Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  For Madison and Jefferson, “safety & happiness” could only mean a benign central government with well-defined powers and well-defined limits, resisting the tendency to favor the interests of factions. For Hamilton, “safety & happiness” directed government toward a comprehensive involvement in high finance, promoting industrial growth through central banking while attaching greater military control to the presidency and undermining all democratic inclinations. The word democratic had the connotation of a breakdown in government and a transfer of power to the ignorant masses.

  Not surprisingly, Hamilton envisioned the bank as an instrument at the disposal of the treasury secretary. Only one-fifth of its money would be the government’s, and most of the bank’s directors would be private individuals empowered to make government loans. Hamilton figured these people would be so enmeshed in government policy that they would be agreeable to his goals, if not downright compliant. Madison rose in the House to assert that at the state ratifying conventions even the supporters of the Constitution did not think that Congress had any right to charter corporations. To establish a national bank would be to grant excessive power to the federal government. Madison was being less than fully honest at this moment, because it was he who had introduced the idea of giving government the power of incorporation at the Constitutional Convention.19

  In a strictly sectional vote, the House rejected Madison’s call to quash the bank bill. Now Washington sought the views of Jefferson and Randolph, both of whom opposed the measure, and promptly conveyed their opinions to Hamilton. It was Hamilton’s custom to respond to challenges with overly long papers in his own defense; in this case, over the course of a week, he drafted a document that laboriously asserted the constitutionality of bank creation. Washington took it under advisement, asking Madison to draft a veto message, in case he should reject the bill on the basis of its questionable constitutionality.

  The president waited until the last day possible under the Constitution before signing the bill into law. If, in this instance, he eventually gave Hamilton what he wanted, it was not necessarily because he was in agreement. With a relative detachment that Jefferson would not subsequently be known for, he had suggested to Washington that, unless he felt strongly that the bill was unconstitutional, the president should go along with Congress’s decision. And since Congress had voted in favor, on February 8, 1791, Washington accommodated.20

  Madison’s concern with men of money, begun at the time of the debate over assumption, rose to a new level of outrage now. He was concerned that a group of merchants and speculators beholden to the government would in fact end up controlling the government. The national bank was the last straw in his conversion from trusting a strong central government to deeply fearing government corruption.

  The focus of Madison’s concern was the new environment Hamilton was creating, in which speculators in government paper—stockjobbers—were forming a class (or political faction) of their own. A significant number of these people were members of Congress. Madison believed that if Hamilton had his way, as it appeared he would, Philip Schuyler, his father-in-law, would be at the head of the New York subscribers to bank stock.

  In May 1791, Congress having adjourned, Madison was back in the soon-to-be banking mecca of New York, whence he sounded an alarm. He complained to Jefferson of the “licentiousness of the tongues of the speculators and Tories” who were bad-mouthing Washington for waiting so long to sign the bank bill. They had held over his head, Madison wrote, “the most insolent menaces.” It suggested a threat to the president’s legitimacy, while defining the emerging speculator class as a matured “party,” at least in Madison’s mind. He invoked the word party as it was generally understood in the years before the formal establishment of a two-party system: a self-interested group of men, inherently corrupt in their dealings. Hamilton was blatantly purchasing their support. In accepting the munificence of Hamilton, he and they became inseparable.

  A few months later, again from New York, Madison warned Jefferson that “the stockjobbers will become the praetorian band of the Government, at once its tool and its tyrant.” The Praetorian Guard, in its well-known classical sense, was a dictator’s private army, and the current version of the guard was liable to plot a financial coup in America. “Bribed by [the Government’s] largesses, and overawing it by its clamours and combinations,” the corrupt class was proving to be the embodiment of those “factions” Madison had nervously written about in The Federalist.21

  We need to understand what Madison was thinking. As he had explained to Jefferson in a long letter of 1787 and incorporated into Federalist 10, the central government was to play the role of impartial arbiter among competing interests: rich and poor, creditors and debtors, speculators, merchants, planters, and manufacturers. Government, he wrote Jefferson, was meant to be “sufficiently neutral between different parts of Society to control one part from invading the rights of another, and at the same time sufficiently controuled itself, from setting up an interest adverse to that of the entire Society.” Nothing could have been clearer. Hamilton’s policies upset that balance by favoring the growth of a “monied interest,” or commercial class, over others in society. This was obnoxious for many reasons, not the least of which was that the chosen class of people was concentrated in northern cities. By compromising its integrity, the government endangered society. Madison had to stick to his principles, or Hamilton would ride roughshod.22

  Pennsylvania senator William Maclay noted in his illuminating, if caustic, diary how the treasury secretary dominated in 1790–91. Protesting the way Hamilton manipulated members of Congress (“all the business is done in dark cabals, on the principle of interested management”), he expressed frustration with the results: “Mr. Hamilton is all-powerful and fails in nothing he attempts.” Though the senator did not characterize Madison, he peppered his diary with references to the congressman’s central role in all political activities. John Adams, with little disguise, wrote at about the same time that Madison’s abilities were overrated—he was “a Creature of French Puffs”—and his proposals in Congress adequate proof of his “Infamy.” An almost magnetic repulsion continued to operate between Madison and the nation’s first vice president.23

  Hamilton may have bullied as he sought to persuade, but he had his reasons. For him, moderation did not win wars on battlefields or wars over policy. While it may be true that he, Madison, and Jefferson all hoped to establish the character of the chief executive as an embodiment of the popular will—an accountable political actor who was also a moral protector—Hamilton was clearly attempting to deny the legislative branch preeminence and making as many of its members as possible personally beholden to him. Madison fought Hamilton tooth and nail. The illustrious face-off between Hamilton and Jefferson, a political battle that tore apart the executive, is better known, but for many months before Jefferson appeared on the scene, it was Madison who was Hamilton’s adversary. It was he who witnessed Hamilton behaving as though he were a king’s prime minister. It was he who led the counteroffensive. Madison gave Jefferson a vocabulary with which to scold Hamilton and those attracted to him.

  Once Jefferson became part of the equation, Hamilton saw the obstructionist threat increasing and began more intently to count administration allies. Around the same time, in an institutional move, Washington shifted ghostwriting assignments—such as the president’s annual message—from Madison to Hamilton and Jefferson. He did so not because of any falling out with Madison but because he recognized that such assistance should properly come from within the executive branch. This seemingly innocent move helped to change the dynamic.24

  “The Indiscretion of a Printer”

  As we have seen, Madison’s and Jefferson’s minds were on different trajectories as they embarked, with little certainty, on a major experiment in government—life under the Constitution. Philosophically, the Jefferson of 1790 was probably closer to the perspective of the Revolutionary gadfly Tom Paine than he was to th
e constitutional concerns of his friend Madison. But by the middle of 1791 both were finding Paine’s sweeping arguments in favor of social equality crucial to their program. A new militancy in the political world served to deemphasize the remaining differences between Madison and Jefferson, as the methods of Alexander Hamilton rankled both of them equally.

  After publication of the first volume of The Rights of Man in that year, Paine once again became a symbol of resistance to despotism. Common Sense had bolstered America’s Revolutionaries in the months leading up to the Declaration of Independence. At the time John Adams had taken exception to the consensus view, calling Paine “a disastrous meteor,” whose wildly successful pamphlet was hardly more than icing on the cake. It was only fitting that Vice President Adams’s name should become enmeshed in the controversy over Paine’s latest publication.25

  The pamphleteer had left America in 1787, returning to his native England. Jefferson and he met up in Paris and remained in touch; when Adams departed London and sailed back to Boston the next year, Jefferson relied on Paine for information on British political developments. In 1790, with Jefferson in New York, Paine went to press with The Rights of Man, a defense of Revolutionary France; it would eventually result in his expulsion from England.26

  The impetus for The Rights of Man was Edmund Burke’s equally inflammatory Reflections on the Revolution in France, which demeaned even the auspicious energy of Lafayette and his allies of 1789. Writing with a heavy hand, Burke thought it prudent to “suspend” his congratulations to the French until they had proven that their movement was “something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface.” For Burke, the anti-Christian agitation associated with the French Revolution exposed hypocrisy. “These Atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own,” he railed, doubting the collective vision of popular politicians and their intellectual backers. “With them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one … They think that government may vary like modes of dress, and with as little ill effect.” Dismissive and tart in his repudiation of what he viewed as democratic tyranny, Burke celebrated the balance and resilience of the British model.27

  Paine rejected his adversary’s association of the French Revolution with fanatics bent on tearing society apart. Burke was ignorant of what was truly happening in France: cleansing a nation of autocratic government. Even if Louis XVI, whose reign seemed mild, was not an evil man, he symbolized “hereditary despotism”—nothing prevented worse rulers from arising in the future. Echoing Jefferson’s thinking about generational tyranny, Paine wrote: “Every age and generation must be free to act for itself in all cases … The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.”28

  He pitied the British subjects of the “feeble and crazy” George III for their learned passivity. And echoing Madison’s criticism of Hamilton’s strategic plan, he attacked the funding system in Britain for accruing a large debt in order to pay for wars, increase taxes, and cultivate “a monied interest of the Nation” in support of state-sponsored aggression. It was almost word for word the danger to the republic that Madison (and, in due course, Jefferson) saw in Hamilton’s assumption plan. “It is power, and not principles, that Mr. Burke venerates,” taunted Paine, as he questioned his opponent’s moral sensibility.

  The suspicions of Burke and Paine would be reproduced in the United States. In both the Old and New worlds, the politics of the 1790s were beset by premonitions of civilization’s collapse. According to Paine’s diagnosis, those who could still feel had no problem perceiving the justice of popular resentment. The Revolution in France, like the Revolution in America, was a “renovation of the natural order of things …, combining moral with political happiness.” He dedicated the first volume of The Rights of Man to George Washington and shipped him fifty copies. Washington may not have extolled the British political model as Burke did, but he certainly shared neither the radical intellectualism nor the moral imagination of the campaigning Tom Paine.29

  The life of Paine’s friend Jefferson was about to change. Giving little thought to a brief cover letter that he wrote to a man he had never met, he passed on an early copy of the first (British) edition of The Rights of Man, which Madison had loaned to him. Jefferson had merely followed Madison’s instructions. Or so he thought. Unbeknownst to him, the recipient of the book was the brother of the man who intended to publish it in America, a man who clearly saw publicity value in using Jefferson’s words as a prefatory recommendation for the book. “I am extremely pleased,” Jefferson had casually penned, “that something is at length to be publickly said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us.” He was disturbed by the rise of pro-British feelings among those in government whom he would soon be referring to as “Anglomen.”

  When the American edition came out, Jefferson acknowledged, to Washington as well as to Madison, the accuracy of the quote. It was, he explained, a dissent from the unrepublican notions of John Adams, who appeared to have renounced his Revolutionary principles in favor of a government steeped in privilege. The vice president had just published Discourses on Davila, a labored work on appetites and ambition in which he expressed his reservations about popular government. His ultimate reasoning may have elicited questions, but it was hard for an honest politician to object to his realism. “National passions and habits are unwieldy, unmanageable, and formidable things,” Adams wrote. No other member of the Washington administration was as yet prepared to acknowledge, as Adams was, that where competition among political parties existed, “the nation becomes divided into two nations, each of which is, in fact, a moral person, as much as any community can be so, and are soon bitterly enraged against each other.”

  Jefferson regarded as political heresy Adams’s solution to the foibles of human nature. In any society, Adams wrote, famous figures attracted a following, such that it was irresistible for people to want to emulate them. Conferring rank and distinction restricted an otherwise out-of-control ambition among men, just as democratic impulses produced a “sordid scramble for money.” Rank and distinction preserved stability so that good things got done. By seeking to abolish social distinctions, the Revolution in France was attempting the impossible, because wealth, honor, and beauty never went out of fashion. Without some kind of paternalistic intervention, new rivalries always formed. For Adams, inequality was natural and should be preserved. The U.S. government should bestow titles upon the “natural aristocracy” of America. He wanted state conventions called for the purpose of appointing hereditary U.S. senators.

  Adams did not consider himself unrepublican, but his definition of a republic was rather unusual: “a government whose sovereignty is vested in more than one person.” On this basis, Britain’s government was a “monarchical republic,” and as he phrased it in a letter to Roger Sherman, the United States would remain a republic whether power was invested “in two persons, or in three millions.” Republics, according to Adams, were no less productive of inequality than despotisms, only less cruel. The policies and institutions he favored would defeat socially disruptive impulses but also retain a class hierarchy.30

  John Adams, then, was the individual Jefferson was thinking of when he wrote of “political heresies”—and he meant nothing more than that. To Madison: “I tell [Adams] freely that he is a heretic, but certainly never meant to step into a public newspaper with that in my mouth.” Addressing President Washington, the secretary of state was less piquant and more circumspect. It was, he said, “the indiscretion of a printer” that had unfortunately resulted in his sentiments spilling out onto the page. Adams and he differed “as friends should do.” He hoped it would end there.

  Something like this did not disappear overnight, however, and a flurry of newspaper commentary ensued. One series of articles, signed “Publicola,” took Jefferson to task for sponsoring Paine’s obnoxious ideas and labeled Jefferson the real political heretic. The
aggressive style of “Publicola” resembled that of John Adams. Jefferson did not weigh in; nor did he immediately contact Adams. Writing supportively to Paine after the initial storm over Rights of Man had subsided, he reported optimistically that the author’s friends were winning the battle for public opinion over the friends of “Publicola.” He did not identify by name those who constituted the opposing side, referring instead to a “sect …, high in names but small in number.”

  Madison’s response to the incident showed that he and Jefferson were on the same wavelength. Seeing the preface to the American edition of Paine’s work and the quote from Jefferson, he correctly put together all the circumstances that had produced an unsolicited controversy. Writing Jefferson, he could not resist adding his own strong critique of the “antirepublican discourses” that he regarded as an endorsement of the royal court. Madison viewed Adams’s ideas as irrelevant, if not ridiculous, and was confident that the vice president was incapable of convincing public men of anything at this point. It was Hamilton’s pro-British attitude that struck Madison as most unsound and no less ridiculous. Yet Hamilton was succeeding in convincing public men of the justness of his policies. And Madison had run out of patience.

  Two more months passed before Jefferson sought to clear the air with Adams, dexterously explaining the motive behind his letter: “to write from a conviction that truth, between candid minds, can never do harm.” His notorious quote to the printer had been a throwaway line, he reiterated, never meant to see the light of day. Adams, as ingenious as he was spontaneous, replied to Jefferson with an affectation of surprise, claiming that they had never really discussed their respective views on government. He was telling Jefferson that it was dangerous to assume too much about another person’s beliefs. And indeed, Jefferson may not have known that the vice president, for all intents and purposes excluded from major policy discussions, cared little for Hamilton’s economic proposals, which he saw as a “swindle” of ordinary Americans that only gave license to a “mercenary spirit of commerce.” Nor did Adams approve in the least the closer ties Hamilton wanted with England.