First of Men

by Ferling, John;

  Hamilton had just this one paper left to present, a Report on Manufactures. It was an exposition over which he had labored for two years, and as with his earlier reports this, too, was in response to Congress’s direction that he draft a plan “for the . . . promotion of such manufactories as will . . . render the United States independent of other nations for essential, particularly military supplies.” The secretary went beyond those bounds to insist that the augmentation of manufacturing not only was necessary for national security but for the nation’s economic vitality as well. Remain an agrarian society, he warned, and you will remain an economic colony of industrial Europe. On the other hand, manufacturing would secure the true independence that the late war had failed to gain. Moreover, manufacturing would bind the sections together, linking by economic interest the producers of raw materials to those who purchased their commodities. But how was it to be accomplished? The government itself would manufacture arms and munitions, he answered, and it would assist in the construction of the roads and canals over which these commodities would flow. In addition, under the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution the government would offer bounties and subsidies and tariffs, the very stuff of British mercantilism.53

  Hamilton got some of what he wanted. During the next several weeks Congress enacted a new tariff that included eighteen of the twenty-one increased rates that he had recommended, affording some protection for American hemp cotton, steel and iron. But that was about all that he got, and, even so, the Tariff of 1792 in reality was more a revenue-raising measure than a truly protectionist instrument. Hamilton’s achievements in 1790 and 1791 had been significant, yet his thoughts on transforming the United States into a manufacturing empire were far too utopian to generate much support. The country was rural and agrarian, and most people wanted to keep it that way. Besides, many harbored a virulent distrust of the bankers and financiers who were synonymous with Hamilton’s scheme of things. And there were constitutional questions about the role of the government envisioned by Hamilton, not to mention concern over the new taxes that the subsidies and bounties would occasion. Finally, the South was hardly enthusiastic about a program that offered it virtually nothing. During that winter, engendered by the visionary schemes of the secretary, the embryo of a new and formal opposition to the thrust of the Federalist revolution began to emerge.54

  Factionalism was inevitable. And, with 1792 an election year, it was to be expected that more clearly defined coalitions would begin to take shape. Already the piquant clashes over the debt question and the constitutionality of the Bank Bill had been polarizing Americans. Hard on the heels of the Bank fight Jefferson and Madison had traveled to New York on a “botanizing excursion,” a junket that Hamilton suspected had more to do with rounding up political allies than with searching out flora and fauna. Hamilton undoubtedly read more into the Virginians’ excursion than the truth would bear, yet his realization that the resistance to the Federalist program was crystallizing was quite true, and he was shaken by the likelihood that the opposition might be led by Jefferson and Madison.

  The “tumults of conflicting parties,” as Jefferson referred to the situation early in 1792, took many forms, some, as always is the case in America’s party wars, intensely and indecorously personal. Hamilton and Jefferson were ambitious men. For reasons of state each wished to be Washington’s principal advisor. Each also wished to be Washington’s heir. In part, therefore, this was a struggle for the mind of President Washington. Additionally, each man needed Washington. The president’s support for Hamilton not only was an essential “aegis” to the young man’s continued political ascent, but the fatherly esteem that Washington showered on him fell like balm on the fatherless, illegitimate secretary. Jefferson’s relationship with Washington had an equally emotional and psychic dimension. Despite his extraordinary accomplishments Jefferson was dogged by a sense of inadequacy, by a fear that he was a failure as a man. Indeed, in the one great test of courage to which he had been subjected—Great Britain’s invasion of Virginia while he still was that state’s governor—many believed his response had been that of a panicky and inept ruler, if not of a coward. Jefferson concurred in that harsh judgment. For a man of such temperament, the respect of General Washington was crucial. During these years Jefferson never seems to have questioned Washington’s greatness. He saw his fellow Virginian as strong and fearless (a “Samson in the field”), as America’s greatest warrior, as a man of wisdom and common sense. Above all, he saw Washington as the very embodiment of every masculine virtue that he longed to exhibit. The respect of such a commanding figure allayed Jefferson’s insecurities just as it met the emotional needs of his cabinet rival.55

  Of course, the deepening rift in American politics transcended personalities. The debate soon took on strident, ideological air, and each side came to believe that nothing less than the nation’s survival was at stake. The Federalist revolution sparked the strife, but the factional battle involved not just conflict over funding and the Bank, over a tariff and, later, over taxation. By endeavoring to erect an American economy built upon an English model and directed through the central government’s fiscal creations, and by seeking to preserve a hierarchical society dominated by an elite bent on imitating the privileged class of England, the Federalists resurrected long-moribund issues and images. Indeed, historian John Murrin even has suggested that the decade can best be understood as a time when an attempt was made to deal with the unresolved problems of the Revolutionary era, with the result that the party battles in the“1790s . . . mark[ed] something of a reversion to [the familiar] patterns of provincial politics.” But if battles between court and country parties in the pre-Revolutionary period had centered about questions of American autonomy versus English sovereignty, the emerging parties during Washington’s presidency clashed over which Americans would exercise authority. Convinced that ordinary men were debased and vicious, the Federalists believed that an elite—the merchant-financiers and their planter allies, of course—must predominate, and that the broad electorate must defer to the governance of its social betters. The antifederals, as the Federalists sought to label their foes, saw such a construct as synonymous with the aristocratic values that had characterized the outlook of the ruling classes in the former parent state. Instead, they argued, human beings possessed the capacity for self-government and were not lacking in the rationality that would enable them to govern in a restrained manner for the good of the community. To those opposed to the Federalists, therefore, the issue had become one of egalitarianism versus privilege, of an elite-managed economic development versus the opportunity for independent individuals to exert themselves.

  Hamiltonianism, said Jefferson and his followers, had placed America on the same road that had led not only to the eradication of the English yeoman but to the alleged corruption and degradation of all facets of life in that blighted nation. Sometimes, they even referred to Hamilton’s followers as the “British party.” Madison, once so close to the administration, asserted that Hamilton and his ilk (he called them “the satellites & sycophants which surround” Washington) had “wound up the ceremonials of government to [such] a pitch of stateliness” that the Washington government had taken on the air of a royal court. If not all Hamilton’s foes went that far, they certainly believed that his policies sought to help a special class, the wealthy merchants and financiers of the urban Northeast, and especially the speculators, the bank directors, the holders of public credit, that is, those men of paper wealth who thrived because of government favors. From the South and the rural sections of the middle states came the greatest protest. Republicanism, the disaffected said, could best survive in a nation in which most men were property-owning yeomen possessed of equal rights and equal opportunities, a people who exuded the unsullied virtues of commoners. To such folk Hamiltonianism offered nothing, save the almost certain demise of the great gains of the Revolution.56

  To Jefferson, Hamilton seemed to be winning the war. In fa
ct, Hamilton even seemed to be on the verge of wresting control of American foreign policy from the secretary of state. There could be no question that Britain was the apotheosis of all that Hamilton admired; an imperial and commercial giant, an industrializing entity, it was, to boot, socially stable and, in Hamilton’s eyes, run by the right class of people. It was an order that Hamilton hoped to replicate in America, and one of the best ways to achieve his goal, he thought, was by fostering commercial relations with London, for the revenue that would be generated by Anglo-American trade would fuel America’s economic transformation. American foreign policy, therefore, was a key ingredient of Hamiltonianism.

  Indeed, the very first clash between Hamilton and his opponents had been stirred by questions of trade with Britain. During 1789 and 1790 Madison had sought to induce Congress to close American ports to Britain. His idea was simple. Not only did Britain still occupy its old fortresses on America’s wilderness frontier, but it refused to buy many American goods, it had paid no compensation for the slaves it had seized during the Revolution, and it shunned diplomatic relations with the United States. A retaliatory measure toward Britain, Madison reasoned, might serve as the lever to pry concessions from London. Hamilton, however, used chicanery as well as his clout with Washington to forestall any curtailment of Anglo-American trade.

  Unbeknownst to Washington, Hamilton had been meeting secretly since 1789 with a British contact. George Beckwith, formerly a major in the British army, had surfaced in the American capital shortly after Washington’s inauguration. Although Beckwith clearly was a foreign agent, Hamilton saw him frequently, even divulging information concerning the president’s keen desire for a rapprochement with Britain. In 1790, at the height of Madison’s campaign to secure retaliatory measures against British commerce, the treasury secretary at last chose to reveal his clandestine activities to the president, telling him that Beckwith recently had shown him secret documents that demonstrated London’s enthusiasm for an alliance with the United States. Do not permit better relations with Britain to be destroyed by Madison’s proposed navigation acts, Hamilton advised. In fact, however, Hamilton’s allegation concerning Whitehall’s intentions was not quite true. Beckwith’s documents merely stated that the agent should continue to seek to induce the United States to form an alliance with Great Britain. Nevertheless, whatever Washington’s reaction to his cabinet officer’s improper behavior, the president swallowed the bait and threw his prestige behind the effort to thwart Madison’s initiative. Soon Congress rejected the notion of retaliation, whereupon Washington, again at Hamilton’s behest, agreed to dispatch Gouverneur Morris to London in quest of that chimerical alliance.57

  Britain, of course, was not ready to deal, and the Morris mission was a spectacular failure. But a year later a war scare between Spain and Britain transformed the situation. The contretemps between those old European rivals sprang from a clash over their competing Pacific Ocean designs, a quarrel that began when London sought to move in on Spanish bases on Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island. As these two foes prepared for hostilities, President Washington had to take notice. He summoned his cabinet late in the summer of 1790 and posed a thorny question: if Britain sought to attack Spanish possessions on the American border (Florida, perhaps, or Louisiana or New Orleans), should the United States permit the redcoats to reach their destination by crossing American territory?58

  Jefferson and Hamilton took opposite sides. If Britain seized that portion of Spain’s North American domain, Jefferson warned, the United States would be encircled by its former parent state. This must be prevented, even if war with London was the result. Hamilton on the other hand counseled accommodation. In the end a clash between Britain and Spain was averted, but the Nootka Sound Crisis had troubled Whitehall as much as it had worried President Washington, and in the autumn of 1791 London dispatched its first minister to the United States. Jefferson interpreted these events as evidence that Hamilton had succeeded in moving America closer to the orbit of Great Britain, a step, he feared, that would pose a dire threat to the commercial relations the new nation so painstakingly had constructed with its old ally, France.59

  Coinciding with the arrival of the British minister, recriminations between Washington’s two secretaries and their friends moved from the drawing room to the printed page. Since the beginning of the Washington administration John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States had served as a virtual house organ for the treasury department, trumpeting Hamilton’s policies, pillorying his foes. In the fall of 1791, however, Jefferson and Madison bankrolled a newspaper of their own. They lured Philip Freneau from the editor’s desk at a slumbering little journal in Monmouth, New Jersey, and put him in charge of the National Gazette. By mid-year Hamilton, writing under various pseudonyms, had begun to stuff Fenno’s paper with essays in defense of his economic policies, as well as with pieces that portrayed Jefferson as a disunionist and as empathetic toward the worst excesses of the French Revolution. An answer was not long in coming.60

  Hamilton’s newspaper, according to accusing doggerel in Jefferson’s and Madison’s new journal, was inclined

  To flatter and lie, to pallaver and puff;

  To preach up in favour of monarchs and titles,

  And garters and ribbons, to prey on our vitals. . . .

  By implication, President Washington stood accused of complicity in furthering Hamilton’s allegedly nefarious schemes. Washington offered no public defense. In fact, he sought to convey the impression that the rising opposition had not given him “a moments painful sensation,” but that surely was not true. He complained to Jefferson that the burgeoning factionalism might divide the populace until governance was impossible. Moreover, Jefferson later recalled that Washington was “extremely affected” by the calumny directed at him. He was “sore and warm” at the attacks, Jefferson remembered, and he added that Washington “feels these things more than any person I ever met with.”61

  One result of the newspaper campaign was to foster the impression that the president was little more than Hamilton’s dupe, an apolitical rustic who unwittingly had been led astray by the evil genius at the treasury. Some historians continue to find it difficult not to give credence to such a view, suggesting, as one scholar recently did, that Hamilton’s program was “so audacious that almost no one, not even his staunchest supporters, understood it until it had been executed, and few understood it even then.”62 Washington hardly sought to foster the notion that he blindly followed Hamilton, but he postured as a benign administrator who merely carried out the dictates of Congress or the policies collectively agreed upon by his principal counselors. Indeed, as soon as the party battles heated up he instituted formal cabinet meetings, abandoning his earlier practice of simply conferring in private with each department chief. While such a step amounted to a legitimate endeavor to minimize discord within his administration by means of reaching decisions through consensus, the practice, as with his councils of war, also was a stratagem that he adopted to mask disharmony, to reinforce the notion that he listened to and acted on the advice of the majority of his advisors. While collective discussion created the impression of collective responsibility, it always was Washington’s style to have someone walk the point for him, to be in front in the line of fire. From his point of view the tactic had one pronounced virtue. If matters went well, he got most of the credit; if things went awry, someone else bore the opprobrium for having failed. Thus, during the war Sullivan or Greene or Lee had taken Washington’s army into battle. As for his economic program, it was Hamilton’s turn to be the point man.

  But if Washington was not Hamilton’s credulous booby, what was the president’s relationship to the policies of his administration? Some have suggested that circumstances led him to embrace the program of his treasury secretary. Hamilton, according to this logic, was with Washington in the capital from the beginning, whereas Jefferson did not arrive until the new government had been in place for a full year. Hamilton, thus, filled the voi
d. But such a notion trivializes the ideological differences of the era, making them appear to be little more than disputes between rival personalities. Nor does such a view concede much acumen to the president.

  Perhaps Washington backed Hamilton for less than noble reasons. Consciously or not, Washington may have seen Hamilton and the faction that he represented as the gravest threat to the ability of the Union to survive. The New-burgh Conspiracy must have alerted him to how far such men were willing to go. Three years after that incident Washington heard voices from the same quarter, now murmuring about secession from the Union if the government under the Articles was not strengthened. Surely he realized the dangers that might follow if this potent faction was obstructed under the new government. Indeed, the more success that element enjoyed under his presidency, the more he relaxed. Thus, whereas in 1786 he had thought the greatest danger to the Union was the threat of a monarchical counterrevolution by these very people, in 1792 he told Jefferson—who still harbored that fear—that there no longer were ten royalists in all of America. Certainly Washington now denied that Hamilton posed a danger to republicanism. “By some he is considered as an ambitious man, and therefore a dangerous one. That he is ambitious I shall readily grant,” said the president. But that was as far as he was willing to go. His secretary was not a menace.63

  Washington also may have been lured to the side of this powerful interest because it normally got what it set out to attain. The earliest opposition to Great Britain had surfaced within the northern maritime colonies; thereafter, its provincial leaders had maintained a steady drumbeat for boycotts and congresses, military resistance and eventually independence. In the 1780s this faction first had attained much of what it had sought when it conspired with the officers at Newburgh, then it had succeeded in overthrowing the Articles of Confederation government. Despite his knowledge of their machinations in the Newburgh Conspiracy, Washington remained their friend. He became their ally in the campaign against the Articles. Together they enacted the Federalist program. He preferred to bet on a winner.