Madison and Jefferson
Page 51
Jefferson did not move from the boardinghouse on Capitol Hill into the large, but largely vacant, President’s House on Pennsylvania Avenue until he had been in office two weeks. He engaged Captain Meriwether Lewis, a twenty-seven-year-old from Albemarle, as his private secretary. The president’s salary of $25,000 was quite ample, but Jefferson applied a good portion of it to the support of his French steward, French chef, and other staff. Jefferson’s noted love of good wines extended his financial outlay, while providing guests with stories of his epicurean table. The inauguration itself was a more modest affair than the first two presidents’ had been. This was a symbol of change in keeping with Jefferson’s anti-aristocratic principles. John Adams did not stay in town for the ceremony. He and his wife left before dawn, riding north into a less-than-ideal retirement.29
The third president was sworn in by Chief Justice Marshall, who that very day paid Jefferson a backhanded compliment in a letter to the disappointed candidate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney: “The democrats are divided into speculative theorists and absolute terrorists,” he wrote. “With the latter I am not disposed to class Mr. Jefferson.”30 Marshall had honed his political skills before his appointment to the High Court, and Jefferson did not know how to neutralize him. As a result, Marshall would occupy the spot on Jefferson’s enemies list that Patrick Henry and Alexander Hamilton had held before. With Henry entombed and Hamilton ineffectual, Marshall had taken their place. He was a Virginian who possessed the kind of popularity that could threaten the Republican mission, and he had no second thoughts about flexing his legal muscle.
President Jefferson would have to contest men younger than himself who did not subscribe to older models of deference. Yet whatever bitterness he felt concerning his predecessor’s appointments, he did not show it in (to draw on Marshall’s phrasing) the theoretical speculation contained in his cheerful, stirring, almost sermonic inaugural address.
“Harmony and Affection”
On March 4, 1801, the incoming president carried on his person an address that had gone through several drafts. The House chamber was still unfinished, though the Capitol’s physical incompleteness did not detract from the dignity of the occasion. With gravity, and in a small voice, Jefferson read to a full Senate chamber that contained members of both sexes.
“Friends and Fellow Citizens,” he saluted, exalting his country as a “rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land … advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.” As many before have argued, the first inaugural was Jefferson’s most eloquent public address. With hope and the promise of forgiveness, he proposed to his countrymen: “Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.” Alluding to both the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the Alien and Sedition Acts, he continued: “And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.” But then he softened his language again: “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans: we are all federalists.”31
The message of political toleration and social harmony was a hypnotic suggestion meant to bring about Jefferson’s therapeutic solution to the diseased imagination of the pathological decade. It recalled the imagery of 1776, when the union of the states was depicted as thirteen clocks that chimed together and thirteen hearts that beat as one.32 Much in the way that his 1786 “Head and Heart” letter to Maria Cosway made friendship and commitment a visceral matter by invoking “generous spasms of the heart,” his inaugural sentiments bespoke a kind of manic compassion, an inventive altruism, by ignoring the fact that the emerging two-party system had up to that point made political cooperation impossible.
This was Jefferson at his best. With a lyrical energy that none of his contemporaries could even try to imitate, he relegated the “agonizing spasms of infuriated man” to the “throes and convulsions of the ancient world.” In saying this, he gave a kind of presidential blessing over a hopeful new world poised for change, for humane progress.
If we are to believe that Jefferson’s offer was legitimate, “We are all republicans: we are all federalists” was the high point of his optimism and his fondest vision for a democratic republic. These were not words that Madison would have uttered, because Madison did not recur to the kinds of rhetorical constructions Jefferson found irresistible; nor did he believe that such a healing could take place. Madison’s influence is absent from this production; he was, it appears, too preoccupied with family matters at the time to restrain the prose of the incoming president. Madison did not dream as Jefferson did, and Madison would not have declared, as Jefferson did in a letter of 1819, that his election symbolized a revolution—“the Revolution of 1800”—as real as that of 1776 had been.
As the inaugural address returned to like themes, the third president enlarged on his America, “the world’s best hope …, the strongest government on earth,” “a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” For the sake of promoting harmony, uplifting images eclipsed any and all suggestions of a specific policy direction. Still, it was the effusive appeal of “We are all republicans …” that readers of his speech focused on most intently, then as now. It was an offering, an olive branch after nearly ten years of an interparty communication breakdown—a decade of “agonizing spasms,” crowned with spite and satire.
These outpourings do not quite reveal what was in the politician’s head. Jefferson was anticipating improved conditions that would take place over a number of years, once the bitterest Federalists, an illegitimate, unrepresentative ruling group, were dethroned, and moderate Federalists, as a political minority, accepted a kinder and gentler oppositional arrangement until they ultimately merged with the Republicans. His unrelenting, long-term political strategy of eliminating all vestiges of monocracy and toryism—the extreme, minority element among those who identified themselves as Federalists—was disguised in his inaugural address as a mellow retreat from politics as usual. When the new order he envisioned came to be, the election of 1800 would stand as a testament to national redemption after a time of national delusion. The Republicans’ triumph meant that America was being restored to its first principles.33
But none of this was apparent as citizens found themselves focusing on the attention-getting phrase “We are all republicans: we are all federalists.” Jefferson’s clever composition worked not because it was original or visionary but because it was an easy concept for people to relate to who had been weaned on models of enlightened humanity in a colonial setting. Precisely one century earlier, in 1701, William Penn concluded a momentous agreement with the Conestoga tribe and declared that relations between his people and theirs would henceforth be governed by something even greater than filial affection. As the following generation of Indians remembered it, Governor Penn said that he would reckon whites and Indians as “one Body, one Blood, one Heart, and one Head.” At a council in Philadelphia, another Indian speaker qualified shortly thereafter, “William Penn said, We must all be one half Indian & the other half English, being as one Flesh & one Blood under one Head.” Peace between the cultures lasted for six decades, until white Pennsylvanians massacred the head-and-heart metaphor when they dispatched the Conestoga tribe. But for the white Pennsylvanians of 1801, the lesson drawn from history was that harmony was worth striving for.34
Additionally, both Penn and Jefferson were using the “one flesh” metaphor, a biblical allusion to marital accord and productivity. As he had done in the Declaration of Independence and in his original version of the Kentucky Resolutions, Jefferson again found a matrimonial parallel to help him redefine the body politic. The Federalists could join under the Republican banner,
strengthening the country by bringing harmony. Doing so would produce “descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” This theme of fertility corresponded easily with Jefferson’s bucolic vision of a future America, expansive and fruitful, no longer held back by partisan divisions, a nation in which kinship gradually supplanted the artificial boundaries that faction sustained.
A week after the inauguration, his old friend Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia excitedly praised the new president: “It would require a page to contain the names of all the citizens (formerly called Federalists) who have spoken in the highest terms of your speech.” Another who appreciated the gesture was Henry Knox, secretary of war when Jefferson was secretary of state, who wrote graciously from Boston: “I cannot refrain from expressing to you, the heart felt satisfaction I have experienced in perusing your address … The just manner in which you appreciate the motives of the two parties, which have divided the opinions, and which sometimes have seemed to threaten to divide the territory and government of the Country … evince conspicuously, at one view, your intelligence patriotism and magnanimity.” He made a point of telling Jefferson that he had preferred Adams for a second term; but he accepted Jefferson’s words as literal and wished him “a richly merited reward, similar to that bestowed by a grateful people on the much loved Washington.”35
Just three days after his inaugural address, Jefferson gave Virginia governor James Monroe his recapitulation of the months of turmoil preceding it. He thought he understood the psychology of the average Federalist: weak-minded, easily led, and (most important) so afraid of social anarchy that he was capable of being manipulated by whomever was in power. After months of calling Jefferson an anarchist, these people, “from timidity of [physical] constitution,” had come to fear “anarchy” and now “only wanted a decent excuse” to reembrace government; they had laid down their arms, as it were, because they “wished for a strong executive,” one way or the other. “Timidity” needed to believe in a leader.
This was hardly the way to establish a hybrid Republican-Federalist regime. To longtime confidant John Page, Jefferson significantly toned down his language, which he certainly did not have to do in light of Page’s recent harangue against the Federalists in the House. “My dear friend,” he wrote with generous intent, “I am very much in hopes we shall be able to restore union & harmony to our country.” Unlike the “desperado” leaders—the “incurables” among the High Federalists—middle-of-the-road Federalism consisted of many “real republicans” who had merely been “carried over from us by French excesses” and might now, without too much struggle, be won back.36
That bastion of Federalist journalism, Philadelphia’s Gazette of the United States, decided to give Jefferson a chance to make good on his promise. His accession to the presidency gave the party of “good order” a chance to demonstrate its devotion to the high principles of “religion, morality, and laws” rather than any “blind attachment to particular men.” Federalists were not Jacobins, the paper insisted, and would therefore honor the constitutionally elected chief executive as long as he proved himself worthy of the public’s trust. It was up to Jefferson to hold in check “the factious, the impious, the rapacious, the clamorous, the ambitious, and the turbulent”—those Republicans whom Chief Justice Marshall had termed “terrorists.” It was up to Jefferson to imitate George Washington.37
On the other hand, many prominent Federalists were unconvinced from the outset of the new president’s sincerity. They suspected that Jefferson was thinking deviously, if not thinking of outright revenge. They understood power, and Jefferson understood power. The real test would come when Federalist officeholders were either retained or dismissed by Jefferson’s administration.38
“We are all republicans …” was a form of idealism foreign to most Federalists’ way of thinking. If Jefferson embraced that hybrid political entity he seemed to be calling for, it would be as an opiate to ease the pain of a nervous transition. How long would Jefferson be patient with the Federalists, if he was really thinking, deep down, that their party would have to fade away for his vision to be realized? Even the most charitable interpretation of the “one flesh” metaphor as a model for Jeffersonian bipartisanship assumed a natural subordination amid unity. As partisan feuds gave way to marital felicity and public tranquillity, the reins of power would remain in the firm but gentle hands of the Republican head of family. In their prospective marriage, the dominant, or male, persona was to be the Republican; the subordinate, or female, the Federalist. Why should Federalists not be skeptical of a promise of equality that was not really equality?
What, then, to do about Federalist officeholders? Albert Gallatin, despite having been tossed from Congress by illiberal Federalists who regarded him as an untrustworthy foreigner, took a moderate position and for years to come would privilege competence over ideology in appointments.39 Governor Monroe was less magnanimous and proposed that a slow testing-of-the-waters approach made the most sense. Laying out his thoughts in a stream of consciousness, he reminded his friend the president (unnecessarily) that “the royalist party has committed infinite crimes and enormities.” But he reckoned that if Republicans maintained their cohesion, Federalism would never rise to challenge again.
For Monroe, the administration’s first responsibility was to leave no cause for discontent among Republicans by extending the olive branch too far. But he also believed, as Gallatin did, that Federalists who had performed their offices competently and without political prejudice should be retained; and he predicted that most victory-savoring Republicans would not object to this middle way. But there were also Republicans who would not appreciate any concession to any Federalist, he said, and it was with these people that Monroe was most concerned. He concluded the letter with an assessment of Madison’s Department of State, where he was sure a complete overhaul would be needed. Owing to the intensity of anti-French feeling, which had long festered, Monroe presumed that the incoming administration would uncover “the most gross and depraved kind” of abuse in State Department files.40
“Prejudice and Passion, Which Never Can Be Friendly to Truth”
Letters poured in from around the country recommending candidates for federal appointment. Some used colorful language in making their partisan points; men with Republican credentials blatantly asked for appointments to bail them out of the financial straits in which they were caught. A Philadelphian who had served as a commercial agent for Virginia during the Revolution said he was compelled by his “present unfortunate situation” to “throw” himself upon the president’s “indulgence” after his estate had been seized.
Another correspondent wanted nothing for himself but had plenty to say. He described himself as a man “who inhaled with his first breath the genuine spirit of republicanism” and thought he should write to warn Jefferson about the dangers of continuing Federalists in office. He was a Vermonter and a “warm friend” of the recently liberated Matthew Lyon, the Irish pugilist representing that state who had wielded fireplace tongs against an upraised cane on the floor of the House. He wanted the president to know that there were still those in office who had labeled Jefferson “an anarchist and an atheist.” Whether by chance or by design, the never-boring Lyon wrote to Jefferson with encouraging reports at just about the same time. While on the road in Pennsylvania, he had heard a confirmed Federalist decrying all those who had spoken ill of Albert Gallatin. Everyone had an opinion.41
For several months Jefferson’s correspondence with political allies was filled with such discussion. To Gallatin, the president reasserted his basic principle for staffing federal positions: “We must be inflexible against appointing federalists till there be a due portion of republicans introduced into office.” He divided the various interests into categories of “Monarchical federalists,” the salvageable “Republican federalists,” the uncompromising “Sweeping republicans,” and the deserving “moderate & general republicans,” who invariably saw things his way.
Certain executive acts of an overtly partisan nature would not wait. Even before Madison arrived in Washington, Jefferson rewarded the electioneering energies of South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney by appointing him U.S. minister to Spain. He also pardoned several who had been convicted under the Sedition Act, including the notorious James T. Callender. Somehow, though, Callender concluded that Jefferson was standing in his way and delaying his release from prison.42
Reestablishing former connections, the president wrote to friends abroad. He humbly announced his change in status and conveyed his “constant & sincere affection” to William Short, Thomas Paine, and the Marquis de Lafayette. He promised fair decisions and “sentiments worthy of former times.” As he weighed fairness against sentiments, he continued to collect letters of recommendation and compiled careful lists of candidates for office. Who was to be hired, who was to be fired? The page was divided into columns, marking each individual’s residence, the position requested, the recommender’s name, and the date of the recommendation letter. Elaborating on his comment to Secretary Gallatin, the president explained to any who inquired what his guiding principle would be. Appointments made by John Adams after his electoral defeat in December were deemed unacceptable; and partisan imbalances within the federal judiciary were to be corrected through appointment of Republicans as state attorneys where the courts were presently dominated by Federalists.
Nevertheless Jefferson retained a majority of the justices of the peace for the District of Columbia whom the Senate had confirmed only days before he took office. One of those to whom he denied office, William Marbury, would shortly become a sizable footnote in history. Adams himself appeared not to have anticipated the hubbub surrounding his “midnight” appointments, having written to his successor, with considerable grace, on his arrival back in Massachusetts: “I See nothing to obscure your prospect of a quiet and prosperous Administration, which I heartily wish you.”