SIXTEEN
On March 1, 1790, with Hamilton engulfed in conflict over his funding scheme, Thomas Jefferson set out from Monticello to assume his duties as the new secretary of state. He had sailed from Paris in October 1789, ending a five-year stint as American minister to France. Only when his ship docked in Norfolk, Virginia, in late November did he discover Washington’s letter asking him to take the cabinet post. The Senate, still in its trusting infancy, had confirmed the nominee before he knew about the offer. Where the hyperthyroid Hamilton jumped at his assignment and sprang quickly into action, Jefferson dithered through the winter about taking the State Department job and did not accept until mid-February 1790.
Similarly, as Hamilton, Madison, and Jay had defended the Constitution in The Federalist, Jefferson had vacillated about America’s new charter. At moments, he sounded as if he would have preferred a patched-up version of the Articles of Confederation. “There are very good articles in it and very bad,” he declared of the new charter from Paris. “I do not know which predominate.”1 He confided to Madison that he liked the government’s division into three branches but voiced grave doubts about his favorite bogeyman: executive power. In Philadelphia, Hamilton had espoused a lifetime president on good behavior, while Jefferson recoiled at any president who could serve additional four-year terms. “I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government,” he told Madison. “It is always oppressive.”2 Such a man was bound to clash with Hamilton and have misgivings about serving in the new central government. When Congress first met in the spring of 1789, Jefferson was still equivocating about the Constitution. Asked whether he was a federalist or antifederalist, Jefferson evaded the issue and expressed opposition to all party labels. “Therefore I protest to you that I am not of the party of the federalists,” he explained to Francis Hopkinson, a Pennsylvania judge and signer of the Declaration of Independence. “But I am much further from that of the antifederalists.”3 So with a multitude of reservations, Thomas Jefferson cast his lot with the new government.
In 1789, French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon executed a bust of Jefferson that shows a handsome man with a calm, self-confident air. Yet the vigilant eyes hint at someone who moved slowly, cautiously, taking everything in before acting. The tightly sealed lips convey something enigmatic beneath the patrician ease. Like Burr, Thomas Jefferson found strength in secrecy, in silence. Shy and aloof, he seldom made eye contact with listeners yet could be a warmly engaging presence among small groups of like-minded intimates. This laconic man knew how to sprinkle his conversation with brilliant aperçus that lingered in people’s minds. With his quiet charm and courtly demeanor, he had a knack for winning people over at dinner parties distinguished by good food and eight varieties of wine.
Tall, lean, and freckled, with reddish hair and hazel eyes, Jefferson had one trait that the marble bust failed to capture: his slack-jointed movements. When William Maclay met the new secretary, his slouching figure seemed to lack ministerial dignity. Maclay groused, “He sits in a lounging manner, on one hip commonly, and with one of his shoulders elevated much above the other…. [H]is whole figure has a loose, shackling air.”4 His dress was casual, almost sloppy. The folksy air charmed people and allowed Jefferson to root out their secrets. The plain dress, mild manners, and unassuming air were the perfect costume for a crafty man intent upon presenting himself as the spokesman for the common people.
With an elite pedigree on both sides of his family, Jefferson was anything but common. His father, Peter, was a tobacco planter, a judge of the court of chancery, and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, while his mother, Jane Randolph, came from a prominent family. By the time Peter Jefferson died, he bequeathed to his children more than 60 slaves, 25 horses, 70 head of cattle, 200 hogs, and 7,500 acres; two-thirds of this bountiful legacy went to his eldest son, Thomas.
Peter Jefferson gave the boy a complete classical education. Tutored at home at age five, Jefferson went to a boarding school at age nine that afforded such thorough grounding in Greek and Latin that biographer Dumas Malone claims that for Jefferson “the heroes of antiquity were more real than either the Christian saints or modern historical figures.”5 He attended the College of William and Mary, which schooled the scions of the Virginia gentry, before being admitted to the bar. Like Hamilton, Jefferson was a fanatic for self-improvement. He rose before dawn each morning and employed every hour profitably, studying up to fifteen hours per day. Extremely systematic in his habits, Jefferson enjoyed retreating into the sheltered tranquillity of his books, and the spectrum of his interests was vast. He told his daughter, “It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.”6 Whether riding horseback, playing the violin, designing buildings, or inventing curious gadgets, Thomas Jefferson seemed adept at everything. Like many accomplished people, he was seduced by this quest for self-perfection and not easily lured into public office. The self-sufficiency and philosophic repose made him an atypical politician. He once wrote, “The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves and to suffice for our own happiness.”7
This pampered life rested on a foundation of slavery. Jefferson’s earliest memory was of being carried on a pillow by a slave on horseback. He never tried to justify slavery and said he eagerly awaited the day “when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil.”8 When the Virginia legislature rebuffed his bid to stop importing slaves into the state, he regretted that “the public mind would not bear the proposition.”9 However much Jefferson deplored the “moral and political depravity” of slavery, his own slaves remained in bondage to his career and his incorrigibly spendthrift ways.10 When he commissioned his mountaintop home at Monticello, he seemed oblivious of the toll this would exact on his slaves, who had to hoist the building materials to such a height.
In 1769, while the fourteen-year-old Hamilton dreamed of escape from St. Croix, the twenty-six-year-old Jefferson was elected to Virginia’s House of Burgesses. Jefferson belonged to an aristocracy with a clear path of advancement. At twenty-eight, he married a young widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, who inherited 135 slaves after her father’s death. This loving ten-year marriage was marred by childhood mortality—only two of their six children reached maturity—and in September 1782 Martha herself died at thirty-four. Only thirty-nine at the time, Jefferson survived his wife by forty-four years but never remarried. Ensconced at Monticello with his books, inventions, and experiments, Jefferson became an unfathomable loner.
If the American Revolution had not supervened, Thomas Jefferson might well have whiled away his life on the mountaintop, a cultivated planter and philosopher. For Jefferson, the Revolution was an unwelcome distraction from a treasured private life, while for Hamilton it was a fantastic opportunity for escape and advancement. Like Hamilton, Jefferson rose in politics through sheer mastery of words—sunny, optimistic words that captured the hopefulness of a new country. Nobody gave more noble expression to the ideals of individual freedom and dignity or had a more devout faith in the wisdom of the common man. As chief draftsman of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson took often commonplace ideas and endowed them with majestic form. When the new government was formed, the Declaration had not yet attained the status of American Scripture. (Jefferson’s authorship remained largely anonymous until he found attribution politically convenient in the 1790s.) Thus, when Hamilton first met Jefferson in 1790, he did not see him as quite the revered figure that we do today.
Hamilton may have believed that Jefferson’s contributions to the nation paled beside his own and not just because of his own work on behalf of the Constitution. Besides handling Washington’s correspondence, Hamilton had spent five years in combat, exposing himself to enemy fire on many occasions. Jefferson had never set foot on a battlefield. Elected Virginia governor in 1779, he found the job irksome and wanted to resign, prompting Edmund Pendleton to complain to Madison, “It is a little cowardly to quit our posts in a bustling time!”11 When the turncoat Benedict Arnold burned and pillaged Richmond in January 1781, the capital stood defenseless despite warnings from Washington to Jefferson. Governor Jefferson fled in the early hours, giving up Richmond without a shot and allowing munitions and government records to fall into British hands. In June, in Jefferson’s waning hours as governor, the British pounced on Charlottesville and almost captured the Virginia Assembly gathered there. Then, when word came that a British cavalry was approaching Monticello, Jefferson scrambled off on horseback into the woods. He was accused of dereliction of duty and neglecting the transfer of power to his successor. Though the Virginia Assembly exonerated him of any wrongdoing, Hamilton wasn’t the only one who suspected Jefferson of cowardice. He later wrote mockingly that when real danger appeared, “the governor of the ancient dominion dwindled into the poor, timid philosopher and, instead of rallying his brave countrymen, he fled for safety from a few light-horsemen and shamefully abandoned his trust!”12
The Revolution left Jefferson with an implacable aversion to the British, whom he regarded as a race of “rich, proud, hectoring, swearing, squabbling, carnivorous animals.”13 He had a long list of personal grievances beyond his distaste for Britain as a corrupt, monarchical society. Cornwallis had ravaged one of Jefferson’s farms, butchering animals, torching crops, and snatching thirty slaves. Like many Virginia plantation owners, Jefferson was land rich but cash poor and chronically indebted to British creditors. He once said mordantly that the Virginia planters were “a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.”14 By the late 1780s, as tobacco prices plummeted, Virginia planters struggled to repay old debts to London creditors and demanded the return of slaves carried off by British troops. The steep payments he owed British bankers forced Jefferson to retain his enormous workforce of slaves despite his professed hatred for the institution. “The torment of mind I endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall owe not a shilling on earth is such really as to render life of little value,” he told his American manager in 1787. But he would not sell land to pay his debts; “nor would I willingly sell the slaves as long as there remains any prospect of paying my debts with their labor.”15 The weight of that debt, created by his own extravagance, perhaps prevented Thomas Jefferson from being the person he would ideally like to have been. Even while secretary of state, he remained in hock to British creditors for an exorbitant seven thousand pounds. He carried these large debts until his death in 1826, necessitating the sale of 130 of his slaves at Monticello six months later. It was not the image that the philosopher of the common man would have preferred to leave to posterity.
When Jefferson went to France in 1784, succeeding Ben Franklin as U.S. minister—the word ambassador was still eschewed as a vestige of monarchy—he had firsthand experience of an absolutist government. “The truth of Voltaire’s observation offers itself perpetually that every man here must be either the hammer or the anvil,” he told a friend.16 To George Washington, he expressed himself as unequivocally. “I was much an enemy to monarchy before I came to Europe. I am ten thousand times more so since I have seen what they are.”17 His French sojourn radicalized Jefferson and left him with a heightened suspicion of the damage that could be done by any aristocratic or monarchical sympathies in America—suspicions that were to crystallize around the figure of Alexander Hamilton.
All the while, Jefferson clung to a vision of France as America’s fraternal ally. “Nothing should be spared on our part to attach this country to us,” he wrote to Madison.18 While scorning French political arrangements, Jefferson adored his life in that decadent society. He relished Paris—the people, wine, women, music, literature, and architecture. And the more rabidly antiaristocratic he became, the more he was habituated to aristocratic pleasures. Jefferson fancied himself a mere child of nature, a simple, unaffected man, rather than what he really was: a grandee, a gourmet, a hedonist, and a clever, ambitious politician. Even as he deplored the inequities of French society, he occupied the stately Hotel de Langeac on the Champs Elysées, constructed for a mistress of one of Louis XV’s ministers. Jefferson decorated the mansion with choice neoclassical furniture bought from stylish vendors. The philosopher in powdered hair employed a coachman, a footman, a valet—seven or eight domestics in all, a household staff so complete that it included a frotteur whose job consisted solely of buffing the floors to a high gleam. Jefferson’s colossal shopping sprees in Paris—he bought two thousand books and sixty-three paintings—betrayed a cavalier disregard for his crushing debts as well as the slaves whose labor serviced them. While Jefferson’s Parisian life seems to contradict his politics, he was embraced by a group of Enlightenment aristocrats who exhibited the same exquisite contradictions.
For part of his Parisian stay, Jefferson was joined by his two daughters. The younger one, Polly, arrived in 1787 in the company of his light-skinned fourteen-year-old slave, Sally Hemings, who was called “Dashing Sally” at Monticello and was later described by another slave as “mighty near white” and “very handsome” with “long straight hair down her back.”19 Jefferson had inherited the Hemings family via his wife, and it is now presumed that Sally Hemings was her half sister. We do not know for certain whether Jefferson’s apparent romance with Sally Hemings began at this time or after he returned to America. He was a widower who was highly susceptible to women. For all his paeans to married life, he had no qualms about flirtations with married women. In 1786, Jefferson, forty-three, squired around Paris a blond, coquettish British artist born in Italy, twenty-six-year-old Maria Cosway, whose husband, the painter Richard Cosway, was usually absent. Their dalliance lasted long enough to bring Jefferson into contact with Maria Cosway’s closest friend, Angelica Church, who had recently incorporated the Cosways into her thriving salon.
When Jefferson first met Church in Paris in late 1787, she acted as a go-between for Mrs. Cosway, which tells us something about her own liberal views on extramarital escapades. “Have you seen yet the lovely Mrs. Church?” Maria Cosway wrote to Jefferson that Christmas. “If I did not love her so much, I should fear her rivalship, but, no, I give you free permission to love her with all your heart.”20 Church brought Jefferson a little tea vase from her friend. He was as entranced by the worldly, seductive Church as Hamilton. Jefferson loved her warm vivacity and what he described as her “mild and settled” temperament.21 When John Trumbull painted two miniatures of Jefferson, the American minister sent one copy to Maria Cosway, the other to Angelica Church. “The memorial of me which you have from Trumbull is the most worthless part of me,” Jefferson confided to Church in an accompanying note. “Could he paint my friendship to you, it would be something out of the common line.”22 In an equally coquettish reply, Church said that she and Cosway were “extremely vain of the pleasure of being permitted to write him and very happy to have some share of his favorable opinion.”23 Though Angelica Church was married with four children, Jefferson persisted in his advances. In 1788, projecting a trip to America the following year, he invited her to visit him at Monticello, or else he would visit her in New York and they would travel to Niagara Falls. So close were Jefferson and Angelica Church at this time that Jefferson’s copy ofThe Federalistdisplays this surprising dedication: “For Mrs. Church from her Sister, Elizabeth Hamilton.”24 Evidently, Church had given Jefferson the copy that Eliza rushed off to her in England.
In the end, Angelica Church spurned Jefferson’s coy overtures, and nothing ever came of their flirtation. The feud beween Hamilton and Jefferson forced Church to choose between the two men, and, inevitably, she chose her brother-in-law. Yet the brief liaison may have had a political impact. During her 1789 stay in New York, Church doubtless told Hamilton about Jefferson’s fling with Maria Cosway and his provocative suggestion that he and Church travel together in America. She may even have voiced some suspicions about Sally Hemings, whose son Madison later claimed that it was in Paris that “my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, and when he was called home, she was enceinte by him.”25 Any such gossip about Jefferson in Paris would have given Hamilton an image of the new secretary of state strikingly different from the more ascetic one he wanted to project to the world. And when Hamilton later began a campaign to unmask what he saw as the real Jefferson, the closet sensualist, the knowledge of Jefferson’s amorous ways, culled from Church’s stories, may have colored his portrait. Both Hamilton and Jefferson came to see each other as hypocritical libertines, and this fed a mutual cynicism. Hamilton offered testimony of his own inexcusable lapses in this area, while the sphinxlike Jefferson was a man of such unshakable reticence that it took two centuries of sedulous detective work to provide partial corroboration of the story of his sexual liaison with Sally Hemings.
A congenital optimist, Jefferson was convinced that France, following America’s lead, would cast off the shackles of despotism. Lafayette and other French aristocrats, he believed, after imbibing a love of liberty in America, would effect a comparable transformation in their own society. In November 1788, Jefferson wrote to Washington of a France buoyant with hope: “The nation has been awakened by our revolution, they feel their strength, they are enlightened, their lights are spreading, and they will not retrograde.”26 No less serenely, he told James Monroe that within two or three years France would have “a tolerably free constitution” without “having cost them a drop of blood.”27 As late as March 15, 1789, Jefferson seemed oblivious of the violent emotions churning in the breasts of the French populace, telling Madison, “France will be quiet this year, because this year at least is necessary for settling her future constitution.”28 By this point, desperate French peasants were looting grain wagons. The following month, the mere rumor that a wallpaper manufacturer was about to slash wages led workers to encircle his house, shouting, “Death to the rich, death to the aristocrats.”29 The subsequent crackdown on protesters left dozens, perhaps hundreds, dead.
It would be richly paradoxical that Jefferson, long an eyewitness to French politics, was blind to the murderous drift of events while Hamilton, who never set foot in Europe, was much more clear-sighted about the French Revolution. At first, Jefferson’s exuberance was natural and understandable. In June 1789, the legislature was renamed the National Assembly, as Louis XVI seemed to accept a constitutional monarchy. On July 11, Lafayette presented to the assembly a declaration of rights that had been helpfully reviewed by Jefferson. Then came the gory atrocities that shadowed the Bastille’s fall on July 14, 1789: severed heads propped on pikes, mutilated bodies dragged through the streets, corpses swinging from streetlamps. For those who cared to read the signs, the future of the Revolution was written in these bloodstained images. Simon Schama has noted that violence was, from the outset, part and parcel of the Revolution: “The notion that between 1789 and 1791, France basked in some sort of liberal pleasure garden before the erection of the guillotine is a complete fantasy.”30
With his highly selective vision, Jefferson preferred to dwell on the hopeful aspects of the situation and filtered out the carnage. On August 3, 1789, he wrote to a friend:
It is impossible to conceive a greater fermentation than has worked in Paris, nor do I believe that so great a fermentation ever produced so little injury in any other people. I have been through it daily, have observed the mobs with my own eyes in order to be satisfied of their objects and declare to you that I saw so plainly the legitimacy of them that I have slept in my house as quietly through the whole as I ever did in the most peaceable moments…. I willagree to be stoned as a false prophet if all does not end well in this country.31
To Maria Cosway, Jefferson hazarded a small joke about decapitating aristocrats—“The cutting off heads is become so much à la mode that one is apt to feel of a morning whether their own is on their shoulders”—and he left little doubt that the French Revolution was a worthy sequel to its American predecessor: “My fortune has been singular to see in the course of fourteen years two such revolutions as were never seen before.”32 Even as Jefferson departed from France that fall, thousands of poor, desperate women were swarming toward Versailles, determined to drag the royal family back to Paris.
Many Americans were flattered to think that their revolution had spawned a European successor with a similar respect for legal forms. All the more prophetic then the letter of October 6, 1789, that Hamilton sent to his old friend Lafayette, who had been appointed head of the national guard. Sitting in New York, slaving over his Report on Public Credit, the new secretary of the treasury peered deeper into French affairs than did Jefferson after five years in residence. “I have seen with a mixture of pleasure and apprehension the progress of the events which have lately taken place in your country,” Hamilton began his carefully worded letter. “As a friend to mankind and liberty, I rejoice in the efforts which you are making to establish it, while I fear much for the final success of the attempts, for the fate of those I esteem who are engaged in it.” Hamilton knew that Lafayette would wonder why he experienced “this foreboding of ill” and listed four reasons. The first three were the disagreements that would surface over the French constitution; the “vehement character” of the French people; and the resistance of the nobility to the sacrifices they would have to make. The fourth point was perhaps the most compelling: “I dread the reveries of your philosophic politicians who appear in the moment to have great influence and who being mere speculatists may aim at more refinement than suits either with human nature or the composition of your nation.”33
The future secretary of state, now sailing home, was to strike Hamilton as just such a “philosophic politician” ignorant of human nature. Hamilton later explained to a political associate that Jefferson in Paris “drank deeply of the French philosophy in religion, in science, in politics. He came from France in the moment of a fermentation which he had had a share in exciting and in the passions and feelings of which he shared both from temperament and situation.”34 Fresh from the French Revolution, Jefferson was to be greeted by a most unexpected shock when he showed up in New York to assume his post.
On March 21, 1790, Jefferson moved into lodgings on Maiden Lane, where he was to live with something less than republican austerity. From Paris, he had shipped home eighty-six crates packed with costly French furniture, porcelain, and silver, as well as books, paintings, and prints. He had brought home 288 bottles of French wine. To appease his craving for French food, he also brought along one of his slaves, James Hemings (Sally’s brother), who had studied fine cooking with a Parisian chef. While secretary of state, Jefferson maintained a household of five servants, four horses, and a maître d’hôtel imported from Paris.
In seeming contradiction to this patrician style, Jefferson cherished a vision of America as a place of arcadian innocence. “Indeed, madam, I know nothing as charming as our own country,” he had written to Angelica Church from Paris. “The learned say it is a new creation and I believe them, not for their reasons, but because it is made on an improved plan. Europe is a first idea, a crude production, before the master knew his trade, or had made up his mind as to what he wanted.”35 Settled in his palatial Parisian residence, Jefferson lamented reports of unspoiled Americans succumbing to luxurious ways. “I consider the extravagance which has seized them as a more baneful evil than toryism was during the war,” he told one correspondent.36 Now he was eager to assess “the tone of sentiment” in America after his prolonged absence.37
In New York, Jefferson soon decided that America had been corrupted in his absence and that the Revolution stood in mortal danger. He concluded that “a preference of kingly over republican government was evidently the favorite sentiment” among affluent New Yorkers.38 As he attended dinners, he was taken aback by the pro-British inclinations of many merchants and the sumptuous gowns and jewelry of their wives. The town struck him as infested with Tories and avaricious speculators in government securities, all looking worshipfully to Hamilton as their favorite. The heroes of 1776 had given way to those of 1787; as exemplified by Hamilton, they were a different, more conservative breed. Jefferson blamed the influence of British manners and manufactures for this decay of republican purity.
Twelve years Jefferson’s junior, Hamilton had never met him before. Hamilton had been a lowly artillery captain at the time Jefferson was composing the Declaration of Independence, and Hamilton’s incandescent rise had coincided with Jefferson’s years abroad. Hamilton would have heard favorable things about Jefferson from Angelica Church and from James Madison, and the latter likely introduced them. That Hamilton and Jefferson were to become antagonists in a bloody, unrelenting feud would not have occurred to either man upon first meeting, and their relations started out amicably enough. Alexander and Eliza hosted a welcoming dinner for the newcomer, who showed up in a blue coat and crimson knee breeches and talked fondly of the French people and their desire to eliminate the monarchy. Jefferson got to know Eliza so well that he chided Angelica Church in June for not writing more often and sighed with mock despair, “I can count only on hearing from you thro’ Mrs. Hamilton.”39 The new secretaries of state and treasury traded cordial notes.
Jefferson never underestimated Hamilton’s superlative talents. After reading The Federalist, Jefferson pronounced it the “best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written.”40 Nor did he slight Hamilton’s virtues. As he noted in later years, after their epic battles had faded into history, “Hamilton was indeed a singular character of acute understanding, disinterested, honest, and honorable in all private transactions, amiable in society, and duly valuing virtue in private life—yet so bewitched and perverted by the British example as to be under thorough conviction that corruption was essential to the government of a nation.”41 By corruption, Jefferson did not necessarily mean outright payments so much as unhealthy executive influence over legislators through honors, appointments, and other perquisites of office. A central tenet of the American Revolution had been that a corrupt British ministry had suborned Parliament through patronage and pensions and used the resulting excessive influence to tax the colonists and deprive them of their ancient English liberties. Jefferson always viewed Hamilton through the lens of this unsettling analogy.
By the time Jefferson arrived in New York, Madison had been trounced by Hamilton in the discrimination vote, and the treasury secretary was hurtling ahead with his funding scheme. Jefferson must have regretted having arrived so late. He had no doubt that the original holders of government paper had been cheated of rightful gains by speculators who were “fraudulent purchasers of this paper…. Immense sums were thus filched from the poor and ignorant and fortunes accumulated by those who had themselves been poor enough before.”42 Jefferson’s objections to Hamilton’s plan had philosophical roots. In his view, the smaller the government, the better the chances of preserving liberty. And to the extent that a central government was necessary, he wanted a strong Congress with a weak executive. Most of all, Jefferson wished to preserve state sovereignty against federal infringement. Since Hamilton’s agenda was to strengthen the central government, bolster the executive branch at the expense of the legislature, and subordinate the states, it embodied everything Jefferson abhorred.
Jefferson feared that the funding scheme would create a fiercely loyal following for Hamilton among those enriched by it. He later told Washington that Hamilton had promoted a “regular system” of “interested persons” who were at the beck and call of the Treasury Department.43 He was convinced that congressmen were investing in government securities and that “even in this, the birth of our government, some members were found sordid enough to bend their duty to their interests and to look after personal rather than public good.”44 Jefferson also did not believe that Hamilton really intended to pay off the government debt. “I would wish the debt paid tomorrow,” Jefferson told Washington. “He wishes it never to be paid, but always to be a thing wherewith to corrupt and manage the legislature.”45 This idea of perpetual debt flew in the face of Hamilton’s express words and turned his funding program into a blatant grab for power.
The ideological differences between Hamilton and Jefferson did not blaze into sudden, open enmity. In their early days in the cabinet, these erudite men held many private talks, with Jefferson hoarding statements by Hamilton that he later used against him. As a courtly gentleman of impeccable manners, Jefferson shrank from disagreement. Unlike Hamilton, a swashbuckler who reveled in debate, Jefferson hated controversy and was more guarded than Hamilton in exposing his thoughts. He suited his words to the occasion and catered to listeners’ prejudices, saying what they wanted to hear. This kept his own views secret while encouraging others to speak. Hamilton—opinionated, almost recklessly candid—was incapable of this type of circumspection. Jefferson had learned the advantages of inscrutable silence. While serving with Jefferson in the Continental Congress, recalled John Adams, “I never heard him utter three sentences together.”46 On another occasion, Adams labeled the Virginian a “shadow man” and likened his character to “the great rivers, whose bottoms we cannot see and make no noise.”47 For Hamilton, unable to govern his tongue or his pen, his habit of self-exposure eventually placed him at the mercy of the tightly controlled Jefferson.
Jefferson’s horror over the discrimination defeat led to the first major political alignment in the infant republic as Jefferson made common cause with Madison, now the House floor leader. Their partnership was to have ramifications for America’s future as important as the earlier one beween Hamilton and Madison. Of the nearly mystic bond between Jefferson and Madison, John Quincy Adams said it was “a phenomenon, like the invisible and mysterious movements of the magnet in the physical world.”48 Since Hamilton’s relationship with Madison had revolved around ideas, there was little personal chemistry to sustain their friendship when they fell out over politics. Madison’s defection was a tremendous blow for Hamilton, who had consulted him in the early stages of his Report on Public Credit. So boundless was Hamilton’s respect for Madison that he later said that he would never have accepted the Treasury post had he not believed that he could count on his general support.
Jefferson arrived in New York in the thick of the debate raging over assumption—Hamilton’s plan to have the federal government assume the twenty-five million dollars of state debt. This venomous clash made the fight over discrimination look civilized, and Jefferson later categorized it as “the most bitter and angry contest ever known in Congress before or since the union of the states.”49 On February 24, 1790, Hamilton had been stunned when Madison, reversing his former position, contested assumption. Retreating from his old nationalist perspective, Madison complained that his home state and some other southern states had paid off most of their wartime debts and would be penalized if, “after having done their duty,” they were forced “to contribute to those states who have not equally done their duty.”50 To Hamilton, it seemed that Madison spoke for his Virginia constituents and not, as in The Federalist, for the national good. (Of course, as treasury secretary, Hamilton enjoyed the luxury of a continental view.) Hamilton was blind-sided by this backlash against his program; that Madison led it was an unkind cut. Hamilton plainly recalled discussing assumption with Madison during an “afternoon’s walk” at the Constitutional Convention, and “we were perfectly agreed in the expediency and propriety of such a measure.”51
Madison’s physical appearance—his pale, unsmiling visage, his detached air and short stature—transmitted a superficial impression of timidity. And some fellow politicians believed that “Little Jemmy,” as he was known, lacked the commanding, decisive air of a successful politician. His mental vigor, unlike Hamilton’s, was not matched by a corresponding talent for translating thought into action. “His great fault as a politician appears to me a want of decision and a disposition to magnify his adversaries’ strength,” Congressman Edward Livingston told his brother, Robert R. Livingston. “He never determines to act until he is absolutely forced by the pressure of affairs and then regrets that he has neglected some better opportunity.”52 So powerful was this appearance of timidity that many observers were convinced that Madison, eight years younger than Jefferson, must have been dominated by his shrewd mentor. “Mr. Madison had always entertained an exalted opinion of the talents, knowledge and virtues of Mr. Jefferson,” Hamilton later wrote. But he thought that, at bottom, each man stiffened the other’s determination in opposing his funding program: “Jefferson was indiscreetly open in his approbation of Mr. Madison’s principles upon his first coming to the seat of Government. I say indiscreetly because a gentleman in the administration of one department ought not to have taken sides against another in another department.”53
The impression that Jefferson controlled Madison could be misleading, and not only because Madison deserted Hamilton before Jefferson even arrived in New York. Like Jefferson, Madison operated in the shadows and relied on subtle craft and indirection. His professorial air masked an iron will and a fanatical sense of conviction. Albert Gallatin, later treasury secretary under Jefferson and Madison, was to call Madison “slow in taking his ground, but firm when the storm rises.”54 If anything, Madison had a more supple and original mind than Jefferson and a deeper grasp of constitutional issues. If Madison in the 1780s was a philosopher king, Madison in the 1790s was a formidable practicing politician and so skillful at cutting deals that he was dubbed “the Big Knife.” Hamilton’s followers, who feared Madison’s ability to marshal votes, later called him “the general” and Jefferson “the generalissimo.”55 Congressman Zephaniah Swift of Connecticut later confirmed that Madison’s lack of Hamiltonian verve could be deceptive:
He has no fire, no enthusiasm, no animation, but he has infinite prudence and industry. [With] the greatest apparent candor, he calculates upon everything with the greatest nicety and precision. He has unquestionably the most personal influence of any man in the House of Representatives. I never knew a man that better understood [how] to husband a character and make the most of his talents. And he is the most artificial, studied character on earth.56
On four separate occasions between February and July 1790, the dexterous Madison thwarted attempts to enact assumption. People whispered into Hamilton’s ear that Madison was jealous of his power, that Madison coveted his job. Time showed that political differences dwarfed personal considerations. Hamilton’s funding plan brought state loyalties to the surface. Some states, such as Massachusetts and South Carolina, struggled with heavy debts and were glad to be relieved by the central government. Others, such as Virginia and North Carolina, had settled most of their debts and saw no reason to help. Such differences threatened to explode the brittle consensus that had been so arduous to reach at the Constitutional Convention.
In defending his plan, Hamilton did not speak just in arid technical terms. He talked of justice, equity, patriotism, and national honor. His funding system was premised upon a simple concept: that the debt had been generated by the Revolution, that all Americans had benefited equally from that revolution, and that they should assume collective responsibility for its debt. If state debts were unequal, so were the sacrifices made during the fighting. Praising the “immense exertions” of indebted Massachusetts, for instance, Hamilton stated, “It would not be too strong to say that they were in a great degree the pivot of the revolution.”57 Some states, he noted, had paid their debts by ignoble means. New York, for instance, had reneged on interest payments to drive down the market value of its debt, making it cheaper for the state to buy it back. Hamilton also made a subtle, sophisticated argument that without assumption, indebted states would have to raise their taxes, while healthy states would lighten their tax loads. This would trigger a dangerous exodus of people from high-tax to low-tax states, producing “a violent dislocation of the population of particular states.”58
For Hamilton, assumption was his make-or-break issue, and the outlook seemed grim. Hamilton recalled, “It happened that Mr. Madison and some other distinguished characters of the South started in opposition to the assumption. The high opinion entertained of them made it be taken for granted in that quarter that the opposition would be successful.”59 Hamilton threw himself into battle with his accustomed impetuosity. In this exceptionally hard fight, Hamilton had to lead the charge without Washington. The president supported assumption but did not want to be accused of partisanship and so hesitated to express a public opinion. To aggravate the problem, Washington was laid low in May with an attack of pneumonia so debilitating that, Jefferson said, he was “pronounced by two of the three physicians present to be in the act of death…. You cannot conceive of the public alarmon this occasion.”60
From May 10 to June 24, Washington was too feeble to record an entry in his diary, and Hamilton seemed to function as the de facto head of state. In unpublished comments on this period, Hamilton accused Jefferson of harboring presidential wishes during the interregnum:
Mr. Jefferson fears in Mr. Hamilton a formidable rival in the competition for the presidential chair at a future period…. After he [Jefferson] entered on the duties of his station, the President was afflicted with a malady which while it created dismay and alarm in the heart of every patriot only excited the ambitious ardor of the secretary to remove out of his way every dangerous opponent. That melancholy circumstance suggested to him the probability of an approaching vacancy in the presidential chair and that he would attract the public attention as the successor to it were the more popular Secretary of the Treasury out of the way.61
Perhaps Hamilton decided to suppress this recollection because it revealed his own presidential fantasies as well as Jefferson’s.
During Washington’s illness, Hamilton and his minions, in a tremendous display of organizational skill, accosted congressmen and proselytized for assumption. The treasury secretary became a ubiquitous figure at Federal Hall, packing the gallery with supporters. Nobody was more offended than William Maclay. In his journal, he castigated Hamilton as “his Holiness” and on another occasion called him “a damnable villain.”62 (Hamilton got off easy: John Adams reminded Maclay of “a monkey just put into breeches.”)63 On account of his whirling energy, Hamilton encountered enormous resistance from congressmen fearful of a strong executive branch. His activities brought to mind Robert Walpole, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer in the 1720s, who achieved such omnipotence that he was the first to acquire the title of “prime” minister. In Philadelphia, Benjamin Rush deplored Hamilton’s high-pressure lobbying: “I question whether more dishonourable influence has ever been used by a British Minister (bribery excepted) to carry a measure than has [been] used to carry the report of the Secretary. This influence is not confined to nightly visits, promises, compromises, sacrifices, and threats in New York.”64
Alexander Hamilton was trying through his assumption plan to preserve the union, and yet nobody, for the moment, seemed to be widening its divisions more. If politics is preeminently the art of compromise, then Hamilton was in some ways poorly suited for his job. He wanted to be a statesman who led courageously, not a politician who made compromises. Instead of proceeding with small, piecemeal measures, he had presented a gigantic package of fiscal measures that he wanted accepted all at once.
As the newspaper war against Hamilton heated up, Madison’s backers scented victory. On April 8, William Maclay gloated over the gloom of Hamilton’s adherents: “I never observed so drooping an aspect, so turbid and forlorn an appearance as overspread the partisans of the Secretary in our House this afternoon…. [Rufus] King looked like a boy that had been whipped.”65 Maclay’s exuberance was justified. On April 12, 1790, the House voted down Hamilton’s assumption plan, thirty-one to twenty-nine, and two weeks later voted to discontinue all debate on the issue. By early June, it looked as if the assumption plan was heading for oblivion. So Hamilton began to search for a compromise that would salvage the linchpin of his economic program.
The issue that he seized on was the divisive question of where the national capital should be located. At the Constitutional Convention, the delegates had decided to create a federal district, ten miles square, in an unspecified location. This decision generated melodramatic speculation. Some people found the idea of a separate capital fraught with danger, fearing a privileged enclave. Governor George Clinton envisioned the ten-mile square as the scene of a presidential “court” disfigured by royal trappings and marked by “ambition with idleness, baseness with pride, the thirst of riches without labor…flattery…treason…perfidy, but above all the perpetual ridicule of virtue.”66
The capital’s location had already led to intensive lobbying and intrigue. It was a monumental decision for contestants, since it would confer massive wealth, power, and population upon the winning state. More important, it would affect the style of the federal government, which was bound to soak up some of the political atmosphere of the surrounding region. In a large country with poor transportation, the voices of local citizens would resonate loudly in the ears of federal legislators.
Complicating the debate was the expectation that there would first be a temporary capital, likely New York or Philadelphia, which would function as the makeshift seat of government while a permanent capital was readied. Notwithstanding his nationalist bent, Hamilton wanted New York to remain at least the temporary capital. In August 1788, he contacted his old mentor, Governor William Livingston of New Jersey, and expressed shock at reports that Livingston had capitulated to “the snares of Pennsylvania” and was leaning toward Philadelphia as temporary capital for the first Congress.67 The northeastern states feared the enhanced power that would accrue to Pennsylvania if it housed the temporary capital, which might then prove permanent. Before Livingston, Hamilton dangled a tantalizing deal: if he supported New York City as temporary capital, Hamilton would endorse Trenton, New Jersey, as the long-term capital.
Hamilton’s desire to have the capital in New York intensified as Washington’s inauguration neared. In February 1789, he made a spirited campaign speech for his friend John Laurance, then running for Congress from New York City, and urged “that as the residence of Congress would doubtless be esteemed a matter of some import to the city of New York…our representative should be a man well qualified in oratory to prove that this city is the best station for that honorable body.”68 By January 17, 1790, with the uproar mounting over Hamilton’s funding scheme, William Maclay believed that Hamilton, emboldened by his burgeoning power, was determined to retain New York as the capital: “I have attended in the minutest manner to the motions of Hamilton and the [New] Yorkers. Sincerity is not with them. They will never consent to part with Congress.”69
In this tussle, New York was a controversial choice. It was becoming so associated with Hamilton that his enemies branded it “Hamiltonopolis.” For many southerners, Jefferson in particular, New York City was an Anglophile bastion dominated by bankers and merchants who would contaminate the republican experiment. These critics equated New York with the evils of London. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia booster, told Madison, “I am satisfied that the influence of our city will be against the [Treasury] Secretary’s system of injustice & corruption…. Philadelphia will be better ground to combat the system on than New York.”70
The question of the capital served as a proxy for the question of whether America should assume an urban or agrarian character. Many southerners believed that a northern capital would favor the mercantile, monied urban interests and discriminate against agrarian life. Jefferson’s pastoral dream of a nation of small, independent farms had a powerful appeal to the American psyche, however much it differed from the slaveholding reality of the south. Jefferson, Madison, and Washington wanted a permanent capital on the Potomac, not far from Mount Vernon. For Jefferson, this would plant the nation’s capital in a bucolic setting, safe from abolitionist forces and the temptations “of any overgrown commercial city.”71 Madison and Henry Lee speculated in land on the Potomac, hoping to earn a windfall profit if the area was chosen for the capital.
There were other political questions to consider. Should the capital be near the population or the geographic center of America? New York was scarcely equidistant from the northern and southern tips of the country—sixteen of the twenty-four original senators came from south of the city—and this would present hardships for southern delegates who had to travel long distances. The choice of the capital was also seen as a referendum on America’s future growth. For those who believed that the country would expand westward—a view especially prevalent in the southern states, whose western borders functioned as gateways to the frontier—a northeast capital would poorly serve America’s future political landscape. All these simmering issues came to the surface during the ensuing debate.
During the spring of 1790, quarrels over assumption and the national capital grew so vitriolic that it didn’t seem far-fetched that the union might break up over the issues. The south increasingly fired at Hamilton the same vituperative rhetoric once directed at the British. In writing to Madison, Henry Lee stated that the battle to stop assumption brought back memories of the Revolution: “It seems to me that we southern people must be slaves in effect or cut the Gordian knot at once.”72 Jefferson long remembered the sour mood that hung like a miasma over New York that spring: “Congress met and adjourned from day to day without doing anything, the parties being too much out of temper to do business together.”73
Of the two policies that Hamilton wished to promote—the federal assumption of state debt and the selection of New York as the capital—assumption was incomparably more important to him. It was the most effective and irrevocable way to yoke the states together into a permanent union. So when he saw that Madison possessed the votes to block assumption, Hamilton considered bargaining away New York as the capital in exchange for southern support for assumption. As early as May 16, glimmers of a deal emerged in a letter from Philip Schuyler to Stephen Van Rensselaer: “No motion has yet been brought forward to remove the seat [of] government, but we apprehend that, if the assumption is not carried, that the South Carolinians may (in order to obtain an object which is so important to them) negotiate with those who wish the removal.”74 Nine days later, William Maclay reported frantic negotiations: “The [New] Yorkers are now busy in the scheme of bargaining with the Virginians, offering the permanent seat on the Potomac for the temporary one in New York.”75
On June 2, 1790, the House enacted Hamilton’s funding bill without the assumption component. Hamilton knew he had to strike a deal quickly. Reluctant to surrender his reputation for uncompromising stands, he relied on deputies to make the conciliatory overtures. In the early republic, it was difficult for politicians to engage in legislative maneuvering that later became standard practice, so Hamilton dispatched emissaries to sound out Robert Morris, the Pennsylvania senator and a leading proponent of Philadelphia as the capital. “I did not choose to trust them,” Morris said, “but wrote a note to Colonel Hamilton that I would be walking early in the morning on the Battery and if Colonel Hamilton had anything to propose to him he might meet him there.”76 To Morris’s surprise, Hamilton was already at the rendezvous spot when he arrived. Hamilton’s deal was simple: if Morris rounded up one vote in the Senate and five in the House for assumption, he would back Germantown or Trenton—both hard by Philadelphia—as the permanent capital. Hamilton had now tipped his hand as the master strategist behind the bargaining over the capital. Pennsylvania congressman Peter Muhlenberg told Benjamin Rush, “It is now established beyond a doubt that the Secretary of the Treasury guides the movements of the eastern phalanx.”77
What likely scuttled Hamilton’s deal was that the Pennsylvania and Virginia delegations had already reached an understanding: Philadelphia would become the temporary capital and the Potomac site the permanent capital. This was the very solution Hamilton had worked to avoid because it rejected a role for New York and placed the long-term capital in the south. The Pennsylvania legislators probably consented from a wishful hunch that the capital, once placed temporarily in Philadelphia, would be difficult to dislodge. By June 18, having surrendered hope of a permanent capital on the Delaware, Hamilton was slowly coming around to the Potomac site. That day, William Maclay reported that Hamilton “affects to tell Mr. Morris that the New England men will bargain to fix the permanent seat at the Potomac or at Baltimore.”78
It was against this backdrop of an emerging consensus that one must evaluate the famous anecdote told by Jefferson about the dinner bargain that fixed the capital on the Potomac. According to Jefferson, the northern states were threatening “secession and dissolution” when he ran into a ragged Hamilton outside Washington’s residence. Usually, Hamilton was dapper and polished; now, to Jefferson’s amazement, he was despondent and unkempt: “His look was somber, haggard, and dejected…. Even his dress uncouth and neglected.”79 Hamilton seemed in despair.
He walked me backwards and forwards before the President’s door for half an hour. He painted pathetically the temper into which the legislature had been wrought; the disgust of those who were called creditor states; the danger of the secession of their members and the separation of the states. He observed that the members of the administration ought to act in concert; that though this question was not of my department, yet a common duty should make it a common concern…that the question having been lost by a small majority only, it was probable that an appeal from me to the judgment and discretion of some of my friends might effect a change in the vote.80
If assumption faltered, Hamilton hinted, he might have to resign. Jefferson blandly informed Hamilton that he “was really a stranger to the whole subject” of assumption—Jefferson was very adroit at presenting himself as a political naïf—when he had, in fact, followed the debate intently and had just written George Mason urging a compromise on the matter.81 Doubtless with this in mind, he invited the treasury secretary to dine at his home the next day.
If we are to credit Jefferson’s story, the dinner held at his lodgings on Maiden Lane on June 20, 1790, fixed the future site of the capital. It is perhaps the most celebrated meal in American history, the guests including Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and perhaps one or two others. For more than a month, Jefferson had been bedeviled by a migraine headache, yet he presided with commendable civility. Despite his dislike of assumption, he knew that the stalemate over the funding scheme could shatter the union, and, as secretary of state, he also feared the repercussions for American credit abroad.
Madison restated his familiar argument that assumption punished Virginia and other states that had duly settled their debts. But he agreed to support assumption—or at least not oppose it—if something was granted in exchange. Jefferson recalled, “It was observed…that as the pill would be a bitter one to the southern states, something should be done to soothe them.”82 The sedative measure was that Philadelphia would be the temporary capital for ten years, followed by a permanent move to a Potomac site. In a lucrative concession for his home state, Madison also seems to have extracted favorable treatment for Virginia in a final debt settlement with the central government. In return, Hamilton agreed to exert his utmost efforts to get the Pennsylvania congressional delegation to accept Philadelphia as the provisional capital and a Potomac site as its permanent successor.
The dinner consecrated a deal that was probably already close to achievement. The sad irony was that Hamilton, the quintessential New Yorker, bargained away the city’s chance to be another London or Paris, the political as well as financial and cultural capital of the country. His difficult compromise testified to the transcendent value he placed on assumption. The decision did not sit well with many New Yorkers. Senator Rufus King was enraged when Hamilton told him that he “had made up his mind” to jettison the capital to save his funding system. For King, Hamilton’s move had been high-handed and secretive, and he ranted privately that “great and good schemes ought to succeed not by intrigue or the establishment of bad measures.”83
True to his dinner pledge, Hamilton applied his persuasive powers to the Pennsylvania delegation. Maclay’s journal is again invaluable in tracking these closed-door deliberations. When he discovered that Hamilton had linked the “abominations” of his funding scheme with the Potomac capital, he berated Washington as a tool of Hamilton and “the dishclout of every dirty speculation.”84 In the Senate on June 23, Maclay noticed that Robert Morris was summoned from the chamber. “He at last came in and whispered [to] me: ‘The business is settled at last. Hamilton gives up the temporary residence’” for New York.85 The next day, the Pennsylvania congressional delegation bowed to the compromise that was to make Philadelphia the temporary capital for ten years.
To clinch the deal, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Secretary of War Knox dined with the Pennsylvanians on June 28. Maclay’s recollections of that dinner are instructive. He found Jefferson stiff and formal, possessed of a “lofty gravity.” He warmed more to the fat, easygoing Knox, who may have drunk to excess—Maclay calls him “Bacchanalian”—yet managed to project an aura of dignity. The description of Hamilton is suggestive: “Hamilton has a very boyish, giddy manner and Scotch-Irish people could well call him a ‘skite.’”86 The Oxford English Dictionary defines the Scottish word skite as meaning a vain, frivolous, or wanton girl. The choice of words hints at something feminine about Hamilton beneath the military bearing, an androgynous quality noted by others. The description also suggests that Hamilton had gone from abject despair to inexpressible elation as he won final backing for his funding scheme.
On July 10, 1790, the House approved the Residence Act, designating Philadelphia as the temporary capital and a ten-mile-square site on the Potomac as the permanent site. A disenchanted Maclay concluded that Hamilton was now all-powerful: “His gladiators…have wasted us months in this place…. Everything, even to the naming of a committee, is prearranged by Hamilton and his group of speculators.”87 On July 26, the House narrowly passed the assumption bill. The famous dinner deal had worked its political magic. Madison voted against Hamilton’s measure but arranged for four congressmen from Virginia and Maryland to change their votes in favor of assumption.
In retrospect, it was a splendid moment for Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson. They had devised a statesmanlike solution that averted disintegration of the union. In this idealistic dawn of the republic, however, such a compromise evoked howls of execration. Any backdoor deal savored of corruption, and legislators anxiously awaited the public response. Thomas FitzSimons of the Pennsylvania delegation feared “that stones would be thrown at him” in Philadelphia because he had gone along with a Potomac capital.88On the New York streets, the Pennsylvanians endured obscene epithets shouted by pedestrians disgusted at losing the temporary capital, New York City having already broken ground on a new presidential mansion. Among the most aggrieved New Yorkers was Philip Schuyler, who bewailed “a want of that decency which was due to a city whose citizens made very capital exertions for the accommodation of Congress.”89
Jefferson would have to defend to posterity his complicity in a deal that weakened the states. He could have cited the peril to the union and left it at that. Instead, he decided to scapegoat Hamilton. Of his own part in passing the assumption bill, he later told Washington, “I was duped into it by the Secretary of the Treasury and made a tool for forwarding his schemes, not then sufficiently understood by me, and of all the errors of my political life this has occasioned me the deepest regret.”90 In 1818, Jefferson made the point still more graphically. Through assumption, Hamilton had thrown a lucrative sop “to the stock-jobbing herd. This added to the number of votaries of the Treasury and made its chief the master of every vote in the legislature which might give to the government the direction suited to his political views.”91 Jefferson traced the formation of the two main parties—to be known as Republicans and Federalists—to Hamilton’s victory over assumption. For Jefferson, this event split Congress into pure, virtuous republicans and a “mercenary phalanx,” “monarchists in principle,” who “adhered to Hamilton of course as their leader in that principle.”92
Why did Jefferson retrospectively try to downplay his part in passing Hamilton’s assumption scheme? While he understood the plan at the time better than he admitted, he probably did not see as clearly as Hamilton that the scheme created an unshakable foundation for federal power in America. The federal government had captured forever the bulk of American taxing power. In comparison, the location of the national capital seemed a secondary matter. It wasn’t that Jefferson had been duped by Hamilton; Hamilton had explained his views at dizzying length. It was simply that he had been outsmarted by Hamilton, who had embedded an enduring political system in the details of the funding scheme. In an unsigned newspaper article that September, entitled “Address to the Public Creditors,” Hamilton gave away the secret of his statecraft that so infuriated Jefferson: “Whoever considers the nature of our government with discernment will see that though obstacles and delays will frequently stand in the way of the adoption of good measures, yet when once adopted, they are likely to be stable and permanent. It will be far more difficult to undo than to do.”93
The dinner deal to pass assumption and establish the capital on the Potomac was the last time that Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison ever cooperated to advance a common agenda. Henceforth, they found themselves in increasingly open warfare.