Madison and Jefferson (67 page)

Contrary to subsequent histories, which were too accepting of secondhand gossip, neither Madison nor Jefferson suspected Vice President–designate Aaron Burr of bad behavior. The Federalist press in Washington
urged congressmen, in rather stark terms, to choose Burr over Jefferson: “Col. Burr is not a Virginian. This is a reason of primary importance.” Besides, the article read, he was “a person of a cool, clear head,” not a “professed deist; nor a scoffer at religion.” To this, a hopeful scenario was added: “Col. Burr has been abused by no party, and stands committed to no party.” Committed to no party? Though entirely unsubstantiated, many a desperate Federalist bought into this notion, and many subsequent historians have deemed it credible too.
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Burr stayed away from Washington, where he might have embroiled himself in the election controversy and subverted the intended order, had he chosen to do so. He remained in close touch with Jefferson and Gallatin, resenting the impertinence of the more distrustful Republicans whose fears of a Federalist “usurpation” led them to suspect the worst of him. No firm evidence exists to prove that either Burr or Jefferson made any meaningful promises to any Federalist electors. As a result, the House Federalists ultimately surrendered the presidency to Jefferson on the thirty-sixth ballot.
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John Page, a congressman from Tidewater Virginia through most of the turbulence of the 1790s, had been Jefferson’s close friend since their late teens. He identified the offenders in the House of Representatives as “the insolent faction” and recited a long train of abuses of power by Federalists in Congress. He included in the list “their utter Contempt of the Opinions & Wishes of the People,” which was causing even “their best Friends” to “give them up to the Censure they deserve.” Convinced that the “Friends of Man throughout the World will hate them,” Page projected his wish that “in their eagerness to grasp at the Shadow [they] have lost the Substance. Their Power & Influence is gone forever.” Honoring “the Commencement of a new Aera,” as many other Republican enthusiasts would, he signed off the letter to his old college chum with a fanciful gesture, if not a Frenchified wish: “Health & Fraternity.”
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An English visitor to the new national capital as it existed in Jefferson’s first term described its “dreary” atmosphere: “There were no objects to catch the eye, but a forlorn pilgrim forcing his way through the grass that overruns the streets.” He was not the only one to write of the rudeness of Washington, D.C., but if we accept that a certain amount of literary license is taken with these words, we should read the same into his fascination with the U.S. Capitol, “rising with sacred majesty above the woods,” which he viewed from a sailing vessel on the Potomac.
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Madison was unable to come to Washington for Jefferson’s March 4 inauguration.
His father died in late February, at the age of seventy-seven, and he was executor of the estate. Though he had to tend to his sixty-eight-year-old mother, Madison himself was in ill health, referring nonspecifically to “several complaints” when he wrote to Jefferson. Burr arrived in the national capital on March 1, and in thanking the citizens who gathered to welcome him, he affirmed: “No person could have supposed that I would have stepped in between the wishes of the people and the man whom they have looked up to.”

The new order was slow in getting under way. Albert Gallatin, whose mere presence on the scene had irked Federalists for the better part of a decade, was within reach. He was to hold only an interim appointment as secretary of the treasury until the Republican-led Congress finally met and approved him. Personally incorruptible and opposed to the culture of public debt and speculative risk, Gallatin would go on to serve with distinction in the cabinets of both Jefferson and Madison, reducing government expenditures and improving efficiency. This would be done to the detriment of the War and Navy departments, where the most obvious cuts were to be made. Gallatin was, after Madison, Jefferson’s most influential adviser in Washington.
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With little fanfare, Madison’s name was safely given to Congress the day after the inauguration. Despite the fact that Madison had never left American shores, the president could not conceive that anyone would question his choice for secretary of state, and indeed, unanimous approval was given. The same was true with his nominations for secretary of war and attorney general. The first of these was Henry Dearborn of Maine, a farmer by birth, physician by training, and a Revolutionary officer who had taken part in key battles from Bunker Hill to Yorktown; the second, Levi Lincoln of Massachusetts, was a Harvard graduate and an early convert to the political perspective of Madison and Jefferson. Until Madison took up his post, Lincoln served as acting secretary of state as well as attorney general.
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Jefferson did not move from the boardinghouse on Capitol Hill into the large, but largely vacant, President’s House on Pennsylvania Avenue until he had been in office two weeks. He engaged Captain Meriwether Lewis, a twenty-seven-year-old from Albemarle, as his private secretary. The president’s salary of $25,000 was quite ample, but Jefferson applied a good portion of it to the support of his French steward, French chef, and other staff. Jefferson’s noted love of good wines extended his financial outlay, while providing guests with stories of his epicurean table. The inauguration itself was a more modest affair than the first two presidents’ had been. This was
a symbol of change in keeping with Jefferson’s anti-aristocratic principles. John Adams did not stay in town for the ceremony. He and his wife left before dawn, riding north into a less-than-ideal retirement.
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The third president was sworn in by Chief Justice Marshall, who that very day paid Jefferson a backhanded compliment in a letter to the disappointed candidate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney: “The democrats are divided into speculative theorists and absolute terrorists,” he wrote. “With the latter I am
not
disposed to class Mr. Jefferson.”
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Marshall had honed his political skills before his appointment to the High Court, and Jefferson did not know how to neutralize him. As a result, Marshall would occupy the spot on Jefferson’s enemies list that Patrick Henry and Alexander Hamilton had held before. With Henry entombed and Hamilton ineffectual, Marshall had taken their place. He was a Virginian who possessed the kind of popularity that could threaten the Republican mission, and he had no second thoughts about flexing his legal muscle.

President Jefferson would have to contest men younger than himself who did not subscribe to older models of deference. Yet whatever bitterness he felt concerning his predecessor’s appointments, he did not show it in (to draw on Marshall’s phrasing) the theoretical speculation contained in his cheerful, stirring, almost sermonic inaugural address.

On March 4, 1801, the incoming president carried on his person an address that had gone through several drafts. The House chamber was still unfinished, though the Capitol’s physical incompleteness did not detract from the dignity of the occasion. With gravity, and in a small voice, Jefferson read to a full Senate chamber that contained members of both sexes.

“Friends and Fellow Citizens,” he saluted, exalting his country as a “rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land … advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.” As many before have argued, the first inaugural was Jefferson’s most eloquent public address. With hope and the promise of forgiveness, he proposed to his countrymen: “Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.” Alluding to both the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the Alien and Sedition Acts, he continued: “And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet
gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.” But then he softened his language again: “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans: we are all federalists.”
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The message of political toleration and social harmony was a hypnotic suggestion meant to bring about Jefferson’s therapeutic solution to the diseased imagination of the pathological decade. It recalled the imagery of 1776, when the union of the states was depicted as thirteen clocks that chimed together and thirteen hearts that beat as one.
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Much in the way that his 1786 “Head and Heart” letter to Maria Cosway made friendship and commitment a visceral matter by invoking “generous spasms of the heart,” his inaugural sentiments bespoke a kind of manic compassion, an inventive altruism, by ignoring the fact that the emerging two-party system had up to that point made political cooperation impossible.

This was Jefferson at his best. With a lyrical energy that none of his contemporaries could even try to imitate, he relegated the “agonizing spasms of infuriated man” to the “throes and convulsions of the ancient world.” In saying this, he gave a kind of presidential blessing over a hopeful new world poised for change, for humane progress.

If we are to believe that Jefferson’s offer was legitimate, “We are all republicans: we are all federalists” was the high point of his optimism and his fondest vision for a democratic republic. These were not words that Madison would have uttered, because Madison did not recur to the kinds of rhetorical constructions Jefferson found irresistible; nor did he believe that such a healing could take place. Madison’s influence is absent from this production; he was, it appears, too preoccupied with family matters at the time to restrain the prose of the incoming president. Madison did not dream as Jefferson did, and Madison would not have declared, as Jefferson did in a letter of 1819, that his election symbolized a revolution—“the Revolution of 1800”—as real as that of 1776 had been.

As the inaugural address returned to like themes, the third president enlarged on his America, “the world’s best hope …, the strongest government on earth,” “a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” For the sake of promoting harmony, uplifting images eclipsed any and all suggestions of a specific policy direction. Still, it was the effusive appeal of “We are all republicans …” that readers of his speech focused on most intently, then as now. It was an offering, an olive branch after nearly ten years of an interparty communication
breakdown—a decade of “agonizing spasms,” crowned with spite and satire.

These outpourings do not quite reveal what was in the politician’s head. Jefferson was anticipating improved conditions that would take place over a number of years, once the bitterest Federalists, an illegitimate, unrepresentative ruling group, were dethroned, and moderate Federalists, as a political minority, accepted a kinder and gentler oppositional arrangement until they ultimately merged with the Republicans. His unrelenting, long-term political strategy of eliminating all vestiges of monocracy and toryism—the extreme, minority element among those who identified themselves as Federalists—was disguised in his inaugural address as a mellow retreat from politics as usual. When the new order he envisioned came to be, the election of 1800 would stand as a testament to national redemption after a time of national delusion. The Republicans’ triumph meant that America was being restored to its first principles.
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But none of this was apparent as citizens found themselves focusing on the attention-getting phrase “We are all republicans: we are all federalists.” Jefferson’s clever composition worked not because it was original or visionary but because it was an easy concept for people to relate to who had been weaned on models of enlightened humanity in a colonial setting. Precisely one century earlier, in 1701, William Penn concluded a momentous agreement with the Conestoga tribe and declared that relations between his people and theirs would henceforth be governed by something even greater than filial affection. As the following generation of Indians remembered it, Governor Penn said that he would reckon whites and Indians as “one Body, one Blood, one Heart, and one Head.” At a council in Philadelphia, another Indian speaker qualified shortly thereafter, “William Penn said, We must all be one half Indian & the other half English, being as one Flesh & one Blood under one Head.” Peace between the cultures lasted for six decades, until white Pennsylvanians massacred the head-and-heart metaphor when they dispatched the Conestoga tribe. But for the white Pennsylvanians of 1801, the lesson drawn from history was that harmony was worth striving for.
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Additionally, both Penn and Jefferson were using the “one flesh” metaphor, a biblical allusion to marital accord and productivity. As he had done in the Declaration of Independence and in his original version of the Kentucky Resolutions, Jefferson again found a matrimonial parallel to help him redefine the body politic. The Federalists could join under the Republican banner, strengthening the country by bringing harmony. Doing
so would produce “descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” This theme of fertility corresponded easily with Jefferson’s bucolic vision of a future America, expansive and fruitful, no longer held back by partisan divisions, a nation in which kinship gradually supplanted the artificial boundaries that faction sustained.

A week after the inauguration, his old friend Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia excitedly praised the new president: “It would require a page to contain the names of all the citizens (formerly called Federalists) who have spoken in the highest terms of your speech.” Another who appreciated the gesture was Henry Knox, secretary of war when Jefferson was secretary of state, who wrote graciously from Boston: “I cannot refrain from expressing to you, the heart felt satisfaction I have experienced in perusing your address … The just manner in which you appreciate the motives of the two parties, which have divided the opinions, and which sometimes have seemed to threaten to divide the territory and government of the Country … evince conspicuously, at one view, your intelligence patriotism and magnanimity.” He made a point of telling Jefferson that he had preferred Adams for a second term; but he accepted Jefferson’s words as literal and wished him “a richly merited reward, similar to that bestowed by a grateful people on the much loved Washington.”
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