The Great Divide

by Thomas Fleming

  A beaming Madison handed the letter to President-elect Thomas Jefferson, who instantly asked Madison to be his secretary of state. He just as instantly accepted. There can be little doubt there was a veritable flood of good cheer at the Montpelier dinner table that night. An ebullient Dolley Madison probably joined them, adding to the festive mood.9

  In Washington, D.C., Thomas Jefferson learned that a bizarre problem might keep him from occupying the presidential “palace,” as many people were calling the huge, unfinished, not yet designated White House. Jefferson and Aaron Burr had both received the same number of electoral votes. Burr had been angered by the failure of Southern electors to vote for him when he ran with Jefferson in 1796. He had exacted a solemn promise from Madison that this would not happen again. But at least one elector in some southern state was supposed to vote for someone—anyone—else to avoid a tie.

  No one remembered to do this, and the election had been thrown into the House of Representatives, in accordance with the Constitution’s rule that the congressmen had the power to choose a president when both candidates lacked a nine-state majority in the electoral college. It soon became apparent that the House was divided—eight states for Jefferson, and six for Burr.

  At first, the Federalists saw a chance to nullify the election. They talked of maintaining the 8–6 split and appointing an interim president—perhaps John Marshall, who had just been named chief justice of the Supreme Court by President Adams. James Monroe, the governor of Virginia, warned that a refusal to seat Jefferson could start a civil war. The Democratic-Republican governor of Pennsylvania echoed him.

  Various people, notably Congressman Albert Gallatin, thought Burr should come to Washington and make it clear to the Federalists that he would not accept an offer to make him president. Burr chose to remain in Albany, N.Y., serving in the state legislature, and pretending to be preoccupied with preparations for his daughter’s wedding. More and more Federalists began to think he represented a solution they could and would tolerate.

  Alexander Hamilton, the man who had almost singlehandedly created this impasse, wrote frantic letters to leading Federalists, condemning Burr for almost every sin in the catalogue of evil. He urged them to choose the hated Jefferson, who at least had “pretensions to character.” As a decisive vote loomed in the House of Representatives, Gouverneur Morris, now a senator from New York, told Hamilton that the Federalists, “seriously and generally after much advisement” preferred Burr to Jefferson. It was oblique testimony that the Federalist Party was collapsing—and Alexander Hamilton’s political career was over.10

  Thomas Jefferson tried to solve this deadlock with an act of astonishing hypocrisy. On the first day of the New Year and the new century, he took a ferry across the Potomac River at Alexandria, hired a horse, and rode to Mount Vernon to express his sympathy for Washington’s death to his presumably still grieving widow. Martha Washington and her granddaughter, Nelly, received him with icy politeness.

  Martha Washington had no trouble concluding that Jefferson’s motive for his visit was an attempt to win favor from Federalist congressmen who now had the power to decide the election. Martha was soon telling friends that, next to her husband’s death, the “detestable” Jefferson’s visit was “the most painful occurrence” of her life. He must have known, she added, that she was well aware of his “perfidy.”11

  For seven days and nights, the House of Representatives voted repeatedly without altering the 8–6 division. Finally, Congressman James Bayard of Delaware grew weary of the deadlock. As the lone representative of his tiny state, he had the power to end the impasse. He let it be known that he would be willing to do so if Mr. Jefferson made certain promises: 1. He would not meddle with Hamilton’s financial system. 2. America’s foreign policy would remain neutral. 3. The Navy would be preserved and gradually increased. 4. There would be no wholesale purge of Federalist officeholders.

  This was a solution that George Washington would have undoubtedly approved. Much later, Jefferson would claim he had refused to accept the presidency “with his hands tied.” But there is strong evidence that he negotiated through a third party and accepted these conditions. James Bayard switched his vote and Thomas Jefferson became the third president of the United States.

  The new chief executive and Vice President Burr exchanged warm letters vowing to ignore the scandalmongers who were claiming that Burr had secretly suggested to certain Federalists that he was willing to become president in Jefferson’s place. Simultaneously, the new chief executive began filling his Anas with reports of Burr’s untrustworthiness. It was the first step to what would soon become a hatred far more virulent than his antipathy for George Washington.12

  CHAPTER 26

  The UnWashington President in His Federal Village

  THE NATION’S NEW LEADER described his presidency as “The Revolution of 1800.” The phrase starkly reveals Thomas Jefferson’s envy of George Washington, the man who had won the Revolution of 1776. President Jefferson was determined to do as many things as possible the way President Washington did not do them.

  This program began in Washington, D.C. on March 4, 1801, with Jefferson’s trip to the Capitol to give his inaugural address. Instead of riding in a splendid carriage like his predecessors, President-elect Jefferson walked. He was escorted by a company of militia from Alexandria, two of John Adams’s cabinet officers, and a few dozen Democratic-Republican congressmen. Ex-President Adams was nowhere to be seen. At four a.m., he had boarded a stagecoach and headed back to Massachusetts, unable to endure facing the man who had defeated him.

  Artillery boomed as Jefferson entered the Senate wing of the Capitol, the only part of the building that had been completed. There was no cheering crowd; the population of the District of Columbia was so sparse, it would have been difficult to assemble one.

  Symbolism aside, walking was the only realistic option. Jefferson had been staying at a boardinghouse a few hundred yards from the Capitol. Riding in a carriage would have looked pretentious—even silly. But Democratic-Republican newspapers—and later, biographers—seized on this stroll to demonstrate his identification with average Americans. No aristocrat, he! This was a man of the people!1

  In the preceding two weeks, Jefferson had worked hard on his inaugural address. He had finished it in time to have printed copies to distribute to the listening congressmen and senators and the eager hands of newsmen. He included a tribute to George Washington, calling him “our first and greatest revolutionary character, whose preeminent services…entitled him to the first place in his country’s love.” Then, in a voice so soft, few of the one thousand people in the Senate chamber could hear him, Jefferson called for reconciliation and forgiveness.

  He urged everyone to “bear in mind that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be right must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal right which equal law must protect and to violate would be oppression. Let us then, my fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are dreary things… Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists…”2

  It was a much needed plea for political peace. But would the President be able to deliver on its promise? A substantial number of his listeners/readers were in no mood for such a message. The Democratic-Republican politicians who had borne a decade of Federalist slurs and sneers that they were malcontents, traitors, and Jacobins wanted revenge. The new president’s Federalist cousin, Chief Justice John Marshall, who administered the oath of office, thoroughly understood their state of mind, having recently campaigned for Congress in Virginia.

  Marshall divided Jefferson’s party into “speculative theorists” like the President, and “absolute terrorists” like Robespierre. If Jefferson did not side with the latter group, Marshall pred
icted these revenge seekers would “soon become his enemies and calumniators.”3

  In pursuit of his proclaimed goal of Republican simplicity, the new president abandoned the levees and receptions of George Washington’s presidency. He also declared an end to presidential proclamations. These “monarchical” customs had to be expunged from the presidency to make it more acceptable to the people. These changes drew praise from the Democratic-Republican newspaper chorus.

  Even more popular was President Jefferson’s cancellation of all internal taxes, and the demolition of the jobs of hundreds of tax collectors. Equally praised was his reduction of appropriations—and salaries—for the army and the navy.

  The goal was a shrinkage of federal power—with a special enmity reserved for the Washington-style presidency. President Jefferson saw Congress, the supposed voice of the people, as the central power in the federal government. A small but important step in this direction was the abandonment of the presidential speech at the opening session of a new Congress. Instead, Jefferson sent a written message, which was read aloud by a clerk. It was an example that would be imitated by every president for more than a century. Not until 1912 did a historian by profession, President Woodrow Wilson, decide George Washington had the right idea. A speech reminded Congress that the president was the leader of the government, the only true spokesman for all the people.

  Also on the political menu was a shrinkage of the third branch of the federal government, the judiciary. President Jefferson yielded to the wrath of the terrorist wing of his party and repealed the Judiciary Act of 1801. This law had created twenty-six new judges; lame duck President John Adams had made sure they were all Federalists. The legislation also made it easier to move cases from state to federal courts, and gave the latter jurisdiction over land titles. This clause stirred fury in Kentucky and Tennessee, which further tilted the president toward repeal.

  Vice President Burr, presiding in the Senate, told Federalist Senator Gouverneur Morris of New York that he disliked the bill. Burr doubted the “equity” of depriving these judges of their gavels when the Constitution stated clearly that federal judges would serve for life and their pay could not be reduced. He wondered if the bill were “constitutionally moral.” One of Burr’s friends, Senator Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, had similar feelings, and proposed that the act be “revised and amended” rather than repealed.

  When the bill came to a vote in the Senate, enough moderate Democratic-Republicans liked this idea to create a 15–15 deadlock. The Vice President now had a vote, and he tilted toward Dayton, recommitting the bill for further discussion. Before any revisions could be considered, an absent Democratic-Republican senator showed up and it passed, 16–15. Some people said if the Senate had voted by secret ballot, the bill would never have won approval.

  Burr’s vote to recommit was another reason for President Jefferson to worry about his vice president. He may have been thinking of him when he said, while signing the repeal bill, that the talk of a compromise emanated from “wayward freaks which now and then disturb operations.” This was not the language of a man supposedly committed to political reconciliation.4

  In the afterglow of the president’s inaugural address, other transactions escaped the attention of both politicians and newsmen. One of the new chief executive’s first moves was an order to his Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin. He was to examine the U.S. Treasury’s books and discover proof of Alexander Hamilton’s double-dealing and corruption. Jefferson was hoping for a pretext to junk the whole Hamilton system. This violated the secret promise Jefferson had made to Congressman Bayard of Delaware. There were times when President Jefferson spoke and sometimes acted as if he were one of his party’s terrorists.

  Gallatin scrutinized the former Treasury secretary’s records until his eyes grew bleary and his large nose drooped. The man from Geneva informed the dismayed president he had not found an iota of corruption—and Gallatin’s economist head told his Democratic-Republican heart that the Bank of the United States and its funded debt and thriving stock market were vital to the stability of the republic. The bank, he informed Jefferson, had been “wisely and skillfully managed.”5

  Another presidential move got far more publicity—and erased the kind words President Jefferson had said about George Washington in his inaugural address. Less than two weeks after he took office, Jefferson wrote a letter to Thomas Paine, inviting him back to America. Paine had contacted Jefferson the previous October, breaking five years of silence. The pamphleteer was living in Paris on money borrowed from friends. Napoleon’s France had no interest in him or his ideas.

  The President told Paine that the frigate, USS Maryland, would soon bring Congressman John Dawson to France, bearing some modifications of John Adams’s treaty of peace for the French to ratify. “Mr. Dawson is charged with orders to the Captain of the Maryland to receive and accommodate you,” Jefferson wrote.

  Paine translated Jefferson’s letter into French and published it in a Paris newspaper. The French, who had largely forgotten the agitator, were baffled; the English, who soon read a translation in their papers, were bewildered that the new president would send a warship to bring back a man who had so grossly insulted George Washington, the American they most admired. The reaction in America was a mixture of rage, revulsion, and embarrassment. How could the president write an affectionate letter “to that living opprobrium of humanity, TOM PAINE,” raged the Federalist Gazette of the United States.

  Most editors could not decide what made Paine more opprobrious, the seventy-page collection of expletives he had flung at George Washington or his attack on Christianity in The Age of Reason, the book he had written after his bestselling The Rights of Man. The Democratic-Republican press was unable to summon anything even approaching enthusiasm for the President’s invitation. One paper claimed that Paine was a citizen and therefore entitled to cross the Atlantic in a “public vessel.” The President’s favorite paper, the National Intelligencer, which he had helped bring to the new capital, insisted that everyone should “feel charity for the misfortune of a fellow mortal.”6

  Omitted by the commentators of the day was a probability that this historian finds particularly troubling. President Jefferson must have known that Martha Washington was still alive at Mount Vernon. In letters, she sometime referred to her late husband as “my ever regretted friend.” Did it occur to the President that Martha would soon learn he had invited the slanderer of her late friend to return to America as an honored guest of the republic? It made an even greater mockery of Jefferson’s visit to Mount Vernon to express his pretended condolences. Remembering the cool reception he had received, perhaps the leader of the Revolution of 1800 did not care.

  Another move contradicted the new president’s claim that, henceforth, only one nation, the United States of America, was the object of his affections. Four months after Jefferson became president, a smiling Louis Andre Pichon appeared in his office, hoping to arouse his supposedly abandoned passion for France and her Revolution. Pichon had been the man who helped revive John Adams’s first peace overture after Foreign Minister Talleyrand’s friends, X, Y, and Z, had aborted it. Now the slim charming Frenchman was back in America, still only a Charge’ d’Affaires, but one with a diplomatic triumph on his escutcheon.

  The affable Pichon was encouraged by President Jefferson’s cordial greeting. The Charge’ cheerfully reported the latest good news from Europe. First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte had regained almost all the territory lost in the resurgence of anti-French sentiment after Admiral Nelson’s 1798 victory in the Battle of the Nile. An exhausted England, battered by nine years of seesaw war, would soon sign a treaty of peace with France at Amiens. This semi-surrender restored First Consul Napoleon’s access to the world’s seas and oceans. Would the President of the United States object if France shipped an army to Santo Domingo to regain control of that troubled island?

  The 1789 Revolution had stirred wild violence on the one-third of the i
sland that spoke French and is today called Haiti. The other two-thirds spoke Spanish, as they still do in the modern Dominican Republic. An explosive mix of whites, mulattoes, and slaves had triggered a bloody upheaval that ended with both halves of the island ruled by a gifted black man, Toussaint Louverture. President John Adams, seeing a chance to frustrate a belligerent France, had shipped Louverture’s army food and ammunition and weapons, and sent him advice on creating a government. Loverture soon established a stable interracial society which had begun to restore the island’s once fabulous prosperity.

  President Jefferson’s response to Pichon could not have been more positive. He thumped his desk and declared that “nothing would be easier than for us to supply everything for your army and navy, and starve out that black dictator, Toussaint!” The sneering label revealed that President Jefferson remained convinced that blacks were incapable of forming a worthwhile government. He was also oblivious to the danger of letting Napoleon Bonaparte plant a French army within striking distance of American shores. The proposal would have set off alarm bells in George Washington’s mind.7

  Pichon rushed back to his quarters and sent President Jefferson’s carte blanche for an invasion of Santo Domingo across the Atlantic to his superior in Paris, Foreign Minister Talleyrand. The XYZ negotiator had survived the transition from the Directory to the Consulate without even the hint of a problem. He and Napoleon Bonaparte saw cynical eye to cynical eye about politics and power. The Foreign Minister had a plan to reduce the cocksure American republic to a submissive satellite. France would snuff out their westward expansion with a “wall of brass” along the Mississippi River.