Jefferson

by Albert Jay Nock

  He does not tell the profound and austere Secretary what these measures were; but they come out in the diary of his travels. “Poggio, a muleteer, who passes every week between Vercelli and Genoa, will smuggle a sack of rough rice for me to Genoa; it being death to export it in this form.” To keep a sheet-anchor to windward of this enterprise, since for some reason he had “no great dependence on its success,” he stowed away the contents of the small parcel on his own person, “as much as my coat and surtout pockets would hold,” and made his way unostentatiously across the frontier into free Genoa, his raiment bulging all over with contraband rice. Poggio turned out to be worthy of confidence; he also ran the blockade successfully; muleteer and diplomat met in triumph at Genoa, and promptly shipped off the fruits of iniquity to South Carolina and Georgia.

  VI

  It was all to the good; it would all come handy when one got back to the New World. First, there was Monticello, which one could make a great experiment-station in everything that was new, practical and beautiful. All the new ideas, the new agricultural processes, the new devices —the folding ladder, the hexagonal lantern, the “economical curtain bedstead,” and all the rest—could be tried out there, perhaps improved, and disseminated among one’s fellow-workers. It had been a good five years; and now it was time to go home, reclaim one’s property from “the ravages of overseers,” and get to work in earnest. One might so easily have too much of a good thing. “Travelling makes men wiser, but less happy,” Mr. Jefferson wrote a nephew. “When men of sober age travel, they gather knowledge which they may apply usefully for their country; but they are subject ever after to recollections mixed with regret; their affections are weakened by being extended over more objects; and they learn more habits which can not be gratified when they return home.” The public service needed him no longer. He would retain his ambassadorship, go back to Paris for a few months, more or less as a visitor, “to see the end of the Revolution, which I then thought would be certainly and happily closed in less than a year”; and that would end his office holding. The Constitution had been drafted; it did not suit him, but he had written long letters of advice to Madison and others concerning its amendment—advice which was being satisfactorily followed. He had heard of a political party-division on an issue called Federalism. He did not know much about this, and when it was explained to him by letter, he took instinctively a Pauline view of it. “I am not a Federalist,” he wrote Hopkinson, shortly before leaving France, “because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all. Therefore I am not of the party of Federalists. But I am much farther from that of the anti-Federalists.” Being neither for the Jew nor for the Greek, he was for the new creature. When he returned to America, would he find himself alone in this view? He had an uneasy sense of the need to get acquainted with his countrymen; times change, and a people changes with them. There were rumours, indeed, that a great spiritual change had already come over America. “I hope to receive soon permission to visit America this summer,” he wrote Colonel Humphreys, “and to possess myself anew, by conversation with my countrymen, of their spirit and ideas. I know only the Americans of the year 1784. They tell me this is to be much a stranger to those of 1789.”

  Chapter V

  WASHINGTON, HAMILTON, ADAMS

  I

  MR. JEFFERSON landed at Norfolk late in the autumn of 1789, bringing with him his fine French clothes, and all the furnishings that he had bought for his two houses in Paris, carefully packed and ready for further use at Monticello; all the toile de Jouy, nearly a thousand francs worth of it, the lawn curtains, the red damask window-curtains, the blue damask bed-curtains, the pictures and ornaments. His mind was full of happy anticipations—Christmas at Monticello, and Martha’s marriage early in the new year. The only cloud on his sky came out of a letter that he found waiting for him at Norfolk from President Washington, requisitioning his services as Secretary of State in the new Government. He had already heard that something of the kind was in the wind; Madison had sounded him out some weeks before. He was not sure of his duty in the matter. Washington, for whom he had great respect, was in a difficult position, needing all the help he could get; this was the first consideration. Mr. Jefferson felt that he could manage foreign affairs well enough, probably, but if there were any domestic responsibilities attaching to the office, the case was different; he had been long out of contact with domestic matters, and knew next to nothing about them. The proposal was disappointing, take it as one would, for the centre of his interest in public affairs had, for the time being, shifted to France. Still, one must do the right thing. He could see that there was really no one else for the place. Of those who had had much practical experience in foreign affairs, Adams was now Vice-President, John Jay was at the head of the newly-formed Supreme Court, and Franklin was too old and ill to be at work. It would be delightful to go back to Paris for another year and see the end of the French Revolution, and Washington had given him a free option in the matter; yet, as things were, one might not be hard-headed about it.

  Mr. Jefferson made a slow progress from Norfolk to Monticello, visiting along the way, and gathering odds and ends of information about the state of the country. Madison came to see him. The precise little scholar set him straight about the duties of the new office. The Secretary of State was to look after foreign affairs, and all he needed to know about domestic concerns could easily be picked up as he went along. So much to the good. But politics at large were in a dubious way, and Madison was uncertain about them; the new Government would not have easy going, by any means. The Constitution looked fairly good on paper, but it was not a popular document; people were suspicious of it, and suspicious of the enabling legislation that was being erected upon it. There was some ground for this. The Constitution had been laid down under unacceptable auspices; its history had been that of a coup d’état. It had been drafted, in the first place, by men representing special economic interests. Four-fifths of them were public creditors, one-third were land-speculators, and one-fifth represented interests in shipping, manufacturing and merchandising. Most of them were lawyers. Not one of them represented the interest of production—Vilescit origine tali. In the second place, the old Articles of Confederation, to which the States had subscribed in good faith as a working agreement, made all due provision for their own amendment; and now these men had ignored these provisions, simply putting the Articles of Confederation in the waste-basket and bringing forth an entirely new document of their own devising.

  Again, when the Constitution was promulgated, similar economic interests in the several States had laid hold of it and pushed it through to ratification in the State conventions as a minority-measure, often—indeed in the majority of cases—by methods that had obvious intent to defeat the popular will. Moreover, and most disturbing fact of all, the administration of government under the Constitution remained wholly in the hands of the men who had devised the document, or who had been leaders in the movement for ratification in the several States. The new President, Washington, had presided over the Constitutional Convention. All the members of the Supreme Court, the judges of the Federal district courts, and the members of the Cabinet, were men who had been to the fore either in the Philadelphia Convention or in the State ratifying conventions. Eight signers of the Constitution were in the Senate, and as many more in the House. It began now to be manifest, as Madison said later, who was to govern the country; that is to say, in behalf of what economic interests the development of American constitutional government was to be directed.

  Mr. Jefferson was slow to apprehend all this. He had hitherto regarded the Constitution as a purely political document, and having that view, he had spoken both for it and against it. He had criticized it seve
rely because it contained no Bill of Rights and did not provide against indefinite tenure of office. With these omissions rectified by amendment, however, he seemed disposed to be satisfied with it. Its economic character and implications apparently escaped him; and now that for the first time he began, very slowly and imperfectly, to get a sense of it as an economic document of the first order, he began also to perceive that the distinction between Federalist and anti-Federalist, which he had disparaged in his letter to Hopkinson, was likely to mean something after all.

  He set out on the first of March, 1790, for New York, the temporary capital, where he found himself a cat in a strange garret. Washington and his entourage greeted him cordially, and the “circle of principal citizens” welcomed him as a distinguished and agreeable man. He had grown handsomer as he approached middle age, and his elaborate French wardrobe set him off well. His charm of manner was a reminiscence of Fauquier; he was invariably affable, courteous, interesting. The people of New York could have quite taken him to their hearts if they had not felt, as every one felt in his presence, that he Was always graciously but firmly holding them off. Yet if they had any suspicions of his political sentiments and tendencies, they put them in abeyance; his attitude towards the French Revolution had shown that he was amenable to reason. As soon, no doubt, as this well-to-do, well-mannered, highly cultivated and able man of the world saw which way the current of new national ideas was setting, he would easily fall in with it.

  At any rate, everything should be made easy for him. “The courtesies of dinner-parties given me as a stranger newly arrived among them, placed me at once in their familiar society.” But every hour thus spent increased his bewilderment. Every one talked politics, and every one assiduously talked up a strong government for the United States, with all its costly trappings and trimmings of pomp and ceremony. This was a great let-down from France, which he had just left “in the first year of her revolution, in the fervour of natural rights and zeal for reformation. My conscientious devotion to these rights could not be heightened, but it had been aroused and excited by daily exercise.” No one in New York was even thinking of natural rights, let alone speaking of them. The “principal citizens” held the French Revolution in devout horror. “I can not describe the wonder and mortification with which the table-conversations filled me.” Where indeed was the old high spirit, the old motives, the old familiar discourse about natural rights, independence, self-government? Where was the idealism that these had stimulated —or the pretence of idealism that these had evoked? One heard nothing here but the need for a strong government, able to resist the depredations which the democratic spirit was likely to make upon “the men of property,” and quick to correct its excesses. Many even spoke in a hankering fashion about monarchy. All this, manifestly, was nothing to be met with the popgun of Constitutional amendments providing for a Bill of Rights and rotation in office; manifestly, the influential citizenry of New York would but lift their eyebrows at a fine theoretical conception of the United States as a nation abroad and a confederacy at home. Mr. Jefferson’s ideas were outmoded; nothing was of less consequence to the people about him; he might have thought himself back in Paris in the days of Calonne, at a soirée of the Farmers-General. Other ideas were to the front; and when Washington’s Cabinet came together, Mr. Jefferson confronted the coryphæus of those ideas in the person of a very young and diminutive man with a big nose, a giddy, boyish and aggressive manner, whom Washington had appointed Secretary of the Treasury.

  II

  Alexander Hamilton came to the colonies at the age of sixteen, from his home in the West Indies, dissatisfied with the prospect of spending his days in “the grovelling condition of a clerk or the like, . . . and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station. . . . I mean to prepare the way for futurity.” This was in 1772. He found the country ripe for him. There was something stirring all the time, something that an enterprising young man might get into with every chance to make himself felt. At eighteen he came forward in a public meeting with a harangue on the Boston Port Bill, and he presently wrote a couple of anonymous pamphlets on public questions, one of which was attributed by an undiscriminating public to John Jay, who, as Mr. Jefferson said, wielded “the finest pen in America,” and therefore resented the imputation of authorship with a lively chagrin. He showed his bravery conspicuously on two occasions in resisting the action of mobs; once to rescue the Tory president of King’s College, now Columbia, and once to rescue another Tory named Thurman. He saw that war was almost certainly coming on, bearing a great chance of preferment to the few in the colonies who had learned the trade of arms; so he studied the science of war, and the outbreak of hostilities found him established as an artillery officer. He had an unerring instinct for hitching his fortunes to the right cart-tail. Perceiving that Washington would be the man of the moment, he moved upon him straightway, gained his confidence, and remained by him, becoming his military secretary and aid-de-camp.

  But the war would not last forever, and Hamilton had no notion of leading the life of a soldier in time of peace. Arms were a springboard for him, not a profession. He served until the end of the campaign of 1781, when he retired with some of the attributes of a national figure, and with the same persistent instinct for alliance with power. He always gave a good and honorable quid pro quo for his demands; he had great ability and untiring energy, and he threw both most prodigally into whatever cause he took up. Money never interested him. Although he inaugurated the financial system which enriched so many, he remained all his life quite poor, and was often a good deal straitened. Even in his career as a practicing lawyer, conducting important cases for wealthy clients, he charged absurdly small fees. His marriage in 1780 with one of the vivacious Schuyler girls of Albany, made him a fixture in “the circle of principal citizens” of New York; it was a ceremony of valid adoption. He was elected to Congress in 1782; he served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787; and now he was in the Cabinet, as the recognized head of the centralizing movement.

  The four great general powers conferred by the Constitution upon the Federal Government were the power of taxation, the power to levy war, the power to control commerce, and the power to exploit the vast expanse of land in the West. The task now before Congress was to pass legislation appropriate to putting these powers into exercise. There was no time to be lost about this. Time had been the great ally of the coup d’état. The financial, speculative and mercantile interests of the country were at one another’s elbow in the large towns, mostly on the seaboard; they could communicate quickly, mobilize quickly, and apply pressure promptly at any point of advantage. The producing interests, which were mostly agrarian, were, on the other hand, scattered; communication among them was slow and organization difficult. It was owing to this advantage that in five out of the thirteen States, ratification of the Constitution had been carried through before any effective opposition could develop. Now, in this next task, which was, in Madison’s phrase, to administration the government into such modes as would ensure economic supremacy to the non-producing interests, there was urgent need of the same powerful ally; and here was the opportunity for the great and peculiar talents that Alexander Hamilton possessed.

  Perhaps throughout, and certainly during the greater part of his life, Hamilton’s sense of public duty was as keen as his personal ambition. He had the educated conscience of the arriviste with reference to the social order from which he himself had sprung. A foreigner, unprivileged, of obscure origin and illegitimate birth, “the bastard brat of a Scots pedlar,” as John Adams testily called him, he had climbed to the top by sheer force of ability and will. In his rise he had taken on the self-made man’s disregard of the highly favourable circumstances in which his ability and will had been exercised; and thus he came into the self-made man’s contemptuous distrust of the ruck of humanity that he had left behind him. The people were “a great beast,” irrational, passionate, violent, dangerous, needing a s
trong hand to keep them in order. Pleading for a permanent President and Senate, corresponding as closely as might be to the British model of a King and a House of Lords, he had said in the Constitutional Convention that all communities divide themselves into the few and the many, the first being “the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. . . . The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share of government. . . . Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy. Their turbulent and uncontrollable disposition requires checks.” He had no faith in republican government, because, as Gouverneur Morris acutely said, “he confounded it with democratical government, and he detested the latter, because he believed it must end in despotism, and be in the meantime destructive to public morality.”

  But republican government was here, and he could not change it. Of all among “the rich and well-born” who talked more or less seriously of setting up a monarchy, there was none doubtless unaware that the republican system could hardly be displaced, unless by another coup d’état made possible by some profound disturbance, like a war. Hamilton, at any rate, was well aware of it. The thing, then, was to secure the substance of absolutism under republican forms; to administration republican government into such absolutist modes as the most favourable interpretation of the Constitution would permit. Here was the line of coincidence of Hamilton’s aims with the aims of those who had devised and promulgated the Constitution as an economic document. These aims were not identical, but coincident. Hamilton was an excellent financier, but nothing of an economist. In so far as he had any view of the economics of government, he simply took for granted that they would, as a matter of course and more or less automatically, arrange themselves to favour “the rich and well-born,” since these were naturally the political patrons and protectors of those who did the world’s work. In a properly constituted government, such consideration as should be bestowed upon the producer would be mostly by way of noblesse oblige. The extent of his indifference to the means of securing political and economic supremacy to “the rich and well-born” cannot be determined; yet he always frankly showed that he regarded over-scrupulousness as impractical and dangerous. Strong in his belief that men could be moved only by force or interest, he fearlessly accepted the corollary that corruption is an indispensable instrument of government, and that therefore the public and private behaviour of a statesman may not always be answerable to the same code.