Madison and Jefferson (41 page)

Neoclassical Monticello was the definitive place of repose for him, of course, and pastoral agriculture the healthful alternative to urban-based production. Hamilton wanted government to actively stimulate the economy, especially in the manufacturing sector, and to promote internal improvements such as roads and canals. While a canal enthusiast himself, Jefferson wanted government to interfere as little as possible. There was a fundamental contradiction between Madison and Hamilton on matters of constitutionality and principles of economics. For Jefferson, more than constitutional principles, matters of social health dominated the real economy.

Washington signed the residence bill into law on July 16, 1790. It ensured that the federal city, as it was first known, would be built on the banks of the Potomac. The aging warhorse Edmund Pendleton chose the obvious metaphor when he wrote to Madison: “I am happy to find the Potowmac stands on so good grounds as the Permanent seat of Congress.” Madison told Monroe that the assumption plan, as agreed to, “will very little affect the interest of Virginia,” because, he rationalized, the numbers had been crunched in such a way as to reduce the state’s responsibility from what had been previously calculated.

To his father, Madison wrote that acceptance of the adjusted assumption plan was “a lesser evil” than a deepening of state antagonisms. Patrick Henry disagreed with the “lesser evil” rationale and subsequently introduced a resolution in the Virginia House of Delegates calling assumption “repugnant to the Constitution.” It would pass the Assembly in December 1790, by a vote of 75 to 52, representing the first step in a reassertion of state sovereignty.
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In mid-August 1790, as assumption became law, Madison and Jefferson packed their books for the move from Manhattan to the next temporary capital, Philadelphia. Then they rode south together, stopped at Mount Vernon to visit the president, saw George Mason at nearby Gunston Hall, and proceeded on to Orange, after which Jefferson continued on to Albemarle by himself. Also over that summer, taking no chances, Madison orchestrated his reelection to Congress, recruiting his younger brothers Ambrose and William as his campaign managers. Unlike the troubled campaign of 1788, when he had to face off against Monroe, this time he ran largely unopposed.
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To solidify his plan for a vigorous economy, Hamilton had one more maneuver in mind: the establishment of a national bank, which he presumed Congress had the right to undertake. His notes to Washington in March 1791 spell out his reasons for recommending such an institution. It would circulate more money, given the limited amount of specie on hand; it would facilitate loans to emerging industries and to merchants who paid duties; it would make tax collection more routine and make funds available in case of national emergencies, by which he meant wars. “Lastly,” Hamilton wrote somewhat heavy-handedly, “an attentive consideration of the tendency of an institution, immediately connected with the national Government which will interweave itself into the
monied
interest of every State, which will by its notes insinuate itself into every branch of industry … ought to produce strong prepossessions in its favor in all who consider the firm establishment of the National Government as necessary to the safety & happiness of the Country.”

For Madison and Jefferson, “safety & happiness” could only mean a benign central government with well-defined powers and well-defined limits, resisting the tendency to favor the interests of factions. For Hamilton, “safety & happiness” directed government toward a comprehensive involvement in high finance, promoting industrial growth through central banking while attaching greater military control to the presidency and undermining all democratic inclinations. The word
democratic
had the connotation of a breakdown in government and a transfer of power to the ignorant masses.

Not surprisingly, Hamilton envisioned the bank as an instrument at the
disposal of the treasury secretary. Only one-fifth of its money would be the government’s, and most of the bank’s directors would be private individuals empowered to make government loans. Hamilton figured these people would be so enmeshed in government policy that they would be agreeable to his goals, if not downright compliant. Madison rose in the House to assert that at the state ratifying conventions even the supporters of the Constitution did not think that Congress had any right to charter corporations. To establish a national bank would be to grant excessive power to the federal government. Madison was being less than fully honest at this moment, because it was he who had introduced the idea of giving government the power of incorporation at the Constitutional Convention.
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In a strictly sectional vote, the House rejected Madison’s call to quash the bank bill. Now Washington sought the views of Jefferson and Randolph, both of whom opposed the measure, and promptly conveyed their opinions to Hamilton. It was Hamilton’s custom to respond to challenges with overly long papers in his own defense; in this case, over the course of a week, he drafted a document that laboriously asserted the constitutionality of bank creation. Washington took it under advisement, asking Madison to draft a veto message, in case he should reject the bill on the basis of its questionable constitutionality.

The president waited until the last day possible under the Constitution before signing the bill into law. If, in this instance, he eventually gave Hamilton what he wanted, it was not necessarily because he was in agreement. With a relative detachment that Jefferson would not subsequently be known for, he had suggested to Washington that, unless he felt strongly that the bill was unconstitutional, the president should go along with Congress’s decision. And since Congress had voted in favor, on February 8, 1791, Washington accommodated.
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Madison’s concern with men of money, begun at the time of the debate over assumption, rose to a new level of outrage now. He was concerned that a group of merchants and speculators
beholden
to the government would in fact end up
controlling
the government. The national bank was the last straw in his conversion from trusting a strong central government to deeply fearing government corruption.

The focus of Madison’s concern was the new environment Hamilton was creating, in which speculators in government paper—stockjobbers—were forming a class (or political faction) of their own. A significant number of these people were members of Congress. Madison believed that if
Hamilton had his way, as it appeared he would, Philip Schuyler, his father-in-law, would be at the head of the New York subscribers to bank stock.

In May 1791, Congress having adjourned, Madison was back in the soon-to-be banking mecca of New York, whence he sounded an alarm. He complained to Jefferson of the “licentiousness of the tongues of the speculators and Tories” who were bad-mouthing Washington for waiting so long to sign the bank bill. They had held over his head, Madison wrote, “the most insolent menaces.” It suggested a threat to the president’s legitimacy, while defining the emerging speculator class as a matured “party,” at least in Madison’s mind. He invoked the word
party
as it was generally understood in the years before the formal establishment of a two-party system: a self-interested group of men, inherently corrupt in their dealings. Hamilton was blatantly purchasing their support. In accepting the munificence of Hamilton, he and they became inseparable.

A few months later, again from New York, Madison warned Jefferson that “the stockjobbers will become the praetorian band of the Government, at once its tool and its tyrant.” The Praetorian Guard, in its well-known classical sense, was a dictator’s private army, and the current version of the guard was liable to plot a financial coup in America. “Bribed by [the Government’s] largesses, and overawing it by its clamours and combinations,” the corrupt class was proving to be the embodiment of those “factions” Madison had nervously written about in
The Federalist
.
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We need to understand what Madison was thinking. As he had explained to Jefferson in a long letter of 1787 and incorporated into
Federalist
10, the central government was to play the role of impartial arbiter among competing interests: rich and poor, creditors and debtors, speculators, merchants, planters, and manufacturers. Government, he wrote Jefferson, was meant to be “sufficiently neutral between different parts of Society to control one part from invading the rights of another, and at the same time sufficiently controuled itself, from setting up an interest adverse to that of the entire Society.” Nothing could have been clearer. Hamilton’s policies upset that balance by favoring the growth of a “monied interest,” or commercial class, over others in society. This was obnoxious for many reasons, not the least of which was that the chosen class of people was concentrated in northern cities. By compromising its integrity, the government endangered society. Madison had to stick to his principles, or Hamilton would ride roughshod.
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Pennsylvania senator William Maclay noted in his illuminating, if caustic,
diary how the treasury secretary dominated in 1790–91. Protesting the way Hamilton manipulated members of Congress (“all the business is done in dark cabals, on the principle of interested management”), he expressed frustration with the results: “Mr. Hamilton is all-powerful and fails in nothing he attempts.” Though the senator did not characterize Madison, he peppered his diary with references to the congressman’s central role in all political activities. John Adams, with little disguise, wrote at about the same time that Madison’s abilities were overrated—he was “a Creature of French Puffs”—and his proposals in Congress adequate proof of his “Infamy.” An almost magnetic repulsion continued to operate between Madison and the nation’s first vice president.
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Hamilton may have bullied as he sought to persuade, but he had his reasons. For him, moderation did not win wars on battlefields or wars over policy. While it may be true that he, Madison, and Jefferson all hoped to establish the character of the chief executive as an embodiment of the popular will—an accountable political actor who was also a moral protector—Hamilton was clearly attempting to deny the legislative branch preeminence and making as many of its members as possible personally beholden to him. Madison fought Hamilton tooth and nail. The illustrious face-off between Hamilton and Jefferson, a political battle that tore apart the executive, is better known, but for many months before Jefferson appeared on the scene, it was Madison who was Hamilton’s adversary. It was he who witnessed Hamilton behaving as though he were a king’s prime minister. It was he who led the counteroffensive. Madison gave Jefferson a vocabulary with which to scold Hamilton and those attracted to him.

Once Jefferson became part of the equation, Hamilton saw the obstructionist threat increasing and began more intently to count administration allies. Around the same time, in an institutional move, Washington shifted ghostwriting assignments—such as the president’s annual message—from Madison to Hamilton and Jefferson. He did so not because of any falling out with Madison but because he recognized that such assistance should properly come from within the executive branch. This seemingly innocent move helped to change the dynamic.
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As we have seen, Madison’s and Jefferson’s minds were on different trajectories as they embarked, with little certainty, on a major experiment in
government—life under the Constitution. Philosophically, the Jefferson of 1790 was probably closer to the perspective of the Revolutionary gadfly Tom Paine than he was to the constitutional concerns of his friend Madison. But by the middle of 1791 both were finding Paine’s sweeping arguments in favor of social equality crucial to their program. A new militancy in the political world served to deemphasize the remaining differences between Madison and Jefferson, as the methods of Alexander Hamilton rankled both of them equally.

After publication of the first volume of
The Rights of Man
in that year, Paine once again became a symbol of resistance to despotism.
Common Sense
had bolstered America’s Revolutionaries in the months leading up to the Declaration of Independence. At the time John Adams had taken exception to the consensus view, calling Paine “a disastrous meteor,” whose wildly successful pamphlet was hardly more than icing on the cake. It was only fitting that Vice President Adams’s name should become enmeshed in the controversy over Paine’s latest publication.
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The pamphleteer had left America in 1787, returning to his native England. Jefferson and he met up in Paris and remained in touch; when Adams departed London and sailed back to Boston the next year, Jefferson relied on Paine for information on British political developments. In 1790, with Jefferson in New York, Paine went to press with
The Rights of Man
, a defense of Revolutionary France; it would eventually result in his expulsion from England.
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The impetus for
The Rights of Man
was Edmund Burke’s equally inflammatory
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, which demeaned even the auspicious energy of Lafayette and his allies of 1789. Writing with a heavy hand, Burke thought it prudent to “suspend” his congratulations to the French until they had proven that their movement was “something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface.” For Burke, the anti-Christian agitation associated with the French Revolution exposed hypocrisy. “These Atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own,” he railed, doubting the collective vision of popular politicians and their intellectual backers. “With them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one … They think that government may vary like modes of dress, and with as little ill effect.” Dismissive and tart in his repudiation of what he viewed as democratic tyranny, Burke celebrated the balance and resilience of the British model.
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