“On Wednesday, the Honorable John Adams, Vice-President of the United States, arrived in this city,” reported the National Gazette—the intellectual biweekly of the nation’s then-capital, Philadelphia—on Saturday Dec. 8, 1792, “and on Thursday took his seat as President of the Senate.”
A reader is hard-pressed to find another paragraph in the whole two years of the National Gazette’s life that spoke of John Adams in a similarly polite fashion.
Instead, month after month, the National Gazette blasted Adams with insults, mockery, invective, distortion, and deeply educated character assassination—all vastly superior in mean-spirited firepower to anything we witness or invoke in modern political discourse.