Madison and Jefferson (50 page)

The Virginians were as keen as ever to secure the rights of Americans to ply the Mississippi. What may have happened is that the secretary of state, initially open to westerners’ claims, changed his mind after Genet embarrassed him, then forbade American citizens from joining any Louisiana
filibuster in violation of neutrality laws. Under the circumstances, he had little choice but to make it clear that the United States was not at war with Spain.

The ironies compounded. As the Jacobin leader Robespierre took over in Paris, France exited the filibuster game. Calling off the Louisiana and Florida projects, the Jacobins demanded Genet’s return in shackles. The move came in large measure as a result of a letter Jefferson wrote at the behest of the president and a united cabinet, recommending the minister’s recall. Genet’s failure to respect American neutrality had led him to poor judgments. He had not alienated all parts of the country, but he had embarrassed Jefferson. Genet had no choice now but to act to save his own skin; and so the obnoxious emissary of republican brotherhood fled to New York State. Next, the French demanded the recall of the unrepublican Gouverneur Morris. Tit for tat.

All ended well for Genet. President Washington magnanimously granted him political asylum, and in 1794 he married a daughter of Governor George Clinton, earning American citizenship ten years later. Once a provocateur, Genet spent the remainder of his life farming in well-deserved obscurity except for occasional labor as the publisher of others’ pamphlets. His replacement, Jean-Antoine-Joseph Fauchet, though more prudent than his predecessor, would prove equally controversial and equally enfeebled by the Hamiltonians.
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In mid-1793 Madison’s longtime Philadelphia landlady, Mary House, died. “She extinguished almost like a candle,” Jefferson apprized him in June. Her daughter Eliza House Trist would sell the boardinghouse where, since he first joined Congress, Madison had resided for a greater amount of time than he lived with his family at Montpelier.

The sale of the House-Trist establishment redirected the life of Madison’s former slave Billey Gardner. Brought north by his master in 1780, Billey had run away three years later, only to be recaptured and sold, without acrimony, but sold nonetheless, into a servitude in Pennsylvania of seven years’ duration. After 1790 he found jobs in Philadelphia. Mrs. House employed him for a period of time, and Madison occasionally paid him to carry goods to Virginia. Jefferson interacted with Billey as well, utilizing the
services of his wife, Henrietta, a washerwoman. Finally Billey found work as a merchant seaman, while his parents remained as slaves at Montpelier. Tragically, he would perish off the coast of Louisiana not long after.
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Billey Gardner’s conditional existence—his curious passage from slavery to freedom—was acted out on a larger scale in Congress, but with far less humanity than Madison had shown. A court case in Pennsylvania involving the rendition of a fugitive slave from Virginia resulted in the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, fortifying the constitutional understanding that slaves were property and not afforded the rights of U.S. citizens to a fair trial. The
Annals of Congress
denoted it “an Act respecting fugitives from justice, and persons escaping from the service of their masters.” Anyone who tried to rescue or in any way interfered in the return of a “fugitive from labor” was to be fined $500. Without any protest over its constitutionality, and few votes in opposition, President Washington signed the bill, and it became law.
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In August and September 1793 death descended on Philadelphia. While Jefferson was still dealing with repercussions of the Genet fiasco, an epidemic of unprecedented proportions struck the city of thirty thousand. Though fairly common in the tropics, yellow fever had not been visited upon Philadelphia for some thirty years. Nearly half the city fled to the uninfected countryside, among them the president of the United States. Government was at a standstill. By the time the contagion passed, several thousand were dead, including the attorney John Todd, who left behind a wife, Dolley (the future Mrs. Madison), and their one-year-old son. What made the fever “yellow” was the discoloration of the skin of its victims; in the final phase of the disease, nausea and internal bleeding led to delirium and coma.

Death on so large a scale produced scenes of daily horror, with many more rotting corpses in sight than there were brave nurses. Approximately half of those who exhibited symptoms eventually died from the yellow fever. While it raged, Jefferson refused to flee the stricken city and in the midst of the horror found a new way to unload on his chief adversary. Writing to Madison in early September, he announced, almost giddily, that Hamilton was ill. From sources close to the patient, Jefferson had learned that Hamilton’s life was in danger. But Jefferson had his doubts. He knew Hamilton’s tendencies as well as anyone and figured he could read meaning into his ailing enemy’s behavior: Supposedly, an overwrought Hamilton had been pacing back and forth in recent days, certain that he was
going to catch yellow fever and die. Friends of Hamilton’s presumed that he was in fact suffering from nothing more than the common, nonlethal “autumnal fever.”

All this gave Jefferson license to slur Hamilton. In a letter to Madison, he wrote offhandedly: “A man as timid as he is on the water, as timid on horseback, as timid in sickness, would be a phænomenon if the courage of which he has the reputation on military occasions were genuine.” This was a rejoinder to a little newspaper nastiness Hamilton was responsible for under the pseudonym of “SCOURGE,” which sarcastically celebrated Jefferson for his exemplary bravery as governor.

It had not been that long since Hamilton had mocked Madison’s and Jefferson’s “womanish” resentment toward England. All who knew the slightly built Madison would have been aware of his exaggerated health fears—
he
could legitimately be called timid according to that definition. But Jefferson, aside from his migraines, was a healthy specimen. Of the two Virginians whom Hamilton had termed “womanish,” Jefferson took insults less well. His definition of manliness did not require participation in warfare or private duels, which he regarded as barbaric rather than brave. And despite his bookishness, Jefferson did not lead a sedentary life by any means; he was a man who knew lust. If he had been cowardly in the way that “SCOURGE” implied, he would not have been able to devise the icy tactics he did to combat Hamilton, well knowing that Hamilton would take extreme measures in return. Jefferson was not one to panic.

He was clearly glad for the opportunity to refute the headstrong Hamilton’s wide reputation for machismo, and it is hard to imagine anyone other than Madison with whom he could so easily share such a cruel joke. Four days after his “timidity” letter he was obliged to amend his diagnosis in a quick update on the situation in Philadelphia. “The fever spreads faster,” he jotted to Madison. “Deaths are now about 30. a day. It is in every square of the city. All flying [i.e., leaving] who can.” And as to Hamilton: “H had truly the [yellow] fever, and is on the recovery, and pronounced out of danger.” So it was more than “autumnal fever.” Hamilton had contracted the deadly virus and survived it.

Nevertheless Jefferson had proved his own resolve, and courage, by standing his ground. As Washington and Secretary Knox left town, and as Hamilton lay ill, he remained behind so as to avoid, he said, an even greater panic. He told Madison that “serious ills” would have ensued if the entire executive were absent from Philadelphia. And yet this political soldier
wanted nothing more than to finish his tour of duty and to retire, once and for all, to Monticello.
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Having made his point, Jefferson left Philadelphia mid-September and visited with Madison at Montpelier. Not long afterward, Madison followed up with a visit to Monticello, where Monroe joined them to strategize. Before they returned north in November for another session of Congress, a dramatic change occurred that would profoundly affect Madison’s future. His younger brother Ambrose, age thirty-eight, died at the family estate. Ambrose had run the Montpelier plantation; now that duty passed to James, Jr., who soon learned of a small reversal of fortune: most of his Kentucky land was improperly surveyed and the purchase thereby voided. He proceeded to sell his land in the Mohawk region of New York in order to put up a gristmill at Montpelier, passing up the chance for substantial profit if he had only held on to it for a few more years. Responsibilities and misgivings multiplied.
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Philadelphia’s self-anointed “republican interest” was the first to establish a “democratic society,” and the Hamiltonians promptly claimed that Genet had started it. It was just too easy to bestow the label “Jacobin” on them, and soon “American Jacobin” became a common slur applied to the Madison-Jefferson axis. In 1793 democratic societies spread across the country, a network of popular political assemblies akin to the committees of correspondence that had flourished on the eve of the American Revolution. While not directly the arm of a named party, the members of these societies were all critics of Hamiltonian policies. Madison would report to Jefferson that in the case of the New York Democratic Society, Edward Livingston, a prominent member, could not have been elected to Congress in 1794 without its exertions. Livingston’s older brother Robert was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, and Edward, a Princetonian, had the talent and enthusiasm to jump right into the fracas as a key Madison ally.
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With 33,000 inhabitants, New York had recently surpassed Philadelphia as the most populous U.S. city and was beginning to rival it in political speech as well. A characteristic example of what was happening is contained in the published address of William Wyche, a liberal-minded
British-born attorney who immigrated to America, attained citizenship, and now resided in Manhattan. At Tammany Hall (as yet more a social than a political gathering place), he made an appeal for calm and cautioned against “the influence of interested faction on the mind of man.” With strength of mind, he declared in favor of a new brand of independence: “The idle distinctions of aristocrat and democrat I would bury in oblivion, and treat no one as enemies but those who would deprive me of my liberty.” In a time of intense competition, the attorney’s message—“Liberty ought to have no enemies”—was modest and conciliatory. The distinctions drawn between Whig and Tory, Clintonian and Jay-ite, and, most recently, aristocrat and democrat, served only to destroy the general good, he said.

His oration was titled “Party Spirit,” a phrase with a long history, and for the next several years it was used steadily as an admonition to both sides on the American political scene. The original was penned by Joseph Addison in London in 1711, as part of the
Spectator
series of essays, which were still widely read and greatly admired in America in the mid-1790s. As relations within Congress and the executive, and between those two bodies, deteriorated, U.S. pamphleteers and newspapermen cribbed this passage most often:

In an “unseasonable” state assembly contest that heated up in 1747, the
New-York Gazette
had editorialized against “violent party spirit.” The
Boston Evening-Post
had seen the writing on the wall in 1772, when a devotee of the penetrating style of
Spectator
appealed to enlightened morals: “A FURIOUS
party spirit, when it rages in its full violence, exerts itself in civil war and bloodshed.” In July 1776, while contemplating the shaky partnership among leading gentlemen in Virginia, Edmund Pendleton was reminded of “the Spirit of Party, that bane of all public Councils,” in a letter he wrote to Jefferson. The concept lived on as a reminder, an oracle. Its resurfacing in the mid-1790s, though, was different, because the Addisonian admonition suddenly became pervasive.

Left unchecked, the spirit of party had always brought chaos to a liberty-loving republic. “What caused the fall of Athens?” the lawyer Wyche posed: “Faction: the spirit of discord prevailed, and liberty was destroyed.” Party spirit had a “pernicious” tendency to “make honest men hate one another,” another wrote, reiterating the message of
Spectator.
“A man should not allow himself to hate even his enemies.”
Spectator
provided the code words meant to prompt a softening of the accusatory script, but it was all to no avail.

By the end of 1793 it had become axiomatic that partisan “zeal” led to “calumny”—defamation and misrepresentation. But that is all that the two sides in political debate agreed on. Each denied that it was doing anything to contribute to the problem. As a species of invective belonging to their mutual blame game, the acrimonious “party-spirit” may have been used equally by those supportive of the Washington administration and those critical of it, but the term was used more excitedly in pro-administration publications. For instance, the
Mirrour
, a conservative newspaper published in Concord, New Hampshire, would open the year 1794 with a warning about democratic societies, “detached clubs … constantly involved in contradictions” (which meant hypocrisy). The “boisterous republicans,” “mighty liberty folks,” merely pretended to support a generous “rotation in office,” when what they really aimed for was the opposite: “They exert every nerve to keep their own party in office for life.” For papers like the
Mirrour
, the Republicans alone were spreading hate: “This party spirit is blind and headstrong; it never seeks truth; but with a mind made upon every subject it seeks for facts and opinions that favour his premature judgment.” The piece concluded with
Spectator
’s warning that party spirit “extinguishes all the seeds of good nature, compassion, and humanity.”