Alexander Hamilton (62 page)

With his highly selective vision, Jefferson preferred to dwell on the hopeful aspects of the situation and filtered out the carnage. On August 3, 1789, he wrote to a friend:

It is impossible to conceive a greater fermentation than has worked in Paris, nor do I believe that so great a fermentation ever produced so little injury in any other people. I have been through it daily, have observed the mobs with my own eyes in order to be satisfied of their objects and declare to you that I saw so plainly the legitimacy of them that I have slept in my house as quietly through the whole as I ever did in the most peaceable moments....I will agree to be stoned as a false prophet if all does not end well in this country.
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To Maria Cosway, Jefferson hazarded a small joke about decapitating aristocrats— “The cutting off heads is become so much à la mode that one is apt to feel of a morning whether their own is on their shoulders”—and he left little doubt that the French Revolution was a worthy sequel to its American predecessor: “My fortune has been singular to see in the course of fourteen years two such revolutions as were never seen before.”
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Even as Jefferson departed from France that fall, thousands of poor, desperate women were swarming toward Versailles, determined to drag the royal family back to Paris.

Many Americans were flattered to think that their revolution had spawned a European successor with a similar respect for legal forms. All the more prophetic then the letter of October 6, 1789, that Hamilton sent to his old friend Lafayette, who had been appointed head of the national guard. Sitting in New York, slaving over his
Report on Public Credit,
the new secretary of the treasury peered deeper into French affairs than did Jefferson after five years in residence. “I have seen with a mixture of pleasure and apprehension the progress of the events which have lately taken place in your country,” Hamilton began his carefully worded letter. “As a friend to mankind and liberty, I rejoice in the efforts which you are making to establish it, while I fear much for the final success of the attempts, for the fate of those I esteem who are engaged in it.” Hamilton knew that Lafayette would wonder why he experienced “this foreboding of ill” and listed four reasons. The first three were the disagreements that would surface over the French constitution; the “vehement character” of the French people; and the resistance of the nobility to the sacrifices they would have to make. The fourth point was perhaps the most compelling: “I dread the reveries of your philosophic politicians who appear in the moment to have great influence and who being mere speculatists may aim at more refinement than suits either with human nature or the composition of your nation.”
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The future secretary of state, now sailing home, was to strike Hamilton as just such a “philosophic politician” ignorant of human nature. Hamilton later explained to a political associate that Jefferson in Paris “drank deeply of the French philosophy in religion, in science, in politics. He came from France in the moment of a fermentation which he had had a share in exciting and in the passions and feelings of which he shared both from temperament and situation.”
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Fresh from the French Revolution, Jefferson was to be greeted by a most unexpected shock when he showed up in New York to assume his post.

On March 21, 1790, Jefferson moved into lodgings on Maiden Lane, where he was to live with something less than republican austerity. From Paris, he had shipped home eighty-six crates packed with costly French furniture, porcelain, and silver, as well as books, paintings, and prints. He had brought home 288 bottles of French wine. To appease his craving for French food, he also brought along one of his slaves, James Hemings (Sally’s brother), who had studied fine cooking with a Parisian chef. While secretary of state, Jefferson maintained a household of five servants, four horses, and a maître d’hôtel imported from Paris.

In seeming contradiction to this patrician style, Jefferson cherished a vision of America as a place of arcadian innocence. “Indeed, madam, I know nothing as charming as our own country,” he had written to Angelica Church from Paris. “The learned say it is a new creation and I believe them, not for their reasons, but because it is made on an improved plan. Europe is a first idea, a crude production, before the master knew his trade, or had made up his mind as to what he wanted.”
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Settled in his palatial Parisian residence, Jefferson lamented reports of unspoiled Americans succumbing to luxurious ways. “I consider the extravagance which has seized them as a more baneful evil than toryism was during the war,” he told one correspondent.
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Now he was eager to assess “the tone of sentiment” in America after his prolonged absence.
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In New York, Jefferson soon decided that America had been corrupted in his absence and that the Revolution stood in mortal danger. He concluded that “a preference of kingly over republican government was evidently the favorite sentiment” among affluent New Yorkers.
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As he attended dinners, he was taken aback by the pro-British inclinations of many merchants and the sumptuous gowns and jewelry of their wives. The town struck him as infested with Tories and avaricious speculators in government securities, all looking worshipfully to Hamilton as their favorite. The heroes of 1776 had given way to those of 1787; as exemplified by Hamilton, they were a different, more conservative breed. Jefferson blamed the influence of British manners and manufactures for this decay of republican purity.

Twelve years Jefferson’s junior, Hamilton had never met him before. Hamilton had been a lowly artillery captain at the time Jefferson was composing the Declaration of Independence, and Hamilton’s incandescent rise had coincided with Jefferson’s years abroad. Hamilton would have heard favorable things about Jefferson from Angelica Church and from James Madison, and the latter likely introduced them. That Hamilton and Jefferson were to become antagonists in a bloody, unrelenting feud would not have occurred to either man upon first meeting, and their relations started out amicably enough. Alexander and Eliza hosted a welcoming dinner for the newcomer, who showed up in a blue coat and crimson knee breeches and talked fondly of the French people and their desire to eliminate the monarchy. Jefferson got to know Eliza so well that he chided Angelica Church in June for not writing more often and sighed with mock despair, “I can count only on hearing from you thro’ Mrs. Hamilton.”
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The new secretaries of state and treasury traded cordial notes.

Jefferson never underestimated Hamilton’s superlative talents. After reading
The Federalist,
Jefferson pronounced it the “best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written.”
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Nor did he slight Hamilton’s virtues. As he noted in later years, after their epic battles had faded into history, “Hamilton was indeed a singular character of acute understanding, disinterested, honest, and honorable in all private transactions, amiable in society, and duly valuing virtue in private life—yet so bewitched and perverted by the British example as to be under thorough conviction that corruption was essential to the government of a nation.”
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By
corruption,
Jefferson did not necessarily mean outright payments so much as unhealthy executive influence over legislators through honors, appointments, and other perquisites of office. A central tenet of the American Revolution had been that a corrupt British ministry had suborned Parliament through patronage and pensions and used the resulting excessive influence to tax the colonists and deprive them of their ancient English liberties. Jefferson always viewed Hamilton through the lens of this unsettling analogy.

By the time Jefferson arrived in New York, Madison had been trounced by Hamilton in the discrimination vote, and the treasury secretary was hurtling ahead with his funding scheme. Jefferson must have regretted having arrived so late. He had no doubt that the original holders of government paper had been cheated of rightful gains by speculators who were “fraudulent purchasers of this paper.... Immense sums were thus filched from the poor and ignorant and fortunes accumulated by those who had themselves been poor enough before.”
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Jefferson’s objections to Hamilton’s plan had philosophical roots. In his view, the smaller the government, the better the chances of preserving liberty. And to the extent that a central government was necessary, he wanted a strong Congress with a weak executive. Most of all, Jefferson wished to preserve state sovereignty against federal infringement. Since Hamilton’s agenda was to strengthen the central government, bolster the executive branch at the expense of the legislature, and subordinate the states, it embodied everything Jefferson abhorred.

Jefferson feared that the funding scheme would create a fiercely loyal following for Hamilton among those enriched by it. He later told Washington that Hamilton had promoted a “regular system” of “interested persons” who were at the beck and call of the Treasury Department.
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He was convinced that congressmen were investing in government securities and that “even in this, the birth of our government, some members were found sordid enough to bend their duty to their interests and to look after personal rather than public good.”
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Jefferson also did not believe that Hamilton really intended to pay off the government debt. “I would wish the debt paid tomorrow,” Jefferson told Washington. “He wishes it never to be paid, but always to be a thing wherewith to corrupt and manage the legislature.”
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This idea of perpetual debt flew in the face of Hamilton’s express words and turned his funding program into a blatant grab for power.

The ideological differences between Hamilton and Jefferson did not blaze into sudden, open enmity. In their early days in the cabinet, these erudite men held many private talks, with Jefferson hoarding statements by Hamilton that he later used against him. As a courtly gentleman of impeccable manners, Jefferson shrank from disagreement. Unlike Hamilton, a swashbuckler who reveled in debate, Jefferson hated controversy and was more guarded than Hamilton in exposing his thoughts. He suited his words to the occasion and catered to listeners’ prejudices, saying what they wanted to hear. This kept his own views secret while encouraging others to speak. Hamilton—opinionated, almost recklessly candid—was incapable of this type of circumspection. Jefferson had learned the advantages of inscrutable silence. While serving with Jefferson in the Continental Congress, recalled John Adams, “I never heard him utter three sentences together.”
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On another occasion, Adams labeled the Virginian a “shadow man” and likened his character to “the great rivers, whose bottoms we cannot see and make no noise.”
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For Hamilton, unable to govern his tongue or his pen, his habit of self-exposure eventually placed him at the mercy of the tightly controlled Jefferson.

Jefferson’s horror over the discrimination defeat led to the first major political alignment in the infant republic as Jefferson made common cause with Madison, now the House floor leader. Their partnership was to have ramifications for America’s future as important as the earlier one beween Hamilton and Madison. Of the nearly mystic bond between Jefferson and Madison, John Quincy Adams said it was “a phenomenon, like the invisible and mysterious movements of the magnet in the physical world.”
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Since Hamilton’s relationship with Madison had revolved around ideas, there was little personal chemistry to sustain their friendship when they fell out over politics. Madison’s defection was a tremendous blow for Hamilton, who had consulted him in the early stages of his
Report on Public Credit.
So boundless was Hamilton’s respect for Madison that he later said that he would never have accepted the Treasury post had he not believed that he could count on his general support.

Jefferson arrived in New York in the thick of the debate raging over assumption—Hamilton’s plan to have the federal government assume the twenty-five million dollars of state debt. This venomous clash made the fight over discrimination look civilized, and Jefferson later categorized it as “the most bitter and angry contest ever known in Congress before or since the union of the states.”
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On February 24, 1790, Hamilton had been stunned when Madison, reversing his former position, contested assumption. Retreating from his old nationalist perspective, Madison complained that his home state and some other southern states had paid off most of their wartime debts and would be penalized if, “after having done their duty,” they were forced “to contribute to those states who have not equally done their duty.”
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To Hamilton, it seemed that Madison spoke for his Virginia constituents and not, as in
The Federalist,
for the national good. (Of course, as treasury secretary, Hamilton enjoyed the luxury of a continental view.) Hamilton was blindsided by this backlash against his program; that Madison led it was an unkind cut. Hamilton plainly recalled discussing assumption with Madison during an “afternoon’s walk” at the Constitutional Convention, and “we were perfectly agreed in the expediency and propriety of such a measure.”
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Madison’s physical appearance—his pale, unsmiling visage, his detached air and short stature—transmitted a superficial impression of timidity. And some fellow politicians believed that “Little Jemmy,” as he was known, lacked the commanding, decisive air of a successful politician. His mental vigor, unlike Hamilton’s, was not matched by a corresponding talent for translating thought into action. “His great fault as a politician appears to me a want of decision and a disposition to magnify his adversaries’ strength,” Congressman Edward Livingston told his brother, Robert R. Livingston. “He never determines to act until he is absolutely forced by the pressure of affairs and then regrets that he has neglected some better opportunity.”
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So powerful was this appearance of timidity that many observers were convinced that Madison, eight years younger than Jefferson, must have been dominated by his shrewd mentor. “Mr. Madison had always entertained an exalted opinion of the talents, knowledge and virtues of Mr. Jefferson,” Hamilton later wrote. But he thought that, at bottom, each man stiffened the other’s determination in opposing his funding program: “Jefferson was indiscreetly open in his approbation of Mr. Madison’s principles upon his first coming to the seat of Government. I say indiscreetly because a gentleman in the administration of one department ought not to have taken sides against another in another department.”
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