Jefferson and Hamilton

by John Ferling

  When the president dismissed McHenry, his bitterness toward his disloyal secretary of war, and his hatred of Hamilton, gushed forth. Near nightfall on May 5, Adams summoned McHenry from dinner to discuss a trivial federal appointment. The conference ended quickly, but as McHenry was leaving the president’s office, something he said—or perhaps his tone of voice—brought Adams’s volcanic rage to the surface. He accused McHenry of having deceitfully conspired with Hamilton to hamper his presidency. When the secretary tried to object, Adams silenced him. In the grip of long pent-up passions, Adams lashed out. With a burst of incivility, Adams told McHenry that he was inept and two-faced, and called him a toady of “the greatest intriguant in the World,” meaning Hamilton, of course. With a head of steam, Adams insisted that Hamilton was largely responsible for the erosion of Federalist strength in Manhattan and the party’s almost-certain loss of the presidency in 1800. The president did not stop there. Hamilton, he told McHenry, was “devoid of every moral principle—a Bastard, and … a foreigner.” In what Adams must have thought would be the cruelest blow of all, he added: “Mr. Jefferson is an infinitely better man; a wiser one, I am sure, and, if President, will act wisely. I … would rather be Vice President under him … than indebted to such a being as Hamilton for the Presidency.”17

  After learning from McHenry of Adams’s tirade, Hamilton set out on a three-week tour of New England. Officially, he went north “to disband Troops.” No one was fooled. His “visit was merely an Electioneering business,” Abigail Adams reported, and she and many others assumed he was beating the bushes on behalf of Pinckney. Soon enough, word reached the President’s House in Philadelphia that Hamilton and some of his officers had encouraged political leaders in Connecticut and Rhode Island to see to it that some electoral votes were withheld from the president.18 For months, Hamilton had been saying privately that Adams was given to capricious and irrational behavior, and that he was “very unfit and incapable.” Most party leaders despised the president, he had said. In the spring, Hamilton had gone so far as to tell some of his fellow Federalists that the party might be better off if it lost the election, after which it could regroup in opposition to Jefferson’s foreordained “foolish and bad measures.” Once McHenry dutifully reported the president’s uncivil comments, Hamilton responded that Adams was “as wicked as he is mad.”19 There can be no doubt that he aired these feelings in his talks with the Yankee activists.

  There is also no question that Hamilton’s trip did not go well. Time and again, New Englanders told him straightaway that they were “decidedly for the re-election of Mr. Adams,” and some warned that if Hamilton persisted in his plot against the president’s reelection, electoral votes would be withheld from Pinckney. Getting word of this, some South Carolinians tried to restrain Hamilton, telling him that his behavior was counterproductive and widely seen as stemming from “private pique” rather than principle.20

  For weeks thereafter Hamilton abandoned his open vendetta against Adams, which had been as unwise as it was unnecessary. Based on the information at this disposal, Hamilton knew that Pinckney stood a good chance of outscoring the president. For one thing, South Carolina’s congressional delegation had given “every assurance” that “such was the popularity of General Pinckney,” that he would receive all of the state’s electoral votes even if the Republicans controlled the state assembly. In other words, in a worst-case scenario, Jefferson and Pinckney would divide South Carolina’s electoral votes. Furthermore, Hamilton was convinced that once it was widely perceived that Adams probably could not win, two or three Federalist electors in Connecticut and New Jersey would withhold their vote from him in the hope of securing Pinckney’s election.21

  But while Hamilton refrained from openly going after Adams, during the summer he took the extraordinary step of writing to the president. His letter was composed along the lines of a first communiqué leading to a challenge to duel. Declaring that he was “injured” by Adams’s alleged assertions that he was part of a “British Faction” within the Federalist Party, Hamilton asked the president of the United States to avow or disavow his remarks. When Adams did not respond, Hamilton fired off a second letter, in which he branded the president’s supposed comments to McHenry as a “wicked and cruel calumny,” as well as the product of a depraved mind. Adams did not respond to that letter either. In his second missive, Hamilton had pointedly defended himself as one “who without a stain has discharged so many important public trusts.” Knowing there would never be a duel, Hamilton may have engaged in this exercise in the hope of causing uneasiness in a hated nemesis who had sullied his character.22 Whatever the reason, Hamilton’s judgment was at best clouded, and this was only his most recent instance of imprudence. As Hamilton disparaged Adams’s soundness, his own volatility, even irrationality, was growing more evident.

  Jefferson returned home from Philadelphia in May and remained at Monticello for the duration of the campaign. Of the four candidates, only Burr openly electioneered, trekking to New England and New Jersey in a vain search for a Federalist elector or two who might be persuaded to vote for the Republican candidates.23 The others sought to convey to the public that they awaited a call to the presidency that they would not seek. Despite their posturing, Adams and Jefferson stealthily courted voters. Adams’s purge of his cabinet was done with an eye on the election, and late in May he also rode south to inspect the new Federal City on the Potomac—or Washington, as everyone was calling it—which was slated to become the national capital on June 15. Adams took a roundabout route through the backcountry of Pennsylvania and Maryland, states in which he had garnered only eight of a possible twenty-five electoral votes in 1796. In the course of his peripatetic journey, the president stopped in one dusty village after another to deliver a brief speech. He repeatedly emphasized his commitment to national independence, his role in the American Revolution, and his blood ties to his acclaimed cousin, Samuel Adams.24

  Jefferson had also taken a circuitous route on his trip home earlier that same month, swinging through Richmond, which he had not previously visited during his vice presidency.25 The detour permitted him to shore up the Republican base in the face of recent Federalist successes. Jefferson delivered no speeches that summer or fall, but he wrote a campaign autobiography, the first presidential candidate to do so. He listed achievements that he had “been the instrument of doing”: writing the Declaration of Independence, terminating the foreign slave trade in Virginia, sending a “great number of olive plants … to … S. Carola”—that most crucial of states—and seeking a “more general diffusion of knowledge” in Virginia.26 Jefferson additionally wrote numerous letters in which he spelled out his convictions, producing a party platform of sorts. He articulated his belief in reserving to the state those powers not expressly given to the national government, and he added that he wished to retire the national debt, limit the president’s encroachment on congressional authority, eliminate the standing army, keep the navy small, and rely on the militia to safeguard national security. He opposed foreign alliances—“let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce”—and wished for free trade with all nations. He favored freedom of religion and the press, and opposed “all violations of the constitution to silence … our citizens.”27

  While most of the candidates avoided the hustings, party activists were busy. For the most part, both sides spread their message through pamphlets, broadsides, and newspapers. The Federalists had a decided edge in the press, but Republican newspapers had climbed from about 15 percent of the total in 1796 to nearly one-third by 1800. The Republicans were better organized for disseminating information, as they established committees of correspondence to funnel publications to the hinterland. Each party’s campaign literature proclaimed its policies, but much of it also consisted of what today is called “negative” or “attack ads,” bitter, often scurrilous invective directed toward the other side.28

  Some Republican penmen limned Adams as
a monarchist and portrayed Pinckney as a mediocrity, but their essayists mostly focused on the Federalist program. One writer after another attacked the Alien and Sedition Acts, the taxes levied to pay for the debt and the New Army, and the very existence of the standing army. Much of their ink was spilled on Hamilton’s economic program, and, indeed, almost as many barbs were directed at the former treasury secretary as at the president. The “ambitious, amorous little Hamilton,” said one Republican, was responsible for having run up a twenty-million-dollar national debt in peacetime, roughly one-third as much as had been accumulated in the entire Revolutionary War. Funding was the “most memorable piece of imbecility and impudence that was ever imposed on a nation,” said another. Calling their foes the “Anglo-federal party,” many scribblers emphasized the link between Federalist and British economics. In time, they argued, Hamiltonianism would transform America into a land dominated by corrupt stockjobbers who saw peace as their greatest enemy. Federalist opposition to political and social change was another focal point of the Republican message. Party writers insisted that there was little to distinguish the Federalist Party and the Tories who in 1776 had opposed breaking with Great Britain. In this vein, Republicans repeatedly broadcast Hamilton’s pro-monarchy speech to the Constitutional Convention.

  Republicans also defended Jefferson. His Declaration of Independence was “the most sublime production of genius which either the ancient or modern world has exhibited.” He was the friend of small farmers and American commerce, the foe of high taxes, standing armies, and any who sought to impose their religious beliefs on others. Jefferson would preserve the peace. He would save the American Revolution. Asserting that the real meaning of the election concerned the fulfillment of the “Spirit of 1776,” it was said: “If your independence was worth achieving, it is worth preserving,” and Jefferson was the candidate who would do so.

  New England Federalists made a case for Adams as a trenchant thinker and prudent statesman who had resisted the temptation to rush madly to war. As the campaign unfolded, however, other Federalists openly insisted that Pinckney’s chances of winning were better than those of the president. They defended the South Carolinian as a moderate with a distinguished war record, a public figure without a blot on his record, a soldier who had won the esteem of General Washington.

  Federalists took credit for the nation’s economic well-being since 1789 and trumpeted that Washington had sympathized with what the party stood for. Their principal tactic was to take the offensive, and they were good at it, so good that few future mudslingers surpassed them. Federalists painted the Republicans as indistinguishable from radical French Jacobins, and stamped their adversaries as democrats, atheists, and wild-eyed revolutionaries who would not rest until they dragged the United States to war against Great Britain.

  The abuse that Republicans directed against Hamilton paled in comparison to the calumny heaped on Jefferson. Jefferson was said to have gulled his clients while a practicing attorney. His war record was one of “uninspiring patriotism.” He lived sumptuously while others sacrificed during the war, acted as a coward when Tarleton’s soldiers descended on Monticello in June 1781, and thereafter never “peeped out of his hermitage” until the war ended. Nor had he authored the Declaration of Independence; it was the work of a committee. Federalists charged that Jefferson’s residence in France had transformed him into a dangerous radical, so that when he returned to America his head was filled with a “stock of visionary nonsense.” A Federalist newspaper in Virginia alleged that Jefferson had a slave mistress. The closest the charge came to receiving any attention elsewhere, however, came when a New York paper enigmatically called him “a libertine.” Federalists twisted Jefferson’s advocacy of religious freedom in Notes on the State of Virginia to brand him an atheist. New Englanders were warned to hide their Bibles should Jefferson become president, and across the land Federalists cautioned that Jefferson’s election would call down God’s vengeance on the United States. Voters were told that their choice was between “A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT or … JEFFERSON—AND NO GOD.” Federalists had a field day with the Mazzei letter, which led them to charge that Jefferson hated Washington. They rebuked him as a “Solomon of Jacobinism.” Speaking at a Federalist gathering that summer in Boston, Hamilton said he hoped American tradesmen would “never act as the Journeymen of Jacobinism; nor as Master-workmen in the Mazzeian Babel.”29

  That was not all that Hamilton said during this election. Early in the summer, Hamilton encouraged his closest political allies to spread word of Adams’s “unfitness.” His entreaties fell on deaf ears. When he told them of his plans to publish a tract that chronicled “in detail” the president’s supposed shortcomings, many advised against it, cautioning that it would divide the party. With pitiless honesty, one friend warned that such a tract would constitute “new proof that you are a dangerous man.” Still churning with resentment at Adams, and driven by a recklessness that had recently grown more pronounced, Hamilton could not be dissuaded. By late summer he had completed his draft of a pamphlet that he intended to have circulated only in South Carolina, hoping it would discourage that state’s electors from voting for Adams. Once his draft was complete, Hamilton passed it along to acquaintances for criticism. Someone in possession of the manuscript turned it over to a Philadelphia editor, who, seeing a major story, published extracts. A few days later, just a few weeks before the electors were to vote, the Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq. President of the United States, appeared as a pamphlet.30

  Hamilton filled fifty-four pernicious pages with venom about Adams’s allegedly wrongheaded behavior as a congressman, diplomat, and chief executive. The heart of his indictment was that Adams’s virtues were offset by his “distempered jealousy,” “extreme egotism,” “vanity without bounds,” “ungovernable indiscretion,” and “ungovernable temper,” traits that had led the president to spurn the “prudent” advice of his cabinet and to act impetuously and injudiciously. Already, Adams had torn down much that President Washington had achieved, Hamilton claimed. Given four more years, he might bring the Union to the brink of doom.31

  Hamilton’s published rejoinder to Callender in 1797 had been harmful. His public assault on Adams was ruinous. Hamilton’s standing was already in decline. His junket to New England had failed, the Federalist governors of New York and Maryland—and some party regulars in Congress—condemned his intrigue to defeat the president, and when word leaked out of Adams’s barbed comments to McHenry about Hamilton’s character, not a few Yankees were inclined to agree. In July, Hamilton acknowledged that he no longer could sway the “second class” Federalists, the lesser, mostly younger, members of his party.32 When the Letter from Alexander Hamilton appeared, perceptive observers such as Madison instantly realized that the pamphlet’s “recoil” would hurt Hamilton more than it would Adams, and in fact it was not long before Noah Webster, a New York Federalist editor, countered with a tract charging that the former treasury secretary’s “ambition, pride, and overbearing temper” were leading the party, and possibly the Union, to devastation. Even Robert Troup, Hamilton’s friend since college, candidly told him: “Not a man … but condemns it.”33

  Some of the traits that Hamilton attributed to Adams were true, but some aptly described his own character, as his former adherent, George Cabot, a Massachusetts senator, told him.34 Disregarding sound advice, Hamilton’s rancor and thirst for power and fame—as well as revenge—had driven him to act rashly. Some signs of Hamilton’s flawed temperament were apparent years earlier. In some respects, it is surprising that he rose as far as he did. It is even more astonishing that so many other public figures permitted themselves to become satellites orbiting about him, or like Washington to believe so deeply in him. For Jefferson, on the other hand, Hamilton’s latest act was merely further confirmation that he was indeed “the evil genius of this country.”35

  People spoke of December 3 as “Election Day
.” They were referring to the day designated for the presidential electors to meet and vote. There was no single day when voters went to the polls. The electors were chosen by popular vote in only five of the sixteen states. Elsewhere, state legislatures chose them, and the assembly elections were conducted throughout the year. However, by autumn, as the Pennsylvania and South Carolina elections approached, the likely outcome had come into sharper relief.

  All along, many assumed that Adams had been mortally wounded by the Republicans’ springtime victory in New York, but the president never entirely lost hope, and in the fall his cause was helped immeasurably by events in Pennsylvania. The state’s October 14 elections resulted in a stunning victory for the Republicans, who captured fifty-five of the seventy-eight seats in the lower house of the assembly, won six of the seven seats up for grabs in the upper house, and carried ten of the thirteen congressional districts. Nevertheless, even though three-fifths of Pennsylvania’s voters had demonstrated a preference for Republican candidates, the Federalists still clung to a narrow majority in the statehouse’s upper chamber, and they used it to block a decision on the choice of presidential electors. The deadlock dragged on for weeks. With Election Day on the horizon, it appeared that Pennsylvania might be unrepresented in the electoral college. But at the last moment the two parties reached an agreement, each hopeful that its presidential candidate would ultimately triumph, and each lusting after the spoils of office should their party be victorious. The compromise awarded eight electoral votes to the Republicans and seven to the Federalists.36