by John Ferling
Doubtless learning what had occurred, Hamilton, who had brought so many to his way of thinking, mounted his horse at headquarters in Newark and rode hard to reach Trenton. An air of desperation sped Hamilton on his mission. Three days before the inspector general saddled up, Jefferson had predicted that “we may expect peace” to stem from the negotiations in Paris.92 Hamilton must have also believed that would be the outcome of the talks. He called on Adams on the pretense of discussing issues concerning the army, but Hamilton’s real objective was to persuade the president to abort the peace talks in Paris.
Hamilton was shown into the parlor that Adams was using as a temporary office. As the president was staying at the home of two maiden aunts, the room was likely simply furnished. Given his illness and the trying deliberations with his cabinet, Adams’s disposition, already sulky and resentful, was not improved by Hamilton’s presence. For his part, Hamilton knew beforehand that he was not a favorite of Adams, but he had no idea of the depth of the president’s hatred for him. Hamilton had only infrequently been in Adams’s company, and the inspector general may never have previously called on this president as a supplicant. Standing before Adams, who sat smoking a cigar and listening with exemplary patience, Hamilton likely fell back on the manner that had worked so well for him on so many occasions, and especially with Adams’s predecessor. Hamilton manifested an air not merely of authority but also of infallibility.
Hamilton began with a lengthy monologue on the state of Europe. He spoke condescendingly, or so Adams thought. In fact, Hamilton reminded the president, who recognized few as his intellectual equal, of a teacher addressing a callow student. Adams also thought Hamilton came across as “an impertinent ignoramus.” As Hamilton proceeded, he grew more frenzied. He spoke louder, flailing with agitation. Years before, army officers had told Adams that Hamilton often grew more impassioned as he argued, so that the president, for whom this was a novel experience, was prepared. In fact, Adams subsequently said that he enjoyed this “paroxysm” on the part of his nemesis. While Hamilton argued that the Bourbons would be back on the throne by Christmas, making Adams’s mission unnecessary, the president listened with delight to this desperate, “[over]wrought … little man.”
When Hamilton concluded his discourse, Adams respectfully but assertively rejected his predictions for Europe, remarking that it was more likely that “the sun, moon & stars will fall from their orbits.” (The president was the more accurate of the two. The Bourbons did regain power in France, but not until more than fifteen years after the autumn of 1799.) Thereafter, Hamilton switched course. He asserted that the peace mission would trigger war with Great Britain. Once again, Adams—correctly, as it turned out—demolished the logic of Hamilton’s argument piece by piece. Adams had thoroughly beaten Hamilton, and he had done so, he later claimed, without ever losing his temper.93
Hamilton’s world was collapsing. He had been bested by Adams, and many observers, including Jefferson and probably Hamilton as well, expected the Republicans to make considerable gains in both houses of Congress in the following year’s elections.94 Near Christmas, Hamilton received the worst news of all. Washington had died unexpectedly at Mount Vernon. Some Federalists had already begun to importune Washington to stand for the presidency in 1800, telling him that Adams was unelectable and that Jefferson surely would become the next chief executive.95 Hamilton had not approached Washington on the matter, though it is not difficult to imagine him having a hand in the nascent campaign to lure the general back into public life. Hamilton was overcome on learning of Washington’s demise. No “man … has equal cause with myself to deplore the loss,” he said, adding: “My imagination is gloomy my heart sad.” But Hamilton grieved not so much the loss of a man he loved as one who had been “an Aegis very essential to me,” as he put it.96
Adams got in one more dig against Hamilton. He left the post of commanding officer of the army, which Washington had held, unfilled. Adams could not bring himself to elevate Hamilton to that position. It made little difference. In February 1800, two months almost to the day after Washington’s death, Congress suspended enlistments in the New Army. Three months later, the army disbanded.97
Hamilton never gave up. He told High Federalists that Republican “sentiments dangerous to social happiness” necessitated further strengthening of the national government. Hamilton contemplated several steps, including legislation even more harsh than the Sedition Act and unspecified “Vigorous measures of counteraction” to curb the “incendiary and seditious practices” that he imagined.98
To achieve his ends, Hamilton knew, the Federalists must win the election of 1800, and unseat John Adams in the process.
Chapter 14
“The gigg is up”
The Election of 1800
From the start of the Quasi-War, and the repressive Federalist legislation that followed, it is likely that Jefferson planned to run for president in 1800. In fact, he may never have considered not being a candidate. But, like Washington and many another of that time, Jefferson wanted to convince others that he was a reluctant candidate. He said repeatedly that he did not want to be president. He allowed that a man’s ambition raged between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, but thereafter one’s “principal object” became a “sigh for tranquility.” He was “sated with public life” by age thirty-eight, Jefferson claimed, the time his unhappy gubernatorial years ended. Some older men continued in public life until an advanced age, though “not from a passion for pre-eminence.” They were driven by avarice, partisan passions, or “to promote the public good or public liberty.” Of course, he stressed the latter as his reason for running.1
Federalist “bigots” had “dishonored our country” through their “delirium” of looking “backwards instead of forwards,” Jefferson declared. In his mind, the election of 1800 would be a contest between those who longed for the change heralded by the American Revolution and reactionaries who sought to revert to a dark, static past when monarchs had held sway and those in the lower social orders knew their place and were impounded in that place. If his side prevailed, Jefferson believed the American Revolution would be fulfilled and the United States would become “the asylum for whatever is great and good.”2
Jefferson was confident. He sensed a “growing detestation” of all that the Ultra Federalists stood for, including the “heroes of the party.” The party’s demise, and with it Hamilton’s downfall, would be the “last act of the federal tragedy.” Jefferson believed the Republicans could regain control of the House of Representatives and make substantive inroads against the majority that the Federalists had long enjoyed in the Senate.3 The signs also looked good for a Republican victory in the presidential election. Even an indifferent observer—and Jefferson was not that, but a seasoned politician who followed such things closely—could see that Republican prospects were promising.4
In 1796, Adams had squeaked past Jefferson by three electoral votes, winning every vote from New England, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware. Four years earlier, Jefferson had received all but two of the electoral votes from south of the Potomac, all of the votes from Kentucky and Tennessee, and four of Maryland’s ten votes. Jefferson believed he could do as well, if not better, in those states in 1800.
Informed observers, including Jefferson and Hamilton, believed the election’s outcome would be determined in New York, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. Even though New York had given its twelve electoral votes to Adams and Pinckney in 1796, Jefferson radiated optimism about a shift in that state. In January 1800 he met in Philadelphia with Aaron Burr, who told him that there was “no doubt” that the Republicans would win every legislative seat at stake in April’s elections in Manhattan. That, said Burr, would give the party control of the assembly, and as the assembly chose the state’s presidential electors, that would mean the two Republican nominees would win all twelve of New York’s electoral votes in 1800.5
While his prospects in New York were favorable, Jefferson knew
that he would not do as well in Pennsylvania as he had in 1796, when he had won fourteen of the Keystone State’s fifteen votes. The difference was that in 1800 the lower house of the state assembly was controlled by the Republicans and the upper chamber by the Federalists, and the two parties differed over the selection of presidential electors. Republicans favored a winner-take-all system, which had worked well for them in 1796. Federalists preferred to have the electors chosen in districts, through which the party seemed certain to win three or four electoral votes. If the two houses could not concur on how the electors were to be chosen, Pennsylvania would not cast any electoral votes. That would help the Federalists. If there was a compromise, it was inconceivable that the Federalists would agree to a solution that awarded Jefferson more than eight or nine votes. It was certain that Jefferson would win fewer votes in Pennsylvania than he had in the last election.
In 1796, South Carolina had done something unique. Its legislature had decreed that each of the state’s presidential electors was to cast one vote for Jefferson, the Republican, and one for the favorite son Thomas Pinckney, a Federalist. What the state’s electors would do in 1800 hinged on whether the Federalists once again nominated a South Carolinian and on which party controlled the assembly. The composition of the legislature would not be determined until the autumn elections.
Through the early months of 1800, Jefferson continued to tell friends that he hoped to remain the vice president, as the office enabled him to spend most of each year at home. His friends responded by telling him that they wanted him to become their president, and they expected him to be elected, as the “tyde of the Political affairs” had changed. If the chief executive was chosen by a popular vote, said one, Jefferson would receive 75 percent of the votes.6 Like Washington in 1788 and 1789, Jefferson in 1800 was genuinely conflicted. He wanted to be president to shape America’s future, but he longed to stay at home “where all is love and peace.” What is more, he thought of the presidency as a “splendid misery.” Nothing else that he said so encapsulated his ambivalence over the price he would have to pay to hold the office.7
While Jefferson was torn over the presidency, Hamilton knew that his chances of holding meaningful power in the near future were slim. On the occasion of his forty-fifth birthday in 1800, Hamilton appeared to say that he might have chosen a more promising political course. After leaving Washington’s cabinet, he might have agreed to a European diplomatic assignment, or perhaps he could have served in Congress. Instead, he “had left every thing else to follow the Drum,” to soldier. Yet, through an “Injustice,” his “sacred” service had, if anything, diminished his standing. Never denying his obsessive ambition, Hamilton looked toward a distant future for vindication: “I feel that I stand on ground which, sooner or later, will ensure me a triump over all my enemies.”8
Hamilton had intrigued in the three previous presidential elections. He intended to do so again. In 1800, he would seek Adams’s political destruction, “even though the consequence should be the election of Jefferson.”9 Hamilton seethed with hatred for Adams, who had resisted the creation of the New Army and his appointment as inspector general. He was embittered that Adams had pursued negotiations to end the Quasi-War crisis. What he must have regarded as his belittling treatment at the hands of the president during their meeting in Trenton only further infuriated Hamilton. It was Hamilton’s hope that General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, brother of the 1796 nominee and second in command of the fading New Army, would be one of the Federalist nominees. And Hamilton planned to do all he could to ensure Pinckney’s election, as it offered the best hope of his speedy return to some powerful position.
Hamilton’s task of electing any Federalist grew more formidable in the wake of the New York assembly elections in April. Just as Burr had forecast, the Republicans won all the lower house seats up for grabs in Manhattan and seven of the nine that were contested in the upper house. The outcome gave the party control of the legislature. Shut out in New York in 1796, the Republicans were now guaranteed all twelve of the state’s electoral votes in 1800.
What had occurred in New York disclosed a looming seismic shift in American politics. New York City had been a Federalist stronghold for the past dozen years. Manhattan had supported the ratification of the Constitution and thereafter the lion’s share of its residents consistently embraced Hamiltonian economics, which both the city’s tradesmen and unskilled workers viewed as the facilitator of trade, jobs, and prosperity. But in the late stages of the 1790s, those who worked with their hands turned away from the Federalist Party, increasingly seeing politics—as Hamilton discerned in an analysis in 1796—as “a question between the Rich & the poor.”10 Workers saw the Federalist Party as the home of the gentry, and viewed its tight money policies as securing the “advantage of the Few,” but offering nothing to the cash-hungry members of society’s lower strata. Growing numbers were put off by the party’s social traditionalism and its national policies, especially the Alien and Sedition Acts, its standing army and seeming lust for war with France, and the new taxes levied to pay for the army. Some even noted that following Jefferson’s departure from the State Department, the Federalists had removed from the federal currency all symbols of liberty, such as the Liberty Tree or the Liberty Cap.
The growing disenchantment with Federalist attitudes and programs, which Jefferson and others had noticed as early as 1798, had to be politically harnessed. That was precisely what Burr did in Manhattan in 1800, displaying a nearly unmatched awareness of what was soon to become standard urban political practice. He organized an operation in which decisions flowed down from a central committee to small councils at the ward level. The Republican Party published its message and held street rallies at which leaders, including Burr, addressed the crowds. Party workers campaigned door-to-door and got the voters to the polls on election day. Burr also picked legislative candidates with name recognition, including former Governor Clinton and General Horatio Gates, to run against the Federalist slate of bankers and lawyers from elite law firms. The only thing that was not modern about the Republican campaign was that—as Burr told Jefferson—it had been conducted in a “highly honorable” manner with “no indecency, no unfairness, no personal abuse.”11
When Jefferson learned of the results in New York, he remarked that the Republican triumph went “far towards deciding the great election.” Indeed, he thought it would have determined the outcome of the general election had it not been for the “peculiar circumstances” in Pennsylvania.12 For Hamilton, however, South Carolina was now the crucial battleground. He urged his party to choose General Pinckney, a South Carolinian, as one of its nominees. Moreover, fully aware that in 1796 eighteen New England electors—fearing anti-Adams intrigue, chiefly by Hamilton—had cast their second vote for someone other than Thomas Pinckney, Hamilton appealed to the party’s leaders to pledge in “a distinct & solemn concert” to “support Adams & Pinckney, equally.” This, he added, “is the only thing that can possibly save us from the fangs of Jefferson.”13
Hamilton took an additional step, one that not only laid bare his gnawing disdain for America’s emerging democratic practices but that also exposed him as a relic of an earlier era. He beseeched Governor John Jay to override the recent legislative elections by summoning the current Federalist-dominated assembly into a special session to draw up a new set of rules for the selection of presidential electors. Ever the schemer, Hamilton’s shocking plan was to have the outgoing legislature vote that the electors be chosen according to the popular vote in each congressional district, and for this arrangement to be retroactive. Through this ploy, the Federalists would win perhaps ten of New York’s twelve electoral votes. It “will not do to be over-scrupulous” when striving “to prevent an Atheist in Religion and a Fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of the State,” Hamilton reasoned. Jay refused to be part of such a contemptible scheme.14
Soon after New York’s election, congressional Federalists caucused
and named Adams and General Pinckney as their candidates. Thinking along the same lines as Hamilton, Jefferson observed that Pinckney’s selection was one of the Federalists’ typical “hocus-pocus maneuvers” to siphon Republican votes in both of the Carolinas, as they had done in 1796.15 A few days later, the Republicans in Congress chose their candidates. Jefferson’s selection was never in question, but some preferred George Clinton as the other nominee, thinking him more popular than Burr with Southerners. However, Clinton endorsed Burr, who was chosen. This time the Republican caucus stipulated that Jefferson was the party’s first choice for the presidency.16
Burr’s selection was just one of the rip currents set off by the pivotal New York election. Soon thereafter, and within hours of again receiving his party’s nomination, Adams settled old scores with the disloyal McHenry and Pickering. He fired both men. His action was premeditated and vengeful, but it was political as well. Needing Connecticut’s votes if he was to have any chance of winning, Adams did not oust Wolcott, whose treachery had been as great as that of his colleagues. What is more, in ridding himself of McHenry and Pickering, Adams sought to demonstrate his independence and commitment to an honorable peace, and to show that he was unfettered by the radical right wing of his party. Trolling for support in the South, more crucial than ever now that New York was lost, Adams named Virginia’s John Marshall as Pickering’s successor.
