Washington: A Life (134 page)

On July 25 the feud between Hamilton and Jefferson acquired new ferocity when Hamilton, for the first time, published an anonymous essay rebuking Jefferson. Writing in Fenno’s
Gazette of the United States,
he posed a simple question about Freneau and his State Department stipend: “Whether this salary is paid him for
translations
or for
publications,
the design of which is to vilify those to whom the voice of the people has committed the administration of our public affairs … ?”
⁵⁴
The attack, one paragraph in length, showed that Hamilton had thrown down a gauntlet to Jefferson and was prepared to take his case to the public.

Washington would now have to stop the sparring between his two cabinet members; their feud was far more vitriolic than he had dreamed possible. On July 29, in a confidential letter, he told Hamilton that he had sought the views of people en route to Mount Vernon and at home and found that they viewed the country as “prosperous and happy” but were alarmed at certain policies and interpretations of the Constitution.
⁵⁵
He enumerated twenty-one complaints that touched on Hamilton’s policy initiatives, including accusations that he had created excessive public debt, imposed onerous excise taxes on the people, promoted financial speculation, and corrupted the legislature. Although Washington cited George Mason as the source of these complaints, the language was drawn verbatim from Jefferson, and Hamilton could scarcely have missed the allusion. One can only assume that Washington, sensitive to nuance, wanted Hamilton to hear echoes of Jefferson’s phraseology. The most damning charge was the final one: that the real object of Hamilton’s policies was “to prepare the way for a change from the present republican form of government to that of a monarchy, of which the British Constitution is to be the model.”
⁵⁶
Disquieted by the political backlash against his programs in the South, he asked Hamilton to respond to his letter as soon as possible.

Even before receiving Washington’s complaints, Hamilton had implored him to soldier on as president for another year or two. The failure to do so, he stressed, would be “deplored as the greatest evil that could befall the country at the present juncture.”
⁵⁷
Reading Washington’s psychology astutely, Hamilton emphasized the damage that would be done to Washington’s character if he retired. By now Hamilton had declared all-out warfare against Jefferson and Madison. In the
Gazette of the United States
that August, he took off the velvet gloves and showed the clenched fist of steel, charging that the
National Gazette
had been set up as a vehicle to publicize Jefferson’s views and that Madison had been the intermediary for bringing Freneau to his State Department sinecure.

On August 18 the frustrated Hamilton sent Washington a fourteen-thousand-word letter, listing his own accomplishments in office and defending his policies. What troubled him was less the criticisms of specific programs than the character assassination practiced by his opponents: “I trust that I shall always be able to bear, as I ought, imputations of errors of judgment, but I acknowledge that I cannot be entirely patient under charges which impeach the integrity of my public motives or conduct. I feel that I merit them
in no degree
and expressions of indignation sometimes escape me in spite of every effort to suppress them.”
⁵⁸

At this point Washington could no longer stand aside while Hamilton and Jefferson tore each other to ribbons. He warned Edmund Randolph that if press diatribes against his cabinet members continued, “it will be impossible … for any man living to manage the helm or to keep the machine together.”
⁵⁹
His vision of a unified government now seemed hopelessly utopian. In late August he exhorted Hamilton to end his bloody clash with Jefferson. Asking for civility, he hoped that “wounding suspicions and irritating charges” would give way to “mutual forbearances and temporizing yieldings
on all sides
. Without these, I do not see how … the union of the states can be much longer preserved.”
⁶⁰
Searching for common ground, Washington hinted that Hamilton and Jefferson had “the same
general
objects in view and the same upright intentions to prosecute them.”
⁶¹
To underline his support for Hamilton, Washington invited him to Mount Vernon and ended by saying that Hamilton could rest assured of his “sincere and affectionate regard.”
⁶²
Aiming to be impartial, Washington also admonished Jefferson to end the squabbling, noting that attacks on his administration—attacks Jefferson himself had orchestrated—had “for a long time past filled me with painful sensations.”
⁶³

On September 9 Hamilton wrote to Washington that he was the injured party to the dispute and that the day would soon come “when the public goodwill will require
substitutes
for the
differing members
of your administration.”
⁶⁴
For the first time, Hamilton singled out Jefferson as his adversary and accused him of starting the
National Gazette
to sabotage his fiscal program: “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 to enter upon his present office.”
⁶⁵
Although Hamilton and Jefferson were often on their best behavior when dealing with Washington, they were now like two rowdy, boisterous students, brawling in the schoolyard whenever the headmaster turned his back. Far from desisting in his broadsides against Jefferson, Hamilton, under the pen name “Catullus,” commenced a new series of newspaper essays, disputing that the Federalists were plotting to abolish the republic. Turning the tables, Hamilton said it was the Republicans, led by Jefferson, who were engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the government. He even made veiled references to Jefferson’s being a closet libertine, perhaps hinting at secret knowledge of his relations with his slave concubine, Sally Hemings.

The same day that Hamilton wrote to Washington to defend his conduct, Jefferson at Monticello did likewise. In an unusually long and heated letter, Jefferson charged that Hamilton had duped him into supporting his schemes and had trespassed on State Department matters by meeting with French and British ministers. He admitted hiring Freneau but made it seem as if Freneau had initiated the contact, and he swore that he had no influence over the
National Gazette
. This may have been technically true, since Jefferson turned to surrogates, especially Madison, for his political dirty work. The supreme populist of early American history then slandered Hamilton, the self-made immigrant, with the hauteur of a born aristocrat chastising a pushy upstart: “I will not suffer my retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment at which 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 its honors on his head.”
⁶⁶
Clearly, Washington’s efforts to arbitrate a truce between his warring cabinet chieftains had failed, but he never wavered in his effort to terminate the intrigue.

As Washington wrestled with the problem of whether to remain as president, he was preoccupied by the fading health of his nephew George Augustine, who had grown so weak that summer that he was spitting up blood and could scarcely walk. By early August he was confined to his room at Mount Vernon, and Washington did not expect him to survive much longer. If he recovered his strength, he would probably require a quiet interlude in some milder climate. His illness returned Washington’s thoughts to the management of Mount Vernon and made him eager to reassert control of his neglected business affairs.

On October 1, 1792, Washington, still at Mount Vernon, met with Jefferson before breakfast in yet another attempt to thrash out their differences. Still wavering about a second term, Washington cited his dislike of “the ceremonies of his office” and said his nephew’s plight made his presence at Mount Vernon desirable.
⁶⁷
For the first time Washington seemed to lean toward a second term, however, remarking that “if his aid was thought necessary to save the cause to which he had devoted his life principally, he would make the sacrifice of a longer continuance.”
⁶⁸
Jefferson stated that only Washington could rise above partisan wrangling and fortify the government. Washington confessed that, while he had been aware of political differences between Jefferson and Hamilton, “he had never suspected it had gone so far in producing a personal difference and he wished he could be the mediator to put an end to it.”
⁶⁹
In spite of everything, Washington wanted to retain Jefferson in the cabinet and maintain an ideological balance.

Until this point the discussion had been cordial. But now an exasperated Washington, fed up with conspiracy theories, squarely told Jefferson that “as to the idea of transforming this government into a monarchy, he did not believe there were ten men in the U.S. whose opinions were worth attention who entertained such a thought,”
⁷⁰
as Jefferson noted his words. This was tough language, tantamount to branding Jefferson a crackpot, and unlike anything Washington ever said to Hamilton. The secretary of state replied with stiff dignity: “I told him there were many more than he imagined … I told him that tho[ugh] the people were sound, there was a numerous sect who had monarchy in contemplation, that the Sec[retar]y of the Treasury was one of these.”
⁷¹
Here the two men encountered a fundamental difference that could not be bridged. When Jefferson again talked about Hamilton corrupting the legislature, with many in Congress owning government paper, Washington described the problem as unavoidable “unless we were to exclude particular descriptions of men, such as the holders of the funds, from all office.”
⁷²
The president saw the real test of the funding system as its effectiveness and “that for himself, he had seen our affairs desperate and our credit lost and that this was in a sudden and extraordinary degree raised to the highest pitch.”
⁷³

At this point Jefferson must have realized that he had irrevocably lost the battle for George Washington’s soul to Alexander Hamilton. In his memo on the talk, he simply wrote in defeat at this point, “I avoided going further into the subject.”
⁷⁴
After this meeting the obdurate Jefferson never unburdened himself so openly to Washington again, and a coolness entered their relationship. In his diary, Jefferson speculated that the president’s mind was weakened by age and said that he showed “a willingness to let others act and even think for him.”
⁷⁵

Back in Philadelphia in mid-October, Washington again tried to negotiate a truce between Hamilton and Jefferson. At moments he seemed genuinely baffled by their intransigence, as if he could not believe that men of goodwill could not work out their differences. Perhaps the decisive stroke in convincing Washington to run for a second term came after a meeting with Eliza Powel that November, in which Washington said he might resign. In a masterly seven-page follow-up letter, Powel, a confirmed Federalist, gave Washington the high-toned reasons he needed to stay in office, shrewdly playing on his anxious concern for his historic reputation. If he stepped down now, she wrote, his enemies would say that “ambition had been the moving spring of all your actions—that the enthusiasm of your country had gratified your darling passion to the extent of its ability and that, as they had nothing more to give, you would run no farther risk for them.” She warned that the Jeffersonians would dissolve the Union: “I will venture to assert that, at this time, you are the only man in America that dares to do right on all public occasions.”
⁷⁶
Evidently she managed to convince Washington, who decided to stand for a second term.

ONCE HE DECIDED to serve a second term, George Washington was reelected by a unanimous 132 votes in the Electoral College. If one counted his selection as commander in chief, president of the Constitutional Convention, and president in his first term, he had compiled a string of four straight unanimous victories. Again inaction had been his most potent form of action, silence his most effective form of expression. Still, it was a subdued triumph for the overburdened president, who confessed to Henry Lee that he “would have experienced chagrin if my re-election had not been by a pretty respectable vote. But to say I feel pleasure from the prospect of
commencing
another tour of duty would be a departure from truth.”
¹

On December 13, 1792, Washington conversed with Jefferson about buying porcelain in Germany to dress up the presidential table. He had inquired whether Samuel Shaw, the U.S. consul at Canton, could acquire china there, but Shaw told him that it would take at least two years to arrive. Washington emphasized to Jefferson that he would be gone from office by then, and Jefferson recognized the heavy-handed hint. “I think he asked the question about the manufactories in Germany,” Jefferson concluded, “merely to have an indirect opportunity of telling me he meant to retire, and within the limits of two years.”
²
Once again, if he thought he could cut short his captivity to public service, Washington was fooling himself, and people kept reminding him how much the Union needed him. “There is a prevailing idea in G[reat] B[ritain],” wrote one correspondent, “if not in other parts of Europe, that whenever you are removed, the federal union will be dissolved, the states will separate, and disorder succeed.”
³

With a presidential victory assured for Washington, the Jeffersonians tried to register their disaffection and covertly chip away at his power by ousting John Adams as vice president. Purely as a matter of propriety, Washington never openly endorsed Adams, who retained office with 77 votes against a stiff challenge from Governor George Clinton of New York, a firm Jeffersonian, who garnered 50 votes. Washington likewise worried that, if he got involved in congressional races, he might trespass on the separation of powers. This same reasoning made him reluctant to veto legislation, and he did not overrule a bill until April 1792. As their populist rhetoric led to significant inroads among farmers, shopkeepers, and artisans, Republican adherents gained a clear majority in the House of Representatives, guaranteeing a contentious second term for Washington.