“Knowing the impetus you felt when speaking of Hamilton, I have been fearful whether you would not get into too hot a temper, and thus disease your rebukes with the fever of animosity. I have thought that you would have been safer to have followed Plato, and to have said, ‘Speusippus, do you beat that fellow, for I am angry.’ But, sir, you set him before me in new and horrid odiousness. Of ‘his debaucheries in New-York and Philadelphia’ - of ‘his audacious and unblushing attempts upon ladies of the highest rank and purest virtue’, of ‘the indignation with which he has been spurned” and of ‘the inquietude he has given to the first families’…”
William Cunningham, Jr. to John Adams
