The Great Divide

by Thomas Fleming

  The Secretary of the Treasury had risked his life in too many battles under General Washington’s command. There was a bond between these two men that Jefferson could never alter with sneers about Hamilton’s low birth in the West Indies. It is far more likely that the words deepened Washington’s disillusionment with Jefferson—a process that was already well advanced.

  Also worth noting was Jefferson’s continued determination to retire. The intention was now stated as a certainty, whether or not Washington served another term. Beneath Jefferson’s ostensible deference there seemed to be a growing personal antagonism toward the President. Perhaps the Secretary of State resisted the idea that Washington was certain to be ranked far above everyone else in the competition for fame. Did he find himself wondering if Washington could have managed his military triumph without the inspiring words of the Declaration of Independence to rally the Americans to the cause?

  In August 1792, Washington wrote to Hamilton, urging him to moderate his hostility towards Jefferson. He vowed to persuade Jefferson to do likewise. These “wounding suspicions” and “irritating charges” were all too likely to be believed by people on both sides of the quarrel, guaranteeing that the differences would or could grow into disputes that might ultimately rupture the Union. This primary value remained a constant concern for the President, as he struggled to decide whether to spend another four years in office.6

  In late September, Washington invited Jefferson to have breakfast with him at Mount Vernon for another attempt to resolve their differing opinions of Hamilton’s program. Before they sat down to dine, the President told Jefferson about the illness of his nephew, George Augustine Washington, who was managing Mount Vernon’s farms. The young man was dying of tuberculosis. It made Washington wish he could devote his full attention to making his three thousand acres more profitable. But he also confessed that he was more and more resigned to serving another term, if his aid was needed to keep the federal government from disintegrating.7

  Were the words aimed at flattering Jefferson, or at least in persuading him not to think about his own retirement? Jefferson reiterated that he saw Washington as the only man who could rise above the disagreements that were tearing the country apart. With not a little artifice, Washington replied that he had “never suspected” that these conflicts had created “a personal difference” between Jefferson and Hamilton.

  Jefferson responded with another outburst against Hamilton’s “monarchical” tendencies. It was a turning point. Washington’s temper flared. He curtly informed the Secretary of State that he did not believe there were ten men in the country “whose opinions were worth attention” who wanted to be ruled by a king or an imitation of one. Jefferson instantly noted the change in tone. There was contempt as well as anger in the President’s voice. In his record of the conversation in the journal Jefferson called his Anas, he wrote: “I told him there were many more than he imagined. I told him tho the people were sound, there was a numerous sect that had monarchy in contemplation and the Secretary of the Treasury was one of these.”8

  The conversation staggered on, but the friendship between the two men had received a fatal wound. When Jefferson attempted to regain the offensive by reiterating that Hamilton was corrupting Congress by encouraging the members to buy government securities, the President curtly dismissed the problem as unavoidable. He did not see how they could start barring men from holding public office on the basis of their stock portfolios. With an almost ruthless candor, Washington said the only worthwhile test of Hamilton’s system was its effectiveness.

  A shocked Jefferson abandoned the argument—and his belief that he could change George Washington’s mind. In his recounting of this pivotal meeting, he virtually surrendered, saying: “I avoided going further into the subject.” Never again would the Secretary of State see himself as the potential leader of the Washington administration, guiding a passive president down the path of true republicanism.9

  The impact of this defeat on Jefferson’s emotions is starkly visible in a letter he wrote to James Madison later on this momentous day. He began by admitting that he had somehow lost on the road to Bladensburg, Maryland, a packet of papers, including a very confidential letter from Madison. Then Jefferson turned to a topic he and his best friend had been discussing in that letter.

  Secretary Hamilton was planning to open a branch of the Bank of the United States in Virginia. Henry Lee, a famous cavalry leader of the Revolution, was governor. The ex-soldier had approached some wealthy Virginians about creating a state bank that would compete with the federal intruder. They had sought Madison’s opinion, and he, in turn, had asked Jefferson for his reaction to the idea.

  The Congressman got a reply that almost emitted steam in its raging ferocity. Jefferson dismissed a state bank as a “milk and water measure.” What he wanted was total opposition to all aspects of the federal bank. His rage building, Jefferson insisted that the federal government had no power to create corporations or banks. That privilege was reserved to the states. “For any Virginian to recognize a foreign legislature”—he was talking about the Congress of the United States—“is an act of treason against the state, and whoever shall do any act under the colour of the authority of a foreign legislature—whether by signing notes, issuing or passing them, acting as director, cashier or any other office relating to it shall be adjudged guilty of high treason & suffer death accordingly.”

  This lunge into blood-drenched violence is the most astonishing letter Thomas Jefferson ever wrote. It makes his epistle on the earth belongs to the living almost commonsensical in comparison. Within it are visible his deep-seated hostility to the Constitution that had been created in his absence, and his readiness—at least verbally—to propose the wildest acts and ideas against it. The seeds of a disease in the public mind that would one day flower into the tragedy of the Civil War are lurking in this frantic letter.

  Congressman Madison made not the slightest attempt to disagree with his tall friend from Albermarle County. “Your objections to it [the state bank] seem unanswerable,” he replied. The once independent thinker had become an echo of Thomas Jefferson’s angry ideological voice.10

  Things were not much happier on the other side of the fractured Washington cabinet. In June of 1792, Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton had finally managed to break off his affair with Maria Reynolds. But getting rid of her husband, James Reynolds, was more difficult. For some time, Hamilton had been paying him small sums they called loans but were obviously blackmail, amounting to about $1,000. (More than $15,000 in 2014 money.) In mid-November, Comptroller General Oliver Wolcott had Reynolds and a fellow swindler, Jacob Clingman, arrested for fraud. They had asserted they were the executors of a deceased former soldier’s estate with a $400 claim against the government. Unfortunately, the ex-soldier, one Ephraim Goodenough, was very much alive.

  Faced with serious jail time, Reynolds started telling people that he had the power to ruin the Secretary of the Treasury. He claimed that he had helped Hamilton engage in secret speculations based on the Secretary’s insider’s knowledge that had made him millions of dollars. Soon his partner Clingman was telling the story to Senator James Monroe and two influential congressmen, Abraham Venable of Virginia and Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania, until recently the Speaker of the House of Representatives. At his suggestion, they questioned Maria Reynolds and she confirmed everything her husband said. Meanwhile, after an early morning interview with Secretary Hamilton, Reynolds vanished from Philadelphia.

  The three politicians decided to confront Hamilton with these charges of fraud. Monroe was hardly neutral in this situation. His articles in the National Gazette defending Jefferson left no doubt where he stood. He had little difficulty persuading the others that Hamilton was guilty of a serious crime. Why else would he persuade the chief witness to flee the city? On December 15, Monroe, Venable and Muhlenberg strode into the Secretary’s office, accompanied by Comptroller Oliver Wolcott. Muhlenberg, ostensibly less h
ostile than the two Virginians, informed Hamilton of their suspicions.

  Hamilton exploded into almost hysterical rage. He seemed ready to deny the charge until Muhlenberg presented him with several handwritten notes to Reynolds, which the swindler had given him. Hamilton calmed down and admitted the letters were authentic. He invited his accusers to visit him at his home that evening. There, he assured them, he would give them an explanation which would refute their suspicions.

  That night, Hamilton gave the three politicians evidence they had not anticipated: a cache of letters from Maria Reynolds and her husband. With them came a confession of his year-long affair with Maria, replete with salacious details that left his listeners gasping with dismay. One of the delegation, probably Muhlenberg, assured him they were convinced that he was innocent of any fraud and there was no need to tell them the whole story. But Hamilton insisted on describing the entire sordid affair. Muhlenberg and Venable apologized for intruding on such a private matter and promised to mention it to no one. Monroe’s manner was far less friendly. In a cold, matter-of-fact voice, he conceded that Hamilton’s confession had convinced him no fraud had been committed by anyone but James Reynolds. He also promised to keep the affair a secret.

  Two days later, Hamilton began to worry about the likelihood that the pledge of secrecy would be violated. He asked his three accusers for copies of the letters they had shown him. Senator Monroe gave the documents to John Beckley, the clerk of the House of Representatives, for copying. The Senator must have known what would happen next. Beckley was a Jefferson worshipper, hired thanks to their political party’s majority in the House.11

  Two days later, Thomas Jefferson jotted the following comment in his Anas. “Dec. 17. The affair of Reynolds and his wife.” The Secretary of State proceeded to list all the characters in the drama, from Jacob Clingman to Muhlenberg to Monroe, Venable, and Wolcott. He also noted others who were in on the secret, such as James Madison and Edmund Randolph.12

  The paragraph makes it clear that Jefferson knew everything James Monroe had heard at Hamilton’s house on December 15. If there were any doubts, a paragraph in another essay in the series that Monroe published on “The Vindication of Mr. Jefferson” made the Senator’s readiness to act on the Secretary of State’s behalf all too clear. “I shall conclude by observing how much it is to be wished [that] this writer [Hamilton] would exhibit himself to the public view that we might behold in him a living monument of that immaculate purity to which he pretends and which ought to distinguish so bold and arrogant a censor of others.”13

  While this drama held center stage for politicians, President Washington decided to serve another term and permitted his name to be placed on the ballot. He ran without opposition, and on December 5, 1792, when the electoral college delegates met in the capitals of their respective states, they again voted unanimously for him. The Jeffersonians, knowing Washington was unchallengeable, concentrated on marshaling enough votes to unseat Vice President John Adams.

  Their choice was Governor George Clinton of New York. He was hardly an ideal candidate. In the spring, Clinton had lost a race for another term in Albany to Chief Justice John Jay, whom Hamilton had persuaded to run. Clinton reclaimed a dubious majority by invalidating the votes of three counties on a technicality. Jefferson was appalled, but he had held his nose and supported the badly soiled candidate for vice president.14

  The combination of this blatant corruption and strenuous efforts by Hamilton to hold Federalists in line for the unpopular Adams worked, but just barely. Adams got seventy-seven votes to Clinton’s fifty. The result by no means ended the Jeffersonians’ effort to unseat the Secretary of the Treasury, a man they now hated with almost irrational passion: to handle this task, they turned to a man who was second only to Patrick Henry as an orator, Virginia Congressman William Branch Giles.

  A husky, unkempt brawler with a fondness for extreme rhetoric, Giles always looked like he had recently emerged from a wrestling match. The strategy, laid out by Jefferson and Madison, was to make outrageous accusations against Hamilton and force him to go to enormous lengths to refute them. After battering the Secretary ferociously on the floor of the House, Giles demanded a complete accounting of all the foreign loans Hamilton had negotiated, and how he was repaying them, plus records of all transactions between the government and the Bank of the United States. Adding to the enormity of these demands was a deadline of March 3, when Congress would adjourn.

  To the dismay of Giles and his allies, Madison and Jefferson, Hamilton produced seven huge reports totaling sixty thousand words, by February 19. The documents were replete with charts, lists, and masses of statistics. The few congressmen who attempted to read them were reduced to awed silence. At the close of one report, Hamilton remarked that he had risked his health to complete it. This achievement only prompted Jefferson to take the field personally. He asked President Washington to order an official inquiry into Hamilton’s conduct. Washington curtly refused, making it clear where he stood in this confrontation.

  Jefferson drew up a series of resolutions calling on Congress to censure Hamilton and gave them to Congressman Giles. Toward the end of February, Giles submitted no less than nine of these denunciations, condemning Hamilton for various offenses. They reached a climax of sorts with the final shaft: “Resolved, that the Secretary of the Treasury has been guilty of maladministration in the duties of his office and should, in the opinion of Congress, be removed from his office by the President of the United States.” Once more the game plan included an impossible deadline for a Hamilton reply. Congress was now scheduled to adjourn within a week.

  Congressman James Madison hurled himself into rallying his followers in the House of Representatives to approve Giles’s resolutions. To his dismay, the House voted down all nine verbal assaults. Even Virginians deserted Madison’s leadership. Only five congressmen, including Madison, voted for every resolution. It was a stunning defeat for Thomas Jefferson—with a bitter personal dimension. He had no doubt that President Washington had exercised a hidden hand to influence numerous votes.15

  Until this point, the differences between the President and his Secretary of State had revolved almost entirely around American issues. But news from France was about to make the clash into a conflict with global dimensions. On January 21, 1793, King Louis XVI was decapitated in Paris’s Place de la Concorde, while a mob of twenty thousand people screamed in delight.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Problems of the Secretary of State’s Polar Star

  THE DRAMA IN FRANCE had not been totally absent from America’s temporary capital, Philadelphia, during 1792. By the time this critical year began, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson had made it clear that he regarded the success of the French Revolution as crucial to the political purity of the United States. In mid-1791, the French Charge’ d’Affaires in Philadelphia told his foreign minister: “It is M. Jefferson who takes the greatest interest in the success of our great revolution. He has often told me that the work of our National Assembly will serve to regenerate not only France but also the United States, whose principles were beginning to become corrupted.”1

  During these months, the Secretary of State was receiving a flow of reports from his protégé and former secretary, twenty-five-year-old William Short, who was serving as the American Charge’ d’Affaires in Paris. During Jefferson’s years in Paris, Short had accompanied him to salons and soirees where he met the moderate aristocrats who turned to Jefferson for advice as the revolution became a reality.

  Besides Lafayette, one of the most prominent of these noblemen was the Duc de la Rochefoucauld. He had a beautiful wife, Rosalie, who was decades younger than her husband. Gradually, both she and Short realized they were passionately attracted to each other. In America, this might have produced ostracism and violence. But in France, there was nothing unusual about such an affair, except perhaps its blazing intensity.2

  Throughout 1791 and 1792, Short’s eyewitness reports to Jefferson reve
aled the steady growth of violence in the French capital. At one point, he told Jefferson there was a “degree of fermentation” in the streets of Paris that threatened to create “a new revolution.” What would that revolution entail? King Louis XVI had already agreed to become a constitutional monarch like George III of Great Britain. The answer was soon obvious to observers in England and America: a “pure” republic—without a king.

  How would this political destination be reached? Here was where Short’s dispatches from the scene reported things that Jefferson did not want to hear. The National Assembly, which was writing a constitution under the guidance of the Marquis de Lafayette and his faction, was aiming at a carefully balanced moderation. The King would retain considerable powers, which he would wield in conjunction with the assembly. The finished document, Jefferson had predicted, would be a “superb edifice.” Short warned the Secretarty of State that there were a lot of Parisians who were bent on challenging the constitutional moderation of Lafayette and his friends. The American Charge’ described these opponents as “a mob of their constituents” who were threatening “to hang them.”3

  By 1792, there was now another player in the Parisian revolutionary game: the Paris Commune, which Jefferson called “the assembly of the people of Paris.” They were much more radical than the rest of France. President Washington seems to have been well aware of the Commune’s differences with the National Assembly. When Benjamin Franklin died in 1790, the Assembly had declared they would observe three days of mourning for the sage whose diplomatic skills had persuaded France to support the American struggle for independence. The Commune staged its own mourning ceremony featuring a long eulogy by one of their best orators, and sent the speech and other reports of their admiration to “the President and Congress,” as if the Commune were France’s government.