The discomfited Federalists sought an explanation for their defeat in everything save their own actions. After only twelve years, and twelve years passed in creating an efficient from a deficient government, the people had turned against them. "No party ever existed knew itself so little," said John Adams, "or so vainly overrated its own influence and popularity as ours. None ever understood so ill the causes of its own power or so wantonly destroyed them." State debt assumption, the bank, the excise, the increased debt, the war expenditures, the direct taxes, and the Alien and Sedition laws would seem to furnish a sufficient list of reasons for the downfall of a party, which came into the Administration by only three votes. Yet, by common consent, the blame for the defeat was placed on the aliens and their presses. "A group of foreign liars," was the forceful way in which the defeated President explained it, "encouraged by a few ambitious native gentlemen, have discomfited the education, the talents, the virtues, and the property of our country." Chagrined that Washington should have two terms and he cut off with one, smarting under the treacherous letter of Hamilton, to which he speedily framed a reply, the ex-President "trotted the bogs" back to Massachusetts, as he termed it, without paying his successor the courtesy of waiting to see him inaugurated. Gadsden, the old Revolutionary leader of South Carolina, now relegated to the line of spectators, lamented the short-sightedness of early days in not sufficiently guarding American citizenship from the admission of foreign meddlers. "Our old-standers and independent men of long, well-tried patriotism, sound understanding, and good property," said he, "have now in general very little influence in our public matters." He wished the advice of John Rutledge had been taken. He would have admitted only the sons of aliens to citizenship.