by Gore Vidal
Hamilton’s grievances against Jefferson were manifold and such was his passionate nature that he could not keep from confiding them to me, a potential enemy but then, for all he knew, a potential ally, since I was senator from a state devoted to trade and manufactures.
“Three years ago when Jefferson became secretary of state, we made an arrangement. I wanted the federal government to assume the debts of the states. But as Virginia had paid off most of her debt, the Virginians in Congress were opposed. I appealed to Jefferson. We were standing outside the President’s house in New York. I practically got down on my knees to him, begged him to help me change the Virginia votes. Warned him that other states would secede if we did not help them pay their debts. He entirely agreed, he said, and—now this is crucial—he agreed that the assumption of debts was in the interest of all the states. He then suggested that I put my case to Madison at a dinner in his house. I repeated for Madison what I had said to Jefferson but Madison was cool to the plan, and so to my surprise was Jefferson, who kept changing the subject. Spoke of climate. Of flora. Of fauna. Of the natural beauties of Virginia. I did my best to appear spellbound when he favoured me with a long digression on the physical nature of the opossum. There is a pouch, it seems, in the stomach of the opossum. Jefferson was worried about that pouch. Finally, I realized what our deep philosopher was after. He wanted the new capital of the country to be placed in Virginia—specifically on the banks of the Potomac River near Georgetown. If I gave him the capital, he and Madison would support me on the assumption of debts. I agreed. I had no choice. And that is how my bill to assume the debts of the states promptly passed the Congress, with the aid of the Virginia delegation, and that is why nine years from now Virginia will have the capital of the country, assuming those desultory farmers remember to build a city between now and then.”
At the time I rather doubted Hamilton’s version. Later I discovered it was correct. But then he was always truthful in such matters. Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never lied about issues, only men.
“It would seem to me,” I was thinking rapidly, “that if Jefferson is so agreeable to arrangements, you must simply keep on making it worth his while …”
“Unfortunately he has discovered the people. That beast attracts him. He would like to level everyone, and not because he has any abiding love for the majesty of the multitude but because he is a demagogue and thinks that to cry ‘monarchist’ at the President or at me is the surest way of inciting the people against us. Well, if he succeeds, Heaven help him! No Washington, no United States. No United States, no Jefferson. He is without conscience.”
I made my only objection. “I would not under-estimate his zeal. He strikes me as a man addicted to the most rigid principles …”
“Principles! You should have seen the letter he recently wrote a friend in Paris.” During this period the one certain way of gaining total publicity was not through the newspapers but through the postal service. In consequence, most of us wrote in cipher; even so, letters were constantly intercepted and the ciphers regularly broken. Hamilton and Jefferson spent a good deal of time reading one another’s private correspondence.
“Jefferson wrote to advise a Mr. Short to invest his money in the bank! In the very bank Jefferson is publicly accusing of being a menace to the republic! Oh, he is as two-faced as Janus! Do you know why he is so eager for a war in Europe? Because it will increase the price of the wheat he is growing in prospect of just such a war. He has also instructed his farm agent to grow hemp, cotton and flax because when the fighting begins in Europe he will be able to make a huge profit here at home. So Jefferson actually promotes war as being—in his very phrase—‘helpful to domestic manufacture’!”
I have no idea if any of this was true. The important thing is that Hamilton believed it to be true. What zealots those two were! Yet of the two I regard Hamilton as the more honourable. Certainly he had the more realistic view of the world. Trained as a boy by Jews in the Indies, he understood money and commerce in a way that no one else at that time did, excepting Gallatin. Personally Hamilton was probably honest, though surrounded by thieves. One such thief was his close friend and assistant secretary of the Treasury, William Duer. Hamilton allowed Duer to sell Treasury secrets to speculators until Duer went to jail. But then Hamilton was no judge of character. He lived in a rarefied world of theory; unlike Jefferson who appeared unworldly yet understood human character better than any other politician I have ever known. Had the two been combined into a single statesman, we might have been governed by Plato’s philosopher-king, and I would have gone rather earlier to Mexico, my Syracuse!
I recall no more of our exchange. Hamilton was desperate for votes in the Senate now that he had lost Schuyler. He was counting on my neutrality—on my accessibility to reason in the coming sessions. As it turned out, much of the time we were allied.
As I was leaving “the palace,” I found myself walking beside Adams—known behind his back as His Rotundity. Round, plump, tactless, with a nose like a parrot’s beak and a cold piercing eye, Adams was an imposing if somewhat comical figure, famed for his gaffes: as president he once told a hostile Republican Congress how honoured he had been to be presented to the King of England. He never did understand men, but he was quite at home with their ideas.
As we waited for our carriage (this was a part of our pretentiousness in Philadelphia: although most distances were short we all owned or hired carriages to take us from Congress Hall to “palace” to boarding-house), Adams said, “Your family is highly regarded in New England, Senator.” This sort of pronouncement was purest Adams. “Your grandfather Jonathan Edwards might be said to have shaped our very being.”
“Then I understand New England better.”
For all Adams’ bluntness, he was not—like Jefferson—immune to irony. “Yes, I suspect you do. You are a contemporary of Mr. Hamilton. I saw you speaking to him just now.”
“We are almost exactly contemporary. But no more.”
“Faction! Faction! This place stinks of political faction!” Fisher Ames heard this as he passed us on his unexpectedly democratic way home by foot. “For some,” Ames flung at Adams, “this stench is like attar of roses.”
Adams was joined by his wife, a lady always amiable to me. She spoke of Hamilton with a degree of fondness. “I have the desire to be like a mother to him.” Mrs. Adams was not particularly motherly in manner.
“Well, I have no desire to be his father, and could not!” Adams’ mind was indeed shaped by my grandfather’s puritanism. So much so that John Adams was not, finally, a creature of our century at all but a relic of old New England days, of a wrathful god delighting in the ubiquity of sin and its terrible punishment. Yet Adams’ intelligence, though limited, was profound. What he knew he knew well. Unfortunately what he did not know he did not suspect existed.
Hamilton’s bastardy used to exercise Adams even before they quarrelled (led to the quarrel?). Mrs. Adams reproved her mate. But Adams was not done with the subject. “One day the world will understand that young man you want to be a mother to for what he is: a natural orphan.”
“Charity, John.”
“I merely observe. Hamilton needs, lusts for fathers and mothers and he picks them up wherever he goes. The President did not adopt him as a son, he adopted the President as a father. He has been attaching himself to older men since he was a boy, an orphan, an outcast from the respectable world and quite rightly, too, considering how he was born, and of what blood. Senator Burr, the world is stern but the world is just.”
The vice-presidential carriage arrived, splattering us sternly but justly with mud.
As the groom descended, Adams turned to me. “I trust, Sir, that this Congress will be the better for your attendance.”
“As it is better, Sir, for your presidence of our chamber.”
A wide cold stare raked my face like grape-shot. “I fear this Congress may be like the first, full of faction. I also fear those members who are too attached
to France’s vicious revolution.”
“I fear all attachments which are excessive.”
Adams took this ambiguity in stride. “We are in danger of government by professional office-holders …”
“Come, John.” Mrs. Adams was impatient and uneasy.
Adams was not finished. “By men of party rather than by men of state.”
“It is sometimes hard to tell the difference.”
“I can tell.” From inside the carriage Mrs. Adams yanked hard at her husband’s arm which was just inside the door.
“Can you also tell change when it comes, Mr. Adams? And whether it be for good or ill?”
“When it is for ill …”
Mrs. Adams and the groom had now got the Vice-President by sheer force into the carriage.
Mine was the last word as the groom shut the door. “New occasions, Mr. Adams, require new men and new ideas.”
The carriage started with a jolt. I heard Adams say to his wife in a tone of exasperation, “Look at him, sleek as a duck!” I felt a certain distress. What he said was true. I had gained weight with all the party-going. I vowed a new regimen the next day.
As I waited for my carriage, I noticed James Monroe behind me. He had heard the end of our conversation. He made a face. “They’re powerful enemies, those old Tories.”
“Shall we replace them presently?” Almost casually, I set about the first of my alliances.
“Can it be done, without bloodshed?”
“It can be done, and it will be done, if we are wise.”
“Are you a prophet?”
“No, Sir. But I can see what is in front of me. This faction mistrusts the people. All we need do is let the people know in what contempt their masters hold them, then they will do the rest.” I got into my rented carriage.
“Are you with Jefferson?” Monroe called after me.
“In this matter, what republican is not?” On that equivocal, as Hamilton would say, note, we parted—with Monroe shouting after me to beware the Philadelphia tradesmen as “sharpers.” In those few minutes on the steps of Washington’s “palace” I had made my first move toward the presidency.
Thirteen
THIS MORNING I found Colonel Burr in his office, much amused by an account of a recent Senate performance by Henry Clay. “Mr. Clay apparently made the rafters ring, denouncing Andrew Jackson. He then turned to the Vice-President who was in the chair. Pleaded with him to bring his friend the President to reason. Listen to this. ‘Entreat him to pause,’ ” Burr caught marvellously Clay’s plangent frontier voice, “ ‘to pause and to reflect that there is a point beyond which human endurance cannot go, and let him not drive this brave, generous and patriotic people to madness and despair!’ ”
Burr even managed the half-sob Clay sometimes works with such effect into his codas. “Then Mr. Van Buren turned over the chair to a senator, made his way down the aisle to where Henry Clay still stood with arms out-stretched in a gesture of pleading and, as everyone stared, said in a soft little voice, ‘Mr. Clay, might I have a pinch of your fine maccoboy snuff?’ ” Burr’s laughter echoed in the stuffy office.
“He sounds like you, Colonel.”
“I was never so superbly deflationary. But then we had no audience in the early days of the Senate. Our proceedings were secret until I insisted on making them public. The level of our debate changed over night. Nothing so improves a senator’s speech as an audience.”
Sam Swartwout threw open the door, unannounced as always. “Colonel—leader!”
“You exaggerate, my boy.”
“I was passing in the street and thought I’d bring you the news straight from the port. Lafayette is dead!”
“One cannot say that he was taken before his time. We must restrain our grief.” The Colonel was suitably dry. “He must have been—what, eighty?”
“Seventy-seven. Younger than you, Colonel.”
“Then I shudder at this cold premonitory wind from France. Poor boy! So much to look forward to. I trust he is now in Heaven with General Washington and, side by side, they rest on a cloudy mantle of stars for all eternity, dreaming up disastrous military engagements.”
“News from Washington City.” Swartwout looked conspiratorial. I withdrew.
Later when the Colonel began his dictation, France was on his mind.
Memoirs of Aaron Burr–Five
IT IS DIFFICULT for people in 1834 to understand to what extent the life and politics of the early republic were governed by the fact of Europe, particularly by France and England. Yet no one preferred it that way; not even the Tories who loved the King wanted us to be embroiled in the problems of Europe. Unfortunately, we had no choice.
At the beginning France was our chief ally. After all, had it not been for the French fleet, there would still be a British garrison on the Battery. But the Revolution in France distressed our Tories—or Federalists as they came to be known; a nice irony since they had not wanted any federal government, preferring the King. But after we forced independence on them, the Tories wanted a strong federal government in order the better to protect their property and to keep the people in its place.
Looking back, we Republicans were not much different. Neither Jefferson nor I fretted particularly over the Constitution’s limited franchise. I recall that in the election of 1789 there were over 300,000 residents of New York state of whom only 12,000 were qualified to cast a vote for governor. Needless to say, no one was allowed to vote directly for president. That was considered much too dangerous a privilege even for our small propertied electorate. They could vote for state legislators who in turn would select a president.
Between the First and Second Congresses, what Adams called “the spirit of faction” emerged. Hamilton was no more monarchist than Jefferson but he did see the American future as being dominated by manufacture and commerce which, in turn, required banks, taxation, cities, an army and a navy. Jefferson saw the whole continent as a kind of Virginia, filled with honest yeomen enjoying the fruits of black labour. Jefferson wanted no cities, no banks, no manufactories, no taxes. Jefferson was wrong and Hamilton was right. Worse, Jefferson was impractical.
The divisions in Washington’s cabinet were exacerbated by the French Revolution. When the Bastille fell in 1789 even the Federalists were for a moment thrilled. Although every American owed a considerable debt to Louis XVI, we were all of us certain that he would be a better and happier king if he presided over a republic. I fear we were a bit simple at the time, interpreting everything that happened in Paris as a sort of Gallic repetition of our own glorious experiment.
Sometime in April 1793 we learned of the execution of Louis XVI. Republicanism had truly triumphed. Pigtails were cut off and hair worn a la Brutus. Trousers replaced small-clothes. Everyone started calling everyone else “citizen” and “citizeness,” and the bad manners so many foreign visitors remark upon when they come to our shores (the children who do not respond politely to adults, the surliness of tradesmen and servants) began that spring with the arrival of the French ambassador Citizen Genêt. Over night it was considered slavish for the lower orders to be polite to anyone. Yet before Genêt’s arrival, Americans were considered the politest people in the world—resembling the British but with greater sweetness and less servility. After Genêt they became what they are today—truculent, sullen and envious.
At the time of the execution of the King and Queen, their portraits hung on the walls of our Senate chamber (and everyone, including Mrs. Bingham, remarked how much she resembled Marie Antoinette). After the beheadings, various Republicans—including Freneau—wanted the portraits taken down. Jefferson’s view of the portraits is unknown but he did delight in the executions. “After all,” he said to me, “was ever such a prize won with so little blood?”
I said that from all accounts the prize had cost a good deal of blood.
But Jefferson was hard. “Rather than their revolution fail, Colonel Burr, I would see half the earth desolated! After all, if in
every country there was but one Adam and Eve left, one free Adam and one free Eve remaining, the world would be better than it is now.” I could not believe my ears. Either Jefferson was a fool in his zealotry or an active principle of evil.
Since France was now at war with England, Austria, Russia, Sardinia and the Netherlands, President Washington wisely insisted on our maintaining a strict neutrality. This enraged Republicans and Federalists. The first wanted war with England; the second with France. As a result, there were now two plainly recognisable political parties: the Republican party which was pro-French, anti-British and in tone egalitarian; the Federalist party which was the reverse. The Republican national leadership consisted of Jefferson, Madison, Clinton and myself. The Federalists included Hamilton, Adams, Jay, Knox and, more or less covertly, Washington himself.
On Thursday, May 16, 1793, Citizen Edmond Genêt arrived in Philadelphia to present his credentials to the President. He had already presented his credentials to the American people. Arriving some weeks before in Charleston, South Carolina, he had made a triumphal progress toward our capital, addressing along the way—and in excellent English—cheering crowds. The Federalists were alarmed. Jefferson, however, was benign. Do we not all detest tyrants?
An enthusiastic Philadelphia crowd assembled at Gray’s Ferry to welcome Genêt. Unfortunately, the ambassador had appeared at the wrong wharf where he delivered a powerful address to a dozen startled loungers whom he took to be the Republican party. But the next few days more than compensated for the comedy of this début.
A splendid dinner was given him at Oeller’s Hotel. Because of the Neutrality Proclamation, those of us who held public office were requested to attend ex officio. Needless to say the entire Republican delegation to the Congress was on hand.