American Sphinx (28 page)

Madison served as the floor manager for the Republicans during the debate in the House of Representatives—it was the first instance when they met in caucus as an opposition party—and the humiliation fell on him when the Republican majority melted away. John Adams observed that “Mr. Madison looks worried to death. Pale, withered, haggard.” When the final vote came in late April 1796, Madison attributed the narrow Federalist victory to an urban conspiracy led by “the Banks, the British Merchts., the insurance Comps.” In truth, the swing votes had come from western representatives, whose constituents had decided to support the treaty because the removal of British troops from the frontier promised to open up the Mississippi Valley for settlement. Madison apprised Jefferson that “the exertions and influence of Aristocracy, Anglicism, and mercantilism” had combined to “overwhelm the Republican cause, [and] has left it in a very crippled condition. . . .” The disaster was so total and so unexpected that, as Madison explained his dismay to Jefferson, “my consolation . . . is in the effect they have in riveting my future purposes.” He was played out and ready for retirement.
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Jefferson, who had the advantage of viewing the devastation from Monticello, had a fundamentally different and more politically astute appraisal. The primary reason for the Federalist victory, he told Monroe in France, was the gigantic prestige of Washington, “the one man who outweighs them all in influence over the people” and whose support for the Jay Treaty proved in the end too much to overcome. Jefferson’s conclusion was shrewdly prophetic:

The Anglomen have in the end got their treaty through, and so far have triumphed over the cause of republicanism. Yet it has been to them a dear bought victory . . . and there is no doubt they would be glad to be replaced on the ground they possessed the instant before Jay’s nomination extraordinary. They see that nothing can support them but the Colossus of the President’s merits with the people, and the moment he retires, that his successor, if a Monocrat, will be overborne by the republican sense. . . . In the meantime, patience.
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Jefferson was usually even more disposed than Madison to regard any Federalist success as the result of corruption and conspiracy. After all, if the vast majority of the citizenry allegedly opposed a particular policy, and it nevertheless kept winning victories, the only logical explanation must be conspiratorial. What Jefferson saw clearly in the wake of the Jay Treaty debate, and Madison was simply too closely involved to notice, was that the resolution of the questions raised by the treaty had been reached by a new kind of politics in which both sides acknowledged that success depended upon an appeal to popular opinion. Washington’s nearly unassailable popularity had given the Federalists a decided edge in this particular contest. But once the game had been defined in these terms—that is, once republicanism became more democratic in character—the Federalists were doomed.
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LUCKY LOSERS

I
N SEPTEMBER
1796 Fisher Ames, the oracular champion of the Federalist cause, observed that Washington’s Farewell Address was “a signal, like dropping a hat, for the party races to start.” In fact the Republicans had been organizing for several months. Jefferson’s candidacy had been a foregone conclusion for almost a year; as early as May 1796 Madison had apprised Monroe that the presidential election was likely to pit
“Jefferson
the
object on one side
[and]
Adams
apparently
on the other.”
Neither man was expected to campaign. The emergence of an early form of democratic politics had not yet reached that stage of development. It was still considered unbecoming for a serious statesman to prostitute his integrity by a direct appeal to voters.
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This lingering aristocratic code fitted Jefferson’s mood perfectly, for it allowed him to remain sequestered at Monticello throughout the summer, publicly oblivious of the campaign that Madison was waging in his behalf and even privately capable of sustaining the pretense that he would live out his life in retirement. Madison was the complicitous partner in this psychological game, never corresponding with Jefferson about the looming election until it was over. Even then, when he finally wrote Jefferson in December 1796, his political report studiously avoided mention of Jefferson’s candidacy. “It is not improbable that Pinckney will step in between the two who have been treated as the principals in this question,” he observed, a reference to efforts by Hamilton to run a third candidate, Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, who might displace Adams as the Federalist choice for president. “This Jockeyship is accounted for by the enmity of Adams to Banks and funding systems,” Madison went on, “and by an apprehension that he is too headstrong to be a fit puppet for the intriguers behind the skreen.” Adams, in other words, was not a loyal Hamiltonian—the truth was that Adams disliked Hamilton almost as much as Jefferson did, and after learning about this Pinckney scheme, he loathed him even more—so the next occupant of the presidency was going to be either Jefferson or a man the Republicans could tolerate.
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Jefferson’s first acknowledgement of his own candidacy came in response to Madison’s letter. While not attempting to affect complete surprise, Jefferson maintained the posture that Madison had always remained his preferred choice: “The first wish of my heart was that you should have been proposed for the administration of government. On your declining it I wish any body rather than myself. And there is nothing I so anxiously hope as that my name may come out second or third. These would be indifferent to me; as the last would leave me at home the whole year, and the other [the vice presidency] the other two thirds of it.” Jefferson then informed Madison to put out the word that if the election ended in a tie, he wished it known that Adams should be declared the winner. “He has always been my senior from the commencement of our public life,” Jefferson observed with becoming modesty, a circumstance “that ought to give him preference,” adding as a final thought that he had “no confidence in myself for the undertaking.”
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Over the ensuing weeks, as the results of the electoral vote in the fourteen states became clear, Jefferson sustained a public posture of personal reluctance and political deference to Adams. Even before the votes had been counted, he wrote to his old colleague from Philadelphia and Paris days, regretting “the various little incidents [that] have happened or been contrived to separate us” and disavowing any competitive urges. “I have no ambition to govern men,” he confided. “It is a painful and thankless task.” He was obviously paying close attention to press reports on the voting, since he was one of the first to predict that Adams would win by three electoral votes (71–68), which turned out to be the exact result. But he wished to squelch all rumors that he had any objection to serving under Adams: “I was his junior in life, was his junior in Congress, his junior in the diplomatic line, his junior lately in our civil government.” Besides, Adams was “perhaps the only sure barrier against Hamilton’s getting in.” The office of the vice presidency was a “tranquil and unoffending station” that would effectively allow Jefferson to remain in semiretirement. He expected to spend “philosophical evenings in the winter, and rural days in the summer.”
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Beneath such expressions of reluctance and deference, which accurately reflected a genuine feeling at one layer of his personality, there existed another, much more realistic assessment of the political situation. While reiterating his political innocence, claiming that “I never in my life exchanged a word with any person on the subject, till I found my name brought forward generally, in competition with that of Mr. Adams,” he also offered a shrewd analysis of what was in store for the winner. “The second office of this government is honorable and easy,” he explained; “the first is but a splendid misery.” The chief problem was the long shadow of George Washington. In an uncharacteristically mixed metaphor, he offered Madison this uncanny insight: “The President is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag. Yet, as his departure will mark the moment when the difficulties begin to work, you will see, that they will be ascribed to the new administration, and that he will have his usual good fortune of reaping credit from the good acts of others, and leaving to them that of his errors.” In short, whoever followed Washington was virtually assured of failure, and “no man will bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.” The Republicans had been lucky to lose.
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Neither Madison, who was too busy trying to diagnose the likely course of an Adams presidency, nor Adams himself, whose combination of vanity and obsession with public duty never permitted such political detachment, was capable of seeing things so clearly. To his credit, Jefferson’s first reaction was to share this political appraisal with his long-standing friend from Quincy. He assumed the Ciceronian posture of the retired farmer; he was living, as he put it to Adams, in a secluded canton where “I learn little of what is passing; pamphlets, I never see, papers but a few; and the fewer the happier.” Though disingenuous, it was a posture Adams understood for what it was and in keeping with the somewhat contrived civility that both men had assumed toward each other in recent years. After congratulating Adams on his victory and assuring him that he “never one single moment expected a different issue,” Jefferson tried to warn him of the storm into which he was riding. First, there was “the subtlety of your arch-friend of New York”—Hamilton’s duplicity was a sure source of complete consensus—who “will be disappointed as to you” and “contrive behind the scenes” to manipulate his protégés in the cabinet. More generally, both the foreign and domestic affairs of the nation were victims of partisan squabbling: “Since the day on which you signed the treaty of Paris our horizon was never so overcast.” He concluded with a reference to earlier and better days, “when we were working for our independence,” and a vague promise to renew the old partnership.
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Instead of posting the letter directly to Adams, Jefferson decided to run it past Madison first, just to assure its propriety. Madison counseled against sending the letter, offering six reasons why its sentiments might be misconstrued. The last and most politically significant reason was telling: “Considering the probability that Mr. A’s course of administration may force an opposition to it from the Republican quarter, and the general uncertainty of the posture which our affairs may take, there may be real embarrassments from giving written possession to him, of the degree of compliment and confidence which your personal delicacy and friendship have suggested.” In other words, Jefferson’s well-known affection for Adams was admirable, but it must not be allowed to become an impediment to the Republican cause. If Jefferson were correct about the political earthquakes about to shake the Adams presidency, best to keep one’s distance.
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This was excellent political advice that Jefferson immediately recognized as such, but it came at a price. For the bond Jefferson felt toward Adams was palpable. “Mr. A. and myself were cordial friends from the beginning of the revolution,” he explained to Madison, and although they had parted company on several issues in the early 1790s, these differences had “not made me less sensible of the rectitude of his heart. And I wished him to know this. . . .” What’s more, Adams was no hard-line Federalist of the Hamiltonian stripe. He had in fact opposed Hamilton’s banking and funding schemes and offered only lukewarm support for the Jay Treaty. Furthermore, Jefferson knew that Adams mistrusted the English as much as he did. (The problem was that he mistrusted the French even more.) In short, Adams did not fit the Federalist stereotype that both Jefferson and Madison carried around in their heads. Indeed Adams’s first instinct as president-elect was to ask if Madison would be willing to head the American diplomatic delegation to France and if Jefferson would consider serving in the cabinet rather than waste his talents in the Senate. It was a clear bipartisan gesture designed to offer the Republicans a significant role in the new administration.
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Jefferson’s decision to distance himself from Adams, then, was both personally poignant and politically fateful. At the political level one can only speculate about the prospects of a bipartisan government headed by the Adams-Jefferson tandem, which would have enjoyed at least a fighting chance of inhabiting Washington’s massive legacy. But such speculation is idle, not just because of Jefferson’s decision but also because the Federalists whom Adams unwisely chose to retain in his cabinet were just as opposed to a vigorous Jeffersonian presence in the new administration as was Madison; they threatened to resign en masse if it occurred.

At the personal level Jefferson was effectively forced to choose between his long-standing loyalty to a friend and his responsibility to the Republican agenda. He was psychologically incapable of seeing himself as a party leader, but that in fact was what he once again had become. In his own mind he was taken off the hook in March 1797, when, after a cordial dinner at Washington’s house in Philadelphia, he and Adams walked home together along Market Street and Adams apprised him that his Federalist associates had vetoed the bipartisan initiative as preposterous. As Jefferson remembered it later, the two old allies took different directions, “his being down Market Street, mine off along Fifth, and we took leave; and he never after that said one word to me on the subject or ever consulted me as to any measure of the government.” Adams too, when forced to choose, had opted for party over friendship.
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Neither man, it should be noted, saw his decision in quite those terms. Adams regarded himself as the American version of “the patriot king,” the virtuous chief magistrate who would oppose all factions on behalf of the public interest, even if it meant repudiating his own Federalist colleagues, as it eventually did. Jefferson, on the other hand, saw himself as head of the government-in-exile, again placed in the anomalous position of serving officially in the administration he opposed. At his swearing-in ceremony he joked about his rusty recall of parliamentary procedure, a clear signal that his time in Philadelphia would be spent in the harmless business of monitoring debates in the Senate. Three weeks later, on March 20, he was already back at Monticello, waiting for the inevitable catastrophes to befall the Federalists and, all in good time, deliver the full promise of the American Revolution into its rightful hands.
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