Arrested, Paine was flung into a fetid prison where he was soon a very sick man, physically and mentally. Envoy James Monroe procured his release, and discovered Paine was nursing a violent hatred of George Washington for failing to rescue him from his ordeal. One suspects, in spite of later denials, that Monroe’s negative view of the President’s politics had something to do with this antipathy.
The letter began by accusing the President of conniving at Paine’s imprisonment. Washington had supposedly declined to inform the French government that Paine was an American citizen. This was, to say the least, a stretch, since Paine had accepted French citizenship and had served as a delegate in the National Convention. Brushing these facts aside, Paine claimed that Washington had secretly encouraged Robespierre to guillotine him to make sure he did not reveal the ugly truths about America’s hero that he was now about to tell the world.
For pages, Paine blasted Washington as a liar and a secret enemy of liberty. “Almost the whole of your administration,” he ranted, was “deceitful if not perfidious.” Everything Washington did and said was part of a desire to destroy France and appease England. Turning to the President’s military career, he sneered at his abilities as a general. “You slept away your time in the field till the finances of the country were completely exhausted,” he raged. He gave Washington no credit for the victorious war. Other generals, such as Horatio Gates and Nathanael Greene, won the crucial battles. Without aid from France, Washington’s “cold and unmilitary conduct” would have “lost America.”
Equally unimpressive was Washington’s political career. Paine went on. The Constitution he had helped produce was “a copy, not quite so base as the original model—the British government.” The essence of Washington’s politics was meanness. He had no friendships. He was “incapable of forming any.” He was “constitutionally” ready “to desert a man or a cause” whenever he saw it was to his advantage. Finally, the era’s best known pamphleteer lunged to a peroration that was a cross between a roar and a howl: “Treacherous in private friendship…and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an impostate or an imposter, whether you have abandoned good principles or ever had any.”6
The President did not stay in Philadelphia long enough to read Paine’s diatribe or sample the reactions to The Farewell Address. He was in his carriage, on his way to Mount Vernon, the day the address was published. There, he was soon reading letters from friends and admirers, praising it extravagantly. Most Americans were deeply moved by the calm tone and wise sentiments. Few beside active politicians commented on the implied attack on Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party’s policies. The majority of the readers were awed as well as exalted to realize that Washington was again relinquishing political power without bloodshed. In England, George III said this made it a certainty that the President would become “the greatest character of his age.”7
CHAPTER 21
Martha Washington Sends a Message
ORATOR FISHER AMES TOLD Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott that the Farewell Address was “a signal, like the dropping of a hat, for party racers to start.” Everyone knew what Ames meant. With Washington out of the running, the presidential election of 1796 had begun. Even before the Farewell Address made this clear, many people had been predicting that the contestants would be John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Alexander Hamilton confirmed this probability when he published a savage attack on Jefferson in the Gazette of the United States on October 16, 1796. The blast was the first of twenty-five equally fierce assaults in the next five weeks.1
It seems more than likely that Hamilton—and Washington—saw these articles as making explicit what was implied in the Farewell Address: Thomas Jefferson was unfit to be the next president. Using the pen name Phocion, Hamilton repeatedly dwelt on Jefferson’s blind worship of the French Revolution. Other rhetorical flights mocked his lack of physical courage—dramatized by his flight from British dragoons when he was governor of Virginia. Hamilton saw similar cowardice in Jefferson’s retreat from Washington’s cabinet when the nation was confronting international threats that should have been the special concern of a secretary of state.
Especially mocked was Jefferson’s repeated claim that he had no political ambitions—and detested all aspects of seeking and wielding power. Far from it, Phocion/Hamilton declared. He was a proto-Caesar who “coyly refused the proffered diadem” while secretly doing everything in his power to obtain it. In a word, he was a hypocrite.2
Phocion/Hamilton’s view of John Adams was drastically different. He was a man “pure and unspotted in private life” and a citizen “preeminent for his early, intrepid, faithful, persevering and comprehensively useful services” to his country. He was also no monarchist. Jefferson’s followers in the press had spread this smear about the Vice President. True, he believed in checks and balances in the federal government, on the British model. But that was a long way from seeking kingship for himself or anyone else.3
Neither candidate campaigned in any modern sense of that word. Jefferson did not move off his mountaintop, and John Adams spent much of the time on his farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. But spokesmen supplied verbiage by the ton in their newspapers and pamphlets. The Federalists followed Phocion/Hamilton’s lead, portraying Jefferson as a deeply flawed, dangerous man. The Democratic-Republicans insisted Adams was a closet monarchist.
When voters got beyond the rhetoric and compared the careers of the two men, Adams was clearly superior in terms of public achievements. In the Continental Congress, he had been the “Atlas of Independence,” whose speeches had persuaded Congress to approve America’s break with England. In Europe, he had played an equally major role in the peace negotiations. Jefferson’s backers replied by hailing their candidate as the author—not the mere drafter—of the Declaration of Independence.
Adding to the drama was the discovery that Hamilton was secretly backing a third candidate, South Carolina’s Thomas Pinckney, the negotiator of the treaty with Spain that opened the Mississippi. He was popular in both the West and South. Hamilton hoped that enough members of the electoral college would vote for him as their second choice, and the total would exceed both Adams and Jefferson. Hamilton thought Pinckney would be far more amenable to party politics than the stubborn, opinionated Adams.4
Early in the contest, the Democratic-Republicans discovered they had an unexpected ally—the French envoy, Pierre-Auguste Adet. When he forwarded the Farewell Address to Paris, Adet had denounced “the lies it contains, the insolent tone that governs it, the immorality which characterizes it.” President Washington had scarcely returned from his visit to Mount Vernon at the close of October 1796, when Adet published a violent letter in the Aurora, addressed to Secretary of State Pickering. He excoriated Washington’s administration for its hostility to France and announced that the French would start seizing American ships and searching them for contraband, in the English style.
This was grim news. Even worse was Adet’s studied insult to the President—to go public with such a drastic change in policy before submitting it to the Secretary of State for possible negotiation.
Behind this unpleasant shift to outright hostility was a letter that Thomas Jefferson had written to Adet in October of the preceding year. The retired Secretary of State had launched into a passionate declaration of the virtual identity of Revolutionary France and America. “Two people(s) whose interests, whose principles, whose habits of attachment, founded on fellowship in war and mutual kindnesses, have so many points of union, cannot but be easily kept together,” Jefferson declared. A veritable explosion of adoration followed, ending with: “our struggles for liberty keep alive the only sensation which public affairs now excite in me.”5
Jefferson knew people were talking about him as a possible successor to Washington. He also knew Adet would communicate this embrace of France to his superiors in Paris. The diplomat was soon telling his foreign minister how pleased he was by
“the trust which the leaders of the Republican Party reposed in me.” The Farewell Address had almost made him request a recall to Paris. But “the approach of the nominations for President, the necessity to get out the vote for a man devoted to France, the services I could render to the Republic after his election” changed the envoy’s mind about going home. Adet was soon telling his foreign minister about “the friendship and confidence which the leaders of the Republican Party have shown to me…the share I have had in…their projects and plans, my perfect knowledge of the means they intend to employ.”
In New York, another Frenchman, Edmond Genet, was reading the newspapers and brooding not a little about his old friend, “Mr. Jeff,” running for president. Genet wrote a thirty-eight-page letter to the candidate, which was anything but complimentary. His motive was a speech that William Branch Giles had made in Congress, describing the ex-envoy as a wild man who had threatened to oust President Washington and otherwise made Secretary of State Jefferson’s life miserable.
Genet began with a savage comment on Jefferson’s career. “I only knew you, sir, before my nomination to the United States mission, through the useful, however timid, role you played in the American Revolution.” As Secretary of State, Jefferson had initiated him into “the foibles and secrets of your cabinet, of the political divisions of your country.” So he decided to “give myself up to you who seemed so well disposed.”
Then, as the political tumult intensified, “Fear took possession of your soul” and Jefferson cruelly sought “to deprive me of the weapons which you had given me, to unpopularize me and to smother the republican fires which were being kindled on all sides.” Now it was time for Thomas Jefferson to admit this betrayal, which he had helped to perpetrate, while pretending a weariness with politics. Genet wanted “a reparation as brilliant as the outrages which I endured…”
The letter was nothing less than a keg of gunpowder, with the fuse sizzling. Fortunately for candidate Jefferson, Citizen Genet showed it to his father-in-law, Governor George Clinton. This horrified gentleman persuaded the enraged ex-envoy not to send it to the newspapers—thereby acquiring a debt of gratitude that candidate Jefferson would one day have to repay.6
There was as yet no national election day, only clusters of state election days. Theoretically, Vice President John Adams was running with Pinckney on the Federalist ticket and Jefferson was running with Senator Aaron Burr of New York on the Republican ticket. Any one of the four could win the presidency if he garnered enough electoral votes. The Twelfth Amendment, making a two-man presidential ticket a single entity, was still in the future. But electioneering tactics were in full flower. The New England states, aware of Hamilton’s secret backing of Pinckney, made a point of not making the South Carolinian their second choice.
By December, the electoral votes had been counted and it was soon—if not officially—known that John Adams had won with seventy-one yeas, and Thomas Jefferson had finished second with sixty-eight. Thomas Pinckney was third with fifty-nine, and Aaron Burr a poor fourth with thirty. That meant Jefferson would be vice president—a job that Adams had frequently described as a political nullity. Fisher Ames was not so sure this would be the case with Jefferson. Party politics was in the saddle and Ames foresaw that “two presidents, like two suns in the meridian, would meet and jostle for four years.” Then, he feared, “vice would be first.”7
When the new Vice President heard the news, he rushed a letter to James Madison assuring him he was not in the least disturbed by his second-place finish. With the French in a rage at America, Jefferson thought foreign affairs “never [had] so gloomy an aspect since the year 1783. Let those come to the helm who think they can steer clear of the difficulties. I have no confidence in myself for the undertaking.”8
If Jefferson was apparently not disappointed, the same could not be said for envoy Pierre-Auguste Adet. He had discovered his influence was neither wanted nor approved by most Americans. He glumly informed his foreign minister that he had begun to doubt that Jefferson “was entirely devoted to our interest.” He liked France largely because “he detests England.” When and if Great Britain “ceased to frighten him, he would change his feelings toward us.” Jefferson, the minister Adet sourly concluded, “is an American.”
In mid-December, at a reception, Martha Washington found a moment for a confidential exchange with John Adams. She congratulated him on his victory and told him that her husband was equally delighted. It was a revealing moment in several ways. Martha would not have been entrusted with such an important message if she abided by the prevailing idea that politics was not a woman’s sphere. Thomas Jefferson was firmly of this opinion. The contrary would seem to be true in the Washington marriage. As Martha and her husband testified in their letters, they regarded each other as friends—a word with large meaning in their era. A friend was someone to whom a man or a woman could and would share his most significant thoughts and feelings.
Another implication of Martha’s message was all too clear. The President had not wanted Thomas Jefferson to become his successor. Can we doubt that he had communicated this opinion to numerous people, starting with Martha and Alexander Hamilton? That night, John Adams rushed a letter to Abigail, who was still at home in Massachusetts. “John Adams never felt more serene in his life,” he told her.
Adding to the President-elect’s pleasure was the soon-confirmed rumor that James Madison was abandoning politics for the peace and quiet of his Orange County mansion, Montpelier. With a wry glance at Jefferson’s supposed retirement, Adams scoffed at the idea that the Congressman’s retreat would be permanent: “It is amazing how some political trees grow in the shade.”9
Around the time that Martha Washington was conveying her husband’s congratulations to Adams, Thomas Jefferson wrote the President-elect a note saying far more extravagant things. He hoped his old friend’s term would be “filled with glory and happiness to yourself and advantage to us.” He felt not the slightest envy—he had “no ambition to govern men.”
With that marvelous ability to pursue his own political agenda in spite of repeated denials, Jefferson launched a savage attack on Alexander Hamilton for trying to intrigue Adams out of his triumph with his secret backing of Thomas Pinckney. Jefferson called it “a trick worthy of the subtlety of your arch-friend of New York.” He compared this attempt to convert men into “tools” with his own warm memories of the time when “we were working for our independence.”
Confirming the fact that his letter was a political weapon, Jefferson sent it to Madison, asking his opinion on the wisdom of sending it. He had written it, he explained, hoping to induce Adams “to administer the government on it’s (sic) true principles and to relinquish his bias to an English constitution.” Jefferson also thought it was important to “come to a good understanding with him as to his future elections. He is perhaps the only sure barrier against Hamilton getting in.”
If Jefferson meant that last sentence, he had inexplicably forgotten that James Monroe had long ago told him the story of Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds. It was a virtual guarantee of Hamilton not becoming president. Jefferson’s real purpose here was an attempt to damage Adams’s relationship with the chief spokesman of the Federalist Party—and make his election to a second term improbable.
Madison told Jefferson not to send the letter. He feared Adams might view the attack on Hamilton as an attempt to rupture the Federalist Party. (Yet another instance of Madison’s superior political judgment.) He also warned his once and future candidate that the new president’s policies might “force an opposition” to them. That could create “real embarrassments” if President Adams possessed a letter full of “the degree of compliment” that Jefferson had given him.
Jefferson decided on a better approach. He had received a congratulatory letter from Senator John Langdon of New Hampshire, a warm friend of Adams. He would respond with “exactly the [same] things he had written to Adams,” knowing that the Senator would repeat them t
o the new president.10
Here was additional evidence that Fisher Ames might be right about the “Vice” becoming first in four years. As for George Washington, he had no idea that a climactic clash with his ex-secretary of state was awaiting him during John Adams’s presidency.
CHAPTER 22
The Vice President as Party Boss
ON MARCH 2, 1797, when Thomas Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia to take the oath of office as vice president, he was greeted by a large crowd plus a company of artillery hauling two twelve-pound cannon. The guns boomed sixteen rounds, one for each state in the Union, and the cheering crowd waved a flag that read: JEFFERSON, THE FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE. Thomas Mifflin, still the governor of Pennsylvania, was once more trying to discomfit George Washington. Mifflin’s right-hand man, Alexander James Dallas, who was often the acting governor, since Mifflin was drunk a great deal of the time, was no doubt on hand, directing the celebration. The message was unmistakable. Jefferson’s followers considered the vice presidency a mere pause on his way to the nation’s highest office.1
Although Jefferson had made a pro forma statement to James Madison that he wanted to avoid all such displays, he was not entirely averse to accepting this greeting from one of the President’s oldest enemies. George Washington’s impending departure had stirred not a little bitterness in his soul. As General and President, Washington had survived so many challenges and difficulties, while Jefferson’s career was stained by his failures and flights as wartime governor of Virginia and his inglorious retreat from the President’s cabinet.
In a letter to Madison, the Vice President-elect virtually snarled that Washington was “fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag.” The coming difficulties “would be ascribed to the new administration and…he will have his usual good fortune of reaping credit for the good acts of others and leaving to them that of his errors.”2
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