Joseph J. Ellis (14 page)

As Jefferson and Madison arrived in Philadelphia for the first session of Congress in the new but merely temporary capital, the newspapers were filled with caustic commentary on the defiant tone of the Virginia resolution:

Hamilton also took note of the implicit secessionist threat contained in Virginia’s statement. It was, he warned, “the first symptom of a spirit which must either be killed or will kill the constitution of the United States.” Back in September of 1787, just as the Constitutional Convention was completing its business, Hamilton had made a prediction: The newly created federal government would either “triumph altogether over the state governments and reduce them to an entire subordination,” he surmised, or “in the course of a few years … the contests about the boundaries of power between the particular governments and the general government … will produce a dissolution of the Union.” Virginia’s posture toward assumption was now making his prophecy look prescient. Hamilton shared his ominous sense of the situation with John Jay, his part-time collaborator as “Publius” in
The Federalist Papers
. But he said nothing to Madison, his full-time collaborator, since it was no longer clear where Madison stood. Was he a Virginian or an American? Did he think the truly founding moment for the new nation was 1776 or 1787? These dramatic questions, as much
as the location of the capital on the Potomac, were the residual legacies of the dinner at Jefferson’s.
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F
OR THE NEXT
seventy years, until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the essence of political wisdom in the emergent American republic was to insist that such choices did not have to be made. But the recognition that these were the competing options, the contested versions, if you will, of what the core legacy of the American Revolution truly meant, first became visible in the summer of 1790. The Constitution did not resolve these questions; it only provided an orderly framework within which the arguments could continue. Nor would it be historically correct to regard the issues at stake as exclusively or even primarily constitutional. Legalistic debates over federal versus state sovereignty were just the most accessible handles to grab, the safest and most politically suitable ways to talk about alternative national visions.

The Compromise of 1790 is most famous for averting a political crisis that many statesmen of the time considered a threat to the survival of the infant republic. But it also exposed the incompatible expectations concerning America’s future that animated these same statesmen. In a sense, it is a very old story, which has been rendered even more familiar by the violent dissolution of revolutionary regimes in modern-day emergent nations: Bound together in solidarity against the imperialistic enemy, the leadership fragments when the common enemy disappears and the different agenda for the new nation must confront its differences. Securing a revolution has proven to be a much more daunting assignment than winning one. The accommodation that culminated in the agreement reached over Jefferson’s dinner table provides a momentary exposure of the sharp differences dividing the leadership of the revolutionary generation: sectional versus national allegiance; agrarian versus commercial economic priorities; diffusion versus consolidation as social ideals; an impotent versus a potent federal government. The compromise reached did not resolve these conflicts so much as prevent them from exploding when the newly created government was so vulnerable; it bought time during which the debate could continue.
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Thanks to the efforts of Jefferson and Madison, the ongoing debate would have a decidedly southern accent. In some vaguely general fashion,
they understood this, regarding the construction of the District of Columbia on the Potomac as a statement of Virginia’s enduring influence over the federal government. Although the Virginia-writ-large view of the United States they harbored had an arrogant and provincial odor about it, their presumptions did reflect certain demographic and economic realities: Virginia contained one-fifth of the nation’s total population and generated one-third of its commerce. What’s more, as John Adams so nicely put it, “in Virginia all Geese are Swans,” meaning that Virginia’s elite genuinely believed that it had almost single-handedly launched and led the war for independence. The Old Dominion was accustomed to thinking of itself as
primus inter pares
in any confederation of states. The geographic location of the new capital played to these pretensions by making it the physical projection of Virginia. It did not matter so much that the Virginia-writ-large vision was mostly an illusion; it was a deeply felt illusion that the location of the new capital somewhat appeased.
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Although it never seemed to be part of the conscious intention of either Jefferson or Madison at the time, the isolated location and
de novo
character of the national capital had even deeper political implications. For at the start and for several decades thereafter, it remained a vast and nearly vacant plot of ground. Visitors in those early years who stopped to ask directions to the American capital were often astonished when told they were standing squarely in its center. Anyone apprehensive about the encroaching powers of the federal government must have felt a palpable sense of reassurance that the seat of power was virtually invisible. Or if, like Jefferson, one believed that cities were sores on the body politic, and agrarian values were the mainstay of American virtue, then Washington, D.C., must have seemed the perfect capital for the new republic, since it was really not a city at all. If the clustering together or consolidation of political power touched some primal nerve, conjuring up horrific scenes of courtiers in London or Paris plotting against the rights of ordinary citizens, again the American capital performed visual therapy by lacking courts, corridors, or many public buildings whatsoever. It symbolized the victory of diffusion over consolidation.
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Nor were Hamilton’s dreaded moneymen likely to find it a particularly hospitable environment. The pervasive emptiness and stultifying summer heat were only minor deterrents when compared with the
more elemental consideration that all the banking and commercial institutions were based elsewhere, chiefly in Philadelphia and New York. By selecting the Potomac location, the Congress had implicitly decided to separate the political and financial capitals of the United States. All the major European capitals—Berlin, London, Paris, Rome, Vienna—were metropolitan centers that gathered together the political, economic, and cultural energies of their respective populations in one place. The United States was almost inadvertently deciding to segregate them. The exciting synergy of institutional life in an all-purpose national metropolis was deemed less important than the dangerous corruptions likely to afflict a nexus of politicians and financiers.
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And so while Hamilton and his followers could claim that the compromise permitted the core features of his financial plan to win approval, which in turn meant the institutionalization of fiscal reforms with centralizing implications that would prove very difficult to dislodge, the permanent residence of the capital on the Potomac institutionalized political values designed to carry the nation in a fundamentally different direction. It was also symbolic in a personal sense for Jefferson and Madison. For the Compromise of 1790 signaled the resumption of their political partnership after five years of separation. Now “the great collaboration” was truly an alliance worthy of its name.

Many of their closest friends and colleagues in Virginia had urged them to regard Hamilton’s program as clinching evidence of a foreign takeover of the national government that fully justified a withdrawal from the union. Jefferson and Madison claimed to share their apprehensions and their political principles, but not their secessionist impulses. Their strategy was different. They would not abandon the government, but capture it. Like the new capital, it would become an extension of Virginia, or at least the Virginia vision of what the American Revolution meant and the American republic was therefore meant to be. Jefferson would oversee and orchestrate this campaign and provide its rhetorical foundation, which enjoyed a privileged association with the spirit of ’76. Madison would actually lead the troops and do the necessary political infighting. Though it would not be easy, and would take the remainder of the decade to accomplish, that is pretty much what happened.

J
UST A FEW
months before Jefferson staged his historic dinner party, something happened in the Congress of the United States that no one had anticipated; indeed, most of the political leadership considered it an embarrassing intrusion. On February 11, 1790, two Quaker delegations, one from New York and the other from Philadelphia, presented petitions to the House calling for the federal government to put an immediate end to the African slave trade. This was considered an awkward interruption, disrupting as it did the critical debate over the assumption and residency questions with an inflammatory proposal that several southern representatives immediately denounced as mischievous meddling. Representative James Jackson from Georgia was positively apoplectic that such a petition would even be considered by any serious deliberative body. The Quakers, he argued, were infamous innocents incessantly disposed to drip their precious purity like holy water over everyone else’s sins. They were also highly questionable patriots, having sat out the recent war against British tyranny in deference to their cherished consciences. What standing could such dedicated pacifists enjoy among veterans of the Revolution, who, as Jackson put it, “at the risk of their lives and fortunes, secured to the community their liberty and property?”
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William Loughton Smith from South Carolina rose to second Jackson’s objection. The problematic patriotism of the Quaker petitioners was, Smith agreed, reprehensible. But his colleague from Georgia need
not dally over the credentials of these pathetic eccentrics. The Constitution of the United States, only recently ratified, specifically prohibited the Congress from passing any law that abolished or restricted the slave trade until 1808. (Article 1, Section 9, paragraph 1, read: “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight.”) Several current members of Congress also happened to have served as delegates to the Constitutional Convention, and they could all testify that the document would never have been approved in Philadelphia or ratified by several of the southern states without this provision. Beyond these still warm memories, the language of the Constitution was unambiguous: The federal government could not tamper with the slave trade during the first twenty years of the nation’s existence. The Quaker petitioners, therefore, were asking for something that had already been declared unavailable.
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Jackson, however, was not about to be consoled by constitutional protections. He detected even more sinister motives behind the benign smiles of the misnamed Society of Friends. “I apprehend, if through the interference of the general government, the slave-trade was abolished,” he observed, “it would evince to the people a general disposition toward a total emancipation.” In short, the Quaker petition for an end of the slave trade was really a stalking horse for a more radical and thoroughgoing scheme to end the institution of slavery itself.

James Madison rose to assume his customary role as the vigilant voice of cool reason. His colleague from Georgia was overreacting. Indeed, his impassioned rhetoric, while doubtless sincere, was both misguided and counterproductive. The Quaker petition should be heard and forwarded to a committee “as a matter of course.” If, in other words, the matter were treated routinely and with a minimum of fuss, it would quickly evaporate. As Madison put it, “no notice would be taken it out of doors.” On the other hand, Jackson’s own overwrought opposition, much like airbursts in a night battle, actually called attention to the issues the Quakers wished to raise. If Jackson would only restrain himself, the petition would go away and “never be blown up into a decision of the question respecting the discouragement of the African slave-trade, nor alarm the owners with an apprehension that the general government were about to abolish slavery in all the states.”
For, as Madison assured Jackson, “such things are not contemplated by any gentlemen in the congress.”
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