CHAPTER 8
Mr. Jefferson Wins a Victory That He Soon Regrets
JEFFERSON’S FIRST WEEKS IN New York were largely social. President Washington greeted him cordially and invited him to one of his levees. More enjoyable was one of Martha Washington’s sumptuous dinners, where the Secretary of State was one of a dozen guests, most of them congressmen and senators and their wives. This may have been where the ever critical Senator Maclay met Jefferson and confided his impression to his diary.
The Pennsylvanian thought the Secretary of State had a “rambling vacant look, and nothing of the firm collected deportment that I thought would dignify a…secretary or minister.” The senator also disliked Jefferson’s “’laxity of manner” and the way he spoke “almost without ceasing” in a “loose and rambling way.” He also thought Jefferson’s clothes did not fit him very well. Maclay was critical of almost everyone he met in New York, but his description of Jefferson was especially harsh. One suspects the senator thought the Secretary of State acted too much like a Virginia aristocrat for Maclay’s hardscrabble taste.1
Jefferson did not like or approve of the formality of Washington’s levees. Some years later he claimed that Madison had warned him that the people around the President had “wound up the ceremonials of the government to a pitch of stateliness” incompatible with a republican government. It is doubtful that Madison was displaying this kind of animus to Washington in 1790, when he was still the President’s frequent advisor and ghostwriter. He had played a part in helping Washington work out his social routine. But the comment is an indication of the way the political current began running, after Jefferson arrived.2
The Secretary of State was soon on the prowl for anyone who did not agree with his view of the French Revolution—and/or showed even a hint of what Jefferson deemed favoritism to Great Britain. His first target was John Adams. The Vice President had begun publishing a series of essays, Discourses on Davila, which rambled widely about the art and science of government. Enrico Caterno Davila was a long dead historian who had written an eighteen hundred-page chronicle on the French civil wars of the late sixteenth century. The essays were appearing in The Gazette of the United States, a semi-official newspaper edited by Boston-born John Fenno. The Gazette had a profitable monopoly on publishing notices and statements by the federal government.
On April 27, 1790, the day that the first of these Davila essays appeared, the Vice President remarked to the Senate that America was being deluged with British pamphlets on the French Revolution—most of them highly favorable. “I despise them all but the production of Mr. Burke,” Adams said. Hearing these words caused Senator Maclay to all but levitate from his seat. He knew how little Mr. Burke thought of the French Revolution.
If Maclay had seen the letter Adams had recently written to the liberal English clergyman, Richard Price, a few days earlier, he would have been even more exercised. The Vice President had known and liked Price in the days when Adams had been America’s first ambassador to London. The clergyman had sent him a copy of a sermon he had given, praising the French Revolution. Price thanked God he had lived to see “thirty millions of people spurning at slavery and demanding liberty.” Adams had replied by telling his “dear friend” that he too rejoiced—but “with trembling.”
The American Revolution, Adams reminded him, had been based on the solid principles of English philosopher John Locke. The French were relying on claptrap concocted by erratic savants such as Francois Marie Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Worse, Adams added, “I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.” Worst of all, the revolutionists were relying on the National Assembly to lead them. Such legislatures had failed with dismaying regularity since the days of the ancient Greeks. In an ultimate dismissal, Adams told Price the French, like “too many Americans, pant for the equality of persons and property.”3
Adams was soon saying similar things about the French Revolution in the Gazette of the United States. When Jefferson combined these remarks with his old friend’s aborted pursuit of elaborate titles for the president and vice president, the Secretary of State concluded that Massachusetts’s favorite son should never be trusted with significant political power.
John Adams’s skepticism about the French Revolution was mild compared to what Edmund Burke began saying in Parliament. “The French have proved themselves the ablest architects of ruin that ever existed in the world. In one summer….they have completely pulled down to the ground their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army; their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures…Yet they are so unwise to glory in a revolution which is a shame and a disgrace to them.” This rhetoric quickly crossed the Atlantic and also appeared in the Gazette of the United States.4
Jefferson cited Burke’s wild words when he urged President Washington to regard all British commentaries on the French Revolution as tainted. The Secretary of State pointed to promising developments in France. Except for the bloodshed of the Paris mob’s invasion of Versailles in October, the year 1790 was relatively calm and seemingly productive politically. France seemed to be evolving into a constitutional monarchy not unlike Britain’s.5
In fact, the King and Queen were virtual prisoners in their Paris palace. But the National Assembly was still in control of liberal noblemen such as the Marquis de Lafayette and Jefferson’s close friend, the Baron de la Rochefoucauld. This apparent calm enabled the Secretary of State to persuade John Fenno to balance his coverage by reprinting stories from pro-French European newspapers. Federal cash played a part in persuading Fenno to be more evenhanded. The Secretary of State was authorized to “print the federal statutes” in three newspapers. Jefferson would soon find out that Secretary Hamilton had even more cash to bestow via Treasury notices about the department’s many fingers in the national pie, from tariffs to tax collectors to the operations of the Coast Guard.
Jefferson’s first impression of the Secretary of the Treasury was positive. Hamilton invited him to dinner and Jefferson was charmed by his wife, Eliza. But this cordiality was soon disrupted by politics. Hamilton had trounced Madison in Congress, winning a mandate to ignore the Virginian’s claim that the original owners of federal securities should be considered in the government’s payment for them.
Jefferson went farther than his friend in his comments on this hard-nosed policy. “Immense sums” were being “filched from the poor and ignorant” by the “fraudulent purchasers,” he claimed. This sentiment collided head-on with Hamilton’s contention that there was nothing dishonest or dishonorable in an investor buying this hitherto worthless paper.6
By the time Jefferson was settled in a house on Maiden Lane, he had also drawn some dark conclusions about New York City. Although he had five servants, including a slave chef, James Hemings, whom he had taken to Paris for training, as well as a maitre d’ hotel (essentially a butler) imported from the French capital, he told one correspondent that he was dismayed by the way hitherto unspoiled Americans were succumbing to extravagance and luxury. It was “a more baneful evil than Toryism was during the war.”
We might pause here to note the unreality of these words. Toryism during the Revolution was a matter of life and death. The British and their loyalist American supporters were looking forward to hanging, drawing, and quartering General Washington and dozens of other rebel Whigs, as they had done after quelling revolts in Scotland and Ireland. Extravagance and luxury were hardly comparable, especially since their condemnation was coming from a man who had shipped from France 86 crates of expensive French furniture, dinnerware, silver and paintings, plus 288 bottles of expensive wine.7
The Secretary of State eagerly, if covertly, joined Madison in a new collision with Secretary Hamilton. During the Revolution, the semi-independent states had all contracted large debts—amounting to some 25 million unpaid dollars. Most of this money had been spent fending off British invasions or bombardments, paying militiamen, and recruiting men
for the Continental Army with generous bonuses. The Treasury Secretary wanted to buy up these debts, too.
The proposal stirred even more resistance than the quarrel over the federal debt. Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia had paid off almost half their obligations in the intervening years. Other states, notably Massachusetts and South Carolina, had paid little or next to nothing. On this issue, there is little doubt that Madison felt threatened by a surge of hostility in Virginia, fanned by a sneering Patrick Henry. Hamilton made little attempt to understand or excuse the congressman’s decision to oppose the policy. For the Secretary, it was a betrayal of the words Madison had written in The Federalist about the importance of minimizing state power to guarantee a strong federal government.8
Hamilton maintained that it made political sense for the federal government to assume the states’s debts. Arguing over who had repaid and who had not repaid them was beside the point. The money had been spent fighting a common enemy in the name of their country’s salvation. But the underlying anti-federalism of thousands of voters dismissed this patriotic appeal as sophistry and a lunge for too much personal power. On April 12, 1790, Madison had the satisfaction of watching the House of Representatives defeat Hamilton’s proposal, thirty-two to twenty-nine. When Hamilton partisans attempted to revive the subject two weeks later, Madison was ready with a coup de grace—he persuaded the House to vote against further debate on the issue.
Worsening the prospect of a Hamilton comeback was an alarming illness that President Washington contracted on May 7—pneumonia. For a few days, he seemed close to death and New York City was plunged in anxiety and gloom. Confounding the pessimism of his doctors, the President rallied and was soon out of danger. But he was in no condition to give Hamilton any help in the battle over assuming the states’ debts, which looked more and more like a total defeat.
There was a contentious issue smoldering in the background of the battle about assumption: where to locate the new nation’s capital. New York, having acquired the wandering Continental Congress largely by accident, seemed to think fate had confirmed a well deserved destiny. New Yorkers were sure they were on their way to becoming the nation’s largest and wealthiest city.
Philadelphia was quick to point out that Gotham had by no means achieved this supremacy. The City of Brotherly Love was more populous—forty-five thousand industrious citizens—and more civilized than New York, thanks to founder William Penn’s passion for order and cleanliness. New York did not even have an adequate water supply. Moreover, the Quaker city had been the original choice for a capital in 1776.
The nation’s most influential politician, George Washington, had been having his own geographical thoughts. He was convinced that a federal city, at the mouth of the Potomac River, would be certain to grow and unite North and South. The Constitutional Convention had voted to create this “federal district” but had not specified its location. The President’s fellow Virginians, Jefferson and Madison, agreed with his Potomac River choice, as did numerous voters in the Old Dominion. Washington’s vision was linked to a belief that canals could and would remove the many obstacles to making the Potomac a navigable link to the steadily growing settlements in the West.
Thomas Jefferson had a very different motive for favoring the idea: hatred of cities. He was fond of saying that those who “labor in the earth” were nature’s true noblemen. He saw a nation of independent farmers as the only hope of preserving America’s commitment to liberty. In cities, men were too easily corrupted by money and luxury to worry about fundamental political truths.
Packed with people, cities were also subject to epidemics that spread sudden death. It is hard to see how these convictions jibed with Jefferson’s faith in the ultimate triumph of the French Revolution, which was struggling to be born in one of the largest cities in the world, with an addiction to luxury that was second to none.
Further complicating the location of the national capital was the fact that Secretary Hamilton was strongly in favor of New York. Unfortunately, Hamilton’s abrasive tactics in the first stage of assuming the nation’s debt, and his overall energy and evident delight in wielding power, had made New York’s chances of winning this contest dubious at best. Senator William Maclay was among those who were convinced that Hamilton and his fellow “Yorkers” were ready to try anything, from bribery to threats of secession, rather than “part with Congress.” Some senators and congressmen who agreed with the Pennsylanian had begun calling the city “Hamiltonopolis.”9
According to Jefferson, it was he who wove this web of potentially ruinous disagreements into Congress’s first great compromise. He happened to meet Secretary Hamilton at the close of a June day outside President Washington’s residence. “His look was somber, haggard and dejected,” Jefferson recalled many years later. “Even his dress was uncouth and neglected.” Hamilton’s conversation was as ragged as his appearance. If assumption failed, he told Jefferson, he would probably resign. God alone knew when and if Congress could work out an agreement on the states’ debts. There was so much anger between “creditor” states and those who had paid their debts that secession was a distinct possibility. In desperation, Hamilton wondered if Jefferson could intercede with some of his friends to change their votes.10
Jefferson invited the Treasury Secretary to dinner the following night. While the French wine flowed and everyone savored James Hemings’s French cooking, Jefferson urged his other guest, Congressman James Madison, to reconsider his opposition to assumption. (Also at the table, though not mentioned by Jefferson, may have been the shrewd, beefy Secretary of War, Henry Knox, as a semi-spokesman for the ailing Washington.) Madison probably sighed heavily, as if he were being asked to sign his own death warrant, and admitted some kind of agreement was a possibility—if he got something in exchange.
Otherwise “the pill would be a bitter one for the Southern states,” and Dr. Madison had no intention of administering it. The implication was clear—some highly effective medicine had better be on the table. Hamilton supposedly gnashed his teeth and said he was ready to trade the location of the nation’s capital for Madison’s support on assumption.
The scene would play well as drama, but the reality was a bit more complicated. We now know that Hamilton had begun negotiating before he went near Thomas Jefferson. The Secretary had persuaded Robert Morris, who was a senator from Pennsylvania, to approve the deal, with a nice proviso to soothe his fellow Philadelphians. The City of Brotherly Love would be the capital for ten years, while the government was building the federal city beside the Potomac. This was long enough to encourage the Keystone Staters to hope they might make their temporary “capitalization” permanent.
However many grains of salt we may want to mix into Thomas Jefferson’s version, the deal was soon translated into votes in Congress—although it was a bumpy ride to this destination. Senator Rufus King of New York, hitherto a Hamilton admirer, exploded with rage when the Secretary told him of the swap. Hamilton’s wealthy senator father-in-law, General Philip Schuyler, was equally chagrined. He pointed out that New York City had all but broken ground on a sumptuous official residence for the President.
Meanwhile, Hamilton had to make sure the Pennsylvanians agreed to the bargain. Senator Maclay, still convinced Hamilton was evil incarnate, told his diary that on June 23, Senator Morris was called from the Senate chamber for several minutes. When he returned, he whispered in Maclay’s ear: “The business is settled at last.” Maclay cared little about Philadelphia; in his western Pennsylvania bailiwick, it was another word for snob. He was far more appalled that Congress would now adopt the “abominations” of Hamilton’s funding plan. The Senator blamed President Washington for letting himself become “the dishclout of every dirty speculation.”11
Here we should pause again to ask a question that few historians have raised about this deal: what America lost by it. Instead of a capital like London, which was also the headquarters of the nation’s financial and cultural elite, for the
next two hundred years, the American capital would remain a small, isolated town, whose only industry was politics. For the first few decades, it was a swampy, primitive village, in which petty envies and parochial thinking (personified by Senator Maclay) would become the norm. Gone was any hope of writers and artists, as well as businessmen and journalists, unifying the nation around a community that would embody its finest aspirations.
Granted, Washington D.C.’s destiny had complex causes: President Washington’s hopes of making the Potomac a waterway to the West never materialized. The preferences of three Virginia presidents (Jefferson and his two disciples, Madison and Monroe) played a significant part in Congress’s lack of interest in spending the money to create a federal metropolis. The million young men who died in the Civil War bear mute witness to one of the many prices America paid for this hostility to the kind of unified nation Washington and Hamilton hoped to create in America.
In the second week in July, the House of Representatives approved the Residence Act, which made Philadelphia the capital for ten years, and selected a ten-mile square district on the Potomac as the place for a permanent capital. Two weeks later, the House passed the bill to assume the states’ debts. Congressman Madison demonstrated his political stubbornness (and his survival instincts) by voting against it. But he had persuaded four congressmen from Virginia and Maryland to become supporters. Moreover, with the help of some deft accounting, he procured a better deal for Virginia in the final estimate of what the Old Dominion owed.
As Congress ended its session in late August 1790, and the federal government began preparing for the transfer to Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison headed back to Virginia. They were not happy travelers. Treasury Secretary Hamilton had gotten his way on another step in his financial program. The dispute over state debts had demolished the two Virginians’ hopes of getting Congress to pass a bill discriminating against the hundreds of British ships arriving in their ports.
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