American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  A harsher test of Jefferson’s strategy of coalition and consolidation was patronage, or what he called “appointments & disappointments.” As usual, the latter seemed far to outnumber the former. It was hard enough to ascertain dependably which high Federalists should be removed, which good Republicans should be hired without, as Jefferson said, “me donn [ant] un ingrat, et cent ennemis.” The best he could do was to ask the simple questions “Is he honest? Is he capable? Is he faithful to the Constitution?” It was much harder to avoid alienating moderate Federalists whom the President wished to bring over to his party, without antagonizing Republican stalwarts hungry for loaves and fishes. Angry though he was over the near-exclusion of Republicans from office under Washington and Adams, and furious over Adams’ packing Federalists into administrative and judicial offices just before leaving the presidency, he dismissed relatively few men from office, but usually waited for the slow process of death and resignation to do its work before installing Republicans. Still, he picked only Republicans.

  The President’s removal of a collector in New Haven roused a great furor. New Haven “was the Vatican City of New England Federalism,” Smelser has written, “under Pope Timothy Dwight,” president of Yale, whose younger brother had described respectable Republicans as “Drunkards and Whores / And rogues in scores.” Answering a protest from New Haven merchants over the removal, Jefferson wrote: “This is a painful office; but it is made my duty, and I meet it as such. I proceed in the operation with deliberation & inquiry, that it may injure the best men least, and effect the purposes of justice & public utility with the least private distress; that it may be thrown, as much as possible, on delinquency, on oppression, on intolerance, on incompetence, on ante-revolutionary adherence to our enemies….” The President did not exaggerate his effort; he spent endless hours corresponding about possible appointments, weighing qualifications, but always with an eye to their place in his political strategy.

  Jefferson made no pretense of one-man leadership. He gave his Cabinet a central role in decision making, especially in foreign relations. He worked so closely with his Secretaries of State and of the Treasury that this troika provided a case study in collective leadership. Madison and Gallatin were important to him in different ways. While he consulted with Madison on almost all major political and diplomatic matters, he felt thoroughly at home in foreign policy; he saw Gallatin less often, but depended on his expertise more, for Jefferson would never have tried to serve as his own Secretary of the Treasury. Cabinet members in turn worked closely with congressional leaders and with party heads both in Washington and in the states. But no one doubted who was chief of government.

  The President derided the notion that public administration had to be complex and obscure. “There are no mysteries in it,” he said; when difficulties arose, “common sense and honest intentions will generally steer through them.” His administrative technique appeared to be simplicity itself: canvassing of opinion outside the mansion, intensive consultation with cabinet and staff members, clear instructions couched in polite but firm language. He did not care for formality. Forms, he said, “should yield to whatever should facilitate business.”

  Certainly the President’s mansion was more a place of business than of pomp and circumstance during these Republican years. It stood bulky and Ionic, without the porticos that later gave it more style and proportion. The great stone house was “big enough for two emperors, one pope and the grand lama in the bargain,” a newspaper observed, and Jefferson, his steward, his housekeeper, several servants, and his small executive staff hardly filled it. The President worked quietly in his library at the southwest corner of the main floor, amid tables large and small, a few chairs, and a letterpress which made copies of the letters that Jefferson wrote with his own hand. For a time his main aide was Meriwether Lewis, a young army officer from Albemarle County in Virginia.

  No First Lady graced the President’s house, as Martha Washington had in New York, or hung her clothes out to dry in downstairs rooms, as Abigail Adams had in Philadelphia. Jefferson occupied the house for almost a year before his daughters visited him there. James and Dolley Madison stayed with him for a few weeks before setting up housekeeping on their own, and Jefferson had other guests and held some grand dinners, but most of the time the place stood cold and quiet. Federalists charged that he collected rent from his guests. Jefferson’s only consolation lay in frequent visits to Monticello. Accustomed to the breezes on his mountain, he positively refused to stay in the malarial and bilious “tidewater” of Washington during the hot summer months.

  Washington, Jefferson wrote a friend, “may be considered as a pleasant country-residence, with a number of neat little villages scattered around within the distance of a mile and a half, and furnishing a plain and substantially good society.” He was happy to be free, he wrote his son-in-law, “from the noise, the heat, the stench and the bustle of a close built town.” Few would have agreed with the President’s view of either the city or the social life. One “village” consisted of the President’s house and an unsightly collection of temporary government buildings and private houses extending west into Georgetown. Flanking the mansion were the brick Treasury building and the combined State and War building. A mile and a half to the east was another “village,” dominated by the huge but incomplete Capitol and radiating out in a corona of avenues, most of which were still muddy trails lined by rows of stumps.

  Pennsylvania Avenue, connecting the two governmental villages, was a “streak of mud newly cut through woods and alder swamps,” in Irving Brant’s words. In years to come that avenue would come to symbolize a large distance between the executive and legislative branches, as Pierre L’Enfant had planned in laying it out. In 1801 it symbolized the closeness of the two branches, contrary to a Constitution designed to separate them, and the legislative supremacy of a man who had long extolled the importance of checks and balances between President and Congress.

  On the face of it, the legislative tasks facing Jefferson seemed far less daunting than those confronting his predecessors. Washington and Adams had needed congressional support for major fiscal programs and foreign policy initiatives. Jefferson’s immediate goals were to repeal much of what had been done—to cut federal spending and the national debt, to repeal the Judiciary Act of 1801, to break away from alliances that might entangle the nation in foreign affairs, to alter Hamilton’s banking program. Yet even this task of alteration and demolition would call for unity and discipline among congressional Republicans, some of whom liked particular fiscal policies, especially military spending in their own districts. The trouble was, the President complained to his friend Du Pont de Nemours, Hamilton’s policies had departed from “true principles” at the very start. “We can pay off his debt in 15 years: but we can never get rid of his financial system.” He would do the best he could.

  Federalists warned of the Jeffersonian “phalanxes” in Congress but the Republican majorities in each house were mainly composed of fiercely independent, individualistic, and often unruly men. They had been accustomed to fighting the executive, not cooperating with him, a posture that was indeed an article of their Republican faith. Other factors encouraged disunity in Congress: “weak party organization,” as Robert Johnstone says, “a high rate of turnover, divergent constituency obligations, an eighteenth-century ethos of independence from party control, rules of procedure that encouraged dissent, and ‘patterned social avoidance’ among men of different regions.” Members of Congress were cut off from one another as a result of living in small boardinghouses scattered through the city, another scholar has pointed out, and acoustics were so bad in the House that representatives could not always hear one another when they did convene. Some time later, John Quincy Adams described the “typical” Republican legislator as “a mixture of wisdom and Quixotism.…His delight was the consciousness of his own independence, and he thought it heroic virtue to ask no favors. He therefore never associated with any members of
the Executive and would have shuddered at the thought of going to the drawing room.”

  How could the new President unify a group of men so sovereign in outlook, so dependent on their state parties and local constituencies, so independent politically of him? Here again, Jefferson had carefully worked out his tactics: to gratify the self-esteem of legislators by deferring to the doctrine of legislative supremacy; in fact to insert himself in the life of legislators and the crucial phases of legislation and thus to become the real “chief legislator”; to do so not by seeking to influence Congress from the outside as chief executive but from inside as “chief of party” by involving himself centrally in the Republican leadership and loyalties of the two houses; and to do all this so quietly and adroitly, by working through congressional and party leaders and asking them to keep his involvement secret, that Federalists would not be aroused, nor Republicans feel threatened.

  It was not hard for Jefferson to treat Congress and congressmen with exquisite courtesy and deference; it was his natural style. As a Republican long pledged to the doctrine of the legislature as the “first among equals” in the tripartite balance, he found it easy to defer to Congress in his official posture. “Guided by the wisdom and patriotism of those to whom it belongs to express the legislative will of the nation,” he had said in response to the notification of his election, “I will give to that will a faithful execution.” He consulted with individual legislators at length, to gain their views and information as well as to influence them, and he cleared with them letters that came to the mansion from their districts. If he had few jobs to disburse, he had another means of pleasuring congressmen far from the comforts of home—his dinners. These were superb in cuisine and especially in wines, for the President had an excellent French chef, a large collection of French and Italian recipes, and a penchant for introducing new foods from Europe. But even more, the dinners were occasions for lively talk, for Jefferson planned them that way. He brought together officials, visitors from abroad, diplomats, scientists, and senators and representatives carefully chosen from different boardinghouses to create the most fruitful blend, politically and intellectually—though he did not mix Republicans and Federalists, and invited the latter strictly by boarding-house bloc.

  Few enjoyed Jefferson’s dinners more than John Quincy Adams, the increasingly independent Federalist, or made better reports of them. “I had a good deal of conversation with the President,” he wrote after a dinner in 1804. “The French Minister just arrived had been this day first presented to him, and appears to have displeased him by the profusion of gold lace on his clothes. He says they must get him down to a plain frock coat, or the boys in the street will run after him as a sight.” Three years later Adams reported on “one of the agreeable dinners I have had at Mr. Jefferson’s,” among a company chiefly of congressmen. The talk ran from wines to philosophy to Fulton’s steamboat and torpedoes to “oils, grasses, beasts, birds, petrifactions, and incrustations.” “Mr. Jefferson said that the Epicurean philosophy came nearest to the truth, in his opinion, of any ancient system of philosophy, but that it had been misunderstood and misrepresented. He wished the work of Gassendi concerning it had been translated.…I mentioned Lucretius. He said that was only a part—only the natural philosophy. But the moral philosophy was only to be found in Gassendi.”

  The President’s involvement in congressional policy making was continuous and pervasive. He and his officials provided congressmen with “material” ranging from information to actual drafts of bills. Department heads testified before congressional committees and remained to help draft bills in executive sessions. And of course the President always had the right to veto legislation, but the practice of a veto on purely policy grounds was not yet established, and Jefferson did not exercise it or—evidently—threaten to exercise it. More important, he worked closely with congressional and party leaders on the Hill, calling them into frequent conferences, helping them deal with obstacles, talking with other politicians who might help the congressional leaders and hence him. The President encouraged likely Republicans to run for Congress and to try for leadership positions. By no means did things always go smoothly, especially in the first year or two. But he achieved unsurpassed cooperation in Congress by throwing into the balance every ounce of his political skill, his personal charm, and his moral authority—authority all the greater because this was Jefferson who was asking for support.

  The President covered his political hand by planning on secrecy and by insisting on it. His obsession with secrecy might have been considered pathological if he had not experienced serious political setbacks in earlier days when letters of his had been intercepted and exposed. Repeatedly he asked his political lieutenants not to trust the confidentiality of the post office and to keep his letters to themselves, or share them only with trusted persons. He concealed his interference in Congress mainly, however, by intervening indirectly through his leaders there. And those leaders well knew, from correspondence and conversations, what the President wanted.

  To conclude that Jefferson dominated the legislative process largely because he dominated the Republican party in Congress—that he was chief legislator mainly because he was party chief—is to assume that the Republican party itself was strong and united in both House and Senate. Historians have long debated this question. In the last century, influenced by Federalist politicians and journalists who suspected that the President was marshaling his legislative troops like a Prussian drillmaster, chroniclers saw a powerful party caucus at work. More recent and more sophisticated analysis has challenged this conclusion, but may have overreacted to the previous Federalist bias. Certainly the party systems both in the nation and in Congress were primitive affairs compared to those that emerged later. The congressional party did not openly elect leaders and whips and other officials, or impose formal discipline, or choose policy or steering committees. But an informal congressional party has been identified, comprising Republican senators and representatives powerfully committed to certain values and policies, a group of congressional leaders in close touch with the rank and file in both houses and with the President, and a rudimentary but influential caucus system. Those caucuses were so informal, and they met so secretly because of the bias against “party machinations,” that evidence of their existence has been elusive and scattered. But some kind of meeting was held—serving the function of a caucus without being labeled by that name—to unify the positions of Republican lawmakers before major legislative actions on the Hill. A formal flow chart is not necessary, as Johnstone says, for a group of persons to act as a cohesive and effective force. It was largely through this loosely organized but zealous and well-led majority of Republican senators and representatives that Jefferson exerted his legislative leadership. He was chief executive and chief legislator among a collective of executive and legislative chiefs.

  TO LOUISIANA AND BEYOND

  Europe savored a moment of peace at the start of the new century. During the lull France and England, the great mobiles of European politics, swung in uneasy balance with each other. Surrounding these central mobiles were lesser ones, Spain, Holland, Naples, Prussia—suspended in arrays of alliances and animosities.

  Each mobile was a cluster of satellite mobiles, a quivering balance of domestic politics embracing royal pride and ambition, party and leadership rivalries, military chieftains, religious establishments, parliamentary combat, economic interests. Conflict within satellite mobiles often set the parent mobile to trembling and pulsating, causing disturbances throughout the system. Usually the arching balances of the whole system righted themselves, but there was always the threat that the tempest of war would leave the balance of mobiles shattered.

  A far-off mobile in this precarious array of balances was the land called Louisiana. In the very different perspective of Americans, Louisiana was their western borderland, nearby but mysterious, filled with endless forests and swamps, peopled by roving Indian tribes, and rich in fertile land for set
tlers moving west. Fronting this area was the legendary Mississippi, rising somewhere in the far north, swelling miles-wide and shallow as it approached the Gulf of Mexico, and providing a boulevard to the world for husbandmen and flatboatmen throughout the area. To Westerners, Madison said, the Mississippi was everything—“the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the Atlantic States, formed into one stream.” And at the foot of the Mississippi lay New Orleans, a place of exotic peoples and erotic temptations, a commercial center vitally necessary to American traders for depositing their goods for transshipment abroad—and a city owned by the Spanish and ruled over by a formidable Spanish intendant.

  The vast area both to the east and the west of the Mississippi was “Republican country.” As Virginia landowners bought and sold “Western” acres by the tens of thousands, as Virginia frontiersmen and settlers moved down the long valleys into Kentucky and Tennessee and western Georgia, Republican ideas and politics had moved with them. Virginia politicians had cultivated ties with the Kentuckians who were seeking political self-government and economic development. Jefferson had always had a “peculiar confidence in the men from the western side of the mountains,” in his words, as they had had in him. Kentucky had become a state in 1792, and Tennessee in 1796, but western Georgia was far behind. Not until 1802 would Georgia cede to the nation the whole region between its present western border and the Mississippi, thus creating most of the states of Alabama and Mississippi.