Jefferson and Hamilton
Page 37
The ecstatic greeting that Genêt received in Charleston put Washington on guard against potential troubles in pursuing a neutral course. A huge crowd welcomed the envoy ashore, after which he commissioned four vessels as French privateers. That was merely the beginning. Throughout Genêt’s month-long journey to Philadelphia, town after town hailed him with banquets, the pealing of bells, artillery salutes, and addresses that pulsated with love for France. Philadelphia welcomed him with open arms on May 16. Two days later, the president, a formidably reserved, cold individual to begin with, received Genêt with glacial formality while standing beneath portraits of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.13
The reception extended by Jefferson could not have been more different. Hoping that the voice of the people would melt the “cold caution of their government,” Jefferson saw that, through Genêt, the United States might gain its long-sought commercial ends with France, a step that might weaken Great Britain and set in motion the death rattle of the British monarchy. One other thing. Jefferson interpreted the receptions lavished on Genêt as evidence that “the old spirit of 1776 is rekindling,” which he was convinced would be to the detriment of the Federalist Party. Genêt, he believed, could be useful for partisan political reasons.14
Jefferson was eager for Genêt to succeed, and as a result of things that the secretary of state said, or through his tone and manner, the Frenchman may have surmised that he would be given extraordinary latitude. Early on, Jefferson shared things with Genêt as he had never done with George Hammond. For instance, he divulged that Washington was influenced by the Anglophiles in his cabinet. Jefferson additionally coached Genêt, advising patience, as a more friendly Congress—the one elected the previous autumn—would convene near the end of the year. However, Jefferson also told Genêt what the United States would not tolerate, and he defended and elucidated his country’s position in a lengthy and learned discourse on international law.
Genêt refused to listen, and he rapidly wore out his welcome. He answered Jefferson with impertinence, threatened to go over Washington’s head to the American public to get what he wanted, and ignored United States policy by arming a privateer in the port of Philadelphia. Hamilton, who labeled Genêt the “most offensive” diplomat imaginable, was so sufficiently worried—“panick struck,” was how Jefferson characterized him—that he met secretly with Hammond to assure him of his efforts to prevent the French envoy from dragging the United States into war with Great Britain. Through conduits such as the influential Federalists John Jay and Rufus King, Hamilton leaked to the press word of Genêt’s threat to appeal to the public. And he launched yet another newspaper campaign, a series of nine essays that he penned that summer under the signature “No Jacobin.” His objective was to turn public opinion against Genêt by publishing details of the envoy’s behavior, and in fact Hamilton’s initial sentence trumpeted: The “Minister of the French Republic has threatened to appeal from the President of the United States to the People.” Within fifty days, Jefferson was equally dismayed, having on his own come to see Genêt as a detriment to Franco-American relations. Condemning Genêt as a “Hotheaded … disrespectful and even indecent” blunderer, Jefferson “saw the necessity of quitting a wreck which could not but sink all who should cling to” him. He agreed with Washington and Hamilton that the administration must demand Genêt’s recall.15
Genêt was gone, but the firestorm aroused by the European war blazed on. The French minister had stirred the pot, but most of the heat directed toward the Washington administration had been provoked by American neutrality, which was assailed in Republican quarters as a betrayal of France and republicanism, and as a pro-British policy. To this point, Washington had largely escaped criticism. No longer. He was ripped in the Republican press for his “cold indifference” toward America’s Revolutionary War ally and a republic at war with a monarchical tyrant, and blasted for listening only to those Toryinclined members of his cabinet rather than to public opinion. The criticism did not sit well with the notoriously thin-skinned president. At one cabinet meeting, his volcanic temper erupted, causing Jefferson to note that the “President … got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself.”16
However, nothing bothered Washington and Hamilton more than the emergence of the Democratic-Republican Societies that sprang up after Great Britain entered the war. Hamilton was sure that Genêt, or possibly French secret agents, had orchestrated their creation, but in fact they mushroomed spontaneously to give voice to the pulsating popular mood. They were, as their name suggested, the manifestation of the democratizing spirit that was part and parcel of Revolutionary America, and that in itself excited pangs of anxiety in Hamilton.
The first Democratic-Republican Society was formed in Philadelphia in 1793, but within a few months some fifty others had come into being in several states. The membership was galvanized by alarm at the growing reach and power of the national government, and particularly by signs of presidential omnipotence and the monarchical overtones of Washington’s presidency. Manhattan’s Society, for instance, sprang into being in the course of a campaign to protect a local printer accused by Federalists of sedition for having criticized the Washington presidency. But it was the French Revolution, and the threat it faced from Europe’s monarchical powers, that really fueled the movement. Members often wore red, white, and blue cockades in imitation of French radicals, frequently addressed one another as “fellow citizen” rather than with the class-imbued “sir,” and on occasion actively mobilized voters for the Republican Party. Now and then a fiery orator urged republicans everywhere to “unite with France and stand or fall together.” But on the whole, few advocated American involvement in France’s war, though they were clearly bent on making it difficult for the Washington administration to aid London.17
Hamilton feared the clout of the Democratic-Republican Societies, which mimicked the Sons of Liberty and other radical organizations that had played an important role in organizing the insurgency against Great Britain during the American Revolution. His most immediate concern was the danger they posed to American neutrality, and during the summer of 1793 he authored seven newspaper essays on the subject. He defended Washington and his authority to proclaim neutrality. He insisted that since France had started the European war, the United States was not obligated by the Treaty of Alliance to come to its assistance. Hamilton argued that it was not in the best interests of the United States to enter the war on the side of France. Surrounded by British and Spanish possessions, faced with hostile Indians along its frontier, and lacking a navy, the new American nation would find itself in an “unequal contest.” And in what would be a staple of right-wing politics for generations to come, Hamilton painted those who questioned American foreign policy as disloyal. However, the lengthiest portions of his essays were devoted to extinguishing America’s sense of obligation toward France. Only weeks after his lachrymose essays praising Louis XVI for his magnanimity in providing assistance during the American Revolution, Hamilton asserted that “the interest of France had been the governing motive of the aid afforded us” after 1775.18 Eighteenth-century politicians and polemicists were decidedly modern in that not every word they uttered was to be taken as forthright.
At the height of the partisan furor, Philadelphia was invaded by a more dangerous foe than any foreign adversary. Yellow fever struck in August, and for weeks it gripped the city. Transmitted by mosquitoes, Philadelphia’s outbreak commenced along the waterfront, a low-lying, swampy region that was a breeding ground for the insects. It quickly spread across the city. In no time, nearly 150 people were dying each week, and the epidemic continued until autumn’s first frosts destroyed the mosquitoes. By then, nearly five thousand had perished, roughly 8 percent of the population.
Philadelphians assumed the disease was spread by human contact, leading them to avoid others as much as possible. “Every body who can is flying” from the city, Jefferson said, and in fact upwards of twenty thousand did flee, but neithe
r he nor Hamilton took that expedient. Jefferson never fell ill, which he attributed to his remoteness from the “filth” and heat of the city. Thinking that he would retire at the conclusion of Washington’s first term, Jefferson had given notice that he would be abandoning his Market Street home. However, when the president persuaded him to stay on, Jefferson had to find another residence, and in April he had moved beyond the city to a summer cottage on the east bank of the Schuylkill River. That reduced his risk, but did not eliminate it, as he commuted daily to his office.19 Fortune smiled on Jefferson, and he escaped the malady.
Hamilton was not so lucky. He fell ill on September 5, and Betsey contracted the illness a few days later. Like all the afflicted, both suffered excruciating headaches, nausea, chills, and aches. They were attended by Edward Stevens, the son of St. Croix’s Thomas Stevens, who had taken in young Hamilton when he was orphaned. Edward Stevens had eventually immigrated to the mainland and was now a Philadelphia physician. Most physicians prescribed purges, or rubbed their patients with ointments and wrapped them in blankets soaked with vinegar. Those treated by Stevens received quinine, cold baths, wine, a concoction to stop the vomiting, and laudanum, a painkiller consisting mostly of opium. At the height of the epidemic, Jefferson said that about two in three victims survived, and the Hamiltons not only pulled through but also were on the mend within five days, a far more rapid recovery than most experienced. Stevens’s therapies were of doubtful benefit. But because the Hamiltons could afford a physician, it is likely they were never dehydrated, and that was probably crucial in their deliverance.20
Jefferson was aware that Hamilton had been taken ill, but his hatred for his counterpart was so suffocating that he never sent a note of sympathy or well-wishing. In fact, he told Madison that he doubted the treasury secretary was actually suffering from yellow fever. Jefferson thought it possible that Hamilton might have caught cold, but more likely that he was merely a hypochondriac. In one of his cruelest utterances, Jefferson added that Hamilton “had been miserable several days from a firm persuasion he should catch it [the yellow fever]. A man as timid as he is on the water, as timid on horseback, as timid in sickness, would be a phaenomenon if the courage of which he has the reputation in military occasions were genuine.”21
Jefferson finally left for Monticello in mid-September, six weeks into the epidemic. This was his planned autumn leave, though several days before his carriage rattled out of the city, the government had shut down. Jefferson remained at home for a month, where he scrupulously tended to his State Department correspondence, but never wrote a personal or partisan letter. It was the beginning of the end of this phase of Jefferson’s public service, and when he returned to Pennsylvania on November 1—to Germantown, actually, where the government met for several weeks—his pace seemed to wind down. In part, this was because Jefferson was initially challenged to find a space for his work; for two weeks he shared a public room in a tavern with numerous other refugees. However, because of his stature, or perhaps because he could afford it, he secured a bed while most others slept on the floor.22
Jefferson’s final cabinet dustups with Hamilton occurred during his stay in Germantown. In June, the British government had issued an Orders in Council directing the captains of Royal Navy vessels to seize American ships bound for French ports with cargoes of grain. While Hamilton and Jefferson agreed that the United States must protest London’s action, Jefferson wanted Washington to denounce this malevolent action in the harshest tones in his annual State of the Union address. This was not their only dispute over the contents of the president’s address. Washington wished to report on a wide range of the administration’s actions since Congress’s adjournment in March, including the proclamation of neutrality and the dismissal of Genêt. The cabinet fought over both what Washington should say and, as he could not cover everything in an oral address, what documents—if any—should be made public. Hamilton insisted on keeping all documents secret, declaring that it would provoke a “serious calamity” should Washington divulge the French offer to negotiate a commercial accord. He also bristled over the language that Jefferson recommended in responding to the Orders in Council. His “draught … amounted to a declaration of war” against England, Hamilton asserted. Jefferson “whittled down the expressions” in the draft he had prepared for Washington, but they remained tough. No one was more surprised than Jefferson when Washington took his side. The president, Jefferson said, expressed “more vehemence” toward London “than I have seen him shew.” It was one of the first times that Jefferson could remember Washington siding with him against Hamilton.23
Making public Jefferson’s correspondence with Genêt vindicated him even in the eyes of some of his harshest critics, many of whom—taken in by Hamilton’s partisan assaults—had presumed the secretary of state had acted slavishly toward the French envoy. Even Hamilton’s close friend and confidant, Robert Troup, told the treasury secretary that having been made aware of Jefferson’s tenacity had “blotted all the sins … out of the book of our remembrance.” Doubtless to Hamilton’s consternation, Troup even expressed his “regret that he [Jefferson] should quit his post.”24
Jefferson’s final major act as secretary of state was to report to Congress on American commerce, an accounting that Congress had requested nearly three years earlier. In 1791, Hamilton had persuaded him to delay his report, lest it jeopardize negotiations over London’s yielding of its western posts. Thereafter, it was Jefferson who dragged his feet, awaiting a more friendly Congress. In December 1793, when the Congress that had been elected in 1792 finally assembled, he acted.
Jefferson’s report was the culmination of twenty years’ of his thinking, and the final salvo on behalf of much that he had sought to accomplish as secretary of state. The author of the Declaration of Independence was seeking to make the United States truly independent, to terminate the commercial dependence on Great Britain that had prevailed in the colonial era and continued despite the American victory in the Revolutionary War. Jefferson was privy to secret, and accurate, information from intelligence sources that the British ministry was unrelenting in its policy of denying American trade in the West Indies, and that it harbored malign intentions toward America’s shipbuilding and fishing industries. Armed with this knowledge, he saw little to lose through a more confrontational policy toward London. Indeed, he remained convinced that reciprocity offered the best hope of compelling Great Britain to trade more fully and equitably with the United States. Jefferson longed to break Britain’s commercial domination of Europe and North America. At the same moment, he looked for ways to forestall the evils that he imagined would ensue from Hamiltonian economics, to indefinitely sustain America’s agrarian republic, and to bring about closer relations with France. In one way or another, his commercial report was aimed at achieving these objectives.
Jefferson opened with statistical data calculated to show the dangerous degree to which Britain dominated American commerce. This was a prelude to the heart of his message: his call for free trade. Instead of the prevailing “piles of regulating Laws, Duties, and Prohibitions” that “shackles” world commerce, Jefferson dreamt of each nation being free “to exchange with others mutual surpluses for mutual Wants.” Free trade was crucial for the American economy, he said, but it was also “essential” as a “resource of Defence.” Free trade would not only lead to economic independence, it would also result in a robust commerce, which in turn would produce a flourishing commercial fleet that would serve as a nursery of sailors for the American navy. Some nations, he went on, wanted free trade, and in an accompanying letter he advised the Speaker of the House that France was ready to negotiate a commercial treaty “on liberal principles.” But for those nations such as Great Britain that would not abandon systems that discriminated against American commerce, he said, “it behooves us” to retaliate with countermeasures. Very nearly the last word that Jefferson uttered as secretary of state was that the United States should adopt similarly restrict
ive commercial policies toward Great Britain, imposing punishing taxes on English imports, or forbidding their importation altogether, until London agreed to admit American exports to British ports.25
With that, Jefferson was ready to go home. He had remained in Washington’s cabinet a year longer than he had wished, and he was not swayed when, just before Christmas 1793, the president made a final attempt to persuade him to stay on. Jefferson told him that he was “immoveable.” With sadness, Washington relented. He wrote to Jefferson thanking him for his “integrity and talents,” and added that all the reasons that had led him to nominate his fellow Virginian to serve as secretary of state had been vindicated by the expertise “eminently displayed in the discharge of your duties.”26
On January 5, after visiting his Philadelphia barber for the last time and purchasing several items for Monticello, Jefferson set off for home and what Hamilton snidely called another “permanent” retirement. (Actually, to this point Jefferson and Hamilton had each “retired” twice.) Jefferson rode the public stage most of the way, and on the eleventh day after departing the capital, he reached his hilltop mansion. He was fifty-one and convinced that he would never again leave Monticello for any extended time. “The little spice of ambition, which I had in my younger days, has long since evaporated,” he contended. The “length of my tether is now fixed for life from Monticello to Richmond,” he remarked two weeks after he came home, and in fact, during the next three years his longest journey was his lone trip to Richmond. Jefferson likely reasoned that he had about fifteen years left, perhaps twenty if he was especially fortunate. He was the leading light of what was coalescing into an organized political party, which had to have made him aware that someday he might be called on to stand for election to the presidency. Then again, that might never occur, for in 1794 it was far from certain how long Washington would occupy the office, and the feeling was widespread that Vice President Adams was the heir apparent.27