Madison and Jefferson (55 page)

At this moment especially, Madison and Jefferson recognized the value of a critical public to their cause. Two of the leading Republicans in Pennsylvania, Alexander James Dallas and Albert Gallatin (both born outside the United States), were active members of democratic societies. Gallatin spoke with a noticeable French accent and had already made himself a symbol of the French menace among Federalists in Congress. In 1793, thirteen years after emigrating from Switzerland, he found his election to the U.S. Senate overturned on the basis of his qualifications for citizenship.

In many ways, Gallatin was more American than the provincials who went after him. He had spent his first years in Revolutionary America tutoring French at Harvard. He knew from firsthand experience how western land was a magnet for Virginians, having traveled to the Ohio River in the mid-1780s and having speculated, without much success, in the vicinity of some of Washington’s properties. Before permanently settling in Pennsylvania, he thought for a time that he would acculturate among Virginians who had migrated west. When the Federalists rewrote the law concerning citizenship, they were unequivocally conniving to exclude the Gallic Republican.

Elected to the House in 1794, Gallatin began his long political career by speaking out against Jay’s mission and writing against Hamilton’s economic system. Like Madison and Jefferson, he was leery of the long-term national debt that Hamilton so enthusiastically embraced. Federalists could tout their magical-sounding “sinking fund” all they wanted, just as William Pitt had done in England, but there was, Gallatin said with wry insistence, only one way for a nation to pay its debts and that was to “spend
less than you receive.” Reporting to Jefferson on Congressman Gallatin’s specialized skills, Madison credited him for being a “real Treasure” as a colleague, “sound in his principles, accurate in his calculations and indefatigable in his researches.” They had found someone they could rely on to undo the Hamiltonian system.
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In London, John Jay was well treated. The British considered him second only to Hamilton among England’s American friends. Lord Grenville, their chief negotiator, had been a member of Parliament since the age of twenty-three and was a self-possessed political operative. Concerned with U.S.-Canadian issues for a decade already, he was well enough aware of America’s exploitable weaknesses to have thought it possible to wean Kentucky away from the eastern states. Grenville gave Jay few nonnegotiable demands, which made the American’s acquiescence to British power seem less dramatic than it would appear to his many critics back home.
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In Paris the Terror was finally past, but anxiety was still rampant. As Washington’s envoy, James Monroe faced a skeptical leadership set, men who wondered whether he represented the administration or just imagined he did. Monroe sought to allay these fears by assuring his hosts that the United States would always support its sister republic. “Their governments are similar,” he volunteered. “They both cherish the same principles and rest on the same basis: the equal and unalienable rights of man.”

His passionate address was immediately reprinted. Monroe’s diplomatic counterpart in London was irritated, and when a transcript arrived stateside, Madison felt obliged to inform Monroe that the Federalists had found his tone “grating.” Secretary of State Randolph reprimanded him for going too far: his instructions had been to assure the French of America’s attachment without suggesting any abandonment of U.S. neutrality at a time of Anglo-French hostilities. Whereas Jay was expected to negotiate a treaty, Monroe was expected to give the false impression that the administration was guileless in conveying its respect for France.
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While the Monroes were in Paris, the newly wedded Madisons occupied their Philadelphia home during the congressional session. Madison asked Elizabeth Monroe to make purchases for him in Paris: curtains, carpets, and furniture “in a stile suitable to my stile and fashion.” In the months since the “self created” societies reanimated him, Jefferson returned to
commenting on his farming activities. Now, when Madison heard from him, the lead subject was usually a mix of weather reports and corn or wheat prices. Lest Madison allow himself to think that his friend was ready to return to the fracas, Jefferson would request a pamphlet on crop rotation. It was Madison who saw to it that the conversation never strayed from national affairs for long. He kept Jefferson current on the “Treasury faction,” as he called the Hamiltonians; he wrote of state elections and the changing shape of parties. While he had not heard privately from Monroe, Madison seemed to think that France was strong and the rest of Europe resentful of the fact.
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Shortly after New Year’s 1795, without specifying his sources, Madison told Jefferson that he believed the Jay mission to London would bear fruit. “It is expected,” he wrote, “that he will accomplish much if not all he aims at. It will be scandalous, if we do not under present circumstances, get all that we have a right to demand.” He was setting them both up for disappointment.

In early spring Jay returned with treaty in hand. Its terms were not immediately made public, forcing Madison to change his tune. “It is kept an impenetrable secret by the Executive,” he noted scornfully in a letter to Jefferson.
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For more than two months, the country waited to learn what Jay had negotiated, because President Washington was reluctant to endorse what he knew was a less-than-perfect treaty; he finally came to the decision that if the Federalist-led Senate approved it, he would go along. And that is precisely what occurred. By the terms of the treaty, the British agreed to evacuate the same Northwest frontier posts they had already agreed to abandon in 1783, something Lord Grenville had been prepared to do even before Jay arrived. But England made no new commercial concessions. It did not agree to stop taking American merchant vessels and confiscating their cargo. It did not even begin to recognize the rights of neutrals during wartime. The treaty did reduce the chance of Anglo-American war, which was Washington’s first priority. And Jay did not suffer much for his weakness as a negotiator: he was elected governor of New York while abroad. It pleased him to step down from the bench in order to assume the office he had wanted three years before, when he narrowly lost it to George Clinton.
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Despite Monroe’s efforts in Paris, an undesired consequence of the Jay Treaty was that it intensified resentment toward the United States on the part of the French. The treaty was not neutrality to them; it was subservience to England, a resumption of the colonial relationship. American
professions of friendship would no longer be deemed credible. No one could have expected the French to take a nuanced view at this time, with Hamilton, who wished to model America’s economy on Britain’s, steering U.S. foreign policy. His pending retirement from the cabinet would not put an end to his influence.
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The time had come for Madison and Jefferson to discuss the future of the presidency after Washington. At the end of 1794, precisely one year after he resigned from the cabinet, Jefferson pleaded that the nation could not afford for both of them to retire. If Madison ever left the House, he said, it should be to accept “a more splendid and a more efficacious post.” He meant, of course, the presidency. Madison took several months to answer, and when he did, he said only that his reasons for shrinking from higher ambition were “insuperable” and “obvious” and would be spelled out when they had the “latitude of a free conversation.” Jefferson should prepare himself “to hear truths, which no inflexibility will be able to withstand.”
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Madison would win the argument, as he had in the past when he brought Jefferson out of retirement. In an awkward reprise of his emotional letter to Madison of June 1793, when he had maintained that the motion of his blood no longer kept time with the tumult of the world, Jefferson acknowledged on April 27, 1795, that while he was still in the cabinet, he had been approached (by whom he did not say) to run for president. To do so, then or now, would be to give his enemies the satisfaction of being able to say that they were right about his presidential ambitions. That was not the full explanation, however. At fifty-two, he claimed he was beginning to feel the effects of growing old: “My health is entirely broken down within the last eight months; my age requires that I should place my affairs in a clear state.” He protested to Madison that “the little spice of ambition, which I had in my younger days, has long since evaporated.” Knowing how adept his associate was in putting pressure on him, Jefferson punctuated his statement with the most definitive line he could summon: “I do not mean an opening for future discussion, or that I may be reasoned out of it. The question is forever closed with me.” Somehow Madison still talked him into challenging John Adams for the presidency.
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Jefferson and Adams had continued to maintain cordial relations through the mails. Late in 1794, fresh from a long vacation back home in
Massachusetts, the vice president wrote the former secretary of state from Philadelphia: “I have Spent my Summer So deliciously in farming that I return to the Old Story of Politicks with great Reluctance. The Earth is grateful. You find it so, I dare say. I wish We could both say the Same of its Inhabitants.” Agriculture was a convenient subject for two who might otherwise step on each other’s principles. Jefferson gamely replied to Adams: “I have found so much tranquility of mind in a total abstraction from every thing political … Tranquility becomes daily more and more the object of my life.” If he really wished it so, he wished in vain. To a fellow Virginia planter, he feigned: “I am encouraging myself to grow lazy.” Insisting that he was no longer attempting to steer the ship of state in any particular direction, he sang his own dirge: “I consider myself now but as a passenger, leaving the world and it’s [
sic
] government to those who are likely to live longer in it.”
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In a letter to the apolitical Maria Cosway, who knew him much better as a man of the arts than as a politician, Jefferson could not resist making reference to the “great buz about Mr. Jay and his treaty.” But then he recovered his familiar pose, resolutely describing the transition from a “public life which I always hated” to “the full enjoiment [
sic
] of my farm, my family, and my books.” He was, he said, eating the peaches, grapes, and figs of his own garden: “I am become, for instance, a real farmer, measuring fields, following my ploughs, helping the haymakers, and never knowing a day which has not done something for futurity. How much better this than to be shut up in the four walls of an office, the sun of heaven excluded, the balmy breeze never felt.” Before he was finished, he reclaimed the nostalgic feeling that had been a part of his romantic letters to Mrs. Cosway when he was in Paris and she in London: “In truth whenever I think of you, I am hurried off on the wings of imagination into regions where fancy submits all things to our will.”
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Jefferson may have had a carefree side, but his carefully cataloged correspondence suggests that he rarely showed it in this most demanding decade. Much as he tried, he could not remain aloof from politics.

Hamilton’s men were concerned that the unpopularity of Jay’s treaty might swing opinion back to France, in which case Monroe’s representations
to that country’s new leaders would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that could not be allowed to occur.

Secretary of State Edmund Randolph was the only Virginian in national office who might still have imagined there could be a middle ground. But his drumming out of office in 1795 ended Randolph’s career in politics and instructed Madison and Jefferson that it was time to acknowledge that they were building a distinctive party and not simply putting forward an opinion.

Randolph’s downfall was set in motion in August when a letter written by the French minister, Baron Fauchet, to his government, was intercepted at sea by a British warship. The letter was then translated and presented to President Washington. It showed Randolph in a questionable light. He appeared to have revealed sensitive information to the French minister. At best, Fauchet was overstating what Randolph had said to him in order to impress his superiors in Paris. But there could be no gray area in these black-and-white times.

Washington did not understand French, and the translation he read was defective. Hamilton’s handpicked successor, Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut, and the man who replaced Henry Knox in the War Department, Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, deliberately made it appear that Randolph had committed treason. Wolcott and Pickering confronted the unsuspecting cabinet officer, in a scene they staged for the president’s benefit. Blindsided, the unoffending Randolph had no time to react. He could see that Washington, whom he had known since his Williamsburg boyhood, was already convinced of his guilt. The nation’s second secretary of state promptly resigned his office. He drew up papers freeing the slaves he had brought with him to Philadelphia and rushed to New England to track down Fauchet. There he found the French minister and obtained from him an affidavit to prove his innocence of any charge of collusion with the French.

That December the disgraced cabinet officer released a statement in his own defense.
A Vindication of Mr. Randolph’s Resignation
was a nearly hundred-page pamphlet, giving a blow-by-blow account of his untarnished patriotism, his relations with Fauchet, and the unraveling of his career within the executive. Son of a noted Tory, Randolph had been a Washington aide early in the war, a governor of Virginia, and the first public servant to hold two different cabinet-level appointments. Over the course of his career, he had always sought to steer a middle course. He believed in facts. He aimed to be fair.

The
Vindication
is more than a denial of wrongdoing; it is a testament to
unselfish public service. Highlighting his long and honorable devotion to one man, Randolph addressed that man directly, insisting that the two cabinet posts he held were positions “which I did not covet, and which I would not have accepted, had I not been governed by my affection for you, my trust in your republicanism, and your apparent superiority to the artifices of my enemies.” Sensitive to the need to keep Washington from political harm, Randolph had acted as a best friend did, persuading the president “to abhor party” and forestall “intestine convulsion.” He had done all he could to see that Washington went down in history as “a bulwark against party-rage.” Despite such carefully wrought well-wishes, readers were meant to conclude that the president had submitted to a party, to the detriment of the country.
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