The supposed leader of the Republicans was not more encouraging in his letters to Madison when he wrote a month later: "I feel myself so thoroughly weaned from the interest I took in the proceedings there, while there, that I have never a wish to see one [a newspaper], and believe that I shall never take another paper of any sort. I find my mind totally absorbed by my rural occupation."[315] Yet the old fame flared up occasionally, as when he learned that Hamilton was being considered to succeed Pinckney who would be recalled from England: "a more degrading measure could not have been proposed," he wrote to Monroe. In regard to Hamilton, he foresaw an investigation on the Treasury and had wanted to withdraw before it took place.[316] But he fell back into the same detached attitude of mind, when he wrote to Washington the next day: "I return to farming with an ardor which I scarcely knew in my youth, and which has got the better entirely of my love of study. Instead of writing ten or twelve letters a day, which I have been in the habit of doing as a thing of course, I put off answering my letters now, farmer-like, till a rainy day." As a matter of fact, I doubt very much whether he had reached any such equanimity. For if he was unwilling to reënter public life, he was not averse to giving his opinion and advice in critical circumstances. While Madison's resolutions were still before Congress, news arrived in Philadelphia of the seizure of American ships in the Caribbean, under the Order in Council of November 6. Indignation was running high and democratic societies held patriotic meetings throughout the country. War seemed imminent, and although Jefferson preferred to contemplate the tranquil growth "of his lucern and potatoes", he still felt indignant when thinking "of these scoundrels" (the British). Yet he believed that war should be avoided and wrote to that effect to Tench Coxe: We are alarmed here with the apprehension of war; and sincerely anxious that it may be avoided; but not at the expense either of our faith or honour.... As to myself I love peace, and I am anxious that we should give the world still another useful lesson, by showing to them other modes of punishing injuries than by war, which is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferers.[317]