The Great Divide

by Thomas Fleming

  Jefferson still found it impossible to credit Washington for the political skills that had piloted the ship of state between the reefs of a war with England and the shoals of a takeover by France. Worse, the men in charge of his beloved French Revolution—the Directory—were very close to declaring war on the United States.

  Further irritating Jefferson was the contentment that pervaded most of the nation. Thanks to Hamilton’s financial system and a huge increase in commerce with the West Indies and Europe, America was incredibly prosperous. Salaries of skilled workers and laborers in Philadelphia and other cities had doubled in the previous four years. Farmers were getting ever higher prices for their corn and wheat and cotton. On February 22, twelve hundred well-dressed admirers celebrated Washington’s birthday at Philadelphia’s sprawling Ricketts Amphitheater, normally the site of visiting circuses. “For splendor, taste and elegance,” wrote David Claypoole, the publisher of the Farewell Address, the affair “was perhaps never excelled by any entertainment in the United States.” Martha Washington reportedly shed tears of happiness to see and hear so much affection heaped on her smiling husband.3

  On inauguration day (March 4, 1797), the departing President walked alone to Congress Hall. He wore a simple black suit and a military hat with a black cockade. Jefferson, too, walked, wearing a long, blue frock coat. President-elect John Adams arrived in a gleaming new two-horse carriage with a coachman and footman. The incoming chief executive wore a pearl colored broadcloth suit with wrist ruffles and a powdered wig. Some Democratic-Republicans sneered that he was trying to look like a man of the people by using only two horses, whereas “monarchical” President Washington had preferred four steeds and sometimes six.

  When the crowd around Congress Hall saw Washington approach, there was a tremendous explosion of cheers. In the House of Representatives, the applause was thunderous. President-elect Adams and Vice President-elect Jefferson also got hearty bursts of clapping. It was a day of more than justified rejoicing. The United States was witnessing a peaceful transfer of political power, something so rare it won exclamations of amazement around the nation and the world. Congressman William Loughton Smith of South Carolina described it as happening with “a facility and calm which has astonished even those of us who always augured well of the government and the good sense of our citizens. The machine has worked without a creak.”4

  Almost everyone gave Washington most of the credit for this semi-miracle. Some people disagreed, of course. Benjamin Franklin Bache’s editorial in the Aurora declared the departing president had done everything in his power to “canker the principles of republicanism in an enlightened people.” Not content with this canard, Bache went back to the first military action of Washington’s career. In 1754, he had been leading a reconnaissance party on the Virginia frontier and collided with a French patrol. In Bache’s version, Washington ordered his men to open fire, even though the French were displaying a flag of truce. The French commander was killed in the first volley. Bache called it “an act of assassination.” For Democratic-Republican readers in 1797, this fictionalized history proved that Washington had always hated the French and it was no surprise to see him so violently opposed to an alliance with Paris.5

  In the chamber of the House of Representatives, President Adams gave an inaugural address that was brief but very much to the point. He paid tribute to ex-President Washington and declared his deep admiration for the Constitution. He alluded almost offhandedly to his narrow victory and affirmed his desire for peace with France. But he also warned in sharp language against the danger of “foreign intrigue” in America’s politics. This was an undoubted reference—and rebuke—to Minister Plenipotentiary Adet’s barefaced campaigning for the Democratic-Republican ticket. In a more subtle rebuke to the opposition’s obsession with monarchical tendencies, Adams denied he had ever entertained the slightest fondness for royal government and affirmed his faith in the republican brand.

  While he spoke, Adams noticed tears streaming down the faces of numerous listeners, both in the galleries and on the floor of the House. It dawned on him that they were weeping over Washington’s departure. In a letter to Abigail, he wryly pretended he was unsure whether they were grieving for “the loss of their beloved President [or the arrival] of an unbeloved one.” Or maybe it was “the joy of exchanging presidents without tumult.” Or maybe it was the sheer “sublimity” of his speech.6

  On March 3, the day before the inauguration, Adams had called on Jefferson at the Madisons’ home, where the incoming Vice President was staying. The President-elect was upset about the looming crisis with France. The French had recalled Minister Plenipotentiary Adet and refused to accept Charles Cotesworth Pinckney as James Monroe’s replacement. Such gestures often preceded a declaration of war. Adams told Jefferson he wished he could send him to Paris as a special ambassador.

  That was impossible, of course. But perhaps Jefferson could persuade James Madison to go. Adams had a bipartisan commission in mind, men from both parties. Jefferson said he would consult Madison, but he warned it was a hopeless task. The Congressman was unalterably opposed to risking his fragile health in a six- or eight-week voyage across the Atlantic Ocean.

  Three days later, after a pleasant farewell dinner with George Washington, at which politics was somehow avoided, Jefferson and Adams again discussed Madison as an envoy. As Jefferson had predicted, the Congressman had turned down the proposal. Adams confessed that after conferring for the first time with his cabinet, he now had second thoughts about the idea.

  To reassure the public that he was following in Washington’s footsteps, Adams had retained all of the first president’s cabinet officers. They had told him that Madison would just be Monroe with a different name. When Adams lamented this adherence to “party passions,” Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott threatened to resign. It was grim evidence of the gulf between the two parties—and an ominous hint of a possible gulf between the new president and the Federalist Party that had elected him.7

  Relations with France continued to deteriorate. Before 1797 ended, French warships would seize over three hundred American merchantmen. A troubled President Adams called Congress into special session in May. He reiterated his desire to achieve a peaceful understanding with Paris. But he thought it equally important to prepare for war. He called on Congress to put cannon on American cargo ships, fortify American ports, and create an adequate U.S. Navy.

  In 1794, during the crisis over the Jay Treaty, President Washington had made a similar request, and Congress had commissioned six warships. But the trickle of money they voted for their construction had turned the process into a slow-motion charade. Only three frigates were anywhere near the point of being launched. Congress insisted these would be enough to masquerade as a navy.

  Vice President Jefferson was dismayed by the President’s belligerent stance. He told acquaintances and newspapermen such as Benjamin Franklin Bache that Adams was a warmonger. This rhetoric had not a little to do with Congress’s resistance to the President’s proposals. It is easy to see why wiser men soon realized that it was necessary to amend the Constitution and ensure that the vice president and the president belonged to the same party. The memory of Vice President Jefferson sabotaging President Adams’s policies was a convincing argument, in itself.8

  To prove his peaceful intentions, the President launched a three-man commission to negotiate an agreement with Paris. Repudiated minister Charles Cotesworth Pinckney would be joined by Federalist Congressman John Marshall of Virginia and Democratic-Republican Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. The cabinet begged Adams not to send the erratic, argumentative Gerry, but he was an old friend and the President insisted on having his way.

  The new President’s stubbornness was a fact of life to which the cabinet was becoming unhappily accustomed. Oliver Wolcott compared it to the way the god Jupiter supposedly governed from Olympus: “Without regarding the opinions of friends or enemies, all are summoned to hear, reverence and obey
.”9

  In the Senate, Vice President Jefferson swiftly took command of the Democratic-Republican Party. It was another ironic comment on his supposed distaste for politics. He was soon reporting to retired James Madison how the party voted in the House as well as in the upper chamber where he presided. When the Federalists fired his friend and backstage operator John Beckley as clerk of the House, Jefferson saw it as a blow to “the Republican interest.” When three Virginians started voting with the Federalists in the House, the Vice President called them “renegadoes.”10

  Jefferson lived at the St. Francis Hotel, where, one Federalist sourly remarked, he was surrounded by a “knot of Jacobins”—also known as Democratic-Republican senators and congressmen. He eagerly thrust his oar into the nomination of Elbridge Gerry as a peace commissioner. In a letter to Gerry, Jefferson said he was “a spring of hope” in the darkness of Federalist hostility to France.11

  When dismissed envoy James Monroe returned to Philadelphia during the special session of Congress, Jefferson and fifty Democratic-Republican congressmen gave him a sumptuous dinner at Oeller’s Hotel. Federalists were outraged. They regarded Monroe as a virtual traitor to his country for his sycophantic worship of the French Revolution during his days in Paris.

  There was more than an undercurrent of defiance in Jefferson’s public embrace of Monroe. As the special session of Congress began, Federalist newspapers had gotten their hands on a copy of a letter he had written to his Italian friend Philip Mazzei at the height of the controversy over the Jay Treaty. Reporting on the state of American politics, Jefferson described the Federalists as “an Anglican, monarchical and aristocratic party.” Shifting to individuals, he told Mazzei it “would give you a fever were I to pass on to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field & Solomons in the council, who have had their heads shorn by the harlot, England.”

  Mazzei had sent this explosive message to friends in Paris, who were delighted to publish it. Soon it was translated back into English for London readers and inevitably made its way to America. Federalists declared the letter was an insult to George Washington. Who else had been a “Samson” on the field of battle as well as a “Solomon” in the nation’s councils?

  Monroe urged Jefferson to publish a defense. Madison advised him to remain silent. Such a statement might lead to “disagreeable explanations or…tacit confessions.” Jefferson took this advice but it was not a pleasant solution. More than one Philadelphia gentleman and/or his wife crossed the street when they saw the Vice President approaching. Federalist newspapermen began calling him “Monsieur Jefferson.” One editor called his opinion treasonous.12

  During this same summer of 1797, Jefferson’s ousted follower, John Beckley, counterattacked with a revelation he had been hoarding for six years. He gave Scottish-born James Thomson Callender, a Democratic-Republican journalist who had once offered a toast to “the speedy death” of President Washington, the papers he had acquired from James Monroe about Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds. Callender published these documents in a murky “History of the United States for 1796.” Jefferson liked it so much, he visited Callender’s rooming house to congratulate him and bought several copies of his book.

  The Vice President was soon calling the author a “man of genius” and “a man of science, fled from persecution.” Callender had been run out of Britain for calling the English constitution a “conspiracy of the rich against the poor.” Exactly why Jefferson considered him a scientist remains a mystery—unless it was his talent for twisting the truth into venomous accusations. Callender defended his exposure of the long-dead affair as justified by the “unfounded reproaches heaped on Mr. Monroe” for which he claimed Hamilton was responsible.13

  Instead of adopting the policy of dignified silence that Madison had urged on Jefferson, Hamilton reached for his pen. The result was an erotically detailed thirty-seven-page confession bolstered by fifty-seven pages of documents. Hamilton claimed he was forced to undergo this public humiliation because Callender had asserted the affair with Maria Reynolds was a device to conceal his corrupt dealings with her husband. Hamilton fiercely refuted this accusation, and added denunciations of the politicians behind this plot to destroy him—notably Thomas Jefferson.

  Vice President Jefferson and retired Congressman Madison read this unwise exercise with undisguised pleasure—at least in their private correspondence. Jefferson told a Virginia friend that Hamilton’s “willingness to plead guilty seems rather to have strengthened than to have weakened; that he was, in truth, guilty of the speculations.” Madison was somewhat kinder. He called the pamphlet “a curious example of the ingenious folly of its author.” Was he remembering those days of friendship, when he and Hamilton wrote the Federalist? If so, Madison swiftly returned to politics and dismissed the ex-treasury secretary’s “malignant insinuation” against Jefferson as “a masterpiece of folly, because its impotence is in exact proportion to its venom.”14

  But Hamilton was not quite as impotent—or as foolish—as this tormented confession made him look in Jefferson/Madison/Monroe’s eyes. While the nation’s political class reeled with the double shocks of the Mazzei letter and Hamilton’s admissions, a package from Virginia arrived on the doorstep of the troubled ex-secretary’s household on Cedar Street in New York. In the package was a four-bottle silver wine cooler—and a message from George Washington.

  The ostensible reason was the recent birth of another Hamilton son. But the message went far beyond this pretext. The ex-president said he was sending it, “not for any intrinsic value the thing possesses, but as a token of my sincere regard and friendship for you.” Washington was saying he still had confidence in Hamilton’s integrity—and his patriotism.15

  In Virginia, Jefferson was troubled by something he regarded as far more serious than the destruction of political reputations. Congressman James J. Cabell, from the district that included Monticello, was accused of writing a letter to his constituents that endangered the peace and prosperity of the nation. The message was severely critical of the Adams administration’s foreign policy toward France. Supreme Court Justice James Iredell, sitting as a federal judge on circuit, told a Richmond grand jury that “some foreign nation” might use such statements “to take advantage of our internal discords, first making us the dupe and then the prey” of their ambition to control our government. The grand jury indicted Cabell for threatening “the happy government of the United States.”

  Jefferson called the indictment an invitation to federal judges to become “inquisitors on the freedom of…their fellow citizens.” The Vice President drafted a “Protest against the interference of the [Federal] judiciary between Representative and Constituent” for forwarding to the Virginia Assembly. The document claimed that the federal grand jury had committed a crime “of the highest and most alarming nature.” The members should be promptly impeached and punished.

  The Vice President first sent copies of the protest to Madison and Monroe. Both dutifully praised it, but Madison wondered about the wisdom of “embarking the legislature in the business.” This was his polite way of saying he did not think it was a good idea to promote a clash between states’ rights and federal rights—one of the chief problems he and George Washington had tried to solve in the Constitution. Monroe confessed a similar worry.

  Jefferson ignored his two lieutenants. He sent the protest to the Virginia House of Delegates, where the members angrily denounced Congressman Cabell’s indictment. But they ignored Jefferson’s call to punish the grand jurors. In fact, they did not even send their wrathful resolutions to the state senate. Nor did they forward them to Congress. The inaction suggests others were uneasy about promoting a clash with the federal government.16

  Back in the Senate, early in 1798, Jefferson told one friend that “party animosities” had “raised a wall of separation between those who differ in political sentiments.” After examining the various names being called, he told one correspo
ndent that Whig (liberal) and Tory (conservative) were the only meaningful terms for the “two sects.” He never admitted to himself or to anyone else that he was among the most reckless users of slanderous terms, such as the ones he had produced for the Mazzei letter.17

  Determined to defend Jefferson as their once and future candidate, the Democratic-Republicans in the House, led by Albert Gallatin, objected to Federalist criticism of the Mazzei letter—especially when a Connecticut representative read it into the congressional record. The Federalists were trying to link Jefferson to Democratic-Republican policies in the current Congress, where the party resisted President Adams’s call to raise money for an army and a navy to deal with the threat of French aggression. Federalists declared the Mazzei episode proved Jefferson was “the life and soul of the opposition” to protecting America’s independence.18

  This invective would have been dismissed as far too mild if the Federalists knew what Jefferson told the latest French envoy, Philippe Henri Letombe. He was only a Charge’ d’Affaires instead of a Minister Plenipotentiary—a diminishment that underscored French hostility. On June 7, 1797, Letombe reported to Paris that he had enjoyed a “long and tranquil” conversation with “the wise Jefferson.” The Vice President had assured him that America had “broken…forever the chains which attached it to England” and the nation “was penetrated with gratitude to France.”19

  Jefferson swiftly segued to the underlying reason for these declarations. President John Adams was a disaster—“vain, irritable, stubborn, endowed with excessive amour-propre and still suffering pique at the preference accorded Franklin over him in Paris.” But his presidency would last “only five (sic) years.” He had only became president by three electoral votes, and “the system of the United States will change” with his departure.20