Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  At the same time, however, Jefferson was telling Thomas Paine that there were in America “high and important characters,” Adams, of course, being one of them, who were “preaching up and panting after an English constitution of king, lords, and commons, and whose heads are itching for crowns, coronets and mitres.” He congratulated Paine for his book, which had awakened people to the English monarchical thinking expressed by the “Defence of the American constitutions” and the “Discourses of Davila.” He had rescued republicanism from the sect, “high in names but small in numbers,” that was trying to destroy it.60

  This sort of duplicity by Jefferson came from his compulsive politeness and from an intense desire to avoid all personal confrontations. Despite knowing that his political views were nearly diametrically opposite of those of his old friend, he desperately wanted to maintain his connection with Adams. Over the next two years, Jefferson wrote a pair of businesslike letters to Adams, one in November 1791, the second in March 1793, with no response from Adams. Although the two men were in the federal capital together much of the time and had less need of letters, it was clear that the relationship had greatly cooled.61

  • • •

  THE ENTIRE CONTROVERSY over Paine’s Rights of Man had elevated Jefferson into the champion of the republican cause. As an English dinner partner observed in 1792, Jefferson in conversation had become “a vigorous stickler for revolutions and for the downfall of an aristocracy. . . . In fact, like his friend T. Payne, he cannot live but in revolution, and all events in Europe are only considered by him in the relation they bear to the probability of a revolution to be produced by them.”62

  Jefferson was a thorough Francophile who was eager to demonstrate his new cosmopolitanism to America’s political world. In his Philadelphia home in the early 1790s, he sought to re-create his Paris residence of the 1780s. He had a French housekeeper, a French coachman, French wine, French food, French paintings, and French furniture. In fact, he returned from France with eighty-six packing crates of furnishings, mostly in the Louis XVI style, which included fifty-seven chairs, two sofas, six large mirrors, wallpaper, silver, china, linen, clocks, scientific equipment, a cabriolet, and a phaeton, not to mention all the books, artworks, wine, and French dogs he brought back. At the same time, he began remodeling and enlarging Monticello in line with what he took to be the highest standards of an elegant Parisian town house.63 Just as opponents of the Federalists thought that John Adams had spent too long at the British court, so too did the Federalists come to believe that Jefferson had spent too much time in Paris imbibing all those radical doctrines of the French philosophes.

  Just as the scandal over Jefferson’s note was breaking in the spring of 1791, Jefferson and Madison were on a trip up the Hudson Valley on holiday. In the minds of the Federalists, however, the two Virginians were using the trip to meet with some New Yorkers to plan their opposition to Hamilton’s program. Certainly Jefferson and Madison were alarmed enough by the support of the administration in Fenno’s paper to want a paper of their own. They entered into negotiations with the poet Philip Freneau, who had been Madison’s classmate at the College of New Jersey in Princeton, to edit a newspaper that could oppose the Federalists’ program.

  After being offered a position in the State Department as a translator and other promises of support, Freneau finally agreed. The first issue of his National Gazette appeared at the end of October 1791, and the paper immediately took an anti-British and pro-French tone. By early 1792 Freneau’s newspaper was claiming that Hamilton was plotting to subvert liberty and establish monarchy and aristocracy in America. At the same time, the paper hailed Jefferson as the distinguished patriot who was defending republicanism against Hamilton’s monarchical system of corruption.

  Although the opponents of the administration were not as yet organized as a party, something labeled the “republican interest” emerged in the Congress in 1791, with the Virginia delegation at its center.

  Freneau and his newspaper effectively altered the terms of the national debate. His National Gazette now openly declared that “the question in America is no longer between federalism and anti-federalism, but between republicanism and anti-republicanism.”64 As Hamilton quickly realized, casting the dispute as one between supporters of monarchy and republicans was not at all favorable to the Federalists.

  Finally, in the summer of 1792, Hamilton had had enough, and he began writing in Fenno’s Gazette and attacking Jefferson directly. He stated that the secretary of state, though “the head of a principal department of the Government,” was “the declared opponent of almost all the important measures which had been devised by the Government.” In a stream of newspaper pieces under different anonymous names, Hamilton accused Jefferson of having hired Freneau to set up a newspaper that was “an exact copy of the politics of his employer” and had him “regularly pensioned with the public money.” He accused Jefferson of wanting to become president.65

  Jefferson was obviously upset by Hamilton’s attacks, but, as he explained to Attorney General Edmund Randolph, he was not going to counter with newspaper pieces of his own. He had, he said, “preserved through life a resolution, set in a very early part of it, never to write in a public paper without subscribing my name, and to engage openly an adversary who does not let himself be seen, is staking all against nothing.”66 Besides, he realized that two ministers of the government squabbling in the public press would be utterly indecent. But even squabbling in cabinet meetings was indecent, and President Washington was alarmed.

  In February 1792 Jefferson privately mentioned to Washington his concern over the overweening influence of the Treasury Department, which threatened “to swallow up the whole Executive powers.” The discontent in the country, he told the president, flowed from the actions of that department. It had created a system that enticed the citizens into “a species of gambling, destructive of morality, & which had introduced it’s poison into the government itself.” He suggested to Washington that people were wondering whether Americans lived “under a limited or unlimited government,” but he hoped the elections of 1792 would settle the dissatisfaction of people and keep “the general constitution on it’s true ground.”67

  On May 23, 1792, in an extraordinary and lengthy letter to Washington, Jefferson spelled out all of his mounting apprehensions about what Hamilton and the Federalists, including Adams, were up to. Hamilton had organized a “corrupt squadron of paper dealers” that had bought off the Congress. This squadron had the “ultimate object” of preparing “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.” Indeed, “the Monarchical federalists” with their program had threatened to separate the Union into northern and southern parts. They had broadly construed the Constitution for their own ends and had interpreted “the new government merely as a stepping stone to monarchy.” Only Washington himself, said Jefferson, held the country together, and thus he must stay on for a second term.68

  • • •

  BY 1792 THE REPUBLICAN INTEREST IN the Congress had spilled out into the country and had become the Republican Party, organized to win elections, with Jefferson and Madison as its leaders. But the emergence of this Republican Party, which eventually became the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party, did not yet signify 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 gentry-aristocrats who presumably had sufficient reputations to gather supporters and followers. Although no one as yet thought parties were a healthy thing in a republic, some were coming to realize that they might be impossible to avoid.

  The two parties that emerged were something other than modern political parties. Neither accepted the legitimacy of th
e other and neither saw itself as permanent. The Federalists did not even think of themselves as a party. They were the government, the administration, not a party. The Republicans did call themselves a party, but they claimed they were only a temporary organization, like the Whigs in the 1760s designed to combat the Tories. They assumed that once they had displaced the “monocrats,” the “Eastern men,” and the “British party”—the terms they applied to the Federalists—they could safely disband. For their part, the Federalists saw their Republican opponents as illegitimate threats to order, labeling them “Jacobins,” the “Virginia party,” or the “French party.”

  Jefferson, who described his followers as “the Friends of the People,” was pleased by the 1792 elections for Congress, which, he told Thomas Pinckney, the American minister to Britain, had “produced a decided majority in favor of the republican interest.” He thought the Federalist interest in the country had peaked and that beginning with the next session of Congress in 1793, the government would “subside into the true principles of the Constitution.”69

  For his part, Adams could only express his astonishment “at the blind Spirit of Party which has Seized on the whole Soul of this Jefferson. There is not a Jacobin in France more devoted to Faction.” Jefferson realized that some members of the new Republican Party wanted to deprive Adams of the vice presidency in the election of 1792. They had seized upon the election of the vice president as a proper way of “expressing the public sense on the doctrines of the Monocrats.” Jefferson therefore knew that there would be “a strong vote against Mr. Adams, but the strength of his personal worth and his services will I think prevail over the demerit of his political creed.”70

  Although Adams complained constantly of the impotence of the vice presidency—“my Country,” he said, “has in its Wisdom contrived for me, the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived”—he was proud of his having achieved the second office in the land, and he knew too that it was the stepping-stone to the presidency.71

  In the election of 1792 Washington again received every possible electoral vote, 132, with Adams gaining 77 votes for the second-place position, elected this time by what Jefferson called “a great majority.”72 On behalf of the newly formed Republican Party, 50 electors, including all 21 of Virginia’s votes, supported Governor George Clinton of New York. Jefferson received 4 votes from Kentucky, and would have received 21 more if the electors of Virginia could have voted for both him and Washington; but the Constitution required that one of the two votes each elector cast be for a person outside his own state.73

  This competition between Adams and Jefferson for the vice presidency in 1792 strained their relationship but didn’t break it. In February 1793, Adams informed Abigail that “Mr. Jefferson was polite enough to accompany me” to a meeting of the American Philosophical Society, to which Adams had been newly elected; “so you see,” he told Abigail, “we are still upon Terms.” He didn’t perceive that Jefferson’s Philosophical Society had “any great superiority” over his own American Academy of Arts and Science in Boston, “except in the President.” Of course, Adams was playing at being modest, since he had helped found the American Academy in 1780 and in 1793 was its president.74

  Adams even contributed twenty dollars to support Jefferson’s dream of a proposed scientific expedition into the West. As vice president of the American Philosophical Society, Jefferson had enthusiastically helped organize this western expedition to be conducted by the French botanist André Michaux, but unfortunately it never came off.

  Instead, Edmond Genet, the French minister to the United States, persuaded Michaux to join up with some Kentucky forces and liberate Louisiana from Spain. As secretary of state, Jefferson could scarcely endorse such a venture against a foreign state. But, he noted, with his usual finesse in making fine distinctions, Genet communicated these filibustering plans to him, “not as Secy. of state, but as Mr. Jeff.” He told Genet that Michaux would have to travel as a private citizen and not as a French consul, as Genet wanted. Jefferson warned that if Michaux and the Kentucky soldiers were caught taking up arms against a friendly country, they might be hanged. “Leaving out that article,” he coolly told Genet, he “did not care what insurrection should be excited in Louisiana.”75

  Adams continued to suggest that all Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution stemmed from his burden of personal debts. Because of all “his French Dinners and Splendid Living,” he had run further into debt and was being forced to sell his furniture and horses. Adams wished “somebody would pay his Debt of seven Thousand Pounds to Britain and the Debts of his Country men,” meaning his fellow Virginians, and then, said Adams, “his Passions would subside, his Reason return, and the whole Man and his whole State become good Friends of the Union and its Govt.”76

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  BUT ADAMS KNEW THE PROBLEMS facing the country were really more serious than Jefferson’s debts. The conflict that was emerging was not simply between elite members of the cabinet or the administration; it reached deep into the society and involved tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. Through parades, festivals, songs, political societies, and the unprecedented proliferation of newspapers, the populace was making itself felt as never before, and the public “out of doors” took on a heightened significance. Jefferson was delighted by these new expressions of popular politics. “Our constituents,” he told Madison, “seeing that the government does not express their mind, perhaps rather leans the other way, are coming forward to express it themselves.”77

  Adams, like other Federalists, was alarmed by the spread of popular politics, especially by the emergence of self-created Democratic-Republican societies existing outside of the formal institutions of government.78 He realized that the new American government was “still but an Experiment.” Elective politics being as licentious as it was, he could not help but feel that the United States might eventually have to resort to some hereditary offices. When he saw the pressure that Hamilton as secretary of the treasury was under from the Congress, he wondered “whether the Ministers of state under an elective Executive will not be overborne, by an elective Legislature.”79 But most despairing to Adams were the “Personal hatreds and Party Animosities” that consumed the capital. The “Altercations” between the followers of the two leading ministers had spilled out into the streets, he told Abigail, harming the reputations of both Hamilton and Jefferson. “Ambition is imputed to both, and the Moral Character of both Suffered in the Scrutiny.”80

  When Adams learned of the killings and upheavals in France, he could only express astonishment that Louis XVI and Jefferson’s liberal friends—Lafayette, La Rochefaucauld, and others—“should have had So Little Penetration as to believe that the late Constitution [of 1791] could long endure.” He thought his fellow citizens were much too enthusiastic in their support of the French Revolution. Even before hearing of Louis XVI’s execution, which took place in January 1793, he expressed little hope for the outcome of the Revolution. Indeed, in a conversation with Jefferson and Edmund Randolph, Adams, according to Jefferson’s notes, launched into one of his usual diatribes that “men could never be governed but by force,” and that “neither virtue, prudence, wisdom nor anything else sufficed to restrain their passions.” Adams predicted that the French revolutionaries would create and demolish one constitution after another, hanging each successive group of constitution-makers, “until force could be brought into place to restrain them.” Sooner or later, he said, the French people would find themselves so exhausted and so irritated that they would “unite in a military Government for the defense of their Persons and Property.”81

  When Adams did finally learn of Louis XVI’s death, which suddenly dampened many Americans’ enthusiasm for the Revolution, he emphasized once again his pessimistic view of human nature and the constant dangers of uncontrolled power. “Majorities, banishing, confiscating, massacring, guillotining
Minorities, has been the whole History of the French Revolution,” which he had “told them would be the Case in three long Volumes before they began—But they would not believe me.”82

  Although Adams had come to realize that Jefferson had become the ideological leader of a party passionately committed to the French Revolution and opposed to the Federalist administration, he scarcely knew the half of it. If he could have read Jefferson’s letter of January 3, 1793, to his protégé William Short, he would have been appalled at just how much of a fanatical ideologue Jefferson had become.

  Short had written Jefferson from Europe, telling him that many of his former French friends were being guillotined. Jefferson’s response was extraordinary. He told Short that he deplored the fact that some innocent lives were being lost in the struggle, but, he said, the fate of the French Revolution—indeed, “the liberty of the whole earth”—was at stake. “Was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?” No doubt the Revolution was devouring the lives of many of his friends, and he was hurt by that; “but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.” Jefferson did not see his sentiments as unusual or extreme; they were, he said, “really those of 99 in an hundred of our citizens.”83

  (Presumably this was another example of what Madison referred to as Jefferson’s habit, shared by “others of great genius, . . . of expressing in strong and round terms impressions of the moment.”84)

  • • •

  BY 1793 THE TWO GREAT POWERS of Europe, Britain and France, were at war, locked in a titanic struggle for supremacy in the Western world. Although the Washington administration adopted a formal policy of neutrality, the two American parties, the Federalists and the Republicans, felt that they had to choose sides. While the Federalists were horrified by what was happening in France and most of them looked to England as a source of stability in a world gone mad, Jefferson and the Republicans celebrated their new sister republic, France, and passionately wished for its success.