But Madison did not take the bait. He was content to take bed and plate under the same roof as the British envoy. Aware that he was sacrificing many “hourly enjoyments” in Jefferson’s company by remaining where he was, he explained that he did not wish to upset his routine: “My papers and books are all assorted around me.” Nor did he wish to give Beckwith the impression that he was moving out so he would not have to board with an enemy.
It made sense. Any apparent incivility would spoil the chance to make diplomatic inroads. As long as Madison was staying put, Jefferson prevailed on him to informally discuss with his English housemate the British-Indian arms trade that was threatening America’s position along the northwestern frontier in the area of British-occupied Detroit. Britain still maintained eight of the fortifications it had agreed to give up when it acknowledged American independence in 1783.58
It is unclear the extent to which Congressman Madison and Secretary of State Jefferson were aware of Hamilton’s communications with Beckwith. The latter two held private meetings over the eighteen months since Hamilton first suggested Madison’s limitations by pointing to his lack of worldliness. Some of the issues Hamilton took up with Beckwith belonged within the proper scope of the State Department, although it must be said that the duties of the two department heads overlapped more than they would in future presidencies.
George Hammond arrived in Philadelphia as the first official minister from Great Britain in November 1791, and the treasury secretary cozied up to him. Hammond confirmed Beckwith’s impression of Hamilton, writing home that the New Yorker had a “liberal” attitude and shared England’s larger interests, whereas Jefferson was an obstructionist. Hammond admitted his bias to a U.S. senator from New Jersey in March 1792, in a statement sounding like that of Hamilton’s comment to Beckwith about Madison. “The Secretary of the Treasury is more a man of the world than Jefferson,” Hammond said, “and I like his manners better, and can speak more freely to him.” To which he added, significantly: “Jefferson is in the Virginia interest and that of the French.” It would appear that worldliness was a code word for accommodating England’s geopolitical strategy.
Following up on Madison’s unprofitable discussions with Beckwith, Jefferson sounded out Hammond on what mattered most to America’s government over the long term: the fulfillment of treaty obligations and the removal of British posts and troops from U.S. territory in the West. He also pressed for direct U.S. access to the British West Indies trade, which had been long denied. London’s position was that it would not abandon the western posts until southern planters had paid their prewar debts, with interest, to British merchants; but southerners would not go ahead on debt payments until they received compensation for their loss of slave property during the war. Anglo-American talks did not progress far.59
Jefferson heard bad news from overseas. In the late summer of 1792 his successor as U.S. minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, notified him that Lafayette had fallen into enemy hands. Earlier that year France had declared war on Austria and Prussia, partially out of a fear that émigré armies would crush the Revolution. Partisans of Lafayette were among the pro-war coalition. The marquis would spend the next five years in a series of prisons, under the control of both the Austrians and the Prussians. “He has spent his Fortune on a Revolution,” the unsympathetic Morris wrote to Jefferson, “and is now crush’d by the wheel which he put in motion.”60
Not long after Jefferson received this intelligence, he got word from the new U.S. minister to the Netherlands, his former secretary, William Short, that the king of France and his family faced execution—or as Short put it, “assassination.” Distrusting Morris, Lafayette had written to Short just before being jailed, asking to be “reclaimed” by the U.S. government. In identifying himself as “an American Citizen, an American officer,” he expected Short to find some way to pursue his release through diplomatic channels. Short did the only thing he could under present circumstances, which was to appeal to Gouverneur Morris, aware that Lafayette detested Morris. This whole string of events placed America’s Francophiles, such as Madison and Jefferson, on the defensive.61
As he brought Hamilton up to date on all that he was witnessing, Morris queried his correspondent on partisan developments back in the United States. “What will be the republican Sense as to the new Republic?” he posed sarcastically. “Will it be taken for granted that Louis the sixteenth was guilty of all possible Crimes and particularly of the enormous one of not suffering [i.e., allowing] his throat to be cut which was certainly a nefarious Plot against the People and a manifest Violation of the Bill of Rights.” Later in life, thinking about the French patriots’ unreal expectations from their Revolution, John Adams would enjoy a chuckle when he wickedly pressed Jefferson to acknowledge the truth about the self-destructiveness of the French at this time in their history.62
“Womanish”
Hamilton feared outbursts of passion among the common people of America and advocated strong measures to keep the masses quiet. Madison was similarly attuned to the need for lawful control, but he no longer feared to the same degree as Hamilton what popular resistance might entail. The danger of an executive bent on domination was now his primary concern.
Ten years after the end of the Revolution, Jefferson still espoused a soaring rhetoric of equality and natural rights, continuing to embrace a comprehensive theory of moral equality, educability, and humane interaction, at least among free whites. This subjected him to the charge of being an airy philosopher, too carefree for the tastes of many northern men of business. For the likes of Hamilton, Jefferson was something else entirely: a panderer, a demagogue, routinely engaged in behind-the-scenes arm-twisting and playing politics with craft and cunning. Once his pretty language was stripped away, he was like everyone else.
The most telling of nationally significant communications in this transformative year of 1792 may be the letter that Hamilton, prickly and proud and never reluctant to acknowledge his drive, wrote to Edward Carrington on May 26. It was one of the longest and most illuminating letters of his career. He was hoping to make inroads with Carrington, then supervisor of revenue for the Commonwealth of Virginia, whom he had met during the Revolution when together they carried out a prisoner exchange. Hamilton knew that he could not “turn” Madison or wean him away from Jefferson; but he thought a reasoned appeal to Carrington might at least succeed in gaining support in a state he had not visited since the Battle of Yorktown: the home state of the president, the secretary of state, and the single most prominent congressman.
He began his letter by extending the wish that good feelings still subsisted between Carrington and himself, “persuaded also that our political creed is the same on two essential points, 1st the necessity of Union to the respectability and happiness of this Country and 2 the necessity of an efficient general government to maintain that Union.” Hamilton got right to the crux of his complaint: Aware, early on, of Madison’s power of argument, he would not have accepted his position in the executive branch had he not believed firmly in their political compatibility. Funding the national debt by co-opting the speculating note holders, along with the assumption of state debts, were two vital areas in which Hamilton believed he and Madison shared a vision dating back to 1783. They had had a long conversation about state debts in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention and were, he said, “perfectly agreed.” Something had happened, and Hamilton wished to understand it. Of course, he had his own theories, which was where his letter was heading.
With a habit of claiming victimhood, Hamilton warranted that it made perfect sense for him to have lost respect for “the force of Mr. Madison’s mind” after Madison’s unexpected about-face on the assumption issue. Yet he had not doubted Madison’s “good will” at the time this occurred. After a while, he explained, he finally recognized that “Mr. Madison, from a spirit of rivalship or some other cause had become personally unfriendly to me.” Rivalship? According to Hamilton, Madison had adm
itted to an unnamed individual his fear of being supplanted. It was through this conduit that Madison’s improper and vilifying words had reached Hamilton.
Pursuing his narrative of honorability, wounded innocence, and sudden surprise, it had dawned on Hamilton that “Mr. Madison cooperating with Mr. Jefferson is at the head of a faction decidedly hostile to me and my administration, and actuated by views in my judgment subversive of the principles of good government and dangerous to the union, peace and happiness of the Country.” As if his underlining pen were shaking from having to revisit the moment of a painful realization, Hamilton rhetorically stepped back, offering Carrington a line that reeks of eighteenth-century literary pathos: “These are strong expressions; they may pain your friendship for one or both of the Gentlemen whom I have named. I have not lightly resolved to hazard them. They are the result of a Serious alarm in my mind for the public welfare.”
It is hard to say who in the early American republic privileged the public welfare over more parochial, or even egoistic, concerns. In his newspaper attacks, Hamilton had already shown how much personal investment he had in the outcome of his battle with “Plain Thomas J.” He saw theirs as a true test of wills, possessing the character not of a sibling rivalry but of a landmark crusade; or a race to determine, right from the starting line, the direction government would take. With Madison, Hamilton thought the problem was one of an intellectual competition, at least until Jefferson intervened. He believed that Madison and he could at least tolerate each other. With Jefferson it was more elemental, something deep-seated, a never-ending duel.
“Mr. Jefferson,” Hamilton prodded Carrington, “with very little reserve[,] manifests his dislike of the funding system generally; calling in question the expediency of funding a debt at all … In various conversations with foreigners as well as citizens, he has thrown censure on my principles of government. He has predicted that the people would not long tolerate my proceedings & that I should not long maintain my ground.”
He held Jefferson solely responsible for Freneau’s “malignant and unfriendly” newspaper. In accepting that Madison had made vicious remarks about him in rumored conversations, Hamilton wanted Carrington to know, should Carrington be able to intercede, that “I cannot persuade myself that Mr. Madison and I, whose politics had formerly so much the same point of departure, should now diverge so widely.” If he really did believe that their political rupture might be healed, Hamilton undercut his purpose by once again personalizing the problem: “The opinion I once entertained of the candour and simplicity and fairness of Mr. Madison’s character has, I acknowledge, given way to a decided opinion that it is one of a peculiarly artificial and complicated kind.” By “artificial and complicated,” Hamilton meant “tactical,” in a Machiavellian sense—this is the nearest modern equivalent to his words.
What would these tactics have been aimed at? Having thought things through, Hamilton concluded that James Madison was involved in nothing less than a conspiracy to force the treasury secretary’s resignation from the president’s cabinet, perhaps to clear the way for Jefferson. Warning Carrington of “unfriendly intrigues,” Hamilton noted Madison’s “abuse of the Presidents confidence in him.” Presumably Washington was coming to see things as Hamilton did, forbearing as long as possible until no other inference was possible. Madison’s pose, like Jefferson’s, was duplicitous: his “true character is the reverse of that simple, fair, candid one, which he has assumed.”
While Hamilton incorrectly assigned to Jefferson primary responsibility for the establishment of Freneau’s anti-administration newspaper, he did include Madison in “the consequences imputable to it.” Moving on to foreign policy, Hamilton predicted that, left to their own devices, Madison and Jefferson would, within six months, resort to an “open war” with England. “They have a womanish attachment to France,” he declaimed, “and a womanish resentment against Great Britain.” This insult to their collective manhood was the ultimate dishonor.
In Paris, according to Hamilton, Jefferson “drank deeply of the French Philosophy, in Religion, in Science, in politics,” and returned to America “with a too partial idea of his own powers, and with the expectation of a greater share in the direction of our councils than he has in reality enjoyed.” In fact, Hamilton surmised, Jefferson may actually have “marked out for himself” Hamilton’s job. This was a first thought, before Hamilton arrived at the grander suspicion that Jefferson actually wanted to contest him for Washington’s job.
Hamilton characterized the bond between his two Virginia adversaries: “Mr. Madison had always entertained an exalted opinion of the talents, knowledge and virtues of Mr. Jefferson. The sentiment was probably reciprocal.” Aware of their warm correspondence while Jefferson was abroad, he offered a pair of explanations for what happened after Jefferson’s return: either Jefferson had redirected Madison’s political sentiments (Jefferson being “more radically wrong” in politics than Madison); or else “Mr. Madison was seduced by the expectation of popularity” into changing his opinions. Whatever the case, Hamilton judged: “The course of this business & a variety of circumstances which took place left Mr. Madison a very discontented & chagrined man and begot some degree of ill humor in Mr. Jefferson.” It is curious that Hamilton saw Madison, and not Jefferson, as the generator of ill humor.
Yet he perceived in Jefferson a worse trait than any of Madison’s: the lust for power. As he flailed away, Hamilton went from suspecting to proclaiming that Jefferson owned an “ardent desire” to occupy the “Presidential Chair.” This was, for him, the ultimate proof that Madison and Jefferson were engaged in “party-politics”—meaning political dissension. Hamilton had pieced it all together, he explained, after hearing that some in Virginia were anxious lest the state governments were to be subsumed into a behemoth of a national government.
The foregoing was a roundabout way for Hamilton to tell Carrington that Virginians needed to be reassured by someone they trusted—Carrington—that their fears of consolidation were entirely off base. “As to my own political Creed, I give it to you with the utmost sincerity,” pronounced Hamilton. “I am affectionately attached to the Republican theory.” It was, he pledged, “the real language of my heart.” He knew there were men “acting with Jefferson & Madison” who saw him differently. “I could lay my finger on them,” he said boldly and, perhaps, a little roguishly.
Feeling entirely justified in his disappointment with Madison, and no less confident in his reconstruction of events to which he had no proximity, Hamilton thus made his case before those in Virginia who were still willing to listen. Wrapping up the long letter, he indulged in a momentary reconsideration of the two Virginians who, motivated by irrational fear, had dangerously determined to “narrow the Federal authority.” If, in fact, Madison and Jefferson had not meant to go so far as to accuse him of promoting monarchy, Hamilton would admit that he had treated them in print “with too much severity.” He did not wish to do them any injustice, he professed to Carrington, but he would retreat from his argument no more than that. “From the bottom of my soul,” he swore, “I have drawn them truly.” And so he brought to a close more than twenty pages of exceedingly strong invective.63
Hamilton was convinced that the antifederalist Jefferson had had it in mind to “turn” Madison even before he left Paris. He was reaching too far here, wrong about the course of events: Madison had become suspicious of Hamilton’s motives entirely on his own. He had not needed Jefferson to instruct him. Indeed, by the end of 1792 Madison was convinced that Congress needed to look into Hamilton’s secret expenditures and possible misuse of Treasury Department funds. The prime mover was Madison, not Jefferson.
Adding to existing suspicions, allies of Madison and Jefferson had learned that Hamilton was paying blackmail to a man who had attempted to defraud the U.S. government. That man, James Reynolds, was the husband of a woman with whom Hamilton had engaged in a protracted sexual affair. Senator James Monroe was among a small delegation from Con
gress to meet with Hamilton in December 1792. They accepted Hamilton’s explanation that no federal funds were involved in the payments. For the moment Hamilton’s critics resolved that, as gentlemen, they would keep quiet about his private problem. And they decided that there was no cause to notify the president.64
Apparently Hamilton felt safe, or at least unconcerned that his risky actions would come back to haunt him, because he did not let up in his efforts to discredit Jefferson. The secretaries of state and treasury may have held a grudging respect for each other’s intellectual range. But if they did, it did nothing to slow down the ever-growing conflict in the cabinet. As much as Jefferson despised Hamilton for his transparent bid to shape the federal government in his own image, Hamilton suspected Jefferson of plotting to do the same. Where policy differences fail to expose the whole truth, personal foibles may complete the picture, at least in explaining how Hamilton could have been led to overstate Jefferson’s role in Madison’s rejection of his basic programs. It could always be said of Madison that he was direct; but he was also subtle enough in his nonverbal communication that Hamilton did not follow the trajectory of his thinking (since publication of The Federalist) until they were past being able to communicate.
Hamilton had a need for vindication and found it as he wrote Jefferson into the history of Madison’s drift. He would not, by any means, be the last to paint the history of the 1790s with this broad brush. Eventually the perception of Jefferson’s consummate role in the development of a partisan mind-set would be chiseled in stone.
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