by John Ferling
To assorted correspondents, Jefferson remarked that at times resistance to government was valuable. A rebellion, “like a storm in the Atmosphere,” clears and refreshes the air, he said. “[A] little rebellion now and then is a good thing” if it added to the “happiness of the mass of the people.” It was healthy for the people to rise up against their rulers at least once each generation. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”48
Given his outlook, it was not surprising that in 1787 Jefferson hoped that a severe financial crisis in France might lead to dramatic political changes. When Louis XVI summoned an Assembly of Notables, Jefferson thought a reduction in royal authority might be the result. Although he proved mistaken, Jefferson remained certain that liberal constitutional changes were inevitable, for the “young desire it, the middle aged are not averse, the old alone are opposed to it [and they soon] will die.” What is more, he believed that revolutionary change would be achieved “without it’s having cost them a drop of blood.”49 Jefferson’s optimism was ultimately misplaced, though if he was wrong, so were many others, some fatally so.
When in the spring of 1789 the king summoned a meeting of the Estates General, the French parliament that no monarch had convened for generations, Jefferson was ecstatic. A “revolution in their constitution seems inevitable,” he declared, including “great modifications” in the king’s authority. Recognizing that Paris was “politically mad” and in “high fermentation,” Jefferson followed events closely, even attending some of the legislative sessions. In high spirits, he wrote to Washington that France “has been awaked by our revolution.”50
In fact, Jefferson was not merely an observer. Since his arrival in Paris five years before, he had grown quite close to Lafayette, with whom he had worked during his final harried year as Virginia’s war governor. He liked the Frenchman and admired his intellect, but he was also convinced that Lafayette would “one day be of the ministry.” Jefferson calculatingly fostered his trust and friendship. As events reached the critical stage in 1789, Jefferson received information from Lafayette about the plans and agenda of liberal aristocrats who were seeking to curb the monarchy’s power, and he in turn provided advice on strategy. Imprudently, Jefferson hosted meetings at his residence and participated in the discussions, especially on the contents of a French bill of rights. He encouraged Lafayette and his confederates to demand that the Estates General meet regularly, enact all laws, and gain exclusive powers of taxation. He urged that the French “Military … be subordinate to the Civil authority,” and he supported civil liberties for the French citizenry, including freedom of the press, trial by jury, freedom of conscience, and the right of habeas corpus. At Lafayette’s behest, Jefferson also hosted a secret dinner at which an attempt was made to patch up differences among the progressive aristocrats.51
From nearly the beginning, Jefferson had predicted, the “fate of the nation depends on the conduct of the King and his ministers.” The crisis could end in civil war or a peaceful constitutional revolution. When in June the king agreed to concessions, the Estates General was transformed into the National Assembly. Soon thereafter Lafayette introduced the Declaration of Rights in the assembly. Jefferson knew immediately that the reformers had succeeded in “cutting the Gordian knot.” A great revolution had taken place, though he thought that the reformers, having kicked open the door, would seek, and obtain, more. Given France’s standing as a major power, Jefferson without question hoped the French Revolution would spread across Europe and into Great Britain.
Jefferson’s thinking may have been influenced by his awareness that Paris was in a “violent ferment,” and in July, while out on business, he witnessed a clash between the king’s soldiers and a mob. A few days later, on July 14, a mob stormed the Bastille—where for generations royal prisoners had been incarcerated, and often tortured—and in cold blood massacred the guards. Over a period of five days, inflamed mobs took control of the streets of Paris, demonstrating, plundering, and killing in a grim foretaste of horrors to come. Jefferson seems not to have been terribly outraged by the lawlessness. In his memoirs, written many years later, he said that he would “neither approve nor condemn” the actions of the Paris mobs, though he came very close to saying that people had a moral obligation to use the “power in [their] hands” for “maintaining right, and redressing wrong.” From the first, he laid the blame for the “crimes and calamities” that occurred during the French Revolution at the hands of the monarch and his black-hearted advisors, whom Jefferson assailed “for the Turkish despotism of their characters.”52
Jefferson exulted over the historic changes in France, and there can be no question that he also had no truck with those whose “polar star,” as he put it, was in “preserving the ancient regime.” Some who fought for the preservation of their privileges insisted, as radical conservatives are always wont to do, that only the unwary would risk tampering with the traditional “elementary principles of society.” This may have been among the inspirations for the last truly significant letter that Jefferson wrote before leaving France. In the waning days of the momentous summer of 1789, Jefferson’s thoughts turned to the question of “Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another.” His answer was akin to an exclamation point to his ever greater commitment to republicanism and his zealous opposition to tyranny and exploitation. The “earth belongs to the living, and not to the dead,” he said, to which he added: “the dead have neither powers nor rights.”53
After five years abroad, Jefferson had changed in substantive ways. He appeared to be more self-assured, not that he had ever doubted his abilities. His liaison with Maria Cosway had broken the fetters of grief and despair that lingered long after his wife’s demise, yet the heartache that attended their affair must have steeled his resolve against ever entering into another loving relationship that could lead toward marriage. What Jefferson had observed in Europe made him more respectful of the promise of America, deepened his belief in republicanism, and convinced him that the spirit and ideology of the American Revolution would spread far and wide.54 What is more, Jefferson’s reputation, which had nearly been fatally shattered by his final, disastrous months as governor of Virginia, had been rehabilitated.
Outside Virginia, Jefferson’s name was not yet a household word. Few Americans knew that Jefferson had been the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. The first two histories of the American Revolution appeared in 1789, and neither addressed the authorship of the Declaration. Somewhat startlingly, Jefferson had done nothing to make the American public aware of his achievement. Franklin devoted a lifetime to self-promotion, Washington retained a biographer and helped him smooth over the military disasters that had occurred on his command, and, to be sure, Hamilton never hid from the public his valor in storming the British redoubt at Yorktown. Jefferson was cut from a different cloth. In a 1786 response to questions by a French historian, Jefferson said only that a committee had drawn up the document. A year later, when the Journal de Paris published a piece that credited John Dickinson with having written the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson took umbrage and drafted a letter to the editor that clarified matters. However, in the draft, he did not claim to have been the Declaration’s author, and Jefferson never mailed his account of what had transpired in Congress.55
Jefferson was not as widely known as Washington, Franklin, and Adams, but among the politically active in America he was admired and respected as never before, both for his lengthy service to his state and nation and for his superb intellect. At an annual Independence Day gala at the Hôtel de Langeac in 1789, a group of Americans in attendance paid tribute to Jefferson, recognizing him as the author of the Declaration of Independence. Their ringing written statement acknowledged that Jefferson’s “elegance of thought and expression” had “added a peculiar lustre to that declaratory act which announced to the world the existence of an empire.” Word was g
etting out.56
Chapter 8
“To check the imprudence of democracy”
Hamilton and the New Constitution
Jefferson had returned to Congress and gone abroad in the hope of getting his life back together. In July 1783, Hamilton, who was twenty-eight, five years younger than Jefferson had been when he drafted the Declaration of Independence, left Congress to get on with his life. Hamilton could not have imagined how different the American political scene would be in just five years, or how much his life would change because of political developments. What he could see in 1783 was that peace was at hand and that he had a wife and infant son to support.
Hamilton resumed his legal practice in Albany in August, but that fall he decided to move to New York City, a large bustling port city, a center of finance, and the hub through which political power ran within the state. It was a place where a skilled attorney might flourish. His denials notwithstanding, Hamilton was hardly ready to abandon public life. By December 1, the Hamiltons had made the move and taken up residence in a rented house on Wall Street.
Hamilton may already have arrived when the British, on November 25, abandoned Manhattan and the Continental army marched in, formally retaking possession of the city in a gala parade down Broadway. General Washington remained in New York for ten happy days of ceremonies and celebratory dinners. Hamilton never called on him, and when Washington hosted a farewell luncheon for his officers at Fraunces Tavern on December 4, Hamilton did not attend, though his residence was only a short walk away. Hamilton’s disillusionment with Washington had not faded, and it must have seemed unlikely to him that the general could be of further use. Now in his fifties, Washington had announced his intention of retiring, vowing never again to hold public office. Not only was Washington a man of his word, but it was also inconceivable that he would be drawn to any office that existed under the Articles of Confederation.
During his first autumn in New York, Betsey bore their second child, a daughter they named Angelica, after her sister Angelica Church—soon to be Jefferson’s friend. A second son, Alexander, was born in the spring of 1786, and a third, James Alexander, in 1788. Four more children followed in the decade after 1792, and during those years the couple also took in an orphaned daughter who lived with them for ten years. Whereas the Jeffersons experienced one tragedy after another with their children—four of Martha Jefferson’s six children died before reaching their third birthday, and a son from her first marriage perished at age three during the summer prior to her marriage to Thomas—all eight children borne by Betsey lived past adolescence. All signs point to Hamilton as a devoted father who lavished the care and affection on his children that he had been denied while a child.
He and Betsey were devoted to beneficent causes. Throughout her life, she worked to ameliorate the harsh conditions faced by orphans, eventually co-founding an orphanage in the city. She was a devout Episcopalian who raised her own children in the church and saw to their religious instruction. Her husband provided pro bono legal services to his parish church, though as a deist he neither took communion nor attended worship services on a regular basis. He and Betsey helped free the painter Ralph Earl, whose life of indulgence had landed him in a debtors’ prison. They took in General Friedrich Von Steuben, who was down on his luck, and Hamilton persuaded Congress to award him a long-overdue land bounty. Even though the family owned one or two household slaves, Hamilton was one of the first to join the New York Manumission Society, which was founded early in 1785.1 It pushed for the gradual end of slavery in New York and the immediate termination of the slave trade within the state. The group achieved both objectives in Hamilton’s lifetime, but only after a battle lasting fifteen years. Hamilton once proposed that the members of the Manumission Society must liberate their own chattel, but he could not secure the adoption of his plan.
When Hamilton learned in 1785 that his brother James was at loose ends on St. Thomas, he sent him fifty pounds, approximately a year’s income for a carpenter. Hamilton also promised that in a year or two, when his own affairs were in order, he would purchase a farm for his brother in New York and help him move to the United States. He also inquired about his father, whom he had last heard from five years earlier. He had written several letters, Hamilton said, but none had been answered. “My heart bleeds at the recollection of his misfortunes and embarrassments,” Hamilton continued, adding that if his father was alive and indigent, he would give “all I have to[ward] his accommodation and happiness.”2
Hamilton practiced law off and on for the remainder of his life, and on a full-time basis during his initial thirty months in the city. Despite beginning his practice after studying what a friend said were merely the “elementary books” of law, Hamilton swiftly flourished, though to some degree his rapid success was due to the disappearance into exile of many Tory lawyers who otherwise would have competed for clients.3 As he never came close to knowing the law to the depth and breadth achieved by Jefferson, Hamilton owed his ascent to other qualities. Understanding the importance of presentation, Hamilton was scrupulous about his appearance. He dressed elegantly, favoring brightly colored and smartly tailored clothing, and submitted to a daily ritual with a barber who plaited, combed, and powdered his reddish-brown hair. Many observers remarked on his habit of carrying his slender frame in an erect military bearing. He was also bright, glib, combative, energetic, well connected, and ambitious. Unlike Jefferson, who soon found his legal practice to be drudgery, Hamilton enjoyed his work. He delighted in matching wits with other attorneys, took great pleasure in the theatrics useful in swaying juries, and won acclaim for his facile, extemporaneous discourses before jurors and judges. However, his greatest strength was not as a courtroom orator but in the preparation of learned written arguments. James Kent, later the chief judicial official in New York, thought Hamilton the “pre-eminent” lawyer of his day. Another veteran judge, who had observed dozens of Manhattan’s lawyers over a span of a couple of generations, pronounced Hamilton unequaled in the “power of reasoning” and “creative” thinking.4
Yet another reason for Hamilton’s nearly instant success was his willingness to defend Loyalists, who were victims of a postwar witch hunt fueled by a frenzy for retribution. Numerous factors led him to stand up for these victimized people. He believed that every citizen deserved adequate counsel and a fair trial. As many Tories had been affluent merchants before the war, Hamilton feared that their financial ruin, or exile, would have an adverse economic effect on the city. Having himself endured discrimination as a result of the circumstances of his birth, Hamilton was drawn to help those who suffered from what he called the “furious and dark passions of the human mind.” But he also admitted a pecuniary interest in championing the Tories. This windfall of cases helped jump-start his practice, and led him to remark that the “folly” of prejudice “has afforded so plentiful a harvest to us lawyers … that we have scarcely a moment to spare from the substantial business of reaping.”5
Hamilton won few friends by aiding those who had opposed the American Revolution, but given his distinguished war record, he had no worries that he would be considered a closet Tory. He took on scores of cases, and toward the end of the decade, when he was again a member of the state assembly, Hamilton was instrumental in securing the repeal of all legislation that discriminated against the Loyalists.
The anti-Tory maliciousness left a stamp on Hamilton’s thinking. He saw the popular vindictiveness as a foretaste of what could be expected should the United States become a democracy. In “times of heat and violence,” he warned, there was always a tendency “to gratify momentary passions” with steps that “afterwards prove fatal to themselves.” Furthermore, there was an ever-present danger that demagogues would both whip up hysteria—“corrupt the principles” of the people, was how he put it—and seek to capitalize on it. The governor of New York, George Clinton, was doing just that by playing on anti-Tory passions, Hamilton concluded. Hamilton had once admired Clinton, who
had served as a brigadier general during the war. Back in 1782, Hamilton had called him “a man of integrity” and “a statesman.” Now, however, he thought Clinton, who was in the midst of six three-year terms as the state’s chief executive, was the quintessential demagogue, a “designing” man out to seize on “a prevailing prejudice” for his personal gain.6
The best defense against demagoguery and unrestrained popular passion, Hamilton said in two lengthy essays in 1784, was to embody Enlightenment rationalism, or what he called the “spirit of Whiggism,” in American laws. This “generous, humane, beneficent and just” spirit, he added, should be sanctified in a “regular and constitutional mode.” His first objective was the rule of law, but he also hoped to maintain a connection with the past. He wished for a legal code that would embody the “customs of all civilized nations” and that “cherishes legal liberty, holds the rights of every individual sacred, condemns or punishes no man without regular trial and conviction … [and] reprobates equally the punishment of the citizen by arbitrary acts of legislature.”7
Jefferson would have agreed with Hamilton—to a point. He too might have been shocked by the retributive tenor of the anti-Tory legislation. However, whereas Hamilton responded with obeisance toward the law and tradition, Jefferson urged liberation from the dead hand of the past. Hamilton cherished the past as a weapon against radical innovation. Not for nothing did Hamilton tell a friend that he sought to “erect a temple to time.”8
Banking also occupied some of Hamilton’s time in the 1780s. He had urged a national bank as early as 1780, and he believed one had been created when Congress chartered Robert Morris’s Bank of North America two years later. Hamilton and Morris had seen the bank as a means of stabilizing society. Both were convinced that a national bank would not only strengthen the Union through “one general money connexion,” but—as Morris had said—would also “indissolubly … attach many powerful individuals to the cause of our country by the strong principle of self-love and the immediate sense of private interest.”9 However, the Bank of North America was undercapitalized and never became much more than a Pennsylvania bank headquartered in Philadelphia.
