Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (27 page)

Both men were suspicious of governmental power, including the power of elected representative legislatures. But Jefferson’s suspicion was based
on his fear of the unrepresentative character of the elected officials, that is, that the representatives might be too apt to drift away from the virtuous people who had elected them. Madison’s suspicion, by contrast, was based on his fear that the elected officials were only too representative, only too expressive of the passions of their constituents. Jefferson worried about the rights of the majority; Madison worried about the rights of the minority.
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As far as Jefferson was concerned, the people could do no wrong. When Madison was wringing his hands in the late 1780s over the turbulence of Shays’s Rebellion, Jefferson was writing blithely from France about the value of the spirit of popular resistance to government and the need to keep it alive. “I like a little rebellion now and then,” he said. Like a storm in the atmosphere, it cleared the air.
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In the 1780s the two men had had different ideas about politics and the character of the central government. Madison had been a fervent nationalist and had been eager to put down the states and create a strong central government. Jefferson, from his distant position in Paris, had not shared most of Madison’s misgivings about democratic politics in the separate states. Although he had accepted the need for a new federal government, he continued to think of the United States as more of a decentralized confederation than Madison. Give the national government control over foreign policy and foreign trade, he urged, but leave all domestic affairs, including taxation, with the states. “To make us one nation as to foreign concerns, and keep us distinct in Domestic ones,” he told Madison in 1786, “gives the outline of the proper division of powers between the general and particular governments.”
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By 1792 Jefferson had not changed his views at all, but Madison had. For reasons that are still disputed, by 1792 he had become fearful of the very government he had done so much to create. No doubt his nationalism had never been as strong as Hamilton’s, and no doubt his loyalty to Virginia had become more intense as he sensed a Northern bias in Hamilton’s banking and funding system. But most important in his change of thinking was his growing realization that the new national government that Hamilton and the Federalists were erecting did not at all resemble the adjudicatory state that he had imagined in 1787. It was not a
judicial-like umpire they were creating but a modern European-type state with an elaborate bureaucracy, a standing army, perpetual debts, and a powerful independent executive—the very kind of monarch-like war-making state that radical Whigs in England had been warning about for generations. In his mind, as he recalled years later, he did not desert Hamilton, “Colonel Hamilton deserted me.” “In a word,” he told a young disciple, Nicholas Trist, near the end of his life, “the divergence between us took place—from his wishing to
administration
, or rather to administer the Government into what he thought it ought to be.”
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Madison’s growing realization that Hamilton held a different conception of the national government from his own was crucial in explaining his shift in thinking; but also important was his deep friendship with Jefferson. Although Madison was by far the more critical and questioning thinker, Jefferson, eight years Madison’s senior, displayed an intellectual power that impressed his younger colleague. Jefferson knew more about more things and had read more books than any other American leader (except perhaps for John Adams), and, unlike Madison, he had lived in Europe and knew firsthand the great enlightened world beyond America.

For a variety of reasons, therefore, Madison tended to defer to his older friend, ready “always,” he told him in 1794, to “receive your commands with pleasure.”
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Madison, however, was never so deferential as to avoid questioning some of the outlandish ideas that Jefferson was apt to put forward. In 1789, for example, Jefferson outlined for Madison his notion that no generation should be bound by the actions of its predecessors. Jefferson had picked up the idea during discussions in liberal Parisian circles and found it attractive, especially since he had become aware of how burdensome his own personal debts were. “One generation,” he told Madison, “is to another as one independent nation to another.” According to his elaborate but dubious calculations based on the demographic tables of the French naturalist the comte de Buffon, Jefferson deduced that a generation lasted about nineteen years. Therefore, he concluded, the “principle that the earth belongs to the living and not to the dead” meant that all personal and national debts, all laws, even all constitutions ought to expire every nineteen years.

Madison’s reply to this odd notion was a model of tact. After first complimenting Jefferson on the “many interesting reflections” his idea of generational autonomy suggested, Madison went on gently to demolish it for being “not in
all
respects compatible with the course of human affairs.” He pointed out that some debts, like those created by the American Revolution, were actually incurred for the benefit of future generations. Moreover, to bring all constitutions and laws to an end every nineteen years would surely erode confidence between people and breed struggles over property that would unhinge the society. Still, he confessed that perhaps he had only the eye of an “ordinary Politician” that was unable to perceive “the sublime truths . . . seen thro’ the medium of Philosophy.”
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Madison knew his friend and knew that Jefferson’s fanciful and exaggerated opinions were usually offset by his very practical and cautious behavior. As Madison later remarked, Jefferson had a habit like “others of great genius of expressing in strong and round terms, impressions of the moment.”
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Indeed, it was often the difference between Jefferson’s impulsive opinions and his calculated behavior that led many critics to charge him with hypocrisy and inconsistency.

Perhaps it was the very innocence and impracticality of many of Jefferson’s opinions—their utopianism—that attracted the more sober-minded and skeptical Madison. Jefferson’s vision of a world free from coercion and war, free from the accumulated debts and regulations of the past, and free from corruption—this vision was an inspiring antidote to the prudential, mundane, and humdrum world of congressional politics that Madison often had to contend with. At any rate, Madison developed his own utopian views about the use of commercial restrictions in international relations and on this issue eventually became even more visionary than his mentor. But he was always the loyal protégé responsible for the dirty work in the collaboration. Since Jefferson did not like personal confrontations and polemical exchanges, he left it to Madison to write articles defending him in the press and to work out the details of their opposition to Hamilton’s program.

A
S CRITICISM OF
H
AMILTON’S
financial policies and their support by “stock-jobbers” and “speculators” increased during 1791, defenders of the government retaliated. John Fenno had begun his staunchly Federalist newspaper the
Gazette of the United States
in 1789 with the hope of its becoming the official paper of the national government with the mission of supporting the Constitution and the national administration. But soon the
paper moved from simply celebrating the federal government to defending it from its critics. To those critics Fenno’s publishing of Adams’s “Discourses on Davila” was the last straw. The
Gazette
seemed to Jefferson to have become “a paper of pure Toryism, disseminating the doctrines of monarchy, aristocracy, and the exclusion of the influence of the people.”
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Jefferson and Madison were concerned enough with the spread of what they took to be the anti-republican opinions of the
Gazette
to enter into negotiations with the poet Philip Freneau to edit a rival Philadelphia newspaper. After being offered a position as translator in the State Department and other promises of support, Freneau finally agreed. The first issue of his
National Gazette
appeared at the end of October 1791.
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By early 1792Freneau’s newspaper was claiming that Hamilton’s plans were part of a grand design to subvert liberty and establish aristocracy and monarchy in America. At the same time, Jefferson was hailed as the illustrious patriot who was defending liberty against Hamilton’s system of corruption. Although there was no organized party as yet, something labeled the “republican interest” emerged in the Congress in 1791, with the Virginia delegation at its core.

Freneau and his newspaper were effectively altering the terms of the national debate. He portrayed the political conflict not as a contest between Federalists and Anti-Federalists but as a struggle between monocrats or aristocrats on one side and republicans on the other. As Hamilton recognized, these new terms were not at all favorable to the Federalists. It was one thing to cast the opponents of the Federalists as enemies of the Constitution and the Union; it was quite another to describe them as defenders of republicanism against monarchy and aristocracy. Yet to the Federalists’ chagrin, Freneau’s
National Gazette
could now openly declare that “the question in America is no longer between federalism and anti-federalism, but between republicanism and anti-republicanism.” Since the press rarely published authentically signed pieces—most were anonymous or written under a pseudonym—the charges thrown about in the newspapers showed little restraint. When Freneau’s paper bitterly attacked the Federalist government for slyly promoting monarchy and aristocracy and undermining republicanism, Hamilton eventually responded in Fenno’s
Gazette of the United States
by assailing Jefferson directly. He labeled the secretary of state an intriguing incendiary plotting to destroy the Constitution and the authority of the national government.
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This political division quickly spread beyond the press. Although Americans were universally hostile to the idea of parties, observers in 1792 for the first time began to speak of parties in the Congress, with what Madison called the “Republican party” representing the eighteenth-century radical Whig or “country-opposition” of the people against the corrupt influence of the Federalist “court.” Republicans began drawing on the libertarian ideas of the eighteenth-century British radical country-Whigs, ideas that had been integral to colonial American thinking in the years leading up to the Revolution.
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Jefferson was steeped in these ideas, but he found it difficult to lead an opposition. He was in an awkward position, to say the least. He had placed on the government’s payroll an enemy of the administration of which he was an important member. Early in 1792 the secretary of state informed Washington of his desire to leave the government at the end of the president’s first term. In the meantime, however, he sought to diminish Hamilton’s influence. In February 1792 he tried to convince Washington that the post office ought to be put in the Department of State rather than in the Treasury Department where it originally resided. The treasury, he warned the president in a conversation, “possessed already such an influence as to swallow up the whole Executive powers, and . . . even the future Presidents (not supported by the weight of character which himself possessed) would not be able to make head against this department.” He went on to accuse Hamilton of contriving “a system” of unproductive paper speculation that was poisoning the society and even the government itself.
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Indeed, even one of the chief perpetrators, Robert Morris, admitted that a “spirit of speculation infected all ranks” in the 1790s. Those speculative schemes involving the former assistant secretary of the treasury William Duer lent some support to the fears of corruption. Duer was a talented and energetic man, but, unlike Hamilton or Washington, he seemed to have little or no sense that his public responsibilities ought to precede his private interests. In the language of the age he appeared to have little or no virtue. Indeed, Duer epitomized the kind of gambling “stock-jobber” that Jefferson and Madison so feared. Although Duer departed the treasury after seven months, he presumably left with inside information that he tried to turn to his advantage by speculating in the federal debt and bank stock. Duer borrowed from a wide variety of people,
promising them ever increasing returns. When the speculative bubble finally burst in March 1792, investors big and small were badly hurt.

The collapse of Duer’s schemes precipitated a financial panic—the first of its kind in American history—that some believed was so serious that it affected “private Credit from Georgia to New Hampshire.” Suddenly, construction projects were halted, men were thrown out of work, and prices fell. One observer thought that the “revolution of property” was unprecedented.
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Jefferson, who had little understanding of high finance, was convinced that “all that stuff called script, of whatever description, was folly or roguery.”
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Hamilton took a tough line in protecting the credit of the United States during the financial crisis, and Duer ended up in prison. Jefferson and Madison assumed, wrongly it turned out, that Hamilton himself was likewise involved in corruption, and they and their followers in the Congress tried to force the treasury secretary to resign.

By now Hamilton had come to realize that his former collaborator had joined with Jefferson to oppose all of his programs. By May 1792 he was convinced “that Mr. Madison cooperating with Mr. Jefferson is at the head of a faction decidedly hostile to me and my administration, and actuated by views in my judgment subversive of the principles of good government and dangerous to the union, peace and happiness of the Country.”
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Hamilton was horrified to learn that many congressmen wanted to undermine his funding system and even to repudiate the government’s contracts of debt. He believed that Madison and especially Jefferson, whom he accused of wanting to become president, had attempted to make the national government so odious that they ran the risk of destroying the Union. In the opinion of Hamilton and other Federalists the future of the national government was in doubt. If all the states were as small as Maryland, New Jersey, or Connecticut, there would be little to fear. But, he thought, with a state as large and powerful as Virginia in opposition, could the government of the United States maintain itself? Hamilton insisted, perhaps too much so, that he was “
affectionately
attached to the Republican theory,” meaning, as he said, that he had no vested interest in hereditary distinctions or the deprivation of equal political rights. That was true enough, but his idea of republicanism was certainly different from that of Madison and Jefferson.
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