To prevent worse violence, Jefferson wished for the French Revolutionary government to negotiate a compromise with the St. Domingue rebels.13 Instead, Paris acted aggressively, sending fresh troops to the Caribbean while establishing a commission to oversee the colonial government. The head of that commission, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, was both a Jacobin and an antislavery advocate. His priority was to destroy royalism and defend French rule at all costs.
A majority of the white planters on St. Domingue were strongly opposed to French Revolutionary policies. Jefferson was correct in his assumption that as early as 1791, some of these planters viewed secession and an alliance with Great Britain as their only hope of retaining power. Sonthonax put down the first planter coup, deporting hundreds of whites in the process. Then after France declared war against England, and British forces made plans for an invasion, Sonthonax called on black insurgents to rally to his side and defend the French Republic. In the summer of 1793 he decreed that all slaves in the colony were free.14
Many white planters abandoned the island. Their refuge lay in the United States. Congressman Madison did not appear especially alarmed, but as he corresponded with Edmund Pendleton about the “gloomy” conditions on St. Domingue, the Virginia Assembly passed legislation prohibiting free blacks from entering the state. They feared, of course, that the contagion of rebellion might reach their shores.
Jefferson’s reaction to the white immigrants was mixed. He wrote to Monroe that the “fugitives (aristocrats as they are) call aloud for pity and charity.” But he preferred that the state governments, not the federal government, provide assistance to them. He claimed that as secretary of state, it was “with a bleeding heart” that he had resolved to deny the refugees any assistance. When a bill came before Congress to support them, Madison took a different position. He did not believe that the Constitution sanctioned congressional funds for acts of charity, but he conceded that the government could draw on the existing U.S. debt to France to provide assistance to the royalist refugees. The bill passed, and money was charged against the debt.15
Jefferson was crying crocodile tears for the refugees when he called them “fugitives” (which, to him, connoted criminals of the state) and “aristocrats” (a term obviously indicating that he did not regard their arrival on American shores as a hopeful addition to the young republic). To his daughter Patsy, he was rather more blunt. Informing her that four hundred “aristocrats and monocrats” were to be sent to the United States, he snapped: “I wish we could distribute our 400 among the Indians, who would teach them the lessons of liberty and equality.” It is hard to resist smiling at Jefferson’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the royalist planters be humbled through an internment process and treated as political criminals to be reconditioned in camps run by Native Americans, whose equality was unsupported and whose liberty was routinely threatened.16
Even as he mourned slavery’s long-term effect on morals, Jefferson condoned the sense of superiority bred among slave owners. Caught between his devotion to the French Revolution and his wariness of slave rebellions, he felt something between contempt and dismay toward the white refugees. He admitted to Monroe that, down deep, he feared “all the West Indies islands will remain in the hands of people of colour, and a total expulsion of whites sooner or later will take place.” Seeing St. Domingue in grander terms than others did, Jefferson recalled the dark vision he had put forth in Notes on Virginia, in which an eventual race war on the North American continent would lead to the extermination of one or the other race. If St. Domingue was an omen, growing the slave population in the South was a risky prospect. To Monroe again: “It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children, and possibly ourselves (South of Patowmac) have to wade through, and try to avert them.”
Jefferson could not accept that the revolutionary ideology he had for so long embraced—the overthrow of an aristocracy by those who felt oppressed—lay behind the eradication of slavery on St. Domingue. Blaming royalists came naturally to him, but he could not make a real adjustment in his thinking as to the destructive force of racial antagonism. Drawing on his earlier imagery, could he have said that there would be no one left in the Caribbean but a black Adam and Eve? He was unable to reconcile the two global forces of republicanism and racial justice. Jefferson’s blind spot caused him to perceive racial conflict as a force beyond human agency, when in fact free blacks and slaves exercised agency as positive revolutionary actors in St. Domingue.17
“Hotheaded, All Imagination, No Judgment”
The Western world was trembling. As the Revolution in France grew bloodier and more muddled, Madison and Jefferson needed each other’s support more than ever. In April 1793 the political balance in America entirely shifted, as President Washington declared a neutral position with respect to the belligerents. To Madison and Jefferson, it meant that the president had effectively rescinded the 1778 treaty of alliance with France, a diplomatic retreat orchestrated, no doubt, by Hamilton. The larger problem, for Jefferson especially, was less that the Neutrality Proclamation directly harmed France than that it signified Hamilton’s full-scale entry into foreign policy making.18
The Virginians were backed further into a corner when the new French minister arrived in America and took matters into his own hands. Charles-Edmond Genet landed in South Carolina in April and swept north, addressing crowds in a most undiplomatic voice. Actively encouraging U.S. citizens to pressure their government into abandoning neutrality, Genet transgressed. He annoyed Thomas Jefferson, the best friend Revolutionary France had, by proposing to use U.S. ports to outfit French warships or otherwise prosecute the war against England. Already French privateers were showing off captured British vessels to American crowds.
Jefferson, restless in Philadelphia, wrote to Madison, at Montpelier, about Genet’s activities: “Never, in my opinion, was so calamitous an appointment made … Hotheaded, all imagination, no judgment, passionate, disrespectful and even indecent to the P[resident] …, urging the most unreasonable and groundless propositions, and in the most dictatorial style etc. etc. etc.” In early American politics, the terms all imagination and passionate meant essentially the same thing: lacking the emotional balance required for rational (republican) policy choices. Jefferson was sure that the fanatical French emissary would only play into the hands of the “Anglomen” in America.
Urgent communications moved north and south. Each was a week in transit and confided to trusted servants and reliable Virginia gentlemen who happened to be on the road. Taking no chances, Madison and Jefferson wrote in code where prominent names were mentioned. They knew a crisis was at hand and that they had to do something. At the same time, both understood that any problems caused by Genet would land in the lap of the secretary of state, and Madison could only advise from a distance. After one maddening encounter with the Frenchman, Jefferson admitted to his foremost ally: “He renders my position immensely difficult.” Madison, predictably, encouraged Jefferson to talk Genet out of his “folly” before he did any more mischief. Jefferson tried, but the quarrelsome envoy would not listen. He remained a loose cannon.
Washington would not stand for Genet’s insulting behavior. Hamilton and Secretary of War Henry Knox took advantage of the situation and went public. Jefferson reported that the two “pressed an appeal to the people with an eagerness I never before saw in them.” He had to endure it silently, because public criticism of Genet came with the president’s seal of approval.
Madison consulted with Monroe at the Highlands, the latter’s place near Monticello, and came up with the only possible solution: an active defense. Genet was, in this calculation, irrelevant. A “republican interest” was under siege in Philadelphia; a gang of pro-English Virginians (the term Madison used for them was “Anglicans”) were working up strategies to embarrass any Virginian still attached to the French cause. “The only antidote for their poison,” Madison resolved, “is to distinguish between the nation and its Agent”—to insi
st that Genet did not represent a France that American republicans recognized. Faced with no good choices, Jefferson joined his cabinet colleagues in criticizing Genet, urging his recall, and predicting in a confidential letter to Madison that if Genet were allowed to continue as France’s voice in the United States, “he will sink the republican interest.”19
Neither Madison nor Jefferson was surprised by what happened next: Hamilton set out to destroy what remained of pro-French sentiment in America by writing once again for the newspapers. Waiting until the president had left town to prosecute his case, he used the pseudonym “Pacificus” to inflame opinion. Interpreting the Neutrality Proclamation his own way, he wrote that it was expressly designed to renounce the Franco-American alliance. For those who retained fond memories of French aid in the American Revolution, Hamilton corrected the record by illustrating French compulsions: vengeance and a need to “repair the breach” in “the National glory” brought about by an ignominious defeat at British hands in the colonial war that ended in 1763. America’s revolution happened to come along at a time that suited French “calculations” of self-interest. Reminding his readers that King Louis XVI was a “humane kind-hearted man,” Hamilton asked rhetorically how Louis could be a “Tyrant,” and Lafayette a “Traitor.” Genet had opened the door, and Hamilton was the first to walk through.20
Jefferson fought back by giving his political allies a rhetorical weapon, premised on his conflation of pro-British policies with corruption. In the first of his several bold outlines characterizing the duality of American politics, he explained: “The line is now drawing so clearly as to shew, on one side, 1. the fashionable circles of Phila., N York, Boston, and Charleston (natural aristocrats), 2. merchants trading on British capitals. 3. paper men, (all the old tories are found in some one of these descriptions). On the other side are 1. merchants trading on their own capitals. 2. Irish merchants. 3. tradesmen, mechanics, farmers and every other possible description of our citizens.”
Drawing a line in the sand, Jefferson claimed for his side the small, provincial, modest, and hard-working of the nation. (Of course, when he used the innocuous word farmers, he concealed the truth about his prime constituency: wealthy, slave-owning, aristocratic Virginians.) As he promoted the average freeholder’s values, he identified his enemy as two essential types: the armchair speculator, a pompous, ineffective, and parasitic species that produced nothing of value; and the men of commerce who thrived on their association with the British juggernaut and had transferred loyalty to London.
Jefferson was uncompromising when he relied on classification systems, a tendency explained by his comfort with the order and methods of eighteenth-century science. He took his formulation to a private meeting with Washington and complained about “the wealthy Aristocrats, the Merchants connected closely with England, the new created paper fortunes.” At a time when France was mired in confusion, would the president see through the smoke screen, as he did, and understand who actually posed the greatest threat to the young republic? All Jefferson could reasonably hope was that Washington kept an open mind.21
The spring and summer of 1793 were long months of nervous anticipation for Madison and Jefferson. For as long as possible, Washington had resisted taking sides in the conflict between France and England. But as Hamilton amassed influence, the two realized that they would be unable to stem the tide. The 1792 elections had not appreciably changed the composition of the national government, which, to Jefferson especially, meant that popular opinion was excluded from the halls of power. From this perspective, it seemed no exaggeration to suggest that monarchy might result if Congress did not reconstitute itself as a popular body, as the Constitution intended. Outsiders needed an uncorrupted friend among the insiders. That was who Jefferson had convinced himself he was.
Madison also adopted the term monocrats to describe a party so enamored with combinations of power that it would at some point find a comfortable consensus in monarchy. To Monroe, he was perhaps even more unreserved than he was in writing to Jefferson: Genet was “a madman,” he charged; and “Anglicans and Monocrats from Boston to Philada” were running off at the mouth. Madison’s vocabulary most often expressed the philosophical script of the thinking man’s founder, the Madison whom history remembers; but at times such as these the largely unrecorded vernacular of the political activist surfaced. This was the Madison known only to his immediate political circle.22
At Jefferson’s request—“For god’s sake, take up your pen,” he cried out—Madison rose to the occasion as “Helvidius,” rebutting Hamilton’s “Pacificus” in August and September 1793. He questioned the extent of the president’s authority, arguing the law of nations in five prominently featured newspaper articles. He charged that the arguments of “Pacificus” represented nothing less than a reiteration of British modes of conduct. What Madison wrote as “Helvidius” was good political science, highly legalistic and, as such scholarship often is, outstandingly uninspiring.
Still, these essays matter. The two who had collaborated as “Publius” were meeting again in print, this time as dire opponents. Madison’s main objection was Hamilton’s twisting of the Constitution’s language. In reassigning to the executive primary power in all foreign policy matters, he was relegating Congress to a subordinate (and ineffectual) role. In making his case, Madison used Hamilton’s own words from The Federalist against him, because “Publius” had clearly stated that the power to make treaties was “to partake more of a legislative than of the executive character.”
Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation made the president the “organ of disposition” with regard to war and peace and in so doing seriously undermined the ability of Congress to act independently. This, Madison insisted, was wrong. Now Congress faced the unpleasant prospect of offending the president by opposing him; or it could avoid conflict and passively acquiesce to the executive’s announced policy. The republic was untested, and the first president had not been criticized in this way before.
Congress had been granted the power to declare war—a logic repeatedly defended during the Constitutional Convention—in order to prevent the executive from using wars to augment its power. Foreseeing potential danger if Congress should sacrifice its duty to stop the executive from making unilateral decisions regarding war, Madison was cautioning against what critics since the Vietnam War era have come to regard as the modern imperial presidency.23
The Latin pseudonym “Helvidius” was not capriciously chosen. Madison’s alter ego, in this instance, was a Roman official of the first century A.D. who promoted demokratia, was exiled for his opinions, and eventually executed by order of the emperor. Identifying with the honorable Helvidius, Madison was saying that “Pacificus” was something other than a peacemaker: he was a monarchist threatening republican ruin.24
“Inveloped in the Rags of Royalty”
Madison was Jefferson’s pillar of support during these tense times. But how long could Jefferson withstand the infighting? He was getting nowhere in cabinet debates and was sick of the increasingly hostile environment. During the summer of 1793 he told the president that he wished to resign his office effective September 30. He had let Madison know of his resolve back in May; and Madison, predictably, refused to let him off easily. “Every consideration private as well as public require a further sacrifice of your longings for the repose of Monticello,” he maintained. It was not the first time he had met Jefferson’s protest.
Jefferson came back with a literary defense of his right to the “tranquility” of home. He argued, in an affecting if weepy style, that his debt of public service had been paid in full. “The motion of my blood no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world,” he said. This letter, with its poetic effusions, was something different from what Jefferson typically wrote to Madison, presumably because he expected it to find its way into the public press.
The motion of his blood? The tumult of the world? Where did this gut-wrenching language lead? “It leads me to s
eek for happiness in the lap and love of my family,” he wrote, “in the society of my neighbors and my books, in the wholesome occupations of my farm and my affairs, in an interest or affection for every bud that opens, in every breath that blows around me, in an entire freedom of rest or motion, of thought or incogitancy, owing account to myself alone of my hours and actions.” Contrasting his domestic ideal with the political scene, he built up to a mighty expression of regret: “Worn down with labours from morning till night, and day to day … committed singly in desperate and eternal context against a host who are systematically undermining the public liberty and prosperity …, cut off from my family and friends, my affairs [i.e., his plantation economy] abandoned to chaos and derangement, in short giving every thing I love, in exchange for every thing I hate.” For Jefferson, a son of the Virginia gentry, national politics had become a barren profession as well as an unbearable personal sacrifice.
He moved from self-pitying speech to a nearly analogous worry for the health of George Washington—and by its language, this part of the letter was not intended for public eyes. The office of president had become onerous: “Little lingering fevers have been hanging about him for a week or ten days, and have affected his looks most remarkably. He is also extremely affected by the attacks made and kept up on him in the public papers. I think he feels those things more than any person I ever yet met with.”
If one accepts Jefferson’s view, the president’s so-called supporters were hampering him by elevating him. Jefferson recalled Madison saying to him sometime before that “satellites and sycophants” pushing the ceremonial trappings of the presidency could not but have ill effect. Jefferson was now suggesting to Madison that Washington might be trapped in those trappings: “Naked he would have been sanctimoniously reverenced. But inveloped in the rags of royalty, they can hardly be torn off without laceration.”
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