TWENTY-FOUR
I own it is my own opinion … that the present government is not that which will answer the ends of society … and that it will probably be found expedient to go into the British form.
—ALEXANDER HAMILTON, according to an account of Jefferson’s
JEFFERSON HAD BECOME SECRETARY of state in the third week of March 1790. His first opinion on the likelihood of an American war was written for President Washington 113 days later—hardly an epoch of peace. Little wonder his headache plagued him so much in these months.
A world war seemed at hand. In July 1789, Spain, long the dominant power in the Pacific Northwest, had seized two English ships at Nootka Sound, a distant inlet on the western coast of Vancouver Island. With its lucrative fur trade and importance to any significant system of commerce with Asia, the region was of interest to Spain as well as to Russia and Great Britain.
In 1778, Captain James Cook, the English explorer, had landed at Nootka and renamed it King George’s Sound. The Spanish, who dated their claims to the area to a decree of Pope Alexander VI in the fifteenth century, were determined to fend off the encroachments of other nations. A Spanish explorer, Esteban José Martínez, arrived in the spring of 1789 and took control of the British vessels Princess Royal and Argonaut and of their captains and crews.
News of the Spanish attack stunned Britain, inciting talk of war with Spain. Writing from London after dining with members of Parliament late one night in early May 1790, the South Carolina lawyer and politician John Rutledge told Jefferson that he had never “been amongst such insolent bullies” as these British lawmakers. “They were all for war, talked much of Old England and the British Lion, laughed at the idea of drubbing the Dons, [and] began to calculate the millions of dollars [Spain] would be obliged to pay for having insulted the first power on Earth.”
Merriment in England meant anxiety in America. Jefferson fretted about a sprawling war. Britain would be likely to dispatch its troops in Canada to seize Louisiana and the Floridas, both Spanish territories. France, an ally of Spain’s, would be pulled into the fight. There would be combat on oceans the world over. And the United States—with just over a year’s experience under its new Constitution—would be in the middle of it all. War, Jefferson said, was “very possible.”
His worst fear, perhaps, was the prospect of encirclement by the British. Vice President Adams agreed with Jefferson, and Secretary of War Knox believed English control of the Floridas and of the Mississippi would lead to “great and permanent evils.”
As a nation in the middle of an emerging conflict, America had to decide whether to allow foreign troops to march through U.S. territory. Jefferson favored what he called “a middle course,” which meant delaying any answer in the event of a request from Britain. If an answer had to be given, however, he supported allowing the British troops passage since a refusal was likely to start a U.S.-British war. While willing to fight, Jefferson also said “war is full of chances,” suggesting it was wisest to keep as many options open as possible. It was the practical position.
The Nootka Sound episode coincided with a planned American campaign against the Shawnee and Miami Indians to be led by Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory. An important issue arose: Should the Americans tell the British about the operation at the risk of having the British pass along advance word to the Indians, their allies in harassing Americans along the frontier?
Jefferson told Washington that the Americans should keep the Indian mission a secret. What neither the president nor the secretary of state knew was that Alexander Hamilton had already informed England through a British envoy named George Beckwith, who had played a role in turning Benedict Arnold away from the American cause.
Hamilton’s relationship with Beckwith sheds light on the Treasury secretary’s basic sympathies and operating style. In 1789, Hamilton had privately asked Beckwith to tell the British authorities that Washington’s government was open for business with London. “I have always preferred a connection with you, to that of any other country,” Hamilton said to Beckwith, continuing: “we think in English, and have a similarity of prejudices and of predilections.” It was a clear effort to become part of Britain’s sphere rather than France’s—the opposite of the course Jefferson favored.
In the event of war between France and Britain, America’s “naval exertions,” Hamilton told Beckwith, “may in your scale be greatly important, and decisive.” Such views, Hamilton said, “may be depended upon as the sentiments of the most enlightened men in this country.”
But they were not Jefferson’s sentiments, which the Hamiltonians knew. “Mr. Jefferson … is greatly too democratic for us at present,” William Samuel Johnson, a senator from Connecticut, told Beckwith.
The pro-British interest in America embarked on a campaign to paint Jefferson as a dreamer, not a man of affairs. “Mr. Jefferson … is a man of some acquirements … but his opinions upon government are the result of fine spun theoretic systems, drawn from the ingenious writings of Locke, Sydney and others of their cast, which can never be realized,” Senator William Paterson of New Jersey told George Beckwith.
In the end, Spain backed down. (The expedition against the Indians failed for reasons unrelated to Hamilton’s disclosure.) For Jefferson and his contemporaries, the Nootka episode’s possible enormousness, its suddenness, and its coming at such an early hour in the life of the government helped create a habit of mind that persisted through the years. The world was rife with danger, any particular event could produce universal calamity, and the Old World—especially Britain, France, and Spain—remained threats to American serenity and security.
The national capital moved from New York to Philadelphia in 1790, its temporary home until the District of Columbia could be made ready at the beginning of the next decade. En route to Philadelphia in early November, Jefferson and Madison stopped at Mount Vernon to spend the night with Washington. Jefferson was impressed by the president’s skills as a planter and accepted the gift of some wheat to send to Patsy’s husband, Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., to plant at Monticello. Jefferson offered specific directions for his son-in-law: “The richest ground in the garden will be best,” he said, and the seed should be planted “in distinct holes at proper distances.”
Leasing a four-story brick house from Thomas Leiper at 274 Market Street in Philadelphia, Jefferson ordered wine for himself and for Washington, and then immersed himself in the passion and action of the season.
On three separate but related issues, Jefferson fought to create an America that could, so far as possible, become respected, prosperous, and peaceable without being overly dependent on any one ally. From decisions about commercial and diplomatic relations with Britain and France to the struggle over the British impressment of an American seaman named Hugh Purdie to the projection of force against pirates in the Mediterranean, Jefferson sought free trade, mutual regard, and justice.
Yet on the establishment of a national bank and the imposition of an excise tax on what Jefferson called “ardent spirits,” Hamilton’s financial program took precedence.
The tax passed without much drama. With the funding of the debt and assumption now settled, the government needed revenue to operate under its new obligations.
The proposal for a national bank, however, precipitated a significant debate about the role of the federal government and the relative influence of Hamilton and Jefferson in Washington’s orbit. Hamilton wanted the bank to be funded by federal deposits but run, in part, for the benefit of private investors.
Jefferson and Madison objected. They feared that the Hamiltonian program would enable financial speculators to benefit from commercial transactions made possible by government funds.
Washington privately asked Jefferson for his view on the bank bill’s constitutionality. Jefferson replied with an argument for strict construction—that any power not specifically mentioned in the Constitution was reserved for the states, not the federal government. “To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition,” Jefferson wrote in February 1791.
An improviser and a nationalist, Jefferson would not prove dogmatic on such issues. Only when viewed in the light of the moment (as the only means available to register a protest against the triumph of Hamilton’s vision) and when considered with an appreciation for Jefferson’s interpretation of that vision (that it tended to create a climate more congenial to absolutism than to republican democracy) does the opinion fit into the whole of Jeffersonian thinking. Even in 1791 Jefferson was not doctrinaire about his opinion, closing his letter to Washington with pragmatic counsel: “If the pro and con hang so even as to balance [the president’s] judgment, a just respect for the wisdom of the legislature would naturally decide the balance in favor of their opinion.”
Hamilton replied brilliantly, arguing that “an adherence to the letter of [the Constitution’s] powers would at once arrest the motions of government.” Hamilton won, but only barely. Washington had Madison draft a veto message, which was never issued, and took the maximum time allowed by the Constitution to sign the bill. Yet, in a victory for Hamilton, the president did sign it.
“Congress may go home,” wrote William Maclay. “Mr. Hamilton is all-powerful, and fails in nothing he attempts.”
It was springtime in Philadelphia. Writing Polly, Jefferson recorded the burst of colors:
April 5. Apricots in blossom.
Cherry leafing.
9: Peach in blossom.
Apple leafing.
April 11. Cherry in blossom.
Still, Hamilton was not far from Jefferson’s mind. Jefferson wrote to James Monroe, “We are ruined, Sir, if we do not over-rule the principles that ‘the more we owe, the more prosperous we shall be,’ ‘that a public debt furnishes the means of enterprise,’ … etc. etc.” That same day he wrote Patsy about bonnets and a new style of hat in Philadelphia: “Mrs. Trist has observed that there is a kind of veil lately introduced here, and much approved. It fastens over the brim of the hat and then draws round the neck as close or open as you please.”
Just over a week later, Jefferson set off a new storm with a brief letter. The note he wrote was not long—only four sentences, two of which were formulaic—but few communications of Jefferson’s life produced equal effects. Madison had passed on to Jefferson a borrowed copy of the first part of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, just published in England. The pamphlet’s owner (John Beckley, Clerk of the House of Representatives) asked Jefferson to send it on to Jonathan B. Smith, a Philadelphia merchant whose brother, Samuel Harrison Smith, planned to publish it in America. In his accompanying note of April 26, 1791, he then mused, briefly, in the third person.
Jefferson said that he was “extremely pleased to find [Paine’s work] will be re-printed here, and that something is at length to be publicly said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us. He has no doubt our citizens will rally a second time round the standard of Common sense”—by which, of course, he meant Paine’s Common Sense of 1776.
In a matter of days Jefferson opened a copy of the newly republished text to find that his words in the covering note to Smith had been reprinted as well. The implication was clear: Jefferson not only appeared to be Paine’s sponsor but also believed there were “heresies” in circulation “among us.” So it was that the secretary of state appeared to be declaring war on the vice president of the United States and the secretary of the Treasury.
“That I had in my view the Discourses on Davila, which have filled Fenno’s papers for a twelve-month, without contradiction, is certain,” Jefferson told the president in the wake of the publication. “But nothing was ever further from my thoughts than to become myself the contradictor before the public.” He had written it, he told Madison, “to take off a little of the dryness of the note.”
Hamilton, Jefferson believed, was seizing on the Rights of Man note to Jonathan Smith as evidence of Jefferson’s “opposition to the government.” Jefferson disagreed strongly, telling Madison that his remarks had been “meant for the enemies of the government, to wit those who want to change it into a monarchy.” He added that he believed Hamilton was attacking him with vigor: “I have reason to think [Hamilton] has been unreserved in uttering these sentiments.” And there was little Jefferson hated more than the thought that people were disparaging him in the shadows.
There is much truth in the tendency to encapsulate the competing traditions of the early American republic as a contest between Jefferson and Hamilton. For partisans of each man, it was then—and has been ever since—convenient to caricature the other, with Hamilton as the scheming proto-Brit bent on monarchy and Jefferson as the naïve proto-Frenchman intoxicated by visions of excessive democracy. Inevitably, though, such shorthand is incomplete.
In the first hours of the decade and sporadically throughout, Jefferson sometimes found himself in agreement with Hamilton (and with Washington and Adams as well), for Jefferson was a working politician and diplomat who believed in an effective central government—his experience in the Virginia governorship and during the Confederation years had convinced him of that—and often asserted the need to project power.
There was, however, a foundational point on which Jefferson never compromised, a conviction that drove much of his political life from 1790 until his death. He feared monarchy or dictatorship, which is different from fearing a strong national government, though Jefferson is often thought to have believed them the same thing. One of the terms he used to describe his opponents—“Monocrats”—is telling, for the word means government by the one.
Jefferson fretted over the prospect of the return of a king in some form, either as an immensely powerful president unchecked by the Constitution of 1787 or in a more explicitly monarchical or dictatorial role. He did not oppose the wielding of power. He was a good-hearted, fair-minded student of how best to accumulate it and use it. In romantic moments, he dreamed of a future of virtuous yeomen living in harmony. In realistic ones, he suspected the America of which he was an architect could be yet another short-lived chapter in the story of the tyranny of the few over the many. “We were educated in royalism: no wonder if some of us retain that idolatry still,” Jefferson had once written to Madison.
Eternal vigilance was critical. “Courts love the people always, as wolves do the sheep,” Jefferson once remarked. Even John Adams was susceptible to such worries. He wrote Jefferson in October 1787:
If the Duke of Angouleme, or Burgundy, or especially the Dauphin should demand one of your beautiful and most amiable daughters in marriage, all America from Georgia to New Hampshire would find their vanity and pride so agreeably flattered by it that all their sage maxims would give way; and even our sober New England Republicans would keep a day of thanksgiving for it, in their hearts. If General Washington had a daughter, I firmly believe, she would be demanded in marriage by one of the royal families of France or England, perhaps by both, or if he had a son he would be invited to come a courting to Europe.
Intermarriage with noble families in America and Europe, Adams believed, would lead to trouble, and to the United States repeating the mistakes and miming the bad habits of the Old World. “In short, my dear friend, you and I have been indefatigable laborers through our whole lives for a cause which be thrown away in the next generation, upon the vanity and foppery of persons of whom we do not now know the names perhaps.”
Talk of threats came from the American West (“The politics of the western country are verging fast to a crisis, and must speedily eventuate in an appeal to the patronage of Spain or Britain,” wrote “a Gentleman of Kentucky”—James Wilkinson—in 1789) and the palaces of London (“There is such a rooted aversion to us grown up in the court that if we could be smitten without the hazard of a general war, or a risk of shaking the present ministry from their places, hostilities would be recommenced against the United States, if it were only to gratify the irascible feelings of the monarch,” the American lawyer John Brown Cutting had written Jefferson from London in August 1788).
In a report of a conversation with John Graves Simcoe, a British army officer and lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, at Niagara in June 1793, Peirce Duffy, an American military aide, recalled that Simcoe had asked “if the wishes of the people were as much in favor of General Washington as they formerly were or if I thought they would incline to have a British Government.”
The Jefferson of the cabinet, of the vice presidency, and of the presidency can be best understood by recalling that his passion for the people and his regard for republicanism belonged to a man who believed that there were forces afoot—forces visible and invisible, domestic and foreign—that sought to undermine the rights of man by reestablishing the rule of priests and nobles and kings. His opposition to John Adams and to Alexander Hamilton, to the British and to financial speculators, grew out of this fundamental concern.
Like significant politicians before and after him, Jefferson was devoted to an overarching vision, but governed according to circumstance. Committed to the broad republican creed, supported by allies in politics and in the public who believed him to be an unshakable advocate of liberty under the law, Jefferson felt himself free to maneuver in matters of detail.
Where some saw hypocrisy, others saw political agility. As long as a political leader has some core strategic belief—and Jefferson did, in his defense of republicanism—then tactical flexibility can be a virtue. Even Alexander Hamilton recognized Jefferson’s commitment to the nation, no matter how deeply the two disagreed about means. “To my mind a true estimate of Mr. J’s character warrants the expectation of a temporizing rather than a violent system,” Hamilton said in 1801.
Such mature reflections came toward the end, not at the beginning, of their conflicts. The battle between Jefferson and the men he saw as “Monocrats” (and the “Monocrats” believed Jefferson an American Jacobin who would not have minded the erection of a Parisian guillotine in Philadelphia) was interesting not least because they were implacable foes who could—and did—agree and cooperate from time to time, and who, even in their hours of starkest hostility, served in the same cabinet, dined at the same tables, and moved through the same intimate American world. Wars are often fought between brothers. As Jefferson’s decade or so of struggle with the Federalists shows, there can be no more brutal or more bewildering battles than those that divide a family against itself.
In 1790 and in 1791, on the island of St. Domingue (now Haiti), slaves and their free allies rose in rebellion against their French imperial masters. In bloody warfare that was to last well over a decade, the blacks of the island, deeply affected by the promises of the French Revolution, fought to win the liberties proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
For slaveholding Americans, the war on St. Domingue seemed a glimpse of what could come to the United States should the slaves rise en masse. Many of the whites of the island fled, and Jefferson noted their flight with interest. “The situation of the Saint-Domingue fugitives (aristocrats as they are) calls aloud for pity and charity,” he wrote. “Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man… . I become daily more and more convinced that all the West India islands will remain in the hands of the people of color, and a total expulsion of the whites [will] sooner or later take place.” For Jefferson, the only way to make the best of the rebellion was to treat it as a warning. “It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (South of Potomac) [will] have to wade through, and try to avert them,” Jefferson said. Throughout the 1790s slaveholding Americans feared that the example of St. Domingue would lead to the long-dreaded slave war, possibly with the explicit help of refugees from the island. These anxieties would grow to the point that “every account of the success of the negro chiefs has been accompanied by an increased audacity in the people of the same color here,” the British diplomat Edward Thornton reported to London in 1802.
As the years went by, Jefferson wondered whether St. Domingue might become the asylum he sought for America’s slaves. (It did not.) And as he watched the St. Domingue rebellion from his vantage point as secretary of state, Jefferson could not know that the triumph of the blacks, under the leadership of Toussaint-Louverture, would so fatally weaken France in the New World that Paris would one day reassess its ambitions along the American borders.
Washington spent part of 1791 touring southern states. “I write today indeed merely as the watchman cries, to prove himself awake, and that all is well, for the last week has scarcely furnished anything foreign or domestic worthy of your notice,” Jefferson wrote Washington on the first day of May 1791.
Jefferson and Madison decided to take a trip of their own—to New York state and to part of New England. It was Federalist country, and their opponents were watching. Jefferson and Madison claimed they were traveling on a botany excursion; Jefferson was also interested in studying the Hessian fly.
The trip was political as well as scientific. In their brief time together in New York City—Jefferson stayed on Beekman Street—the two Virginians met with New York chancellor Robert R. Livingston and Aaron Burr and with Philip Freneau, a writer they hoped to recruit to start a newspaper to compete with the pro-Hamilton Gazette of the United States. Freneau, whom Madison had known at Princeton, initially declined, but finally accepted and published his first edition of the National Gazette on October 31, 1791. He was to be subsidized by the Department of State, where Jefferson employed him as a translator.
The Freneau appointment was a critical step for the emerging Republican Party. By creating a newspaper, Jefferson was playing the part of leader of the opposition. As the years went on, John Beckley, the clerk of the U.S. House, became the Republicans’ most effective tactician in the battles against the Federalists, helping to orchestrate the disparate mechanics of organized political action. Those “destined for commands,” Jefferson once said, had to bring “the floating ardor of our countrymen” to “a point of union and effect.” That was precisely the work of popular leadership.
Madison remained behind after Jefferson returned southward in the middle of June. Writing from New York, Madison captured the feel of the city. “Nothing new is talked of here,” he told Jefferson in July 1791. “In fact stockjobbing drowns every other subject. The Coffee House is in an eternal buzz with the gamblers.”
In Philadelphia, Jefferson was still settling in. It was not easy: His belongings were scattered between shipments from France to Philadelphia and to Monticello. “You mentioned formerly that the two commodes were arrived at Monticello,” he wrote Polly. “Were my two sets of ivory chessmen in the drawers? They have not been found in any of the packages which came here.”
On Saturday, August 13, 1791, Jefferson and Hamilton spoke privately about Adams and the political storm over Davila. According to Jefferson, Hamilton said that while he believed a British form of government would be a stronger one, “since we have undertaken the experiment, I am for giving it a fair course, whatever my expectations may be.”
Jefferson’s opposition was political. “Whether these measures be right or wrong abstractly,” Jefferson said of the Hamiltonian program, “more attention ought to be paid to the general opinion.” He asked Livingston in New York whether “the people in your quarter are as well contented with the proceedings of our government as their representatives say they are?” Jefferson also noted that “there is a vast mass of discontent gathered in the South, and how and when it will break God knows. I look forward to it with some anxiety.”
He worried, too, about the corruption of the legislature—that lawmakers were becoming financially enmeshed with the Hamiltonian system of securities and bank shares. Such economic ties were not bribes in the overt sense, Jefferson believed, but they did create a pernicious climate of cooperation between the Congress and the Treasury. This subtle form of “corruption” troubled Jefferson, who saw it as the means by which Hamilton and his allies could control the general direction of government. And control was something Jefferson never liked seeing in other men’s hands.