Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

  On July 6, Citizen Genêt committed a colossal blunder that dwarfed all previous gaffes. With Washington at Mount Vernon, Genêt took advantage of his absence to inform Alexander J. Dallas, the secretary of Pennsylvania, that he rejected the notion of American neutrality. He said that he planned to go above Washington’s head and appeal directly to the American people, asking their assistance to rig French privateers in American ports. Genêt was doing more than just flouting previous warnings; he was clumsily insulting the U.S. government and slapping the face of the one man who could not be slapped: George Washington. Dallas related the story to Governor Mifflin, who passed it on to Hamilton and Knox, who passed it on to Washington. Suddenly, Jefferson’s enchantment with Genêt disappeared. “Never, in my opinion, was so calamitous an appointment made as that of the present minister of France here,” he protested to Madison. “Hotheaded, all imagination, no judgment, passionate, disrespectful, and even indecent toward the P[resident] in his written as well as verbal communications....He renders my position immensely difficult.”48

  Hamilton was outraged, while also mindful that Genêt had handed him a blunt weapon to wield against France. On July 8, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Knox conferred at the State House to figure out what to do with La Petite démocrate. The absent Washington had already ruled that privateers armed in American ports should be stopped or forcibly seized. Hamilton and Knox wanted to post a militia and guns at a strategic spot called Mud Island, a few miles down the Delaware River, preventing the ship from escaping. Jefferson favored the milder course of dealing with American crew members rather than the ship itself. While not making promises, Genêt told Jefferson that the vessel wouldn’t sail from Philadelphia before Washington returned. Hamilton, who did not trust Genêt, wanted forcible action to prevent La Petite démocrate from getting away. In a memo, he wrote, “It is a truth the best founded and of the last importance that nothing is so dangerous to a government as to be wanting either in self confidence or self-respect.”49 But Hamilton could not prevail upon his colleagues to use force.

  Washington returned to Philadelphia on July 11. La Petite démocrate managed to slip away and sail past Mud Island on July 12. On the spot, Hamilton proposed that the French government be asked to recall Genêt. Even Jefferson registered no protest. A few days, later La Petite démocrate was at sea.

  As he watched Genêt’s boorish behavior, Hamilton longed to broadcast his views to the public. He was not born to be a silent spectator of events. By late June, Hamilton could contain himself no longer and rushed into print. On June 29, 1793, a writer billing himself as “Pacificus” inaugurated the first of seven essays in the Gazette of the United States that defended the Neutrality Proclamation. Throughout July, Hamilton’s articles ran twice weekly, their impact enhanced by Citizen Genêt’s intolerable antics.

  In the first essay, Hamilton dealt with the objection that only Congress could issue a neutrality proclamation, since it alone had the power to declare war. Hamilton pointed out that if “the legislature have a right to make war, on the one hand, it is, on the other, the duty of the executive to preserve peace till war is declared.”50 Once again, Hamilton broadened the authority of the executive branch in diplomacy, especially during emergencies. He also speculated that the real reason behind the brouhaha over neutrality was the opposition’s desire to weaken or remove Washington from office. In the second essay, he disputed that the Neutrality Proclamation violated the defensive alliance with France. That treaty, Hamilton noted, did not apply to offensive wars, and France had declared war against other European powers. In the third essay, Hamilton evoked the devastation that might result if America was dragged into war on France’s side. Great Britain and Spain could instigate “numerous Indian tribes” under their influence to attack the United States from the interior. Meanwhile, “with a long extended sea coast, with no fortifications whatever and with a population not exceeding four millions,” the United States would find itself in an unequal contest.51

  In subsequent installments, Pacificus presented Louis XVI as a benevolent man and a true friend of America: “I am much misinformed if repeated declarations of the venerable Franklin did not attest this fact.”52 French support for the American Revolution, he argued, had emanated from the king and high government circles, not the masses: “If there was any kindness in the decision [to support America], demanding a return of kindness from us, it was the kindness of Louis the XVI. His heart was the depository of the sentiment.”53 It took courage for Hamilton, stigmatized as a cryptomonarchist, to express sympathy for a dead king. In the last “Pacificus” essay, he defended American neutrality on the grounds that a country “without armies, without fleets” was too immature to prosecute war.54 To amplify his views, Hamilton organized rallies to demonstrate popular approval of the Neutrality Proclamation.

  Hamilton was always fond of his “Pacificus” essays, which show the impassioned pragmatism that informed his foreign-policy views. He later incorporated them into an 1802 edition of The Federalist, proudly telling the publisher that “some of his friends had pronounced them to be his best performance.”55 Hamilton must have enjoyed bundling these essays with The Federalist, because they had provoked a venomous response from his main Federalist coauthor, James Madison. It was Jefferson who prodded Madison into taking on Hamilton over the Neutrality Proclamation. Jefferson had read the first few “Pacificus” essays with mounting dismay and decided once again to deploy a proxy to refute Hamilton. On July 7, he urged Madison to tilt lances with the treasury secretary: “Nobody answers him and his doctrines will therefore be taken for confessed. For God’s sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public. There is nobody else who can and will enter the lists with him.”56

  Jefferson must have thought that Madison would leap at the chance to resist the expanded executive powers embodied in the Neutrality Proclamation. Instead, Madison balked. From his Virginia plantation, he complained to Jefferson that he lacked the necessary books and papers to refute “Pacificus,” and he griped about the summer heat. He blamed hordes of houseguests who overstayed their welcomes. Did even Madison tremble at the thought of confronting Hamilton? When he had exhausted all excuses, he told Jefferson grudgingly, “I have forced myself into the task of a reply. I can truly say I find it the most grating one I ever experienced.”57

  In the end, Madison hammered away at Hamilton with five essays published under the name “Helvidius.” The first essay reflected the deep animosity that had sprung up between the Federalist collaborators: “Several pieces with the signature of Pacificus were late published, which have been read with singular pleasure and applause by the foreigners and degenerate citizens among us, who hate our republican government and the French Revolution.” Madison complained of “a secret Anglomany” behind “the mask of neutrality.”58 He flayed Hamilton as a monarchist for defending the Neutrality Proclamation. Such prerogatives, he said, were “royal prerogatives in the British government and are accordingly treated as executive prerogatives by British commentators.”59

  In prose more pedestrian than Hamilton’s, Madison brought the perspective of a strict constructionist to the neutrality issue. He wanted full authority over foreign policy to rest with Congress, not the president, except where the Constitution granted the chief executive specific powers. Madison was both edited and supplied with cabinet secrets by Jefferson, who seemed to have no reservations about abetting this assault on a presidential proclamation.

  The instigator of many articles against his own administration, Jefferson knew that they were upsetting Washington. He felt sympathy for the president but also believed he was getting his just deserts. He wrote to Madison in June:

  The President is not well. Little lingering fevers have been hanging about him for a week or ten days and have affected his looks most remarkably. He is also extremely affected by the attacks made and kept on him in the public papers. I think he feels those things more than
any person I ever yet met with. I am extremely sorry to see them. [Jefferson then indicated that Washington had brought the attacks on himself.] Naked, he would have been sanctimoniously reverenced, but enveloped in the rags of royalty, they can hardly be torn off without laceration.60

  During that eventful summer of 1793, administration infighting grew increasingly cutthroat. On July 23, Washington held a cabinet meeting that took on a surreal atmosphere. The president wanted to ask for Genêt’s recall without offending France. This pushed Hamilton into an extended harangue on the crisis facing the government. He alluded to a “faction” that wanted to “overthrow” the government, and he said that to arrest its progress the administration should publish the story of Genêt’s unseemly behavior; otherwise, people would soon join the “incendiaries.”61 What made this dramatic scene so unreal was that the spiritual leader of that faction was sitting right there in the room: Thomas Jefferson.

  That summer, Jefferson found Hamilton both insupportable and inescapable. Besides his Treasury job, Hamilton conducted a full-time career as an anonymous journalist. In late July, the American Daily Advertiser printed his piece called “No Jacobin,” the first of yet another nine essays that issued from Hamilton’s fluent pen over a four-week period. He began by hurling a thunderbolt: “It is publicly rumoured in this city that the minister of the French republic has threatened to appeal from The President of the United States to the People.”62 The leak of this secret information about Genêt’s insolent disrespect toward Washington had a pronounced effect on public opinion. In coming weeks, Hamilton continued to lash out at Genêt for meddling in domestic politics: “What baseness, what prostitution in a citizen of this country, to become the advocate of a pretension so pernicious, so unheard of, so detestable!”63

  On August 1, Jefferson found himself trapped again in a cabinet meeting with Hamilton, the human word machine, who spontaneously spouted perfect speeches in every forum. The treasury secretary thundered on about the need to disclose the damaging correspondence with Citizen Genêt. From Jefferson’s notes, we can see the highly theatrical manner that Hamilton assumed in Washington’s small cabinet. “Hamilton made a jury speech of three quarters of an hour,” a weary Jefferson told his journal, “as inflammatory and declamatory as if he had been speaking to a jury.”64 One senses the laconic Jefferson’s perplexity in dealing with this inspired windbag. “Met again,” Jefferson reported the next day. “Hamilton spoke again three quarters of an hour.”65 Hamilton repeated charges made by the royal European powers that France wanted to export its revolution to their countries. Jefferson inwardly reviled Hamilton as a traitor to republican government. “What a fatal stroke at the cause of liberty; et tu Brute,” he wrote in his diary.66

  At this point, Jefferson finally aired his own views. He predictably opposed public exposure of government dealings with Genêt and also warned of the futility of cracking down on “Democratic” societies that had sprung up since Genêt’s arrival. If the government suppressed these groups, Jefferson argued, people would join them merely “to assert the right of voluntary associations.”67 His point was well taken, but he had squandered his credibility with the president, as he was about to discover in peculiarly dramatic fashion.

  With heroic fortitude, Washington had tried to remain evenhanded with Hamilton and Jefferson, but he could no longer tolerate this dissension in his cabinet. A sensitive man of pent-up passion, he also could not endure the vicious abuse he had taken in Freneau’s National Gazette. In May, Washington had asked Jefferson to fire Freneau from his State Department job after the editor wrote that Washington had signed the Neutrality Proclamation because the “Anglomen” threatened to cut off his head. Convinced that the National Gazette had saved the country from monarchy, Jefferson refused to comply with Washington’s request. Now, in a cabinet session, Henry Knox happened to mention a tasteless satirical broadside called “The Funeral Dirge of George Washington,” in which Washington, like Louis XVI, was executed by guillotine. This libel was thought to have been written by Freneau. Knox’s reference lit a fuse inside Washington, and the seemingly phlegmatic president became a powder keg. In his “Anas,” Jefferson described the unusual scene:

  The President was much inflamed; got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself; ran on much on the personal abuse which has been bestowed on him; defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government which was not done on the purest motives; [said] that he had never repented but once the having slipped the moment of resigning his office and that was every moment since; that by God he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation; that he had rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world; and yet they were charging him with wanting to be a king. That that rascal Freneau sent him three of his papers every day, as if he thought he would become the distributor of his papers; that he could see in this nothing but an impudent design to insult him. He ended in this high tone. There was a pause. Some difficulty in resuming our question.68

  Jefferson scored few points in the cabinet that August. It was decided that America, as a neutral nation, could not allow belligerent powers to equip privateers in her ports or give them asylum. As head of the Customs Service, Hamilton was charged with punishing violators, fortifying his hand in foreign affairs. All the while, Jefferson conspired to strip Hamilton of his power. On August 11, he sent a confidential letter to Madison, noting that Republican representation would be stronger in the new House. The time had therefore ripened for weakening Hamilton with two measures: splitting the Treasury Department between a customs service and a bureau of internal taxes and severing all ties between the Bank of the United States and the government. If Jefferson could not diminish the man, he would try to diminish the office.

  For all his growing dismay over the incorrigible Genêt, Jefferson still blocked cabinet efforts to release the full saga of Genêt’s impertinent behavior.69 He threatened to resign in late September, telling Washington that he hated having to socialize in the circles of “the wealthy aristocrats, the merchants connected closely with England, the new created paper fortunes,” and he again cited steps being hatched to bring a monarchy to America.70 Jefferson agreed to stay until year’s end only after Washington agreed to keep confidential Genêt’s obnoxious conduct. His cabinet colleagues continued to dissent. “Hamilton and Knox have pressed an appeal to the people with an eagerness I never before saw in them,” Jefferson told Madison.71

  Hamilton got the story out indirectly by prompting Senator Rufus King and Chief Justice John Jay to publish a revealing letter in a New York paper. An agitated Genêt protested to Washington, asking him urgently to “dissipate these dark calumnies.”72 His letter’s intemperate tone would only have strengthened the suspicions he sought to allay, and Jefferson consequently had to draft a letter to France on August 16 asking for Genêt’s recall.

  Jefferson admitted that the tales told about Genêt were not Federalist fabrications. “You will see much said and gainsaid about G[enet’s] threat to appeal to the people,” Jefferson told Madison. “I can assure you it is a fact.”73 All through August, Madison and Monroe crafted resolutions thanking France for aiding the American Revolution. When Washington broke with Citizen Genêt, a crestfallen Madison stated that it “will give great pain to all those enlightened friends of the principles of liberty on which the American and French Revolution are founded.”74 Nor would Philip Freneau concede that the French Revolution had taken a vicious turn. In early September, to stress parallels between the two revolutions, he printed in succession the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Constitution.

  The situation in Paris, however, soon undermined this thesis. That spring had seen the creation of the Committee of Public Safety, soon the principal vehicle of revolutionary terror. In June, the moderate Girondist faction, to which Genêt belonged, was purged and placed under house arrest by radical Jacobins. This Jacobin triumph, Hamilton realized, had made Fre
nch officials receptive to American requests to cashier the bumbling Genêt, whom they accused of offending a friendly power. Led by Robespierre, the Jacobins swept aside all obstacles to their Reign of Terror. Nocturnal house searches and arbitrary arrests became routine by the fall. Priests were persecuted and churches vandalized in an anti-Christian campaign that led the cathedral of Notre-Dame to be renamed the Temple of Reason. On October 16, Marie Antoinette—or the “widow Capet,” as she was designated—was pulled from her cell, stuck in a tiny farm cart, paraded through streets teeming with heckling citizens, and beheaded. The guillotine worked overtime: twenty-one Girondists were executed on October 31 alone.

  As Hamilton got wind of the bloody fate that awaited Citizen Genêt in Paris, he urged Washington to allow him to remain in the United States, lest Republicans accuse Washington of having sent the brash Frenchman to his death. Washington agreed to give him asylum, and Citizen Genêt, ironically, became an American citizen. He married Cornelia Clinton, the daughter of Hamilton’s nemesis Governor George Clinton, and spent the remainder of his life in upstate New York. In the end, Washington never submitted to Hamilton’s wish to publicize a detailed account of Genêt’s dealings with the administration. But Hamilton had gotten most of what he wanted in the Genêt affair, including the dearest bonus of all: the exit of Thomas Jefferson from the cabinet by year’s end.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  A DISAGREEABLE TRADE

  While Washington meditated the fate of Citizen Genêt that August, Philadelphia was beset by a threat far more fearsome than the French minister appealing to the American people. Some residents who lived