Of public gratitude and fame
But MORE the man whose lofty soul
O’erlooks, combines, directs the whole
Yes, Jefferson….1
Among the numerous politicians who called at the presidential mansion to congratulate President Jefferson was Vice President Aaron Burr. To demonsrate his friendship, President Jefferson invited Vice President Burr to dinner not once but several times in the next weeks. Burr was also cordially saluted by Secretary of State Madison and Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. Neither they nor the President were troubled in the least by the fact that the Vice President had been indicted for the murder of Alexander Hamilton in New York and New Jersey.
At least as eager to befriend Colonel Burr was Senator William Branch Giles of Virginia. He was one of the radical Old Republicans who backed the President’s attack on the judiciary. Giles persuaded ten Democratic-Republican colleagues to sign a letter to New Jersey’s governor, asking him to quash the Vice President’s indictment for murder. Giles and his fellow Virginian, House Majority Leader John Randolph, were looking forward to impeaching Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Samuel Chase, and they wanted and needed the cooperation of the Vice President, who would preside at the trial.2
Like most politicians, Giles and Randolph thought cordiality would assure Burr’s cooperation. They were also fairly certain that Colonel Burr, having been smashed by the Jefferson-Clinton axis in his run for governor of New York, would be awed into virtual servitude by the staggering dimensions of the President’s reelection victory.
In the Chase impeachment trial, Thomas Jefferson saw an opportunity to revamp the Constitution to make it more sensitive to the voice of the people. Chief Justice John Marshall was undoubtedly right when he called Jefferson a speculative theorist. But behind this figure was another Thomas Jefferson, who still secretly believed the earth belonged to the living and there was a constant danger of lingering “Anglomany” turning into monarchism or a dictatorship that would stifle the voice of the people.
The number of Federalist judges appointed by Presidents Washington and Adams was a prime reason for this worry. After Justice Chase was convicted, the President had a proposal ready to present to Congress. First, he would warm up key leaders in the Senate and the House at several of his political dinners in the presidential mansion. He would reiterate and amplify his already stated opinion that Congress could and should remove any federal judge, including those currently on the Supreme Court, by a majority vote of the Senate and the House. Congress could then appoint whomever they pleased, with a reminder that the new judges had better listen to the voice of the people as it emanated from the nation’s legislators—behind whom stood their enormously popular chief executive.
Would anyone dare to defy President Jefferson’s landslide mandate? The answer was a startling yes. In New Orleans and elsewhere in the purchased territory, thousands of new subjects of the United States had not been permitted to participate in the election. Their dissatisfaction with the autocratic government Jefferson had designed for them was acute. Their mood was worsened by the continuing ineptitude of the governor of the territory, William C.C. Claiborne. He could not speak a word of French and made no attempt to learn the language. The Governor soon became convinced he was surrounded by insurrectionists and bombarded the President with anxious letters.
In December 1804, these surly semi-citizens of the United States sent three delegates to Washington, D.C. to state their grievances. With them they carried an impressive “Remonstrance” written by former Mayor Edward Livingston of New York, now a confirmed Jefferson hater. The document was designed to embarrass the author of the Declaration of Independence. It asked why the right to vote and trial by jury had become “problems” in Louisiana. They demanded the citizenship rights guaranteed them in the Louisiana treaty, including statehood. They threatened to take the first available ship to France and demand justice from Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
The now royal ruler of France had returned to the English Channel to ready his two hundred thousand-man “Army of England” for the invasion of Britain. To test his flatboats he sent several thousand men into the heaving channel in dirty weather. Over five hundred men drowned, but the Man of Destiny was undiscouraged. He told one aide that even if it cost twenty thousand men to get the army ashore in Britain, it would be a small price to pay.
Rather than arouse this formidable opponent, who reportedly also talked of another invasion of Santo Domingo, President Jefferson reluctantly agreed to an act that Congress would pass on March 2, 1805, in the closing days of his first term. It gave the territory of Louisiana an elective assembly of twenty-five members. They were also guaranteed statehood when their population reached 65,000. But they were barred from importing slaves, unless they came with immigrants from the United States—and recent land grants by their former Spanish rulers were considered void.
These negatives produced a continuing dissatisfaction, which the Louisiana delegates did not attempt to conceal. One of the most sympathetic listeners was Vice President Burr. He was especially interested when they told him that would-be revolutionists from Mexico were walking the streets of New Orleans proclaiming their desire to win independence from the deadening hand of Spain. This was the sort of information that encouraged an embittered politician to find new meanings in that great Jeffersonian phrase, “the pursuit of happiness.”
On February 4, 1805, the U.S. Senate convened for the impeachment trial of Judge Samuel Chase. Vice President Burr’s preparations were dramatically different from the trial of Judge Pickering, which had taken place with little or no alteration of the Senate chamber. The Vice President ordered the two-story high walls draped in brilliant crimson cloth. Every politician in Washington knew what he was doing. He was saying that the trial was on a historical par with the 1788 impeachment of Warren Hastings, the Viceroy of India, in the British House of Lords.
Everyone also knew that the corrupt, imperious Hastings had been impeached at the insistence of Edmund Burke, the Irish orator who had predicted the French Revolution would descend from the glorious democratic sunrise of 1789 to the sordid dictatorship it had now become. Was Colonel Burr suggesting that President Jefferson’s Revolution of 1800 was heading in the same direction?
The Vice President had carpenters erect a new semi-circular gallery in front of the permanent one. The senators’ desks were moved out and their crimson leather chairs arranged in tiers. The members of the House sat facing the senators in more tiers of green covered seats. Further back, open to the public, was the permanent gallery, with room for over four hundred spectators.
Vice President Burr had his chair placed in the center of the chamber, against a wall. In two enclosed areas nearby sat the House managers of the impeachment, led by John Randolph, and Justice Chase with his battery of top-flight lawyers to defend him. The chamber looked more like a theater than a courtroom. One Federalist senator said the Vice President made the trial “a great, interesting, and super spectacle.”3
The staging was designed to dismantle the Democratic-Republican impeachment program. Throughout the month of January, Burr had watched Senator William Branch Giles telling fellow solons that impeachment was not a particularly significant or dramatic process. Senator John Quincy Adams overheard Giles express his contempt for an independent judiciary. The Virginian told another senator that every justice on the Supreme Court except one, who was a Democratic-Republican, “must be impeached and removed.” This included Chief Justice John Marshall, whom Jefferson—and Giles—especially hated.
“A removal by impeachment,” Giles declared, “was nothing more than a declaration by Congress to this effect—you hold dangerous opinions and if you are suffered to carry them into effect you will work the destruction of the nation.” At another point he described the process as merely saying, “We want your offices” so we can give them to “men who will fill them better.” It had nothing to do with that nonsense about high crimes and mi
sdemeanors in the Constitution. There was no need for a trial and its arguments. All Justice Chase had to do was show up, and the senators could vote to oust him and go back to their boardinghouses.4
This was American Jacobinism, showing its face—and teeth—in Washington, D.C., where it was virtually impossible to summon protestors to oppose it. If Congress had been meeting in New York or Philadelphia, the two previous capitols, such talk would have aroused demonstrators by the thousands. It was one more evidence of the danger of Thomas Jefferson’s romance with his federal village.
More evidence of underlying terrorism was supplied by Chief Justice John Marshall. In 1804, in a ruling that laid the foundation for judicial review, one of the bedrock principles of the modern American republic, Marshall had declared that the high court had the power to rule an act of Congress unconstitutional. This obiter dicta had infuriated President Jefferson and the Old Republicans. Now, trying to save his job, Marshall started telling people Congress might have the right to review Supreme Court decisions and overrule them by a majority vote.
Vice President Aaron Burr was not even slightly interested in such equivocations and evasions. This trial was step one in his revenge on Thomas Jefferson. He insisted that it was extremely serious constitutional business—which was nothing less than the truth. Burr has been so abused by his contemporaries and later historians, another possible motive has been lost. He may well have been deeply sincere in his apparent conviction that the future of the republic was at stake in this trial. He was one of the most successful lawyers in the nation. He had served with distinction in the Revolution and his ancestry went back to the earliest arrivals in New England. If anyone felt he had an inherited stake in the United States of America, it was Aaron Burr.
As the trial began, a Democratic-Republican senator strolled around the Senate chamber munching an apple. The Vice President impaled him with a blazing rebuke that sent him reeling to the nearest refuse bin. Burr was equally hard on another solon who showed up wearing a loose floppy coat, in the nondescript style popularized by President Jefferson at his mansion. The Vice President also insisted on everyone listening to Judge Chase when he replied to the charges against him.
The bulky, white-haired jurist had a formidable reputation and a personality to match it. He had been one of the first Americans to defy Britain’s assertion of the right to tax the colonies and a fiery backer of armed resistance in 1775. He had signed the Declaration of Independence for his native state, Maryland. He was an impressive-looking man, with a suave, confident bearing.
Chase’s answers revealed his defenders’ strategy. He denied again and again that he had violated any law or committed a crime in his behavior on the bench. He noted that the district judges who had served with him, and apparently agreed with his sentiments and rulings, had not been impeached, implying he was the victim of a vendetta. He admitted that he had criticized the Democratic-Republican Party and the Jefferson administration, especially in a charge he gave to a jury in Baltimore in 1803, in which he predicted the nation would soon sink into “mobocracy.” Chase dared the prosecution to prove that this was “seditious” or even unusual, in the light of comments by other judges, whom he quoted at length.
President Jefferson strenuously disagreed with the Justice. When he first heard Chase’s mobocracy description of his administration, he wrote a letter to one of the House of Representatives’ leaders, Maryland Congressman Joseph Nicholson, asking: “Ought this seditious and official attack on the principles of our Constitution…to go unpunished? And to whom so pointedly as yourself will the public look for the necessary measures? I ask these questions for your consideration. For myself, it is better that I should not interfere.”
The President meant, of course, publicly interfere. He was unquestionably interfering by writing the letter. Every congressman who read it—we can be sure there were many—knew that the President of the United States was asking for Chase’s impeachment. Some readers might wonder why Jefferson called Chase’s remarks “seditious” when he had vehemently defended the right of newspaper editors and congressmen to make similar remarks, prompting the Federalists to pass the Sedition Act in 1798.5
Part of Justice Chase’s confident manner emanated from his personal convictions, but it was no doubt bolstered by retaining Luther Martin, the attorney general of Maryland, to head his defense team. Martin was considered the best trial lawyer in America and was a good friend of Vice President Burr. He was also unmatched in his hatred for Thomas Jefferson. When Martin wanted to insult a man, he said he was “as great a scoundrel as Thomas Jefferson.” During Burr’s run for the governorship, Martin had written him a warm letter, wishing him a “compleat triumph” over his enemies.6
Martin and his fellow lawyers mauled the largely emotional arguments of John Randolph, William Branch Giles, and their fellow prosecutors. Martin was especially effective when he accused the Jeffersonians of trying to destroy the Supreme Court. He said he was defending not only his friend Judge Chase, but his fellow citizens against a scheme to demolish a bulwark of their liberty.
On the last day of the trial, Vice President Burr made a crucial ruling on a proposal from Senator James Bayard of Delaware, the man who had masterminded the Federalist deal that broke the electoral deadlock in Congress in 1801. Bayard proposed that each senator be required to vote on whether Judge Chase was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors. This challenge to the Judge Pickering precedent triggered a wild argument between Old Republicans, National Republicans, and Federalists in which several senators asked the Vice President to rule the proposal was out of order. Burr stonily refused, and the proposal passed by a single vote, 17–16.
This meant the senators were forced to focus on the facts of the case rather than on the prosecutors’ declamations on monarchism, Anglomany, and Chase’s violation of the popular will in his brusque assaults on the Democratic-Republican Party. On March 1, Vice President Burr addressed the chamber in a sonorous judicial voice. “You have heard the evidence and arguments adduced on the trial of Samuel Chase, impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors,” he said. “You will now proceed to pronounce distinctly your judgment on each article.”
The secretary of the Senate read each article to every senator, and asked him whether it proved Chase guilty of a high crime or misdemeanor. The process took two hours, while the spectators watched in hushed suspense. The secretary handed the results to Vice President Burr, who solemnly declared: “Samuel Chase Esquire stands acquitted of all the articles exhibited by the House of Representatives.” The Old Republicans had fallen far short of winning a two-thirds majority on almost every article.
Federalist senators gazed at Colonel Burr with dazed disbelief. One confided to his journal that Hamilton’s killer had “done himself, the Senate and the nation proud.” A Federalist newspaper said Burr had presided “with the dignity and impartiality of an angel but with the rigor of a devil.”7
The infuriated Democratic-Republican congressmen withdrew to their own chamber, where they indulged in ferocious condemnations of the Chase verdict. Randolph, Giles, and the other Old Republicans put together a call for a constitutional amendment allowing any federal judge to be removed by a majority vote of Congress. Another amendment, aimed at the moderates who declined to vote for impeachment, would enable a state legislature to recall a senator by a majority vote, if he dared to displease them.
There is no surviving record of what President Jefferson thought of these proposals. But there are glimpses. One senator told his diary that “it seems to be a great and primary object with him never to pursue a measure if it becomes unpopular.” This suggests the moderate Thomas Jefferson was now in control. Another hint comes from a witness who reported that Secretary of State James Madison was wryly amused—and pleased—by the Old Republicans’ agitation over their defeat. This was not surprising. They were trying to eviscerate his Constitution.
In 1820, when Jefferson was seventy-seven years old, he told one friend that h
e still thought there should be some way to make federal judges show a sense of “responsibility” to public opinion. The idea that they should be independent of the will of the nation in a republican government still outraged him. William Short was unquestionably correct when he said Thomas Jefferson never changed his mind.8
The Chase acquittal cast a shadow over President Jefferson’s second inauguration, which took place on Monday, March 4, 1805, only three days after the trial. The President’s oratorical skills were far from mesmerizing, and he was further handicapped by his audience’s memories of a remarkable farewell speech outgoing Vice President Aaron Burr had given in the Senate on the previous Saturday. It had been a deeply moving statement of his pride and pleasure in presiding over the U.S. Senate and a paean to the body’s importance, which reduced several listeners to tears. Some people may have suspected it was Burr’s way of demonstrating his unquestioned superiority to the new vice president, George Clinton.
This became all too apparent when Clinton began presiding over the Senate. Jefferson’s silver-haired executive partner struck one diary-keeping senator as “old and feeble…His voice is weak—I cannot hear the one half of what he says—he has a clumsy, awkward way of putting a question. What a vast difference between him & Aaron Burr!” Another diarist, Senator John Quincy Adams, noted many of the same defects and concluded: “A worse choice…could scarcely have been made.”9
For his second inaugural, President Jefferson did not walk the muddy mile between his mansion and the capitol. Instead, he rode in a carriage accompanied by his secretary and a groom. He gave his inaugural speech in a Senate chamber crowded with spectators. But most of them were not members of Congress. Perhaps signaling their unhappiness with the outcome of Judge Chase’s trial, the national legislature had adjourned the previous night, and most of them were heading home while the President spoke.
The Great Divide Page 42