American Sphinx (22 page)

Although the deeper sources of the conflict were profoundly ideological, it also had a decidedly personal edge. Hamilton was the kind of man who might have been put on earth by God to refute all the Jeffersonian values. Dashing and direct in his demeanor, Hamilton possessed all the confidence of a military leader accustomed to command, just the kind of explicit exercise of authority Jefferson found so irritating. While perhaps rooted in Hamilton’s military exploits as an officer on Washington’s staff during the Revolutionary War (another heroic experience Jefferson could not claim), this palpable projection of authority called attention to its own brilliance in a style that was reminiscent of Patrick Henry’s oratory, which Jefferson also mistrusted for its ostentation. Like Henry, Hamilton was a youthful prodigy of impoverished origins—John Adams later called him “a bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar”—whose visible craving for greatness violated the understated code of the true Virginia aristocrat. To make matters worse, Hamilton as an opponent was equally formidable on his feet and in print. Jefferson recalled his clashes with Hamilton in cabinet meetings as a form of martyrdom and warned Madison to draft all newspaper attacks against Hamilton personally, claiming that Hamilton was “a host within himself. . . .” Capable of mastering massive amounts of detail and tossing off sophisticated political essays against a tight deadline, Hamilton’s mind projected relentless energy rather than Jeffersonian serenity. It also tended to begin with a palpable and practical problem—how to assault a British position, ratify a constitution or develop a national economy—then reason toward the overarching principles that provided the solution. Jefferson’s mind moved along the same arc but in the opposite direction, from principled ideals to specific contexts or problems. This meant that Jefferson’s disappointments occurred when reality failed to measure up to his expectations; Hamilton’s occurred when his realistic proposals struck others as totally devoid of principle. Jefferson appeared to his enemies as an American version of Candide; Hamilton as an American Machiavelli.
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These mutual and highly personal animosities became matters of public record starting in 1792, when Hamilton and his followers, writing under several pseudonyms (i.e., Catullus and Scourge), attacked Jefferson in the press for his pro-French sympathies, his shifting position on the Constitution and the elusive core of his character: “Cautious and shy,” wrote Hamilton, “wrapped up in impenetrable silence and mystery, he [Jefferson] reserves his
abhorrence
for the arcana of a certain snug sanctuary, where seated on his pivot chair, and involved in all the obscurity of political mystery and deception . . . he circulates his poison thro’ the medium of the
National Gazette.”
The final reference was to an anti-Hamilton newspaper edited by Philip Freneau, whom Jefferson had hired as a translator at the State Department in order to subsidize his editorial efforts against the government, all the while claiming that the arrangement violated no conflict of interest principles known to him. Meanwhile the Hamiltonians kept blazing away at the so-called Generalissimo of the opposition party, in the process providing the most scathing attack on Jefferson’s career and character ever put before the public: “Had an inquisitive mind in those days sought for evidence of his Abilities as a Statesman, he would have been referred to the confusions in France, the offspring of certain political dogmas fostered by the American Minister, and to certain theoretical principles fit only for Utopia. As a Warrior, to his Exploits at
Monticelli;
as a Philosopher, to his discovery of the inferiority of Blacks to Whites, because they are more unsavory and secrete more by the kidnies; as a Mathematician, to his whirligig Chair.”
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Apart from Freneau, Jefferson’s chief defenders were all Virginians: the ever-loyal Madison and Monroe, plus the young congressman William Branch Giles, whom Jefferson encouraged to launch an official, though trumped-up, investigation of Hamilton’s financial improprieties as secretary of the treasury. Jefferson himself never entered the public debate, always preferring to work through surrogates, and he was so skillful at covering his tracks that the extent of his involvement in the Giles investigation was not discovered for almost two hundred years.
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Beneath the purely personal animus between the two different-minded and temperamentally incompatible cabinet members, Jefferson and Hamilton had become convenient symbols for a more fundamental ideological division. By 1792 Jefferson was referring to the Federalist leadership as “monarchists,” “tories,” “anti-republicans” and the supporters of Hamilton’s fiscal policies as “monocrats,” “stock-jobbers” and “paper men.” The story that was taking shape in Jefferson’s mind assumed the contours of a plot to reverse the course of the American Revolution, with the chief characters on the other side cast as villainous conspirators covertly commanded by the diabolical secretary of the treasury, whom he described to Washington as “a man whose history, from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has . . . heaped its honors on his head.” The hatred was palpable.
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Historians who have studied this volatile moment in Jefferson’s career and in the political history of the early republic, searching for a way to render plausible what to the modern ear sounds obsessive and almost paranoid, have described it as a fresh application of the same Whig ideology he had brandished so successfully against the English ministry in the 1760s and 1770s. There is much to be said for this interpretation, which has the virtue of linking his earlier obsessions with English political corruption to his equally obsessive hatred of Hamilton’s financial program and the Hamiltonian vision of a proactive national government, which Jefferson purportedly regarded as the latter-day apparition of a political dragon he thought he had slain in 1776. This way of understanding Jefferson’s hyperbolic rhetoric in the 1790s—as a recurrence of the Country Party fears of the American Revolution—also has the virtue of undercutting criticism of his apparent extremism in the political crusade against Hamilton. For if one is going to question Jefferson’s sanity in the 1790s, does that not then cast aspersions on his equivalently polemical assaults on George III during the most gloriously patriotic moment in American history?
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Jefferson was not—let us be clear and emphatic on this point—a mentally unstable person or a man with latent paranoid tendencies. The conspiratorial character of his political thinking in the 1790s, as all scholars of the Whig ideology have reminded us, was a common feature of the political literature of the time, and substantial traces of the same feverish mentality can be found in the private correspondence of the entire political leadership, including Adams, Madison and Hamilton. (Only Washington seems to have remained immune, but then he was immune to everything.) Unless one is prepared to make sweeping psychiatric charges against the vanguard members of the entire revolutionary generation, which is generally credited with being the most intellectually gifted group of political leaders in American history, then psychiatric appraisals of Jefferson himself should be recognized as both misleading and unfair. The leading scholar of the revolutionary era has also reminded us that conspiracy theories not only were prevalent ways of thinking and talking about political events by mainstream as well as marginal figures but also provided a secular way of explaining baffling social changes in terms that improved upon previous resorts to fate, providence or God’s will.
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That said, Jefferson’s simplistic and highly moralistic rendering of what the Federalists and especially the Hamiltonians were doing merits a moment of meditation, if for no other reason than the Country Party interpretation does not do full justice to the way Jefferson’s mind actually worked. Perhaps the best way to put it is that because he began with a purer and more intensely idealistic conception of the levels of individual freedom possible in this world, especially after the final vestiges of kingly and clerical power had been blown away, Jefferson harbored a more acute sensitivity toward the explicit exercise of government power than any other member of the revolutionary generation. Because the primary colors of his political imagination were black and white, there were no shaded hues, no middle-range way stations where his apprehensions about the oppressive effects of political power could rest more comfortably once threats to his utopian goals materialized. Hamilton’s plans for a proactive federal government empowered to shape markets and set both the financial and political agendas were certainly not monarchical in character—if anything, they were more a precocious precursor of twentieth-century New Deal values than an archaic attempt to resuscitate the arbitrary authority of medieval kings and courts—but in Jefferson’s mind these distinctions made no appreciable difference. Energetic governmental power of any sort was intolerable because it originated outside the individual; it therefore violated his romantic ideal of personal autonomy. George III’s edicts and Parliament’s taxation policies, it is true, elicited the same fears back in the 1760s and 1770s. But Hamilton did not just conjure up bad memories of English oppression; he directly threatened the primal core of Jefferson’s wistful world.
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In addition, Jefferson’s emerging sense of himself as the leader of the Country Party assumed a distinctively Jeffersonian flavor that was different from the original English meaning of the term, for the rather obvious reason that “Country” meant different things for him than for a resident of Walpolian England. When he was asked to describe the social composition of the two parties, for example, his list of “anti-republicans” consisted of former loyalists and tories, American merchants trading with England, stock speculators and banking officials, federal employees and other office seekers and—an all-purpose psychological category—“nervous persons, whose languid fibres have more analogy with a passive than active state of things.” The list of “republicans,” on the other hand, was much shorter but included the vast majority of American voters. It was comprised of “the entire body of landholders throughout the United States” as well as “the body of labourers, not being landholders, whether in husbanding or the arts.” Jefferson estimated that “the latter is to the aggregate of the former party probably as 500 to one.”
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Here one gets an early whiff of the distinctively democratic odor with which Jefferson’s name would eventually be associated. In the traditional Whig formulation the Country Party was an elite group of landowners who opposed the policies of the Court Party, and the two competing elites offered different prescriptions for what was in the best interest of the public. But Jefferson had come to see himself as the leader of a popular
majority
doing political battle against an elite
minority.
This was a new way of thinking about politics in the late eighteenth century. True, it drew upon traditional notions of conspiracy long associated with Whig ideology. The “anti-republican” supporters of Hamilton’s policies, for example, though a mere minority, enjoyed “circumstances which give them an appearance of strength and numbers.” Their chief advantage, Jefferson thought, was that “they all live in cities, together, and can act in a body readily and at all times,” whereas his constituency was “dispersed over a great extent of country, [and] have little means of intercommunication with each other.” (The chief disadvantage facing the Country Party, in other words, was that it lived in the country.) But the novel feature of Jefferson’s formulation of American political life was that it was essentially a matter of numbers. He regarded himself as the spokesman for a latent majority of Americans who, if they could ever be mobilized, would assume their rightful place as true heirs to “the spirit of ’76.” And instead of talking about them as “the public,” he began in the 1790s to speak in the more democratic idiom of “the people.” These were prophetic tendencies.
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DREAMS AND DEBTS

V
ERY FEW LETTERS
went out from Monticello during Jefferson’s first year of retirement, and the ones that did conveyed the impression that the former secretary of state had successfully completed the long-awaited odyssey from the purgatory of politics to his own pastoral paradise. He wrote to Washington not as the president but as a fellow farmer, recalling that both men were familiar with a scheme to manufacture “an essence of dung, one pint of which could manure an acre,” and that if any ingenious inventor could render it portable, Jefferson was now prepared to purchase a huge supply. To James Monroe, who was serving as the American minister in Paris, he apologized for the infrequency of his letters, blaming the long silence on “that sort of procrastination which so often takes place when no circumstance fixes a business to a particular time.” When word reached him that his old Parisian infatuation, Maria Cosway, had left her husband, abandoned her young child and sequestered herself in an Italian convent, he wrote her in the old sentimental style of times past: “I regret the distance which separates us and will not permit myself to believe that we are no more to meet till you meet me where time and distance are nothing.” But she was wrong to bury herself in a cloistered room where “the sun [is] ever excluded, the balmy breeze never felt. . . .” He had chosen the opposite direction for himself, spending his days out of doors like “a real farmer, measuring fields, following my ploughs, helping the haymakers, and never knowing a day which has not done something for futurity.” He assured his friends that his serenity, like a field of planted flowers, had germinated and was now bursting out inside his soul. It was the lifelong Jeffersonian domestic ideal, now at midlife and in the proper rural context: to be “living like an Antedeluvian patriarch among my children and grandchildren, and tilling my soil.”
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