Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  None of these historical insights of course was available to Jefferson, who was caught up in an ongoing controversy that put his most cherished political convictions at risk and made all the promises of pastoral seclusion he had made to himself seem like quaint vestiges of a bygone era. Madison had already tried to warn him of what destiny was arranging for him: “You ought to be preparing yourself to hear truths, which no inflexibility will be able to withstand.” Loosely translated, this meant that Jefferson, not Madison, was the consensus choice of the Republican party to succeed Washington in the presidency. Now that the Jay Treaty had given the Republicans a popular issue on which to discredit the Federalists, and now that Washington’s retirement after two terms was a virtual certainty, Jefferson’s reentry into the political arena had massive implications. Writing in coded language to Monroe in France, Madison explained that “the republicans knowing that Jefferson alone can be started with hope of success mean to push him.” By the early spring of 1796, whether he knew it or not, he had become the standard-bearer for the Republican party.71

  This did not mean that Jefferson formally declared his candidacy for the presidency; no self-respecting statesman of the day did that. It meant that he merely neglected to make a public statement declaring his withdrawal. But since Jefferson did not permit the perception of his candidacy to gain access to his conscious mind, even though it was being bandied about throughout the Republican network and in several newspapers, he really had no reason to declare his withdrawal. Madison understood the elaborate system of internal valves that Jefferson could turn off and on so deftly. He therefore understood—it was a critical dimension of their remarkable collaboration—that Jefferson’s willingness to reenter the political arena depended upon sustaining the fiction that it would never happen. Although Madison spent the entire summer and early fall of 1796 at Montpelier only a few miles from Jefferson, he chose not to visit his mentor at Monticello for fear of being drawn into conversations that upset Jefferson’s denial mechanisms. “I have not seen Jefferson,” he wrote Monroe in coded language, “and have thought it best to present him no opportunity of protesting to his friend against being embarked on this contest.” 72

  This psychological minuet enjoyed the advantage of allowing Jefferson to dance back into public life without quite knowing it was happening. On the downside, since he did not yet acknowledge to himself that his remarks were anything but those of a private citizen, he did not feel accountable to anyone but himself or internalize any need to be guarded in his correspondence. His most damaging statement came in a letter to his Italian friend Philip Mazzei, in April 1796, that effectively ended his cordial relationship with Washington when it was picked up in the American press the following year: “It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their head shaved by the harlot England… . We have only to awake and snap the Lilliputian cords which they have been entangling us during the first sleep which succeeded our labors.”73 If, as everyone at the time assumed, Samson was George Washington and the reference to shaved heads was a comment on his support for the Jay Treaty, Jefferson’s letter was both grossly unfair and extremely impolitic. Characteristically, he claimed that the version printed in American newspapers was a distortion of his meaning produced by a bad translation from the Italian papers, where it originally appeared. But the simple truth was that his sentiments had not been garbled in translation, nor were they a temporary aberration, as some latter-day biographers have claimed. This was how he genuinely saw his political opponents at the time, as apostates and heretics and traitors to the cause of American independence. The moral dichotomies were clear and pure. The colors were black and white. There was no room in his mental universe for the notion that honest and principled men could disagree on a landmark issue like the Jay Treaty and make mutually compelling claims to the truth.

  He also made some loose comments on the constitutional issues posed in the debate on the Jay Treaty that he would almost certainly have avoided if his guard had been up. Madison had lent him his personal copy of “Notes on the Debates at the Constitutional Convention” in the fall of 1795 because it was clear by then that the Republican strategy to block passage of the Jay Treaty depended upon throwing the question into the House of Representatives, where the Republicans enjoyed a majority; this required a good deal of constitutional ingenuity because the power to make treaties rested with the president and the Senate. (Indeed, a review of Madison’s “Notes on the Debates” revealed that Madison himself had been one of the staunchest opponents of infringements on executive power over foreign policy at the Constitutional Convention.) Jefferson’s bold and bald solution to this dilemma was to declare that “the true theory of our constitution” allowed the elected representatives in the House an equal share of power over treaties with the president and the Senate. Because he regarded the House of Representatives as the most democratic branch of the government with the closest ties to popular opinion, “the representatives are as free as the President and the Senate were to consider whether the national interest requires or forbids their giving the forms and force of law to the articles over which they have a power.” Indeed, Jefferson claimed that to deny the House a role was to transfer control from the American people to “any other Indian, Algerine or other chief.” He even went so far as to tell Monroe that he had no problem in shifting the main responsibility for approving all the treaties to the House and “in annihilating the whole treaty making power [of the executive branch], except as to making peace.”74

  These were radical prescriptions that, if taken seriously, would have thrown American foreign policy into the cauldron of domestic politics on every controversial occasion. They contrast with Madison’s more narrow and careful constitutional argument, which became the official Republican position, that the House could block passage of the Jay Treaty because certain provisions required funding for their implementation and the House was the proper branch to decide all money bills. Madison’s more careful argument made no frontal assault on executive power but still achieved the desired goal of allowing the Republican majority in the House to hold the Jay Treaty hostage. Jefferson’s more extreme position reflected his more cavalier attitude toward constitutional questions in general. Unlike Madison, who had a deep appreciation for the Constitution as an artful arrangement of juxtaposed principles and powers with abiding influence over future generations, Jefferson tended to view it as a merely convenient agreement about political institutions that ought not to bind future generations or prevent the seminal source of all political power—popular opinion—from dictating government policy. His casual remarks in the spring of 1796 during the height of the debate over the Jay Treaty were uncharacteristic only in the sense that Jefferson customarily left constitutional questions in Madison’s capable hands. But precisely because he did not feel the obligation to filter his opinions through Madison, his statements more accurately reflected his greater willingness to bend constitutional arguments to serve what he saw as a higher purpose, which in this case was defeat of the counterrevolutionary alliance with England. Upsetting delicate constitutional balances or setting dangerous precedents did not trouble him in such moments.75

  Madison served as the floor manager for the Republicans during the debate in the House of Representatives—it was the first instance when they met in caucus as an opposition party—and the humiliation fell on him when the Republican majority melted away. John Adams observed that “Mr. Madison looks worried to death. Pale, withered, haggard.” When the final vote came in late April 1796, Madison attributed the narrow Federalist victory to an urban conspiracy led by “the Banks, the British Merchts., the insurance Comps.” In truth, the swing votes had come from western representatives, whose constituents had decided to support the treaty because the removal of British troops from the frontier promised to open up the Mississippi Valley for settlement. Madison apprised
Jefferson that “the exertions and influence of Aristocracy, Anglicism, and mercantilism” had combined to “overwhelm the Republican cause, [and] has left it in a very crippled condition… .” The disaster was so total and so unexpected that, as Madison explained his dismay to Jefferson, “my consolation… is in the effect they have in riveting my future purposes.” He was played out and ready for retirement.76

  Jefferson, who had the advantage of viewing the devastation from Monticello, had a fundamentally different and more politically astute appraisal. The primary reason for the Federalist victory, he told Monroe in France, was the gigantic prestige of Washington, “the one man who outweighs them all in influence over the people” and whose support for the Jay Treaty proved in the end too much to overcome. Jefferson’s conclusion was shrewdly prophetic:

  The Anglomen have in the end got their treaty through, and so far have triumphed over the cause of republicanism. Yet it has been to them a dear bought victory… and there is no doubt they would be glad to be replaced on the ground they possessed the instant before Jay’s nomination extraordinary. They see that nothing can support them but the Colossus of the President’s merits with the people, and the moment he retires, that his successor, if a Monocrat, will be overborne by the republican sense… . In the meantime, patience.77

  Jefferson was usually even more disposed than Madison to regard any Federalist success as the result of corruption and conspiracy. After all, if the vast majority of the citizenry allegedly opposed a particular policy, and it nevertheless kept winning victories, the only logical explanation must be conspiratorial. What Jefferson saw clearly in the wake of the Jay Treaty debate, and Madison was simply too closely involved to notice, was that the resolution of the questions raised by the treaty had been reached by a new kind of politics in which both sides acknowledged that success depended upon an appeal to popular opinion. Washington’s nearly unassailable popularity had given the Federalists a decided edge in this particular contest. But once the game had been defined in these terms—that is, once republicanism became more democratic in character—the Federalists were doomed.78

  LUCKY LOSERS

  IN SEPTEMBER 1796 Fisher Ames, the oracular champion of the Federalist cause, observed that Washington’s Farewell Address was “a signal, like dropping a hat, for the party races to start.” In fact the Republicans had been organizing for several months. Jefferson’s candidacy had been a foregone conclusion for almost a year; as early as May 1796 Madison had apprised Monroe that the presidential election was likely to pit “Jefferson the object on one side [and] Adams apparently on the other.” Neither man was expected to campaign. The emergence of an early form of democratic politics had not yet reached that stage of development. It was still considered unbecoming for a serious statesman to prostitute his integrity by a direct appeal to voters.79

  This lingering aristocratic code fitted Jefferson’s mood perfectly, for it allowed him to remain sequestered at Monticello throughout the summer, publicly oblivious of the campaign that Madison was waging in his behalf and even privately capable of sustaining the pretense that he would live out his life in retirement. Madison was the complicitous partner in this psychological game, never corresponding with Jefferson about the looming election until it was over. Even then, when he finally wrote Jefferson in December 1796, his political report studiously avoided mention of Jefferson’s candidacy. “It is not improbable that Pinckney will step in between the two who have been treated as the principals in this question,” he observed, a reference to efforts by Hamilton to run a third candidate, Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, who might displace Adams as the Federalist choice for president. “This Jockeyship is accounted for by the enmity of Adams to Banks and funding systems,” Madison went on, “and by an apprehension that he is too headstrong to be a fit puppet for the intriguers behind the skreen.” Adams, in other words, was not a loyal Hamiltonian—the truth was that Adams disliked Hamilton almost as much as Jefferson did, and after learning about this Pinckney scheme, he loathed him even more—so the next occupant of the presidency was going to be either Jefferson or a man the Republicans could tolerate.80

  Jefferson’s first acknowledgement of his own candidacy came in response to Madison’s letter. While not attempting to affect complete surprise, Jefferson maintained the posture that Madison had always remained his preferred choice: “The first wish of my heart was that you should have been proposed for the administration of government. On your declining it I wish any body rather than myself. And there is nothing I so anxiously hope as that my name may come out second or third. These would be indifferent to me; as the last would leave me at home the whole year, and the other [the vice presidency] the other two thirds of it.” Jefferson then informed Madison to put out the word that if the election ended in a tie, he wished it known that Adams should be declared the winner. “He has always been my senior from the commencement of our public life,” Jefferson observed with becoming modesty, a circumstance “that ought to give him preference,” adding as a final thought that he had “no confidence in myself for the undertaking.”81

  Over the ensuing weeks, as the results of the electoral vote in the fourteen states became clear, Jefferson sustained a public posture of personal reluctance and political deference to Adams. Even before the votes had been counted, he wrote to his old colleague from Philadelphia and Paris days, regretting “the various little incidents [that] have happened or been contrived to separate us” and disavowing any competitive urges. “I have no ambition to govern men,” he confided. “It is a painful and thankless task.” He was obviously paying close attention to press reports on the voting, since he was one of the first to predict that Adams would win by three electoral votes (71–68), which turned out to be the exact result. But he wished to squelch all rumors that he had any objection to serving under Adams: “I was his junior in life, was his junior in Congress, his junior in the diplomatic line, his junior lately in our civil government.” Besides, Adams was “perhaps the only sure barrier against Hamilton’s getting in.” The office of the vice presidency was a “tranquil and unoffending station” that would effectively allow Jefferson to remain in semiretirement. He expected to spend “philosophical evenings in the winter, and rural days in the summer.”82

  Beneath such expressions of reluctance and deference, which accurately reflected a genuine feeling at one layer of his personality, there existed another, much more realistic assessment of the political situation. While reiterating his political innocence, claiming that “I never in my life exchanged a word with any person on the subject, till I found my name brought forward generally, in competition with that of Mr. Adams,” he also offered a shrewd analysis of what was in store for the winner. “The second office of this government is honorable and easy,” he explained; “the first is but a splendid misery.” The chief problem was the long shadow of George Washington. In an uncharacteristically mixed metaphor, he offered Madison this uncanny insight: “The President is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag. Yet, as his departure will mark the moment when the difficulties begin to work, you will see, that they will be ascribed to the new administration, and that he will have his usual good fortune of reaping credit from the good acts of others, and leaving to them that of his errors.” In short, whoever followed Washington was virtually assured of failure, and “no man will bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.” The Republicans had been lucky to lose.83

  Neither Madison, who was too busy trying to diagnose the likely course of an Adams presidency, nor Adams himself, whose combination of vanity and obsession with public duty never permitted such political detachment, was capable of seeing things so clearly. To his credit, Jefferson’s first reaction was to share this political appraisal with his long-standing friend from Quincy. He assumed the Ciceronian posture of the retired farmer; he was living, as he put it to Adams, in a secluded canton where “I learn little of what is passing; pamphlets, I neve
r see, papers but a few; and the fewer the happier.” Though disingenuous, it was a posture Adams understood for what it was and in keeping with the somewhat contrived civility that both men had assumed toward each other in recent years. After congratulating Adams on his victory and assuring him that he “never one single moment expected a different issue,” Jefferson tried to warn him of the storm into which he was riding. First, there was “the subtlety of your arch-friend of New York”—Hamilton’s duplicity was a sure source of complete consensus—who “will be disappointed as to you” and “contrive behind the scenes” to manipulate his protégés in the cabinet. More generally, both the foreign and domestic affairs of the nation were victims of partisan squabbling: “Since the day on which you signed the treaty of Paris our horizon was never so overcast.” He concluded with a reference to earlier and better days, “when we were working for our independence,” and a vague promise to renew the old partnership.84

  Instead of posting the letter directly to Adams, Jefferson decided to run it past Madison first, just to assure its propriety. Madison counseled against sending the letter, offering six reasons why its sentiments might be misconstrued. The last and most politically significant reason was telling: “Considering the probability that Mr. A’s course of administration may force an opposition to it from the Republican quarter, and the general uncertainty of the posture which our affairs may take, there may be real embarrassments from giving written possession to him, of the degree of compliment and confidence which your personal delicacy and friendship have suggested.” In other words, Jefferson’s well-known affection for Adams was admirable, but it must not be allowed to become an impediment to the Republican cause. If Jefferson were correct about the political earthquakes about to shake the Adams presidency, best to keep one’s distance.85