper of all persuasions, as is true today, was the media (in those days that meant the press).

Jefferson’s good friend James Madison wrote that Hamilton’s essays were penned for “foreigners and degenerate citizens among us.” His wife Dolly Madison was less kind, naming her feral tomcat “Hamilton” in a wink to his now legendary promiscuity.

History teaches us that Washington wanted a unified government rather than a two-party system but by the end of his second term he was encouraging a Federalist succession to his leadership.

This led Jefferson to write that our country’s first president was “senile.” Benjamin Franklin Bache (Poor Richard’s grandson) went so far as to call Washington “traitor,” asserting he had collaborated with the British in the Revolutionary War.

Soon after, Paine wrote in an open letter a prayer for Washington’s imminent death.

When Ambassador to France (later President) James Monroe told Parisians they could ignore Washington’s peace-making efforts with the British because he was not the United States’ legitimate leader, Washington immediately fired him.

For a quarter of a millennium, all of this demagoguery has shared a fierce love and protection of the ideals of either side of this unsettled debate.

So perhaps that’s the way it should be - perhaps it is the constant bickering that keeps our nation alive.