Neither Hamilton nor Jefferson wanted the United States to get involved in a European war, and both secretaries accepted Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality of April 1793. But Jefferson knew that such a policy of neutrality would in fact mean “a mere English neutrality.”85 As he told Madison, it “will prove a disagreeable pill to our friends, tho’ necessary to keep us out of the calamities of a war.”86 Believing as he did in “the love of the people for the French cause and nation,” Jefferson was embarrassed by the policy of neutrality that he had supported, especially since France and the United States had an alliance dating from 1778.
Although Vice President Adams insisted that “a Neutrality, absolute Neutrality is our only hope,” Jefferson immediately began to distance himself from the proclamation. Jefferson, who, as one British observer noted, had “a degree of finesse about him, which at first is not discernable,” took great pains to tell his friends that he had not written the proclamation, explaining that at least he had been able to have the word “neutrality” omitted from it. Thus the actual proclamation stated only that the United States would “pursue a conduct friendly and impartial towards the belligerent powers.”87 Yet this Jeffersonian nicety scarcely satisfied the most avid Republicans, who believed that the cause of France was the cause of republicanism everywhere.
Naturally the leaders of each of the warring powers looked to the respective American parties for support. Just as the French saw the Republicans as fervent advocates for their Revolution, so were the British encouraged by the Federalists’ many expressions of their ties with England. As one of Jefferson’s American informants in England reported, the British were “confident that we wish to return to the Arms of the mother Country,” and were using the writings of Vice President Adams to bolster their claims. These “Advocates of Tyrants here . . . extol our Aristocrats to the Skies, seem highly interested about who shall succeed the President—and . . . wish to have a Finger in the Business.”88
Jefferson’s position as a member of the government whose policies he strongly opposed became increasingly untenable. Having lost the battle with Hamilton over the financial program and neutrality, and eager, so he informed Hamilton’s sister-in-law, “to be liberated from the hated occupation of politics” and return to “the bosom of my family, my farm and my books,” he finally informed Washington that he would resign as secretary of state on December 31, 1793, and return to Monticello.89 He told the president that every day he had become “more and more convinced that neither my talents, tone of mind, nor time of life fit me.”90 He had been thinking about retiring for over a year, but delayed only because Washington had urged him to remain in office.
Adams had mixed feelings when he learned of Jefferson’s plans. He told Abigail that he had “so long been in habit of thinking well of [Jefferson’s] Abilities and general good dispositions” that he could not but have some regret at the secretary of state’s resignation. But he added that Jefferson’s “Want of Candour, his obstinate Prejudices both of Aversion and Attachment: his real Partiality in Spite of his Pretensions and his low notions about many Things,” including having a “soul poisoned with Ambition,” made it difficult for Adams to weep over Jefferson’s leaving Philadelphia. In a letter to his son John Quincy, Adams went into great detail speculating about all the reasons why Jefferson might have decided to retire. In his mind, every one of Jefferson’s motives was dark and dirty. Jefferson couldn’t support his luxurious style of living on his salary. His heavy debts meant that he did not want to spend his private income on public service. As secretary of state, he found it awkward having the French minister, Citizen Genet, celebrate Thomas Paine’s principles, since those principles were his principles. Moreover, “he could not rule the Roast in the Ministry.” And the “Subtlest Beast” of all, said Adams, was Jefferson’s ambition, which he concealed from himself. By retiring, said Adams, Jefferson hoped to gain a reputation as a “humble, modest, meek Man, wholly without ambition or Vanity,” which would then set him up to be called back to Philadelphia as president.91
By the time Jefferson actually left for Monticello, Adams was ready to wish “a good riddance of bad ware.” He only hoped that retirement would cool Jefferson’s temper and make his principles more reasonable. He knew the man had talent and perhaps integrity, “but his mind is now poisoned with Passion Prejudice and Faction.”92
Despite his harsh view of Jefferson’s character and motives, Adams wrote to him, congratulating him on his retirement. He envied him, he said, being on his plantation, “out of the hearing of the Din of Politicks and the Rumours of War.” He enclosed a book on Swiss politics, perhaps as something of a peace offering.93
Eager to maintain the relationship, Jefferson quickly answered, and, commenting on the issues in the book Adams had sent him having to do with competing claims between the French-speaking Pays de Vaud and the German-speaking city of Berne, declared that these claims were “on grounds which I fancy we have taught the world to set little store by. The rights of one generation will scarcely be considered hereafter as depending on the paper transactions of another,” a reference to his idea, which he had expressed to Madison in 1789, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.94
With his habit of turning a conversation into an argument, Adams took issue with this remark, pointing out, as Madison had in 1789, some of its impracticalities. “The Social Compact and the Laws,” said Adams, “must be reduced to Writing. Obedience to them becomes a national Habit and they cannot be changed but by Revolutions which are costly Things.” Then he dryly added, to the man who had a reputation for loving revolutions, “Men will be too Œconomical of their blood and Property to have recourse to them very frequently.” He ended by saying to Jefferson that if he had “Your Plantation and your Labourers,” he too might think of retiring and escaping from the corruption of Philadelphia.95
Adams had not gotten over his anger at Jefferson and said so in conversations with people, including the British minister in Philadelphia. He and Jefferson kept up a businesslike relationship in the mid-1790s, exchanging several letters with each other annually, usually prompted by some common request from a foreigner. Business or not, Adams didn’t hide his feelings about the foolishness of the French Revolution—“Reasoning has been all lost. Passion, Prejudice, Interest, Necessity has governed, and will govern, and a Century must roll away before any permanent and quiet System will be established.”96
For his part Jefferson kept repeating how much he enjoyed being tranquilly retired and how he felt about politics—“a subject I never loved, and now hate.” And in extolling the greatness of America’s experiment in government, he managed to suggest to Adams that he was “sure, from the honesty of your heart, you join me in detestation of the corruption of the English government,” adding that no one in his right mind, and certainly not Adams, would want that English system introduced into America.97
Inserting these little digs in their letters, knowing they would irritate, indicates that the warm friendship that the two revolutionaries had enjoyed in the 1780s was gone.
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PERHAPS MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE, Adams’s attitude toward the French Revolution divided him from Jefferson and other Republicans. In a conversation with Senator John Taylor of Virginia and Senator John Langdon of New Hampshire in 1794, Adams declared that the people of France were too ignorant and corrupt to sustain republican government. According to Taylor, who kept notes of the discussion, Adams went on to predict that America would eventually go the way of Europe and that Taylor and the other Republicans would sooner or later have to acknowledge that “no government could long exist, or that no people could be happy, without an hereditary first magistrate, and an hereditary senate.”98
Jefferson’s excessive enthusiasm for the French Revolution was matched by his intense hatred of Britain. In fact, he seems to have generated his identity as an American from his loathing of England—understandably so, si
nce the Americans and the English had once been one people but were now presumably two. It was not easy to get Americans to think of themselves as a distinct people. John Jay, who was three-eighths French and five-eighths Dutch, without any English ancestry whatsoever, nevertheless had declared in Federalist No. 2 that the Americans were “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, [and] very similar in their manners and customs.”
How could such a people differentiate themselves from the people of the former mother country? How could they become a nation? In Jefferson’s case, hating the British helped to sustain his sense of American nationalism. By contrast, Adams shared little of Jefferson’s loathing of the British, and like many Federalists, he was proud of his English heritage. He told Joseph Priestley, the English scientist and Unitarian minister, that he couldn’t imagine any Englishman wanting to destroy “the sublime and beautiful fabric of the English Constitution.” It would mean the end of “their liberties and Property.”99
With Jefferson’s hatred of Britain and passion for the French Revolution growing ever more extreme, his relationship with Adams was bound to deteriorate. He had no sympathy for those Federalists opposed to the French Revolution; they were, he said, “conspirators against human liberty.”100 Whenever he thought about all those European tyrants, those “scoundrels,” who were attacking France and resisting the spread of the French Revolution, his blood boiled. He could only hope that France’s eventual triumph would “bring at length kings, nobles and priests to the scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with human blood.”101
With Jefferson’s followers rejoicing over the Revolution—parading and singing the “Marseillaise,” passing liberty caps around, and calling one another “citizen” to emphasize the egalitarianism of republicanism—Adams and other Federalists could only shake their heads in despair. They feared, as Adams said, that the “Anarchy, Licentiousness and Despotism” of the French Revolution were being brought to America.102
Late in his life, Adams vividly recalled the frenzied atmosphere of “Terrorism” that ran through the nation’s capital in the 1790s: “Ten thousand People in the Streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his House and effect a Revolution in the Government, or compel it to declare War in favour of the French Revolution, and against England.”103
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THE REPUBLICANS IN THE CONGRESS were certainly eager to use the power of American trade to change British policy. Since three-quarters of all American exports and imports were exchanged with the former mother country, Jefferson and the other Republicans thought the British were susceptible to American pressure and that they might be able to use trade restrictions to break up Britain’s navigation system. Relying on the arguments set forth by Jefferson in his December 1793 report to Congress on the state of America’s foreign commerce—arguments in favor of free trade that went back to the model treaty of 1776—the Republicans in Congress in early 1794 demanded that Britain agree to neutral rights and to commercial reciprocity with the United States. If Britain refused, the United States would retaliate with tariffs and trade restrictions.
Although trade with America constituted only one-sixth of Britain’s total commerce, the Republican leaders nevertheless assumed that American commerce was absolutely vital to Great Britain. If the United States ceased buying luxuries from Britain, British manufacturers would be thrown out of work, riots would follow, and the British government would be compelled to capitulate. Consequently, the Republican leaders did not expect their commercial retaliation to result in war. “If it does,” said Jefferson, “we will meet it like men: but it may not bring on war, and then the experiment will have been a happy one.” And America will have given “the world still another useful lesson, by shewing to them other modes of punishing injuries than by war, which is as much a punishment to the punisher as the sufferer.”104
The experiment Jefferson referred to was part of the Republican dream that embargoes and commercial restrictions could become alternatives to war. Enlightened liberals in the eighteenth century assumed that war was the consequence of aggrandizing monarchs. The needs of kings—the requirements of their bloated bureaucracies, their standing armies, their marriage alliances, their restless dynastic ambitions—lay behind the prevalence of war. Eliminate monarchy and all its accouterments, Jefferson and other Republicans believed, and war itself would be eliminated.
A world of republican states would encourage a different kind of diplomacy, a peace-loving diplomacy—one based not on the brutal struggle for power of conventional diplomacy but on the natural concert of the commercial interests of the people of the various nations. If the people of the various nations were left alone to exchange goods freely among themselves—without the corrupting interference of selfish monarchical courts, irrational dynastic rivalries, and the secret double-dealing diplomacy of the past—then, it was hoped, international politics would become republicanized, pacified, and ruled by commerce alone. This kind of thinking was what made the stakes behind the success of the French Revolution so high.
Adams and the other Federalists had different assumptions about the world. Ever since the failure to sign commercial treaties with many European states in the mid-1780s, Adams had lost faith in the utopian dreams of 1776. Force was all that worked in the world. And far from yearning to republicanize Europe, Adams was opposed to the “Fanaticism of the times” that was encouraging “the present Spirit of Crusade against European kings.” Republican elections simply didn’t work well in Europe, and people were discovering “that unbridled Majorities, are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited Despots.” He was convinced that “the great Nations of Europe must and will return to hereditary elections or become barbarians.”105
With such views Adams, like other Federalists, was opposed to the Republicans’ commercial measures. The Federalists realized cutting off trade with Britain would unsettle the economy and undermine Hamilton’s entire financial program. Financing the funded national debt was dependent on the customs duties levied on foreign imports, most of which were British. The Republicans were able to get their restrictive measures through the House, but they failed in the Senate when Adams broke a tie with a negative vote.
The Republicans’ attempt to use trade restrictions in order, as Madison put it, to attack Britain “thro’ her commerce” was stymied. Instead, President Washington decided “to supplicate for peace” by sending John Jay in 1794 to negotiate a commercial treaty with Britain, a decision that Adams wholeheartedly supported. “May the gentle Zephers waft him to his Destination,” he told Abigail, “and the Blessings of Heaven succeed his virtuous Endeavors to preserve Peace.” He concluded that Jay’s negotiations with Britain were “temperate, grave, and wise, . . . and the Results judicious.”106
Jefferson and his fellow Republicans could not have disagreed more. In fact, nothing the Federalists did in the 1790s aroused more Republican anger than this treaty with Great Britain. Protests and riots broke out everywhere, and Jay was burned in effigy in nearly every city up and down the continent. Jefferson said that the treaty “excited a more general disgust than any public transaction since the days of our independence.”107
Despite America’s tilt toward Britain represented by Jay’s Treaty (as the agreement came to be known), Jefferson nevertheless looked forward to an ultimate French victory over Britain. In fact, in 1795 he believed that the French were just about to invade England. So sure was he of French success that he was tempted, he said, to leave Monticello and travel to London the following year in order to dine there with the victorious French general and “hail the dawn of liberty and republicanism in that island.”108
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ADAMS THOUGHT THAT THE French Revolution was breeding “false Notions of equality” and that these were being picked up by “the Democrats of this Day” an
d undermining the stability of American society. These developments inspired Adams to write a series of letters to his son Charles on just what “the modern Doctrine of Equality” really meant.
Declarations of equality in the state constitutions and the Declaration of Independence meant “not a Phisical but a moral Equality.” Of course, common sense, said Adams, told us that we were not equal in fact, “not all equally tall, Strong, wise handsome, active,” but we were equal in the sight of God, equal in “Rights and Obligations, nothing more.” But this emphasis on moral equality in so many documents should not blind us to the actual inequalities among individuals, inequalities that were present from birth. These physical inequalities among men in a state of nature were infinite. They were “so obvious so determinate and so unalterable, that no Man is absurd enough to deny them.” They “lay the Foundation for Inequalities of Wealth Power Influence and Importance, throughout human Life. Laws and Government have neither the Power nor the Right to change them.” Even “the Simplest democracy” would have inequalities. “A few will Start forth more Eloquent more Wise, and more brave than the rest and acquire a superiour Influence Reputation & Power.” Inequality was inevitable in any developed society. Once the arts and sciences, manufactures, and commerce were admitted into the society, inequalities of property would naturally arise and were impossible to eradicate. Plato had tried to equalize property in his commonwealth and failed.109
Why were Jefferson’s followers so eager to deny the reality of inequality? If they were “so anxious lest Aristocracy should take root,” Adams suggested to his son, why didn’t they “eradicate all the seeds of it,” including the use of titles? He had been burned so badly over his preoccupation with titles in 1789 that he couldn’t pass up an opportunity to mock his opponents’ desire to do away with them. If the Republicans hated titles so much, why not address the Speaker of the House as “Freddy Mulenbourg” (Frederick Muhlenberg)? Why not call the Republican congressman from Virginia “Billy Giles” (William Branch Giles)? Insurgents, said Adams, always sought to simplify society and level people. During Shays’ Rebellion in 1786 and the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, for example, “Gaffer and Gammar, Mr and Mrs were laid aside.” Once the insurgents have destroyed everything, “We may hope that We shall be out of Danger of Titles and Aristocracy.” He told his son that “this must be quite a Secret between you and me: but I will laugh a little with my Children at least, at the Follies of the Times.”110
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