“A Tissue of Machinations”
Second in its revelatory content only to Hamilton’s letter to Carrington was Jefferson’s to George Washington of September 9, 1792, in which he defended himself against Hamilton’s newspaper attacks. In a memo not long before, the president had asked for “liberal forbearances” from his feuding secretaries. There were matters of national urgency that required cooperation, not the least of which was Spanish, French, and British collusion with hostile Indians. Washington appealed unequivocally: “How unfortunate … whilst we are encompassed on all sides with avowed enemies and insidious friends, that internal dissentions should be harrowing and tearing our vitals.”
Writing from the quiet of Monticello, Jefferson spelled out just how offensive he felt Hamilton’s efforts to intrude upon State Department matters were and how inflammatory the newspaper attacks had been. “I am so desirous ever that you should know the whole truth,” he petitioned the president. He started with the state of affairs in Congress and, denying any attempt of his own to influence votes, cast suspicion on Hamilton’s motives and actions.
The flaw in Hamilton’s system was painfully simple, Jefferson said. It was rooted in “principles adverse to liberty, and was calculated to undermine and demolish the republic, by creating an influence of his department over the members of the legislature.” Calculated to undermine and demolish the republic? Under such terrifying circumstances, there could be no compromise between them. Hamilton’s unethical relations with members of Congress, his “dealing out of Treasury-secrets among his friends,” his destabilizing discussions with the ministers from England and France—there was no better term than cabals to describe such underhanded pacts.
In spite of the clear and present danger, Jefferson hinted at a final retirement from all public business. “When I came into this office,” he wrote, “it was with a resolution to retire from it as soon as I could with decency … I look to that period with the longing of a wave-worn mariner, who has at length the land in view, and shall count the days and hours which still lie between me and it.” If he was ready to call it quits, he could not sign off before he had thoroughly discredited his rival: “I will not suffer my retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment when history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has not only received and given him bread, but heaped it’s honors on his head.” With a grand gesture drawn from classical oratory, alluding at once to Hamilton’s common and foreign origins (born on the island of Nevis, in the Caribbean, and abandoned by his father), Jefferson penned a most memorable slur of the man who had repeatedly attacked his political dignity and moral worth.65
As it happens, Hamilton addressed Washington on the same delicate subject on the very same day. “I know that I have been an object of uniform opposition from Mr. Jefferson, from the first moment of his coming to the City of New York,” he wrote. “I know, from the most authentic sources, that I have been the frequent subject of the most unkind whispers and insinuating from the same quarter.” He claimed that while Jefferson was plotting against him, he “never directly or indirectly retaliated,” remaining for too long a “silent sufferer” of calculated injuries. Most important, Washington needed to know that as a veiled conspirator, Jefferson was behind “a formed party” bent on dismantling the government.66
Jefferson thought himself a guardian of liberty. Hamilton thought himself a model of patience. Washington did not wish to investigate the claims of either of his headstrong advisers. He was interested not in assessing motives but in governing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Party Spirit
1793
Every consideration private as well as public require a further sacrifice of your longings for the repose of Monticello. You must not make your final exit from public life till it will be marked with justifying circumstances.
—MADISON TO JEFFERSON, MAY 27, 1793
To my fellow-citizens the debt of service has been fully and faithfully paid. I acknoledge that such a debt exists: that a tour of duty, in whatever line he can be most useful to his country, is due from every individual. It is not easy to say perhaps of what length exactly this tour should be. But we may safely say of what length it should not be. Not of our whole life, for instance, for that would be to be born a slave.
—JEFFERSON TO MADISON, JUNE 9, 1793
IN JANUARY 1793 LOUIS XVI WAS GUILLOTINED, AS THE VOLATILE Jacobins took control of government and buried the liberal ideals of 1789. When the news reached Philadelphia in March, Jefferson told Madison that he felt a sense of relief because America’s “monocrats” were not deeply troubled by this latest report of Revolutionary violence. He had just dined with a large and diverse group of politicos whose casual colloquy ran the gamut of opinion, from “the warmest jacobinism” to “the most heartfelt aristocracy”; but not a one was roused to anger, or the kind of condemnation he expected. It appeared to him that it was only the town’s squeamish society women who were shocked by the manner in which the French king had been dispatched. At home in Orange between legislative sessions, Madison took the pulse of “the mass of our Citizens” and discovered that Virginians had bought into “spurious” accounts of the king’s innocence that were printed in some newspapers. They felt for Louis the man but not for Louis the monarch.1
Even after the execution, many Americans had hopes for the Revolution. General Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, a recent widower and the present governor of Virginia, made plans to sail to France and offer his services on the battlefield. Not until March did he begin having second thoughts about the idea, and only at the end of April did he inform his old comrades Washington and Hamilton of his preparations. Washington replied, with some understatement, that the French faced more significant domestic threats than foreign ones at that moment. There would be “much speculation” if a U.S. governor were to enlist in the armed services of a foreign power. Lee got the message. Instead of sailing, he stayed home and remarried. In the decade that followed, Ann Carter Lee bore Light-Horse Harry a son, Robert Edward, whom he scarcely knew but who was destined to outdo his father on the battlefields of America.2
In February 1793 England was officially added to the French Revolutionaries’ list of belligerents. Americans learned of the new Anglo-French war in April. Inside France, defense of the state became the justification for revenge against supposed enemies. Aristocracy became, literally, a crime. Civil rights were ignored. This was the age of the Terror, and it would reach high tide in mid-1794. After trials at which defendants were denied counsel, upward of fifteen thousand of the politically suspect met their deaths in a widespread purge.
These events would transform American politics. No power in the United States was capable of calling in a favor with the government during this phase of the Revolution. Based on his intimate knowledge of French politics, William Short saw the Jacobins as demagogues. From his perch in The Hague, he predicted correctly that their reign would be brief: they knew how to inflame the mob but not how to cool it down.
He learned this firsthand. As his beloved Rosalie watched helplessly, her charitable husband, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, was dragged from their carriage, stoned, and slashed to death. Obtaining passports that permitted him to cross French and Austrian lines, Short left the Netherlands, where he continued to serve as U.S. minister, and sped to Rosalie’s side. He proposed marriage to the now-widowed duchess; she refused him but signed over a large portion of the estate to her American lover, who successfully protected the majority of it from confiscation.3
The Marquise de Lafayette pleaded with President Washington to send an envoy to arrange her husband’s release from prison. Lafayette was under close guard, deprived of many necessities, and for the most part unaware of what was going on in the wider world. She was frustrated because, at this dire moment, the American president seemed inattentive. The marquis had been, as she wrote, “in the chains of the enemy” for six months
and the marquise herself under virtual house arrest. She had been able to smuggle out of the country only the one letter to Washington, with the help of an English farmer. At once haunted and disbelieving, the marquise wondered where Washington was when Lafayette needed him: “I confess to you, Sir, that your silence … is perhaps of all our evils the most inexplicable to me.”
The president did the only thing he thought possible: he sent her money, in case it was needed. But he did not see that he had any other options. Upon receiving her first letter, he had asked Jefferson to draft a reply, offering “all the consolation I can … consistent with my public character and the National policy.” In its final form, it read: “Be assured that I am not inattentive to his condition, nor contenting my self with inactive wishes for his liberation. My affection to his nation & to himself are unabated, & notwithstanding the line of separation which has unfortunately been drawn between them, I am confident that both have been led on by a pure love of liberty & a desire to secure public happiness.” Jefferson enclosed a copy to Gouverneur Morris, reminding him to undertake “all prudent efforts” to aid Lafayette.4
“Half the Earth Desolated”
War between England and France placed Americans in one of two camps—and for the next several years made political life especially challenging for the Madison-Jefferson coalition. The “rights of man” remained an attractive-sounding slogan, but those who had predicted a smooth course for the progress of liberty struggled now to find in the French experiment the obvious appeal it once had had. When Jefferson learned from William Short of the inhumanity displayed toward their celebrated friends, his instinct was to shame Short into recanting. “You have been … hurried into a temper of mind which would be extremely disrelished if known to your countrymen,” he lectured.
Jefferson counseled patience with the Jacobins, convinced that the French nation stood behind them. But his thinking was flawed insofar as he was unable to separate the fate of the French Revolution from the fate of republican principles in America. For Short he defined his domestic opponents: “characters of opposite principles; some of them are high in office, others possessing great wealth, and all of them hostile to France and fondly looking to England as the staff of their hope.” He claimed that these usurpers of the American republic were a “little party” but a dangerous one.
In the same letter, composed just after New Year’s Day 1793, Jefferson contributed to America’s political vocabulary his most unfortunately phrased maxim with respect to the cause of republicanism. Rather than watch the French Revolution fail, he said, “I would have seen half the earth desolated; were there but an Adam & an Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than as it now is.” Gore Vidal has called this wording “raging melodrama.” In defense of the Jacobins, Jefferson was willing to accept the loss of the liberal aristocrats as martyrs in the struggle for a better world.
Conventional hyperbole aside, Jefferson could be mistaken about major matters, as he was here. His habitual hatred of monarchy combined with his compulsive fear that the Hamiltonians espoused republican government “only as a stepping stone to monarchy.” As Short remarked at the time of Jefferson’s death: “It was most difficult to make him change an opinion.” Madison knew this too: both he and Short found ways to accommodate Jefferson’s foible. But as a subordinate, Short could say only so much.5
Jefferson’s cavalier allusion to mass extermination can be explained, but it remains disturbing. He conceived of republican revolution as a global battle against the corrupting power of monarchy. Its success in France would ensure the survival of republicanism in America. Writing to Lafayette a short time before the marquis became a prisoner, he resorted to hyperbolic language when he praised the Frenchman for undertaking heroic efforts toward “exterminating the monster of aristocracy, and pulling out the teeth and fangs of it’s [sic] associated monarchy.” Jefferson compared the French beast to the “sect” of aristocrats and monocrats he faced in the United States. Not shying from the word extermination, though, Jefferson came dangerously close to condoning the actual murder of flesh-and-blood royalists.6
His point was that death was part of the price of freedom. It had always been so. Revolution required purification, and sometimes innocent blood was sacrificed in the process. Because he had not yet discovered effective medicine to combat the political contamination introduced by Hamilton, he could envision only a macabre end to the American experiment.
His Adam and Eve allusion, at once a dystopian and a utopian nightmare, was not meant to sound quite as fatalistic as it does today. He summoned up the promise of republicanism, and not just the threat to it, when he called forth the Garden of Eden, a golden age of innocence, a return to first principles and first parents, a perfect, natural relationship untainted by the sins of the flesh. Republicanism required naked simplicity, a state of being in which time-honored virtue was transparent, artifice was stripped away, and even the proverbial lust for power could be overcome. The Enlightenment that Jefferson breathed sometimes took for natural science, or political science, what was in fact a romance of the mind. That deficiency—moralism masquerading as science—was what spawned his eccentricities, sanctioned his rationalizations, hardened his prejudices, and encouraged extravagant language.
Recall that in 1787 Jefferson had justified to Madison “a little rebellion now and then” in defense of Shays’s Rebellion, comparing it to the occasional disturbance caused by an ordinary storm. In six years that small storm had magnified into a natural disaster of cataclysmic proportions when he suggested to Short that he was willing to tolerate “half the earth desolated” rather than the failure of the French Revolution. In fact, though, in pursuit of a romantic truth, Jefferson was mixing his biblical allusions, because the image of God decontaminating the earth has more in common with the story of Noah than the Garden of Eden. The metaphorical ark of Jefferson’s imagination contained, instead of animals, male and female representatives of every nation.
It is always hard to voice opinions in politics and achieve consistency. It was especially hard in an age of revolutions.
“With a Bleeding Heart”
Toppling monarchy and aristocracy in faraway France was one thing. Responding to an incipient revolution in St. Domingue (now Haiti) was quite another. St. Domingue was the most valuable French outpost in the West Indies. Taking up approximately one-third of the island of Hispaniola, just slightly larger than the state of Vermont, it produced most of the sugar and coffee that European and U.S. markets required, reducing Americans’ need to trade with the British and Spanish Caribbean colonies. This made it an important partner to the United States in the post-Revolutionary decades.
The alliance with France at the time of the American Revolution had opened up a thriving trade, which also made it possible for slavery to expand rapidly on the island. Power was concentrated in the hands of a ruthless planter elite, creating a stark demographic imbalance: 35,000 white residents, 30,000 gens de couleur (those of mixed-race ancestry), and nearly half a million black slaves.7
This oppressive slave system was responsible for the rebellion that swept through the island colony in 1791, but events in France had a decisive impact too. After the French Assembly proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1790, the abolition society Amis des noirs organized a campaign, with the help of gens de couleur on both sides of the Atlantic, to grant political rights to free blacks on the island. When this effort failed, a mixed-race militant named Vincent Ogé, fresh from France and in possession of American arms, mounted an insurrection, which was crushed. But then a much larger slave revolt broke out, and hundreds of plantations were destroyed; blacks and whites alike were slaughtered.8
Secretary of State Jefferson kept a cautious eye on these events. He sensed that unilateral American action would be seen as interference, and he did not wish to offend the Revolutionary French government. But as news of the rebellion spread, and as whites’ accounts of death and des
truction (many of them exaggerated to win outside support) reached both France and the United States, Jefferson changed his mind. He felt that the white planters of St. Domingue might turn to London for backing if their appeals were ignored. And if the British were to gain a foothold on the island, U.S. commercial interests would be seriously threatened.9
That change of mind is of consequence to the course of American history. “A man attacked by assassins will call for help to those nearest him,” Jefferson wrote to William Short, as grim reports came to his desk.10 Viewing this as the moment to extend meaningful assistance to the colonial government on St. Domingue, he argued that the law of self-defense applied to colonies as well as nations and that in an emergency the nearest ally should come to the aid of the endangered population. It was the early 1790s, and Jefferson was already laying the foundation for what would become known three decades later as the Monroe Doctrine. By identifying a sphere of influence in the Caribbean, he drew a line: America’s national interest was at stake wherever instability and violence appeared in its hemisphere.11
In a rare moment of agreement in the executive branch, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Washington all concurred that the United States should aid the island’s white colonists by selling arms and making money available to the colonial government. The amount expended would be deducted from Revolutionary War loans that the United States still owed France. It was a risky proposition. The French Assembly might reject America’s terms, and no one wished to become embroiled in an unpleasant diplomatic dispute with France over money. But Jefferson felt something had to be done. The white islanders were vulnerable and growing increasingly desperate. If they became “disgusted with either France or us,” he told Short, Great Britain waited in the wings and would take advantage.12
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