Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 Read online

  In August 1792 in a fourteen-thousand-word document Hamilton answered Jefferson’s arguments one by one and demonstrated his exceptional understanding of financial matters. He could not help assuming the exasperated tone of the sophisticated Wall Street lawyer explaining the intricacies of banks and credit to country bumpkins. He first pointed out that the debt was created not by the Federalist administration but by the Revolutionary War. If the opponents of the debt wanted it paid off, he said, then they ought to stop misrepresenting the measures of the government and depriving it of its ability to do just that. Hamilton went on to deny the charge that congressmen were corrupt because they were public creditors; indeed, he said, “it is a strange perversion of ideas, and as novel as it is extraordinary, that men should be deemed corrupt & criminal for becoming proprietors in the funds of their Country.” He denied too that there was a conspiracy to transform America into a monarchy. He certainly was somewhat disingenuous in declaring that no one, as far as he knew, “contemplated the introducing into this country of a monarchy.” But he did go on to ridicule the various fears of plots that the two different parties had—one fearing monarchy and the other fearing the overturning of the general government. “Both sides,” he said, “may be equally wrong & their mutual jealousies may be materially causes of the appearances which mutually disturb them, and sharpen them against each other.”

  Unfortunately, as Jefferson had pointed out, the division was assuming a sectional cast. “In the South,” said Hamilton, “it is supposed that more government than is expedient is desired by the North. In the North, it is believed, that the prejudices of the South are incompatible with the necessary degree of Government and with the attainment of the essential ends of National Union.” But happily, he said, most people in both sections favored “their true interest, UNION.” Of course, Hamilton assumed that the Southern position was based on mere “theoretical prejudices,” while the Northern position was based on “great and substantial national objects.”34

  To Washington’s dismay, cabinet meetings had become increasingly acrimonious. As Jefferson later recalled, he and Hamilton were “daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks.”35 At the end of August 1792 Washington wrote to both secretaries, urging “more charity for the opinions and acts of one another.” He assumed that the differences between the two men were still merely personal, “for I cannot prevail on myself to believe that these measures are, as yet, the deliberate acts of a determined party.” He appealed to his two cabinet officials to be less suspicious and more tolerant of one another. If “one pulls this way and another that,” then the government “must inevitably be torn asunder,” and “the fairest prospect of happiness and prosperity that ever was presented to man, will be lost—perhaps for ever!”36

  Both men replied to Washington the same day. Each outlined his grievances against the other in order to justify his actions. Hamilton admitted that he had retaliated in the press against Jefferson. Indeed, his articles published during the latter half of 1792 in the Gazette of the United States actually attacked Jefferson by name and thus may have had the unintended effect of elevating Jefferson to leadership of the Republican opposition. One Federalist even labeled Jefferson the “Generalissimo” of the Republican armies, with Madison being relegated to the title of a mere “General.”37

  Hamilton believed that he had every justification for attacking Jefferson in the press. Jefferson from the beginning had formed a party “bent upon my subversion” and had created a newspaper with Philip Freneau as his agent in order “to render me and all the measures connected with my department as odious as possible.” Undermining the nation’s honor and credit, as Jefferson and his followers intended, would “bring the Government into contempt with that description of Men, who are in every society the only firm supporters of government.”38 Hamilton could not avoid thinking of society in a traditional hierarchical manner, with the proprietary gentry at the top being crucial to social order.

  Jefferson replied with even more venom and self-pity than Hamilton. Although he had vowed never to interfere with the Congress, he had violated his resolution one time in the case of the assumption of state debts. He had been duped into it by Hamilton “and made a tool for forwarding his schemes, not then sufficiently understood by me.” It was, he said, the biggest mistake of his political life. Jefferson then went on to describe his differences with Hamilton, differences that were not merely personal. “His system flowed from principles adverse to liberty, and was calculated to undermine and abolish the republic, by creating an influence of his department over the members of the legislature.” Congressmen, Jefferson said, no longer spoke for the people; they were simply enriching themselves. The debt was a crucial point of difference between him and Hamilton. “I would wish the debt paid tomorrow; he wishes it never to be paid, but always to be a thing wherewith to corrupt and manage the legislature.” Indeed, using influence was his mode of operation. How many sons, relatives, and friends of the legislators, asked Jefferson, had Hamilton provided for out of the thousand offices he had at his disposal? And he had the nerve, said Jefferson, to question the hiring of the newspaper editor Philip Freneau as a translator in the State Department. (Actually hiring Freneau had come to embarrass Jefferson, and he spent an inordinate amount of his letter justifying it.)

  Jefferson’s letter was more than three times as long as Hamilton’s and was far more wide-ranging in its indictment of his enemy. He lashed out at Hamilton in every direction, charging that the treasury secretary’s broad construction of the Constitution and his reliance on the general welfare clause were all part of his scheme of “subverting step by step the principles of the Constitution.” Somewhat disingenuously, Jefferson claimed that he had done nothing to oppose Hamilton’s schemes except to express dissent. Hamilton, he charged, had not been so innocent. The secretary of the treasury had continually interfered with Jefferson’s department, discussing foreign affairs with the ministers of Britain and France, and had written hateful pieces against Jefferson in the press. Did this not, Jefferson asked, harm “the dignity and even the decency of government”?

  Rarely did Jefferson express as much anger in a letter as he did in this one. He promised to retire soon from his office, but he would not promise to give up the fight on behalf of the cause of republican freedom. “I will not suffer my retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment when 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.” Jefferson could not help but think of Hamilton, the bastard immigrant from the West Indies, as a parvenu who was something less than a native American. He never hated anyone more.39

  THE ONE THING the two cabinet officers agreed upon was that Washington had to stay on as president. Washington wanted to retire in 1792. He felt old and tired, and he continued to worry about what people would think about his continuing in office when he had promised way back in 1783 to retire from public life. But everyone urged him to stay. Some Federalists like Robert Morris privately thought that four years was much too short a term for the president. They preferred a life term, and if not that, at least a twenty-one-year term.40

  Even the Republicans wanted Washington to continue in office. Jefferson told him that he was the only man in the country thought to be above party.41 Hamilton even used the ultimate argument on a man who was always anxious about his reputation—that retirement when he was so much needed would be “critically hazardous to your own reputation.”42

  Washington kept postponing a decision and thus tacitly agreed to stand for election for another term. When the electoral votes were counted in February 1793, Washington had once again received every electoral vote, the only president in American history to be so honored. John Adams received seventy-seven votes to fifty for Governor George Clinton of New York, and thus he remained as vice-president. Hamilton thought that Adams was far from perfect, but he was preferab
le to Clinton, who he said was “a man of narrow and perverse politics” and “opposed to national principles.” Adams himself was outraged that Clinton should have received only twenty-seven votes fewer than he did. “Damn’em, damn ’em, damn ’em,” he exclaimed to John Langdon of New Hampshire. “You see that an elective government will not do.” No wonder people suspected Adams of monarchism.43

  Aaron Burr, the senator from New York, apparently had canvassed for the vice-presidency but had received only one electoral vote—from South Carolina. Hamilton was not yet sure about Burr’s character, but what he had heard suggested that “he is a man whose only political principle is, to mount at all events to the highest legal honours of the Nation and as much further as circumstances will carry him.” Hamilton’s biggest worry during the election had been that Adams, Clinton, and Burr would divide the votes of the North and allow Jefferson to sneak in as vice-president, which would have been “a serious misfortune.” Jefferson, he said, was “a man of sublimated and paradoxical imagination—entertaining & propagating notions inconsistent with dignified and orderly Government.”44

  For their part Jefferson and Madison had sought to dampen Burr’s candidacy, arguing that he was too inexperienced for the position. Although the Virginians praised Burr effusively, their opposition to his ambition never sat well with Burr, and he seethed over it.45

  Washington hoped for less partisanship and more harmony in the government, but the worst was yet to come. By the end of 1792 Jefferson and most of his fellow Virginians in the House had become convinced that Hamilton was deep in corruption. In January 1793 they sponsored five resolutions calling for an accounting of the Treasury Department’s affairs. They believed that Hamilton would never be able to answer them before the Congress adjourned in March, and thus the charges would fester for the rest of the year until Congress reconvened. But Hamilton outdid himself in answering his critics, and when the Virginia delegation, perhaps under the influence of Jefferson, pressed the House to censure Hamilton, the representatives refused by large majorities. At the same time, the congressional elections of 1792 suggested that many more of those dedicated to the Republican cause would sit in the Third Congress that would convene at the end of 1793.

  YET THIS WAS NOT YET modern party politics. Politics in the 1790s retained much of its eighteenth-century character. It was still very much a personal and elitist business—resting on friendship, private alliances, personal conversations, letter-writing, and intrigue. Such politics was regarded as the prerogative of notable gentry who presumably had sufficient reputations to gather supporters and followers. Because in America would-be aristocrats and gentlemen lacked any legal titles, their rank had to rest on reputation, on opinion, on having their claim to gentility accepted by the world. This was why eighteenth-century gentlemen, especially those who sought political leadership, so jealously guarded their reputations, or what they more commonly called their honor.

  Honor was the value genteel society placed on a gentleman and the value that a gentleman placed on himself. Honor suggested a public drama in which men played roles for which they were either praised or blamed. It subsumed self-esteem, pride, and dignity and was akin to glory and fame. Gentlemen acted or avoided acting for the sake of their honor. Honor was exclusive, heroic, and aristocratic, and it presumed a hierarchical world different from the one that was emerging in America. Indeed, the eighteenth-century French philosopher Montesquieu, in his Spirit of the Laws (1748), had argued that honor was the animating principle of monarchy.

  Since politics was still an aristocratic matter of individual loyalties and enmities, men had a hard time distinguishing between their status as gentlemen and their position as political leaders. Consequently, political struggles over policy often became personal struggles over reputation. Because reputation was a matter of public opinion, influencing that opinion became an essential aspect of politics. Hence personal insults, calumnies, and gossip were common weapons in these political battles over reputation. Gossip, said Fisher Ames, was an unfortunate fact of political life. “It is provoking,” he lamented, “that a life of virtue and eminent usefulness should be embittered by calumny—but it is the ordinary event of the political drama.”46

  To deal with this sort of personal politics, gentlemen worked out sets of rituals and rules of conduct based on the importance they placed on their reputations. In defense against insult they resorted to a variety of measures: public posting in newspapers, the spreading of counter-gossip, and the writing of pamphlets or newspaper diatribes. Although the most extreme defense of one’s reputation was to challenge the opponent to a duel, physical combat was not the most likely outcome in these ritualized struggles over honor. But the possibility that a political contest could end in an exchange of fire between two men gave an anxious edge to politics.

  Because the United States was still without firmly established institutions and structures of political behavior, this kind of personal gossip-laden politics meant that private relationships necessarily became intermingled with public affairs and vice versa. To attack a government policy was to attack a politician, which immediately called into question his reputation and honor. As William Plumer of New Hampshire complained, “It is impossible to censure measures without condemning men.” This sort of politics based on personal alliances and animosities was difficult to manage and accounts for much of the volatility and passion of political life in the 1790s.47 Although traditional gentry like John Jay continued to assume that “men may be hostile to each other in politics and yet be incapable of such conduct” in private, it was becoming increasingly difficult to behave magnanimously when so much seemed at stake.48

  In this intimate world of competing gentlemen, political parties in any modern sense were slow to emerge. Because there were as yet no elaborate mechanisms for selecting candidates, raising money, and conducting campaigns, notable gentry used their personal reputations to gather supporters and followers. If a member of Congress found himself unable to be present in his district at election time, he might, as Madison did in 1790, write letters to influential friends or relatives and ask them to look after his interest. Gentlemen generally stood, not ran, for election, and canvassing for an office, as Burr was said to have done for the vice-presidency in 1792, was widely thought to be improper. Any interference with the right of each citizen to think and vote independently was anathema. A Connecticut congressman boasted that no one in his state had ever “solicited the suffrages of the freeman, for a place in the legislature.” If anyone was ever foolish enough to try, “he may be assured of meeting with the general contempt and indignation of the people.”49

  With little competition for office, voter turnouts were often very low, sometimes fewer than 5 percent of the eligible electorate.50 Gentlemen put great value on impartiality and disliked and feared parties as factious and self-seeking. “If I could not go to heaven but with a party,” declared Jefferson in 1789, “I would not go there at all.”51 Given this deep-seated hostility to parties, it is not surprising that men found it difficult to draw up tickets of candidates and organize elections in any modern manner.

  Nevertheless, a Republican party of opposition was emerging, and men struggled to explain and justify what was happening. As one of the leaders of the Republican opposition, Madison had become convinced by September 1792 that a division into parties, “being natural to most political societies, is likely to be of some duration in ours.” One party, he wrote publicly in 1792, was composed of those who “are more partial to the opulent than to the other classes of society; and having debauched themselves into a persuasion that mankind are incapable of governing themselves, it follows with them, of course, that government can be carried on only by the pageantry of rank, the influence of money and emoluments and the terror of military force.” These Federalists, or members of what Madison called “the antire-publican party,” expected the government to serve the interests of the few at the expense of the many and hoped that it would “be narrowed i
nto fewer hands, and approximated to an hereditary form.” Members of the other party, “the Republican party, as it may be termed,” were those who believed “that mankind are capable of governing themselves” and hated “hereditary power as an insult to the reason and an outrage to the rights of man.”52

  In this essay, entitled “A Candid State of Parties,” published in the National Gazette on September 26, 1792, Madison meant by parties not organized vehicles for recruiting candidates and winning elections but rather rough divisions of opinion manifested in Congress. In the face of the continual emphasis on the single interest of the public, men were reluctant to admit they might be members of a party. As late as 1794 the Virginia Republican congressman Nathaniel Macon wrote home, “It is said there are two parties in Congress, but the fact I do not positively know. If there are, I know that I do not belong to one.”53

  In these circumstances, of course, the emerging political division between the Federalists and the Republicans bore no resemblance to the party competition of modern American politics or to the politics of the antebellum period. Neither party accepted the legitimacy or existence of the other. Indeed, each believed that the other was out to destroy the country. The Federalists, whom John Adams defined in 1792 as “the Friends of the Constitution, order and good government,” thought of themselves not as a party but as the legitimate administration that represented the whole people and the general good.54 Only their Republican opponents were willing to describe themselves as a party, and they did so out of necessity, just as the colonists had created the Whig party to combat monarchical tyranny during the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s.

  Even so, some Republicans objected to the term “party”; they said they were better described as “a band of patriots,” because they were looking after the good of the whole nation, not a part.55 Because there was no legitimacy for organized opposition to the government, only the most appalling circumstances could justify the resort to a party as a means of collecting the will of the people. And that party had to be a temporary one; it would exist only as long as the threat from the dire circumstances persisted.