A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (35 page)

The public, political Jefferson was more consistent. His first inaugural address set the tone for the Jefferson that most Americans would recognize. He called for a return to Revolutionary principles: strict construction of the Constitution, state power (“the surest bulwark against antirepublican tendencies”), economy in government, payment of the national debt, “encouragement of agriculture, with commerce as its hand maiden,” and, in an obvious reference to the reviled Alien and Sedition Acts, “Freedom of religion, press, and person.” These were not empty phrases to Thomas Jefferson, who waited his whole life to implement these ideals, and he proceeded to build his administration upon them.

Albert Gallatin, Jefferson’s secretary of the treasury, was point man in the immediate assault on Alexander Hamilton’s economic policy and the hated three reports. Gallatin, a French immigrant to Pennsylvania, an Anti-Federalist, and an early target of Federalist critics of so-called alien radicals, had led the attack on speculators and stockjobbers. A solid advocate of hard money, balanced budgets, and payment of the national debt, Gallatin was one of the most informed critics of Hamilton’s system.

With a Republican Congress passing enabling legislation, Gallatin abolished internal taxation and built a Treasury Department funded solely by customs duties and land sales. The Federalists’ annual $5 million budgets were slashed in half, and the Treasury began to pay off the national debt (by 1810, $40 million of the $82 million debt had been paid, despite Jefferson’s extravagant purchase of the Louisiana Territory).

Lest one credit the Jeffersonians with genius or administrative magic, this success was to a large degree Hamilton’s legacy. He had stabilized the money supply by insisting that the debt holders would, in fact, be repaid. The blessings of the Federalist years, including soaring commerce that could support the customs base (Jay’s and Pinckney’s treaties at work), the stable frontiers and safe oceans, the pacification of the Indians, and the state of peace (the result of Washington and Adams’s commitment to neutrality), all provided the undergirding that allowed revenues to flow in while expenses were kept relatively low. Land, already abundant, would become even more so after Jefferson’s acquisition of Louisiana, and this, too, gave the Republicans the freedom to pursue budget cutting, as the revenues of land sales were enormous, giving the Land Office plenty of work for decades.
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More broadly, though, the nation had already adopted critical business practices and philosophies that placed it in the middle of the capitalist revolution, including sanctity of contracts, competition, and adoption of the corporate form for business. This foundation of law and good sense guaranteed relative prosperity for a number of years.

Jefferson wanted to benefit his natural constituency, the farmers, just as Hamilton had befriended the bankers. He did not believe in any direct subsidies for farmers, but he tasked Gallatin to help the agrarian interests in other ways, specifically in reducing transportation costs.
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Congress “experimented after 1802 with financing western roads from the proceeds of federal land sales, and Congress in 1806 ordered Jefferson to build a national road to Ohio.”
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Even Jefferson inquired as to whether Congress could do anything else to “advance the general good” within “the pale” of its “constitutional powers.”
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But in 1806, Jefferson became even more aggressive with internal improvements, recognizing a federal role in the “improvement of the country.”
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It is significant that Jefferson, like Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun after him, saw this physical uniting of the nation as a means to defuse the slavery issue. Calhoun, of South Carolina—a leading advocate of slavery—would argue in 1817 that the Congress was under the “most imperious obligation to counteract every tendency to disunion” and to “bind the republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals.”
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In an extensive report to Congress, finally delivered in 1808, Gallatin outlined a massive plan for the government to remove obstacles to trade.
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Proposing that Congress fund a ten-year, $20 million project in which the federal government would construct roads and canals itself, or provide loans for private corporations to do so, Gallatin detailed $16 million in specific programs. He wanted a canal to connect the Atlantic Coast and the Great Lakes, and he included more than $3 million for local improvements.
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Jefferson endorsed the guts of the plan, having reservations only about the possible need for a constitutional amendment to ensure its legality. But for the small-government Republicans, it constituted a breathtaking project, amounting to five times all of the other total government outlays under Jefferson.
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The project showed the selectivity of Jefferson’s predisposition to small government. He concluded in 1807 that “embracing every local interest, and superior to every local consideration [was] competent to the selection of such national objects” and only the “national legislature” could make the final determination on such grand proposals.
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(Madison did not dissent at the time, but a decade later, as president, he vetoed the Bonus Bill, which called for an internal improvement amendment.)
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However Jefferson and Gallatin justified their plan, it remained the exception to the Republicans’ small-government/budget-cutting character, not the norm. While Gallatin labored over his report—most of which would eventually be funded through private and state efforts, not the federal government—Jefferson worked to roll back other federal spending. The radical $2.4 million reduction of the national budget (one can barely imagine the impact of a 50 percent budget cut today!) sent shock waves through even the small bureaucracy. Gallatin dismissed all excise tax collectors and ordered every federal agency and cabinet office to cut staff and expenses. (Only a few years later, James Madison conducted the business of the secretary of state with a staff of three secretaries.) Then half of the remaining federal employees were replaced with Jeffersonian Republican employees. The Federalist bureaucracy, in which a mere six of six hundred federal employees were Republicans, was thus revolutionized.

The Department of War was the next target for the budget slashers. Jefferson and his followers had never been friendly to the military establishment, and they cut the navy nearly out of existence, eliminating deep-sea vessels and maintaining only a coastal gunboat fleet, virtually all of which were sunk in the War of 1812. With the Northwest Indian wars concluded, the Republicans chopped the army’s budget in half; troop strength shrank from 6,500 to 3,350 men in uniform. To further eliminate what they saw as an overly Federalist officer corps, the Jeffersonians launched a radical experiment—a military academy to train a new “republican” officer class, thus producing a supreme irony, in that the United States Military Academy at West Point became a great legacy of one of America’s most antimilitary presidents.

Finally, Jefferson sought to change the alleged undemocratic tone of the Federalist years through simplicity, accessibility, and lack of protocol. The president literally led the way himself, riding horseback to his March 1801 inauguration, instead of riding in a carriage like Washington or Adams. He replaced the White House’s rectangular dinner table with a round one at which all guests would, symbolically at least, enjoy equal status. Widower Jefferson ran a much less formal household than his predecessors, hosting his own dinner parties and even personally doing some of the serving and pouring of wine. The informality distressed the new British ambassador to the United States when, upon paying his first visit to the White House, his knock upon the door was not answered by house servants, but rather by the president of the United States, dressed in house robe and slippers.

Judiciary Waterloo for Minimalist Government

While the Federalists in Congress and the bureaucracy ran before this flood of Jeffersonian democrats, one branch of government defiantly stood its ground. The lifetime appointees to the judiciary branch—the United States federal courts and the Supreme Court—remained staunchly Federalist. Jefferson thus faced a choice. He could let the judges alone and wait for age and attrition to ultimately create a Republican judiciary, or he could adopt a more aggressive policy. He chose the latter course, with mixed results.

Much of Jefferson’s vendetta against Federalist judges came from bitterness over John Adams’s last two years in office. Federalist judges had unfairly convicted and sentenced Republican editors under the Sedition Act. Adams and the lame-duck Congress added insult to injury by passing a new Judiciary Act and appointing a whopping sixty new Federalist judges (including Chief Justice John Marshall) during Adams’s last sixty days in office. Jefferson now sought to legally balance the federal courts.

The Virginian might have adopted an even more incendiary policy, because his most extreme advisers advocated repealing all prior judiciary acts, clearing the courts of all Federalist judges, and appointing all Republicans to take their place. Instead, the administration wisely chose to remove only the midnight judges and a select few sitting judges. With the Amendatory Act, the new Republican Congress repealed Adams’s 1801 Judiciary Act, and eliminated thirty of Adams’s forty-seven new justices of the peace (including a fellow named William Marbury) and three federal appeals court judgeships. Attempts to impeach several Federalist judges, including Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase, met with mixed results. Chase engaged in arguably unprofessional conduct in several of the Sedition Act cases, but the attempt to remove him proved so partisan and unprofessional that Republican moderates joined the minority Federalists to acquit Chase.

Congressional Republicans won a skirmish with the Amendatory Act, but the Federalists, under Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall, ultimately won the war. This victory came thanks to a subtle and complex decision in a case known as
Marbury v. Madison
(1803), and stemmed from the appointment of William Marbury as a midnight judge. Adams had commissionied Marbury as a justice of the peace, but Marbury never received the commission, and when he inquired about it, he was told by the secretary of state’s office that it had vanished. Marbury then sued the secretary of state James Madison in a brief he filed before the United States Supreme Court itself.

Chief Justice Marshall wrote an 1803 opinion in
Marbury
that brilliantly avoided conflict with Jefferson while simultaneously setting a precedent for judicial review—the prerogative of the Supreme Court, not the executive or legislative branches—to decide the constitutionality of federal laws. There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that grants the Supreme Court this great power, and the fact that we accept it today as a given has grown from the precedent of John Marshall’s landmark decision. Marshall sacrificed his fellow Federalist Marbury for the greater cause of a strong centralized judiciary. He and fellow justices ruled the Supreme Court could not order Marbury commissioned because they lacked jurisdiction in the case, then shrewdly continued to make a ruling anyway. The Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction, Marshall ruled, because a 1789 federal law granting such jurisdiction was
unconstitutional;
the case should have originated in a lower court. While the ruling is abstruse, its aim and result were not. The Supreme Court, said Marshall, was the final arbiter of the constitutionality of federal law. In
Fletcher v. Peck
(1811), Marshall’s court would claim the same national authority over state law. Chief Justice Marshall thus paved the first segment of a long road toward nationalism through judicial review. In the Aaron Burr treason trial (1807), when the chief justice personally issued a subpoena to President Jefferson, it sent a powerful message to all future presidents that no person is above the law.

Equally as important as judicial review, however, Marshall’s Court consistently ruled in favor of capitalism, free enterprise, and open markets. Confirming the sanctity of private contracts, in February 1819 the Supreme Court, in
Dartmouth College v. Woodward
, ruled that a corporate charter (for Dartmouth College) was indeed a contract that could not be violated at will by the state legislature. This supported a similar ruling in
Sturges v. Crowninshield
: contracts are contracts, and are not subject to arbitrary revision after the fact. Some of the Marshall Court’s rulings expanded federal power, no doubt. But at the same time, they unleashed market forces to race ahead of regulation. For example, five years after
Dartmouth
, the Supreme Court held that only the federal government could limit interstate commerce. The case,
Gibbons v. Ogden
, involved efforts by the famous Cornelius Vanderbilt, who ran a cheap water-taxi service from New York to New Jersey for a steamboat operator named Thomas Gibbons. Their service competed against a New York firm that claimed a monopoly on the Hudson River. The commodore boldly carried passengers in defiance of the claim, even offering to transport them on his People’s Line for nothing if they agreed to eat two dollars’ worth of food on the trip. Flying a flag reading
new jersey must be free
, Vanderbilt demonstrated his proconsumer, low-price projects over the next thirty years and, in the process, won the case.
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Lower courts took the lead from Marshall’s rulings. For thirty years American courts would favor developmental rights over pure or pristine property rights. This was especially explicit in the so-called mill acts, wherein state courts affirmed the primacy of privately constructed mills that required the owners to dam up rivers, thus eroding or destroying some of the property of farmers having land adjacent to the same river. Emphasizing the public good brought by the individual building the mill, the courts tended to side with the person developing property as opposed to one keeping it intact.
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Legal historian James Willard Hurst has labeled this propensity toward development “release of energy,” a term that aptly captures the courts’ collective goal: to unleash American entrepreneurs to serve greater numbers of people. As policy it pleased neither the hard-core antistatists, who complained that it (rightly) put government authority on the side of some property owners as opposed to others, nor militant socialists, who hated all private property anyway and called for heavy taxation as a way to spur development.
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