Madison and Jefferson (46 page)

What would these tactics have been aimed at? Having thought things through, Hamilton concluded that James Madison was involved in nothing less than a conspiracy to force the treasury secretary’s resignation from the president’s cabinet, perhaps to clear the way for Jefferson. Warning Carrington of “unfriendly intrigues,” Hamilton noted Madison’s “abuse of the Presidents confidence in him.” Presumably Washington was coming to see things as Hamilton did, forbearing as long as possible until no other inference was possible. Madison’s pose, like Jefferson’s, was duplicitous: his “true character is the reverse of that
simple, fair, candid one
, which he has assumed.”

While Hamilton incorrectly assigned to Jefferson primary responsibility for the establishment of Freneau’s anti-administration newspaper, he did include Madison in “the consequences imputable to it.” Moving on to foreign policy, Hamilton predicted that, left to their own devices, Madison and Jefferson would, within six months, resort to an “open war” with England. “
They have a womanish attachment to France,
” he declaimed, “
and a womanish resentment against Great Britain
.” This insult to their collective manhood was the ultimate dishonor.

In Paris, according to Hamilton, Jefferson “drank deeply of the French Philosophy, in Religion, in Science, in politics,” and returned to America “with a too partial idea of his own powers, and with the expectation of a greater share in the direction of our councils than he has in reality enjoyed.” In fact, Hamilton surmised, Jefferson may actually have “marked out for himself” Hamilton’s job. This was a first thought, before Hamilton arrived at the grander suspicion that Jefferson actually wanted to contest him for
Washington’s
job.

Hamilton characterized the bond between his two Virginia adversaries: “Mr. Madison had always entertained an exalted opinion of the talents, knowledge and virtues of Mr. Jefferson. The sentiment was probably reciprocal.” Aware of their warm correspondence while Jefferson was abroad, he offered a pair of explanations for what happened after Jefferson’s return: either Jefferson had redirected Madison’s political sentiments (Jefferson being “more radically wrong” in politics than Madison); or else “Mr. Madison was seduced by the expectation of popularity” into changing his opinions. Whatever the case, Hamilton judged: “The course of this business & a
variety of circumstances which took place left Mr. Madison a very discontented & chagrined man and begot some degree of ill humor in Mr. Jefferson.” It is curious that Hamilton saw Madison, and not Jefferson, as the generator of ill humor.

Yet he perceived in Jefferson a worse trait than any of Madison’s: the lust for power. As he flailed away, Hamilton went from suspecting to proclaiming that Jefferson owned an “ardent desire” to occupy the “Presidential Chair.” This was, for him, the ultimate proof that Madison and Jefferson were engaged in “party-politics”—meaning political dissension. Hamilton had pieced it all together, he explained, after hearing that some in Virginia were anxious lest the state governments were to be subsumed into a behemoth of a national government.

The foregoing was a roundabout way for Hamilton to tell Carrington that Virginians needed to be reassured by someone they trusted—Carrington—that their fears of consolidation were entirely off base. “As to my own political Creed, I give it to you with the utmost sincerity,” pronounced Hamilton. “I am
affectionately
attached to the Republican theory.” It was, he pledged, “the real language of my heart.” He knew there were men “acting with Jefferson & Madison” who saw him differently. “I could lay my finger on them,” he said boldly and, perhaps, a little roguishly.

Feeling entirely justified in his disappointment with Madison, and no less confident in his reconstruction of events to which he had no proximity, Hamilton thus made his case before those in Virginia who were still willing to listen. Wrapping up the long letter, he indulged in a momentary reconsideration of the two Virginians who, motivated by irrational fear, had dangerously determined to “narrow the Federal authority.” If, in fact, Madison and Jefferson had not meant to go so far as to accuse him of promoting monarchy, Hamilton would admit that he had treated them in print “with too much severity.” He did not wish to do them any injustice, he professed to Carrington, but he would retreat from his argument no more than that. “From the bottom of my soul,” he swore, “I have drawn them truly.” And so he brought to a close more than twenty pages of exceedingly strong invective.
⁶³

Hamilton was convinced that the antifederalist Jefferson had had it in mind to “turn” Madison even before he left Paris. He was reaching too far here, wrong about the course of events: Madison had become suspicious of Hamilton’s motives entirely on his own. He had not needed Jefferson to instruct him. Indeed, by the end of 1792 Madison was convinced that Congress needed to look into Hamilton’s secret expenditures and possible
misuse of Treasury Department funds. The prime mover was Madison, not Jefferson.

Adding to existing suspicions, allies of Madison and Jefferson had learned that Hamilton was paying blackmail to a man who had attempted to defraud the U.S. government. That man, James Reynolds, was the husband of a woman with whom Hamilton had engaged in a protracted sexual affair. Senator James Monroe was among a small delegation from Congress to meet with Hamilton in December 1792. They accepted Hamilton’s explanation that no federal funds were involved in the payments. For the moment Hamilton’s critics resolved that, as gentlemen, they would keep quiet about his private problem. And they decided that there was no cause to notify the president.
⁶⁴

Apparently Hamilton felt safe, or at least unconcerned that his risky actions would come back to haunt him, because he did not let up in his efforts to discredit Jefferson. The secretaries of state and treasury may have held a grudging respect for each other’s intellectual range. But if they did, it did nothing to slow down the ever-growing conflict in the cabinet. As much as Jefferson despised Hamilton for his transparent bid to shape the federal government in his own image, Hamilton suspected Jefferson of plotting to do the same. Where policy differences fail to expose the whole truth, personal foibles may complete the picture, at least in explaining how Hamilton could have been led to overstate Jefferson’s role in Madison’s rejection of his basic programs. It could always be said of Madison that he was direct; but he was also subtle enough in his nonverbal communication that Hamilton did not follow the trajectory of his thinking (since publication of
The Federalist
) until they were past being able to communicate.

Hamilton had a need for vindication and found it as he wrote Jefferson into the history of Madison’s drift. He would not, by any means, be the last to paint the history of the 1790s with this broad brush. Eventually the perception of Jefferson’s consummate role in the development of a partisan mind-set would be chiseled in stone.

Second in its revelatory content only to Hamilton’s letter to Carrington was Jefferson’s to George Washington of September 9, 1792, in which he defended himself against Hamilton’s newspaper attacks. In a memo not long before, the president had asked for “liberal forbearances” from his
feuding secretaries. There were matters of national urgency that required cooperation, not the least of which was Spanish, French, and British collusion with hostile Indians. Washington appealed unequivocally: “How unfortunate … whilst we are encompassed on all sides with avowed enemies and insidious friends, that internal dissentions should be harrowing and tearing our vitals.”

Writing from the quiet of Monticello, Jefferson spelled out just how offensive he felt Hamilton’s efforts to intrude upon State Department matters were and how inflammatory the newspaper attacks had been. “I am so desirous ever that you should know the whole truth,” he petitioned the president. He started with the state of affairs in Congress and, denying any attempt of his own to influence votes, cast suspicion on Hamilton’s motives and actions.

The flaw in Hamilton’s system was painfully simple, Jefferson said. It was rooted in “principles adverse to liberty, and was calculated to undermine and demolish the republic, by creating an influence of his department over the members of the legislature.” Calculated to undermine and demolish the republic? Under such terrifying circumstances, there could be no compromise between them. Hamilton’s unethical relations with members of Congress, his “dealing out of Treasury-secrets among his friends,” his destabilizing discussions with the ministers from England and France—there was no better term than
cabals
to describe such underhanded pacts.

In spite of the clear and present danger, Jefferson hinted at a final retirement from all public business. “When I came into this office,” he wrote, “it was with a resolution to retire from it as soon as I could with decency … I look to that period with the longing of a wave-worn mariner, who has at length the land in view, and shall count the days and hours which still lie between me and it.” If he was ready to call it quits, he could not sign off before he had thoroughly discredited his rival: “I will not suffer my retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment when history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has not only received and given him bread, but heaped it’s honors on his head.” With a grand gesture drawn from classical oratory, alluding at once to Hamilton’s common and foreign origins (born on the island of Nevis, in the Caribbean, and abandoned by his father), Jefferson penned a most memorable slur of the man who had repeatedly attacked his political dignity and moral worth.
⁶⁵

As it happens, Hamilton addressed Washington on the same delicate
subject on the very same day. “I
know
that I have been an object of uniform opposition from Mr. Jefferson, from the first moment of his coming to the City of New York,” he wrote. “I
know
, from the most authentic sources, that I have been the frequent subject of the most unkind whispers and insinuating from the same quarter.” He claimed that while Jefferson was plotting against him, he “never directly or indirectly retaliated,” remaining for too long a “silent sufferer” of calculated injuries. Most important, Washington needed to know that as a veiled conspirator, Jefferson was behind “a formed party” bent on dismantling the government.
⁶⁶

Jefferson thought himself a guardian of liberty. Hamilton thought himself a model of patience. Washington did not wish to investigate the claims of either of his headstrong advisers. He was interested not in assessing motives but in governing.

IN JANUARY 1793 LOUIS XVI WAS GUILLOTINED, AS THE VOLATILE
Jacobins took control of government and buried the liberal ideals of 1789. When the news reached Philadelphia in March, Jefferson told Madison that he felt a sense of relief because America’s “monocrats” were not deeply troubled by this latest report of Revolutionary violence. He had just dined with a large and diverse group of politicos whose casual colloquy ran the gamut of opinion, from “the warmest jacobinism” to “the most heartfelt aristocracy”; but not a one was roused to anger, or the kind of condemnation he expected. It appeared to him that it was only the town’s squeamish
society women who were shocked by the manner in which the French king had been dispatched. At home in Orange between legislative sessions, Madison took the pulse of “the mass of our Citizens” and discovered that Virginians had bought into “spurious” accounts of the king’s innocence that were printed in some newspapers. They felt for Louis the man but not for Louis the monarch.
¹

Even after the execution, many Americans had hopes for the Revolution. General Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, a recent widower and the present governor of Virginia, made plans to sail to France and offer his services on the battlefield. Not until March did he begin having second thoughts about the idea, and only at the end of April did he inform his old comrades Washington and Hamilton of his preparations. Washington replied, with some understatement, that the French faced more significant domestic threats than foreign ones at that moment. There would be “much speculation” if a U.S. governor were to enlist in the armed services of a foreign power. Lee got the message. Instead of sailing, he stayed home and remarried. In the decade that followed, Ann Carter Lee bore Light-Horse Harry a son, Robert Edward, whom he scarcely knew but who was destined to outdo his father on the battlefields of America.
²

In February 1793 England was officially added to the French Revolutionaries’ list of belligerents. Americans learned of the new Anglo-French war in April. Inside France, defense of the state became the justification for revenge against supposed enemies. Aristocracy became, literally, a crime. Civil rights were ignored. This was the age of the Terror, and it would reach high tide in mid-1794. After trials at which defendants were denied counsel, upward of fifteen thousand of the politically suspect met their deaths in a widespread purge.