TWENTY-FIVE
How unfortunate … that whilst we are encompassed on all sides with avowed enemies and insidious friends, that internal dissensions should be harrowing and tearing our vitals.
—GEORGE WASHINGTON
DINNER WAS OVER, and the senior officers of the American government were sitting together, drinking wine. President Washington was out of town, at Mount Vernon, and had asked Jefferson to summon Vice President Adams and the cabinet to handle some pending business.
The matter was dispatched, and the talk drifted to more general topics. Jefferson’s guests were an impressive lot—John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, Attorney General Edmund Randolph—and the after-dinner conversation at the secretary of state’s quarters was dominated by a “collision of opinion” between Adams and Hamilton.
The subject: the British system of government. In the candlelight, Adams said that in his view “if some of its defects and abuses were corrected, it would be the most perfect constitution of government ever devised by man.”
Jefferson sat in a kind of predictable horror, listening to this paean to a nation that preserved and perpetuated the role of hereditary power.
Then Hamilton went a step further than Adams, saying that “it was the most perfect model of government that could be formed; and that the correction of its vices would render it an impracticable government.” To Jefferson’s ears, this meant that Hamilton (and, to a lesser extent, Adams) might well believe more strongly in the British way than the American way.
This impression was underscored by a passing remark of Hamilton’s at dinner. Jefferson had decorated the walls of his quarters with a collection of portraits that included Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Sir Isaac Newton, all men of the Enlightenment. Hamilton asked Jefferson who they were. “I told him they were my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced, naming them,” Jefferson recalled.
Taking this in, Hamilton paused, thinking. After a moment, he broke his silence.
“The greatest man that ever lived,” Hamilton said, “was Julius Caesar.”
As the evening ended, Jefferson reflected on the distinctions between Adams and Hamilton. “Mr. Adams was honest as a politician, as well as a man; Hamilton honest as a man, but, as a politician, believed in the necessity of either force or corruption to govern men.”
Neither man was Jefferson’s ally in the wars of President Washington’s years. Both represented forces and tendencies that Jefferson found unsettling, disturbing—and dangerous.
Early on the afternoon on Tuesday, February 28, 1792, Jefferson was running late. He had hoped to come see Washington well before three o’clock, the time when the president received public callers. The meeting was important to Jefferson—he was arguing for improvements to the postal service by “doubling the velocity of the post-riders” from fifty to one hundred miles a day—but various other matters delayed him.
Arriving at last, Jefferson hurried through his proposals, explaining that the post office should fall under his own State Department, not Hamilton’s Treasury Department, for “the Treasury possessed already such an influence as to swallow up the whole Executive powers.”
The matter was not one of “personal interest,” Jefferson said, for he intended to serve in office only as long as Washington himself were to serve. Jefferson’s only purpose, he told the president, was to seek “to place things on a safe footing” for the public good.
Before he could reply, Washington was summoned to greet the afternoon callers. Would Jefferson come to breakfast the next morning?
He would, and did. After the meal the two men reviewed the postal question. The president then brought the talk back to the broader topics Jefferson had raised the day before. Washington said he intended to leave the presidency after four years both because of his age (“he really felt himself growing old”) and for fear of appearing greedy for place (“were he to continue longer, it might [give] room to say that having tasted the sweets of office he could not do without them”). Yet the president was anxious to prevent the cabinet from following suit, worrying, he said, that “this might produce a shock in the public mind of dangerous consequence.”
Jefferson replied with his own implicit evocations of Cincinnatus, casting his political career as an accident of the age. “I told him that no man had ever had less desire of entering into public offices than myself: that the circumstance of a perilous war, which brought everything into danger, and called for all the services which every citizen could render, had induced me to undertake the administration of the government of Virginia” and that he had twice refused diplomatic appointments before “a domestic loss … made me fancy that absence, and a change of scene for a time, might be expedient for me,” which led him to accept the assignment in France.
In Washington’s company on this late winter morning, engaged by but perhaps tired from struggling against Federalist interests, Jefferson may have felt a quiet comradeship with the president who was flatteringly urging that he stay at his exalted post.
The two Virginians, linked by common heritage and shaped by the same forces of Revolution, were, however briefly, comfortable with each other, pausing at the pinnacle to review the paths they had traveled to the summit. The stories they told to each other about ambition and obligation and power were the stories they told themselves about ambition and obligation and power. They wished to be seen as above party and removed from the hurly-burly of politics.
In the warmth of the moment Washington confided a fear to Jefferson, and Jefferson repaid the confidence with candor. The government, Washington said, “had set out with a pretty general good will of the public, yet … symptoms of dissatisfaction had lately shown themselves far beyond what he could have expected, and to what height these might arise in case of too great a change in the administration could not be foreseen.”
Jefferson did not miss his chance. Speaking bluntly and at some length, he said that there was, in his opinion, “only a single source of these discontents”: Hamilton’s Treasury.
Hamilton, Jefferson said, was “deluging the states with paper-money instead of gold and silver” to encourage speculation, rather than “other branches of useful industry.” Jefferson told Washington of his conviction that Hamiltonian lawmakers had “feathered their nests with paper.”
That was not all. Jefferson said that his foes “had now brought forward a proposition, far beyond every one ever yet advanced, and to which the eyes of many were turned, as the decision which was to let us know whether we live under a limited or an unlimited government.”
Jefferson soon took his leave.
Jefferson and Hamilton were now “daily pitted in the Cabinet like two cocks,” as Jefferson recalled. A savvy politician, Jefferson recognized—and grudgingly appreciated—Hamilton’s political craft. Hamilton, for instance, carefully managed relations with George Hammond, the official British envoy. Jefferson noticed that Hamilton always seemed to know precisely what Hammond was thinking, which Jefferson said “proved the intimacy of their communications: insomuch that I believe he communicated to Hammond all our views and knew from him in return the views of the British court.”
But even Washington himself was not exempt from Jefferson’s dark thoughts about the possibility of a breach of faith with the republican promise. Once, in a conversation about whether the House would vote to provide money stipulated by treaty, Washington grew impatient. “He said that he did not like throwing too much into democratic hands, that if [the members of the House] would not do what the Constitution called on them to do, the government would be at an end, and must then assume another form,” Jefferson wrote in April 1792.
For Jefferson, the images of monarchy swirled. The rhetoric of the American Revolution—Jefferson’s rhetoric, the product of his own pen—seemed ever fainter in the clatter of a capital that was beginning to feel more like a king’s court than the seat of a republic.
The public debt, paper money, excise taxes, the alleged corruption of the Congress: Jefferson believed it all could lead to the consummate betrayal as 1792 wore on. The “ultimate object of all this is to prepare the way for a change from the present republican form of government to that of a monarchy, of which the English constitution is to be the model,” Jefferson told Washington. Jefferson unmistakably alluded to Hamilton’s 1787 advocacy of a more monarchical system. “That this was contemplated in the Convention is no secret, because its partisans have made none of it,” Jefferson said. “To effect it then was impracticable; but they are still eager after their object, and are predisposing everything for its ultimate attainment.”
Jefferson believed that members of Congress had a vested interest in the Hamiltonian financial system. It “will be the instrument for producing in future a king, lords and commons, or whatever else those who direct it may choose,” he told Washington. The aim of the “Monarchial Federalists” was to use “the new government merely as a stepping stone to monarchy.”
He was thinking of the calamitous possibility of southern secession to protest Federalist dominance. “I can scarcely contemplate a more incalculable evil than the breaking of the union into two or more parts,” Jefferson said, yet if northern interests were to predominate, it would become impossible to say what might happen.
This was where Jefferson believed Washington came in. “The confidence of the whole union is centered in you.… North and South will hang together, if they have you to hang on.”
Give us a few years, Jefferson said, and perhaps all would be well. “One or two sessions will determine the crisis: and I cannot but hope that you can resolve to add one or two more to the many years you have already sacrificed to the good of mankind.”
Jefferson dined at Washington’s on Thursday, June 7, 1792. At the table with John Jay, Jefferson recalled that he and Jay “got, towards the close of the afternoon, into a little contest whether hereditary descent or election was most likely to bring wise and honestmen into public councils.” Jefferson argued for democracy; Jay for aristocracy.
Washington was listening to the exchange. “I was not displeased to find the P. attended to the conversation as it will be a corroboration of the design imputed to that party in my letter.”
Jefferson confided his fears to Lafayette. “Too many of these stock jobbers and King-jobbers have come into our legislature, or rather too many of our legislature have become stock jobbers and king-jobbers.”
Washington gently tried to calm Jefferson’s rising anxieties about a monarchical threat. “There might be desires, but he did not believe there were designs to change the form of government into a monarchy,” Jefferson recalled Washington telling him in July 1792. It was hardly a full-throated reassurance.
In August, Washington returned to the divide between Jefferson and Hamilton, writing Jefferson:
How unfortunate, and how much is it to be regretted then, that whilst we are encompassed on all sides with avowed enemies and insidious friends, that internal dissensions should be harrowing and tearing our vitals.… I believe it will be difficult, if not impracticable, to manage the reins of government or to keep the parts of it together: for if, instead of laying our shoulders to the machine after measures are decided on, one pulls this way and another that, before the utility of the thing is fairly tried, it must inevitably be torn asunder—And, in my opinion the fairest prospect of happiness and prosperity that ever was presented to man, will be lost—perhaps for ever!
Jefferson replied with passion and at length, mounting his case with a new level of intensity. The sharper tone he took with Washington—still diplomatic, but nonetheless more confrontational than usual—was in reaction to the implicit criticism in the president’s August letter. Jefferson hated to be told he was wrong, and he defended himself with ferocity. “That I have utterly, in my private conversations, disapproved of the system of the Secretary of the Treasury, I acknowledge and avow: and this was not merely a speculative difference.”
He was challenging Washington directly, answering the president’s assertion that differences of opinion should be worked out in the forge of experience. No, Jefferson was saying, something deeper and more fundamental was at stake between him and Hamilton. Hamilton’s system, Jefferson said, “flowed from principles adverse to liberty, and was calculated to undermine and demolish the republic, by creating an influence of his department over the members of the legislature.”
Bureaucratic struggles assumed epic dimensions, with Jefferson casting himself as a loyal lieutenant victimized by an ambitious, bullying Treasury secretary. “He undertook, of his own authority, the conferences with the ministers of [France and Britain], and … on every consultation [he] provided … some report of a conversation with the one or the other of them, adapted to his views.”
Finally, Jefferson told Washington that, once in private life, he reserved the right to take his stand in “newspaper contests” if events required it: “I will not suffer my retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has not only received and given him bread, but heaped its honors on his head.”
Early on the morning of the first day of October 1792, Jefferson spoke again with the president, this time at Mount Vernon on the banks above the Potomac. Washington still hoped Jefferson would not leave the government. According to Jefferson, the president “thought it important to preserve the check of my opinions in the administration in order to keep things in their proper channel and prevent them from going too far.”
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?”
At 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.
In 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.
In 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.