The American Vice Presidency (6 page)

Jefferson, assuming more political direction of the pro-French Republicans than ever before, privately intervened, calling on the French
representative in Philadelphia to prolong the negotiations with the new American team. The French diplomat noted later that the vice president had reminded him of Adams’s situation: “He only became President by three votes, and the system of the United States will change along with him.” In other words, the trouble would be resolved with Jefferson’s election to the presidency the next time the American people went to the ballot box.
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In any event, the French Directory eventually refused to see the new American mission, and injury was added to insult when three secret agents known only as X, Y, and Z made outrageous stipulations as representatives of the French foreign minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord. They reported that negotiations could proceed only with the payment of $250,000 to Talleyrand, as well as a $1 million loan to France to make up for what the agents said were insults by Adams to their country.

The American negotiators flatly refused, and Adams pressed on in his further military buildup of fortifications at home and more warships at sea to confront marauding French vessels. While calling for these defensive measures, Adams kept the dispatches relating to the XYZ bribery effort secret. Jefferson thereupon accused Adams of warmongering and demanded that the papers be opened to congressional scrutiny. In what proved to be a major political blunder on Jefferson’s part, the Federalists responded by pushing a resolution through Congress ordering publication and wide distribution of the XYZ Papers.
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Their disclosure electrified the American public and greatly dampened the pro-French ardor that had been born of the French assistance to the American Revolution and heightened by the French Revolution. Federalist pressure for war against France soared, and in May 1798 Congress suspended the 1778 treaty with France. At Adams’s urging, it created the Navy Department to oversee shipbuilding and attacks on armed French ships. Adams called for tripling the size of the provisional army and the taxes to pay for it. Congress also approved an enlarged provisional army, and Adams persuaded General Washington to come out of retirement to lead it with the authority to choose his own staff.

As public furor over the XYZ Papers spilled out into street protests in Philadelphia and New York, Vice President Jefferson also was vexed by the notion of a standing army used to suppress domestic dissent. He was
disturbed, too, when Adams surprisingly emerged as a reborn national hero while steadfastly insisting he still sought a peaceful settlement with France. Shunted to the sidelines in the administration in which he marginally served, Jefferson filled the vacuum by working to subvert Adams’s initiatives, obviously with an eye on achieving victory over him in the 1800 presidential election, which had so narrowly eluded him in 1796.

The Federalist newspapers, meanwhile, jumped on Jefferson, one intoning editorially, “The Vice President—May his heart be purged of Gallicism in the pure fire of Federalism or be lost in the furnace,” and “John Adams—May he like Samson slay thousands of Frenchmen with the jawbone of Jefferson.”
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Also in the summer of 1798, news reached the president that his three-man commission to Paris had broken up, a disturbing development to Adams. Amid clamors in some quarters for a declaration of war, Adams diplomatically informed Paris, “I will never send another minister to France without assurances that he will be received, respected and honored as the representative of a great, free, powerful and independent nation.”
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With Adams subsequently drawing an assurance from Paris that his next envoy would be so welcomed, the clouds of war blew over, and in the next presidential election Jefferson was able to argue that the Federalists had favored war with France as the only way to retain control of the government. And then, on December 1, 1799, the sudden death of Washington at sixty-seven put aside all else in respectful mourning.

Meanwhile, in the summer of 1798, the high-riding Federalists had committed a major political blunder. They had pushed through Congress the infamous Alien and Sedition and Naturalization Acts, to which Adams had yielded. The first two laws empowered the president to deport any “dangerous” foreigner and to fine and imprison anyone for writing “false, scandalous and malicious” observations or for stirring up disorder or rebellion among the people and against the government. The third extended the residence requirement for citizenship from five to fourteen years, and the acts taken together were read by the Republicans as another Federalist effort to kill their infant party in its crib.
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The Jeffersonians were confident that the Naturalization Act, with its bias against British, Irish, and French Americans in direct contravention of the Bill of Rights, would drive immigrants into their new party, as would
the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson predicted that such assaults on basic constitutional guarantees of freedom would eventually backfire on their proponents. “A little patience,” he counseled, “and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolved, and the people recovering their true sight, restoring their government to its true principles.”
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Jefferson as a champion of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech was obviously appalled and retreated to Monticello to plot how to make the most of the Federalist actions. He condemned these blatant efforts to stifle political dissent, using them to recruit more support for the new party and to broadcast that the Federalists, with Hamilton still pulling the strings, were as determined as ever to impose a monarchical rule on the country.

Amid spreading domestic fears of disloyalty at home and objections to the new legislative acts of repression, Jefferson spent much of the next six months drafting and refining what came to be known as the Kentucky Resolutions, counters to the Alien and Sedition Acts. The resolutions insisted on the right of each state to nullify any act of the federal government it considered to be a violation of the Constitution. Madison at the same time authored the Virginia Resolutions to the same general purpose. In a letter to Madison, Jefferson almost sounded on the verge of leading a secession, warning that unless the public joined them in their stand, he was “determined, were we to be disappointed in this, to sever ourselves from the union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self-government.”
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The legislatures in Kentucky and Virginia passed the respective resolutions restating that powers not granted to the federal government were reserved to the states, which could reject laws passed by Congress if those legislatures deemed them unconstitutional. They became cornerstones of the Republicans’ creed as the party moved to wrest national power from the fading Federalists in the 1800 election.

About a month later, news reached America of another significant death—of the French Republic, with Napoleon Bonaparte declaring himself first consul at the age of thirty-three. The end of the French Revolution was a particular blow to Jefferson, its prime American champion, but Napoleon by now wanted no part of a distracting war with America. Jefferson was able to focus more intently now on a matter of even greater concern
and importance to him—his bid in the 1800 election to replace Adams in the president’s chair.

After years of partisan sparring between the Federalists and the Republicans, the battle lines were drawn. Adams, despite his cantankerous personality, generally eschewed direct public appeals and was not particularly known as a political brawler. Many of the oratorical punches he threw at rivals were in otherwise loving written exchanges with his highly political wife, Abigail, in perhaps American politics’ most engaging, long-running correspondence. Jefferson by contrast was notorious for waging verbal combat through others, such as the like-minded and cooperative political associate James Madison and the hired-gun propagandist James Callender, a vitriolic Britain-hater.

When Callender was out of work, Jefferson sent him money to carry him over, later deviously writing to James Monroe that his generosity had exceeded his good judgment. “As to myself, no man wished more to see his pen stopped; but I considered him still as a proper object of benevolence,” he told Monroe, adding about Callender’s view of the payments, “He considers these as proofs of my approbation of his writings, when they were mere charities, yielded under a strong conviction that he was injuring us by his writings.” At the same time, Jefferson urged Madison and Monroe to circulate pamphlets espousing the Republican cause, cautioning Monroe, “Do not let my name be connected with the business.”
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While ever professing his friendship toward Adams, Jefferson continued to bankroll Callender’s writing against the president whose office Jefferson now sought. He brushed aside Adams’s continued commitment to peace with France, encouraging Callender to cast the choice in the 1800 presidential campaign as either Adams and war or Jefferson and peace. Callender stooped to the vilest personal descriptions of Adams as “a gross hypocrite” and a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Jefferson, shown the galley proofs of Callender’s handiwork, told him they could “not fail to produce the best effects.”
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For his trouble, Jefferson’s hired gun was arrested in May of the election year for sedition, for inciting the public against the president, and received a sentence of seven months in jail.

Callender for his part, dissatisfied at one point with Jefferson’s payments,
later wrote in a Federalist newspaper in Richmond that Jefferson, then president, had for many years kept one of his slaves as a concubine. “By this wench Sally, our President has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and not a few who know it.… The
AFRICAN VENUS
is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.”
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The reference was to Sally Hemings, and the story spread, with Jefferson neither confirming nor denying it.

From the Federalist side, meanwhile, came a heavy assault on Jefferson for pro-French allegiance and allegations of atheism or of deism—accepting the existence of God without accepting his authority over all things. The Reverend William Linn of New York warned that Jefferson’s election would “destroy religion, introduce immorality, and loosen all the bonds of society.… The voice of the nation in calling a deist to the first office must be construed into no less than rebellion against God.”
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For a young nation that was said to have been born absent of parties, the affliction now was rampant once the unifying or at least the restraining of partisan passions by the dominant presence of George Washington had passed. As Abigail Adams observed, not only was the country’s politics in the grip of rival philosophical differences, but also a schism within the Federalist ranks threatened to bring about the first electoral defeat of an incumbent president. With sixteen states choosing presidential electors in 1800, state legislatures selected them in eleven and popular vote chose them in the other five. Again the double-balloting scheme that had been invented to frustrate voting for favorite sons in the several states enabled Hamilton to participate in another electoral fiasco of unintended consequences.

Southern party leaders decided on another Pinckney from South Carolina, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, recently the American minister to France, to run with Adams, ostensibly but not necessarily for vice president. Hamilton urged the Federalist electors in South Carolina, who would naturally cast one of their two presidential votes for Pinckney, to withhold the other from Adams and presumably give it to the fellow southerner Jefferson. If Federalists elsewhere voted for both Adams and Pinckney, Pinckney rather than Adams might be elected president.

While Hamilton thus went about his machinations, Jefferson was the clear choice of the Republicans, with Senator Aaron Burr of New York running with him for vice president. Burr, a New Jersey–born colonel
of distinction in the Revolutionary War, was chosen on the basis of his masterful political organizing work in New York City, which had assured the Empire State’s presidential electors for the Republicans. Adams had won New York in 1796, and the Jeffersonians knew they had to carry it this time around. When Hamilton, leading the Federalist effort for state legislative seats, ran a slate of loyal but lesser-known figures, Burr trumped him, recruiting such prominent Republicans as Governor George Clinton to run from New York City districts. Burr swept all city seats and the state’s electoral votes for Jefferson, all but assuring the Virginian’s election.

Subsequently, when the Republicans were to meet to determine their national ticket, there was no question Jefferson was to be the presidential nominee. Clinton was sounded out to be the vice presidential candidate but declined, recommending Burr, who was placed on the party’s ticket with the clear understanding he was to be its nominee for the second office.

Hamilton meanwhile remained determined that regardless of party fealty, Adams would not be returned to public office, preferring Jefferson to his fellow Federalist from Massachusetts. “If we must have an enemy at the head of government,” he wrote to party stalwart Thomas Sedgwick, “let it be one who we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace and foolish and bad measures. Under Adams, as under Jefferson, the government will sink.”
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Jefferson for his part was perfectly willing to leave it to Hamilton to divide the ranks of his own party. Abigail Adams wrote to son John Quincy: “The Jacobins are so gratified to see the Federalist split to pieces that they enjoy in Silence the game, whilst in the Southern States they combine to bring Mr. Jefferson in as president.”
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When Hamilton undertook a New England tour supposedly to say good-bye to members of the disbanding provisional army, he pressed Federalist leaders to get behind Pinckney’s candidacy. Abigail was not deceived, calling the trip “merely an electioneering business to feel the pulse of the New England states, and impress upon those upon whom he could have any influence to vote for Pinckney.” She predicted it would backfire on “the little cock sparrow general” and was right regarding the loyalty to Adams at home.
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