Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  In November 1798 he returned to Philadelphia from one of his many long vacations in Quincy determined once and for all to take command of his administration. Aware of Hamilton’s grand military ambitions and machinations and learning from various sources that the French government was finally ready to reach an accommodation with the United States, Adams decided, without consulting anyone, including his own cabinet, to send a new mission to France. On February 18, 1799, he informed Congress that he had appointed William Vans Murray as minister plenipotentiary to make peace with France. Although Murray was a former Federalist congressman from Maryland and presently minister to the Batavian Republic, he was not a major figure among the Federalists; but Adams had known and liked him in London in the 1780s, and for Adams that was enough. All things considered, it was a strange way for a president to behave.

  Most Federalists were stunned by Adams’s action. While many seethed with “surprise, indignation, grief & disgust,” others thought the president had lost his mind.83 Under immense pressure from the High Federalists, including meetings that ended in undignified shouting matches, Adams was forced to make some concessions. He agreed to add two more envoys to join Murray—Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth and William Davie, the governor of North Carolina—and to delay the departure of the mission until the French gave more assurance that it would be received, which they did in August 1799. In the meantime Congress had adjourned at the end of February 1799 without further expanding the army, and Adams had gone back home to Quincy, where he remained angrily secluded for the next seven months.

  The High Federalists, led by Secretary of State Pickering, were furious. With all their plans for the army and the suppression of the Republicans in disarray, they plotted to undermine the mission to France. Only when his new secretary of the navy, Benjamin Stoddard, who was not part of the Hamiltonian gang, warned Adams of the “artful, designing men” in the cabinet working against him did the morose and irritable president reluctantly return to the capital. In October 1799Hamilton, whose own high-strung temperament was being stretched to the breaking point, made a last-ditch effort to delay the mission by arrogantly lecturing the president on European politics and the likelihood of Britain’s restoring the Bourbons to the French throne. “Never in my life,” Adams recalled, “did I hear a man talk more like a fool.”84 (Of course, in 1814–1815 Britain and its allies actually did restore the Bourbon king Louis XVIII to the French throne.) Finally, by early November 1799, Adams was able to get his envoys off to Paris.

  Adams’s awkwardly independent action irreparably divided the Federalist leadership between the moderates who supported the president and the extremists or “ultras” who supported Hamilton—seriously endangering Federalist prospects for the upcoming presidential election in 1800. Once the Federalist caucus had nominated Adams and Charles Cotes-worth Pinckney for president and vice-president in May 1800 (without, however, determining which person should have which office), the president felt strong enough politically to do what he should have done long before—dismiss the Hamiltonians in his cabinet, McHenry and Pickering. In one of his all too common fits of rage, Adams told McHenry that Hamilton, whom he called “the greatest intriguant in the World—a man devoid of every moral principle—a Bastard,” was the source of all the Federalists’ problems and that Jefferson was an “infinitely better” and “wiser” man.85 Learning of Adams’s tirade, and especially the reference to his illegitimacy, a deeply dispirited Hamilton concluded that the president was “more mad than I ever thought him,” and because of his praise of Jefferson perhaps “as wicked as he is mad.”86

  Abandoning all sense of prudence and perspective, Hamilton and some other High Federalists began working to find some alternative to Adams as president, perhaps by electing Pinckney over Adams, or even by calling Washington out of retirement. With his dreams of making the United States a great nation falling apart all around him, Hamilton finally exploded. If he could not instigate a duel with the president to defend his honor, then he would publish a letter that would destroy the president and promote Pinckney’s candidacy, all in “the shape of a defence of my self”—a delicate task that was beyond his angry mood.87 In the summer and fall of 1800 he wrote a fifty-four-page privately published Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq. President of the United States.

  In this work, which apparently was originally intended to circulate only among select Federalists, including Federalist electors, Hamilton described Adams’s career in detail, praising here and there but mostly criticizing the man for his “eccentric tendencies,” his “distempered jealousy,” his “extreme egotism,” his “ungovernable temper,” and his “vanity without bounds.” He also attempted to answer Adams’s “virulent and indecent abuses” of himself, especially Adams’s charge that he was “the leader of a British Faction.” In his counter-charge Hamilton said that Adams, with his many “paroxysms of anger,” had undone everything that Washington had established in his presidency, and if he were to continue as president, he might bring the government to ruin. Despite saying that he had “the unqualified conviction of [Adams’s] unfitness” for the office, Hamilton ended his diatribe strangely enough by supporting the president’s re-election. Apparently he was hoping for some sort of combination of electoral votes that would result in a Pinckney victory.88

  Republicans published excerpts of the leaked Letter in newspapers, a far from dignified forum, which compelled a horrified Hamilton to release the whole to the press. Although the Letter was not entirely wrong in its assessment of Adams’s quirky temperament, when widely circulated, it became a disaster both for Hamilton personally and for the Federalist party. The Federalists were appalled, and the Republicans were gleeful. It was ironic, to say the least, that Republican editors were going to prison for saying some of the very things about the president that Hamilton said in his pamphlet. Although Hamilton’s Letter may not by itself have prevented Adams’s re-election, its appearance was evidence of the deep division among the Federalists that made Jefferson’s election as president more or less inevitable.

  That division was brought about by Adams’s decision to send a new mission to France, the issue that Hamilton most dwelled on in his Letter . Adams, always ready to bemoan his country’s neglect of his achievements, considered this decision to try once again to negotiate with France, as he never tired of telling his correspondents, to be “the most disinterested, prudent, and successful conduct in my whole life.”89 This controversial decision may have been precipitate and injudicious, as Hamilton claimed it was, but it did effectively end the war crisis; and thus it undermined the attempts of the extreme Federalists to strengthen the central government and the military establishment of the United States. After months of negotiations, France, under First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, who would soon make himself emperor, agreed to terms and in 1800 signed the Treaty of Mortefontaine with the United States that brought the Quasi-War to a close and suspended the Franco-American treaty of 1778, thus freeing America from its first of what Jefferson would refer to as “entangling alliances.” Unfortunately for Adams, word of the ending of the conflict did not reach America until the Republicans had won the presidency.90

  8

  The Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800

  Born in reaction to the popular excesses of the Revolution, the Federalist world could not endure. The Federalists of the 1790s stood in the way of popular democracy as it was emerging in the United States, and thus they became heretics opposed to the developing democratic faith. To be sure, they believed in popular sovereignty and republican government, but they did not believe that ordinary people had a direct role to play in ruling the society. They were so confident that the future belonged to them, that the society would become less egalitarian and more hierarchical, that they treated the people with condescension and lost touch with them. “They have attempted,” as Noah Webster observed, “to resist the force of public opinion, instead of falling into th
e current with a view to correct it. In this they have manifested more integrity than address.”1 Indeed, they were so out of touch with the developing popular realities of American life, and their monarchical program was so counter to the libertarian impulses of America’s republican ideology, that they provoked a second revolutionary movement that threatened to tear the Republic apart.

  Only the electoral victory of the Republicans in 1800 ended this threat and brought, in the eyes of many Americans, the entire revolutionary venture of two and a half decades to successful completion. Indeed, “the Revolution of 1800,” as the Republican leader and third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, later called it, “was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.”2 He and his Republican party took over the presidency and both houses of the Congress in 1801 with a worldview that was fundamentally different from that of the Federalists. Not only were the Republicans opposed to traditional monarchies with their bloated executives, high taxes, oppressive debts, and standing armies and in favor of republics with the least government possible, but they also dreamed of a world different from any that had ever existed, a world of democratic republics in which the scourge of war would at last be eliminated and peace would reign among all nations. It is not surprising that Jefferson’s election helped to convince a despairing Alexander Hamilton, the brilliant leader of the Federalists, who more than anyone had pursued the heroic dreams of the age, “that this American world was not meant for me.”3

  JEFFERSON PERSONIFIED this revolutionary transformation. His ideas about liberty and democracy left such a deep imprint on the future of his country that, despite persistent attempts to discredit his reputation, as long as there is a United States he will remain the supreme spokesman for the nation’s noblest ideals and highest aspirations.

  Yet Jefferson himself was the most unlikely of popular radicals. He was a well-connected and highly cultivated Southern landowner who never had to scramble for his position in Virginia. The wealth and leisure that made possible his great contributions to liberty and democracy were supported by the labor of hundreds of slaves. He was tall—six feet two or three—and gangling, with a reddish freckled complexion, bright hazel eyes, and copper-colored hair, which he tended to wear unpowdered in a queue. Unlike his fellow Revolutionary John Adams, whom he both fought and befriended for fifty years, he was reserved, self-possessed, and incurably optimistic, sometimes to the point of quixoticism. Although he could be shrewd and practical, his sense of the future was sometimes skewed. As late as 1806, for example, he believed that Norfolk, Virginia, would soon surpass New York as a great commercial city and would probably in time become “the greatest sea-port in the United States, New Orleans perhaps excepted.”4 He disliked personal controversy and was always charming in face-to-face relations with both friends and enemies. But at a distance he could hate, and thus many of his opponents concluded that he was two-faced and duplicitous.

  He was undoubtedly complicated. He mingled the loftiest visions with astute backroom politicking. He spared himself nothing and was a compulsive shopper, yet he extolled the simple yeoman farmer who was free from the lures of the marketplace. He hated the obsessive money-making, the proliferating banks, and the liberal capitalistic world that emerged in the Northern states in the early nineteenth century, but no one in America did more to bring that world about. Although he kept the most tidy and meticulous accounts of his daily transactions, he never added up his profits and losses. He thought public debts were the curse of a healthy state, yet his private debts kept mounting as he borrowed and borrowed again to meet his rising expenditures. He was a sophisticated man of the world who loved no place better than his remote mountaintop home in Virginia. This slaveholding aristocrat ended up becoming the most important apostle for liberty and democracy in American history.

  Jefferson’s narrow victory in the presidential election of 1800 confirmed the changing course of national developments. Jefferson received seventy-three electoral votes to the sixty-five of the Federalist candidate, John Adams. For several weeks even that close victory was in doubt. Because the original Constitution did not state that the electors had to distinguish between their votes for president and those for vice-president, both Jefferson and the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Aaron Burr, had received the same number of electoral votes. Because of this tie, the election, according to the Constitution, was to be thrown into the House of Representatives, where each state congressional delegation would have a single vote. The newly elected Republican-dominated Congress would not be seated until December 1801. Suddenly, there loomed the possibility that the lame-duck Federalists in the Congress would be able to engineer the election of Aaron Burr as president.

  Many Federalists wanted to do just that, including John Marshall, whom John Adams in the waning days of his administration had appointed chief justice of the United States. Marshall did not know Burr at all, but he did know Jefferson, his cousin, and he had “almost insuperable objections” to Jefferson’s character.5 Marshall feared what the Republican leader would do to the authority of the nation and the presidency, to the Federalist commercial and banking systems, and to American foreign policy. Federalists figured that Jefferson was a doctrinaire democrat who wanted to take the country back to something resembling the Articles of Confederation, and that he was in the pocket of France and would likely go to war with Great Britain. Burr posed no such threat. Some of the Federalists thought that they might work out a deal with Burr. The country was on the verge of a constitutional crisis.

  DURING THE EARLY 1790S Aaron Burr had been one of the most promising leaders in American politics. He had been a member of the United States Senate from New York, and in the election of 1796 he had received thirty electoral votes for president. He seemed to have everything a gentleman could want—looks, charm, extraordinary abilities, a Princeton education, distinguished Revolutionary service, and, above all, a notable lineage. John Adams said that he had “never known, in any country, the prejudice in favor of birth, parentage, and descent more conspicuous than in the instance of Colonel Burr.” Unlike most of the other Revolutionary leaders, who were the first in their families to attend college, Burr was the son of a president of Princeton and the grandson of another Princeton president—Jonathan Edwards, the most famous theologian in eighteenth-century America—and, said Adams, he “was connected by blood with many respectable families in New England.”6 This presumption that he was already an aristocrat by blood separated Burr from most of the other leaders of the Revolutionary generation. He always had an air of superiority about him, and he always considered himself to be more of a gentleman than other men.7

  He certainly sought to live the life of an eighteenth-century aristocratic gentleman. He had the best of everything—fine houses, elegant clothes, lavish coaches, superb wines. His sexual excesses and his celebrated liberality flowed from his traditional European notions of gentility. Since real gentlemen were not supposed to work for a living, he could not regard his law practice, or indeed even money—that “paltry object”—with anything but distaste.8 Like a perfect Chesterfieldian gentleman, he almost never revealed his inner feelings. In several respects he was highly enlightened, especially in his opposition to slavery (despite owning slaves himself) and in his advanced position on the role of women.9

  The great flaw in Burr’s desire to be an eighteenth-century aristocrat was that he lacked the money to bring it off. Money was “contemptible,” he said.10 Despite being one of the most highly paid lawyers in New York, he was perpetually in debt and often on the edge of bankruptcy because of his lavish living. He borrowed over and over and created complicated structures of credit that always threatened to come crashing down. It was this insecure financial situation coupled with his grandiose expectations that led to his wheeling and dealing and self-serving politics.

  Burr could easily have become a Federalist. He viewed politics largely in traditional terms—as contests betwee
n “great men” and their followers, tied together by strings of interest and influence. He expected that someone with his pedigree and talent was owed high office as a matter of course, and that naturally public office was to be used to maintain his position and influence. Beyond what politics could do for his friends, his family, and him personally, it had little emotional significance for him. Politics, as he once put it, was “fun and honor & profit.”11

  Of course, other politicians of the early Republic viewed politics in much the same way as Burr did, especially in New York with its family-based factions of Clintons, Livingstons, Van Rensselaers, and Schuylers. Yet no other political leader of his prominence ever spent so much time and energy so blatantly scheming for his own personal and political advantage. And no one of the other great Revolutionary statesmen was so immune to the ideology and the values of the Revolution as Burr was.

  Burr certainly had little of the aversion to the use of patronage, or what was often called “corruption,” that a Revolutionary ideologue like Jefferson had. Burr was utterly shameless in recommending anyone and everyone for an office—even in the end himself. Jefferson recalled that he had first met Burr when Burr was senator from New York in the early 1790s, and he mistrusted him right away. He remembered that when both the Washington and Adams administrations were about to make a major military or diplomatic appointment, Burr came quickly to the capital “to shew himself” and to let the administration know, in Jefferson’s words, “that he was always at market, if they had wanted him.” Burr’s zealousness over patronage was crucial in eventually convincing Jefferson that Burr was not Jefferson’s kind of Republican.12

  For Burr, befriending people and creating personal loyalties and connections was the way politics and society worked. Aristocrats were patrons, and they had clients who were obliged to them. Hence Burr sought to patronize as many people as he could. His celebrated liberality and generosity grew out of this need. Like any “great man” of the age, he even patronized young artists, including New York painter John Vanderlyn, whom he sent on a grand tour of Europe.