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

  To be in charge of all the American armies seemed to Hamilton like a dream fulfilled. Instead of having to wait patiently for time and social development to turn America into a modern state, he could take advantage of the crisis with France and short-circuit the process. The army was central to his plans, both at home and abroad. With some justification, the Republicans believed that Hamilton intended to use the army against them. Sincerely fearing that a fifth column within the United States was willing to aid an invading French army, Hamilton certainly was eager to suppress any domestic insurrection with a massive show of force. When rumors spread that Jefferson’s and Madison’s home state was arming, he seemed prepared to “put Virginia to the Test of resistance.”62

  When an armed uprising of Germans led by John Fries actually occurred in several northeastern Pennsylvania counties early in 1799, Hamilton told the secretary of war not to err by sending too few troops. “Whenever the Government appears in arms,” he wrote, “it ought to appear like a Hercules, and inspire respect by the display of strength.”63 He thought that a respectable standing army would enable the United States both “to subdue a refractory & powerful state” such as Virginia and to deal independently and equally with the warring powers of Europe. President Adams did respond to the Fries uprising with five hundred militiamen at a cost of eighty thousand dollars. The so-called rebellion was put down with no injuries.64

  A strong military establishment seems to have been just the beginning of Hamilton’s future plans for strengthening the Union. He wanted as well to extend the judiciary, to build a system of roads and canals, to increase taxes, and to amend the Constitution in order to subdivide the larger states.65

  Beyond the borders of the United States his aims were even more grandiose. He thought the war with France would enable the United States, in cooperation with Britain, to seize both Florida and Louisiana from Spain—in order, he said, to keep them out of the hands of France. At the same time, he held out the possibility of helping the Venezuelan patriot Francisco de Miranda to liberate South America. In all these endeavors, he told the American minister in Britain, Rufus King, America should be “the principal agency,” especially in supplying the land army. “The command in this case would very naturally fall upon me—and I hope I should disappoint no favorable anticipation.”66

  As Fisher Ames later pointed out, Hamilton had never wanted power, popularity, or wealth; the only thing he ever craved was military fame and glory, not just for himself but for the country as well. “He was qualified, beyond any man of the age,” said Ames, “to display the talents of a great general.”67

  But in 1798 America already had a great general, in retirement at Mount Vernon. If he were to realize his dreams, Hamilton knew that he would have to convince Washington to buckle on his sword and become Hamilton’s aegis once again, as he had during his presidency. But the current president would be a problem. President Adams had no hesitation in commissioning Washington as “Lieutenant General and commander in Chief of all the Armies raised or to be raised for the service of the United States,” and in July 1798 he did so, even before he received Washington’s permission. Adams was not at all eager to make Hamilton second in command, which was what the High Federalists in his cabinet were plotting. Other officers from the Revolution had been senior to Colonel Hamilton, namely Henry Knox and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.

  How to sort out the order of command? Since Knox declared that he would not serve under Pinckney or Hamilton, Adams favored Knox as next in command to Washington; but Hamilton said he would not serve under Knox. For his part Washington wanted Hamilton as second in command and threatened to resign if the bickering continued. The president, finally outmaneuvered by both his cabinet and Washington, reluctantly had to accede to Hamilton’s becoming major general and second in command to Washington. He was furious that he had been compelled to promote this foreigner, Hamilton, a man who was “the most restless, impatient, indefatigable and unprincipled Intriguer in the United States, if not in the world.”68 Soon, however, he would get his revenge on Hamilton and the whole crowd of Hamiltonians.

  Hamilton had his army, and he had Washington as his aegis. Hamilton told Washington in May 1798 that he was convinced that the Republicans intended “to new model our constitution under the influence or coercion of France,” and in substance, if not in name, “to make this Country a province of France.”69 Washington more or less agreed. Although he doubted that the French were capable at present of invading the country, he was sure that the Republicans were up to no good. Believing as he did that organized party opposition was pernicious, he concluded that the beleaguered Federalists were simply “the Friends of Government” trying to defend a Constitution that the French party of Republicans would use every means to “subvert” and turn into “a mere cipher.”70 The former president knew he could not remain an unconcerned spectator of France’s attempt to do what Britain had once tried to do—deprive America of its rights. Although Washington, as he had repeatedly in the past, expressed his reluctance to resume public office and wondered whether becoming commander-in-chief would not be considered “a restless Act, evincive of my discontent in retirement,” he was far more eager in 1798 to step back into the breach and do his duty than he ever had been before. It indicated just how seriously he took the crisis in 1798.71

  With President Adams expressing a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the whole project, organizing the army did not go well. In November 1798 Hamilton met with Washington and Pinckney in Philadelphia to appoint the officers and to recruit the troops. Because the army was designed not only to resist the French but presumably to put down domestic insurrections, and even political opposition, the officers had to be both talented and scrupulously Federalist; thus the process of appointment was slow. The chain of command was garbled, with Hamilton giving orders to his ostensible superior, the secretary of war, and the recruiting and supplying of the soldiers suffered from delays and confusion, with Hamilton bickering over the most trivial details, including how the soldiers’ hats should be cocked. More dismaying, Washington’s willingness to participate in the creation of the army began to cool; eventually the former president gave up on the project and returned to Mount Vernon thoroughly disillusioned with what was happening in the country. By the time the New Army disbanded in May 1800, it had become a joke.

  EVEN BEFORE THE PASSAGE of the Alien and Sedition Acts, some Southern Republicans were thinking of ways to protect both liberty and the sectional interests of the South from the growing power of the national government. In the spring of 1798 John Taylor, who was rapidly becoming the conscience of the Republican party, wrote Monroe and Jefferson about his fears. Unless the Federalists were stopped, Taylor said, “the southern states must lose their capital and commerce—and . . . America is destined to war—standing armies—and oppressive taxation.” Taylor even raised the possibility that some of the Southern states might secede from the Union. In response, Jefferson tried to calm Taylor down. Federalist dominance was unnatural and only temporary. “A little patience,” Jefferson wrote in his famous letter of June 4, 1798, “and we shall see the reign of the witches pass over, their spells dissolved, and the people recovering their true sight, and restoring their government to its true principles.”72

  With the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the summer of 1798, however, Jefferson changed his tune, especially as he saw the Federalists resorting to all sorts of insidious devices to sustain their popularity. The usually sanguine vice-president despaired. He thought that if these laws were accepted by the American people, Congress would next allow the president to serve for life, which would be the first step toward making the office hereditary, and then it would establish the Senate for life. Some Federalists, he believed, even wanted to restore George III over the American people. He thought the Federalists’ attack on freedom of the press was the prelude to an attack on freedom of religion; the denial of the press’s freedom “had given to the clergy a very favorite hope of obta
ining an establishment of a particular form of Christianity thro’ the U.S.” With some justification, he even feared that “our Buonaparte” Hamilton and the new army might invade Virginia in order to suppress dissent.73 In fact, the Republicans in general were as frightened by what they described as the Federalists’ moves toward monarchy and a war with France as the Federalists were by what they described as the Republicans’ radical efforts to collaborate in bringing the French Revolution to America.

  With both the Federalists and the Republicans having legitimate reasons for their fears, their extreme partisanship divided the country more deeply than at any time since 1776. A Federalist newspaper in Virginia predicted an “ultimate appeal to arms by the two great parties.” Republican William Branch Giles of Virginia hoped “to see a separation of this state, from the General-Union.”74

  With the Congress under the control of the Federalists, the vice-president and both Southern and some Northern Republicans thought the federal government had become in effect a “foreign jurisdiction,” and they began to look to the states as the best means of resisting Federalist tyranny. While Jefferson believed that the federal government had become “more arbitrary, and has swallowed more of the public liberty than even that of England,” he thought that “our state governments are the very best in the world without exception or comparison.”75 There in the states was where integrity and the solution to America’s problems could be found.

  Madison, retired from Congress since 1797, was urged to run for election to the Virginia legislature. As one Republican told James Monroe, it was “highly important, at this moment and will be more so every day, to pay particular attention to the State Legislatures, and to get into them men of respectability.” Before Madison took office in the Virginia legislature in 1799, he and Jefferson thought they had to do something to combat the Federalist actions. Believing, as Madison put it, that the Federalists were seeking to create a consolidated government and “transform the present republican system of the United States, into an absolute, or at best a mixed monarchy,” the two Republican leaders quietly plotted to use the state legislatures as the most effective instrument for combating the constitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Because they intended to set forth radical constitutional ideas about the nature of the Union, they wanted their authorship to remain unknown except to the men who would actually introduce their legislative resolutions. Although Madison and Jefferson were not primarily thinking about protecting slavery in 1798, their ideas—“the spirit of ’98”—certainly laid the basis for the nullification and states’ rights doctrines later used to defend slavery and Southern distinctiveness in the period leading up to the Civil War.76

  In his draft of state resolutions, which was intended for the Virginia legislature but instead ended up in that of Kentucky, Jefferson described the Constitution as “a compact” among the several states, with each state retaining final authority to declare acts of the federal government that exceeded its delegated powers, in this case, the Alien and Sedition Acts, “void & of no force” within that state’s jurisdiction. Jefferson labeled this remedy for abusive federal actions “nullification,” but, fortunately for his subsequent reputation, the Kentucky legislature edited out this inflammatory term when it adopted Jefferson’s draft in a set of resolves issued in November 1798.77

  The resolutions drafted by Madison and issued by the Virginia legislature in December 1798 were somewhat less radical than Jefferson’s, especially in their conception of the compact as the consequence of the collective action of the people in each state; indeed, Madison seems to have thought of his resolutions as protests rather than as acts of nullification. He objected in particular to Jefferson’s idea that the state legislature could declare unconstitutional acts null and void. “Have you ever considered thoroughly the distinction between the power of the State, & that of the Legislature, on questions relating to the federal pact?” Madison asked his friend. Since Madison believed that the state, by which he meant the people themselves, was “the ultimate Judge of infractions,” the legislature had no business exercising such an authority; it belonged to a constitutional convention, since that was “the organ by which the Compact was made.” Unlike Jefferson, who was out of the country in 1787–1788, Madison was there at the creation, and he never forgot that the Constitution was ratified by state conventions, not state legislatures. In America, unlike England, he said, “the people, not the government, possess the absolute sovereignty. The legislature, no less than the executive, is under limitations. . . . Hence, in the United States, the great and essential rights of the people are secured against legislative as well as executive ambition.”78

  Both the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures called upon the other states to join them in declaring the Alien and Sedition Acts unconstitutional, but none of the other fourteen state legislatures followed.79Although four Southern states took no action at all, nine Northern states decisively rejected the resolutions, most of them declaring that the judiciary, and not the state legislatures, was the proper body to determine the constitutionality of acts of Congress. By August 1799 Jefferson was contemplating even more radical action. If the people did not soon change the direction and tone of the national government, he told Madison, Virginia and Kentucky ought “to sever our selves from that union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self government which we have reserved, and in which alone we see liberty.”80 Although secession was being openly discussed, neither Jefferson nor Madison was willing to advocate force to bring it about.

  Instead, the Republican leaders sought to have the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures answer the objections of the other states and reaffirm the sentiments of the original resolutions. With some advice from Jefferson, the Kentucky legislature in November 1799 repeated its opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts and declared “a Nullification of those acts by the States to be the rightful remedy.”81 Even with this provocative word included, the legislature’s resolve was much more conciliatory and much less extreme than the secessionist views Jefferson had expressed in letters several months earlier.

  For his part Madison on January 7, 1800, issued a notable committee report to the Virginia assembly in which he defended the earlier resolutions and warned that the Federalist plans for a consolidation would “transform the republican system of the United States into a monarchy.” If the federal government extended its “power to every subject falling within the idea of the ‘general welfare,’” the discretionary and patronage authority of the executive would be greatly expanded; this in turn would lead to insidious efforts by the chief magistrate to manipulate his repeated re-election or to increasingly corrupt and violent elections, to the point where “the public voice itself might call for an hereditary in place of an elective succession.” In addition to denying the Federalist contention that the common law—“a law of vast extent and complexity, and embracing almost every possible subject of legislation”—ran in the federal courts, Madison made a powerful case for a strict construction of the Constitution, particularly its “necessary and proper” clause that Hamilton had exploited so effectively.

  Finally, he offered a brilliant defense of the freedoms described in the First Amendment, especially freedom of the press. Elective republican governments, which were responsible to the people, required, said Madison, “a greater freedom of animadversion” than hereditary monarchies. This meant “a different degree of freedom, on the use of the press”; indeed, despite the excesses of scurrility and slander, popular governments needed newspapers for “canvassing the merits and measures of public men. . . . To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses,” he concluded, “the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity, over error and oppression.”82

  SUDDENLY, SEVERAL DEVELOPMENTS worked to calm this fearful and frenzied climate. British admiral Horatio Nelson’s naval victory over the French at the Battle of the Nile in October 1798 essentially destroyed the possibility of a Fr
ench invasion of either England or America. With the threat of a French invasion gone, the Federalists lost much of the rationale for their program. But more important in reducing the sense of crisis was the bold and courageous but bizarre action of President John Adams.

  Adams’s presidency had been extraordinarily contentious, and Adams was never in command of his own cabinet, let alone the government. Indeed, he seemed to many to be escaping from the troubles of the capital in Philadelphia by spending more and more time at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. This short, stout, and sensitive man had been much too honest, impulsive, and passionate to handle the growing division among the Federalists over Hamilton’s ascendancy and the military buildup. Despite all the importance his political theory gave to the executive in a balanced government, he was temperamentally ill equipped to be Washington’s successor as president. He shared little of the Hamiltonian dream of turning the United States into a European-like state with a huge bureaucracy and a massive army with the capacity to wage war; indeed, Adams had been the author of the model treaty of 1776, and his ideas about foreign policy and war were closer to Jefferson’s than Hamilton’s. And Adams certainly had none of the personal Benjamin Franklin—like talents needed to deal with the intense, meddling, and high-strung personalities around him. But he was intelligent and patriotic, and he increasingly sensed that he had to do something to end the crisis.