Madison and Jefferson (60 page)

At the center of the firestorm, Abigail Adams was taking the insults to her husband worse than the president himself did. She saw the Republicans collectively as agents of the French and believed that “this lying wretch of a Bache,” as she called the editor, was only the most easily detectable member of a devious band trying to force the president’s resignation. “And then they will Reign triumphant,” she railed, “
headed by the Man of the People
.” She meant, of course, Thomas Jefferson, whom she had once adored. The confidences they had shared as Americans abroad in the 1780s were memories of a bygone era. Madison’s prediction had come true. Both Adamses assumed that Jefferson burned with the same ambition that his Republican minions harbored for him. Mrs. Adams saw Bache’s work not simply as libelous and the atmosphere as lawless; she predicted that if his newspaper was not suppressed, the United States would succumb to civil war.

Cobbett’s newspaper was widely read. The first lady remarked with pleasure that “his shafts are always tipt with wit.” But Cobbett, clever as he was, had no substantive connection to Hamilton or any other leading Federalist. He was unable to coordinate his writing with those in Congress who might otherwise have helped to offset the shock value of Bache’s fear-inspiring pronouncements.
³³

The Fifth Congress of the United States convened in the spring of 1797, the first, since government under the Constitution began in 1789, to open without James Madison as a member. Home at Montpelier with Dolley, Madison had ended his long congressional career feeling that the Hamiltonians had succeeded in compromising republican principles. The struggle would have to continue without him. Federalists, glad to see Madison replaced by others, quickly began referring to the opposition as “Gallatin & Co.”

Madison and Jefferson would remain Republican lightning rods. This time, though, Madison was out of government, and Jefferson back in. Like Jefferson in 1794, Madison wanted so badly to stay out that he wrote to his father urging him not to listen to any entreaties from Jefferson. The courier for Madison’s letter was none other than Jefferson, who was heading south a few weeks sooner. Although they dined together at House clerk John Beckley’s home the day it was penned, we can safely assume that Madison did not allow Jefferson to peek at the letter. Madison had wanted his father to know that he had decided not to stand for election to the Virginia House
of Delegates. “If Mr. Jefferson should call & say any thing to counteract my determination,” he averred, “I hope it will be regarded as merely expressive of his own wishes on the subject, & that it will not be allowed to have the least effect.”
³⁴

After they visited some of Dolley’s Virginia relatives, the Madisons came to live with his parents, who had arrived at their fiftieth year of marriage. James, Jr., in his mid-forties, would father no children, though he and Dolley had been trying; but he remained surrounded by family and helped to raise Dolley’s son Payne. There was his thirty-five-year-old brother William; his two sisters and their children; and his late brother Ambrose’s daughter Nelly, named for her paternal grandmother (reputedly Madison’s favorite among his younger kin). All lived in the vicinity of Orange. As he established a new domestic routine, Madison implemented a system of crop rotation—wheat, corn, peas, and clover—recommended by Jefferson. He solicited architectural designs from his accomplished friend, bought nails from the Monticello manufactory, and scheduled work on an addition to the Montpelier mansion.
³⁵

Meanwhile, as president of the Senate, fifty-four-year-old Vice President Jefferson swore in eight new members of that body and delivered a formal address in which he apologized in advance for any procedural error he might commit. He had been so long away from legislative functions that he was rusty. Adams, of course, had lately served in the position he now took up, and Jefferson seized this formal opportunity to praise his old friend the president as “the eminent character … whose talents and integrity have been known and revered by me thro’ a long course of years.”
³⁶

Their shared sense of honor stood no chance of auguring a time of reconciliation. Not just the partisan press at home but also liberals abroad demeaned Adams. From France, Tom Paine wrote to advise Jefferson that America’s reputation was deflated, and there was little hope of improvement under an Adams regime. “You can have but little conception,” Paine testified, “how low the character of the American Government is sunk in Europe.” Where it was not despised for its impotence, he said, it was being written off for its ignorance of how to conduct meaningful diplomacy: “England laughs at her imbecility, and France is enraged by her ingratitude, and Sly treachery.”
³⁷

Politics inside the United States was still conditioned by manifestations of unfriendliness emanating from the Old World. There were clear signs of troubles yet to come in U.S. relations with an exasperated French government, which had begun to threaten American shipping. There was some
talk of war. Britain remained surly and unbending, which hardly bothered the ruling Federalists but made Republican heads spin. As the Federalists stepped up their philippics against “foreign influences,” Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were to gather on a number of occasions between 1797 and 1799, meeting at one or another’s home in Albemarle or Orange to assess developments. With impending crises at home and abroad, they tried to figure out what the Republicans could do as a minority party.

One hazard of possessing a gift for powerful figures of speech is the tendency to go too far and later feel regret. Jefferson had that tendency and on occasion felt that regret. It is what tempts historians to probe his mind and uncover his prejudices. In March 1796, for example, in a letter to political ally William Branch Giles on a subject of no particular consequence to his reputation, Jefferson speculated on the difficulties associated with the protection of American sailors against impressment by the Royal Navy. One would not expect a champion of tradesmen to express open disdain for the merchant seaman, but here is Jefferson objecting to a plan under review to issue them certificates of citizenship: “But these certificates will be lost in a thousand ways. A sailor will neglect to take his certificate. He is wet twenty times in a voyage. If he goes ashore without it, he is impressed, if with it, he gets drunk, it is lost, stolen from him, taken from him, and then the want of it gives an authority to impress which does not exist now.” Rather than entrust American sailors with paper, the cynical Jefferson would have the men “parade” on deck, while three foreign officers boarded the U.S. vessel to hunt for any non-Americans who might be concealed below.
³⁸

As patronizing and demeaning as this sort of statement may appear now, it would never come back to haunt him. On the other hand, one portion of a single paragraph in a letter he wrote a few weeks later to Philip Mazzei would carry tremendous weight from the moment of its inconvenient publication until the end of his days. Mazzei was the chatty Italian who had resided near Monticello before the Revolution and who, though long since back in Tuscany, still had unfinished business in Virginia. Together Madison and Jefferson were handling Mazzei’s finances, which explains why Jefferson was writing. He was retired from politics in April 1796, when he wrote the letter; but when Mazzei allowed its publication in a Paris newspaper in January 1797, Jefferson was about to reenter the executive.
His letter was translated from French back into English, imperfectly but not inaccurately, and published in early May in Noah Webster’s
American Minerva
, a successful New York newspaper. Webster was a confirmed Federalist.

It was nothing Jefferson had not said before: “In place of that noble love of liberty and republican government which carried us triumphantly thro’ the war, an Anglican, monarchical and aristocratical party has sprung up …, all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty.” But this time, in suggesting that some who had fought for a republic had now conceded to a corrupt British-style regime, he drew inferences. Readers of the
Minerva
took Jefferson’s plural to be singular, when he said: “It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.” The French had printed “la chevelure a été coupée par la catin Angleterre”; retranslated, it read, less beautifully: “whose hair had been cut off by the whore England.”
³⁹
There could be only one man Jefferson was referring to: George Washington. As Samson, he had wrestled the British lion and crushed enemy armies; as wise Solomon, he built a temple to republican values. Jefferson might protest the translation, but the ex-president certainly thought Jefferson’s reference was to him; the benefit of the doubt he had granted Jefferson after their most recent exchange quickly dissolved into anger. He never said anything publicly, but others intervened to make certain that Washington stayed irate.
⁴⁰

Jefferson was torn. He wanted to own up to his authorship of the letter and control its meaning so as to minimize damage. As he put it to Madison, “The general substance” was his, but in one place or another “very materially falsified.” He was splitting (Samson’s) hairs, of course, and realized that “nine tenths of the people of the U.S.” would recoil at anything he might publish in an attempt to rationalize his stated opinion of the retired president. “Think for me,” he implored Madison, “and advise me what to do, and confer with Colo[nel] Monroe on the subject.”

Madison responded promptly. Eager to manage his friend’s career before the Federalists had their chance to end it, he undertook damage control. He confirmed what Jefferson knew, that any hint of a confession would be exploited, and advised silence. In that Monroe had already suggested to Jefferson that he go public, Jefferson was less likely to follow Monroe’s advice unless Madison independently concurred.

While this was going on, Gallatin of Pennsylvania, the most prominent
Republican in Congress, rose to defend what he interpreted as Jefferson’s spirited opposition to an ill-conceived foreign policy. He protested the stigmatization of being labeled “Jacobin” simply for perceiving the world differently than the party in power. His Federalist colleagues did not allow Gallatin’s remarks to stand unanswered, broadly hinting that Jefferson’s language was at least indecent and maybe conspiratorial. In the political climate of Washington’s retirement years, one did not overcome an insult to the supreme founding father. As for President Adams, the Mazzei letter confirmed his larger feeling that the Republicans had lost all sense of national fidelity in their blind devotion to France.
⁴¹

Shortly after the Mazzei letter’s publication, Alexander Hamilton returned to the public eye, this time without having solicited the attention. The Reynolds affair, as it became known, was a tale of adultery and blackmail that scandalized the ultimate symbol of Federalism. But Hamilton seemed incapable of experiencing embarrassment, and the whole sordid mess ultimately had little impact on party politics. Madison and Jefferson were only peripherally involved, but as interested onlookers they captured the moment in their correspondence.

Angelica Schuyler Church was Hamilton’s sister-in-law—they quite adored each other—and also a close friend of Maria Cosway’s in London. After one of the newspapers he subscribed to reported that Angelica and her English husband had docked in New York, Jefferson took the time to write to her. Separating friendship from politics, he wrote delicately: “Your affections, I am persuaded, will spread themselves over the whole family of the good, without enquiring by what hard names they are politically called. You will preserve, from temper and inclination, the happy privilege of the ladies, to leave to the rougher sex, and to the newspapers, their party squabbles and reproaches.” It was Jefferson at his peace-making best.
⁴²

When he resumed his correspondence with Mrs. Church, Jefferson could not have known that the five-year-old story of Hamilton’s adulterous romp was about to make the rounds again. In the summer of 1797 the dangerous liaison he had embarked on with Maria Reynolds in the summer of 1792 found a wider audience at the apparent prompting of a Virginian or two. Angelica’s husband, John Barker Church, conveyed a piece of gossip to Hamilton that raised his hackles. According to Church, Virginians Madison and Giles, along with Pennsylvania Republican William Findlay, had “used a variety of Perswasions [
sic
]” to pressure a former Treasury Department clerk into accusing Hamilton of financial misconduct while in office.

It was not in James Madison’s direction, or even Giles’s, that Hamilton
looked to blow off steam. Instead, he goaded James Monroe, accusing him of having leaked the story to James Thomson Callender, a scandal-seeking writer who had arrived from Scotland in 1793 and who lacked all capacity for restraint. Monroe was the most suitable target, because only he, in this group, was a Revolutionary War veteran—and, like all veterans, familiar with dueling culture. Madison was notably unmartial, and it was absurd to think of anyone enticing him into an “affair of honor” that might lead to the dueling ground.

Hamilton called for an urgent “interview” with Monroe. When these two equally stubborn men met, both grew enraged. In the next phase of negotiation Aaron Burr took on the role of intermediary. The accusatory game ended in stalemate, but at least a duel was averted. A caucus of Republicans, including Jefferson, Madison, Burr, and others, assembled in Philadelphia and devised a strategy to quietly end the Hamilton-Monroe affair. In its wake, Hamilton published an exculpatory pamphlet (at least that is what he thought it was) copping to a lesser charge. He declared to the world that he had not committed “improper pecuniary speculation,” as alleged; he had merely committed adultery, with the “privity and connivance” of the blackmailing husband.