Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (24 page)

Why didn’t Jefferson like Hamilton?

Under Washington and the new Congress, the government moved rapidly toward organization. Drawing from a rich array of political talent, Washington selected appointees to the key posts in his administration, often turning to old friends and war veterans, such as Henry Knox, who became secretary of war. A 1,000-man army was established, principally to confront the Indians on the western frontier. The Supreme Court was created, and John Jay was chosen first chief justice. But the two giants of this administration, and the men who would personify the great debate and division within the country in the years ahead, were Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Dumas Malone, Jefferson’s most prominent biographer, has stated their difference simply. “No other statesman has personified national power and the rule of the favored few so well as Hamilton, and no other has glorified self-government and the freedom of the individual to such a degree as Jefferson.”

America’s envoy in Paris as the Bastille was stormed in 1789, beginning the French Revolution, Jefferson returned to New York to lead the State Department. Although a member of the aristocratic, slaveholding class, Jefferson despised the monarchy and saw Hamilton and his allies as a “British party,” trying to restore a form of elected monarchy to the new nation. He had only disdain for what he called “money men.” In theory, he wanted a weak government and envisioned America as a democracy of farmers and workers.

An illegitimate child born in the West Indies, Hamilton had risen during the Revolution to become Washington’s confidential secretary. He had become an attorney in New York, founder of the Bank of New York, and one of that state’s and the nation’s most powerful men, first helping to frame, then selling the Constitution. Hamilton was no “man of the people,” though. The masses, he said, were a “great beast.” He wanted a government controlled by the merchant and banking class, and the government under Hamilton would always put this elite class first. He would fill the critical role of Washington’s chief adviser in money matters.

Hamilton’s work was cut out for him. The nation’s finances were chaotic. America owed money to foreign nations, principally France and the Netherlands, and there was massive domestic debt. Even worse, there was no money to pay the debts off. The government needed money, and a series of excise taxes were passed, not without a little argument from congressmen, who wanted either local products free from taxes, or overseas products protected by tariffs. Many of them were the same items that had been taxed by the English a few years earlier, prompting the first rebellious actions in the colonies.

There were two key components of Hamilton’s master plan for the financial salvation of America. The first came in his
Report on Public Credit
, which provoked a firestorm of controversy by recommending that all creditors of the government be given securities at par with old, depreciated securities. Since most of these older securities were in the hands of speculators (mostly northern) who had bought them from original holders (mostly southern farmers and many of them veterans of the War for Independence) for a fraction of their worth, Hamilton was attacked viciously for selling out to the “eastern” speculators. When he added the suggestion that the federal government assume the debts of the states, he was also pilloried by the southern states because most of them had already paid their debts, and Hamilton’s plan would be a boon to the “eastern” states.

A real estate deal solved this problem. Opposed to Hamilton’s plan, Jefferson and James Madison, the latter a leader in the House of Representatives, swung the South to support it in exchange for an agreement establishing the site for a new federal city in the South. The nation’s future capital would be located on the banks of the Potomac. (Until the new city was ready, Philadelphia would become the nation’s capital.) But this compromise did not patch up the differences between Hamilton and Jefferson. Their political differences over almost every issue confronting the new government eventually grew to personal enmity.

The second major component of Hamilton’s master plan was the establishment of a national bank to store federal funds safely; to collect, move, and dispense tax money; and to issue notes. The bank would be partly owned by the government, but 80 percent of the stock would be sold to private investors. Again, Jefferson balked. It was unconstitutional, he argued; the government had no such power. Hamilton responded by arguing that the bank was legal under the congressional power to tax and regulate trade. This time there was no compromise, and President Washington went along with Hamilton.

It was a dazzling move in terms of the new nation’s finances. According to Thomas Fleming, “Hamilton had taken a country floundering in a morass of $80 million in state and federal war debts . . . and in a series of brilliant state papers, persuaded Congress to transform this demoralizing legacy of the Revolution into a national asset. . . . To stabilize the new system and prime the national financial pump, Hamilton persuaded Congress to create the semipublic Bank of the United States. In five years, the United States had the highest credit rating in the world and a reliable money supply was fueling prosperity from Boston to Savannah” (
Duel
, p. 5).

The differences between Jefferson and Hamilton extended to foreign affairs. With England and France again at war and the French Revolution under way, Hamilton openly favored the English. Jefferson admired the French and their Revolution, which America had certainly helped inspire, even if he detested the rushing rivers of blood that the guillotine was creating. The lines were similarly drawn over Jay’s Treaty, a settlement made with the British in the midst of another English-French war that threatened to involve the United States. Under its terms, British soldiers withdrew from their last outposts in the United States, but other portions of the treaty were viewed as excessively pro-British, and it was attacked by Jefferson’s supporters. (The treaty was ratified by the Senate in 1795.)

As part of their ongoing feud, both men supported rival newspapers whose editors received plums from the federal pie. Jefferson’s platform was the
National Gazette
, and Hamilton’s was the
Gazette of the United States
, both of which took potshots at the opposition. These were not mild pleasantries, either, but mudslinging that escalated into character assassination. More important, the feud gave birth to a new and unexpected development, the growth of political parties, or factions, as they were then called.

To this point, organized parties were viewed as sinister. There was no scheme for a two-party system consisting of a government party and a loyal opposition. Instead this system evolved piecemeal, and the seeds were sown in the Jefferson-Hamilton rivalry. Jefferson and James Madison, a Federalist during the ratification debate but now swung to Jefferson’s views, began to organize factions to support their growing opposition to Washington’s Federalist administration. Their supporters eventually adopted the name Democratic Republicans in 1796. (Now stay with this: The name was shortened to Republicans, but during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, they became Democrats.) These first Republicans generally favored a democratic, agrarian society in which individual freedoms were elevated over strong, centralized government. Hamilton and his supporters coalesced in 1792 as the Federalist Party, favoring a strong central government, promoting commercial and industrial interests, and supported by the elite and powerful of the nation. Under Washington, who openly disdained any “factions,” the Federalists held most of the power in Washington for several years to come, dominating Congress during the two Washington administrations and the Adams presidency.

To call these two groups the forerunners of the modern Democrats and Republicans is a bit of an oversimplification. The process leading to the present two-party system was a long, slow one, with several interruptions along the way. If he were alive today, would Jefferson be a Democrat or a Republican? His notions of less federal government would sit well with those Republicans who want to dismantle the federal bureaucracy. His preoccupation with civil liberties would seem more at home with the Democrats. And Hamilton? Certainly his commercial and banking instincts would place him in the old guard eastern establishment Republican mainstream. But his insistence on a powerful federal government pulling the economic strings would be heresy to more conservative, laissez-faire, small-government Republicans.

The personal in these politics would soon explode. Married to the daughter of one of New York’s most powerful men, General Philip Schuyler, Hamilton was at the peak of his power as both Treasury secretary and a New York state power broker. But he was about to be brought down in a scandal over, what else, money and sex.

In 1791, Hamilton had become involved with a Philadelphia woman named Maria Reynolds. (He was also rumored to have had an ongoing affair with his sister-in-law, Angelica Schuyler Church. But times were different for eighteenth-century men, whose illicit dalliances, if not expected, were at least tolerated.) James Reynolds, the husband of Maria, had begun charging Hamilton for access to his wife—call it blackmail or pimping. Reynolds then began to boast that Hamilton was giving him tips—“insider information,” in modern terms—that allowed him to speculate in government bonds. Accused of corruption, Hamilton actually turned over love letters from Maria Reynolds to his political enemies to prove that he might have cheated on his wife, but he wasn’t cheating the government. But in 1797, the letters surfaced publicly through a pamphlet by James Thomson Callender (who may have gotten the letters from Virginia’s James Monroe, a Jefferson ally). He accused Hamilton of immense speculation on Treasury policies. Hamilton confessed the affair publicly, and his career seemed over. But Hamilton had powerful, loyal friends. Most of all, he had the support of the “first friend.” With George Washington’s public show of loyalty, Hamilton survived, the eighteenth century’s version of the comeback kid.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

G
EORGE
W
ASHINGTON,
from the Farewell Address:

I have already intimated to you the danger of Parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on Geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party, generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human Mind. It exists under different shapes in all Governments, more or less stifled, controuled [sic], or repressed; but, in those of the popular form it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissention [sic], which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself frightful despotism. . . . [T]he common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it in the interest and the duty of a wise People to discourage and restrain it.

Was George Washington killed by his doctors?

With a last hurrah, Washington led troops once more in 1794 to suppress the so-called Whiskey Rebellion in the frontier of western Pennsylvania. Like Shays’s Rebellion, it was a revolt of backwoods farmers against the establishment, this time over a stiff excise tax placed on whiskey. With 13,000 troops—more men than he had led during the war—Washington rode out in uniform, with Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton by his side, to put down the uprising with ease.

In September 1796, setting aside requests that he take a third term, Washington made the last of his many retirement speeches in his Farewell Address, warning against political parties and “passionate attachments” to foreign nations. He was basically ignored on both counts.

Washington’s retirement to Mount Vernon was interrupted by the near outbreak of a war with France, which was basically kidnapping American sailors to man its ships in its wars against England. In 1798, Congress asked him to lead the army once more, and Washington agreed. He asked Alexander Hamilton to be his second-in-command, but the disagreement with France was settled, and Washington returned to Mount Vernon.

After a winter ride in December 1799, Washington fell ill with a throat infection, then called “quinsy” (most likely what is now called strep throat). With his throat badly swollen, Washington had difficulty breathing. Following standard medical practice of the day, Washington was first given a mixture of tea and vinegar. This was followed by calomel, a commonly used laxative also called “blue mass,” which was intended to flush out sickness. Finally, he was bled by his doctors, a total of four times, taking over half the blood in his body. While the bleeding did not kill him, it certainly didn’t help Washington’s cause. “I die hard,” he said on his deathbed, “but I am not afraid to go.” Washington died on December 14, 1799, two months before his sixty-eighth birthday.

Prior to his death, Washington had told a British visitor to Mount Vernon, “I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can [save] our Union.” While he had done little to bring that end about in his lifetime other than fret about it, his will included specific conditions for the problem that he had publicly and privately wrestled with—his slaves. From 1775, Washington had stopped selling slaves, a profitable enterprise, and the plantation’s slave population actually doubled. All were to be freed after his wife Martha’s death. (She released her husband’s slaves before she died in 1800, and the estate supported some as pensioners until 1833.)