Another Adams, the ex-president’s cousin, was decidedly Jeffersonian in his political spirit and plainly philosophical in the last years of his life. Samuel Adams had entertained the Virginian at his home in Boston on the eve of Jefferson’s departure for France in 1784. He addressed him now as “my very dear friend” and presented a maritime interpretation of the challenges before the country: “With you, I hope we shall once more see harmony restored; but after so severe and long a storm, it will take a proportionate time to still the raging of the waves.” He recognized in the nature of conflict the power of self-deception: “The World has been governed by prejudice and passion, which never can be friendly to truth.” And he closed his letter tenderly: “You have devoutly my Blessing and my Prayers.”43
Jefferson saw Madison at Montpelier one month after the inauguration, as he rode back to Albemarle for a two-week working vacation. He spent the night at the Madisons’ again when he returned north—the new Congress was still months from its first meeting. When Madison joined the administration on May 1, the oath of office was administered to him by Abigail Adams’s nephew, Judge William Cranch, whom Jefferson would later name chief justice of the Federal District Court.
Initially, James and Dolley lodged at the President’s House, moving several blocks uptown as Madison’s physical condition improved. For now, the State and War departments were housed together. Between there and Capitol Hill lay rough country, as Pierre L’Enfant’s radiating street design had not yet been carved out. Indeed, the formless look and feel of low-lying Washington obliged Madison and Jefferson to leave town for the healthier air of central Virginia during the “bilious” summer months.44
The new secretary of state was intricately involved in all appointments and dismissals, especially the choice of some fifty U.S. consuls stationed abroad. Notwithstanding Monroe’s warning about the number of State Department employees whose loyalty was to the other side, Madison by and large retained the staff. One clerk, Daniel Brent, proved such an efficient manager of communications that he would still be at State during the administration of Martin Van Buren. Another, Jacob Wagner, was an out-and-out Federalist, but Madison perceived in him a rare combination of integrity and administrative ability.
Madison was easy to work for, his manner so accommodating, in fact, that the caustic pamphleteer Callender proclaimed that the secretary of state was the only cabinet officer he felt he could trust, the only man “whom I could without hypocrisy profess to feel an attachment for.” When Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis to the agitated Callender, bearing fifty dollars and an explanation for the delay in relieving his pecuniary concerns, Lewis returned to the president with Callender’s demand for—as Jefferson repeated to Monroe—“hushmoney.” He could not imagine what intelligence Callender possessed that could do him damage and wrote fatefully: “He knows nothing of me which I am not willing to declare to the world.” It is curious that the pamphleteer, who was not beyond threatening the president directly, fully expected Madison to see to it that Jefferson named him postmaster of Richmond, which was at that time a quite lucrative position.45
In spite of the abuse he had earlier suffered at the hands of Federalists in Congress, the fair-minded Gallatin took Jefferson’s inaugural optimism to heart. He prepared a circular announcing that his door was open to all political opinions, and he would staff the Treasury Department with men of talent, regardless of previous partisan attachment. Madison and Jefferson were together when Gallatin sent his circular to the president for approval. Madison was probably the more reticent about releasing the document to federal employees, but it was the president who instructed Gallatin to withhold it until it was deemed safe to proceed with a truly nonpartisan policy.
The Federalist press did not take long before announcing that it had sniffed out dissension among the chief players in the administration. As early as mid-1801 the Philadelphia Gazette raised the specter of a dissolution of the Virginia–New York axis: “It is whispered among MR. JEFFERSON’S friends, that he will not be nominated four years hence for re-election … Those who say this also say that MR. MADISON will be his successor.—The friends of Col. BURR are not pleased with this arrangement, and think he ought to succeed to the Presidency … but Virginia never will support for the Presidency any man who is not a Virginian.” In New England, similar reports circulated.46
If the story seems entirely made up, and it may be, this Federalist wish-fulfillment contained elements of truth. Madison and Jefferson were in agreement that they should not shore up Vice President Burr’s patronage power in his home state of New York. Of the other men of influence there, Robert Livingston was in France and his brother Edward was soon to come under a cloud as mayor of New York City. George Clinton had been returned to the governorship. His publicity-seeking nephew DeWitt Clinton waited in the wings, no less desirous of being a political “boss” than Hamilton ever was.
Even before any overtures were made to the Clinton family (the Burrites’ strongest rivals), Jefferson acted to derail the political advancement of Matthew Livingston Davis, Burr’s closest associate. Davis went so far as to pay Jefferson a visit at Monticello, where he stated the case for his appointment as second in command to the collector of customs. Within the administration it appears that only Gallatin protested the snubbing of Davis, unabashedly asking Jefferson whether denying him office was tantamount to announcing that Burr would not be on the Republican ticket in 1804.
The Virginia interest prevailed over the unifying interest—at least, that was how things must have appeared to Gallatin. As time went on, Jefferson’s agenda got people wondering. The administration-friendly Aurora persisted in linking Burr with the Federalists, questioning whether the Burrites had “negociated” with the opposition. The powerful newspaper claimed that the vice president’s refusal to respond to any and all rumors was a black mark against him.47
It did not take Jefferson long to realize that New York’s Republicans could be kept at bay if they remained disunited. The three Republican factions that vied for power during the election of 1800—Clintonians, Livingstons, and Burrites—were held together by a tenuous alliance. By refusing to help Matthew Davis, Jefferson was sending a strong message: Burr’s group no longer had the favor of the administration. He and they were fair game. Stealthily, the president decided he would back the Clintons, while giving a few patronage positions to the Livingstons to keep them happy. The Clintons hired English émigré James Cheetham, editor of the American Citizen, to wage an unrelenting campaign against Burr, at which point Jefferson became a new subscriber and welcomed Cheetham to the President’s House.
Neither Madison nor Jefferson could convincingly claim that he was being evenhanded when it came to Republican interests in New York. Jefferson did not intend to permit any northern Republican to gain control of the party or the presidency, and Madison seemed not to object. While it is true that the administration showed restraint by minimizing the number of Federalists it dismissed from federal offices, the president was too much a Virginian to de-sectionalize his republican theory. Federalism was effete and nonthreatening in his calculations; he saw a greater future threat from the prospect of former Federalists and disgruntled northern Republicans teaming up against Virginia. Keeping the New Yorkers divided was thus a necessary move to prevent the formation of a cross-bred party.48
Of course, the Federalist Party had no plans to dissolve. Its members did not respond to Jefferson’s effort to limit dismissals from office by showering the Republican president with expressions of their appreciation. Taking up where “Peter Porcupine” left off, “Oliver Oldschool” began in 1801 to satirize the Republicans, and Jefferson in particular, in the pages of the Port Folio. “Oldschool” was Boston-bred Joseph Dennie, Harvard class of 1790, whose disenchantment with democratization was equaled only by his compulsion to illustrate a counternarrative to the American Revolution. While publishing a newspaper in Walpole, New Hampshire, in 1797, he had written to his mother castigating the �
�hoary traitor” Samuel Adams and the Tea Party militants, without whom, he said, he might have been “in the service of my rightful King and instead of shivering in the bleakness of the United States, felt the genial sunshine of a Court.” These were strong words and gave credence to Jefferson’s characterization of some incorrigible Federalists as “Tories.”
In 1799 Dennie found a sponsor when the snobbish secretary of state Timothy Pickering, a New Englander, brought him to Philadelphia and made him his private secretary. It was Dennie’s moment to shine, or so he thought. Once President Adams “shamefully and fatally banished” Pickering (as Dennie described the firing), his patron left him high and dry in Philadelphia. Dennie rebounded by finding his voice as the opinionated “Oliver Oldschool.”
The writer was already priming for political battle with Jefferson in February 1800, when he gave his impressions of the then–vice president: “From his sullen & retired habits, few know more than myself. I have frequently listened to his sophistry.” Before the election Dennie authored a pamphlet in which he predicted that the “infidel” Jefferson would rule as “a Chinese or Russian despot.” A few months later, when he began the Port Folio—he termed it “not quite a Gazette nor wholly a Magazine”—Dennie asked his self-selected readership to submit “political observations, from sober, reflecting men of old fashioned principles.” He was confident that a “formidable” minority might yet prove more powerful than the “jacobin interest” that was poised to take over the government.49
Dennie’s unexpurgated manner of speech appealed to an angry readership. “There is a spirit of domination engrafted on the character of the southern people,” he impressed upon them, insisting that relocation of the nation’s capital to an “obscure village” on the Potomac was Virginia’s means of drawing power and population away from the North. He may have been right. On the other hand, he showed little restraint on any topic. He questioned the propriety of hallowing the Fourth of July, because it poisoned the minds of “the ignorant and brutal mob” against the British nation, which had never “manifested a wish unfriendly to our independence.” This was a rarely heard sentiment, even in Federalist circles.
But Dennie was just warming up. He made a mockery of Jefferson’s language in the Declaration of Independence, pointing out that “some hundreds of negroes are constantly at work, making nails, or wading through rice-swamps, at Monticello, the favourite haunt of philosophy, liberty, and other French fairies.” The same week that Madison left Orange and went to work in Washington, Dennie deconstructed Jefferson’s first inaugural address from a rhetorician’s perspective, remarking on improper syntax and figures of speech that gave the oration “an air of juvenility.” Jefferson’s “throes and convulsions of the ancient world,” for example, led the audacious editor to observe that the only “throes” he knew in English concerned “the image of a woman in child-birth.” President Jefferson might still have hoped for civility. With the likes of Dennie stirring the pot, that hope would fade fast.50
“A Large Detachment of Republican Blacks”
The State Department was in charge of a variety of domestic matters in addition to administering the foreign policy of the United States. Madison and his staff were responsible for coordinating the U.S. Census, assigning lucrative publication projects to private printers (what the Government Printing Office does in-house today), and operating the Patent Office. This last function was placed under the care of William Thornton, Madison’s housemate of 1789, a Quaker who had urged a humanitarian policy of emancipation and colonization of enslaved blacks.
Thornton charmed George Washington with his design for the Capitol in the early 1790s. The idea to erect a rotunda was his. After Madison and Jefferson brought him into the administration, he proved so tireless that he helped in the redesign of Montpelier, and in later years Jefferson would consult with him on a layout for the University of Virginia. The choice of the polymath Thornton for a supervisory role in the State Department (a position he held throughout the Virginia Dynasty of presidents) reminds us how mutable and experimental this moment really was.51
As secretary of state, Madison felt free to adopt a neutral position with respect to the European powers. Napoleon’s military ambitions had effectively ended the Republicans’ tortured defense of France; for the better part of Jefferson’s first term, this relegated England to merely secondary concern in the shaping of U.S. foreign policy. The Anglo-French war that had begun eight years before, when Jefferson held Madison’s post, came to an end during Madison’s first year at the State Department. In a very real sense, Madison and Jefferson felt they faced a new world order.
The challenge that arose, then, was an unexpected one. Spain was handing over to Napoleon the strategic territory of Louisiana. It was a “retrocession,” insofar as France had ceded Louisiana to Spain four decades earlier, after its disastrous defeat in the French and Indian War. A mingling of races—French, Spanish, Indians, Anglo-Americans, free and enslaved blacks—made for a polyglot population in Louisiana and seemed to increase the potential for conflict. Even so, Spain was not maintaining a large force there when a revitalized France under Napoleon eyed the western hemisphere with renewed interest.
If, because of Madrid’s desire for New Orleans, the United States had an uncomfortable relationship with the Spanish in the 1790s, the French now looked as if they would be a far more formidable threat to American political and commercial development along the southern Mississippi than Spain ever was. Were French armies to encroach on land that the United States coveted, the Republicans would find themselves hard-pressed not to warm up to Great Britain. It would be a marriage of convenience, to be sure, but a “marriage”—to echo Jefferson’s phraseology—nonetheless.
In a closely related theater, Napoleon had set his sights on St. Domingue (the future Haiti) where a successful slave revolt in 1797 had placed a former slave, Toussaint Louverture, in power. The question at hand was a delicate one: would the Jefferson administration continue to recognize the black republic? The Adams administration had opened diplomatic and trade relations with St. Domingue, a policy Jefferson felt was dangerous to southern interests. Commerce flourished during the Federalist period, and the U.S. Navy even backed Toussaint against a rival leader.
For a brief period, the British attempted to occupy the nominally French island. They were forced out by the islanders themselves. Toussaint, the same age as Jefferson, kept all options open; Jefferson tried to do the same. Not surprisingly, to the minds of most Virginians, close, respectful ties with a former slave boded ill. The prospect of black crews carrying seditious ideas—abolitionist ideas—to southern ports was menacing.52
Although he shared those exaggerated fears, Jefferson proceeded slowly, combining prudence on economic matters with aggressive diplomacy. He could read a balance sheet and had no desire at this point to alienate American merchants by shutting down the profitable Caribbean trade. In July 1801, meeting with Edward Thornton, the British chargé d’affaires (no relation to William Thornton), Jefferson made clear that he supported the Adams policy of “free and open trade” with the island, but he also said that he wished to prevent “all maritime exertion on the part of the Negroes.”
Striking a delicate balance, the administration hoped for improved relations with France too, declaring a policy of neutrality toward all powers on the island and all powers interested in its future. As secretary of state, Madison gave detailed instructions to Tobias Lear, formerly George Washington’s private secretary, who had replaced the Federalist consul on St. Domingue in mid-1801. Taking care not to offend the French, Lear was given the title of commercial agent (instead of a diplomatic title) and was, at least on the surface, to have no formal connection to Toussaint.53
By the time Madison and Jefferson met with Louis Pichon, the French chargé d’affaires in Washington, their position was less clear. Pichon first called on Madison and left the meeting feeling troubled by the secretary of state’s “equivocal and reserved la
nguage,” as he later informed Jefferson, and Madison’s willingness to leave things in St. Domingue as they were, “without pretending to judge.” Madison had told Pichon that, for commercial reasons, the administration would not cut off Toussaint, because northern Federalists would turn an anticommercial policy into an inflammatory sectional issue. But the most jarring exchange between Madison and Pichon occurred when Madison pressed him on French designs in Louisiana. He claimed that serious “collisions” between the two countries would be inevitable if France were to become too near a neighbor of the United States.
Pichon received a different message, at least on the status of St. Domingue, from President Jefferson. Commercial ties with the island were indeed important, he asserted, confirming what Madison had said. But when queried about the U.S. response to a French military expedition to the island, Jefferson gave the impression that he would support an occupation and that he wished to see an unofficial alliance involving France, England, and the United States. All three would come together to crush the island republic, and as Pichon reported home, Jefferson agreed that they would “reduce Toussaint to starvation.”54
By the end of 1801 Jefferson once again changed his tune, complaining to Pichon about the size of the French expeditionary force en route to St. Domingue. Reports had circulated that Napoleon would send as many as twenty thousand troops, far more than was required to subdue a single island. So the president brought forth a new proposal: St. Domingue should declare formal independence and be placed under the combined protection of France, England, and the United States.
It must have appeared to Pichon that Jefferson was taunting him at this point, because the American president would have known that Napoleon would never agree to such an arrangement. Fresh, seemingly reliable rumors were circulating, to the effect that French forces would topple Toussaint and proceed on to Louisiana. So Jefferson warned Pichon that France would remain in formerly Spanish Louisiana only as long as it pleased the United States. He then threatened to align with Great Britain if Napoleon refused to back down.55
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