Langhorne soon replied with explosive news. “John Langhorne” was really Peter Carr, a “favorite nephew of your very sincere friend Thomas Jefferson.” Carr had been raised at Monticello since childhood as “a constant dependent and resident” in the Chief Jacobin’s mansion. This description of Peter Carr was accurate; he was a son of Jefferson’s sister and his close friend, Dabney Carr, who had died young, leaving his wife virtually penniless. Jefferson had raised Peter Carr and his brother at Monticello.
When Washington did not respond to this startling news, Nicholas wrote to him once more, on the retired President’s sixty-sixth birthday. In raging prose, Nicholas described how eager he was to punish Jefferson for this “very extraordinary” and “even infamous affair.” Proving himself in touch with all the latest examples of Jefferson’s hypocrisy, Nicholas denounced the Mazzei letter and Monroe’s obnoxious defense of his mission to France. The Langhorne letter was further proof, Nicholas declared, that Jefferson was “one of the most artful, intriguing…double-faced politicians” on the planet.4
These epithets fit perfectly into what Washington saw as the Democratic-Republican party’s policy of attempting to ruin “men who stand well in the estimation of the people and are stumbling blocks” to their long-range program—to assail the federal government “without hesitation or remorse” until “the Constitution [is] destroyed.” He did not realize he was about to encounter an all too specific example of this dark prophecy, emanating from Monticello.
The Alien and Sedition Acts inflamed Vice President Jefferson and his retired friend James Madison like no issue since Hamilton’s Report on the Bank of the United States. Madison labeled the Alien Act “a monster that must forever disgrace its parents.” Jefferson called it legislation “worthy of the 8th or 9th Century”—Europe’s dark ages. The sedition bill made the Vice President’s pulse pound. “Among other enormities,” he told Madison, it “undertakes to make printing certain matters criminal, tho one of the amendments to the Constitution, has so expressly taken religion, printing presses, etc. out of their [Congress’s] coercion.” Both bills were “palpably in the teeth of the Constitution.”5
In the midst of this political firestorm, the Vice President was caught sponsoring an unauthorized peace mission to France. The envoy was a Quaker friend, Dr. George Logan. Jefferson had given him a “letter of credence” describing him as a visitor to Europe on private business. Logan disappeared so suddenly, friends and acquaintances began talking about it. Soon Federalist newspapers were calling the self-appointed diplomat a “seditious envoy” from the Democratic-Republicans whose mission was to invite a French Army to teach the Americans “the genuine value of true and essential liberty,” French style, through the “blessed operation of the bayonet and the guillotine.” Jefferson ruefully admitted to Madison that “this extravagance produced a real panic among the citizens” of Philadelphia.6
The Vice President rushed to visit Logan’s wife, who lived on the outskirts of the city, to make sure she was not abused by irate Federalists. She told him that she was only suffering from “political excommunication.” She later recalled that Jefferson “spoke of the late acts of the legislature with a sort of despair.”
Heightening the tension was a letter from French Foreign Minister Talleyrand to President Adams, offering to negotiate with Elbridge Gerry, the Democratic-Republican member of President Adams’s three-man mission, but not with the other two men, John Marshall and Thomas Pinckney. The Aurora published this epistle two days before President Adams announced its receipt. It was an all too obvious attempt to embarrass or intimidate the President with a direct appeal to the people a la Citizen Genet.
Federalist newspapers screamed that Bache was a French agent and Paris was trying to disrupt American preparations for war, leaving them exposed to an invading army. Federalist congressmen connected it to the Logan mission and its sponsor, Jefferson. The Vice President was soon being accused of conducting a “treasonous correspondence” with the French Directory.
So alarmed was the Adams administration, Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott rushed to New York to interview a man who had just arrived carrying letters from France addressed to Bache, Monroe, and other Democratic-Republican politicians. Wolcott asked the messenger if he had any envelopes “for the leader of the traitors, Vice President Jefferson.” Examining the letters, Wolcott seized one addressed to Jefferson from Fulwar Skipwith, the American consul in Paris. Though there was no proof of sedition in the letter, the Secretary never bothered to deliver it.7
Jefferson told Madison he was almost praying for Congress to adjourn. Nothing else would “withdraw the fire under [the] boiling pot.” On June 21, President Adams sent a message to the legislature, declaring negotiations with France were “at an end.” That same day, the Federalists introduced a bill in the Senate declaring the 1778 Treaty of Alliance with France was “null and void.” It passed by an almost 3–1 margin.8
As Vice President, Jefferson could only sit in the Senate as a writhing silent witness to the torrent of rage ignited by the XYZ revelations. In a letter to his son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph, he groaned that he “had neither ears to hear, eyes to see or tongue to speak, but as the Senate direct me.” In a letter to his daughter Martha, he deplored “the rancorous passions that tear every breast here, even of the sex which should be a stranger to them. Politics and party hatreds destroy the happiness of every being” in Philadelphia.9
As usual, the Vice President seemed oblivious to his role in creating this conflagration, starting with Philip Freneau. Nor did he ever admit to himself or anyone else that the degeneration of his “polar star,” the French Revolution, was playing an equally large role in stoking the blaze. “I never was more home sick or heart sick,” he told Martha. “The life of this place [Philadelphia] is particularly hateful to me.” Self-pity was unquestionably one of Thomas Jefferson’s less admirable traits.10
The Vice President was especially troubled by the rain of personal attacks on him, which he described as feeling that he was “a fair mark for every man’s dirt.” He decided to go home without waiting for Congress to adjourn. The day before he left the nation’s capital, he had to sit silent as usual when the Federalists introduced their sedition bill in the Senate. Without waiting for it to pass, the government arrested Benjamin Franklin Bache as their first and most detested violator of the law.
The Gazette of the United States published an essay written under the name of the Roman historian, Pliny, urging Jefferson not to depart. “Pray stay a little longer and aid the public councils with your wisdom; leave not your country at this critical period when it is seeking the most effectual means to self preservation,” Pliny mocked. If that appeal failed, Pliny hoped his friendship for Benjamin Franklin Bache would persuade the Vice President to “tarry a day or two.”
Pliny unctuously urged Jefferson to remember how much help Bache had given him and “his fellow laborers in the iniquitous work of alienating the affections and confidence of the people…in their government.” Who else but Franklin’s despicable grandson had “a direct intercourse with the Office of Foreign Affairs at Paris?” Another Federalist newspaper claimed to have proof that when the French invaded, they would carry plans to establish an American Directory—an exact imitation of the current rulers of France. The directors would include Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.11
The sedition bill passed the Senate on July 4, 1798, while Jefferson was en route to Monticello. One of Virginia’s senators told him “there seemed to be a particular solicitude to pass it on that day.” The Federalists especially enjoyed the “drums and trumpets and other martial music” from a military parade that passed the Congress Hall in the midst of their debate, drowning out Democratic-Republican protests. Later, a Federalist rally offered a toast to President Adams: “May he, like Samson, slay thousands of French, with the jawbone of Jefferson.” For modern readers without an eighteenth century knowledge of the Bible, it might be worth adding that the jaw
bone Samson wielded originally belonged to an ass.12
In the House of Representatives, Federalist congressmen repeatedly linked Jefferson with Bache, calling him the editor’s confidential advisor, who was often seen walking the city’s streets arm-in-arm with him. They were undoubtedly “part of a treasonable conspiracy that constituted an internal threat to the nation,” one Federalist newspaper concluded. A Democratic-Republican congressman from Maryland took these charges of treason seriously, and asked Jefferson to reply to them.
The Vice President defended his friendship with Bache, calling him a man with “principles the most friendly to liberty and our present form of government.” As for the abuse he (Jefferson) was receiving, he did not feel the need of a sedition law to repel it. He was not and never would be ashamed of his political principles, which were the same ones that had motivated him in 1775. He was sure that they were the same as “the great body of the American people.”13
This was Jefferson’s mood when, back in Virginia, the Vice President conferred with James Madison about how to respond to the Alien and Sedition Acts. As usual, Jefferson was the leader. He wanted to prepare two sets of protests, one for the legislature of Virginia, the other for North Carolina’s lawmakers. Madison would work on the Virginia version. It was Jefferson’s idea to use state legislatures to defy the federal government. It was the method he had adopted to defend Congressman Cabell from the wrath of the circuit-riding Supreme Court justice in the previous year. Madison did not say a negative word about this new move in the same dangerous direction.
The two men spent much of the summer of 1798 working on their protest essays. Jefferson’s version reflected the abuse he had endured in Philadelphia. Its language was ferocious from the first paragraph. He condemned the sedition law as “a nullity as absolute and palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.” The Constitution’s delegation of power to the national government was severely limited. The Sedition Act violated the First Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed freedom of religion, speech, and the press.
To justify a state legislature’s right to criticize the federal government, Jefferson declared that the union created in 1787–88 had been a “compact between the states.” He seems to have forgotten or decided to ignore the preamble to the Constitution, which expressly declared that “We the people of the United States” were the creators of the national charter. Working from the state compact thesis, Jefferson concluded that acts exceeding the delegated powers were not only unconstitutional, but a state had the power to “nullify” them. He based this on his claim that “every state had a ‘natural right’” to resist “all assumptions of power by others” within their borders.
This was not a new idea for Thomas Jefferson. From it had flowed his call to punish—and even to execute—Virginians who worked for the supposedly unconstitutional Bank of the United States, created by a Congress he saw as a “foreign power.” In these new resolutions, he did not call for such drastic action. Instead, he urged that a nullifying state communicate its views to other states, asking them to declare “whether these acts are or are not authorized by the federal compact.” He was confident that most states would make sure that neither the Alien nor the Sedition Act would be “exercised within their borders.” The goal remained nullification, even if that explosive word was not applied to it.14
Jefferson did not seem to know—or care—that he was introducing an idea that in the coming decades would play a deadly role in undermining the authority of the federal government and the value of the Union that George Washington had labored so hard to convince people to cherish above all other political values. It was dismayingly typical of the way Jefferson could ignore the darker side of human nature and the danger of preaching ideological hatred. The French Revolution had demonstrated this grim truth to a hefty portion of the world by 1798. But for Thomas Jefferson, this evidence simply did not exist.
Madison took a very different approach in his protest essay for the Virginia legislature. He made no reference to nullification or a state’s natural right to defy the federal Congress. Instead, he began by affirming his deep affection for the union of the states. He saw the Alien and Sedition Acts as “alarming infractions” of the Constitution. He then lurched into standard Jeffersonian jargon, claiming that the acts, along with several measures in Washington’s administration, added up to a plan to turn the American government into “an absolute, or at best, a mixed monarchy.” He urged the Virginia legislature to “interpose” against this threat by persuading other states to repeal the detested laws.
Madison sent his set of resolutions to Jefferson via a Monticello neighbor, Senator Wilson Cary Nicholas. While the essay was en route, Jefferson learned that Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont had been convicted under the Sedition Act for attacking President Adams in a letter to his constituents. Jefferson already felt threatened by the accusations hurled at him in Philadelphia, and he identified deeply with Lyon. He confessed his fear that he too might be prosecuted, if someone leaked one of his political letters to the Federalists. He decided to make Madison’s version much harsher. He persuaded Senator Nicholas, who was going to deliver the resolution to the Virginia legislature, to add a sentence declaring the acts were “null, void and of no effect.” This was nothing less than nullification with a rhetorical flourish.15
Madison happened to be visiting friends in Richmond when the resolutions were introduced in the legislature. He calmly removed Jefferson’s insertion, and gave Nicholas a cogent explanation. State legislatures never had anything to do with ratifying the Constitution. That was done by conventions chosen by the people. If a state legislature undertook to call an act of Congress null and void, it could be accused of usurping powers it did not possess.16
Jefferson did not share this concern for the union of the states. He was emotionally committed to enlarging the distinctions between state and federal powers. If the Alien and Sedition Acts were accepted, he predicted, “We shall immediately see attempted another act of Congress declaring that the President shall continue in office during life, reserving to another occasion the transfer of succession to his heirs, and the establishment of the Senate for life. …That these things are in contemplation, I have no doubt; nor can I be confident of their failure, after the dupery of which our countrymen have shown themselves to be susceptible.”17
There is no evidence that any Federalist was contemplating such a step. The claim that John Adams would be made president for life is so divorced from political reality, it deserves satire rather than refutation. But these words, written to Virginia’s senator, Stevens T. Mason, are dolorous proof of the frenzy that was gripping Thomas Jefferson’s mind in October 1798.
Thousands of miles away, on the coast of Egypt, another drama was unfolding that would underscore the mysterious way good luck—or destiny—influenced Thomas Jefferson’s life and career. Revolutionary France, under the nominal rule of the Directory, was now a nation virtually under the control of one man: General Napoleon Bonaparte. Having smashed the royalist coalition in Europe, he forced Austria to accept a humiliating peace, and reduced Italy to a French protectorate. The Corsican-born adventurer decided on an unexpected strategy to defeat Britain, the one enemy that remained formidable.
Napoleon planned to invade Egypt and swiftly conquer the Middle East. Next, his seemingly unbeatable army would march on India, where numerous British-hating native leaders were ready and eager to join forces with him. With the British empire virtually dismantled, George III and his shaken ministers would be ready to surrender—or at the very least, be easily crushed in battle, leaving Bonaparte dictating peace to the humbled Britons in London.
Virtually the entire French battle fleet escorted the ships that brought Bonaparte’s army to Egypt. By dint of absolute secrecy, and not a little good fortune, they had managed to escape a pursuing British fleet led by Rear Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson. Bonaparte had even managed to capture Malta in his zigzag co
urse to Alexandria. Ashore, the French army soon had Egypt prostrate at their feet. Their fleet anchored in Aboukir Bay, twenty miles northeast of Alexandria, ready to fend off any British attempt to regain the initiative with a new army.
The French admiral totally underestimated Nelson’s daring. When the British commander saw the enemy men of war arraigned across the bay, he instantly went to general quarters. His ships split into two groups. One got between the French and the shore, the other assailed them from the seaward side. Caught between two fires, the French men of war were battered by a veritable hurricane of cannonballs. Some surrendered, others exploded and sank in demoralizing flames. The French commanding admiral was killed. The survivors attempted to escape. Only two reached the open sea.
The battle had a stunning impact in Europe. Nation after nation revolted against French liberté. Another coalition of royal armies was soon in the field. A desperate Bonaparte tried to march overland into Palestine and the rest of the Middle East, but he ran out of supplies and men. He finally abandoned the despairing remnant of his army and made his way back to France in a small ship that eluded British patrols. There, he found the Paris mob was ready to reenact the rule by guillotine of the Jacobins. He swiftly discouraged such an enterprise with point blank artillery fire. But it was more than clear that France’s ability to send an army overseas to attack America was no longer a possibility.
When this news reached President John Adams, he began to ask himself why America was spending millions of dollars on an army that no longer had an enemy to fight. He embarked on a policy that would split the Federalist Party and make Thomas Jefferson the next president of the United States.
Since the news of the XYZ demand for bribes, George Washington’s already grave doubts about revolutionary France had turned to grim convictions. “What a scene of corruption and profligacy has these communications disclosed in the Directors of a people whom the United States have endeavored to treat upon fair, just and honorable ground!” the ex-president wrote in a letter to a U.S. senator. His wife Martha shared his dark view of the French. In a letter to the wife of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who had been appointed a general in the new army that her husband now led, Martha called France “a faithless nation whose injustice and ambition know no bounds.”18
The Great Divide Page 33