Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  Madison would win the argument, as he had in the past when he brought Jefferson out of retirement. In an awkward reprise of his emotional letter to Madison of June 1793, when he had maintained that the motion of his blood no longer kept time with the tumult of the world, Jefferson acknowledged on April 27, 1795, that while he was still in the cabinet, he had been approached (by whom he did not say) to run for president. To do so, then or now, would be to give his enemies the satisfaction of being able to say that they were right about his presidential ambitions. That was not the full explanation, however. At fifty-two, he claimed he was beginning to feel the effects of growing old: “My health is entirely broken down within the last eight months; my age requires that I should place my affairs in a clear state.” He protested to Madison that “the little spice of ambition, which I had in my younger days, has long since evaporated.” Knowing how adept his associate was in putting pressure on him, Jefferson punctuated his statement with the most definitive line he could summon: “I do not mean an opening for future discussion, or that I may be reasoned out of it. The question is forever closed with me.” Somehow Madison still talked him into challenging John Adams for the presidency.29

  Jefferson and Adams had continued to maintain cordial relations through the mails. Late in 1794, fresh from a long vacation back home in Massachusetts, the vice president wrote the former secretary of state from Philadelphia: “I have Spent my Summer So deliciously in farming that I return to the Old Story of Politicks with great Reluctance. The Earth is grateful. You find it so, I dare say. I wish We could both say the Same of its Inhabitants.” Agriculture was a convenient subject for two who might otherwise step on each other’s principles. Jefferson gamely replied to Adams: “I have found so much tranquility of mind in a total abstraction from every thing political … Tranquility becomes daily more and more the object of my life.” If he really wished it so, he wished in vain. To a fellow Virginia planter, he feigned: “I am encouraging myself to grow lazy.” Insisting that he was no longer attempting to steer the ship of state in any particular direction, he sang his own dirge: “I consider myself now but as a passenger, leaving the world and it’s [sic] government to those who are likely to live longer in it.”30

  In a letter to the apolitical Maria Cosway, who knew him much better as a man of the arts than as a politician, Jefferson could not resist making reference to the “great buz about Mr. Jay and his treaty.” But then he recovered his familiar pose, resolutely describing the transition from a “public life which I always hated” to “the full enjoiment [sic] of my farm, my family, and my books.” He was, he said, eating the peaches, grapes, and figs of his own garden: “I am become, for instance, a real farmer, measuring fields, following my ploughs, helping the haymakers, and never knowing a day which has not done something for futurity. How much better this than to be shut up in the four walls of an office, the sun of heaven excluded, the balmy breeze never felt.” Before he was finished, he reclaimed the nostalgic feeling that had been a part of his romantic letters to Mrs. Cosway when he was in Paris and she in London: “In truth whenever I think of you, I am hurried off on the wings of imagination into regions where fancy submits all things to our will.”31

  Jefferson may have had a carefree side, but his carefully cataloged correspondence suggests that he rarely showed it in this most demanding decade. Much as he tried, he could not remain aloof from politics.

  “Intestine Convulsion”

  Hamilton’s men were concerned that the unpopularity of Jay’s treaty might swing opinion back to France, in which case Monroe’s representations to that country’s new leaders would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that could not be allowed to occur.

  Secretary of State Edmund Randolph was the only Virginian in national office who might still have imagined there could be a middle ground. But his drumming out of office in 1795 ended Randolph’s career in politics and instructed Madison and Jefferson that it was time to acknowledge that they were building a distinctive party and not simply putting forward an opinion.

  Randolph’s downfall was set in motion in August when a letter written by the French minister, Baron Fauchet, to his government, was intercepted at sea by a British warship. The letter was then translated and presented to President Washington. It showed Randolph in a questionable light. He appeared to have revealed sensitive information to the French minister. At best, Fauchet was overstating what Randolph had said to him in order to impress his superiors in Paris. But there could be no gray area in these black-and-white times.

  Washington did not understand French, and the translation he read was defective. Hamilton’s handpicked successor, Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut, and the man who replaced Henry Knox in the War Department, Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, deliberately made it appear that Randolph had committed treason. Wolcott and Pickering confronted the unsuspecting cabinet officer, in a scene they staged for the president’s benefit. Blindsided, the unoffending Randolph had no time to react. He could see that Washington, whom he had known since his Williamsburg boyhood, was already convinced of his guilt. The nation’s second secretary of state promptly resigned his office. He drew up papers freeing the slaves he had brought with him to Philadelphia and rushed to New England to track down Fauchet. There he found the French minister and obtained from him an affidavit to prove his innocence of any charge of collusion with the French.

  That December the disgraced cabinet officer released a statement in his own defense. A Vindication of Mr. Randolph’s Resignation was a nearly hundred-page pamphlet, giving a blow-by-blow account of his untarnished patriotism, his relations with Fauchet, and the unraveling of his career within the executive. Son of a noted Tory, Randolph had been a Washington aide early in the war, a governor of Virginia, and the first public servant to hold two different cabinet-level appointments. Over the course of his career, he had always sought to steer a middle course. He believed in facts. He aimed to be fair.

  The Vindication is more than a denial of wrongdoing; it is a testament to unselfish public service. Highlighting his long and honorable devotion to one man, Randolph addressed that man directly, insisting that the two cabinet posts he held were positions “which I did not covet, and which I would not have accepted, had I not been governed by my affection for you, my trust in your republicanism, and your apparent superiority to the artifices of my enemies.” Sensitive to the need to keep Washington from political harm, Randolph had acted as a best friend did, persuading the president “to abhor party” and forestall “intestine convulsion.” He had done all he could to see that Washington went down in history as “a bulwark against party-rage.” Despite such carefully wrought well-wishes, readers were meant to conclude that the president had submitted to a party, to the detriment of the country.32

  With a single swipe, ignoring facts and fairness, the Hamiltonians had undone the many years of trust between Washington and Randolph. In simple terms, they wanted the last Virginian out of the cabinet. Wolcott had been, until lately, comptroller of the treasury, in charge of putting Hamilton’s national bank into operation. It is no exaggeration to say that he was completely indebted to Hamilton and completely responsive to him. Pickering, once adjutant general of the Continental Army, had a strong mind and blustery personality and would be an outspoken and unforgiving critic of the Republicans for years to come. These two combined to put the squeeze on Randolph when they introduced the poisonous Fauchet letter to a gullible president.33

  So although Randolph was innocent of all charges, his pamphlet contained enough venom to ensure his political exile. Jefferson dissected the work and sent a critique of it to the restless Virginia Republican William Branch Giles. The gist of Jefferson’s argument was that political neutrality was useless and that Randolph’s failure showed why the establishment of a party was sometimes necessary. He wrote: “Were parties here divided merely by a greediness for office, as in England, to take a part in either would be unworthy of a reasonable or moral man. But where the principle o
f difference is as substantial and as strongly pronounced as between the republicans and the Monocrats of our country I hold it as honorable to take a firm and decided part, and as immoral to pursue a middle line.” This one statement captures Thomas Jefferson’s political creed more succinctly than any of his better-known or more eloquent texts.34

  Another who took an interest in Randolph’s pamphlet was Federalist-friendly “Peter Porcupine.” This barbed quill of a pen name belonged to a newcomer to Philadelphia, William Cobbett, a thirty-year-old British Army veteran who had been stationed in Canada for several years before deciding to try his luck in the United States. A robust critic of the emerging Democratic-Republican Party, he hit the ground running, disputing Randolph point by point. Writing to Jefferson, Madison acknowledged the impact of “Porcupine’s” treatment of the Vindication: “It is handled with much satirical scurrility …, ingenuity and plausibility.” To Monroe, he was rather more severe, calling Cobbett’s piece a “malignant attack.”35

  Meanwhile, the bruised author of the Vindication wrote his old and trusted friend Madison and confessed to how deeply he had experienced Washington’s betrayal. “I feel happy,” he said, “at my emancipation from an attachment to a man, who practiced upon me the profound hypocrisy of Tiberius, and the injustice of an assassin.” It was Randolph’s way of telling Madison that he knew he had just written his own political obituary.36

  Given the rich educations that the gentry received, their classical allusions tend to be illuminating, and Randolph’s invocation of the Emperor Tiberius is no exception. For what turned out to be his last hurrah as a member of the administration, he had taken the pseudonym “Germanicus,” virtuous nephew and adopted son of the Roman emperor, in a series of letters he published in defense of Washington’s “firmness” during the Whiskey Rebellion. It was in the “Germanicus” letters that Randolph had yielded to the term “self created societies,” accusing the democratic societies of planting the seeds of America’s destruction. Such societies were fit for Revolutionary times, he wrote, but “ought to be avoided in seasons of tranquillity because they may be easily abused.” He was wrong about the tranquillity and wrong about who was committing abuses.

  But that is not why Randolph’s pseudonym of 1794 revealed so much in 1795. “Germanicus” symbolized competence and loyalty—especially loyalty. As he prepared his Vindication, Randolph could only have been shocked by the supreme irony in his choice of pen name. Or perhaps he had forgotten how the story ended: the emperor repaid Germanicus for his honorable service by attaching him to an officer who despised him and had him poisoned. Tiberius was thought to have been behind the conspiracy, though it was never proven.37

  In unsubtle ways, Randolph had paternal expectations from Washington. Their break—his shaming—was catastrophic for him; but in politics, suspicion could kill a friendship or an alliance in an instant. So Randolph consciously wrote his Vindication as a life-affirming experience—an “emancipation,” as he told Madison. Washington’s decision to abandon Randolph is harder to explain. He had never had occasion to question the younger man’s integrity. And yet he convicted Randolph on the flimsiest of evidence: a report he never verified, a report that had passed through British hands. Why did he suddenly accept this dark portrait of his long-trusted subordinate? The answer may lie in the Revolutionary past, in an incident known as the Conway Cabal. In 1777–78, at a low point in the war, a number of prominent civilians and military men were writing openly of Washington’s incompetence. The Continental Congress was all abuzz with news of infighting. It came to Washington’s attention that one general in particular, Thomas Conway, had circulated sharp criticisms of his military prowess. So the commander in chief dismissed him with contempt, rallied support, and ruined Conway’s career. In both that instance and this one Washington acted impulsively, apt to believe he was being betrayed.38

  Madison was kind to Randolph, agreeing that Washington’s overreaction was inexcusable. He wrote Monroe that the Vindication redeemed Randolph’s honor, proving his innocence, so that even “his greatest enemies will not persuade themselves that he was under the corrupt influence of France.” But at the same time Madison read the pamphlet as the confession of a failed politician, saying that not even Randolph’s “best friend” could “save him from the self condemnation of his political career as explained by himself.” Madison used the third person singular: his best friend. It is an oddly detached construction, because Madison was really talking about himself; he had long been Randolph’s best friend in the carnivorous land of politics.39

  Edmund Randolph’s star had finally faded. Born to privilege and known to the movers and shakers in Virginia from the time he learned to write, he would never be asked to hold high office again—not under Jefferson, not under Madison. Burdened by personal financial concerns, he returned to the practice of law. He amused himself by writing a history of Virginia, though it would not be published until after his death. Adding insult to injury, when Washington considered a replacement for Randolph as secretary of state, he thought first of Patrick Henry—a peculiar choice at this or any moment—before settling on the redoubtable Timothy Pickering.40

  “Red-Hot Democratic Fools”

  Washington had made his choice. Hamilton had rendered it impossible for Jefferson to remain in the cabinet once Washington had chosen Hamilton over him; Hamiltonians had made it impossible for Randolph, whose one ally in the inner circle was the president himself. It was a purge of Virginia Republicans.

  No Republican anywhere had influence with Washington anymore. The president got his European news from the brilliant, idiosyncratic, ungovernable Gouverneur Morris, a Federalist who predicted that France was tired of experiment and would restore the monarchy before long. Morris acknowledged (and he said the same to Hamilton) that England was not the perfect ally; but, he added, any injuries America suffered from that quarter could be endured.41

  Out of government, Hamilton made sure that he was still heard from. He kept in close touch with the president and the new cabinet. “When shall we cease to consider ourselves as a colony to France?” he posed in a letter to Attorney General Bradford, when Randolph’s purported treason came to light. Hamilton’s unambiguous goal was the total eradication of pro-French feeling in America.42

  In July 1795 Hamilton challenged James Nicholson to a duel. A naval officer during the Revolution, Nicholson was active in the Democratic Society of New York. He was also Albert Gallatin’s father-in-law. Nicholson had annoyed Hamilton with the tenor of his arguments against the Jay Treaty, which somehow proved hurtful enough for Hamilton that he resorted to a deadly challenge. “The unprovoked rudeness and insult which I experienced from you,” wrote Hamilton, “leaves me no option.”

  Hamilton proceeded to make out his will. This time, at least, his impulsiveness ended without bloodshed. On the day following the above exchange, without knowing how the challenge would play out, Hamilton (as “Camillus”) began what would turn into a long series of newspaper pieces in defense of Jay’s treaty. “No one can be blind to the finger of party spirit,” he wrote in the first of the series, accusing the “leaders of clubs” of criticizing Jay in order to elevate Thomas Jefferson and George Clinton.43

  Moved by Hamilton’s enthusiasm, and having taken a liking to Jay, President Washington came to view the imperfect treaty as a lesser evil. Debate would drag on during the second half of 1795 and into the early months of 1796; and though confidence in Washington diminished in some quarters, conservative voices stayed on the attack. This was perhaps best expressed in Noah Webster’s American Minerva, where it was written that opposition to the treaty was “begotten in cabal—supported by knavery” and sustained by a minority.44

  The newspaper was a partisan feast, dripping with political bloodlust. Federalists found satirical poems to be a particular delight. They contained every slur and every slight of the times, mocking the “servile” American Jacobins and the foreign origins and foreign principles of every so-
called Antifederal dissenter. The foreign-born (“A medley mixed from every land”) were dangerous because they produced unrest.

  Scotch, Irish, renegadoes rude,

  From Faction’s dregs fermenting brewed;

  Misguided tools of antifeds

  With clubs anarchial for your heads …

  And whenever “self created societies” were mentioned, James Madison was found making excuses for them. The misdirected rabble were

  Well pleas’d as Madisonian tools

  Or red-hot democratic fools.

  This devastating satire distinguished the Madisonian trash from America’s better prospects under a President John Adams, who was by now regarded as Washington’s presumptive successor. A New England paper, meanwhile, came up with a devious abbreviation of “Madisonian” when it denominated the “Jaco-Demo Crats” as “Mads.” Other critics would pick up on the useful nickname.45

  Aurora editor Benjamin Franklin Bache was not the only “Franklin” in Philadelphia to take on John Jay and George Washington in 1795. In the spring of that year Pennsylvania Republican Alexander James Dallas adopted the name of the late Dr. Franklin, whom he had met years before at the University of Edinburgh. The Letters of Franklin, Or, the Conduct of the Executive, and the Treaty Negotiated by the Chief Justice of the United States, did not deny the constitutional powers of the executive and the U.S. Senate in treaty making but emphasized the unresponsiveness of both to the will of the American people. “This Treaty is of a piece with the other perfidies of Great Britain,” Dallas criticized, while praising Madison for seeking a way to regulate America’s commerce with Britain that would control the “hostile spirit of that nation.” Dallas posed the question of the decade: “How comes it that every man who prefers France to Great Britain—republicanism to monarchy—is denominated Antifederalist, Jacobin, Disorganizer, Miscreant, &c., while men of another humour arrogantly and exclusively assume the titles of Federalist, Friends to order, &c. &c.?”46