Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (28 page)

The president and the secretary of state disagreed anew on the scope of the threat of monarchy. Washington said that he “did not believe there were ten men in the U.S. whose opinions were worth attention who entertained such a thought.” Jefferson replied that “there were many more than he imagined.… I told him that though the people were sound, there was a numerous sect who had monarchy in contemplation. That the Secretary of the Treasury was one of these. That I had heard him say that this constitution was a shilly shally thing of mere milk and water which could not last, and was only good as a step to something better.” Soon breakfast ended the conversation.

Washington took a sensible view of the conflict between his top two lieutenants. “For I will frankly and solemnly declare that I believe the views of both of you are pure, and well-meant; and that experience alone will decide with respect to the salubrity of the measures which are the subjects of dispute,” he wrote Jefferson on Thursday, October 18, 1792. It was an understandable way for a president, who saw the whole picture, to frame the issue.

“Why, then,” Washington continued, “when some of the best citizens in the United States—men of discernment—uniform and tried patriots, who have no sinister views to promote, but are chaste in their ways of thinking and acting are to be found, some on one side, and some on the other of the questions which have caused these agitations, should either of you be so tenacious of your opinions as to make no allowances for those of the other?”

A
t the same time he was dealing with Jefferson and Hamilton, Washington worried about rebellion in western Pennsylvania over the excise tax. Opposition in the region, he told Jefferson, was now “too open, violent and serious to be longer winked at by the government without prostrating its authority and involving the executive in censurable inattention to the outrages which are threatened.” Particularly anxious about the resistance to this tax on distilled spirits, Hamilton drafted a harsh proclamation to be issued by the president. Washington took care to include Jefferson in the consultations and won the secretary of state's signature on the document. The president wanted the appearance of a unified administration, even if it were, in fact, an administration at war with itself.

Jefferson may have been exaggerating the threat of monarchy, but he was not inventing it. “Should Congress adopt a Prince of the House of Brunswick for their future President or King, the happiness of the two nations would be interwoven and united—all jealousies removed and the most durable affections cemented that perhaps ever were formed between two independent nations,” the lieutenant governor of Canada, John Graves Simcoe, wrote in August 1792—the same season in which Washington was securing Jefferson's endorsement of the excise-tax proclamation. “This is an object worthy [of] the attention of Great Britain and which many of the most temperate men of the United States have in contemplation. And which many events, if once systematically begun, may hasten and bring to maturity.” Jefferson's friends fed such fears. One reported an after-dinner conversation with Hamilton in which the Treasury secretary said, “there was no stability, no security, in any kind of government but a monarchy.”

Hamilton had other worries as well. In late 1792 there were revelations of an affair between Hamilton and a married woman, Maria Reynolds, whose husband, James, colluded in the seduction of the Treasury secretary—a seduction which, by Hamilton's own account, was not difficult. The couple blackmailed Hamilton, and word of the affair, embellished by rumors of financial impropriety, led a delegation of lawmakers to investigate. They found Hamilton guilty of adultery but nothing else.

I
n early 1793, Congressman William Branch Giles of Virginia introduced resolutions designed to force Hamilton to explain something more important than his private life. Giles wanted to hear more about the Treasury's fiscal policies.

Viewed by Federalists as a partisan attack on Hamilton allegedly orchestrated by the Virginian Republican interest—including Jefferson—the resolutions burned intensely but quickly as a political issue. One draft attributed to Jefferson concluded dramatically: “
Resolved,
That the Secretary of the Treasury has been guilty of maladministration in the duties of his office, and should, in the opinion of Congress, be removed from his office by the President of the United States.” The final submission to the House by Giles did not include a call for Hamilton's dismissal, and even the somewhat milder resolutions failed to pass.

Jefferson let his frustration show only in private. In March 1793, in a note about Giles's resolutions, he wrote that Giles “and one or two others were sanguine enough to believe that the palpableness of these resolutions rendered it impossible the House could reject them.”

It was not a surprise, Jefferson said, to those, like him, who were more familiar with a House he believed made up of:

1. Of bank directors.

2. Holders of bank stock.

3. Stock jobbers.

4. Blind devotees.

5. ignorant persons who did not comprehend [the resolutions].

6. Lazy and good humored persons, who comprehended and acknowledged them, yet were too lazy to examine, or unwilling to pronounce censure.

Despite the legislative defeat, Jefferson thought perhaps the episode would play well for the Republican interest. “The public will see from this the extent of their danger,” he said. Or so Jefferson hoped.

I
n the end, Washington had consented to reelection to the presidency, and Jefferson agreed to stay on in office for a time. Under assault in the papers, Jefferson hated to think that people might believe he was driven from office. His pride was too great for that. He would remain at his post until “those who troubled the waters before” withdrew. “When they suffer them to get calm,” Jefferson said, “I will go into port.”

Reports of rising violence in France grew from the autumn of 1792, reaching a historic height with the September 1793 declaration of the Reign of Terror by revolutionaries determined to slaughter those they viewed as enemies of the cause. The seemingly endless bloodshed gave fresh strength to the pro-British forces in America.

Support for the French Revolution had once been a unifying factor in American politics. “We were all strongly attached to France—scarcely any man more strongly than myself,” recalled John Marshall. “I sincerely believed human liberty to depend in a great measure on the success of the French Revolution.” Despite some Federalist misgivings from the start, common wisdom held that the French struggle for liberty was of a piece with the American Revolution. From the autumn of 1792 forward, though, as the French Revolution became ever bloodier, American opinion came to be divided—especially after extremists fomented ever-deadlier riots and purges, drove Lafayette abroad, and took Louis XVI to the scaffold in January 1793.

Jefferson's reaction to the events in Paris was complicated. He lost friends to the guillotine. After being driven from his homeland, Lafayette spent five years in captivity in Europe, the prisoner of Austrian and Prussian powers. Yet Jefferson saw the disturbances in France in the context of the larger contest between republicanism and absolutism he believed defined the age. “In the struggle which was necessary, many guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent,” he wrote William Short on Thursday, January 3, 1793. He continued:

These I deplore as much as anybody, and shall deplore some of them to the day of my death. But I deplore them as I should have done had they fallen in battle.… The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is. I have expressed to you my sentiments, because they are really those of 99 of a hundred of our citizens.

The passage's hyperbole is partly rooted in the symbolic role France continued to play in American politics. To Jefferson, to be for the French Revolution was to be a republican and friend to liberty; to be against it, or to have reservations about it, was to be a monarchist and a traitor to freedom.

This was not a radical interpretation of current political sentiment. As late as Tuesday, January 29, 1793, pro-French organizers in Boston announced plans for a rally in support of the revolutionaries, noting that “a number of citizens anxious to celebrate the success of our Allies, the French, in their present glorious struggles for liberty and equality … have agreed to provide an ox, with suitable liquors.”

In February 1793, Washington approached Jefferson with a new thought. Would he consider returning to Paris for a year or two to represent American interests there? Jefferson refused.

Washington's reply was pointed. Jefferson, he said, “had pressed him to a continuance in public service and [now] refused to do the same myself.”

Jefferson struck back with a determination masked, if thinly, by flattery and modesty. “I said the case was very different: he united the confidence of all America, and was the only person who did so: his services were therefore of the last importance: but for myself my going out would not be noted or known, a thousand others could supply my place to equal advantage. Therefore I felt myself free.”

In retreat, Washington coolly asked Jefferson “to consider maturely what arrangement should be made.” There the matter closed.

Jefferson had secured the fulfillment of his own wishes over those of the most popular and powerful man in the nation. He had done so with a mixture of politeness and pragmatism, praising Washington while noting that he could manage the affairs of the hour better in America than in France—a compelling argument.

It was not an easy thing to do, to defy George Washington, but Jefferson's subtlety enabled him to assert his own will against that of the president in such a seemingly gracious way that Washington was unable to counterattack. The moment illuminates the political Jefferson—a man who got his way quietly but unmistakably, without bluster or bombast, his words congenial but his will unwavering.

TWENTY
-
SIX

THE END OF A STORMY TOUR

I feel for your situation but you must bear it. Every consideration private as well as public requires a further sacrifice of your longings for the repose of Monticello.

—J
AMES
M
ADISON
to Thomas Jefferson

T
HE
PLANTATION
WAS
CALLED
Bizarre. Home to Richard Randolph—a distant Jefferson cousin, inevitably—the estate on the Appomattox River in Cumberland County, Virginia, was the center of intense speculation and scandal in 1792–93 after a brutal and disturbing episode that tested even Jefferson's outward equanimity.

The unmarried Ann Cary Randolph, a sister of Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. (and thus Jefferson's daughter Patsy's sister-in-law), was apparently impregnated by her brother-in-law, Richard Randolph. Ann, called Nancy, delivered the baby (though she may have suffered a miscarriage), while on a visit to a neighboring plantation with her brother-in-law and her sister. The dead infant was taken outdoors; no corpse was ever found. The story was so mysterious and tantalizing that it rapidly spread, leading to a trial at which Richard Randolph was defended by lawyers that included John Marshall and Patrick Henry.

For Jefferson, the violence in Virginia was an occasion to think about the harmony so little in evidence in the capital. Urging Patsy to be generous of spirit with their besieged kin, he wrote: “Never throw off the best affections of nature in the moment when they become most precious to their object; nor fear to extend your hand to save another, lest you should sink yourself.” He believed in the virtues of civility, understanding that they were the most required when they were the least convenient. Jefferson faced such tests of harmony every hour in Philadelphia.

A
s Washington's second inauguration approached, the national experiment still felt provisional. In a small session to discuss the ceremonies for the president's swearing-in, Henry Knox's anxiety led to an outburst. “In the course of our conversation Knox, stickling for parade, got into great warmth and swore that our government must either be entirely new modeled or it would be knocked to pieces in less than 10 years,” Jefferson wrote, “and that as it is at present he would not give a copper for it, that it is the President's character, and not the written constitution, which keeps it together.”

In a letter he never sent, Robert R. Livingston of New York wrote that he hoped Jefferson would not resign amid the attacks of 1792–93. Jefferson, Livingston said, should not “suffer yourself in appearance to be drummed out of the regiment and that too when there is every reasonable ground to hope that upon the first vacancy you will be promoted to the command of the troops.” He referred, too, to Jefferson's position in Washington's cabinet as a “post in an enemies' country.”

The war between Hamilton and Jefferson was unending. In September 1792, in the
Gazette of the United States,
Hamilton wrote: “Mr. Jefferson [is]
 … 
distinguished as the quiet, modest, retiring philosopher—as the plain, simple, unambitious republican. He shall not now for the first time be regarded as the intriguing incendiary—the aspiring turbulent competitor.”

In late 1792, Jefferson moved out of the city of Philadelphia to a house on the Schuylkill River. He was hungry for news of home. “From Monticello you have everything to write about which I have any care,” he told his family. “How do my young chestnut trees? How comes on your garden? How fare the fruit blossoms etc.”

Thoughts of Monticello were a relief from the strain of a life in which Jefferson was often out of sync with Washington, Adams, and Hamilton. A small instance: Jefferson had used the phrase “our republic” in letters drafted for Washington's signature (as in, “your Min. plen. to our republic”).

According to Jefferson, Washington told him that “certainly ours was a republican government, but yet we had not used that style in this way: that if anybody wanted to change its form into a monarchy he was sure it was only a few individuals, and that no man in the U.S. would set his face against it more than himself: but that this was not what he was afraid of: his fears were from another quarter, that there was more danger of anarchy being introduced.”

Washington was out of sorts in any event. “Knox told some little stories to aggravate the Pr[esident],” Jefferson recalled. “To wit, that Mr. King had told him, that a lady had told him, that she had heard a gentleman say that the Pr. was as great a tyrant as any of them and that it would soon be time to chase him out of the city.”

Jefferson believed the Hamiltonians were drafting excessively critical articles about Washington in the voice of Republicans in order to alienate the president and “make him believe it was that party who were his enemies, and so throw him entirely into the scale of the monocrats.”

With Jefferson, Washington also alluded to a Freneau newspaper piece he disliked. “He was evidently sore and warm,” Jefferson wrote, “and I took his intention to be that I should interpose in some way with Freneau, perhaps withdraw his appointment of translating clerk to my office, but I will not do it: his paper has saved our constitution which was galloping fast into monarchy.”

Jefferson would not submit. In this battle of wills, the secretary of state, as usual, refused to give way.

T
he wars of the Old World were once again a subject of concern for the New in the first half of 1793. On February 1, eleven days after the execution of Louis XVI, the French Republic declared war on Britain. Washington was determined to declare the United States' neutrality in the conflict. Jefferson disliked the draft of the proclamation, which he found Hamiltonian and pro-British.

The Neutrality Proclamation also raised some Republican questions about an overreaching executive. “It has been asked also,” Madison wrote Jefferson, “whether the authority of the Executive extended by any part of the Constitution to a declaration of the disposition of the U.S. on the subject of war and peace? … The right to decide the question … [of] war or peace … [is] vested in the Legislature.”

Was Washington acting too kingly? James Monroe thought the proclamation “unconstitutional and improper.”

The president was sensitive about the questions over neutrality, noting at a November cabinet meeting that he had used it in a draft of a document and “we had not objected to the term.” After dinner Washington remained sour. “Other questions and answers were put and answered in a quicker altercation than I ever before saw the President use,” Jefferson recalled.

Washington was tired of the strife of governing. In November 1793, the cabinet debated whether the president should propose the creation of a military academy. No, Washington decided, for “though it would be a good thing, he did not wish to bring on anything which might generate heat and ill humor.”

Both heat and ill humor were at hand in the prospect of a visit from an envoy from France, Edmond-Charles Genet. Hamilton questioned whether the Frenchman should be officially received, raising what Jefferson called “lengthy considerations of doubt and difficulty.”

Jefferson hoped an enthusiastic public reception would demonstrate broad support for France. Instead, Genet was a disaster, insulting Washington and making himself generally obnoxious. It was, however, more than a question of personality: The envoy was organizing privateers in violation of Washington's Neutrality Proclamation. Genet was, Jefferson said, “Hotheaded, all imagination, no judgment, passionate, disrespectful and even indecent towards the P. in his written as well as verbal communications.… He renders my position immensely difficult.” Indeed Genet did, confiding in Jefferson about the possibility of fomenting rebellions against British and Spanish holdings—confidences Jefferson chose to keep, noting that Genet had spoken to him “not as secretary of state but as Mr. Jeff.”

At Hamilton's urging, the cabinet decided to ask the French government to recall Genet in August 1793. Jefferson saw the result was inevitable: Hamilton had won this battle. “He will sink the republican interest if they do not abandon him,” Jefferson wrote Madison.

M
adison sensed Jefferson's dwindling patience with service in the administration but advised him to stay the course. Jefferson could not bring himself to agree with his old friend. “To my fellow-citizens the debt of service has been fully and faithfully paid,” Jefferson wrote in June 1793. After a quarter century of public service, in revolution, in war, and in a fraught, fragile peace, Jefferson was tired. “The motion of my blood,” he said, “no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world.”

Then, in a cry of frustration, he cataloged the irritations he felt and the sense of futility that sometimes seized him. “Worn down with labors from morning till night, and day to day; knowing them as fruitless to others as they are vexatious to myself, committed singly in desperate and eternal contest against a host who are systematically undermining the public liberty and prosperity,” he was, he said, “giving everything I love, in exchange for everything I hate, and all this without a single gratification in possession or prospect, in present enjoyment or future wish.”

The battles seemed endless, victory elusive. James Monroe fed Jefferson's worries, saying he was concerned that America was being “torn to pieces as we are, by a malignant monarchy faction.”

A rumor reached Jefferson that Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists Rufus King and William Smith “
had secured
an asylum to themselves in England” should the Jefferson faction prevail in the government. The source of the report “could not understand whether they had secured it themselves, or whether they were only notified that it was secured to them. So that they understand that they may go on boldly, in their machinations to change the government, and if they should be overset and choose to withdraw, they will be secure of a pension in England as Arnold … had.”

A sign of public dissatisfaction with the Federalist leadership in New York came with the organization and popularity of what were called Democratic-Republican societies led by the working and middle classes, with a strong immigrant presence. The groups' rhetoric about republicanism and the threat of aristocracy enraged Washington, who lost his temper at a cabinet meeting after Henry Knox alluded to popular abuse of the president. As Jefferson recalled it, “The President was much inflamed, got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself.… Defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government which was not done on the purest motives.… That
by God
he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation. That he had rather be on his farm than to be made
emperor of the world
and yet that they were charging him with wanting to be a king.”

The meeting was effectively over.

J
efferson wanted out. It was time for a tactical retreat to see whether the larger war could be won. Washington did not want Jefferson to go, and he paid a call at Jefferson's Schuylkill house in August.

The president was unhappy. Hamilton also wanted to resign, and Washington felt he was losing control. Would Jefferson stay on until the end of the next congressional session? Jefferson declined, alluding to the “particular uneasiness of my situation in this place where the laws of society oblige me to move always exactly in the circle which I know to bear me peculiar hatred, that is to say the wealthy aristocrats, the merchants closely connected with England, [and] the new created paper fortunes.”

Washington replied that “the constitution we have is an excellent one if we can keep it where it is, that it was indeed supposed there was a party disposed to change it into a monarchial form, but that he could conscientiously declare there was not a man in the U.S. who would set his face more decidedly against it than himself.”

Jefferson told Washington that “no rational man in the U.S. suspects you of any other disposition, but there does not pass a week in which we cannot prove declarations dropping from the monarchial party that our government is good for nothing, it is a milk and water thing which cannot support itself, we must knock it down and set up something of more energy.”

When Jefferson suggested naming a temporary secretary of state who would then move to the Treasury, Washington demurred, observing that “men never chose to descend: that being once in a higher department he would not like to go into a lower one.”

Y
ellow fever struck Philadelphia in late summer 1793. “It has now got into most parts of the city and is considerably infectious,” Jefferson wrote. “At first 3 out of 4 died. Now about 1 out of 3. It comes on with a pain in the head, sick stomach, then a little chill, fever, black vomiting and stools, and death from the 2nd to the 8th day.” (One job seeker tried to find some personal gain in the epidemic: “Viewing with sorrow the large number of victims in all ranks and professions felled by the late distressing disease, I suppose that some vacancies have taken place amongst the persons employed in public offices. In this conception I take the liberty of addressing your Honor with the offer of my best services in that line.”)

Jefferson was unkind about Hamilton. “Hamilton is ill of the fever, it is said,” Jefferson wrote Madison. “He had two physicians out at his house the night before last. His family thinks him in danger, and he puts himself so by his excessive alarm.… A man as timid as he is on the water, as timid on horseback, as timid in sickness, would be a phenomenon if the courage of which he has the reputation in military occasions were genuine.”

Jefferson was so much concerned about public opinion that he was willing to risk illness. “I would really go away, because I think there is rational danger, but … I do not like to exhibit the appearance of panic.”