The intense ideological conflict of the 1790s is illustrated in this study of the education and career of Benjamin Franklin Bache. Trained as a journalist by his grandfather, Benjamin Franklin, Bache became the leading polemical Jeffersonian journalist of the period.

At the end of his seventy-year career as a journalist, Benjamin Franklin trained his grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, in his profession. After his grandfather's death, Bache brought the republican and Enlightenment ideas he had been taught to the heated party controversies of the 1790s. He became the leading Jeffersonian journalist of the period and was boycotted, physically assaulted, and eventually charged with seditious libel shortly before his death in 1798. Jeffery Smith vividly illustrates the intense ideological conflict of the period through this original study of Bache's education and career.

Smith's careful and thoughtful analysis of the relationship between Franklin and Bache sheds valuable light on the role of education and the fate of disinterested republicanism in the new nation.