“The Thousand Insulting Insinuations”
The trans-Mississippi West was not the only source of anxiety within the administration. As Chief Justice Marshall swore in Jefferson for a second time, sectional tension existed not only between northern Federalists and southern Republicans but also between northern and southern Republicans. The Republican editor of the Vermont Journal responded to the stirrings of Virginians who had openly conveyed their eagerness to alter the federal Constitution by pushing through amendments after Jefferson’s reelection. The plan was supposed to make the republic more democratic, but its covert design was perceived as undoing the careful balance among large and small states, giving Virginia even more weight than it presently carried. Reducing U.S. senators’ terms from six to two years would go far toward eliminating aristocratic pretense in that body. Direct election of the president would be an obvious improvement on the Electoral College. No longer giving judges lifetime appointments seemed a sensible move. But in all of these instances the small states would lose. “May the Constitution and the Union be perpetual!” cried the fearful Vermont editor. As to the kinds of people who made up the best republic, he concluded his piece with a personal statement: he owned a mere fourteen acres, which he farmed with his own hands—and what could be more republican than that? What claims to the republican spirit did his “brother of the south” have who possessed fourteen thousand acres, which his slaves worked for him?6
One of the most privileged of slave owners, the gangly, garrulous John Randolph of Roanoke, cared little how many northern Republicans he upset. On the heels of the Yazoo compromise that so offended him, he went on the warpath again in the cause of justice. As House manager of the impeachment of Associate Justice Samuel Chase of the U.S. Supreme Court, he drew up a list of offenses meant to show that the public good was at peril because Chase held obnoxious opinions. Impeachment was a new instrument, and the standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors” was barely tested. The offenses inventoried by Randolph included the judge’s behavior when he presided at the trial of James Callender in 1800 for seditious libel—and so the martyred Callender was resurrected and dissected yet again.
The Republicans in Congress had been encouraged to go after Chase by none other than President Jefferson. After a mentally unstable judge, an easy target, was removed in New Hampshire, the president eagerly took aim at more valuable prey. If the Chase trial had gone his way, he might well have urged proceedings against Chief Justice Marshall himself. He desperately sought means to purge incorrigible Federalists who enjoyed lifetime appointments to the bench.
What angered the president most was Chase’s 1803 instruction to a Baltimore jury that struck him as seditious speech. The justice had warned of “mobocracy,” while directly condemning the administration’s approach to judicial appointments and removals as “mighty mischief.” Chase was indeed guilty of having a big mouth, but was that enough to remove him from the bench?
Jefferson had to be careful not to have his imprint on the investigation into the judge’s conduct appear obvious. Hinting strongly to a friendly congressman that he wanted Chase gone, he made it clear that, as president, he had to maintain a polite distance from the prosecution. The irony was rich but was lost on Jefferson: he who had done so much, upon entering office in 1801, to see that the Sedition Act was struck down now wanted, in effect, to revive the same charge in individual cases, as a tool for getting rid of political enemies.
Samuel Chase of Maryland was something of a political prodigy. He had been admitted to the bar the year Jefferson matriculated at the College of William and Mary. The republic’s self-anointed guardian against “mobocracy” in 1804 had been a firebrand during the Stamp Act protests in 1765, accused at that time of being a “ringleader of mobs.” He went on to serve in the Continental Congress, signed the Declaration of Independence, and in 1788 became, of all things, an outspoken antifederalist. Nevertheless he was a staunch supporter of the first president, and Washington trusted Chase’s judgment well enough to appoint him to the Supreme Court in 1796. Justice Chase appears not to have made any intemperate remarks on the High Court itself; but on the circuit he proved himself as contentious a speaker as John Randolph was in Congress. That was what got to Jefferson.
The Chase Senate trial unfolded during the interval between the election of 1804 and the second inaugural. Presiding over the impeachment was Vice President Burr’s last duty before stepping down. His fair-minded treatment of the parties impressed those otherwise predisposed to demean his character. In the late nineteenth century the discerning historian Henry Adams, descendant of two presidents, described Chase’s defense team as “a body-guard of the ablest lawyers in America.” Prominent among them was Luther Martin, the attorney general of Maryland, a critic of Madison’s at the Constitutional Convention, and a hard-drinking man whom Adams called a “reprobate genius,” “rollicking, witty, audacious …, shouting with a schoolboy’s fun at the idea of tearing Randolph’s indictment to pieces.”
Eccentric John Randolph was a colorful but rambling speaker and no match for the defense. He conferred at length with his counterpart in the Senate, fellow Virginian William Branch Giles, whose emotional makeup as well as political positions seemed to match Randolph’s. But neither man could construct a linear argument, and even before the issue came to a vote, Madison confided to the historian’s grandfather, John Quincy Adams, then a member of the Senate, that he was unhappy with the “petulance” of the Virginians who were managing the impeachment.7
When the Senate put partisan preferences aside and voted for acquittal based on a strict adherence to the law, the Republican press gloried in its elected representatives’ decency. “Republican Senators,” one Maryland column ran, “notwithstanding the thousand insulting insinuations leveled at them by Mr. Chase, have magnanimously discarded the angry passions of human nature, and strictly (perhaps too strictly) confined themselves to the law.”8
Jefferson hid his disappointment in the outcome. Randolph of Roanoke sulked for a while before returning to Washington with renewed purpose. He was already anticipating a Madisonian presidential succession, and it stuck in his craw. He started referring to those who would join his resistance to the established order as “the old Republicans,” alternatively as the “Tertium Quids” (“third something”), a third political party. Randolph had James Monroe in mind as a proper successor to Jefferson and stepped up his flattering correspondence with this other Virginian, who remained abroad, dutifully carrying out the will of Madison and Jefferson.
Randolph was seeding the ground for a competition that Monroe almost certainly had not considered. The envoy was, at the time, writing frequent long letters to his boss—the secretary of state—on affairs in Europe. It is hard to say precisely why Randolph was convinced that Monroe represented his views better than Madison did. Monroe and Randolph did not know each other well; but Randolph’s prejudices tended to have quirky origins. In this case, there are a handful of clues to his thinking: the natural affinity of the South and the emerging West was of principal concern to him, and in 1803 he quoted at length from a Monroe speech to support his position on this subject. More recently, he was touched by the generous attention Monroe had shown toward a relative of his in England who was deaf and mute. Additionally, Randolph would not have easily forgotten the ostracism that the moody Monroe suffered after imperfectly representing President Washington in Revolutionary France. Sympathy had a reciprocal quality for the Byronic Virginian.
The political game was getting more unpredictable and no easier. When Randolph became irritated, he became irritating—especially so at this time, as he fixed his attention on foreign policy issues. Provoked by Madison, he read secrecy and dishonesty into behind-the-scenes efforts to convince France to advise Spain to sell West Florida to the United States. Undisclosed approaches to foreign governments issued, he said, from the “weak, feeble, and pusillanimous spirit of the keeper of the Cabinet”; he upbraided Madison for carrying ou
t a “base prostration of the national character, to excite one nation by money [France] to bully another nation [Spain] out of its property.” Randolph had made up his mind that Madison was not only untrustworthy but unrepentant.9
He expressed his isolationist viewpoint on the floor of the Congress in early March 1806, when he officially broke with the administration. “What!” Randolph exclaimed. “Shall this great mammoth of the American forest leave his native element and plunge into the water in a mad contest with the shark?” Fixing the republican moment as the year 1798, he vowed he would resist any alteration from the Madison-Jefferson pose in that year; he had stood with them then against the witches of the Adams administration, and he would hold their feet to the fire now.
Randolph had come to see the partnership of the president and his secretary of state as phony republicanism. He could have been talking about either of them when he warned his colleagues: “You give him money to buy Florida, and he purchases Louisiana.” Sensitive to any perceived abuse of power, this man of strange sympathies but deep nostalgia vowed to reawaken “the spirit of inquiry” on behalf of an honest people, “now at home at their ploughs.” Randolph spoke, he insisted, in defense of the South. More agrarian than even Jefferson, he abhorred what anyone else would have seen as progress.10
Louisiana was easy pickings for Randolph because of its remoteness from the nation’s capital and its admittedly confused politics. Territorial Governor William C. C. Claiborne, Jefferson’s appointee, was under fire from some highly placed enemies. Claiborne had served in the belligerent U.S. Congress of 1798 and had tried to break up the fight when Congressmen Lyon and Griswold scuffled on the House floor (literally, on the floor). His mediating skills had been insufficient then and were insufficient now in the existing power vacuum of territorial New Orleans. Local newspapers berated him as unsuited to the town’s cultural scene; he divulged to Madison that the combination of “newspaper scribbling” and “licentiousness” offended him deeply. The criticism became even more personal when he was rumored to be shopping for a rich wife, dissatisfied with his attractive $5,000 annual salary.
Unconcerned who it was that he offended, John Randolph actively cultivated Claiborne’s detractors. He listened to the territory’s representative in Congress, Irish-born Daniel Clark, who, like Lyon and Randolph, had a reputation for an unregulated mouth. At the same time as he turned on the president and secretary of state, Randolph attacked their instrument Claiborne, calling him a “miserable” administrator, entirely ineffective against the Spanish. He acknowledged Daniel Clark as his source, referring to him as “an enlightened member of that odious and imbecile Government.” Clark had organized a volunteer militia in 1803 and was taking credit for the peaceful transfer of Louisiana from France to the United States while disparaging a governor who, he felt, had come late to the scene, reaping an undeserved reward.
Reinforced by Randolph’s performance in Congress, Clark returned south. Over the next several months he continued to taunt Claiborne, alleging in the newspaper that the Orleans militia was in disorder. Tapping into obvious prejudices, he insisted that Claiborne favored a Negro militia unit. The affronted governor challenged Clark to a duel; they fought, and Claiborne received a serious wound to the thigh. Jefferson was relieved when he finally learned that Claiborne, in whom he continued to lodge his trust, was able to resume his duties.11
This was just one of the ways in which Randolph’s prominent and repeated ridicule of fellow Republicans had a ripple effect. After his first momentous speech in March 1806, newspapers in various areas of the country reported that in breaking from the administration Randolph had used language “unequalled by the most virulent federalist writers.” It was enough evidence to convince many that “a complete schism in the party has taken place.” Just across the Potomac, the Alexandria Gazette observed that Jefferson’s conduct and character were “most severely handled” by Randolph, while Madison was “treated with sovereign contempt.”12
As yet, however, Randolph’s amorphous faction had few adherents. One of those inclining in his direction, however, was John Taylor of Caroline, so recently the author of a tough-talking pamphlet defending the policies of the first Jefferson administration. Here was a classic case of strange bedfellows: the late Edmund Pendleton’s nephew Taylor had come to believe that Treasury Secretary Gallatin was refusing to undo Hamilton’s economic policies. Meanwhile Randolph was still communicating his opinions to Madison’s warm ally Gallatin.
Taylor, no hothead, clearly had misgivings about Randolph’s lack of subtlety and restraint, but he tried to put ideas ahead of style. And Randolph somehow avoided alienating Taylor, who in 1808 would still be on Randolph’s rickety Quid bandwagon, criticizing Madison for adhering to the big-government thinking contained in The Federalist. Ironically, they were suspicious of Madison’s Hamiltonian tendencies.
Republican defections began to add up. In the troubled years preceding the election of 1800, no one had been more loyal to Madison and Jefferson than the clerk of the House of Representatives, John Beckley; he did not oppose the administration as Randolph did but nonetheless wrote to James Monroe in July 1806: “Madison, is deemed by many, too timid and indecisive a statesman, and too liable to a conduct of forbearance to the Federal party, which may endanger our harmony and political safety.” At the other end of the political spectrum, Federalists seemed to enjoy speculating on rumors that Jefferson’s putative successor was dismayed and overwhelmed by internal Republican politics and ready to bow out.13
“Fools, Geese, and Clodhoppers”
The Franco-American relationship may have soured considerably with the rise of Bonaparte, but a sense of debt to the Marquis de Lafayette remained constant. In fact, Jefferson was reported to have had Lafayette in mind as his foremost choice to serve as the first U.S. governor of the Louisiana Territory. Lafayette maintained a fairly regular correspondence with both Madison and Jefferson; they learned from him that while he held on to the family’s magnificent estate, La Grange, he had otherwise been broken by the destructive force of the French Revolution. During the years of imprisonment, his considerable fortune had vanished. In 1803, as a bounty for having served as a U.S. major general, Congress voted to award him a tract of land (without stipulating where) that was approximately equal to all that Jefferson—and more than Madison—possessed. Such a quantity of land was available only north of the Ohio River or in Louisiana. In 1805 the matter was resolved when Madison and Jefferson, acting as Lafayette’s agents, arranged a purchase close to the city of New Orleans. A few years later these lands were valued at $200,000, the very sum Lafayette had taken from his once-limitless store of capital to fund the American Revolution.14
The unprecedented addition of territory may have encouraged disputation within Congress, but it made little impression abroad. With the spectacular victory of Admiral Lord Nelson over a combined French and Spanish force off the coast of Spain, England was able to restore its dominance on the high seas. And in December Napoleon’s success at Austerlitz gave France control of the European continent. As these two military giants continued to fight for global hegemony, foreign policy again took center stage in Washington. Though the administration wished otherwise, the inclinations of neutral nations mattered little to England and France. Jefferson’s theory that a muscular Barbary policy would counteract the denigration of America’s capacity was yet to be proven.
Madison responded to the changing scene by retreating to his library, where he prepared a 204-page pamphlet protesting the British disregard for neutral nations. Attacking London’s justifications for the capture of neutral vessels in times of war, he asserted that the policy had no basis in international law but was “a mere superiority of force.” Several members of Congress waded through the overwritten treatise, few of whom found anything quotable or politically useful in it. John Randolph resorted to his usual antics, throwing the document on the floor as he scoffed at “a shilling pamphlet hurled against eight hundred ship
s.”
In his annual message that December, Jefferson called for a better organized militia, ready for any “sudden emergency.” He asked Congress for gunboats to meet the dangers posed by the European belligerents. “We should have a competent number of gunboats,” he said, “and the number, to be competent, must be considerable.” As a purely defensive measure, the small, maneuverable boats were meant to patrol the nation’s coastline and northern border lakes.
To suit his vision of a volunteer republican army, Jefferson hoped that the naval militia would be manned by local militia regulars. He knew that the gunboats were inadequate by themselves, so he asked Congress to fund the construction of more substantial warships, a policy backed by his usually tightfisted treasury secretary. Republican legislators flatly rejected the idea. The president and his secretary of state were ready to expand the peacetime navy, but their southern allies were refusing to follow their lead. This refusal would have dire consequences.15
The party of Madison and Jefferson was so strong in the South that by the congressional campaign season of 1806, there was only one incumbent Federalist below the Potomac. In all but four of the South’s forty-six congressional districts, no Federalist even made the effort to run for a seat.16 In Massachusetts, Senator John Quincy Adams found himself agreeing with the administration’s foreign policy. But rather than herald an era of muted partisanship, the younger Adams’s turnabout served only to isolate him.
No sooner had the Republicans proven that they could best the Federalists nearly everywhere than they began battling among themselves. It went beyond John Randolph. The word schism appeared more frequently in the nation’s newspapers. The Republican Spy, in Northampton, Massachusetts, tried to deny the trend, complaining in September 1805 that the Federalists were the real troublemakers, their papers “full of hopes and wishes about ‘the third party’ in New York and Pennsylvania … They hope that Col. Burr will create a schism in Louisiana and the western states.” Anything that might “perplex the administration” would suit the unseated party just fine, warned the Spy. The Burrite newspaper in Manhattan hoped to deflate at least some of the rumors about their champion, assuring New Yorkers the following spring that the dismissed vice president was back in the Republican fold. “The friends of freedom who lamented a schism … will rejoice,” reported the Morning Chronicle.17
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