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

  Many of those Federalist aristocrats who sought to live up to the classical ideal sooner or later fell on hard times. Federalist congressman Joshua Coit of Connecticut found that his attempt to achieve “Independence” and real gentility by living off a nine-hundred-acre livestock farm was “utopian” and beyond his means. Even wealthy Christopher Gore, the first district attorney for Massachusetts and later one of the commissioners in London dealing with the issues of Jay’s Treaty, discovered that he did not have sufficient proprietary wealth to realize his genteel dreams of living without having to work. Fisher Ames thought that Gore would have to forgo retiring to his Waltham estate for a while and take up his law practice once again if he were to keep up the style of life appropriate to a gentleman of his rank. “A man may not incline to take a certain degree on the scale of genteel living,” Ames told Gore, “but having once taken it he must maintain it.”46

  By the late 1790s in Philadelphia, contemporaries noted, many of “those who call themselves Gentlemen” had gone bankrupt and thus had destroyed that paternalistic “Confidence in men of reputed fortunes and prudence as used to exist.” Federalists who had sought to establish their genteel independence by acquiring landed estates could not fulfill their ambitions of emulating the English landed aristocracy. Since land in the New World was a far riskier investment than it was in England, failure was common; and many prominent Federalists such as Henry Knox, James Wilson, William Duer, and Robert Morris ended their careers in bankruptcy or in some cases in debtors’ prison.47

  At the new government’s outset Benjamin Rush put his finger on the peculiar problem of the aristocracy in America. Many, said Rush in 1789, had expressed doubts about the appointment of James Wilson to the Supreme Court because of “the deranged state of his Affairs.” Rush admitted as much to John Adams. “But where,” he asked, “will you find an American landholder free from embarrassments?” It was a fact of American life that too many of its wealthy gentry, at least in the North, could not live up to their pretensions of aristocratic status.48

  In such circumstances it became increasingly difficult to find gentlemen willing to sacrifice their private interests in order to hold public office. After Henry Knox retired, President Washington had to go to his fourth choice for secretary of war, James McHenry, and to replace Randolph as secretary of state he had to go to his seventh choice, Timothy Pickering. Most of the gentry in America, in the Northern states at least, simply did not have the wherewithal to devote themselves exclusively to public service. This weakness was the Federalists’ dilemma. They believed that they and their kind had a natural right to rule. All history, all learning, said so; indeed, the Revolution had been largely about securing the right of the natural aristocracy of talent to rule. But if their wealth were not sufficient for them to govern, what did that mean? Would that justify the opening of opportunities in government for new men, ordinary men, who seemed to the gentry to be less scrupulous in using government to make money and promote their private interests? In the eyes of the Federalist aristocracy these new middling men such as William Findley, Jedediah Peck, and Matthew Lyon were not supposed to be political leaders; their presence violated the natural order of things. They were not well educated; they were illiberal, ill-bred, and without any cosmopolitan perspective. They were “men, who,” in the opinion of Oliver Wolcott Jr., “possessed neithercapital nor experience” and not even the inclination to be virtuous or disinterested.49

  Ironically, only the South—which provided much of the leadership of the pro-democratic Republicans opposed to the aristocratic Federalists—was able to maintain a semblance of a traditional leisured patriciate. But the Republican leaders, Madison and Jefferson, never really appreciated the character of the democratic and egalitarian forces they and their fellow Southern slaveholding Republicans were unleashing in the North.

  ARISTOCRACY MAY HAVE BEEN unusually weak in America, especially in the Northern states, but some members of this aristocracy continued to cling to what they considered its distinctive manners and customs. Indeed, the more rapidly their aristocratic rank was being undermined by fast-moving social developments, the more insistent some of them were in claiming its prerogatives and privileges. Although the emergence of the Federalists and Republicans as political parties in the 1790s steadily eroded the personal character of politics, the aristocratic concept of honor still remained strong. Many of the leading figures continued to struggle with the various ways of defending their honor in a world where the concept was fast becoming irrelevant.

  The manner in which Jefferson handled publication of a notorious letter he had sent to his Italian friend Philip Mazzei reveals how the politics of reputation could work. Jefferson had written the letter in 1796 in the aftermath of the heated controversy over the Jay Treaty, and in it he expressed his deep disappointment with the Washington administration. “An Anglican monarchical, and aristocratical party,” he told Mazzei, was trying to subvert the Americans’ love of liberty and republicanism and turn the American government into something resembling the rotten British monarchy. “It would give you a fever,” wrote Jefferson, “were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.” Mazzei translated the political portion of this letter into Italian and published it in a Florentine newspaper. A French newspaper picked it up, and this French version, translated back into English, appeared in the American press in May 1797.50

  Since most people assumed that Jefferson was defaming Washington, America’s great hero, the Federalists were delighted with the letter and missed no opportunity to publicize it, even having it read in the House of Representatives. “Nothing but treason and insurrection would be the consequence of such opinions,” declared one Federalist congressman.51

  Jefferson was deeply embarrassed by the revelation of the letter. At first the vice-president thought that in defense of his reputation he must “take the field of the public papers”; but he soon realized, as he explained to Madison, that any response would involve him in endless explanations and would bring on “a personal difference between Genl. Washington and myself,” not to mention embroiling him “with all those with whom his character is still popular, that is to say, nine tenths of the people of the U.S.”52 Madison agreed that silence was probably Jefferson’s best alternative. Among those the vice-president consulted, only James Monroe urged him to reply publicly, as he himself was doing in an angry response to his embarrassing recall from France.

  Monroe was a militant Republican and as a veteran of the Revolutionary War much more committed to the code of honor than either Jefferson or Madison. In 1798 he was angered by President John Adams’s reference to him as “a disgraced minister, recalled in displeasure for misconduct,” and he wrote to Madison for advice on how to respond within the code of honor. Monroe believed he could not simply ignore Adams’s insult, for “not to notice it may with many leave an unfavorable impression agnst me.” Yet a personal challenge to a duel seemed impossible, since Adams was “an old man and President.” He could not simply request an explanation for his recall from France, because he had already done that. Perhaps he could write a pamphlet and attack Adams, “ridicule his political career, shew it to be the consummation of folly & wickedness.” In response, Madison suggested that if Monroe were to do anything in the present heated atmosphere of partisanship, he ought to compose “a temperate & dignified animadversion published with your name to it.”53

  Although Madison never fought a duel, he was well aware of the code of honor involved in these personal confrontations. He criticized Roger Griswold, for example, for not challenging Lyon to a duel. If Griswold had been “a man of the sword” he would never have allowed the House to intervene in his conflict with Lyon. “No man,” he said, “ought to reproach another with cowardice, who is not ready to give proof of his own courage.”54

  Hamilton, as a Revolutionary War veteran,
was very much a man of the sword—as a confrontation he had with Monroe in 1797 showed. Five years earlier, in 1792, Hamilton when he was secretary of the treasury had engaged in adultery with a woman named Maria Reynolds and had actually paid blackmail to her husband in order to keep the affair quiet. When privately challenged in 1792 by several suspicious congressmen, including Senator James Monroe, for misusing treasury funds, Hamilton confessed to the affair and the blackmail, which had nothing to do with treasury business. The congressmen, who were embarrassed by this revelation, seemed to accept Hamilton’s explanation and dropped their investigation.

  Rumors of Hamilton’s involvement with the Reynoldses circulated over the next several years, but it was not until 1797 that James Thomson Callender, a Scottish refugee and one of the new breed of unscrupulous journalists who were spreading scurrility everywhere, used documents that he had acquired to charge Hamilton publicly with speculating in treasury funds. Although it was probably John Beckley, a loyal Republican and recently dismissed clerk of the House of Representative, who had supplied Callender with the documents, Hamilton suspected that it was Monroe, and he pressed Monroe to make a public statement avowing his belief in Hamilton’s explanation of five years earlier. The quarrel between the two men became so heated that only an exchange of letters and some complicated negotiations, including the intervention of Aaron Burr, averted a duel. The code of honor, however, required that Hamilton defend his reputation somehow, and therefore he published a lengthy pamphlet laying out all the sordid details of the affair with Mrs. Reynolds. Better to be thought a private adulterer than a corrupt public official. The pamphlet was a disastrous mistake, and it led Callender to gloat that Hamilton had done himself more damage than “fifty of the best pens in America could have said against him.”55

  Hamilton was unusually intense and thin-skinned and sensitive to any criticism, but his experience with Monroe in 1797 was not unusual. Dueling was part of the politics of the day—a sign of how much aristocratic standards still prevailed even as the society was becoming more democratic. Men engaged in duels were not simply trying to maim or kill their adversaries; instead, they were seeking both to display their bravery, military prowess, and willingness to sacrifice their lives for their honor and to conduct partisan politics. Dueling was part of an elaborate political ritual designed to protect reputations and affect politics in what was still a very personal aristocratic world.

  The challenges and responses and the negotiations among principals and their seconds and friends often went on for weeks or even months. The duels were often timed for political effect, and their complicated procedures and public exchanges in newspapers were calculated to influ-ence a broad public. There were many duels, most of which did not end in exchanges of gunfire. In New York City between 1795 and 1807, for example, there were at least sixteen affairs of honor, though few resulted in anyone’s death. Hamilton was the principal in eleven affairs of honor during his lifetime, but he actually exchanged fire in only one—his last, fatal duel with Aaron Burr.56

  During the 1790s this politics of reputation and individual character was rapidly being eroded in a number of ways, especially through the growth of political parties and the proliferation of scandal-mongering newspapers that were reaching out to a new popular readership. Indeed, the clash between an older aristocratic world of honor and the emerging new democratic world of political parties and partisan newspapers lay behind much of the turbulence and passion of the 1790s. Under these changing circumstances newspapers became weapons of the new political parties, to be used to discredit and demolish the characters of the opposing leaders in the eyes of unprecedented numbers of new readers. Since the lingering code of honor was designed for gentlemen dealing personally with one another, it was incapable of handling the new problems created by an ever growing and more vituperative popular press, especially in a time of great crisis.

  With the inauguration of John Adams as president and the spread of the French Revolution throughout the Western world, America was heading for just that kind of crisis.

  7

  The Crisis of 1798–1799

  When the French learned of Jay’s treaty with Great Britain, they immediately began seizing American ships and confiscating their cargoes. Actually, ever since the European war had broken out in 1793, the French treatment of American neutral shipping had not been all that different from that of the British, despite the stipulations of “free ships, free goods” in the French-American treaty of 1778. But throughout all its erratic seizing of American ships France at least had pretended to respect American neutral rights.

  The Federalists were primed to be suspicious of anything France did. The president’s son John Quincy Adams, minister to the Netherlands, which had recently become a French satellite, fed Federalist fears. France, he reported to his father in 1796, was working to undermine the Federalists and bring about the “triumph of the French party, French principles, and French influence” in American affairs. France believed that “the people of the United States had but a feeble attachment to their government and will not support them in a contest with that of France.” Young Adams even suggested that France planned to invade the South and with the support of sympathizers there and in the West break up the Union and create a puppet republic. Revolutionary France and its armies were, after all, doing just that—setting up puppet regimes—throughout Europe. Such a conspiratorial and fearful atmosphere seemed to make any sort of normal diplomatic relations impossible.1

  In 1797, after Adams’s presidential victory, France abandoned its earlier efforts to divide Americans politically and decided to confront the United States directly. Not only did France’s Directory government refuse to receive Thomas Pinckney’s elder brother Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, whom Washington had sent to Paris to replace Monroe, but it also announced that all neutral American ships carrying British goods were now liable to seizure and that all American sailors impressed onto British ships would be treated as pirates.

  In response, President Adams called a special session of Congress for May 1797, the first president to do so. After Adams urged a buildup of American military forces, especially the navy, Congress authorized the president to call up eighty thousand militiamen, provided for harbor fortifications, and approved the completion of three frigates still on the ways. At the same time, the president criticized the French for trying to divide the people of the United States from their government, declaring that “we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence.”2 By the middle of 1797 the United States and France were on the verge of war with one another in much the same way that the United States and Britain had been in 1794. Since Washington had earlier headed off war with Britain by sending Jay on his diplomatic mission, Adams decided to follow his predecessor’s example and send a similar mission to France.

  At first, Adams toyed with the idea of sending Madison, but his cabinet, composed of Washington appointees Timothy Pickering (State), Oliver Wolcott Jr. (Treasury), and James McHenry (War), was decidedly hostile to this suggestion. Hamilton, on the other hand, favored sending Madison, confident that Madison would be unwilling to sell out the United States to France. America, Hamilton believed, still needed peace; it was not yet mature or strong enough for out-and-out war with any of the European states. But other Federalists wanted no capitulation to French pressure; the extreme hard-liner Pickering, in fact, urged a declaration of war against France and an American alliance with Britain.3

  For their part, the Republican leaders doubted that France wanted war with the United States and urged that America delay any action. They were not at all eager to get involved in peace-making efforts with France that might mean endorsing the Jay Treaty with Great Britain. Jefferson and other Republicans believed that a French invasion of Britain was imminent and that its success would solve all the problems. Since the coalition massed against the revolutionary regime had fa
llen apart, France now dominated Europe. Napoleon had defeated the Austrians in Italy and looked to crush France’s one remaining enemy. It was rumored that the Dutch, in their French-dominated Batavian Republic, were preparing an invasion force. In fact, fourteen hundred French banditti did manage to land on the British coast, though they were quickly surrounded by local militia.

  Britain seemed quite plausibly to be on the verge of collapse. Bread was scarce and famine threatened. Mutinies rocked the Royal Navy. Stocks on the British exchange fell to a record low, and the Bank of England was forced to suspend gold payments to private persons. General Cornwallis, the Yorktown loser who had become governor-general of British India, was deeply alarmed. “Torn as we are by faction, without an army, without money, trusting entirely to a navy whom we may not be able to pay, and on whose loyalty, even if we can, no firm reliance is to be placed, how,” he asked, “are we to get out of this accursed war without a Revolution?”4

  To Jefferson and the Republicans, war with France was inconceivable and had to be avoided at almost any cost. War would play into the hands of the Federalist “Anglomen” in America and destroy the republican experiment everywhere. In this confusing and emotional atmosphere Adams appointed a three-man commission to France to negotiate peace—Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the minister whom the French had refused to receive; John Marshall, a moderate Virginia Federalist; and Elbridge Gerry, Adams’s quirky Massachusetts friend who was even more anti-party than Adams himself.

  The French foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, was, like Jefferson, known for his finesse and his ability to hide his feelings. At this moment he was in no hurry to negotiate with the United States and did not believe he had to. America posed no threat to France, he thought, and most of its people seemed to be sympathetic to the French cause. In fact, Jefferson had been advising French diplomats in America that delay was the best line for the French to take, because, as he and many others assumed, the war between monarchical Britain and revolutionary France would not last much longer. France would conquer Britain as it had conquered other nations in Europe.