Jefferson

by Albert Jay Nock

  The figure of Adams is perhaps the most congenial—one may say perhaps the most lovable—of any made on the page of history by an American of his period. Franklin said, and Mr. Jefferson often quoted it with approval, that Adams was always an honest man, often a great man, and sometimes absolutely insane. His faults were all faults of temper; they laid him continually open to deception, and betrayed him on occasion into incredible inconsistency and pettiness. He was vain, irascible, truculent, suspicious; and these faults were offset by a corresponding excess of the virtues that usually accompany them and are often, in a sense, coloured by them—even his integrity was pugnacious. He never cared to conceal anything that was in his mind, and perhaps the most prepossessing thing about him was his utter inability to do so if he had. Engaging as the sum of his qualities undoubtedly was, it did not precisely recommend him to those who, in their search for a candidate, were considering it by the dry light of partisan exigency. They knew, moreover, that while he was in a general way on their side, he differed sharply from them in certain important particulars, and it was a question how well he could be managed into “going along.” Hamilton, indeed, was so uncertain about this that he tried a piece of political sharp practice to defeat him in the electoral college in favour of Thomas Pinckney, but with no result except to earn for himself the fine old man’s imperishable hatred.

  Not long before the campaign, Adams had published a large treatise on the theory of government, which marked him as a political tertium quid. He was for government by “the rich and well-born,” on the ground of their superior competence, but only under definite checks and restraints. He frankly acknowledged that all politics rests on the basis of economics. He was therefore against democracy, because it meant that the poor and low-born would use politics to despoil the rich and well-born; and here, from a partisan point of view, he was sound. But he also saw that an unchecked aristocracy would use politics to despoil the poor and low-born, and that by virtue of their superiority in intelligence and cunning, they would carry this spoliation to the point of mastery over all a country’s economic resources, and a consequent reduction of the poor and low-born to a state of living on sheer sufferance. He was as much afraid of the rich, in short, as of the poor; and his book was an effort to devise a scheme of governmental mechanics which should impartially restrain the rapacity of both. Without such apparatus, he said, “The struggle will end only in a change of impostors. When the people, who have no other property, feel the power in their hands to determine all questions by a majority, they ever attack those who have property, till the injured men of property lose all patience and recur to finesse, trick and stratagem to outwit those who have too much strength, because they have too many hands to be resisted in any other way.”

  On the veiled issue of the campaign, therefore, which Was its real issue, his position was questionable. One could never be sure whether, on some special point of division, he might not be found heretical. In foreign affairs, also, his attitude was anomalous. He was perhaps the only man in public life whose sentiments were not in some degree pro-English or pro-French; he did not care twopence for the fortunes of either France or England. Hence it was again a question whether on occasion he could be managed into a proper service of international interests in monopoly and finance; it would be quite like him to go blustering off into some commitment against the one country or the other, on the strength of a petty issue of schoolboy’s patriotism, like impressing sailors or rifling cargoes, when really serious considerations made it imperative that he should do nothing of the kind. Managing Mr. Adams would be a very delicate business, and his political sponsors contemplated it with trepidation; yet he was the only shot in their locker, and the alternative, as they put it, was the red and ruthless Jacobinism of an enraged majority.

  The French had a splendid chance at Mr. Adams, and threw it away; yet it was a chance that only an extraordinary political sagacity could improve. If they had so far masked their dislike of the Jay treaty as to abstain from further hectoring tactics against the American Government, they would have had no trouble with Adams, and would have profited by the popular dissatisfaction which was bound to keep on in their favour if only let alone to take its own course. Adams sent commissioners to France to reach a modus vivendi; they came back, saying that they had been badly received, that the French Government had dealt with them only at second-hand through three unofficial representatives (whom Adams designated in his report to Congress as Mr. X, Mr. Y and Mr. Z), and that these men had demanded a cash bribe and an annual cash tribute as the price of French good will.

  Unfortunately it was never clear how far these men actually represented the French Government, or whether anything like these fatuous demands was actually authorized—whether, indeed, any such thing was ever in Talleyrand’s mind. Mr. Jefferson exculpated the Directory on the strength of a parallel case. “When the Portuguese Ambassador yielded to like attempts of swindlers, the conduct of the Directory in imprisoning him for an attempt at corruption, as well as their general conduct, really magnanimous, places them above suspicion.” He made no bones of his belief that whatever basis of fact the incident may have had, the commissioners, led by John Marshall, had made an utterly unscrupulous use of it in behalf of damming the current of pro-French sentiment in America. “You know what a wicked use has been made of the French negotiation,” he wrote Edmund Pendleton, “and particularly the X. Y. Z. dish cooked up by Marshall, where the swindlers are made to appear as the French Government.” The one certain thing is that the French Government had behaved in such a high-handed way as to give colour to almost any kind of report that Marshall saw fit to make. Adams promptly communicated Marshall’s report to Congress, and its publication as promptly turned the tide of popular feeling. “The odiousness of the corruption supposed in these papers excited a general and high indignation among the people,” Mr. Jefferson wrote. “Unexperienced in such manœuvres, they did not permit themselves even to suspect that the turpitude of private swindlers might mingle itself unobserved, and give its own hue to the communications of the French Government, of whose participation there was neither proof nor probability.”

  The American people, never difficult to stir up, and never troubling itself to inquire too closely into politico-economic motive, went into a violent war-hysteria, fomented by every effort of the economic interests affected. This went on increasing in volume until suddenly one day, without a word to his Cabinet or to Congress, John Adams took all the wind out of it by appointing a minister to France. He somehow heard that the French Government had disavowed the X. Y. Z. incident, that it quite wished to be friendly and would gladly receive a minister. Well, if that were so, that was all there was to it; with the casus belli removed, there was no point to keeping on with war preparations just because they had been started in good faith, and there was even less point to keeping on with them merely to gratify a spirit of interested and more or less meretricious belligerency—and so, with one motion, the sturdy old man split his whole political organization from end to end.

  The organization, indeed, had already rather over reached itself with the people. The powers behind it had had such easy going since the X. Y. Z. incident that their strength seemed impregnable. Naturally disposed to make all the hay they could while the sun shone, they fostered a reckless Congressional prodigality with public money. Adams had gone along splendidly in this, for he had been as warm as any one over the X. Y. Z. proposals up to the moment when he smelt a rat in them, and for the first and only time in his life he was the idol of his party. He recommended measures for establishing a navy, for raising an army, for defending harbours, for purchasing supplies. All this meant money, money meant taxes, and taxes meant a certain recrudescence of the old critical spirit against the economic interests which were so obviously capitalizing resentment against France, and raking money out of it with both hands—Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury, for example, opened a loan of five million dollars at eight per cent! The organization of c
ivil recalcitrance, however, like the organization of war, must have a pretext as well as a cause; and the Administration itself furnished a pretext that fitted as if made to order, by the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

  These laws were intended as a clincher for the stability of the existing order, by providing for the deportation of foreign propagandists who were on the wrong side, like Genêt, and for the jailing of disaffected native editors, spellbinders and publicists. The Alien Act was never enforced; there seems to have been no occasion. The Sedition Act was enforced in a strictly partisan way. In themselves, however, these laws were probably not objectionable to the people. Americans were never sticklers for theory; they have been always more concerned with the inconveniences of despotism than with its iniquities. The fate of a few aliens or of a few home-grown seditionists might therefore not have troubled them much—and least of all, perhaps, would they have been disturbed by the inconsistency of such laws with the libertarian principles so lately set forth on dress-parade in the First Amendment. But they looked at these laws with eyes already jaundiced by various afflictions, which Mr. Jefferson enumerated as “the vexations of the Stamp Act, the disgusting particularities of the direct tax, the additional army without an enemy, and recruiting-officers lounging at every court-house, a navy of fifty ships, five millions to be raised to build it, on the ruinous interest of eight per cent, the perseverance in war on our part when the French Government shows such an anxious desire to keep at peace with us, taxes of ten millions now paid by four millions of people, and yet a necessity in a year or two of raising five millions more for annual expenses.”

  Mr. Jefferson took a strong position in precipitating popular sentiment against the Alien and Sedition Acts. Some malcontents in Pennsylvania made a move towards insurrection, which Mr. Jefferson disapproved, believing that “anything like force would check the progress of the public opinion, and rally them around the Government.” He was for getting the State Legislatures to declare these laws null and void, himself writing a pattern resolution for the legislature of Kentucky. Mr. Jefferson apparently never believed that the important function of Constitutional interpretation should be vested in any one branch of the Government, probably perceiving that such an investiture would be equivalent to the establishment of an oligarchy. He seems to have regarded Constitutional interpretation as an occasional function in the general system of checks and balances, to be exercised by the Legislature, Judiciary or even by the Executive, whenever one or another should display any tendency to usurpation or tyranny. “Our country has thought proper to distribute the powers of its government among three equal and independent authorities constituting each a check upon one or both of the others in all attempts to impair its Constitution.” Thus when during the Administrations of Washington and Adams, minority class-control was carried on chiefly through the instrumentality of Congress and the Executive, he was for nullification by the Judiciary or the State Legislatures. When during his own Administration, minority class-control was carried on through the Judiciary, he was for nullification by Congress and the Executive. A letter to Mrs. John Adams, written at the end of his first term in the Presidency, shows how far he thought fit to go, and did go, in the nullification by executive order of laws duly passed and pronounced valid by a preceding Administration. “I discharged every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition law, because I considered, and now consider, that law to be a nullity, as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image; and that it was as much my duty to arrest its execution in every stage as it would have been to rescue from the fiery furnace those who should have been cast into it for refusing to worship the image.”

  The opera-buffa character suddenly put by Adams upon all the high-pressure patriotism vented in preparedness for the French war, made the populace look at one another in the blank and rueful fashion of those who feel themselves “sold.” The Administration had set off all the thunder and lightning in the world, and not a drop of rain fell. They counted up the cost of this eccentric exhibition, and decided that they had seen enough. Hamilton and all that he represented turned viciously upon Adams, who boiled with rage. Conscious of having done the right thing, he struck out blindly against friend and enemy. He stood for re-election in 1800, but got no support. “The rich and well-born” saw that their intrenchment in the legislative and executive branches of the government was no longer safe, and that they must shift it to the Judiciary. As Wolcott wrote to Ames, “The steady men in Congress will attempt to extend the judicial department, and I hope that their measures will be very decided. It is impossible in this country to render an army an engine of government; and there is no way to combat the State opposition but by an efficient and extended organization of judges, magistrates and other civil officers.” Here Adams, in sheer pique and resentment, was easily influenced to do them an incalculable service. At the very fag-end of his Administration, the Judiciary Act was passed, creating twenty-three new Federal judicial districts. Adams sat up half the last night of his term, signing commissions to fill these judgeships with men whom, for the most part, he did not know, but who were of the right stamp. He also appointed John Marshall, author of the X. Y. Z. reports, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, first offering the position to John Jay, who declined it. Then, having made all the political trouble possible for his successor—and with no idea that his acts had any deeper significance—he packed up in high dudgeon, and set forth for his home in Massachusetts, disregarding the customary formality of attending his successor’s inauguration.

  Chapter VI

  EIGHT YEARS OF “SPLENDID MISERY”

  I

  PREVIOUS to the election of the elder Adams to the Presidency, a most veracious stump orator from Providence addressed the Old Britoners and Hardscrabblers, on which occasion . . . he felt he could impart to such intelligent citizens as those before him a profound secret which, when learned, could not fail to convince every independent freeman present who had any regard for the honour and well-being of his country, how immensely in all respects John Adams, the profound and fearless patriot and full-blooded Yankee, exceeded in every respect his competitor, Tom Jefferson, for the Presidency, who, to make the best of him, was nothing but a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father, as was well-known in the neighbourhood where he was raised wholly on hoe-cake (made of coarse-ground Southern corn), bacon and hominy, with an occasional change of fricaseed bullfrog, for which abominable reptiles he had acquired a taste during his residence among the French at Paris, to whom there could be no question he would sell his country at the first offer made to him cash down, should he be elected to fill the Presidential chair. . . .

  At the conclusion of the speech, it was unanimously voted by the assembled freemen present that any Old Britoner or Hardscrabble freeman who should not vote for the glorious John Adams at the coming election, ought to be deemed guilty of treason and shunned by all his neighbours accordingly; whilst in case any individual or individuals should dare to vote for that half Injun, half nigger, half Frenchman, with a touch of the bullfrog, Tom Jefferson, he or they should be rode on a green split chestnut rail, sharp side up.

  The Jonnycake Pafers.

  _____________

  The campaign of 1800 had many diverting features. The moral and religious forces of the country had already largely enlisted themselves in the service of partisan politics, with an immense preponderance on the Federalist side, since, to paraphrase Jay’s dictum, those who owned the churches governed the churches. “The rich and well-born” in New York and New England gave special attention to this mode of propaganda, getting such good results out of it that Hamilton presently proposed to organize it formally on a permanent basis by establishing a “Christian Constitutional Society.” This was to be, in principle, a cheap popular edition of the Order of the Cincinnati, to offset the “Jacobin clubs” and the “democratic societies.” H
amilton’s prospectus for this interesting project set forth its objects as, first, “the support of the Christian religion,” and, second, “the support of the Constitution of the United States.” Rather oddly, not a word more is said about the first object, but a great deal about the second. The Society was to attend to “the cultivation of popular favour by fair and justifiable expedients,” such as, first and foremost, “the diffusion of information. For this purpose not only the newspapers but pamphlets must be largely employed. . . . It is essential to be able to disseminate gratis useful publications.” Next, “the use of all lawful means in concert to promote the election of fit men.” Finally—most interesting anticipation of all—“the promoting of institutions of a charitable and useful nature in [i.e., under] the management of Federalists. The populous cities ought particularly to be attended to; perhaps it would be well to institute in such places—Ist, societies for the relief of emigrants; 2d, academies, each with one professor, for instructing the different classes of mechanics in the principles of mechanics and the elements of chemistry.”

  Hamilton sketched this plan in a letter to Bayard, who deprecated it as unnecessarily obvious. All these desirable objects would in a little time be attained naturally and informally—much better so than by a national organization to “revive a thousand jealousies and suspicions which now began to slumber.” A little patience, and two or three years “would render every honest man in the country their proselyte.” Hamilton’s immense genius for organization stood in the way of his recognition of the imponderabilia; he never really understood the mighty force which has been so well called “the cohesive power of public plunder,” though it was all along his most effective ally—his entire practical statesmanship, indeed, might be not unfairly summed up as merely an agency for its release—and Bayard’s instinct for trusting to it to compass all the objects of Hamilton’s plan was the instinct of the better politician.