Madison and Jefferson (45 page)

Hamilton suddenly warmed up to the man who appeared the least objectionable at the moment. He wrote to Adams to commiserate on the Clinton challenge. Cultivating an us-against-them mind-set, Hamilton made reference to the nastiness in the newspapers, Freneau’s in particular, as he egged on the irritable Adams with a panicky view of the situation: “You will have perceived that a plot thickens & that something very like a serious design to subvert the Government discloses itself.” Though the plot was, indeed, thickening, Adams received a good many more votes than Clinton and retained his second position in the federal system.
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During Jefferson’s nearly four years as secretary of state, one of his critical duties was to receive French and British envoys and to discuss political and
commercial topics with them before reporting to the president. Where matters of trade intervened, Hamilton met with the same envoys. The first official French minister to the United States was Jean-Baptiste Ternant. He was fiftyish and had taken part in the American Revolution. Lafayette thought highly of him. The first British minister was the under-thirty George Hammond. Neither was on the scene during the inaugural year of Washington’s administration.

Jefferson and Hamilton saw foreign representatives separately and sometimes spoke at cross-purposes. Hamilton suspended payment of outstanding U.S. debts to Revolutionary France until a government deemed legitimate was installed. Not surprisingly, he and Jefferson disagreed on what defined political legitimacy.

While the United States was struggling to speak with a single voice at home and abroad, relations among the nations of Europe remained in flux. Distances made the dissemination of essential information slow and uncertain, and diplomacy took place in multiple stages with changing personnel. In 1791 the unofficial British envoy George Beckwith, closely connected to the governor-general of Canada, remained a fixture on the American scene. He took up lodgings in Philadelphia at, of all places, the House-Trist establishment. Jefferson thought this might make Madison uneasy and, with his usual aplomb, suggested that they move in together. He had refrained from making the proposition while Madison was daily enjoying “agreeable Congressional society”; but now that the complexion of things had changed, he urged: “Come and take a bed and plate with me.” Jefferson was living a few short blocks away and had four spare rooms in his rented house, any of which Madison could have moved into at a moment’s notice. “Let me intreat you, my dear Sir, to do it,” he repeated. “To me it will be a relief from a solitude of which I have too much.” He bribed Madison with the convenience of an exceptional private library.

But Madison did not take the bait. He was content to take bed and plate under the same roof as the British envoy. Aware that he was sacrificing many “hourly enjoyments” in Jefferson’s company by remaining where he was, he explained that he did not wish to upset his routine: “My papers and books are all assorted around me.” Nor did he wish to give Beckwith the impression that he was moving out so he would not have to board with an enemy.

It made sense. Any apparent incivility would spoil the chance to make diplomatic inroads. As long as Madison was staying put, Jefferson prevailed on him to informally discuss with his English housemate the
British-Indian arms trade that was threatening America’s position along the northwestern frontier in the area of British-occupied Detroit. Britain still maintained eight of the fortifications it had agreed to give up when it acknowledged American independence in 1783.
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It is unclear the extent to which Congressman Madison and Secretary of State Jefferson were aware of Hamilton’s communications with Beckwith. The latter two held private meetings over the eighteen months since Hamilton first suggested Madison’s limitations by pointing to his lack of worldliness. Some of the issues Hamilton took up with Beckwith belonged within the proper scope of the State Department, although it must be said that the duties of the two department heads overlapped more than they would in future presidencies.

George Hammond arrived in Philadelphia as the first
official
minister from Great Britain in November 1791, and the treasury secretary cozied up to him. Hammond confirmed Beckwith’s impression of Hamilton, writing home that the New Yorker had a “liberal” attitude and shared England’s larger interests, whereas Jefferson was an obstructionist. Hammond admitted his bias to a U.S. senator from New Jersey in March 1792, in a statement sounding like that of Hamilton’s comment to Beckwith about Madison. “The Secretary of the Treasury is more a man of the world than Jefferson,” Hammond said, “and I like his manners better, and can speak more freely to him.” To which he added, significantly: “Jefferson is in the Virginia interest and that of the French.” It would appear that
worldliness
was a code word for accommodating England’s geopolitical strategy.

Following up on Madison’s unprofitable discussions with Beckwith, Jefferson sounded out Hammond on what mattered most to America’s government over the long term: the fulfillment of treaty obligations and the removal of British posts and troops from U.S. territory in the West. He also pressed for direct U.S. access to the British West Indies trade, which had been long denied. London’s position was that it would not abandon the western posts until southern planters had paid their prewar debts, with interest, to British merchants; but southerners would not go ahead on debt payments until they received compensation for their loss of slave property during the war. Anglo-American talks did not progress far.
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Jefferson heard bad news from overseas. In the late summer of 1792 his successor as U.S. minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, notified him that Lafayette had fallen into enemy hands. Earlier that year France had declared war on Austria and Prussia, partially out of a fear that émigré armies would crush the Revolution. Partisans of Lafayette were among the pro-war
coalition. The marquis would spend the next five years in a series of prisons, under the control of both the Austrians and the Prussians. “He has spent his Fortune on a Revolution,” the unsympathetic Morris wrote to Jefferson, “and is now crush’d by the wheel which he put in motion.”
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Not long after Jefferson received this intelligence, he got word from the new U.S. minister to the Netherlands, his former secretary, William Short, that the king of France and his family faced execution—or as Short put it, “assassination.” Distrusting Morris, Lafayette had written to Short just before being jailed, asking to be “reclaimed” by the U.S. government. In identifying himself as “an American Citizen, an American officer,” he expected Short to find some way to pursue his release through diplomatic channels. Short did the only thing he could under present circumstances, which was to appeal to Gouverneur Morris, aware that Lafayette detested Morris. This whole string of events placed America’s Francophiles, such as Madison and Jefferson, on the defensive.
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As he brought Hamilton up to date on all that he was witnessing, Morris queried his correspondent on partisan developments back in the United States. “What will be the republican Sense as to the new Republic?” he posed sarcastically. “Will it be taken for granted that Louis the sixteenth was guilty of all possible Crimes and particularly of the enormous one of not suffering [i.e., allowing] his throat to be cut which was certainly a nefarious Plot against the People and a manifest Violation of the Bill of Rights.” Later in life, thinking about the French patriots’ unreal expectations from their Revolution, John Adams would enjoy a chuckle when he wickedly pressed Jefferson to acknowledge the truth about the self-destructiveness of the French at this time in their history.
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Hamilton feared outbursts of passion among the common people of America and advocated strong measures to keep the masses quiet. Madison was similarly attuned to the need for lawful control, but he no longer feared to the same degree as Hamilton what popular resistance might entail. The danger of an executive bent on domination was now his primary concern.

Ten years after the end of the Revolution, Jefferson still espoused a soaring rhetoric of equality and natural rights, continuing to embrace a comprehensive theory of moral equality, educability, and humane interaction, at least among free whites. This subjected him to the charge of being an
airy philosopher, too carefree for the tastes of many northern men of business. For the likes of Hamilton, Jefferson was something else entirely: a panderer, a demagogue, routinely engaged in behind-the-scenes arm-twisting and playing politics with craft and cunning. Once his pretty language was stripped away, he was like everyone else.

The most telling of nationally significant communications in this transformative year of 1792 may be the letter that Hamilton, prickly and proud and never reluctant to acknowledge his drive, wrote to Edward Carrington on May 26. It was one of the longest and most illuminating letters of his career. He was hoping to make inroads with Carrington, then supervisor of revenue for the Commonwealth of Virginia, whom he had met during the Revolution when together they carried out a prisoner exchange. Hamilton knew that he could not “turn” Madison or wean him away from Jefferson; but he thought a reasoned appeal to Carrington might at least succeed in gaining support in a state he had not visited since the Battle of Yorktown: the home state of the president, the secretary of state, and the single most prominent congressman.

He began his letter by extending the wish that good feelings still subsisted between Carrington and himself, “persuaded also that our political creed is the same on
two essential points
, 1st the necessity of
Union
to the respectability and happiness of this Country and 2 the necessity of an efficient general government to maintain that Union
.
” Hamilton got right to the crux of his complaint: Aware, early on, of Madison’s power of argument, he would not have accepted his position in the executive branch had he not believed firmly in their political compatibility. Funding the national debt by co-opting the speculating note holders, along with the assumption of state debts, were two vital areas in which Hamilton believed he and Madison shared a vision dating back to 1783. They had had a long conversation about state debts in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention and were, he said, “perfectly agreed.” Something had happened, and Hamilton wished to understand it. Of course, he had his own theories, which was where his letter was heading.

With a habit of claiming victimhood, Hamilton warranted that it made perfect sense for him to have lost respect for “the force of Mr. Madison’s mind” after Madison’s unexpected about-face on the assumption issue. Yet he had not doubted Madison’s “good will” at the time this occurred. After a while, he explained, he finally recognized that “Mr. Madison, from a spirit of rivalship or some other cause had become personally unfriendly to me.” Rivalship? According to Hamilton, Madison had admitted to an unnamed
individual his fear of being supplanted. It was through this conduit that Madison’s improper and vilifying words had reached Hamilton.

Pursuing his narrative of honorability, wounded innocence, and sudden surprise, it had dawned on Hamilton 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.
” As if his underlining pen were shaking from having to revisit the moment of a painful realization, Hamilton rhetorically stepped back, offering Carrington a line that reeks of eighteenth-century literary pathos: “These are strong expressions; they may pain your friendship for one or both of the Gentlemen whom I have named. I have not lightly resolved to hazard them. They are the result of a
Serious alarm
in my mind for the public welfare.”

It is hard to say who in the early American republic privileged the public welfare over more parochial, or even egoistic, concerns. In his newspaper attacks, Hamilton had already shown how much personal investment he had in the outcome of his battle with “Plain Thomas J.” He saw theirs as a true test of wills, possessing the character not of a sibling rivalry but of a landmark crusade; or a race to determine, right from the starting line, the direction government would take. With Madison, Hamilton thought the problem was one of an intellectual competition, at least until Jefferson intervened. He believed that Madison and he could at least tolerate each other. With Jefferson it was more elemental, something deep-seated, a never-ending duel.

“Mr. Jefferson,” Hamilton prodded Carrington, “with very little reserve[,] manifests his dislike of the funding system generally; calling in question the expediency of funding a debt at all … In various conversations with
foreigners
as well as citizens, he has thrown censure on my
principles
of government. He has predicted that the people would not long tolerate my proceedings & that I should not long maintain my ground.”

He held Jefferson solely responsible for Freneau’s “malignant and unfriendly” newspaper. In accepting that Madison had made vicious remarks about him in rumored conversations, Hamilton wanted Carrington to know, should Carrington be able to intercede, that “I cannot persuade myself that Mr. Madison and I, whose politics had formerly so much the
same point of departure
, should now diverge so widely.” If he really did believe that their political rupture might be healed, Hamilton undercut his purpose by once again personalizing the problem: “The opinion I once entertained of the
candour
and simplicity and fairness of Mr. Madison’s character has, I
acknowledge, given way to a decided opinion that
it is one of a peculiarly artificial and complicated kind.
” By “artificial and complicated,” Hamilton meant “tactical,” in a Machiavellian sense—this is the nearest modern equivalent to his words.