Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (25 page)

Jefferson marked his forty-seventh birthday in his first weeks in New York. One of the most celebrated Americans in the world, he was an unfamiliar figure to many of those who had come to the national stage during the five years he spent in Paris. William Maclay, a senator from Pennsylvania who was hostile to the administration, found Jefferson's demeanor surprising and rather disappointing. “He had a rambling, vacant look, and nothing of that firm, collected deportment which I expected would dignify the presence of a secretary or minister,” said Maclay. “I looked for gravity, but a laxity of manner seemed shed about him. He spoke almost without ceasing. But even his discourse partook of his personal demeanor. It was loose and rambling, and yet he scattered information wherever he went, and some even brilliant sentiments sparkled from him.”

Others saw him differently through the years. To the newspaper publisher Samuel Harrison Smith, he was “lofty and erect; his motions flexible and easy; neither remarkable for, nor deficient in grace; and such were his strength and agility.”

“His information was equally polite and profound, and his conversational powers capable of discussing moral questions of deepest seriousness, or the lighter themes of humor and fancy,” wrote an English traveler named John Bernard. “Nothing could be more simpler than his reasonings, nothing more picturesque and pointed than his descriptions. On all abstract subjects he was plainness—a veritable Quaker; but when conveying his views of human nature through [that] most attractive medium—anecdote—he displayed the grace and brilliance of a courtier.”

Jefferson believed in the politics of the personal relationship. “When the hour of dinner is approaching, sometimes it rains, sometimes it is too hot for a long walk, sometimes your business would make you wish to remain longer at your office or return there after dinner, and make it more eligible to take any sort of a dinner in town,” Jefferson wrote Henry Knox in July 1791. “Any day and every day that this would be the case you would make me supremely happy by messing with me, without ceremony or other question than whether I dine at home. The hour is from one quarter to three quarters after three, and, taking your chance as to fare, you will be sure to meet a sincere welcome.”

He saw himself as a political creature. Replying to a correspondent who questioned his anti-British tone in the
Notes on the State of Virginia,
Jefferson noted that those words dated from the war, but that Britain had done little to build constructive relations with her former colonies. “Perhaps their conduct and dispositions towards us since the war have not been as well calculated as they might have been to excite more favorable dispositions on our part,” Jefferson said in November 1790. “Still as a political man they shall never find any passion in me either for or against them. Whenever their avarice of commerce will let them meet us fairly halfway, I should meet them with satisfaction, because it would be for our benefit: but I mistake their character if they do this under present circumstances.”

T
hough he tried to make himself pleasant, Jefferson found New York politically uncomfortable. He suffered, he recalled, from “wonder and mortification” at the prevailing Federalist climate in governing circles.

On evenings out he believed himself “for the most part, the only advocate on the republican side of the question.” The quasi-regal air around the president—the levees and the bows, the enormous carriage with numerous horses—bothered Jefferson, who believed substance could follow style. A tilt toward the monarchical in form might, he feared, precede a move toward the autocratic in fact.

Further evidence for such conclusions could be found in the
Gazette of the United States,
published in New York by John Fenno. In a series of essays entitled
Discourses on Davila,
John Adams, writing pseudonymously, made the case that pure democracy was unnatural. “One question only shall be respectfully insinuated: whether equal laws, the result only of a balanced government, can ever be obtained and preferred without some signs or other of distinction and degree?” Adams continued: “We are told that our friends, the National Assembly of France, have abolished all distinctions. But be not deceived, my dear countrymen. Impossibilities cannot be performed. Have they leveled all fortunes, and equally divided all property? Have they made all men and women equally wise, elegant and beautiful?”

Worried about the implications of Adams's argument—that distinctions, possibly hereditary, were intrinsic and might prevail in the New World as well as the Old—Jefferson arranged for Fenno to publish a translation of a National Assembly address to the people: “The
Nation,
The
Law,
The
King
. The
Nation
is yourselves, the
Law
is still yourselves, it is your will: The
King
is the guardian of the
Law
.”

By urging Fenno to print translated excerpts from the
Gazette de Leide,
a reliably republican Dutch paper published in French, Jefferson was putting his own views in the pages that promulgated the Federalist line. By early August 1790 Fenno became entirely a creature of the Federalist faction, but for a brief time Jefferson was able to avail himself of the paper.

He was not fighting solely tactical battles. He was also thinking grandly. “I have but one system of ethics for men and for nations,” he wrote a French friend in April 1790. “To be grateful, to be faithful to all engagements and under all circumstances, to be open and generous, promotes in the long run even the interests of both: and I am sure it promotes their happiness.”

T
here was a late snow in New York in the last week of April 1790. Not long afterward, President Washington became so ill that he was thought to be dying. By early June, however, the president was well enough to take Jefferson along on a fishing trip off Sandy Hook, Long Island. (Jefferson, ever practical and optimistic, hoped any seasickness would “carry off the remains of my headache.”)

After he had returned from the fishing excursion, Jefferson ran into Alexander Hamilton near Washington's house one evening.

Born in 1755 on the British West Indian island of Nevis, Hamilton spent much of his early life on St. Croix. An illegitimate child, he was the son of a French Huguenot mother and a Scottish laird. His mother died when he was thirteen; he became a self-taught man, driven by ambition to overcome the obscurity of his origins. He clerked for a time and then, with the financial support of locals who sensed his potential, went to New York for schooling, ultimately enrolling at King's College (present-day Columbia University). Quick with his pen—he was a prolific essayist—he became a top aide to General Washington during the Revolution. He married into a powerful New York family, the Schuylers, and became a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. His father-in-law, Senator Philip Schuyler, was said to be “amazingly fond of the old leaven” of monarchism.

Hamilton favored a strong national government and to a degree sought to emulate the basic British financial and commercial systems. His was a rational and coherent vision of public life, and he believed his vision the best course for the United States. Skeptical about the durability of republican institutions based on broad suffrage and regular elections—as any student of history and human nature would be; there was nothing like America in the world—Hamilton was more open than Jefferson was to the adaptation of old-world features to American government. And Hamilton was willing to entertain the possibilities of a hereditary (or at least lifelong) presidency or Senate.

In a speech to the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton had spoken of a possible American monarch who would be “capable of resisting the popular current.” More immediately, Hamilton advocated a strong relationship with Britain, which, given the realities of the day, meant the United States would be a subordinate power to London.

Many (though not all) of Hamilton's views set him apart from Jefferson—and some of those views were so strongly expressed that Jefferson began to define himself in opposition to the Treasury secretary. Jefferson, for example, had long believed in, and fought for, a respected and effective national government. After his experience of the ancien régime in France, though, and given his anxiety about British designs on America, Jefferson found the discovery of a quasi-monarchical culture growing up around President Washington unsettling. Jefferson believed in a powerful
republican
government.

As the Washington administration unfolded, Jefferson came to see Hamilton as the embodiment of the deepest of republican fears: as a man who might be willing to sacrifice the American undertaking in liberty to the expediency of arbitrary authority. And Hamilton came to see Jefferson as a man who might be willing to throw everything the Americans had built to the revolutionary winds blowing from France. It was an extreme, overheated view of Hamilton (as of Jefferson), but it was a time of extreme and overheated views. Such was the political reality of the day, and Hamilton and Jefferson were politicians.

In later years, when passions had cooled, Jefferson acquired a bust of Hamilton and placed it opposite one of himself in the entrance hall at Monticello. According to the biographer Henry Randall, “The eye settled with a deeper interest on busts of Jefferson and Hamilton, by Ceracchi, placed on massive pedestals on each side of the main entrance—‘opposed in death as in life,' as the surviving original sometimes remarked, with a pensive smile, as he observed the notice they attracted.”

O
n this particular night in New York City in 1790, Jefferson found the Treasury secretary somber, haggard, and dejected beyond description,” Jefferson wrote. “Even his dress was uncouth and neglected.”

Hamilton had reason to be out of sorts. In his
Report on the Public Credit
in early 1790 (another followed at the end of the year), Hamilton had argued for a national financial system in which the central government would fund the national debt, assume responsibility for all state debts, and establish a national bank. Money for the federal government would be raised by tariffs on imports and excise taxes on distilled spirits.

Funding the debt—which basically meant the federal government would pay holders of federal securities their nominal (or face) value, which was higher than their original value—was controversial, for speculators had been purchasing those securities from the securities' initial holders for less than Hamilton was proposing to pay the current holders. A political and emotional complication was that many of the initial holders were Revolutionary veterans unaware that the paper they owned was about to be worth more. (They had often been paid for their services in Continental paper.) Shrewder speculators, Madison told Jefferson, were “exploring the interior and distant parts of the Union in order to take advantage of the ignorance of the holders.”

Despite these concerns, Hamilton carried the day on the federal purchase of the securities, successfully beginning to put the federal government in the center of the nation's financial system.

The second element of Hamilton's plan—the assumption of all the state debts by the federal government—would further secure the federal establishment's standing. The consolidation of debts at the federal level would create the need for federal taxes to pay down the debts, and the power to tax was, as ever, the most fundamental and far-reaching of all the powers of government, with the possible exception of the war-making power (which is actually also partly about taxes, since wars are so costly).

The assumption proposal, however, instantly divided the nation. Four states (Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland) had already been fiscally responsible and paid off much of their Revolutionary debts. Others (chiefly Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Connecticut) had not, and were therefore quite happy to send their bills to Hamilton in New York. The more fiscally responsible states believed that they would inevitably end up paying federal taxes to bail out their lagging neighbors.

On Monday, April 12, 1790, about three weeks after Jefferson's arrival in New York, the Madison-led forces in the House voted down federal assumption of state debts by three votes. It was a devastating defeat for the Treasury secretary.

The unkempt Hamilton that Jefferson met near the president's house needed allies. He asked for a word with his cabinet colleague, and the two men spoke in the street near Washington's door. Would Jefferson help Hamilton with the assumption issue? Without it, Hamilton believed the “continuance of the Union” was at risk.

Jefferson knew matters were dire. The Congress seemed paralyzed. “It was a real fact,” he said, “that the Eastern and Southern members … had got into the most extreme ill humor with one another,” leading to an atmosphere marked by “the most alarming heat [and] the bitterest animosities.”

Jefferson appreciated the need for unified action. Unlike many of his fellow Virginians, the secretary of state was not reflexively opposed to assumption. Those who were, though, wanted something in return for seeming to invest the northern part of the nation with even more financial power.

The location of the national capital offered some hope for a deal. New York was already the financial center of the nation, and the middle and southern states were eager to see the political seat of government elsewhere. Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Georgetown on the Potomac were candidates. There was also talk of Trenton, New Jersey, or a site along the Susquehanna River. “The Potomac stands a bad chance, and yet it is not impossible that in the vicissitudes of the business it may turn up in some form or other,” Madison wrote Monroe in June 1790.

As Jefferson listened to Hamilton, as he read correspondence from the South, and as he thought through the sundry issues at hand, he realized that perhaps, just perhaps, there was room for a compromise.