The new British ambassador, Anthony Merry, and his large, formidable wife were not amused when the President greeted them in a similar outfit. Merry was wearing full diplomatic regalia—a black coat with gold braid, white breeches, and silk stockings. An infuriated Merry informed Secretary of State Madison that they had been deliberately insulted. Madison told him the President had received the Danish minister in a similar costume. Merry huffily replied that the Dane was a diplomat of the third rank.
With that complaint for a prologue, it was not hard to foresee the Merrys’ reaction when Jefferson announced that he had abolished ranks for visiting diplomats. They would all be treated equally at dinners and receptions. Even more disconcerting was another new rule. When a group of guests went in to dinner, they would be seated “pell-mell” at any convenient chair, “with any other strangers invited.”
At the Merrys’ first presidential dinner, when the service was announced, Jefferson casually offered Dolley Madison his arm. The politically astute Dolley whispered: “Take Mrs. Merry!” but the President ignored her. The Secretary of State tried to make amends by offering the lady his official arm. Ambassador Merry fared even worse. In the dining room, he was about to sit down beside the attractive American wife of the Spanish ambassador when a congressman shoved him aside and seized the chair. “This will be a cause of war!” the bewildered wife exclaimed to her Spanish husband. Merry ended up sitting far below the proverbial salt, at the bottom of the table.
The seething British ambassador and his wife departed in frigid silence the moment they finished their dinners. Merry’s report to his superiors in London was thick with outrage. He saw his treatment as an attempt to exhibit the President’s hostility to Great Britain and his fondness for France—a claim not without foundation. Jefferson had also invited the French Chargé d’Affaires, Louis Andre Pichon, to the same dinner. This was a violation of an unwritten rule that diplomats from countries at war with each other were never expected to mingle.
Merry filled the ears of Federalist senators and congressmen with his fury. Soon the Gazette of the United States was attributing the President’s “unaccountable conduct” to pride, whim, weakness, and malignant revenge. The timing of this silly contretemps could not have been worse. Many Americans, especially in New England, had begun to see Britain as a champion of freedom in their war with Napoleon Bonaparte’s dictatorship.
Ironically, the man who suffered most from the President’s leveling of diplomatic distinctions was his devoted disciple, James Monroe. Jefferson had sent him to London to negotiate an alliance to counter Napoleon’s plan to occupy Louisiana with an army. When Bonaparte abruptly sold the territory, the President decided Monroe should begin talks to replace the Jay Treaty, which was about to expire.
At first, the tall, affable Monroe and his elegant wife, Elizabeth, were welcomed heartily. George III was so polite, Monroe was forced to repudiate the negative opinion of the monarch from his younger days. The new envoy was emboldened to ask the government to abandon the custom of impressing American sailors into the British navy—the major irritant in the two country’s relations. The king and his ministers assured him they would do their utmost to solve the problem.
The worsening war between Britain and France made it difficult for the British to keep that promise. A strong British navy was the key to their national survival. Monroe was soon telling an impatient Secretary of State Madison that there was little hope of a new treaty. Suddenly, the cordial treatment the Monroes had been receiving in London’s diplomatic and social circles underwent a stunning change. They were snubbed at dinners and receptions, and Elizabeth Monroe often ended the evening sobbing in her husband’s arms.
The reason for the icy boycott was slowly revealed to the Monroes. President Jefferson’s treatment of Ambassador Merry and his wife had outraged George III and the entire British upper class. At diplomatic receptions and dinners, Monroe informed Secretary of State Madison, “we have no fixed place and preference seems to be given to Portugal, to Naples, Sardinia, etc., powers which have not one hundredth part of [our] political weight.” The President showed no inclination to help his ostracized diplomat by abandoning his pell-mell rules for White House dining.12
In New York, another drama was in its second act. Vice President Aaron Burr was running for governor. For a while his prospects looked good. Alexander Hamilton, stung by the Federalists’ rejection of his advice, declared himself neutral. His newspaper, the New York Evening Post, backed Burr. So did ex-Governor John Jay, and former Federalist gubernatorial candidate Stephen Van Rensselaer, “the Patroon,” whose thousands of tenants on his Hudson River estates were ordered to vote for the Colonel. The Clintons [NYC Mayor DeWitt and Governor George] nominated as Burr’s opponent Judge Morgan Lewis, chief justice of the Supreme Court, the presider at Harry Croswell’s conviction for seditious libel. Their literary hit man, James Cheetham, received orders to destroy Burr’s reputation with all the ferocity and lack of regard for the truth that were the hallmarks of his methods.
Cheetham described Burr as a lawyer who had plundered the inheritances of his clients, as a sadist who had lashed enlisted men almost to death during the Revolution, as a sexual degenerate who had ruined the reputations of countless New York women, and as a political outcast who had been repudiated by both political parties. On April 26, 1804, the day the polls opened, the editor claimed that the Vice President had tried to attract the black vote by guaranteeing them an elegant supper at his Greenwich Village mansion, Richmond Hill. As a warm-up, he staged a ball at which “a considerable number of gentlemen of color” offered a toast to “a union of all honest men.” The editor of the Evening Post declared that never in the history of New York politics had any newspaper stooped so low.
President Jefferson continued to receive daily deliveries of the American Citizen, putting him in close touch with the election. He was undoubtedly pleased by the result. Although Vice President Burr won New York City by some one hundred votes, he was virtually annihilated in most upstate counties. Chief Justice Morgan Lewis won in something very close to a landslide. The Washington Intelligencer, the President’s semi-official mouthpiece, praised New Yorkers for standing “firm to their principles” and rejecting “acts subversive of the public good.”13
For the next three weeks, a deeply depressed Aaron Burr ignored sympathy letters from friends and business associates. Also ignored were triumphant sniggers from James Cheetham, who gloated that the defeat virtually guaranteed Colonel Burr’s ruin, financially as well as politically. The newsman was right about the financial side. Burr had helped to charter a new bank in New York which would have been eager to give a newly elected governor unlimited credit. In the Colonel’s mailbox lay letters from numerous ex-friends, asking for the immediate repayment of long overdue loans.
On May 23, a totally unexpected visitor materialized on Burr’s doorstep: General James Wilkinson, commander in chief of America’s army. Wilkinson secretly shared with Burr a detestation of President Jefferson. The general regarded the commander in chief’s cost-cutting reduction of the regular army’s salaries and troop levels as a personal insult. At one point, Congress had considered demoting Wilkinson from brigadier to colonel; Vice President Burr had intervened and restored his rank.
This professional double-talker brought interesting news from New Orleans, which he had occupied with his 450 regulars in January. The city was seething with rage at the man who had purchased Louisiana. The President had inflicted on them a government that was little short of a dictatorship. There was no legislature. All the power was in the hands of the appointed governor, William C.C. Claiborne.
Without quite admitting he was on Madrid’s payroll, General Wilkinson told Burr that local Spanish officials in West Florida were ready to believe anything he told them. All in all, it was an ideal moment for enterprising men to carve off a lucrative chunk of Spain’s empire. The most tempting prize was Texas, an immense territory peopled by a handful of Mexicans
and a few wandering Indians. Just over the horizon was Mexico—a country that possessed gold and silver beyond calculation. If all went well, it might not be difficult to persuade certain states, such as Kentucky and Tennessee, to join them in a secessionists’ western empire.
Burr did not hesitate to express his interest in this daring enterprise. First, however, he had some business to settle with Alexander Hamilton. A letter in the Albany Register reported that Alexander Hamilton had spent not a little time denouncing Burr while he was in the state capital three months ago. The letter writer mentioned a few epithets and added that there was “a still more despicable opinion” of Colonel Burr that he declined to specify.
The Vice President—Burr still had nine months left in his term—wrote a letter to Alexander Hamilton demanding an explanation of the phrase, “a more despicable opinion.” The tone was insulting. Hamilton knew it was a challenge to a duel. In a gentleman’s code of honor, dodging such a letter impugned a man’s courage. That rendered him ineligible to command an army. Beyond the horizon still loomed the possibility of New England’s secession, and civil war. Looming even larger was Bonaparte’s invasion of Britain; its success would be followed by renewed imperial interest in America. Either or both crises would overwhelm the leadership abilities of Thomas Jefferson. An American with a military reputation would be needed to rescue the republic.
On July 11, 1804, Colonel Burr and General Hamilton met in Weehawken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York, where dueling was illegal. Burr killed Hamilton with his first shot. It was the greatest imaginable favor anyone ever did for Thomas Jefferson. The duel destroyed Hamilton literally and Burr politically, removing the only two men with the stature and skills to oppose the Revolution of 1800. It also inflicted a fatal wound on New England’s secessionist conspiracy. Most Federalists rediscovered their enthusiasm for the fallen Hamilton, and regarded Burr with loathing as his murderer. The plot floundered to an embarrassed halt.
Colonel Burr did not accept his political destruction. Within three weeks of the duel, he was in Philadelphia, talking to British ambassador Anthony Merry, who was in the City of Brotherly Love to be treated for a medical problem. Burr explained a plan that had been growing in his mind since his conversation with Brigadier General Wilkinson. He asked Merry if the British government would cooperate with a general who led an army of western soldiers down the Mississippi to capture New Orleans, and surge from there to Texas where he would call on the western states to join them in a new confederacy. All they needed was a half-million dollars and a British naval squadron at the mouth of the Mississippi to close the river if President Jefferson called on the American navy to stop this revolution in the making.
The ambassador thought of how often President Jefferson had insulted him at his “pell-mell” dinners. Merry was soon writing a letter marked most secret to his superiors in London, telling them the current Vice President of the United States had given him a proposal “to effect a separation of the western part of the United States.”14
For while, it looked as if a half dozen of President Jefferson’s more dubious political chickens were coming home to roost as nightmare fowls.
Before these disasters could occur, the presidential campaign of 1804 intervened. It was the first opportunity for American voters, as distinguished from political orators and newspaper editors, to express their opinion of the Louisiana Purchase. Local Democratic-Republican leaders did not hesitate to make Louisiana the heart of their campaigns.
In Washington, D.C., President Jefferson had decided to remove the chance of another tie in the electoral college between members of the same party. Among the more important topics at his political dinners was an amendment to the Constitution, providing that a party’s nominees for president and the vice president would run on a single ticket. In August, he was pleased to inform Secretary of State Madison that South Carolina and Tennessee were about to ratify this Twelfth Amendment, making it the law of the land.15
Typical of the presidential campaign’s electioneering was a celebration in New York on May 12, 1804, the approximate first anniversary of the day Robert Livingston and James Monroe signed the agreement to buy Louisiana. At sunrise, every cannon in the forts on the Battery, at the foot of Manhattan Island, and on nearby Governors Island, roared “a Grand National Salute.” Every major building in the growing city and all the ships in the harbor hoisted the Stars and Stripes. While church bells pealed triumphantly, Mayor Dewitt Clinton, fresh from his and his Uncle George’s triumph over would-be governor Aaron Burr, organized a procession in City Hall Park.
Through the city’s streets, to the rattle of drums and the shrill of fifes, marched dozens of the city’s militia companies, gleaming muskets on every shoulder. At the head of this military host, the commander carried a white silk banner with the reason for this celebration printed on it in large letters. EXTENSION OF THE EMPIRE OF FREEDOM IN THE PEACEFUL, HONORABLE AND GLORIOUS ACQUISITION OF THE IMMENSE AND FERTILE REGION OF LOUISIANA IN THE PRESIDENCY OF THOMAS JEFFERSON
Behind the marchers came the city’s leading political organization, the Tammany Society, whose votes had helped make Thomas Jefferson president in 1800. They carried a fifteen-foot-long muslin map of the Mississippi River and the 828,000 square miles of Louisiana. The crowd of onlookers had no trouble getting the message. The cheers were loud and lusty. More than one man among the applauders saw himself becoming a proud and prosperous western landowner in the not-too-distant future.
In the fall of 1804, Thomas Jefferson and New York’s George Clinton ran for the nation’s highest offices against Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina and Rufus King of New York. The Democratic-Republicans carried every state in the Union except Connecticut and Delaware. In the electoral college, they won by a staggering 162–14.
Even Massachusetts, the state that Timothy Pickering had envisioned as a bastion of his secessionist conspiracy, succumbed to the magical promises of the Louisiana Purchase. In Congress, Democratic-Republican majorities remained gigantic. Thomas Jefferson seemed on his way to transcending George Washington as the man who was first in the hearts and heads of their countrymen.16
CHAPTER 30
The Improbable Failures of a Triumphant Second Term
AS THE DEMOCRATIC-REPUBLICANS CELEBRATED their triumph, on the other side of the Atlantic, a related political drama was heading for a climax as well. The desperate British, so fearful of a Napoleonic invasion that George III took the precaution of hiding the crown jewels deep in the countryside, dispatched a band of sixty French exiles with orders to assassinate the Man of Destiny. When Napoleon’s secret police detected the plot, he suspended plans for the invasion and launched a massive manhunt to round up his would-be killers.
When they were captured, the culprits confessed they had a co-conspirator living just across France’s border in the principality of Baden. He was a relative of the executed Louis XVI, the Duc d’ Enghien. The British secret police had funneled him thousands of pounds, with the understanding that the moment Napoleon expired, Enghien would rush to Paris and become Louis XVI’s heir. The First Consul seized the hapless Enghien and executed him by firing squad, outraging the crowned heads of Europe.
Bonaparte decided it was time to abandon his current political title. He told his followers that as long as he reigned as First Consul, he would be the target of other murderous intrigues. The only solution was for him to take the title of emperor of France and name a line of succession in his family. The obedient French newspapers immediately began telling their readers the importance of giving the Man of Destiny a crown. His yesmen in the legislature vociferously agreed. Next came a plebiscite with the same fake results as the Consul for Life vote. The Corsican adventurer and his greedy family became the official rulers of France.
After a threat of a Napoleonic thunderbolt heading in his direction, Pope Pius VII decided to protect the large swatch of central Italy he ruled from Rome. He came to Paris to crown the new mona
rch on December 2, 1804. As the pontiff raised a jeweled coronet to place on the imperial head, Napoleon snatched it out of his hands and crowned himself, dissipating once and for all any lingering illusion that he represented the glorious 1789 Revolution in the name of liberté.
An imperial France astride Europe was the international background against which President Thomas Jefferson celebrated his reelection. He did not confess anywhere, to anyone, even to himself in his Anas, that he had been totally wrong in his vision of a French “empire of liberty” emanating from Paris. He also did not admit his landslide reelection was the result of acquiring Louisiana with very little discernible thought or effort on his part. On the contrary, the President was already beginning to congratulate himself for this achievement, a process that would grow more explicit with time.
For the moment, the President benignly tolerated extravagant praise from his followers. One wrote a long poem, bemoaning France’s failure to live up to “bright freedom’s early dawn.” As for Haiti, the writer ridiculed the ability of blacks to produce a workable government, much less a free one. Writing off Europe and Africa in one sweep, this party-line bard concluded that only in America did the world’s hunger for liberty have any hope of fulfillment.
The nameless poet justified his assertion with a rhapsodic list of the Democratic-Republican leaders in charge of the nation.
Lo, Gallatin sublimely stands
While finance brightens in his hands
His grateful country proud to own
And smile on her adopted son
No less great Madison shall claim
The Great Divide Page 41