Aware that the United States was divided into two rival camps, the British were in no hurry to allay its concerns. Washington hoped that Jay, accommodating by nature, would convince the British to abandon the western forts, as they had consented to do a decade before. He hoped too that both sides would reach an agreement to grant American vessels easier access to the British West Indies. He could not ignore the growing number of incidents in which British warships had captured American merchant ships.
The chief justice sailed to London in mid-May 1794 and followed his instructions closely. But as the British would not bend much, Jay fell short of everyone’s expectations. Rather than express outrage over British depredations, as Madison would have preferred, he remained circumspect, attuned to British sensibilities and driven by a concern that a commercially isolated United States would be at a disadvantage.12
Meanwhile, Monroe left for Paris, accompanied by his wife and young daughter. He knew why he had been chosen for the assignment. The president, he told Jefferson, wanted “a republican character” to serve as his special envoy in order to repress whispers about his own political drift. Not surprisingly, Hamilton proposed Edmund Randolph for the assignment. Randolph, in turn, proposed Monroe. Monroe had offered Burr’s name, which would have made Madison perfectly happy. But Burr was a New Yorker, as Jay was, and Robert Livingston, another New Yorker, had already refused the assignment. So after consultation with Madison and others, Monroe had accepted the appointment “upon the necessity of cultivating France,” as he put it, “and the incertainty of the person upon whom it might otherwise fall.”13
Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of the late Dr. Franklin, was the editor of the pro-French Philadelphia General Advertiser. On learning of Monroe’s mission, he gloated in his paper that a “DEMOCRAT” was going to France who would “supersede” the authority of Gouverneur Morris, Federalist. This was a rare, early evocation of the word democrat in a prideful light. The Federalists were using it as a defamatory term, equating the mobs of Revolutionary France with the “mad democrats” in America. It was the beginning of Bache’s short but colorful reign as the one editor who could intimidate the president of the United States.14
At the end of 1794 Bache’s General Advertiser became known as the Aurora, projecting the dawn of a new age as its anti-administration bent became more purposeful. The editor proved so infatuated with the Revolution in France that he became a complete apologist. He failed even to pick up on Jefferson’s abandonment of Genet. Imbued with an excess of optimism, Bache fed the once popular sentiment that time was accelerating and world historical events multiplying because of the French Revolution. Politicized readers nervously awaited each new piece of intelligence—rumors first, and then corroborations from abroad—which Bache added to an already impassioned American stew.
In 1795, as he began personalizing his attacks, Bache went right after the greatly admired president. Stoking the fires of partisanship, he pronounced that “a good joiner may be a clumsy watch-maker; that an able carpenter may be a blundering taylor; and that a good General may be a most miserable politician.” In time, when he ran out of coy metaphors, Bache would directly assail Washington’s generalship.15
“God Save King George!”
In September 1794 President Washington became General Washington again, and rode at the head of an army. Hamilton rode with him. Another of his generals, Virginia governor Henry Lee, who just a year before had fantasized joining the French Revolutionaries, went along—all of them in pursuit of a domestic enemy. The improbable “enemy” was a nearly invisible corps of western Pennsylvania whiskey distillers who were refusing to pay taxes on their product—taxes established by Hamilton in 1791. At some point between 1791, when he attacked Hamilton in the strongest terms, and 1794, when he decided that the threat of the mob was the greatest threat America faced, “Light-Horse Harry” Lee had turned away from Madison and Jefferson to become an ardent Federalist.16
In the whiskey rebels’ corner were two prominent Republicans from western Pennsylvania: Hugh Henry Brackenridge (another of Madison’s Princeton classmates) and the Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, who was just beginning an illustrious career in politics and finance. As the tax resisters made theirs an issue of freedom from oppressive government, they found solidarity all across the backcountry of western Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky.
Washington called up nearly thirteen thousand militiamen, larger than the size of his entire force during the Revolution. With Hamilton at his side, he led a large contingent of them toward Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Hagerstown, Maryland. These were sites of resistance, to be sure, but only two of many locations in the trans-Appalachian counties of states where the federal government was too weak to make a real show of force. Rural populations communicated easily across state lines, facilitating the movement of arms while giving the backcountry a sense of the government’s weakness. Washington faced the logistical nightmare of feeding and marching an undisciplined army during a change of seasons in the mountains. As they moved about, government troops encountered sporadic protests from plain people in Philadelphia, Norfolk, Baltimore, and other places. In Baltimore a dissenter cried out “God save King George!” and was tarred and feathered by his social betters, who evidently did not appreciate political satire when the butt of the joke was George Washington.
In this phase of the conflict, shots were fired but few casualties resulted. The whiskey men, who had resorted to strongly worded petitions in the early days of the protest, saw themselves as reborn Sons of Liberty, those roguish heroes of the American Revolution whose legend loomed large. But Washington and Hamilton were not in a conciliatory mood, though they might have been: the army they raised was comprised of the kinds of people they were opposing, not those whose interests they were defending. Brackenridge and Gallatin, seeing the hopelessness of outright rebellion, delivered a message of moderation to the disaffected, pleading with them to reject radical methods and exhibit loyalty to the government.
In fact, no rebel army ever took the field against federal conscripts. Madison wrote to Monroe that the whole episode was a ploy by Hamilton to add military despotism to the catalog of powers he wanted the executive to engross. It was clear that aside from a handful of identifiable mischief-makers, there were no rebel leaders. That did not stop Hamilton from ordering the arrest of 150 men, all of whom Washington eventually pardoned. Under these circumstances, the administration’s response to the rebels was an obvious case of overkill.
The president had had to report to Philadelphia, because Congress was back in session. He left the army in Hamilton’s hands. After a month the troops returned east, having accomplished nothing that could reflect well on the administration. Some two thousand of the tax resisters had by this time moved into deeper frontier, where the army of the federal government could not reach them. Once the threat of force ended, the distillers resumed their normal operations, and no one came back to enforce the excise laws.17
The war on the whiskey rebels served the purposes of Madison and Jefferson, who saw value in exploiting social division in the North. The president laid blame on the democratic societies for having fomented the rebellion, a position from which he could not turn away. The only member of his cabinet to oppose a military response was Edmund Randolph, who advocated the use of commissioners to negotiate a peaceful solution—he listed eleven solid reasons in support of his opinion. Randolph, the former attorney general and now secretary of state, argued that the rebellion did not meet the constitutional standard of treason. Washington had not wanted to act precipitously, so he gave Randolph’s plan a chance to work.
Randolph never looked so good as he did at this moment of decision. He had told the president the unvarnished, embarrassing truth—that there was no crisis. But then Hamilton stepped in front of him, outmaneuvering Randolph by refusing to give the commissioners time to do their job. Pretending that negotiations had failed, Hamilton brought the president on board with his plan and called up the m
ilitia. Randolph had no traction left after this.
The problem was compounded by the president’s poor judgment. Indeed, the sequence of events revealed Washington’s tragic flaw: he was not one to admit defeat. Randolph was not merely sidelined; he was forced to submit, to demonstrate his loyalty to Washington by retreating from his principled stand. He went on the record agreeing with his president that the democratic societies had stirred up all the trouble. Randolph went so far as to say that the “late insurrection” had “threatened the authority of the government” and “degraded the American character.”18
If ever there was a moment when Jefferson could have been justified in suspecting Randolph of “Cameleon” tendencies or a lack of backbone, this was it. In November 1794 Randolph served as ghostwriter of the president’s attack on what were now being called “self created” societies. Congressman Madison did not at all like the implication of the phrase and led an effort in Congress to remove “self created” as a designation for what were, in fact, civil gatherings of republicans. Politically charged words continued to drive debate.
With Randolph neutralized, Madison refused to let the matter go. This generally unheralded moment actually serves to define Madison’s centrality in national politics over the first five years of rule by the Constitution. For when Washington came into office in 1789, it was Madison on whom the first president relied most; and in 1794 the same man was defining Washington’s failure as a leader. The fact that Greenville, South Carolina, called its democratic society the “Madisonian,” and Fenno’s Gazette of the United States identified the political clubs en masse as “Madisonian,” probably contributed to the president’s apprehension that his agreement to serve a second term could ruin him. Neither said so, but Madison and the president were now pitted against each other directly. And in 1794, as in 1789, Jefferson was absent from the government and Madison most formidable as a one-man political force.19
As soon as he heard of Washington’s assault on the “self created” societies, Jefferson related to Madison his astonishment that the president would allow himself “to be the organ of such an attack on the freedom of discussion, the freedom of writing, printing and publishing.” If the “democratical societies” plotted anything, he wrote, it was “nourishment of the republican principles of our constitution.” Never one to lose hope, Jefferson took solace in reports from militiamen just back from service who said that the frontier resisters were at no point cowed by the overwhelming show of federal force. They had let the army escape harm, not the other way around. But he also took the reports to mean that a more coordinated western separatist movement was in the offing—a possible dismemberment of the Union. “The excise-law is an infernal one,” Jefferson growled, perversely encouraged that further frontier disturbances would be blamed on the administration.20
At this moment especially, Madison and Jefferson recognized the value of a critical public to their cause. Two of the leading Republicans in Pennsylvania, Alexander James Dallas and Albert Gallatin (both born outside the United States), were active members of democratic societies. Gallatin spoke with a noticeable French accent and had already made himself a symbol of the French menace among Federalists in Congress. In 1793, thirteen years after emigrating from Switzerland, he found his election to the U.S. Senate overturned on the basis of his qualifications for citizenship.
In many ways, Gallatin was more American than the provincials who went after him. He had spent his first years in Revolutionary America tutoring French at Harvard. He knew from firsthand experience how western land was a magnet for Virginians, having traveled to the Ohio River in the mid-1780s and having speculated, without much success, in the vicinity of some of Washington’s properties. Before permanently settling in Pennsylvania, he thought for a time that he would acculturate among Virginians who had migrated west. When the Federalists rewrote the law concerning citizenship, they were unequivocally conniving to exclude the Gallic Republican.
Elected to the House in 1794, Gallatin began his long political career by speaking out against Jay’s mission and writing against Hamilton’s economic system. Like Madison and Jefferson, he was leery of the long-term national debt that Hamilton so enthusiastically embraced. Federalists could tout their magical-sounding “sinking fund” all they wanted, just as William Pitt had done in England, but there was, Gallatin said with wry insistence, only one way for a nation to pay its debts and that was to “spend less than you receive.” Reporting to Jefferson on Congressman Gallatin’s specialized skills, Madison credited him for being a “real Treasure” as a colleague, “sound in his principles, accurate in his calculations and indefatigable in his researches.” They had found someone they could rely on to undo the Hamiltonian system.21
“An Impenetrable Secret”
In London, John Jay was well treated. The British considered him second only to Hamilton among England’s American friends. Lord Grenville, their chief negotiator, had been a member of Parliament since the age of twenty-three and was a self-possessed political operative. Concerned with U.S.-Canadian issues for a decade already, he was well enough aware of America’s exploitable weaknesses to have thought it possible to wean Kentucky away from the eastern states. Grenville gave Jay few nonnegotiable demands, which made the American’s acquiescence to British power seem less dramatic than it would appear to his many critics back home.22
In Paris the Terror was finally past, but anxiety was still rampant. As Washington’s envoy, James Monroe faced a skeptical leadership set, men who wondered whether he represented the administration or just imagined he did. Monroe sought to allay these fears by assuring his hosts that the United States would always support its sister republic. “Their governments are similar,” he volunteered. “They both cherish the same principles and rest on the same basis: the equal and unalienable rights of man.”
His passionate address was immediately reprinted. Monroe’s diplomatic counterpart in London was irritated, and when a transcript arrived stateside, Madison felt obliged to inform Monroe that the Federalists had found his tone “grating.” Secretary of State Randolph reprimanded him for going too far: his instructions had been to assure the French of America’s attachment without suggesting any abandonment of U.S. neutrality at a time of Anglo-French hostilities. Whereas Jay was expected to negotiate a treaty, Monroe was expected to give the false impression that the administration was guileless in conveying its respect for France.23
While the Monroes were in Paris, the newly wedded Madisons occupied their Philadelphia home during the congressional session. Madison asked Elizabeth Monroe to make purchases for him in Paris: curtains, carpets, and furniture “in a stile suitable to my stile and fashion.” In the months since the “self created” societies reanimated him, Jefferson returned to commenting on his farming activities. Now, when Madison heard from him, the lead subject was usually a mix of weather reports and corn or wheat prices. Lest Madison allow himself to think that his friend was ready to return to the fracas, Jefferson would request a pamphlet on crop rotation. It was Madison who saw to it that the conversation never strayed from national affairs for long. He kept Jefferson current on the “Treasury faction,” as he called the Hamiltonians; he wrote of state elections and the changing shape of parties. While he had not heard privately from Monroe, Madison seemed to think that France was strong and the rest of Europe resentful of the fact.24
Shortly after New Year’s 1795, without specifying his sources, Madison told Jefferson that he believed the Jay mission to London would bear fruit. “It is expected,” he wrote, “that he will accomplish much if not all he aims at. It will be scandalous, if we do not under present circumstances, get all that we have a right to demand.” He was setting them both up for disappointment.
In early spring Jay returned with treaty in hand. Its terms were not immediately made public, forcing Madison to change his tune. “It is kept an impenetrable secret by the Executive,” he noted scornfully in a letter to Jefferson.25 For more than two months, the
country waited to learn what Jay had negotiated, because President Washington was reluctant to endorse what he knew was a less-than-perfect treaty; he finally came to the decision that if the Federalist-led Senate approved it, he would go along. And that is precisely what occurred. By the terms of the treaty, the British agreed to evacuate the same Northwest frontier posts they had already agreed to abandon in 1783, something Lord Grenville had been prepared to do even before Jay arrived. But England made no new commercial concessions. It did not agree to stop taking American merchant vessels and confiscating their cargo. It did not even begin to recognize the rights of neutrals during wartime. The treaty did reduce the chance of Anglo-American war, which was Washington’s first priority. And Jay did not suffer much for his weakness as a negotiator: he was elected governor of New York while abroad. It pleased him to step down from the bench in order to assume the office he had wanted three years before, when he narrowly lost it to George Clinton.26
Despite Monroe’s efforts in Paris, an undesired consequence of the Jay Treaty was that it intensified resentment toward the United States on the part of the French. The treaty was not neutrality to them; it was subservience to England, a resumption of the colonial relationship. American professions of friendship would no longer be deemed credible. No one could have expected the French to take a nuanced view at this time, with Hamilton, who wished to model America’s economy on Britain’s, steering U.S. foreign policy. His pending retirement from the cabinet would not put an end to his influence.27
“A Real Farmer”
The time had come for Madison and Jefferson to discuss the future of the presidency after Washington. At the end of 1794, precisely one year after he resigned from the cabinet, Jefferson pleaded that the nation could not afford for both of them to retire. If Madison ever left the House, he said, it should be to accept “a more splendid and a more efficacious post.” He meant, of course, the presidency. Madison took several months to answer, and when he did, he said only that his reasons for shrinking from higher ambition were “insuperable” and “obvious” and would be spelled out when they had the “latitude of a free conversation.” Jefferson should prepare himself “to hear truths, which no inflexibility will be able to withstand.”28
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