Jefferson and Hamilton (53 page)

Washington knew the Jay Treaty would trigger a firestorm. He also knew that the pact’s rejection might set in motion a trail of events leading to war with Britain and its ally Spain, two powerful nations whose colonies stretched along the flanks and hindquarters of the United States. Washington wanted peace, fearing disaster for the weak, strife-torn United States in another round of warfare. He opted to submit the treaty to the Senate, where the Federalists held precisely the two-thirds majority needed for ratification. To help assure this outcome, the president kept the terms of the treaty secret until the Senate met. It was a savvy move that prevented a lengthy onslaught in the Republican press prior to Senate action, and it worked. Voting along political and sectional lines, the Senate ratified the Jay Treaty, though its approval was conditional on the exclusion of Article XII. Every Federalist voted for ratification, every Republican against it; 90 percent of those voting for ratification
represented northern states, and 70 percent who voted against it were from southern or western states.

Once ratification was out of the way, Washington had to decide whether to accept the treaty. He first asked Hamilton to assess the accord. It was the president’s first communication with Hamilton in the four months since the treasury secretary had left his cabinet. Washington had not inquired about Hamilton’s well-being in retirement—nor had he asked Jefferson how he was doing—and in a businesslike letter devoid of niceties, he simply requested Hamilton’s opinion.
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Hamilton responded within a couple of days with a six-thousand-word answer. He analyzed the treaty article by article, quibbling about much of the wording, as if to say that he might have done a better job, though on the whole he was positive. In 1789 Hamilton had told Colonel Beckwith that the United States would agree to trade in the British West Indies even if London restricted the size of America’s vessels; however, he now objected to Article XII, calling it “unprecedented & wrong.” Even so, he urged acceptance of the treaty, asserting that it “closes … as reasonably as could have been expected the controverted points between the two countries.” Hamilton added that the Jay Treaty not only assured that the United States would regain its western posts, “an object of primary consequence in our affairs,” but also, and above all, it would enable the United States to escape “the dreadful war which is ruining Europe.”
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On very nearly the same day that Hamilton first saw the treaty, Jefferson received a copy from one of Virginia’s two senators. Jefferson’s reaction could hardly have been more different. Though he did not speak out publicly, Jefferson told correspondents that the accord was “infamous,” “a monument of folly or venality,” and a “treaty of alliance between England and the Anglomen of this country against … the people of the United states.” Even at the risk of war, Jefferson said he preferred reciprocity to the Federalists’ treaty with their “patron-nation.”
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Hamilton meanwhile wasted little time before publicly defending the treaty. His action was part of another astute strategy on the part of the president. Washington might have accepted the treaty in mid-July, as there is no reason to believe that his views differed in the least from those of Hamilton, but he wanted public opinion to form in support of the treaty before he acted. Washington claimed that he was awaiting the advice of “dispassionate” men before making up his mind, but Hamilton was the only person he consulted, and the president had his answer within three weeks of the Senate’s vote. Having gotten Hamilton’s opinion, Washington as much as asked his former secretary to publicly defend the Jay Treaty against its attackers, who he said were
howling “like … a mad-dog.” Washington even coached him on what to say in defense of the treaty.
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Hamilton required neither mentoring nor arm twisting to spring into action. The Jay Treaty was crucial for his economic program. In mid-July, he spoke at a public meeting outside New York’s City Hall, a gathering called by Republicans who wished to draft a statement beseeching Washington not to sign the treaty. A rowdy crowd of some five hundred mostly anti-treaty proponents were still present when Hamilton spoke late in the afternoon. Hecklers had a field day. Some tried to shout him down, others to silence him by “hissings, coughings, and hootings.” Rocks were hurled at him. According to a suspect story that circulated, Hamilton was struck in the head, after which he responded: “if you use such knock-down arguments, I must retire.” He did angrily storm off the speaker’s stand and soon thereafter came close to fisticuffs with some in the crowd. Still later on this busy, hot day, Hamilton challenged two men who verbally assaulted him to duels. One had slandered him by accusing him of cowardice for once having refused to fight a duel. Both accepted Hamilton’s challenges, though in the end cooler heads prevailed and the combatants never faced off on the dueling ground.
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Hamilton subsequently spoke to friendlier audiences of merchants and Federalists, but his principal activity was to do as Washington wished. He wrote polemics that sought to alter public opinion. Hamilton collaborated with Senator Rufus King of New York to produce thirty-eight pieces in a series titled “The Defence.” Hamilton penned almost three-fourths of the essays, often churning out three a week, and he rushed his first into print only eight days after hearing from the president.

Hamilton opened with his familiar slash-and-burn tactics. The foes of the Jay Treaty, he charged, were Francophiles who for years had been “steadily endeavouring to make the United States a party in the present European war.” What is more, the treaty’s opponents wished to prevent a normalization of relations with London in order to improve Jefferson’s chances of succeeding Washington. Thereafter, he largely elaborated on the points he had made privately to Washington. His most crucial argument was that the United States would not be adequately prepared for war for at least another decade. The beauty of the Jay Treaty was that it prevented immediate hostilities while buying time to resolve other issues that strained Anglo-American relations. It offered hope that “we may … postpone war to a distant period.”
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Washington was pleased, and after reading the partisan assault on the Jeffersonians, the president congratulated Hamilton on the “satisfactory manner” of his response. By the time Hamilton’s eighth essay appeared, Washington had signed the treaty into law and privately told his confederate
that he “sincerely regret[ted]” that he no longer was part of the cabinet. It was a sentiment the president never expressed to Jefferson.
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Hamilton was unaware of perhaps the greatest compliment paid to him. It came from Jefferson, who recognized that Hamilton was at least in part responsible for a shift in public opinion toward the treaty. Even the merchants, Jefferson said, had originally been “open-mouthed … against the treaty,” but Hamilton had brought them around. Through what Jefferson called Hamilton’s “boldest act,” the “hue and cry” against the pact had been redirected onto its foes. To these tributes, Jefferson lauded what his adversary had been able to achieve: “Hamilton is really a colossus to the antirepublican party. Without numbers, he is an host within himself.”
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Jefferson encouraged Madison to take on Hamilton in the press. Though Madison demurred, he fought the treaty in the House of Representatives by attempting to block the appropriations needed to implement the accord. Jefferson neither criticized nor endorsed such a strategy, though in a sense he had encouraged Madison, telling him that the Federalists “have got themselves into a defile.”
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Jefferson reasoned that in time, when the public understood that the Jay Treaty imperiled France, opinion would turn against the act. Madison gambled on that premise, but lost. He stretched out the battle deep into the spring of 1796, but ultimately lost the contest when the House agreed by a three-vote margin to appropriate the funds.

During the nip-and-tuck battle, Washington had again encouraged Hamilton to “shew the impropriety” of Madison’s action. Hamilton immediately rushed out a broadside arguing that the House had no constitutional authority on the subject of treaties. The issue was stark: The “CONSTITUTION and PEACE are in one scale—the overthrow of the CONSTITUTION and WAR in the other.” Madison, he charged, was acting on behalf of a “VIRGINIA FACTION, constantly endeavoring” to plunge the United States into one of Europe’s “most dreadful Wars.” Jefferson and Madison thought that Washington’s foursquare support of the treaty had saved it, but with votes up for grabs even in New York’s delegation in the House, and the outcome razorthin, Hamilton’s last-ditch essay may have been no less crucial.
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The long battle over the Jay Treaty was important in another sense. To this point, neither the Federalists nor the Republicans were true political parties, but the life-and-death issues at stake in this foreign policy clash caused both to begin construction of what one historian has called “national policy machinery.”
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The emergence of something resembling modern political parties may have been about to occur anyway. Rumors abounded that Washington, who would turn sixty-five just as his second term ended, planned to step
down. If so, the election of 1796 would be the first real presidential election and party organization could be the difference between victory and defeat.

Washington was ready to go home. He was physically and emotionally exhausted, and enraged by the steady drumbeat of criticism in the press for his support of the Jay Treaty. He had also achieved everything he had set out to accomplish. The Union was intact, the once-sagging economy was doing well, and at last the West would be opening to a massive influx of settlers. The latter was due to the Jay Treaty and General Anthony Wayne’s victory over the Indians in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. But the West would also be opening because Spain, apprehensive that the Jay Treaty signaled an Anglo-American alliance, had agreed in the Pinckney Treaty in 1795 to open the Mississippi River and New Orleans to American commerce. (The treaty was the result of the mission to Madrid that Jefferson had declined in the summer of 1794.)

When Washington made up his mind to retire, he called on Hamilton one last time. While Hamilton was in Philadelphia in February 1796 to argue a case before the Supreme Court of the United States, Washington asked him to draft his Farewell Address.
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Hamilton not only knew how Washington thought; he also knew that he had often helped to shape the president’s thinking. In this instance, Hamilton prepared a carefully crafted valedictory address that highlighted what he knew to be on Washington’s mind, while at the same time advancing the interests of the Federalist Party in the looming presidential election, a contest that he believed the president hoped the Federalists would win. Washington altered the wording, if not the meaning, of some sections in the drafts presented to him, and he curtailed Hamilton’s verbosity and bombast, giving the speech a more statesmanlike sheen. Once the work was done, the president thanked Hamilton with uncustomary warmth, signing his final letter: “With true respect & attachment.” Washington issued the Farewell Address in September.

The final product of the Washington-Hamilton collaboration stressed the importance of the Union and the necessity of obeying the government. By branding dissenters as “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men” who threatened to “impair the energy of the system,” it included a thinly veiled defense of Hamilton’s fiscal program. It warned of the danger of foreign alliances and made a camouflaged appeal to the citizenry to overcome their enmity toward Great Britain.
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Republicans construed the address as unvarnished partisanship. They were sure it revealed that Washington was “completely in the snares” of the Federalist Party, as they put it. Furthermore, as Washington issued his “Adieu”—as Jefferson called it—six months before the end of his term, Republicans
also saw the Farewell Address as the Federalists’ first shot in the presidential election of 1796.
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Hamilton may have thought about running for president, and if so, it was likely a fleeting thought. He knew that New England believed its turn had come to have one of its own in the presidency, and Vice President John Adams was a New Englander. Besides, Adams had served long and well. He had spent three years in Congress, where he led the fight for independence, and almost a decade abroad as an American diplomat before his eight aimless years in the vice presidency. In the minds of many, Adams’s service made him Washington’s heir apparent. It was now or never for Adams, who was twenty years older than Hamilton, and New England wanted it to be now. So did Adams. The moment that Washington informed his cabinet that he planned to step down, Adams told his wife that he would be a candidate.
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Soon thereafter Adams wrote to Jefferson. It was unusual for Adams to write the Virginian, for their once-close relationship had been a casualty of political passions. When Jefferson became secretary of state, he and the Adamses had picked up where they had left off during their days in Europe. They socialized frequently, often arguing vehemently about politics, especially after Adams in 1790 published essays in which he appeared to defend monarchical government. Yet, not even those disagreements corroded their affection for each other. However, when a private letter written by Jefferson that criticized Adams was published, their relationship was sundered. Jefferson had complained about “the political heresies that have sprung up,” and it was clear that he was alluding to Adams, among others, as a republican heretic. Adams was outraged, Jefferson horrified. Adams felt betrayed. It was one thing for Jefferson to say something like that in private, but quite another for him to slander Adams behind his back. Jefferson tried to make amends. Adams would have none of it. Their friendship died.
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