Madison and Jefferson
Page 39
All this gave Jefferson license to slur Hamilton. In a letter to Madison, he wrote offhandedly: “A man as timid as he is on the water, as timid on horseback, as timid in sickness, would be a phænomenon if the courage of which he has the reputation on military occasions were genuine.” This was a rejoinder to a little newspaper nastiness Hamilton was responsible for under the pseudonym of “SCOURGE,” which sarcastically celebrated Jefferson for his exemplary bravery as governor.
It had not been that long since Hamilton had mocked Madison’s and Jefferson’s “womanish” resentment toward England. All who knew the slightly built Madison would have been aware of his exaggerated health fears—he could legitimately be called timid according to that definition. But Jefferson, aside from his migraines, was a healthy specimen. Of the two Virginians whom Hamilton had termed “womanish,” Jefferson took insults less well. His definition of manliness did not require participation in warfare or private duels, which he regarded as barbaric rather than brave. And despite his bookishness, Jefferson did not lead a sedentary life by any means; he was a man who knew lust. If he had been cowardly in the way that “SCOURGE” implied, he would not have been able to devise the icy tactics he did to combat Hamilton, well knowing that Hamilton would take extreme measures in return. Jefferson was not one to panic.
He was clearly glad for the opportunity to refute the headstrong Hamilton’s wide reputation for machismo, and it is hard to imagine anyone other than Madison with whom he could so easily share such a cruel joke. Four days after his “timidity” letter he was obliged to amend his diagnosis in a quick update on the situation in Philadelphia. “The fever spreads faster,” he jotted to Madison. “Deaths are now about 30. a day. It is in every square of the city. All flying [i.e., leaving] who can.” And as to Hamilton: “H had truly the [yellow] fever, and is on the recovery, and pronounced out of danger.” So it was more than “autumnal fever.” Hamilton had contracted the deadly virus and survived it.
Nevertheless Jefferson had proved his own resolve, and courage, by standing his ground. As Washington and Secretary Knox left town, and as Hamilton lay ill, he remained behind so as to avoid, he said, an even greater panic. He told Madison that “serious ills” would have ensued if the entire executive were absent from Philadelphia. And yet this political soldier wanted nothing more than to finish his tour of duty and to retire, once and for all, to Monticello.38
Having made his point, Jefferson left Philadelphia mid-September and visited with Madison at Montpelier. Not long afterward, Madison followed up with a visit to Monticello, where Monroe joined them to strategize. Before they returned north in November for another session of Congress, a dramatic change occurred that would profoundly affect Madison’s future. His younger brother Ambrose, age thirty-eight, died at the family estate. Ambrose had run the Montpelier plantation; now that duty passed to James, Jr., who soon learned of a small reversal of fortune: most of his Kentucky land was improperly surveyed and the purchase thereby voided. He proceeded to sell his land in the Mohawk region of New York in order to put up a gristmill at Montpelier, passing up the chance for substantial profit if he had only held on to it for a few more years. Responsibilities and misgivings multiplied.39
“What Caused the Fall of Athens?”
Philadelphia’s self-anointed “republican interest” was the first to establish a “democratic society,” and the Hamiltonians promptly claimed that Genet had started it. It was just too easy to bestow the label “Jacobin” on them, and soon “American Jacobin” became a common slur applied to the Madison-Jefferson axis. In 1793 democratic societies spread across the country, a network of popular political assemblies akin to the committees of correspondence that had flourished on the eve of the American Revolution. While not directly the arm of a named party, the members of these societies were all critics of Hamiltonian policies. Madison would report to Jefferson that in the case of the New York Democratic Society, Edward Livingston, a prominent member, could not have been elected to Congress in 1794 without its exertions. Livingston’s older brother Robert was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, and Edward, a Princetonian, had the talent and enthusiasm to jump right into the fracas as a key Madison ally.40
With 33,000 inhabitants, New York had recently surpassed Philadelphia as the most populous U.S. city and was beginning to rival it in political speech as well. A characteristic example of what was happening is contained in the published address of William Wyche, a liberal-minded British-born attorney who immigrated to America, attained citizenship, and now resided in Manhattan. At Tammany Hall (as yet more a social than a political gathering place), he made an appeal for calm and cautioned against “the influence of interested faction on the mind of man.” With strength of mind, he declared in favor of a new brand of independence: “The idle distinctions of aristocrat and democrat I would bury in oblivion, and treat no one as enemies but those who would deprive me of my liberty.” In a time of intense competition, the attorney’s message—“Liberty ought to have no enemies”—was modest and conciliatory. The distinctions drawn between Whig and Tory, Clintonian and Jay-ite, and, most recently, aristocrat and democrat, served only to destroy the general good, he said.
His oration was titled “Party Spirit,” a phrase with a long history, and for the next several years it was used steadily as an admonition to both sides on the American political scene. The original was penned by Joseph Addison in London in 1711, as part of the Spectator series of essays, which were still widely read and greatly admired in America in the mid-1790s. As relations within Congress and the executive, and between those two bodies, deteriorated, U.S. pamphleteers and newspapermen cribbed this passage most often:
There cannot a greater judgment befall a country than such a dreadful spirit of division as rends a government into two distinct people, and makes them greater strangers and more averse to one another, than if they were actually two different nations. The effects of such a division are pernicious to the last degree …, fatal both to men’s morals and their understandings; it sinks the virtue of a nation, and not only so, but destroys even common sense.
A furious party-spirit, when it rages in its full violence, exerts itself in civil war and bloodshed; and when it is under its greatest restraints, naturally breaks out in falsehood, detraction, calumny, and a partial administration of justice. In a word, it fills a nation with spleen and rancour, and extinguishes all the seeds of good-nature, compassion and humanity.41
In an “unseasonable” state assembly contest that heated up in 1747, the New-York Gazette had editorialized against “violent party spirit.” The Boston Evening-Post had seen the writing on the wall in 1772, when a devotee of the penetrating style of Spectator appealed to enlightened morals: “A FURIOUS party spirit, when it rages in its full violence, exerts itself in civil war and bloodshed.” In July 1776, while contemplating the shaky partnership among leading gentlemen in Virginia, Edmund Pendleton was reminded of “the Spirit of Party, that bane of all public Councils,” in a letter he wrote to Jefferson. The concept lived on as a reminder, an oracle. Its resurfacing in the mid-1790s, though, was different, because the Addisonian admonition suddenly became pervasive.
Left unchecked, the spirit of party had always brought chaos to a liberty-loving republic. “What caused the fall of Athens?” the lawyer Wyche posed: “Faction: the spirit of discord prevailed, and liberty was destroyed.” Party spirit had a “pernicious” tendency to “make honest men hate one another,” another wrote, reiterating the message of Spectator. “A man should not allow himself to hate even his enemies.” Spectator provided the code words meant to prompt a softening of the accusatory script, but it was all to no avail.
By the end of 1793 it had become axiomatic that partisan “zeal” led to “calumny”—defamation and misrepresentation. But that is all that the two sides in political debate agreed on. Each denied that it was doing anything to contribute to the problem. As a species of invective belonging to their mutual blame game, the acrimon
ious “party-spirit” may have been used equally by those supportive of the Washington administration and those critical of it, but the term was used more excitedly in pro-administration publications. For instance, the Mirrour, a conservative newspaper published in Concord, New Hampshire, would open the year 1794 with a warning about democratic societies, “detached clubs … constantly involved in contradictions” (which meant hypocrisy). The “boisterous republicans,” “mighty liberty folks,” merely pretended to support a generous “rotation in office,” when what they really aimed for was the opposite: “They exert every nerve to keep their own party in office for life.” For papers like the Mirrour, the Republicans alone were spreading hate: “This party spirit is blind and headstrong; it never seeks truth; but with a mind made upon every subject it seeks for facts and opinions that favour his premature judgment.” The piece concluded with Spectator’s warning that party spirit “extinguishes all the seeds of good nature, compassion, and humanity.”
Shouts in earnest, appeals to common sense, came at a time of increasing alienation. Each side claimed legitimacy when it branded the other a “faction.” Words carried weight. John Adams adopted the prevailing vocabulary in a perplexed letter to his wife, Abigail, in late 1792: “I am really astonished at the blind Spirit of Party which has Lived on the whole soul of this Jefferson. There is not a Jacobin in France more devoted to Faction.” The New Yorker Washington Irving, who came of age in the 1790s and first came to prominence as a political satirist, fed the following line to the protagonist of one of his later, lesser-known tales: “The republic of letters is the most factious and discordant of all republics, ancient or modern.” The bookish men whom history chooses to remember as political geniuses were really gladiators, as frantic and fearful as they were inspired.42
Public discord was of more than rhetorical concern: it went against everything the leadership group had been taught growing up. Rational discourse was at the heart of the eighteenth century’s ideal of civil society. Enlightenment thinkers had imagined that the free exchange of ideas in public forums, whether set in type or voiced in small gatherings of educated citizens, created an environment conducive to intellectual and moral progress. Those who joined the democratic clubs drew upon this ideal. They defended themselves with appeals to open and transparent debate and freedom of speech—only to be labeled destructive to civil society. Who was right and who was wrong? Both sides could not be right.
This conundrum explains why Madison and Jefferson were so invested in public opinion. In their world, productive conversation took place on neutral terrain (beyond the control of government) where government abuses could be safely exposed. Faction, on the other hand, poisoned the body politic. It blinded and it inflamed the worst passions of the people. The American republic shook when vehicles of public opinion such as Freneau’s National Gazette, designed to advance debate, became virulent organs of factional rage. The dissemination of knowledge quickly turned into something else, as a new breed of journalist, influenced by the London tradition of slander and satire, took center stage. Refusing to adhere to the conventions of civil discourse, the partisan editor served up scandal to readers whose appetite for salacious news appeared insatiable. Faction, once ignited, stayed lit.
This was how the two political parties known as Federalist and Republican came to be. “In every political society, parties are unavoidable,” Madison had stated in January 1792. But when his statement proved true over the ensuing year, most did not like what they saw; the organized party was not greeted as a healthy means of managing political competition.
As two national tickets slowly but inexorably took form, a quiet war arose over whose definition would ultimately apply to quintessential political labels. Freneau’s National Gazette used the term federalist inclusively, taking in every devotee of republican government; but John Fenno, editor of the pro-administration Gazette of the United States, would not cede the term to Freneau’s readers: “The federalists, as they call themselves, speak of the constitution as a thing full of dangerous principles.” Fenno then identified the opposition’s stand as “pretend federalism.”
Thomas Greenleaf’s New-York Journal, friendly to Madison and Jefferson, took the next step in party definition in the summer of 1793, by explaining the absorption of former antifederalists into the Madisonian position: “In the year 1788 every one knew how to define an anti-federalist … The constitution once adopted, the appellation should have ceased … A modern anti-federalist, then, is one who is sincerely attached to the constitution of his country, which proceeded from the people.” In contrast were former federalists who had made government the “servant” of “a host of speculators.” They were not to be called federalists, because Madison’s supporters had never abandoned the name. The New-York Journal offered an easy definition: federal was “an English word, strictly meaning a leagued confederacy, a compact.”43
But as the months went by, the word republican became the first choice of the widening anti-administration alliance, while those who supported the administration identified themselves with the “benign influences of the federal government” that extended to all states of the Union. They referred to themselves as “true friends of the constitution” and “friends to peace freedom and government” but saw no need to contrive any fancier name for their creed than federal or federalist. Initially some experimented with the more comprehensive federal republican, which did not stick at the time but would revive on conservative newspaper banners during Jefferson’s and Madison’s presidencies.
The banner of a newly established newspaper in Baltimore read Federal Intelligencer. Its editorial policy was to reveal the hypocrisy in its opponents’ naming practices and to expose the crankiness of those out of power: “It might seem, from the outs, or Antifederalists, as they were called, that they are the only friends of liberty and the constitution, while the federalists are become enemies to liberty and the government … Instead of Antifederalist you are to use the word republican, and in place of federalist you are to use the word aristocrat.” Lumping together all self-styled republicans as disorderly “democrats,” many of whom were recent arrivals to America (which, to most minds, meant quarrelsome Scots and Irishmen), the Federal Intelligencer insisted that no “democrat” had ever taken part in “one single act to advance the independence of America”; yet these same troublemakers were trying to convince native-born citizens that “the old federalist cares nothing about the people, and wishes to destroy the government.”44
American newspapers were not great profit centers, but hard-working and increasingly contentious printer-editors believed that their aggressive efforts to earn the public’s trust were paying off for them in other ways. People paid attention. Politicians could not ignore them. During the next two years the editors’ role in electoral politics enlarged as they set the country’s Republicans and Federalists against one another. Accusing and satirizing at will, the partisan press moved from population centers into smaller and smaller communities.45
Party spirit had transformed the landscape. Fearless and full of life, the American newspaper of the 1790s merrily rejected long-established modes of public decorum and took a sledgehammer to the character and dignity of homo politicus.
James Madison (1751–1836), as a member of the House of Representatives. Painted by Charles Willson Peale, 1792. Courtesy Gilcrease Museum
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), as secretary of state under George Washington. Painted by Charles Willson Peale, 1791. Courtesy Independence National Historical Park
Edmund Pendleton (1721–1803), Virginia’s foremost politician at the time of the Revolution, was a crucial resource for both Madison and Jefferson. William Mercer miniature, ca. 1790. Courtesy Virginia Historical Society
Edmund Randolph (1753–1813), a friend and ally to both Madison and Jefferson, held such positions as governor of Virginia and attorney general of the United States before succumbing to political assassination at the hands of highly placed Hamiltoni
ans.
Patrick Henry (1736–1799), the most popular man in Virginia, was for many years the formidable opponent of Madison and Jefferson.
William Short (1759–1848), Virginia-born diplomat who studied the law under Jefferson, became his secretary in Paris, and transcended Virginia parochialism. Painted by Rembrandt Peale. Courtesy Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary; gift of Mary Churchill Short, Fanny Short Butler, and William Short
Marquis de Lafayette (1758–1834), French aristocrat whose ties to Madison and Jefferson, as to the American Revolution itself, were lifelong. Engraving from an 1857 text, based on a portrait of 1790.
James Monroe (1757–1831), Jefferson’s protégé, Madison’s friend and sometime rival, who succeeded Madison as president. National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
John Taylor of Caroline (1753–1824), the nephew of Edmund Pendleton, was a nationally known promoter of agrarianism and an apologist for the institution of slavery.
William Jones (1760–1831), a proactive secretary of the navy during the War of 1812, was one of the few cabinet members Madison came to trust as president. Courtesy Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Albert Gallatin (1761–1849), born in Geneva, Switzerland, was a western Pennsylvania politician despised by the Federalists. He served as treasury secretary in the Jefferson and Madison administrations and was an irreplaceable policy advisor to both presidents.
A newspaper welcomes Madison, Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton to Philadelphia in an entirely too optimistic poem, as the federal government sets up its temporary capital in the City of Brotherly Love at the end of 1790. This is the start of what grew to be the most emotionally exhausting decade in American political history prior to the Civil War.