Jefferson and Hamilton
Page 31
Jefferson did not want the job. He hoped to sail for Paris in early April, after spending some seventy-five days at Monticello. He told the president that he wished to remain in his post in France, adding that he not only dreaded the public “criticisms and censures” that a cabinet officer would inevitably face but that he also feared he lacked the skills to run the Department of State. (In those days, State was responsible both for foreign policy and for what now is handled by the Department of the Interior.) However, Jefferson did not close the door. It “is not for an individual to chuse his post,” he said, adding that he understood the president had to “marshal us as may best be for the public good.” When Washington asked him a second time to take the position, Jefferson accepted.12
During his ten weeks at Monticello, Patsy married her cousin, Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., following a whirlwind courtship. Less happily, while at home Jefferson saw firsthand the deterioration his farms had suffered during his lengthy absence, and he learned that his indebtedness now totaled a staggering £7,500. As early as 1785, while he was living in Paris, Jefferson’s attorney in Virginia had sold thirty-one of his client’s slaves to satisfy creditors. Having seen what he called his “deranged” property, Jefferson knew that transaction had been merely the tip of the iceberg. He would have to sell more slaves, and some of his land, simply to service the interest on his debt.13
Jefferson finally arrived in New York on March 21, more than two months after the House of Representatives received Hamilton’s plan. He rented a house on Maiden Lane, and as he had done with both residences in Paris, embarked on a remodeling project. He lived in a boardinghouse for several weeks while the house was refurbished. During this period, Jefferson drew closer than ever to Madison. When the two first met is unknown, but a relationship flowered in 1779 while Madison served on the Governor’s Council, becoming one of Jefferson’s trusted advisors. They grew still closer four years later when both were in Philadelphia, Madison serving in Congress and Jefferson awaiting a diplomatic appointment. Before sailing to France, Jefferson even tried to persuade Madison to purchase “a little farm” near Monticello so they could visit frequently. They corresponded during Jefferson’s long stay in France, exchanging important letters concerning the French Revolution and American constitutional issues. They were reunited for the first time in nearly six years only days after Jefferson returned to Monticello in 1789, a visit that included a discussion of the post of secretary of state. Either then or soon after Jefferson’s arrival in Manhattan, the two became political confederates and collaborators. Well-educated, intellectually curious Virginia planters, the two had much in common, and the warm relationship between them flourished unabated for the remainder of Jefferson’s life.14
On arriving in Manhattan, Jefferson immediately plunged into his diplomatic and administrative responsibilities by day, while seemingly every night he enjoyed the social whirl of the capital. One occasion was a welcome-home dinner provided by the president. Hamilton and Knox attended as well, and this was probably the first time that the three cabinet members were in one another’s presence. Jefferson also renewed his acquaintance with John and Abigail Adams, who were living at Richmond Hill, an elegant home situated a mile north of the city on a tall bluff overlooking the Hudson River.
Jefferson was still dressing as he had while a diplomat in Paris. Attired in “a suit of silk, ruffles, and an elegant topaz ring,” he attended parties hosted by important New Yorkers nearly every evening. He was struck by how little of the American Revolution’s radical spirit had taken root among Manhattan’s upper crust. Filled with “wonder and mortification” at learning of their “preference of kingly over republican government,” Jefferson responded by dressing in a simpler manner, donning what he called “a more republican garb.”15
Surprisingly, Hamilton, who owned a house and entertained regularly, appears to have never invited Jefferson to his home, though once Jefferson was situated, he entertained Hamilton on a least two occasions. During one dinner, Hamilton gazed at Jefferson’s portraits of John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, and Sir Francis Bacon. He asked the identity of the subjects, to which Jefferson replied that they were “the three greatest men the world had ever produced.” Hamilton responded: “The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar.” If he did not already know it, Jefferson discovered in that instant the yawning chasm in sensibilities that separated Hamilton and himself.16
Jefferson socialized with members of Congress as well, and one left a cogent description of the Secretary of State:
Jefferson is a slender man; has rather the air of stiffness in his manner; his clothes seem too small for him; he sits in a lounging manner, on one hip commonly, and with one of his shoulders elevated much above the other; his face has a sunny aspect; his whole figure has a loose, shackling air. He had a rambling, vacant look, and nothing of that firm, collected deportment which I expected would dignify the presence of a secretary or minister. I looked for gravity, but a laxity of manner seemed shed about him. He spoke almost without ceasing. But even his discourse partook of his personal demeanor. It was loose and rambling, and yet he scattered information wherever he went, and some even brilliant sentiments sparkled from him.17
The social whirlwind that Jefferson enjoyed came to a sudden end around May 1. He fell ill with another headache. This bout was one of the worst he ever experienced. He was confined to his residence for nearly a month, and in bed for a good portion of that time.
Jefferson’s lengthy illness and heavy workload—his duties were now far more time-consuming than his ministerial responsibilities had been—took him out of play during most of the roiling battle ignited by Hamilton’s report on funding. Hamilton anticipated opposition, but he was startled when Madison, his friend and former colleague who now was the leading figure in the House of Representatives, challenged the notion of funding the domestic debt at face value.18 Under Hamilton’s plan, those who owned Continental securities were to exchange their notes for the new federal securities. Madison objected, insisting that the original holders—soldiers, farmers, and suppliers who had helped win the war—should receive a portion of the current market value of the paper. Madison was not alone. “Congress have been much divided,” Jefferson said, and in fact the opposition included both northern and southern representatives. Many feared that Hamilton’s program would result in an undue influence of the executive on the legislative branch, while some—recollecting the warning of radical English Whigs—saw in his plan the embryo of monarchy and aristocracy.19
Hamilton fought hard for his program. One observer said that no British prime minister ever worked harder, adding that Hamilton and his associates resorted to “nightly Visits” to many congressmen, offering “promises—compromises—Sacrifices—& threats.” A member of the Pennsylvania delegation noted that Hamilton had built a faction within the House; it “is now established beyond a doubt,” he continued, that the treasury secretary “guides the movements of the eastern phalanx,” that is, the congressmen from the mid-Atlantic and New England states. It was said that Hamilton was “moving heaven and earth” to secure the adoption of his program, and that he had dispatched what various onlookers called his “gladiators,” “machines,” and “cabals” to lobby the members of Congress. These included those who worked in the Treasury Department, but also what one called Hamilton’s “New York junto,” important businessmen and former army officers who now were members of the Society of the Cincinnati. Robert Morris, who sat in the Senate, circulated among colleagues with whom he had rarely spoken in order to praise Hamilton, labeling him “damned sharp.” Some in Congress were as alarmed by Hamilton’s tactics as by his program, fearing that the end game would be the corruption of Congress, much as Parliament had supposedly been corrupted by diabolical British prime ministers. Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania, in fact, thought some heads were being turned by offers of pecuniary gain, which led him to predict that Hamilton “will soon overwhelm us.”20
Hamilton wa
s doing nothing illegal. He was playing superb politics, though some were put off by him. Thinking him arrogant, Maclay referred to the treasury secretary as “his Holiness,” a view seconded by a newspaper essayist who said that Hamilton would not speak to or acknowledge those he encountered on New York’s busy streets. Vice President Adams regarded Hamilton as “insolent,” and later claimed that only a little wine at dinner caused him to be “silly” and boastful of his exploits “like a young girl about her brilliants and trinkets.”21
That may have been correct, but it was also true that Hamilton had learned the political arts and practiced them with an adroitness that in 1790 set him apart from most officeholders. His years in the cauldron of New York politics had been a learning experience, as had his long, uphill battle for consolidation and the ratification of the Constitution. He had learned much from General Washington, a political master who at times dispatched his well-coached aide to meet with state officials and others. Hamilton was never reluctant to bargain, and he expended much of his legendary energy in meeting after meeting, often behind closed doors, where he must have had to draw on all his arts of persuasion and manipulation. Furthermore, the treasury secretary entered this fray with a well-crafted organization and a plan of action that took his adversaries by surprise.
Nevertheless, as the long battle for consolidation had demonstrated, machinations and organization did not always lead to immediate success. As spring turned to summer, it was clear that Congress would endorse funding, but the fate of his proposed plan to assume state debts was far from certain. It was unpopular in states such as Virginia, which had already retired what it owed. With a vital cog in his program in jeopardy, Hamilton began casting about for a compromise.
The dealings of politicians are seldom transparent, and that was true of James Madison’s behavior in 1790. He may never have wanted to defeat either funding or assumption. Madison was mending fences at home, where he had been damaged by his support for consolidation. It is also a good bet that he too was trolling for a compromise that would net something for Virginia. Indeed, in the early discussions over Hamilton’s program, the question of the location of the national capital, an issue that had been bruited about in Congress since 1779, arose once again.22 One of five sites seemed certain to be chosen to be the capital: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, somewhere on the Susquehanna River in the Pennsylvania backcountry, or some undetermined place on the Potomac River. Madison badly wanted the capital to be located on the Potomac, and he ultimately got his way through what he called a fortunate “coincidence of causes.”23 Jefferson, on the other hand, attributed the outcome of the assumption/national capital contests to a grand deal—often called the “Compromise of 1790”—that he, Madison, and Hamilton concluded.
The narrative of a bargain struck quickly and neatly had its inception in an account penned by Jefferson several years later. Sometime during the summer of 1790, Jefferson recalled, he had met a “somber, haggard, and dejected” Hamilton at the door to the president’s residence. One part of his story rings true. Hamilton, he said, opened the conversation with a threat: the Union could not survive unless assumption and a “general fiscal arrangement” were approved. Supposedly, Hamilton then asked Jefferson to intercede with southern congressmen to support the Assumption Bill. Though Jefferson had remained aloof from the legislative battle, and he subsequently claimed that to this point he had not even “considered it [assumption] sufficiently,” he said that he sought “conciliation” by hosting a dinner at which Hamilton and Madison were the guests.
Jefferson depicted the dinner as one at which he remained on the sideline while Madison and Hamilton bargained. The agreement that they allegedly reached called for Madison and Jefferson to persuade a couple of recalcitrant Virginia congressmen to support assumption, and for Hamilton to convince some Pennsylvania representatives, who longed for Philadelphia to be the nation’s capital, to consent to locating the capital on the Potomac. On the surface, it appeared that Madison and Jefferson swallowed a bitter pill in order to get the capital, while Hamilton scuttled his friends back home who were depending on him to give them the opportunity to become very rich by making New York the national capital. “This is the real history of the assumption,” Jefferson declared.24
Jefferson’s story is true insofar as assumption was part of a bargain that involved the national capital, but the negotiations were more extensive than he recalled, or acknowledged, and a settlement was not reached until long after his famous dinner. Before the issue was settled, many congressmen, as well as the president, got into the act. Senator Maclay of Pennsylvania said that Washington exerted a “great influence in this business,” and he depicted the president as Hamilton’s tool, his “dishclout of … dirty speculation,” for Washington’s “name goes to wipe away blame and silence all murmuring.” The senator was wrong about Washington being anyone’s puppet. Washington wanted both assumption and a capital on the Potomac, and he fought to persuade Congress to select a site on the Potomac near where he owned vast amounts of property at Mount Vernon and in Alexandria. The president lobbied members of at least four state delegations. Hamilton had begun “jockeying and bargaining” well before the dinner that Jefferson hosted, and he continued to negotiate for a month thereafter, and Jefferson probably did so as well. Senator Maclay, who opposed assumption and badly wanted Philadelphia to become the capital, knew that his aspirations were doomed the moment he saw the tandem of Hamilton and Washington in action. “If Hamilton has his hand in the residence [the choice of the national capital] now, he will have his foot in it before the end of the session,” Maclay predicted.25
The whole story will never be known, in part because Madison had long since mastered the arts of backroom negotiating and Hamilton was a maestro at intrigue. Nor was Jefferson as naïve or as dispassionate with regard to assumption as he wished others to think. Ever after, Jefferson depicted himself as a guileless innocent who was taken advantage of by Hamilton. Having been abroad for years, he claimed to have been a “stranger” both to the putative crisis that led to the overthrow of the Articles of Confederation and to the meaning of, and the need for, the “system of finances” that Hamilton advocated. “I was most ignorantly and innocently made to hold the candle,” he said of the role he had played. Later, he told Washington: “I was duped into it by the secretary of the Treasury, and made a tool for forwarding his schemes, not then sufficiently understood by me; and of all the errors of my political life, this has occasioned me the deepest regret.”26 At the time, however, Jefferson said that he supported Hamilton’s program from the fear that “something much worse will happen” if funding and assumption were rejected. The “something worse” was the ruin of American credit in Europe, which he believed would usher in “the greatest of all calamities.” But Jefferson’s tale of naïveté was not entirely a fabrication. He failed to understand that funding and assumption constituted only the foundation of Hamilton’s grand design. More was to come, and it was only upon discovering that Hamilton harbored still other plans that Jefferson came to feel that he had been deceived.27
In the end, Congress in July enacted both the Assumption and Residence Bills. The latter moved the capital to Philadelphia for ten years while a new capital city was constructed at some site on the Potomac. The exact location was left to Washington’s choosing. Not surprisingly, he selected a plot as near to Mount Vernon as possible.28
Soon after Congress acted, the government moved to Philadelphia. Hamilton was one of the first to find a home for his department and his family. He situated the Treasury Department in a modest two-story brick building on Third Street, between Walnut and Chestnut, just two blocks east of the Pennsylvania State House, where the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention had met. Hamilton rented a house half a block away. Jefferson, who had resided in New York for only about one hundred days, came to Philadelphia shortly after Hamilton. He rented two new adjoining four-story brick houses on Market Street, situated only one block
north and five blocks west of Hamilton’s offices and residence. Jefferson’s plan was to live on the ground floor—typically, he hired workers to renovate one of the houses, expanding the dining room and adding a library, stables for five horses and three carriages, and a garden house—and to utilize the remaining space for the State Department.29 All three departments commenced operations in more or less the same size buildings, but that did not last long. While War and State each had only six employees and did not grow, Treasury’s staff of ninety-three grew to more than five hundred employees before the capital moved to the Potomac in 1800. By then, its Philadelphia offices stretched from one end of the block to the other.
Jefferson returned home in mid-September, stopping en route for his first visit to Mount Vernon. He spent a busy fifty days at Monticello, during which he found a home nearby for Patsy and her husband. He also took more painful steps to cope with his indebtedness. He sold more slaves—he would sell more than fifty of his chattel during the first five years after his return from France—and he negotiated the sale of more than a thousand acres below the James River for approximately three thousand dollars. (Patsy’s dowry included one thousand acres of his Poplar Forest property in Bedford County as well as twenty-seven slaves, some or all of whom he might otherwise have sold to cope with his indebtedness.)30
Jefferson may have begun to wrestle with his quagmire of debt, but decisions that he made in 1790 foreshadowed the losing battle that he would wage. Convincing himself that he could beat indebtedness both through altering business operations at Monticello and by selling his surplus lands and slaves, Jefferson recklessly lived beyond his means. The cost of the offices that he rented for the State Department exceeded by threefold his government allotment for rent. He had borne the expense of lavishly remodeling his New York residence, only to live in it for three months, and now he was engaged in a similar undertaking in Philadelphia. He beseeched Adrien Petit, his maître d’hôtel in Paris, to work for him in Philadelphia, not only paying him a handsome salary but covering his Atlantic crossing as well. Atop those expenditures, at year’s end he was presented with a considerable bill for the cost of having shipped eighty cases of furniture, books, and assorted other items that he had left in Paris the year before, thinking that he would soon return to France.31