by John Ferling
Washington steadfastly defended Hamilton. He told Jefferson that he approved “the treasury system” and added that the secretary of state’s fears of monarchy were delusional. On two occasions, Washington offered to be “the Mediator to put an end” to the battling between his cabinet members, but Jefferson would have none of it. Early in 1793, Jefferson told Washington that he would not rest until Congress was “cleansed of all persons interested in the bank or public stocks,” leaving America with a “pure legislature.”8
Jefferson’s initial visit with Washington to carp about Hamilton’s program had come when the treasury secretary proposed his plan for manufacturing. As it turned out, Jefferson could have saved himself the trouble. The House of Representatives turned aside the proposition and it was not enacted, convincing Jefferson that the tide had turned and that “things were returning into their true channel.” Indeed, as historian Lance Banning pointed out, “the political mood of the country had undergone a radical change” during 1791, as criticism of Hamiltonianism grew more pronounced. Jefferson thought the turnabout was due to his organizing efforts, including his assistance in enabling Freneau. He exaggerated his influence, though it had been enormous. Given the change, Jefferson was confident that the agrarian interests would win control of Congress in the congressional elections of 1792. That alone, he said, would keep “the general constitution of it’s true ground.”9
Hamilton knew that Jefferson and Madison had opposed parts of his economic program, but was slow to realize that they had taken steps to piece together a concerted opposition. He discounted warnings about the hidden intent behind their botanizing tour and dismissed hearsay that Madison had “insinuate[d] unfavorable impressions of [him].”10 Although he and Jefferson had often disagreed in cabinet meetings, Hamilton did not at first suspect his counterpart. Jefferson’s refinement and loathing of confrontation had led him to remain polite and gentlemanly, but Hamilton was misled even more because both were serving the same president. Hamilton was not alone in his shortsightedness. It was not until eighteen months after the dustup over the bank, and a half year after Jefferson first complained to him about Hamilton’s program, that Washington said he was aware of “a personal difference” between his two cabinet members. However, everyone else appears to have known what was occurring by the spring of 1792, when Abigail Adams remarked on the “Rage” of the Virginians against Hamilton. Spring was in full bloom when Hamilton finally deduced what was afoot. Like Jefferson, Hamilton received a combination of news and gossip from what he characterized as “many channels,” and by May everything pointed toward Jefferson and Madison as the instigators of the growing opposition to his economic designs.11
Hamilton was startled by Madison’s opposition. They had become friends a decade earlier and were colleagues in the campaign to achieve consolidation and the impost. Besides, Hamilton had not thought it possible that Madison, a Virginian, could oppose policies supported by Washington. Like some historians, the treasury secretary may have privately attributed Madison’s turnaround to jealousy occasioned by Hamilton’s having captured Washington’s favor, but he also now concluded that Madison, while “a clever man,” was “very little Acquainted with the world.”12
Hamilton was also convinced that Madison’s “exalted opinion of the talents, knowledge and virtues of Mr. Jefferson” largely accounted for his former friend’s transformation. Hamilton now saw Jefferson as a “man of profound ambition & violent passions” who was guided by an “unsound & dangerous” philosophy. Drawing on the tidbits provided by his informants, Hamilton’s impression of Jefferson was a tangle of truths, half-truths, and misconceptions. He believed that Jefferson had from the first opposed the Constitution (partially true); that he shared the “temperament” of the radical French revolutionaries, whom “he had had a share in exciting” to act (true in part, though mostly an exaggeration); that he had returned to America hoping to become the treasury secretary (incorrect); that from the first he had secretly disapproved of funding (inaccurate); and that, above all, Jefferson was consumed with an “ardent desire” to succeed Washington as president (badly mistaken). Hamilton thought Jefferson was dangerous. If he succeeded in rousing the states to “narrow the Federal authority,” the entire system of consolidation that had been achieved might unravel. It put Hamilton in mind of a “very just, though a course saying—That it is much easier to raise the Devil than to lay him.”13
Aware of the danger, Hamilton as always took the offensive. In six essays churned out in rapid succession during the summer of 1792—mostly for Fenno’s Gazette of the United States—Hamilton dispelled any doubt that Jefferson was responsible for the National Gazette or that he was the “head of a party.” He contended that Jefferson disliked the Constitution and believed the president had “administered injudiciously and wickedly” in signing the Bank Bill. Hamilton painted Jefferson as seeking nothing less than the reduction of the national government to “the skeleton of Power,” with states elevated “upon its ruins.” If Jefferson succeeded, Hamilton warned, he would tear down a strong United States and the “reinvigoration” of the economy achieved during the past few years. In its place, a victorious Jefferson will have substituted “National disunion, National insignificance, Public disorder and discredit.”14
Hamilton knew that his biting essays would bring a response, and he imagined that Jefferson would author the rejoinders. He was wrong. Jefferson covertly assisted Freneau in framing some of his visceral essays, plied the editor with restricted Department of State materials, and persuaded Madison to take up his pen. Seldom able to say no to his friend, Madison contributed at least nineteen unsigned essays to the National Gazette before the fall elections in 1792. In the process, Madison and Freneau reframed the debate from a battle over the scope of government to an epic contest between republicans and monarchists. From this point forward, the Jeffersonians portrayed Hamilton and his faction as favoring an elitist system in which the citizenry remained deferential and acquiescent while the “true republicans” sought to fulfill the American Revolution.15
Madison defended political parties, which to this juncture had been almost universally condemned as existing to advance factional interests rather than the general good. Though he never said so explicitly, Madison offered a blueprint for democratic politics. He came close to embodying Jefferson’s precept that the earth belonged to the living, and that one generation could not be held in check by its forebears. Madison defended parties because they provided representation to the hitherto unrepresented, and in so doing they offered the promise of spreading wealth and power. He charged that Hamiltonianism was not only directed “less to the interest of the many than of a few” but also bottomed on the hope that control of the national government would “by degrees be narrowed into fewer hands” until it ultimately “approximated … an hereditary form.” But those who opposed Hamilton believed “that mankind are capable of governing themselves.” They hated “hereditary power as an insult to the reason and an outrage to the rights of man.” Underscoring what he and Jefferson saw as the fundamental difference in their outlook and that of their foes, Madison reminded readers that the American Revolution had been an assertion of the people against monarchical and aristocratic tyranny. He proclaimed that the Revolution, and the war that secured independence, had not been for the purpose of creating an all-powerful state, much less to perpetuate rule from the top down. The American Revolution had been a struggle against British consolidation and a battle to save liberty. Liberty had been saved, and “liberty [was] the great end, for which the Union was formed.” It was not the government but the “people themselves” who were the “best Keepers of the People’s Liberties.” With pride, Madison referred to the anti-Hamilton faction as the “Republican party.” (It was a name that stuck, though throughout the 1790s the Jeffersonians would also sometimes be called the Democratic-Republican Party, and beginning early in the nineteenth century the faction became the Democratic Party.)16
Jeff
erson may not have written any essays, but in May he sent a remarkable letter to Washington in the hope of shaking the president’s confidence in Hamilton, and possibly even persuading him to cut his ties with the treasury secretary. Though he never mentioned Hamilton by name, Jefferson told the president that Hamiltonianism was pushing the nation toward annihilation. Funding’s “artificially created” debt necessitated higher taxes, duties that would turn the citizenry against the government and provoke such “clamour” that they could only be collected “by arbitrary and vexatious means.” Nor would the people sit by idly while Hamiltonianism turned society into a “gaming table” and corrupted Congress so that it consented to the decimation of the “limitations [on government] imposed by the constitution.” The people were beginning to understand that the “ultimate object” of Hamiltonianism was to “prepare the way for a change, from the present republican form of government, to that of a monarchy, of which the English constitution is to be the model,” Jefferson said. The country was divided between what he called the “republican party” and the “Monarchical federalists,” and increasingly too between North and South. As the divisions deepened, the “incalculable evil” of the “breaking of the union” could not be ruled out.17
Washington waited nearly six weeks to respond, but finally did so in a face-to-face meeting. He ignored Jefferson’s complaints about Hamiltonian economics, a sign that he continued to approve Hamilton’s ideas, and brushed aside the allegations that Hamilton was bent on establishing a monarchy, though he acknowledged that some of the gentry in the largest northeastern cities—the bedrock of the treasury secretary’s support—might desire an American king. They were a tiny minority, Washington said, adding that most Americans were “steadily for republicanism.” But, he warned, if extremists such as Freneau provoked disunion and anarchy, that would “produce a resort to monarchical government.”18
Washington was more troubled than he let on to Jefferson. Concerned for the survival of Hamiltonianism, which he supported, the president was additionally beginning to worry that the American Union might not survive the tempestuous partisanship. (Startlingly, Washington subsequently confided to Edmund Randolph that if the United States broke up, “he had made up his mind to remove [from Mount Vernon] and be of the northern” states.)19 Like most, Washington knew little about economics. But he did know his treasury secretary, and from experience the president was fully aware of Hamilton’s propensity for intrigue. Despite what he told Jefferson, Washington found the talk about monarchy to be worrisome. What is more, by this time some of Jefferson’s warnings about the corrosive effects of speculation had been borne out. Trading in bank script had been so frenzied in the summer of 1791 that in no time its value increased twelvefold. But after just five weeks, the bubble burst and America experienced its first crash in government securities. The pattern was replicated a few months later when three new banks opened and speculators rushed to get rich quick. Once again, only five weeks elapsed before another collapse occurred. On this occasion, many of the desperate speculators tried to save themselves by preying on the gullible from the lower economic classes, borrowing their money to fend off creditors. Instead, all went bust, including “Widows, orphans, merchants[,] mechanics &c.,” as one of Hamilton’s friends informed him.20 Many of those who were ruined were stockholders in the Society for Establishing Useful Manufacturing, dooming the planned industrial experiment on the Passaic.
A few days after his conversation with Jefferson, Washington, in need of reassurance, wrote to Hamilton. After making clear that he believed Hamilton’s program had left the “Country … prosperous & happy,” the president passed along a list of twenty-one complaints about Hamiltonianism that he had allegedly heard on a recent trip to Mount Vernon. In fact, Washington had heard everything from Jefferson, and much that he transmitted to Hamilton was word for word from his secretary of state.21
Typically, Hamilton responded in detail, his letter running ten times the length of that which he had received from the president. He explained public debts and banking, falsely claimed that not a single member of Congress was a speculator (though he acknowledged that some owned “a pretty large amount” of bank stock) and flatly denied that he sought a monarchy for America. Whatever Hamilton desired in his heart of hearts—and the circumstantial evidence points to his monarchist bent—he knew that his countrymen would not tolerate a crowned head in their government, and he presented a compelling argument showing why there would never be a serious conspiracy to replace the presidency with monarchy. “[N]one but a madman” could attempt such a thing, he said. “If it could be done at all, which is utterly incredible, it would require a long series of time, certainly beyond the life of any individual to effect it. Who then would enter into such a plot? For what purpose or ambition?” Unless brought on by “convulsions and disorders,” or “popular demagogues,” an American monarchy would never exist, he declared. Next, he went after Jefferson, who he correctly assumed was the author of the complaints that Washington had passed along. Jefferson’s unquenchable ambition had led him to “mount the hobby horse of popularity,” Hamilton charged, and he added the hint that Jefferson’s dismissal from the Cabinet might be necessary to save the strong national government.22
Washington soon wrote to both of his cabinet officers asking for “forbearances and temporizing,” and reminding Hamilton that Jefferson was a “zealous” patriot. He did not feel the need to point out Hamilton’s patriotism to Jefferson, but he did tell the secretary of state that he regarded the attacks on Hamiltonianism as attacks on himself that “filled me with painful sensations.”23 Washington’s concern for the safety of the Union was genuine, and there can be no doubt that he hoped the partisan fighting would be brought to an end. Yet, what he had said during the past year to Jefferson and what he had not said to Hamilton made clear that he fixed the blame for the inflammatory partisanship solely on Jefferson and his faction.
Misled by his respect for Washington, Jefferson continued to believe that the president had an open mind. Hamilton, however, excelled at understanding Washington. Among other things, he knew that Washington not only listened to him but also embraced his economic policies. Hamilton shrewdly acknowledged his recent retaliatory essays against Jefferson and Madison, telling Washington that after years as “a silent sufferer,” he felt that he could no longer remain still. His foes, he charged, were seeking nothing less than the “undoing of the funding system,” a step that would “prostrate the credit and the honor of the Nation.” Confident that Washington was anchored to him more than to Jefferson, Hamilton advised the president to purge his cabinet should the unbridled partisanship persist. Jefferson replied in one of his longest, and least impressive, letters. Rehearsing his familiar allegations, Jefferson contended that much of the treasury secretary’s program had been enacted through corruption and because its supporters had “swallowed his bait.” That made it sound as if Jefferson was suggesting that the president had been “duped by the Secretary of the treasury, and made a tool for forwarding his schemes.” This was not the sort of thing that someone as proud as Washington was happy to hear. Furthermore, whereas Jefferson usually denounced Hamilton in the judicious language of a proper diplomat, his boiling anger got the best of him as he penned page after page. Jefferson poured out his venom in the manner of a haughty, well-born gentleman who scorned a social upstart. Blinded to the reality that Hamilton fit perfectly the description of the less fortunate but meritorious young man whom he had once been eager to assist through enlightened educational reforms, Jefferson, in a gust of disdain, proclaimed to Washington that Hamilton was “a man whose history, from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the country which has not only received him and given him his bread, but it’s honors.”24
Foreign policy rarely surfaced in Washington’s dialogues with his secretaries over partisanship, aside from when the president expressed his concern that “our enemies will triumph” should
“internal dissentions” tear apart “our vitals.”25 Yet, striking differences over American policy toward Great Britain were part of the factional conflict, and they surfaced even before Washington’s inauguration and long before Jefferson returned to America. They first became apparent when Madison in 1789 asked Congress to enact the impost that twice had failed in the days of the Confederation. He proposed a 5 percent duty on most imports, but discriminatory rates against Great Britain, which was responsible for 90 percent of all American imports. Madison saw discrimination as the only means available for compelling London to open its ports, including those in its West Indian colonies, to American vessels. Madison was challenged by representatives from the northern merchant-dominated states, and he lost the battle. On very nearly the same day that the nomination of Hamilton to be treasury secretary was approved, Congress enacted the impost without discriminatory features.26