Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (49 page)

J
EFFERSON PERSONIFIED
this revolutionary transformation. His ideas about liberty and democracy left such a deep imprint on the future of his country that, despite persistent attempts to discredit his reputation, as long as there is a United States he will remain the supreme spokesman for the nation’s noblest ideals and highest aspirations.

Yet Jefferson himself was the most unlikely of popular radicals. He was a well-connected and highly cultivated Southern landowner who never had to scramble for his position in Virginia. The wealth and leisure that made possible his great contributions to liberty and democracy were supported by the labor of hundreds of slaves. He was tall—six feet two or three—and gangling, with a reddish freckled complexion, bright hazel eyes, and copper-colored hair, which he tended to wear unpowdered in a queue. Unlike his fellow Revolutionary John Adams, whom he both fought and befriended for fifty years, he was reserved, self-possessed, and incurably optimistic, sometimes to the point of quixoticism. Although he could be shrewd and practical, his sense of the future was sometimes skewed. As late as 1806, for example, he believed that Norfolk, Virginia, would soon surpass New York as a great commercial city and would probably in time become “the greatest sea-port in the United States, New Orleans perhaps excepted.”
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He disliked personal controversy and was always charming in face-to-face relations with both friends and enemies. But at a distance he could hate, and thus many of his opponents concluded that he was two-faced and duplicitous.

He was undoubtedly complicated. He mingled the loftiest visions with astute backroom politicking. He spared himself nothing and was a compulsive shopper, yet he extolled the simple yeoman farmer who was free from the lures of the marketplace. He hated the obsessive money-making,
the proliferating banks, and the liberal capitalistic world that emerged in the Northern states in the early nineteenth century, but no one in America did more to bring that world about. Although he kept the most tidy and meticulous accounts of his daily transactions, he never added up his profits and losses. He thought public debts were the curse of a healthy state, yet his private debts kept mounting as he borrowed and borrowed again to meet his rising expenditures. He was a sophisticated man of the world who loved no place better than his remote mountaintop home in Virginia. This slaveholding aristocrat ended up becoming the most important apostle for liberty and democracy in American history.

Jefferson’s narrow victory in the presidential election of 1800 confirmed the changing course of national developments. Jefferson received seventy-three electoral votes to the sixty-five of the Federalist candidate, John Adams. For several weeks even that close victory was in doubt. Because the original Constitution did not state that the electors had to distinguish between their votes for president and those for vice-president, both Jefferson and the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Aaron Burr, had received the same number of electoral votes. Because of this tie, the election, according to the Constitution, was to be thrown into the House of Representatives, where each state congressional delegation would have a single vote. The newly elected Republican-dominated Congress would not be seated until December 1801. Suddenly, there loomed the possibility that the lame-duck Federalists in the Congress would be able to engineer the election of Aaron Burr as president.

Many Federalists wanted to do just that, including John Marshall, whom John Adams in the waning days of his administration had appointed chief justice of the United States. Marshall did not know Burr at all, but he did know Jefferson, his cousin, and he had “almost insuperable objections” to Jefferson’s character.
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Marshall feared what the Republican leader would do to the authority of the nation and the presidency, to the Federalist commercial and banking systems, and to American foreign policy. Federalists figured that Jefferson was a doctrinaire democrat who wanted to take the country back to something resembling the Articles of Confederation, and that he was in the pocket of France and would likely go to war with Great Britain. Burr posed no such threat. Some of the Federalists thought that they might work out a deal with Burr. The country was on the verge of a constitutional crisis.

D
URING THE EARLY 1790S
Aaron Burr had been one of the most promising leaders in American politics. He had been a member of the
United States Senate from New York, and in the election of 1796 he had received thirty electoral votes for president. He seemed to have everything a gentleman could want—looks, charm, extraordinary abilities, a Princeton education, distinguished Revolutionary service, and, above all, a notable lineage. John Adams said that he had “never known, in any country, the prejudice in favor of birth, parentage, and descent more conspicuous than in the instance of Colonel Burr.” Unlike most of the other Revolutionary leaders, who were the first in their families to attend college, Burr was the son of a president of Princeton and the grandson of another Princeton president—Jonathan Edwards, the most famous theologian in eighteenth-century America—and, said Adams, he “was connected by blood with many respectable families in New England.”
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This presumption that he was already an aristocrat by blood separated Burr from most of the other leaders of the Revolutionary generation. He always had an air of superiority about him, and he always considered himself to be more of a gentleman than other men.
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He certainly sought to live the life of an eighteenth-century aristocratic gentleman. He had the best of everything—fine houses, elegant clothes, lavish coaches, superb wines. His sexual excesses and his celebrated liberality flowed from his traditional European notions of gentility. Since real gentlemen were not supposed to work for a living, he could not regard his law practice, or indeed even money—that “paltry object”—with anything but distaste.
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Like a perfect Chesterfieldian gentleman, he almost never revealed his inner feelings. In several respects he was highly enlightened, especially in his opposition to slavery (despite owning slaves himself) and in his advanced position on the role of women.
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The great flaw in Burr’s desire to be an eighteenth-century aristocrat was that he lacked the money to bring it off. Money was “contemptible,” he said.
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Despite being one of the most highly paid lawyers in New York, he was perpetually in debt and often on the edge of bankruptcy because of his lavish living. He borrowed over and over and created complicated structures of credit that always threatened to come crashing down. It was this insecure financial situation coupled with his grandiose expectations that led to his wheeling and dealing and self-serving politics.

Burr could easily have become a Federalist. He viewed politics largely in traditional terms—as contests between “great men” and their followers, tied together by strings of interest and influence. He expected that someone with his pedigree and talent was owed high office as a matter of course, and that naturally public office was to be used to maintain his position and influence. Beyond what politics could do for his friends, his family, and him personally, it had little emotional significance for him. Politics, as he once put it, was “fun and honor & profit.”
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Of course, other politicians of the early Republic viewed politics in much the same way as Burr did, especially in New York with its family-based factions of Clintons, Livingstons, Van Rensselaers, and Schuylers. Yet no other political leader of his prominence ever spent so much time and energy so blatantly scheming for his own personal and political advantage. And no one of the other great Revolutionary statesmen was so immune to the ideology and the values of the Revolution as Burr was.

Burr certainly had little of the aversion to the use of patronage, or what was often called “corruption,” that a Revolutionary ideologue like Jefferson had. Burr was utterly shameless in recommending anyone and everyone for an office—even in the end himself. Jefferson recalled that he had first met Burr when Burr was senator from New York in the early 1790s, and he mistrusted him right away. He remembered that when both the Washington and Adams administrations were about to make a major military or diplomatic appointment, Burr came quickly to the capital “to shew himself” and to let the administration know, in Jefferson’s words, “that he was always at market, if they had wanted him.” Burr’s zealousness over patronage was crucial in eventually convincing Jefferson that Burr was not Jefferson’s kind of Republican.
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For Burr, befriending people and creating personal loyalties and connections was the way politics and society worked. Aristocrats were patrons, and they had clients who were obliged to them. Hence Burr sought to patronize as many people as he could. His celebrated liberality and generosity grew out of this need. Like any “great man” of the age, he even patronized young artists, including New York painter John Vanderlyn, whom he sent on a grand tour of Europe.

Most of Burr’s surviving correspondence deals either with patronage and influence or with speculative money-making schemes. Many of
his letters were the hastily scribbled notes of a busy man who did not have the time or the desire to put much on paper. They were for the moment and, unlike the letters of the other Founders, were rarely written with a future audience in mind. Indeed, he once warned his law clerks, “Things written remain.”
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He was always worried that his letters might “miscarry,” and thus he tried to avoid saying anything in them too implicating. “If it were discreet to write plainly,” he said at one point, but in his conspiratorial world it was rarely possible to write plainly. He repeatedly appended warnings to his letters: “Say nothing of this to any other person,” or “Let no suspicion arise that you have any knowledge of these matters,” or “The recommendation must not appear to have been influenced by me,” or “You & I should not appear to act in concert.”
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But the peculiar character of Burr’s correspondence goes beyond his preoccupation with haste and secrecy. Burr never developed any ideas about constitutionalism or governmental policy in the way the other Revolutionary statesmen did, because, in truth, he was not much concerned about such matters. If he had an idea about the new federal Constitution of 1787, he left no record of it. Nor did he have much to say about the Federalists’ great financial program of the early 1790 s. Although he mentioned Hamilton’s plan for a national bank at one point in 1791—the year he was elected to the U.S. Senate—he confessed he had not read Hamilton’s arguments.
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Burr had “
no theory
,” it was said; he was “a mere matter of fact man.” He seems not to have cared much what posterity thought of him. Burr, said Hamilton, in his most damning indictment, “never appeared solicitous for fame.”
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Burr never pretended to be public-spirited in the fulsome way that Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, and other Founders did. There was nothing self-righteous and hypocritical about him. Perhaps because he was so sure of his aristocratic lineage, he did not have the same emotional need the other Revolutionary statesmen had to justify a gentlemanly status by continually expressing an abhorrence of corruption and a love of virtue.

In the early 1790s Burr could have gone in several different directions; only a series of accidents and his own trimming temperament had thrown him into the Republican party. He opposed Jay’s Treaty and championed the Democratic-Republican Societies against Washington’s criticism. When his efforts to become vice-president in 1796 did not pan out, he lost interest in his Senate seat; he stopped attending the sessions and devoted his attention to making money through speculation. Because there were more opportunities for money-making in the state legislature than in the Congress, he entered the New York assembly in the hope of aiding his business associates and restoring his personal fortune. He pushed for tax exemptions, bridge and road charters, land bounties, alien rights to own land—any scheme in which he and his friends had an interest. His manipulation of the Manhattan Company in 1798–1799, where he used a state charter to provide water for the city of New York as a cover for the creation of a bank, was only the most notorious of his self-interested shenanigans.

Burr’s political skills were extraordinary. He developed remarkably modern hands-on techniques for organizing the Republican party and getting out the vote. Eventually he built such a strong political machine in New York that he was able to carry the state assembly for the Republicans in the spring elections of 1800. Artisans and other workers in New York City were especially angry at Hamilton and the Federalists’ general neglect of their interests, and in the election to the assembly they supported the Republicans by a two-to-one margin.

Since the New York legislature chose the presidential electors, the Republican presidential candidates would be assured of all twelve of New York’s electoral votes later that year. The frightening prospect that Jefferson might become president led a desperate Hamilton to urge Governor John Jay to change retroactively the state’s electoral rules and reverse the results, telling Jay that “in times like these in which we live, it will not do to be overly scrupulous.” It was imperative, he said, “to prevent an
Atheist
in Religion and a
Fanatic
in politics from gaining possession of the helm of the State.” Jay never replied, writing on the back of Hamilton’s letter, “Proposing a measure for party purposes which it would not become me to adopt.”
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