Joseph J. Ellis (34 page)

If the primary function of the collaboration within the Adams family was to insulate and eventually isolate Adams from the ideological warfare raging between both political parties, the primary function of the collaboration between Jefferson and Madison was to generate mutual reinforcement for their uncompromising assault on the presidency, frequently at the expense of even the most rudimentary version of factual accuracy. In their minds, the political stakes were enormous, the threat posed by the Federalists put the entire republican experiment at risk, the battle was to the death, and taking prisoners was not permitted. They convinced themselves that Adams was the enemy, and then all the evidence fell in place around that rock-ribbed, if highly questionable, conviction.

Jefferson’s nearly Herculean powers of self-denial also helped keep
the cause pure, at least in the privacy of his own mind. In 1798, he commissioned James Callender, a notorious scandalmonger who had recently broken the story on Hamilton’s adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds, to write a libelous attack on Adams. In
The Prospect Before Us
, Callender delivered the goods, describing Adams as “a hoary headed incendiary” who was equally determined on war with France and on declaring himself president for life, with John Quincy lurking in the background as his successor. When confronted with the charge that, despite his position as vice president, he had paid Callender to write diatribes against the president, Jefferson claimed to know nothing about it. Callender subsequently published Jefferson’s incriminating letters, proving his complicity, and Jefferson seemed genuinely surprised at the revelation, suggesting that for him the deepest secrets were not the ones he kept from his enemies but the ones he kept from himself.
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When Congress began the debates over the Sedition Act in the spring of 1798, Jefferson’s first fear was that it was aimed pointedly at him. He complained to James Monroe that “my name is running through all the city as detected in criminal correspondence with the French directory.” Editorials in Federalist newspapers accused him of passing information to the French government through pro-French agents in America and meeting routinely with Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the
Aurora
, the chief vehicle for the opposition. Jefferson privately acknowledged to Madison that these accusations were essentially true. Even though he was the second-ranking member of the Adams administration, he was, as the Federalist leadership in the House described him, “the very life and soul of the opposition.” Jefferson defended himself by claiming that his consultations with Bache were not clandestine meetings; he had met with Bache many times, true enough, but he was not, as the Federalists charged, “closeted” with him. More basically, Jefferson simply did not regard his behavior as seditious or treasonable. Indeed, it was the Federalist government, though duly elected, that was guilty of treason.
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Here was the core of the problem. Jefferson genuinely believed, and Madison reinforced the belief, that the Federalists had captured the government from the American people. Despite its electoral mandate, the programs and policies the Federalists were implementing at the national level—an expansive agenda for the federal government, a version
of neutrality that aligned the United States more with England than France—represented a repudiation of the spirit of ’76. The passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, then the creation of the New Army, only confirmed that the Federalist agenda violated the central tenets of the American Revolution, conjuring up memories of Parliament’s restrictions on the colonial press and British troops quartered in the major colonial cities. How could opposition to such measures be treasonable now when they had been legitimate expressions of American dissent back then?

The legal guidelines that might permit a clear answer to that question had not yet congealed. By modern standards Jefferson’s active role in promoting anti-Adams propaganda and his complicity in leaking information to pro-French enthusiasts like Bache were impeachable offenses that verged on treason. But then Hamilton had been guilty of similar indiscretions with pro-English advocates during the Jay’s Treaty negotiations. And his conduct in providing clandestine instructions to Adams’s cabinet undermined the constitutional authority of the executive branch in ways that would have landed him in jail in modern times. Only ten years after the passage and ratification of the Constitution, however, what were treasonable or seditious acts remained blurry and more problematic judgments without the historical sanction that only experience could provide. Lacking a consensus on what the American Revolution had intended and what the Constitution had settled, Federalists and Republicans alike were afloat in a sea of mutual accusations and partisan interpretations. The center could not hold because it did not exist.

The capstone of the Jefferson-Madison collaboration occurred at this volatile political moment—namely, their joint authorship of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. Jefferson visited Madison at Montpelier on July 2–3 to discuss their response to the Sedition Act, which passed the Senate the following day. (The Federalists, ironically, thought it was the perfect way to celebrate the Fourth of July.) They agreed to launch a pamphlet campaign against what Jefferson called “the reign of witches.” Working alone at Monticello, Jefferson composed what became known as the Kentucky Resolutions in August and September. His core argument was that the Sedition Act was unconstitutional because it violated the natural rights of the citizens of each state to control their own domestic affairs. Moreover, each state “has a
natural right in cases not within the compact”—that is, in all cases not specified as under federal jurisdiction in the Constitution—“to nullify of their own authority all assumptions of power by others within their limits.” Here was the classic states’ rights position, topped off by the sweeping claim that federal laws could be nullified by the states, which then had a legitimate right to secede, what Jefferson called “scission,” if the federal Congress or courts defied their decision. If the Sedition Act was a serious threat to civil liberties, Jefferson’s response was an equally serious threat to the sovereignty of the national government and the survival of the union.
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Fortunately for Jefferson, the leadership of the Kentucky legislature decided to delete the sections of his draft endorsing nullification, presumably because such open defiance of federal law seemed excessive and unnecessarily risky. Madison’s more judicious arguments, published as the Virginia Resolutions, were circulating in the national press and achieving the same goal—condemning the Sedition Act—but without recourse to nullification. In fact, the Virginia Resolutions described the Alien and Sedition Acts as “alarming infractions” of the Constitution that violated the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment. Instead of challenging the authority of the federal government, Madison invoked the protections afforded by that very government, implicitly suggesting that the federal courts and not the individual states were the ultimate arbiters of the Constitution. Whereas Jefferson’s line of thought led logically to the compact theory of the Constitution eventually embraced by the Confederacy in 1861, Madison’s arguments led toward the modern doctrine of judicial review and constitutional guarantees for free speech and freedom of the press.
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When Madison wrote or spoke on constitutional questions, Jefferson always deferred. To Republican confidants in Virginia, he reiterated his conviction that “the true principles of our federal compact” left the states sovereign over all domestic policy; if Congress failed to rescind the Sedition Act, “we should sever ourselves from that union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self government which we have reserved.” After a personal visit from Madison in September of 1799, however, Jefferson agreed to soften his stance on secession, “not only in deference to his judgment,” as he put it, “but because we should never think of separation but for respected and enormous
violations”—or, as he had previously written in the Declaration of Independence, after “a long train of abuses.” Madison’s prudent and silent intervention rescued Jefferson from the secessionist implications of his revolutionary principles and artfully concealed the huge discrepancy between their respective views of the Constitution. The imperatives of their collaboration, plus the need to present a united front against the Federalists, took precedence over their incompatible notions of where sovereignty resided in the American republic.
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T
HERE ARE
only a few universal laws of political life, but one of them guided the Republicans during the last year of the Adams presidency—namely, never interfere when your enemies are busily engaged in flagrant acts of self-destruction. As soon as the Federalists launched their prosecutions of Republican editors and writers under the Sedition Act—a total of eighteen indictments were filed—it became clear that the prosecutions were generally regarded as persecutions. Most of the defendants became local heroes and public martyrs. Madison quickly concluded that “our public malady may work its own cure,” meaning that the spectacle of Federalist lawyers descending upon the Republican opposition with such blatantly partisan accusations only served to create converts to the cause they were attempting to silence. The threatened prosecution of aliens also backfired on the Federalists, when Irish immigrants in New York and Germans in Pennsylvania, formerly staunch supporters of the Adams administration, went over to the Republicans in droves.
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What Jefferson had described as “the reign of witches” even began to assume the shape of a political comedy in which the joke was on the Federalists. In New Jersey, for example, when a drunken Republican editor was charged with making a ribald reference to the president’s posterior, the jury returned a not guilty verdict on the grounds that truth was a legitimate defense. There was even room for irony. It was while James Callender was serving his sentence for libel in a Richmond jail that he first heard rumors of Jefferson’s sexual liaison with a mulatto slave named Sally Hemings. He subsequently published the story after deciding that Jefferson had failed to pay him adequately for his hatchet job on Adams.
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But this delectable morsel of scandal, which was only confirmed as
correct beyond any reasonable doubt by DNA studies done in 1998, did not arrive in time to help Adams in the presidential election of 1800. Indeed, Adams’s string of bad luck or poor timing, call it what you will, persisted to the end. The peace delegation he dispatched to France so single-handedly negotiated a treaty ending the “quasi-war,” but the good news arrived too late to influence the election. Moreover, the New Army, which Adams had opposed and then rendered superfluous, had strained the federal budget to a point that demanded new sources of revenue. Even as the army was being disbanded, much to Adams’s credit and relief, the cost of raising it landed on the voting public. Adams had somehow managed to miss the political rewards due him and catch the criticism that properly belonged to others.

Abigail’s earlier characterization of the Adams-Jefferson competition—the oak versus the willow—proved prophetic. Perhaps the supreme example of Jefferson’s greater flexibility occurred on the foreign policy front. Throughout the Adams presidency, Jefferson and his Republican followers had been insisting that the French Revolution was the American Revolution on European soil and that France was therefore America’s major international ally. But when Napoleon overturned the French Republic and declared himself omnipotent military dictator, again just as Adams had predicted would happen, Jefferson quickly shifted his position to accommodate the new reality. “It is very material for the … [American people] to be made sensible that their own character and situation are materially different from the French,” he observed in 1800, “and that whatever may be the fate of republicanism there, we are able to preserve it inviolate here.” This was precisely the neutral foreign policy that both Washington and Adams had been urging for a decade and that Jefferson had condemned as a betrayal of the spirit of ’76. Jefferson’s conversion occurred with such breathtaking speed that hardly anyone noticed how deftly he was discarding the chief weapon the Republicans had wielded against two Federalist administrations. That weapon was unnecessary now, as both Jefferson and Madison understood, because the superior organization of the Republicans at the state level virtually assured their victory in the looming presidential election.
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Given this formidable array of bad luck, poor timing, and the highly focused political strategy of his Republican enemies, Adams actually did surprisingly well when all the votes were counted. He ran
ahead of the Federalist candidates for Congress, who were swept from office in a Republican landslide. Outside of New York, he even won more electoral votes than he had in 1796. But thanks in great part to the deft political maneuverings of Aaron Burr, all twelve of New York’s electoral votes went to Jefferson. As early as May of 1800, Abigail, the designated vote counter on the Adams team, had predicted that “New York will be the balance in the scaile, skaill, scaill (is it right now? it does not look so.)” Though she did not know how to spell
scale
, she knew where the election would be decided. In the final tally, her husband lost to the tandem of Jefferson and Burr, 73 to 65.
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Though it probably occurred too late to have much, if any, bearing on the results, the most dramatic event of the campaign was provided by Hamilton. In October he wrote and privately printed a fifty-four-page pamphlet assailing the character of Adams, describing him as an inherently unstable creature, a man driven by vanity and his own perverse version of independence, a pathetic bundle of twitches and tantrums who was “unfit for the office of chief Magistrate.” Adams responded with uncharacteristic calmness to this personal vendetta. “I am confident,” he observed, “that it will do him more harm than me.” He was right. Coming too late to affect many voters, Hamilton’s diatribe exposed the deep rift within the Federalist camp for all to see and suggested to most readers that Hamilton himself was out of his mind. In political terms, the Hamilton pamphlet was fully as fatal, and perhaps suicidal, as his subsequent decision to face Aaron Burr on the plains of Weehawken. His reputation never recovered.
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