The Vice President launched into a rhapsody of praise for the recent French military triumphs in Europe. France was “at the summit of her glory.” She could afford to wait, “to precipitate nothing,” and soon “everything would return to order.” President Adams’s envoys should be received peacefully. But there was no need to accede to their demands. Instead, the Directory should “allow the negotiations to drag on,” softening matters whenever possible with the requisite “urbanity.” Letombe added that Jefferson “repeats to me incessantly…Machievelli’s maxim. Nil repente [never repent] is the soul of great affairs.”21
It was a truly astonishing performance. The Vice President, not content with undercutting the President in Congress, was now telling the French how to talk his foreign policy to a humiliating political death. If this was not treason to the nation, it was certainly a betrayal of his supposedly revered friendship with John Adams. Jefferson rationalized this policy by convincing himself he was preventing a war. He closed by telling Letombe it was time to arrange reciprocal citizenship between the two republics. He hoped France would soon invade England and dictate a peace that would guarantee “a purer government” for export to “other portions of mankind.”22
There is a touching nobility—and a dismaying naivete—about these ideas. In a country already boiling with antipathy to France, as their men of war seized American merchantmen by the dozen, why would Americans embrace reciprocal citizenship, which would entitle future Citizen Genets to operate with virtual impunity in the United States? Did the Vice President really think that a French army in the ruins of London would inspire the dictatorial Directory to create a purer government?
In Congress, the political atmosphere became so rancid, Vermont Congressman Matthew Lyon, a volatile Democratic-Republican, spit in Connecticut Federalist Roger Griswold’s face when the latter suggested he had been a less than heroic soldier in the American Revolution. Griswold responded the next day by assaulting Lyon with his cane. The Vermont firebrand defended himself with a poker.
Jefferson found this violence distasteful. But he told Madison it might have one beneficial outcome. “These proceedings must degrade the federal government, and lead the people to lean more on their state governments, which have been sunk under the early popularity of the former.” This was a shift in loyalty that Jefferson approved and even welcomed. It was one more piece of evidence of his underlying hostility to the Constitution. The so-called “father” of that document made no attempt to disagree.
A few weeks later, the Vice President was gleefully telling Madison a more entertaining story. “The late birthnight,” he wrote, “has sown tares among the exclusive Federals.” He was talking about a ball that Washington devotees had proposed to celebrate the ex-president’s birthday, even though the man being honored had retired to Mount Vernon. The organizers had invited President Adams and his wife, assuming they would endorse the festivities.
Revealing in stark detail his political limitations, Adams exploded and declared himself insulted. Abigail, badly damaging her reputation as the person who prevented her dearest friend from going to extremes, agreed with him. The contretemps split the Federalist Party and the Adams administration. The President’s four cabinet members attended the ball. Those who stayed home drew glares of disapproval from the Washington devotees.
Jefferson described all this in delighted terms. He added a touch for which he may have been responsible. The Democratic-Republicans went “in number,” he told Madison. This encouraged the idea that all the previous celebrations had been “for the General and not the President.” It was a neat way of dismissing Washington’s presidency as worthy of no more than a glimmer of respect.23
Across the wintry Atlantic came only silence from the three envoys to France. Jefferson convinced himself that this non-communication was an omen of peace. He did not respond to a Madison letter, which compared Adams to Washington. After complimenting the first president in a half-dozen ways and criticizing Adams, the retired Congressman feared serious trouble lay over the horizon.
The confirmation of this pessimism came in March. In phrases charged with tension, Adams reported the peace mission was a failure and there was immediate need to take seriously his call to prepare the nation to defend itself. Vice President Jefferson called the announcement “an insane message.” His first instinct was to rally his party to dismiss the President’s summons to war. He could think of no reason for such a move that would be plausible even to “the weakest mind.”
The Federalists lacked a majority in the House of Representatives, which would vote the money for this preparedness. Jefferson thought the Democratic-Republicans should call for an adjournment, so everyone could go home and consult their constituents. He was sure a vast majority of the people were opposed to both war and the new taxes it would require.
The Vice President swiftly learned no one in the party had the nerve to propose such a move. The best he could get was a lame statement that it was “inexpedient” to go to war with “the French Republic.” This weak reed was soon in grave danger of crumpling under pressure from the President, two-thirds of the Senate, and the Federalist share of the House. Madison suggested another tactic. Demand from the President “the intelligence” which led him to his brusque demands.
In the executive mansion, President Adams and Secretary of State Pickering were reading dispatches from envoy John Marshall that revealed the latest truth about the rulers of France. The Directory were revolutionists in name only. Their power depended almost totally on the tolerance of the generals who had won the victories that Vice President Jefferson applauded. With their reign precarious, these pseudo-rulers were eager to line their own pockets should a hasty departure be just around the corner.
When the three envoys arrived at the offices of Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, they were greeted with cool politeness. A former priest, Talleyrand had the most flexible conscience in Europe. Through three spokesmen, he delivered a message to the shocked Americans: it would take money, a lot of money, to reach an understanding.
The spokesmen had no compunction about suggesting a down payment of $50,000. That might enable the envoys to begin conversing with Foreign Minister Talleyrand. Up the road, if some understanding was reached, the French Republic expected a very large loan from her sister republic across the Atlantic. Also needed were profuse apologies for President Adams’s speech to the special session of Congress, which had left the Directory “extremely exasperated.” This ominous word was succeeded by boastful descriptions of the “power and violence” of the French Republic, demonstrated within a week of the envoys’ arrival by Austria’s surrender of Italy to General Napoleon Bonaparte.24
Here, surely, was the reductio ad absurdum of the French Revolution as Thomas Jefferson’s “polar star.” Adding to the intended humiliation of the envoys was a warning from one of Talleyand’s messengers that if they went home and accused the French of unreasonable demands, the “French party” in America would unite with skillful French diplomats and “throw the blame for the rupture of negotiations on the Federalists”—the British Party, “as France terms you.”25
When the House Democratic-Republicans took Madison’s advice (via Jefferson) and demanded to see the “intelligence” which made the supposedly vain, irritable, stubborn, pique-ish President Adams so anxious to prepare the United States for war, Secretary of State Pickering described the confrontation with Talleyrand’s spokesmen in acid detail. As a gesture of decorum, the foreign minister’s agents were not named. They were called X, Y and Z. But the size and arrogance of their demands was not withheld. Nor was Charles Cotesworth Pinckney’s response: “No! Not a sixpence!” This was soon improved by a Federalist congressman to “Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute!”26
A bewildered Vice President Jefferson described the impact to James Madison: “Such a shock on the Republican Mind…has never been seen since our independence.” A gleeful Abigail Adams revealed w
hat she thought of Jefferson and his followers: “The Jacobins in the Senate and the House were struck dumb and opend (sic) not their mouths.” On March 23, 1798, the President proved he was not quite as politically inept as Jefferson portrayed him; he called for a national day of fasting and prayer to seek God’s protection from an amoral, voracious enemy.27
Vice President Jefferson knew defeat when it stared him in the face. He told Madison the Democratic-Republicans in the House had abandoned their resolution calling war inexpedient. It made it look like they were in agreement with the XYZ swindlers. The best they could do now was resist “war measures externally” while voting approval of “every rational measure of internal defence.”
Behind the scenes, however, the Jefferson/Madison love affair with the French Revolution continued. The Vice President called the XYZ demands “very unworthy of a great nation,” and doubted they were the official policy of France’s rulers. Madison agreed. Unless proof was “perfectly conclusive,” the decision should be “agst the evidence rather than on the side of infatuation.”28
Like a good president should, Adams sought advice on his next moves from all quarters. Swallowing his hostility, he even invited Alexander Hamilton to dine with him and Abigail to discuss the administration’s response. Benjamin Franklin Bache was soon telling readers of the Aurora about this dinner party with the “adulterous” Hamilton. He claimed to be aghast at the President’s selection of such company for the entertainment of his wife. “Oh Johnny! Johnny!” he mocked.29
No one paid the slightest attention to this desperation tactic. Letters and addresses of support poured across President Adams’s desk. “The Students of Harvard University” joined “the inhabitants of Providence, R.I. and the ‘Soldier Citizens’ of New Jersey” in affirming their admiration. When Adams attended the theater, the audience went berserk. The orchestra played “The President’s March” a dozen times and people danced to it. Robert Treat Paine wrote a song, “To Adams and Liberty” to the melody of an old tune, “Anacreon in Heaven.” Its final line had words that soon became ominous to Democratic-Republicans: “Her pride is her Adams—his laws are her own.”30
Meanwhile, the “heavy” frigates United States, Constitution, and Constellation slid down the ways and headed for the open seas to take on French raiders. These ships wielded forty-four guns and were more stoutly built than any ship of their class on the high seas. Other American men of war were also on the prowl. On July 7, 1798, the USS Delaware’s twenty guns subdued a French schooner, Le Croyable, that had seized and looted an American merchantman, the Alexander Hamilton. The citizens of Charleston, S.C. launched a warship they had paid for out of their own pockets, the USS John Adams. The President decided it was time to take his warrior sailors seriously and created a Department of the Navy to supervise and supply them.31
In May, Congress voted to raise a regular army of ten thousand men for active duty and a “provisional” or backup force of twelve thousand. President Adams, facing the fact that he had not an iota of military experience, rushed a letter to Mount Vernon, asking George Washington to emerge from retirement. “If the Constitution and your convenience would permit of my changing places,” he wrote, “or of taking my old station as your Lieutenant Civil, I should have no doubts about the ultimate prosperity and glory of the country.” To the President’s dismay, Washington accepted the task on one condition—that Adams would appoint Alexander Hamilton as a major general and his second-in-command.32
By now, Congress had no doubt whatsoever it was preparing for war with France. This stirred a worry about enemies on American soil. There were at least thirty thousand French men and women in the United States. Most were fugitives from their murderous revolution. But there was more than a possibility that many were secret agents, ready, willing, and able to sabotage the American war effort from within. Didn’t they have vivid evidence in the XYZ revelations, with their boast of the readiness of their so-called diplomats to work with the “French Party” to overthrow the U.S. government? Federalist congressmen easily convinced themselves that it was time to pass a law giving the president the power to order any and all of these aliens out of the country.
As for the “French Party,” what better way to keep the Democratic-Republicans and their devious vice presidential leader under control than a law to silence—or at least, subdue—their obnoxious newspapers? Soon Congress was crafting an “Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes.” This “Sedition Act” made it a criminal offense to speak or print “any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States, or either House of the Congress of the United States, with intent to defame…or to bring them…into contempt or disrepute.” The law gave the accused newspaper editor the right to defend himself in court. If he could prove the truth of his statements, he would walk out a free man. If he was found guilty? A federal judge would decide his fate.
President Adams had not requested these proposals. But he was in wholehearted agreement with them. So was his dearest friend and advisor, Abigail. He signed both bills into law. Neither he nor the congressmen and senators who wrote them were aware that they were committing political suicide. They were also triggering a final clash between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson that would profoundly affect the future of the nation.33
CHAPTER 23
The Ultimate Divide
WHEN EX-PRESIDENT WASHINGTON FIRST reached Mount Vernon, he told himself he had left politics behind him, once and for all. He cancelled all his newspaper subscriptions. But he soon found it was not easy to make this gesture a reality. Some editors, like his original gadfly, Philip Freneau, mailed him copies of their latest productions. He wrote Freneau a stiff letter requesting him to cease and desist. Other papers, with stories that friends thought the ex-President should or might want to read, arrived in a steady stream. Soon he found the ongoing quarrel with France an irresistible topic and resubscribed to no less than ten papers.
Obviously, Washington was still in the grip of the primary emotion that had persuaded him to become president: To see this country happy is so much the wish of my soul, nothing this side of Elysium can be placed in competition with it. Almost from the beginning of his presidential career, Washington’s relationship to Thomas Jefferson was central to this epochal drama. That may have been why he devoted so many hours to reading James Monroe’s attack on the ex-president and his administration when it was published in 1797.
Monroe claimed he had been an innocent victim in a presidential plot to convince the American people that the Jay Treaty was a better alternative than an alliance with France. The ex-diplomat heaped abuse on the treaty and the man who signed it. The notes the ex-president scribbled in the margins of the book come to sixty-six typed pages; they ranged from sarcastic to infuriated. Washington found particular fault with Monroe revealing his private instructions and his correspondence with the administration. It did not much matter that Washington probably never learned that Jefferson had been a combination ghost writer/editor in this venture. Washington already regarded Monroe as little more than a Jeffersonian mouthpiece.1
On May 2, 1797, came the revelation of Jefferson’s letter to the Italian radical, Mazzei. Washington did not care whether Jefferson considered him one of the Samsons “shorn by the harlot, England” that supposedly peopled the federal government during his two terms. The description of his administration was more than enough to infuriate him. He dismissed Jefferson’s defense—that the phrase referred to the Society of the Cincinnati. These ex-officers of the Continental Army had made Washington their organization’s first president. Was being included in a generic smear supposed to make him feel better about his ex-secretary of state?2
In the fall of 1797, Washington had another experience that convinced him his friendship with Thomas Jefferson had ended forever. In the mail came a letter from a man who signed himself John Langhorne, a resident of Albermarle County, Virginia, where Monticello loomed on its small mountain. The au
thor described himself as deeply disturbed by the “unmerited calumny” and “villainous machinations” that Washington had endured as president. He was writing in the hope of providing some “comfort to a mind eminently just and virtuous.” Langhorne was almost too good to be true, and Washington’s reply to him was brief, polite, and cautious. He thanked the writer for his “favorable sentiments” and assured him his retirement was “perfectly tranquil,” thanks to his inner conviction that he had never merited such “envenomed darts” from his critics.
A month later, another letter added a swirl of malice to Langhorne’s sympathy. John Nicholas, the clerk of Albermarle County, informed Washington that his reply had spent more than a month in the Charlottesville post office, exciting not a little comment. Like all the ex-president’s letters, it was sent with a frank bearing his signature. The letter was finally picked up by “a certain character in this county closely connected to some of your greatest and bitterest enemies.” Although the man’s name was not Langhorne, he claimed the letter was a reply to one he had written.
John Nicholas described himself as “living within cannon shot of the headquarters of Jacobinism in America”—an unmistakable reference to Monticello. He knew that Washington had once been deceived by the “Chief Jacobin’s” pretensions to friendship, and wanted to warn him of a possible plot to embarrass and humiliate him. The ex-president told Nicholas that if such a plot existed, the conspirator had fallen “far short of his mark.” But he enclosed copies of his correspondence with Langhorne for possible use in revealing “any nefarious plan” against him or the federal government.3
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